Course Catalog 2022-2023 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Course Search
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This is a comprehensive listing of all active, credit-bearing courses offered by Oberlin College and Conservatory since Fall 2016. Courses listed this online catalog may not be offered every semester; for up to date information on which courses are offered in a given semester, please see PRESTO.
For the most part, courses offered by departments are offered within the principal division of the department. Many interdisciplinary departments and programs also offer courses within more than one division.
Individual courses may be counted simultaneously toward more than one General Course Requirement providing they carry the appropriate divisional attributes and/or designations.
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Economics |
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ECON 309 - Advanced Development FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
This course explores the factors determining economic development from a microeconomic and macroeconomic perspective. In the first half of the course, topics covered include population growth and fertility, poverty traps and multiple equilibria, migration and remittances, foreign aid, the role of institutional factors and the institutions vs. geography debate . The second half of the course explores the theory and evidence of economic development from a macroeconomic perspective. Topics include economic growth macroeconomic policies, and international trade and finance. This is a team-taught course.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251; ECON 253; and MATH 133.
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ECON 310 - Economic Development in Latin America FC SSCI CD QFR
4 credits
This course examines why many Latin American countries started with levels of development similar to those of the U.S. and Canada but have diverged in the last two centuries. A significant portion of the course will involve discussion of the long-lasting impact of the historical policies driving this divergence. In particular, we will analyze the colonial and post-independence period to examine the roots of the weak institutional frameworks than could explain a low growth trajectory. Additionally, we will look at events in the past decade, comparing and contrasting the experience of different countries with respect to growth, poverty and inequality.
Prerequisites & Notes: Econ 101, Econ 253, and completed or currently enrolled in Econ 255.
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ECON 312 - Data Science Tools for Social Scientists FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
This course serves as an introduction to tools, environments and workflows that are frequently used by data scientists working in industry, and is targeted to students in social sciences. The emphasis is made on mastering tools, rather than learning methods. Topics include Python and Unix fundamentals, SQL, data cleaning and regex, data wrangling and visualization with Python, API requests, multiprocessing and distributed computing, containers and cloud environments. Students in groups will propose and work on a data-related project. Minimal coding skills or willingness and time to learn those are required. Please check https://alexmoskalev.com/e312 for details.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 101 and (STAT 113 or ECON 255) or Instructor’s permission.
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ECON 315 - Financial Markets FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
A microeconomics approach to the study of the functions of financial markets. Topics include the fundamentals of risk and return, the valuation of equity and fixed income securities, the term structure of interest rates, investment and security analysis, and questions of market efficiency.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 253 and ECON 206 or 211.
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ECON 317 - Industrial Organization FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
Analysis of the modern theory and empirical evidence about the organization of firms and industries, why firms and industries take on particular forms, and what is the impact of that organization on market outcomes for consumers and producers. Specific topics include monopoly behavior, strategic firm behavior in markets with few firms, mergers, antitrust, governmental regulation, and consumer welfare.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 253 and MATH 133.
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ECON 322 - Public Economics FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
We use tools of economic analysis to study the public sector, which plays a dominant role in our lives. We examine the foundation of welfare economics, developing rationales for the existence of government. We introduce major concepts of public finance: externalities, public goods, voting and redistribution. We supplement the theory with discussions on relevant policy issues (public education, health care reform, social security, etc.) and with examples of empirical research related to taxation and expenditure.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 253 or consent of the instructor.
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ECON 326 - International Trade FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
This course offers the advanced theory of international trade, focusing on the factors which determine trade patterns, the gains from trade, and the domestic and international distribution of the gains from trade. Trade restrictions in the form of tariffs and quotas will be analyzed as well to understand how government policies can alter both trade flows and the distribution of gains from trade.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 253 and MATH 133 or equivalent.
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ECON 332 - Energy Economics FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
This course examines energy markets and policies. It applies economic theory and uses empirical evidence to analyze oil, natural gas, and electricity markets. Understanding the structure of supply and demand in these industries is essential for designing effective energy policy. Emphasis will be placed on understanding energy’s interaction with climate change.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 253
Sustainability
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ECON 351 - Macroeconomic Theory FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
This course examines central issues in macroeconomic research and policy. Building on basic models developed in ECON 251, the course develops more rigorous models to investigate economic growth, consumption and savings, investment, and business cycle fluctuations emphasizing the roles of monetary and fiscal policies, and their macroeconomic effects.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and MATH 133. ECON 255 is also recommended.
