Great Classes in Fall 2021

Check out these great lecture classes,
each taught by one of our department's award-winning instructors!

British Literary Traditions, Part 1 (English 210-1) with Prof. Helen Thompson

Monday/Wednesday 10-10:50, plus discussion section

This is part one of a two-quarter survey that covers writings produced in North America between the time Native peoples encountered Europeans for the first time and the turn of the twentieth century.

In the first quarter we’ll explore the history of North American literature from its indigenous beginnings—including the migration by Europeans to what they imagined as a “new world”—through the crisis of slavery in the mid-1850’s.  We will be centrally engaged with a set of related questions: What is American literature?  Who counts as an American?  Who shall be allowed to tell their stories, and on whose behalf?  We embark on this literary journey at a moment of questioning the relations between the present and our “literary traditions”: various organizations are debating how to commemorate the four hundredth anniversaries of the years 1619 (the year the first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia) and 1620 (the year of the Plymouth settlers’ landing in what is now Massachusetts); at the same time, people are calling for the removal of monuments to Christopher Columbus and to the Confederacy.  We will be reading authors that canonical literary histories have usually included—Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—alongside Native American authors who told stories of European encounter and African American accounts that radically contest the meanings of some of the key terms of U.S. literature, history, and culture: discovery, citizenship, representation, nation, freedom.

Introduction to Poetry (English 211) with Prof. Susannah Gottlieb

Monday/Wednesday 11-12:20, plus discussion section

The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways:  as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown.  Theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience.  In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us.  In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process.

Introduction to 20th Century American Literature (English 273) with Prof. Kalyan Nadiminti

Monday/Wednesday 12:30-1:50, plus discussion section

The twentieth century has been called “the American century” by Cold War ideologues and humanities critics alike, albeit for divergent political reasons. What might it mean for an entire temporality to be named after a nation-state, particularly one that has been fashioning itself not just as a sovereign geopolitical actor but as a global, imperial force? In contradistinction to this narrative of US supremacy, this course turns to twentieth and twenty-first centuries counter-narrative literatures that present a roadblock to the primacy of imperial logics. To both understand and contest US empire, we will harness literature, history, political and critical theory to understand the evolving contours of settler colonialism, Cold War military expansionism, post-9/11 counterinsurgency, global internment, and neoliberal market hegemonies in distinctly global terms. Reading multi-generic texts like Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13666, Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Viet Than Nguyen’s The Refugees, and work by Yusef Komunyakaa, Solmaz Sharif, and Aria Aber, we will work through novels, graphic memoirs, nonfiction, and poetry to interrogate the spheres of influence that have remapped the contemporary world as one that, to quote George Bush Jr., stands “with us or against us.” Theoretical readings around empire will include work by Amy Kaplan, Jasbir Puar, Judith Butler, Junaid Rana, and Anjuli Raza Kolb. Assignments will include one close-reading paper, one theoretical reading paper, quizzes, and a final paper.