As a foundational gateway to the study of literature for English majors, this course “prepares students to enter the field of literary studies by introducing three genres, key concepts, and two-to-three critical approaches to literature.” To achieve these outcomes, students will read texts from the genres of poetry, fiction, and graphic narrative, and they will consider and apply theoretical approaches, including Formalism, Structuralism, New Historicism, Marxism, Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, and Deconstruction. We will consider the ways literature is shaped by society, and how we, as readers, situate ourselves within both literary and cultural texts. Students who take this course will learn essential terms of literary discourse, consider several critical and theoretical approaches to literature, attain and practice strategies of literary research, and apply these skills in the analysis of texts.

The course examines both contemporary canonical and less canonical women writers and the ways women are portrayed in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. How does women’s literature represent the experiences of those who identify as women and/or challenge conventional notions of gender and sexuality? We will explore how women writers think about gender roles, address various forms of oppression, and confront social and political issues.

This course examines some key works of world literature, highlighting diverse perspectives shaped by historical and imperial contexts. We will explore narratives as histories and geographies that influence our worldviews and challenge conventional ideas of “world,” analyzing texts that prompt a rethinking of traditional archetypes. Our journey will take us across continents, investigating aesthetic forms that are deeply local, material, and historically rooted. We will begin by exploring the political implications of “worlding” literature, then move on to ecological texts that trace the paths of empire and the cultural logic of late capitalism. We will also examine climate fictions that illuminate the interconnectedness of global ecologies and speculative fictions that disrupt false binaries such as inside and outside, self and other, and human and nature. Our storytellers will include Amitav Ghosh, Nnedi Okorafor, Emmi Itäranta, and Chen Qiufan.

Since the term "postcolonial" entered academic discourse en vigeur in the late 1980s, it has spurred numerous debates both inside and outside the academy. Does the "post-" in postcolonial refer, for example, to temporality, to the time after the formal end of European colonialism, or does it refer to a form of discourse, a resistance to the language and culture of Empire that may remain as prevalent today--if occupying a different costume--as during the era of the British Raj and the Scramble for Africa of 1885? This course will assess many of the central arguments concerning postcoloniality and put them into the context of literature written about and in nations which gained independence following the period of mass decolonization in the mid- to late twentieth century.

In this course, students will analyze important examples of nineteenth-century American poetry, prose, short and long fiction, by the likes of William Apess, Edgar Allan Poe, Zitkala-Sa, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, in order to evaluate how their engagement with traditional literary themes of the period such as family, nation, and belonging have gendered and classed, among other, political implications. Participants will analyze imaginative renderings of loss, fear, and desire in relation to matters of race and labor in order to gain a thorough understanding of the ways in which power is manipulated and sustained. Course readings and activities will undermine perceptions of nineteenth-century American writing as unified in its purpose or goals, illuminating instead its texture, complexities, and contradictions.

When you have finished reading the literature in this course, your grasp of our present world will be more profound than ever. The tropes that define practically every aspect of contemporary life aesthetically, socially, politically, economically, and linguistically were all shaped in the works of literature produced since the Civil War. From W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker Washington to Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to the poets and comics of our moment, the literature of the United States since 1865 shows us how we have become who we are.

This course surveys American literature from the 1600 to 1800. Readings begin with Native American narratives and Indigenous accounts of European arrival in the New World and end with American fiction and poetry written near the of end of the 18th century. In between, we’ll sample the rich and extensive multinational, multilingual, and multicultural American literature, considering how that literature imagines America—whether as home or as foreign territory, as indigenous, colonial, national, or imperial space. We will aim to read selected literary texts closely and carefully, and work toward understanding those texts within their historical and cultural contexts.

In this course we’ll explore the genre of science fiction as well as the field of science fiction studies. We’ll focus our studies on a breadth of Anglophone science fiction and pay particular attention to the way contemporary authors are reshaping how we view the sf genre. Our course readings will primarily be short stories, though we will also read 2-3 novels.

Is there a work or type of literature that you have always wanted to read, but you never had the opportunity to do so? This course takes a "choose your own adventure" approach in which each student can select any such work and analyze it in context of its genre conventions. Our first weeks together will define a wide range of genres and explore a variety of options for the course readings. Each subsequent week will be devoted to the works and genres that you, the students, select. Options include (but are not limited to) genres from: the four mythoi (comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire), speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, sci-fi, etc.), visual narrative media (comics, film adaptation), and others (mystery, fairytales, mythology, parody, etc.).

21st-Century Medieval Monstrosity explores adaptations of medieval monstrosity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by pairing medieval texts with modern literature, television, film, and games (tabletop and video). We will read Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" before diving into a variety of classical Arabic, Old English, and Middle English texts along with a Michael Crichton novel, an Inuit reimaging of Beowulf, films like The Green Knight, and games like Dungeons & Dragons, Skyrim, and more. Our class meetings will be filled with student-driven discussions, film viewings, and gaming to answer the question: what constitutes a monster or the monstrous, then and now?