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ECON 353 - Microeconomic Theory FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
Analysis of selected topics in microeconomic theory at a level consistent with a first-year graduate course. Topics include optimization, risk and uncertainty, economics of information, game theory, market design (auctions and contract theory), welfare economics, and general equilibrium.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 253 and MATH 231
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ECON 355 - Advanced Econometrics FC SSCI QFR
4 credits
The course covers advanced topics in econometrics as a sequel to ECON 255. Topics covered include basic time series analysis, reduced form econometric estimation techniques in the presence of endogeneity, first difference estimators, fixed and random effects, instrumental variables, simultaneous equations, the estimation of treatment effects in experimental and quasi-experimental settings, and limited dependent variable models (Logit, Probit, and Tobit). Practical exercises will be conducted in Stata.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 255, MATH 133, and ECON 253.
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ECON 409 - Seminar: Institutions and Development FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
The seminar will review the most important literature in economic development from a micro perspective with an emphasis on the role that institutions, state capacity, and property rights have on development. Students will have to present the assigned papers and present a small research project.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 413 - Seminar: Comparative Economic Development FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
This seminar explores the theories of comparative economic development through the reading of scientific papers and articles. The ultimate goal of the seminar is understanding the deep causal roots of historic and contemporary wealth inequality across societies. The seminar starts by addressing the role of history and persistence of historical patterns on the different levels of living standards. The discussion of different roles played by geographic factors are discussed next, followed by the study of the effects of culture and diversity on economic development. The seminar ends with the discussion about the relationship between institutions and economic performance.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 415 - Seminar: The Economics of Pandemics FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
This seminar examines how pandemics, epidemics, and outbreaks of infectious disease affect the economy and economic behavior. We will cover how individuals respond to non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as lockdowns, quarantines, and mask mandates, as well as to vaccination policies and the effects of infectious diseases on productivity and human capital. Although much of the course will focus on COVID-19, we also discuss several pandemics and epidemics in American history, including smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, typhoid fever, influenza, measles, and HIV.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 255
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ECON 417 - Seminar: Research in Industrial Organization FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
Students read, discuss, produce, and present research on contemporary topics in industrial organization such as the economics of electronic marketplaces, consumer and firm behavior in online auctions, markets for goods with network effects, the dynamics of competition in high-tech industries, and so on.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 421 - Seminar: Human Capital during the Life Course FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
This seminar examines how investments in human capital starting at the beginning of life and continuing until mid-career affect health and labor market outcomes. We will start with the long-run effects of health investments that occur during the in utero period, also known as the fetal origins hypothesis. Then, we will examine educational investments occurring during primary and secondary school, as well as college enrollment decisions. Lastly, we will discuss the ways in which adult health interacts with income. To provide context, we will also discuss the evolution of health and human capital throughout American history.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 424 - Seminar: Child Development and Welfare FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
In this seminar, we will discuss current research on the economics of child development and determinants of child well-being. We will consider the role of child care, early childhood education, public programs, and the long-run economic and social consequences of early-life circumstances. Other topics include family structure and living arrangements, foster care, and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on children.
Prerequisites & Notes: Econ 251, Econ 253, and Econ 255.
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ECON 430 - Economics of Poverty & Income Distribution FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
This seminar examines poverty and income distribution, mostly in the U.S. We will discuss how poverty rates and wage inequality have changed over time, factors that explain historical trends, consequences of poverty and inequality, intergenerational mobility, and how income differs by race and gender. We will also consider the main government policies and programs that affect poverty and inequality. Students will write and present an original research paper.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 432 - Seminar in Energy and Environmental Economics FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
This seminar examines energy and environmental economics issues, mostly in the U.S. We will discuss carbon and sulfur dioxide emissions in the context of the electricity and automotive industries, as well as the transition to renewable energy. We will consider some of the main government programs that affect pollution, efficiency, and social welfare. Students will write and present an original economics research paper.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
This course is cross-listed with ENVS 432
Sustainability
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ECON 440 - Seminar: U.S. Monetary Policy FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
What does monetary policy do? What should it do? This seminar addresses these questions in the context of the extraordinary measures undertaken by the Federal Reserve in response to the financial crisis of 2007-09. Topics will include the formulation, implementation, and transmission of policy, with an emphasis on using empirical methods to evaluate its impact on the economy and financial markets.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 448 - Seminar: Economics of Housing and Real Estate FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
This seminar explores various aspects of real estate and the housing market through reading of micreconomic literature. Students will be expected to conduct and present an original piece of research. Topics may include: location choice; residential development; hedonic pricing and the valuation of housing; land use regulations and local government; the subprime mortgage crisis and its aftermath.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 449 - Seminar: Economics and Immigration FC SSCI WINT
4 credits
This seminar examines the movement of people between countries from an economics perspective. We will discuss the incentives for immigration, the economic impact of immigrants arrival in a new country and on the country of origin. We will examine theoretical models drawn from macro, public, labor and international economics and consider both policies real and imagined and empirical evidence. Students will write, revise and present an original research paper related to this topic.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 452 - Seminar on Financial Crises in the United States FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
Banking crises in the United States triggered legislative responses that shaped the regulatory structure of the financial system. This course will examine the major financial crises focusing on the underlying causes, the apparent mechanisms, and the regulatory remedies. The lessons from historical crises will be applied to recent financial events like the Panic of 2007 and the regulatory response to them.
Prerequisites & Notes: ECON 251, ECON 253, and ECON 255, or consent of instructor.
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ECON 491F - Honors Program - Full FC SSCI QFR WADV
4 credits
This program is open by departmental invitation to major students whose general and departmental records indicate their ability to carry the program and the likelihood that they will profit from it. The program is two semesters and involves the independent preparation of a thesis, defense of the thesis, active participation with other Honors students and the department staff in a weekly seminar as well as written and oral examinations by an outside examiner.
Prerequisites & Notes: Consent of instructor required.
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ECON 491H - Honors Program - Half HC SSCI QFR
2 credits
This program is open by departmental invitation to major students whose general and departmental records indicate their ability to carry the program and the likelihood that they will profit from it. The program is two semesters and involves the independent preparation of a thesis, defense of the thesis, active participation with other Honors students and the department staff in a weekly seminar as well as written and oral examinations by an outside examiner.
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ECON 995F - Private Reading - Full FC SSCI
4 credits
Private readings are offered as either a half or full academic course and require the faculty member’s approval. Students who wish to pursue a topic not covered in the regular curriculum may register for a private reading. This one-to-one tutorial is normally at the advanced level in a specific field and is arranged with a member of the faculty who has agreed to supervise the student. Unlike other courses, a student cannot register for a private reading via PRESTO. To register for a private reading, obtain a card from the Registrar’s Office, complete the required information, obtain the faculty member’s approval for the reading, and return the card to the Registrar’s Office.
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ECON 995H - Private Reading - Half HC SSCI
2 credits
Private readings are offered as either a half or full academic course and require the faculty member’s approval. Students who wish to pursue a topic not covered in the regular curriculum may register for a private reading. This one-to-one tutorial is normally at the advanced level in a specific field and is arranged with a member of the faculty who has agreed to supervise the student. Unlike other courses, a student cannot register for a private reading via PRESTO. To register for a private reading, obtain a card from the Registrar’s Office, complete the required information, obtain the faculty member’s approval for the reading, and return the card to the Registrar’s Office.
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ECON 999 - Honors FC SSCI
4 credits
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Education |
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EDPR 102 - SITES Spanish In The Elementary Schools “Language Teaching Practicum” CC
1 or 2 credits
This co-curricular Spanish teaching practicum is offered for variable credits (1-2) to students who have successfully completed EDUA 301 and are approved to continue teaching in the SITES program. Every credit represents a weekly time commitment of approximately 3 hours (including 1 hour of teaching).
Prerequisites & Notes: Completion of EDUA 301 and approval to continue in the SITES Program required. EDPR 102 may be repeated with a maximum of 8 co-curricular credits counting towards the graduation requirement. P/NP Grading Only.
Community Based Learning
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EDUA 101 - Language Pedagogy FC ARHU CD
4 credits
What does it mean to know a language? And how do you teach languages effectively? Encouraging students to look at language in new and revealing ways, this course provides an introduction to the field of applied linguistics and language pedagogy. The course includes a practicum in which students work as teachers or tutors in the language(s) of their competency, including English. Spanish-speaking students who are selected will work in SITES. Open to all students, regardless of linguistic background.
Prerequisites & Notes: Application and interview required prior to consent.
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EDUA 301 - Language Pedagogy: The Theory & Practice of Teaching and Learning Languages FC ARHU CD
4 credits
What does it mean to know a language? And how do you teach languages effectively? Encouraging students to look at language in new and revealing ways, this course provides an introduction to the field of applied linguistics and language pedagogy. The course includes a practicum in which students work as teachers or tutors in the language(s) of their competency, including English. Spanish-speaking students who are selected will work in SITES. Open to all students, regardless of linguistic background.
Prerequisites & Notes: Application and interview required prior to consent.
Community Based Learning
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EDUA 312 - Alternative Pedagogies: Theory and Application FC ARHU
4 credits
What are alternative pedagogies? What do they look like? How are they different from and similar to “traditional” ways of teaching and learning? Through readings, discussions, field trips, structured observations and student-facilitated classes, we will explore the theory and application of alternative pedagogies and what supports and constrains their use.
Prerequisites & Notes: Sophomore standing or above and work with children in an educational setting.
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EDUA 320 - Children and Society: Is There Still a Childhood? FC ARHU
4 credits
Through the lenses of children’s literature, developmental psychology and sociological and historical research we will explore the historical role of children and childhood and then examine some of the social, educational and economic issues affecting children and childhood in U.S. society today. Individual and group research will include interviews and library work. The last third of the course will be seminar-based with students sharing research. Field trip(s) required.:
Prerequisites & Notes: Sophomore level or higher.
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EDUA 995F - Private Reading - Full FC ARHU
4 credits
Private readings are offered as either a half or full academic course and require the faculty member’s approval. Students who wish to pursue a topic not covered in the regular curriculum may register for a private reading. This one-to-one tutorial is normally at the advanced level in a specific field and is arranged with a member of the faculty who has agreed to supervise the student. Unlike other courses, a student cannot register for a private reading via PRESTO. To register for a private reading, obtain a card from the Registrar’s Office, complete the required information, obtain the faculty member’s approval for the reading, and return the card to the Registrar’s Office.
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EDUA 995H - Private Reading - Half HC ARHU
2 credits
Private readings are offered as either a half or full academic course and require the faculty member’s approval. Students who wish to pursue a topic not covered in the regular curriculum may register for a private reading. This one-to-one tutorial is normally at the advanced level in a specific field and is arranged with a member of the faculty who has agreed to supervise the student. Unlike other courses, a student cannot register for a private reading via PRESTO. To register for a private reading, obtain a card from the Registrar’s Office, complete the required information, obtain the faculty member’s approval for the reading, and return the card to the Registrar’s Office.
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EDUC 300 - Principles of Education FC CNDP, DDHU
4 credits
Students will explore the complex world of education from historical, philosophical, sociological and political perspectives and assumptions, while also investigating why different models of schools function as they do. Educational theory, policy, and curriculum will be addressed, specifically current issues and research dealing with students’ readiness to learn, assessment and evaluation, funding, teacher assessment, and educational standards. Traditional and alternative pedagogies, their impact on teaching-learning partnerships, and models for teacher reflective praxis will be included in course readings, discussions, and written reflections. While the course focuses on the American educational system at large, students will practice applying key educational concepts to subject areas of their own interest.
Prerequisites & Notes: Counts as liberal arts course for Conservatory and Double-Degree students.
This course is appropriate for new students.
Community Based Learning
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English |
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ENGL 104 - Supervidere: Surveillance Cultures of the American Canon FC ARHU
4 credits
These days someone is probably watching you: followers on social media, operators of security cameras, that pesky elf on a shelf. But was it always so? This survey course considers how surveillance is essential to the development of American literature, culture, and society from the colonial period to the present. The word “survey” itself comes from the Latin “supervidere,” meaning to oversee or supervise. As we survey American literature ranging from colonial-era captivity narratives to Edgar Allen Poe’s nineteenth-century gothic and Thomas Pynchon’s twentieth-century postmodernism, we will consider why watching and being watched are common themes in the American canon.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students may count one 100-Level course toward the English major. This course may also be of interest to CAST majors.
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ENGL 110 - A History of the English Language FC ARHU
4 credits
We will trace the development of the language from its Indo-European prehistory to ca. 1900, emphasizing the intersections between language, literature, history, and culture. We will also study changing attitudes toward language, including such issues as correctness, dialect, dictionaries, and change itself. Students should expect frequent assignments and exams.
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ENGL 112 - One Hundred Poems FC ARHU
4 credits
An introduction to poetry in English, from Late Middle English to the present, giving particular attention to the ways in which lyric distinguishes itself from other genres, manifests both thought and feeling, relates to historical and cultural context, and rewards close, often excruciatingly close, reading. Students will be expected to demonstrate an intimate familiarity with the texts.
This course is appropriate for new students.
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ENGL 123 - Introduction to Shakespeare FC ARHU
4 credits
An interactive lecture course surveying Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, intended for non-English majors and anyone with more curiosity than experience. Likely plays: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, Henry IV part 1, Henry V, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. Occasional screenings.
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ENGL 140 - Arthurian Fictions FC ARHU
4 credits
Stories about King Arthur and his knights have been popular favorites from the Middle Ages to our own day. The legend has been represented across the arts, in dozens of languages, in high and pop culture, as comedy and as tragedy. Rather than attempting to cover this vast and diverse tradition, the course will introduce a variety of key texts and genres (e.g. medieval romance, poetry, children’s lit, film) and methods of analysis. Not writing-intensive.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students may count one 100-Level course toward the English major.
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ENGL 141 - Rivers in American Literature FC ARHU
4 credits
An introduction to the different meanings of rivers in a variety of texts, genres, and formats. Through careful readings of short pieces (poems, films, songs, stories, essays), longer accounts (novels, history, travel writing, autobiography), and local waterways, we will examine some of the different meanings that Americans have attributed to rivers and attempt to imagine where our attitudes towards places, people, and flowing water might lead us. Student writing will include brief essays and exams.
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ENGL 167 - Thirteen Ways of Looking at Sports FC ARHU CD
4 credits
Sports is perhaps the most popular pastime around the world today. And the images, metaphors, narratives, and values that spring up around sports weave themselves into the stories we tell about ourselves and our world, even when we don’t think we’re talking about sports. In this course, we’ll use tools from philosophy, literary and cultural study, sociology, economics, and the sciences to look at sports and its accompanying cultural forms and practices. We’ll be looking at what they tell us about how we think about such things as play, beauty, goodness, violence, money, sex, gender, race, and nations.
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ENGL 180 - Selected Authors: Marilynne Robinson HC ARHU
2 credits
An exploration of the aesthetic style and thematic concerns deployed by a major American writer across her five novels to date, including Housekeeping and the Gilead Cycle. With a distinctive lyricism tied to conceptual intricacy, Robinson elaborates how the deepest questions of meaning continue to matter in our putatively secular age. Requires heavy reading load, class participation and frequent writing assignments.
This course is appropriate for new students.
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ENGL 203 - Early British Literature: Points of Departure FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
How does English literature begin? This course will introduce some of the most influential texts of the British tradition before 1700, texts that survived the centuries to become touchstones for writers around the globe. Authors will include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne. Medieval texts will be read in modern translation. British, Pre-1700.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 206 - Shakespearean Tragedy FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
Intrigue, heartache, existential despair, violence, madness, guilt, shame, grief, jealousy, revenge, murder: the themes of England’s great playwright, writing at the peak of his artistic achievement. Through a careful reading of the plays, we will discover Shakespeare’s remarkable achievements as a tragedian; the course will also provide a sense of the vital world of early modern England, and theoretical considerations of Tragedy as a genre. British, Pre-1700.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level Courses.” This course may count towards the major in THEA.
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ENGL 207 - Lovers, Philosophers, and Revolutionaries: A Survey of Renaissance Literature FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
The Protestant reformation, the scientific revolution, the rise of capitalism, the transvestite theater, the “discovery” of America, the plague: the English Renaissance was a time of daring innovation as well as classical revival. This course will survey the authors writing during this extraordinary time, including Marlowe, Webster, Wyatt, Surrey, Montaigne, Erasmus, Sidney, Queen Elizabeth, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and Spenser. Our focus will be on the relationship between radical cultural and intellectual change and literary expression. British, Pre-1700.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 209 - Ovid in the Middle Ages FC ARHU
4 credits
We will read several of the central works of Ovid (in translation) in conjunction with medieval literature that imitates, invokes, or develops Ovid’s literary corpus. We will emphasize reading and imitation as modes of interpretation, and consider how scholars of the medieval period saw themselves as inheriting and continuing a distinct literary tradition. Texts include Ovid’s Amores, Heroides, and Metamorphses, various Chaucerian works, the Roman de la Rose, and the letters of Abelard and Heloise. Pre-1800.
This course is cross-listed with CLAS 222, CMPL 222
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ENGL 213 - Desire and Literature FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
Erotic desire is one of literature’s great and perennial themes. This course will explore some of its permutations in texts from the classical to the contemporary: from Ovid to Junot Diaz, from Shakespeare to Zora Neale Hurston, from vampires to Marilyn Monroe. We will pay special attention to the role of desire in self-construction. How are selves imagined in relation to loss, absence, and otherness? How do our articulations of desire locate us in time, space, genders, bodies, and communities? What do the literatures of desire tell us about who we are and who we want to be? This course is required for the Arts of Desire StudiOC Learning Community.
Prerequisites & Notes: Field Trip(s) Required.
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ENGL 214 - Image and Enlightenment FC ARHU
4 credits
Image and Enlightenment explores the centrality of images for the eighteenth-century cultural project known as the Enlightenment. We examine physically embodied images that circulated in eighteenth-century print culture as illustrations in philosophical treatises, scientific voyages of discovery, and the novel. We also study theories of the image as developed in Enlightenment debates about the nature of the imagination. Students in this course will examine Enlightenment images, material and immaterial, across genres, from the Encyclopedie, to the illustrated novel, to landscape treatises. Labs in Mudd Special Collections afford hands-on knowledge of the variety and uses of images in the Enlightenment. 1700-1900. Required course for Graphic Accounts: Telling Through Pictures StudiOC Learning Community.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled, “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 217 - Transgender Literature: Transition, Narrative, and Desire FC ARHU
4 credits
There has been an efflorescence of wonderful stories, novels, and memoirs by trans authors over the last decade. As this “genre” of literature takes modern shape, we can start to interrogate the tropes of representation and narrative structure that underlie trans self and communal-understanding. The process of transition itself seems to imply a narrative structure, moving from one position to another. But there is also an expectation and demand made of trans people to tell a specific story about how they have come to understand themselves, of what kinds of pain and violence they have experienced, or even just of how they came to understand their gender and experience, in order to justify their existence. We will read a selection of texts that interrogate these narrative tropes and structures by authors who are trying to develop a trans writing that builds new possible worlds for transness. Instead of simply minority representation, we will look at trans literature as a place to understand trans desire. We will read texts by trans writers that form the backbone of this genre while also providing critiques. We will interrogate transition itself as a narrative process, and ask how literary visions of transness can both limit or unleash trans possibilities. Our approach will combine disciplines of trans studies and literary theory in order to understand what narrative has to offer transness and what transness has to offer narrative.
This course is cross-listed with GSFS 217
This course is appropriate for new students.
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ENGL 218 - Shakespeare and the Limits of Genre: Problem Comedy and Romance FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This class will study Shakespeare’s most inscrutable plays: the disturbing “problem comedies” - All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Merchant of Venice ; and the dazzling “romances” Pericles, Cymbeline , and The Winter’s Tale. In both tragicomic modes, Shakespeare experiments with the limits of genre: crafting “happy endings” to plays that resist them, and thereby speculating on the nature of dramatic representation and fiction-making itself. British, Pre-1700.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200 Level Courses.”
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ENGL 219 - Persona and Impersonation FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
A close look at how pattern, allusion, borrowing, theft, and invention collude in the work of major poets from the Renaissance to the present. Written work will consist of imitation of the assigned poems, and will require extensive revision, collaboration, and responsiveness to peers. Designed to benefit both critical and creative writers, this course seeks to hone skills of observation, listening, and description, as well as to cultivate mastery of the formal and rhetorical vocabularies necessary for careful reading and writing of poetry.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
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ENGL 223 - Meaning and Being FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
A survey of prominent literary works of the 1800s, emphasizing close reading and giving special attention to the concept of ‘Nature.’ The reading list will be centered around Moby-Dick, which appeared in the middle of the century and features tangled relations between meaning and being, self and other. American, 1700-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
Sustainability
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ENGL 225 - Victoria’s Secrets FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
Much as we associate the reign of Queen Victoria with prudishness and moral restraint, literature from this period frequently exposes the dark underside of the Victorians’ social psyche. What are some of the social, political, and psychological concerns and anxieties behind Victorian authors’ fascination with the sinister, the criminal, the vampiric? Authors include Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, R. L. Stevenson, and others. British, 1700-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 227 - Jane Austen and Company: Romantic Revolutions FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This course focuses on Romantics’ responses to the most pressing issues of their day: the French Revolution, massive social and gender inequality, the abolition of the slave trade, the industrial revolution and its ecological disasters, to name a few. Such engagements allowed Romantic authors to explore their own anxieties of authorship as they strove to gauge the rewards and perils of full participation in the “Republic of Letters.” As we ponder these and similar issues, we will pay close attention to the formal and generic attributes of a broad range of literary texts, from poetry to fiction to critical prose. British, 1700-1900. Pre-1800.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 228 - Modern British and Irish Fiction FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
Novels and short fiction by such major 20th-century writers as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
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ENGL 229 - The Poets’ Bible FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
In what ways can we consider the English Bible to be a poetic text? How has the English Bible influenced poetry in English? With these primary questions in mind, we’ll read biblical texts (e.g. Genesis, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, Job, Ruth, Esther, Luke, John, Pauline Epistles, Revelation) and the works of such poets as Donne, Herbert, Milton, Traherne, Crashaw, Watts, Wordsworth, Whitman, Tennyson, Rossetti, Eliot, Stevens, and Hill. American OR British (not both), 1700-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 231 - Sports Literature and Cultural Fantasy FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
We will study how sports appears in fictional, non-fictional, and poetic literary texts from around the world. In addition to exploring the various functions served by sports within different literary forms, we will examine how sports literature functions within broader social and cultural contexts. What fantasies of individual and collective identity does sports literature feed, or reveal? How does the specificity of sports, as portrayed in literary texts, shape the ways we experience and think about bodies, the differences we perceive between them, and the social categories and power structures associated with those differences?
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
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ENGL 233 - Women of Color in the Avant-Garde FC ARHU CD
4 credits
Historically, the American avant-garde canon has privileged the work of white male authors, neglecting the vital contributions of women of color. This class will offer a different vantage point on the history of experimental literature and art in the U.S. Our course will begin with the modernist period and end in the present moment, traversing a century of transgressive literary and visual culture-making. We will explore texts across genre and medium, including prose, poetry, drama, performance art, and film, and consider theoretical and scholarly writing alongside creative work. American, Diversity, Post-1900.
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ENGL 234 - The Postcolonial Trajectories FC ARHU
4 credits
An introduction to anglophone literatures of the global south, this course addresses work by writers from the formerly colonized countries in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean, including their diasporas in Britain and North America. Familiarizing students with some major “postcolonial” texts, as they trace the genealogy of postcolonial writing to the era of decolonization from post-World War II to the late 1960s, the course will also cover contemporary novels (by writers like Monica Ali, J.M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, R.K. Narayan, and Salman Rushdie) that engage with various debates on: 1) gender and sexuality; 2) race and ethnicity; and 3) class and social mobility in postcolonial societies.
This course is cross-listed with CMPL 234
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ENGL 238 - Contemporary American Fiction FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This course selectively surveys contemporary American fiction. Thematic connections include the role of memory and the past in defining current literary practice. We’ll also focus on the nature of interpretation and its role in consolidating its object of study. The reading list is diverse in a number of ways - stylistic, generic and cultural - but always includes some very recently published work. Recent authors have included Beatty, Erdrich, Ozeki, Moshfegh, Ngyuen, Pollack, Whitehead and others.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200 level Courses.”
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ENGL 242 - Asian American Literature at the Crossroads FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
A critical mass of Asian American literature has arrived; that presence, while valuable, also comes with many responsibilities. How does Asian American literature represent its increasingly global constituencies? What narrative forms and literary devices do writers and artists use to give figure to culture? This course explores the aesthetics, theories, and politics of Asian American literature and culture. It will focus especially on questions of diaspora, gender and sexuality, and cultural critique.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
This course is cross-listed with CAST 242
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ENGL 243 - Promise and Peril: Race and Multicultural America FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
This course investigates the intellectual history of race in American literature and culture. It asks students to consider the stakes in constructing racial difference, that is, the political, ideological, economic, and cultural contexts within which discourses of race circulate. It will look at a variety of textual forms, including short and long fiction, poetry and verse, memoir, natural history, and legal documents. The course requires us to take a long view on race – how its lifespan precedes and exceeds any one of us – a discussion that is crucial, if indirect, for addressing the issues we face today. American, Diversity, Post-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled, “200-Level Courses.”
This course is cross-listed with CAST 243
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ENGL 244 - Supervidere: Surveillance Cultures of the American Canon FC ARHU
4 credits
This course considers American surveillance cultures in historical contexts. Focusing on five sites of surveillance - colony, plantation, factory, prison, city - we explore how surveillance has shaped American culture and society from the colonial period through the nineteenth-century. We will ask how literature represents acts of surveillance and also how writing serves as an early surveillance technology. Readings include: Salem witch trial transcripts, captivity narratives, slave narratives, gothic tales, prison literature. We will pay particular attention to how this literary history has shaped the uneven power relations of the present. This course must be taken in conjunction with CAST 312.
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ENGL 246 - Comparative Global South Literatures FC ARHU CD
4 credits
This course will examine literatures of the Global South. Various methods including a South-South comparative approach will be used to interrogate literary works. As useful frameworks to traverse postcolonial borders, they help us navigate the realities of the Global South. Students will also gain an insight into the interconnected experiences shaped by politics, ecological crisis and discourses of gender and sexuality. We will read Anita Desai’s Clear Light of the Day (1980), Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985), Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017).
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ENGL 247 - Shakespeare in the Colonies FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
What happens when Shakespeare travels from England to its former colonies in South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean? Framed by Shakespeare’s canonical position in cultural texts from these former colonies, this course will examine revisionary appropriations of his plays by contemporary Indian cinema and postcolonial literary texts. Our discussions will be informed by postcolonial scholarship on revision and translation as forms of transformation and subversion and theories of cinematic and literary adaptations. Assignments will include informal written and oral presentations and formal writing assignments on the literary, theoretical, and cinematic texts and film viewings. This course is required for the “From Bombay to Cairo: Cinema and Social Change” StudiOC Learning Community. Pre-1800.
Prerequisites & Notes: This course requires students to also take HIST 247: Cinema, Social Movements and Revolution in Egypt. As a ‘globally connected course’ it is also connected with a course in Comparative Literature offered at the American University in Cairo (AUC): ‘Literature and Cinema: Writing Back/Filming Back.’
This course is cross-listed with CMPL 247
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ENGL 247OC - Shakespeare in the Colonies FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
What happens when Shakespeare travels from England to its former colonies in South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean? Framed by Shakespeare’s canonical position in cultural texts from these former colonies, this course will examine revisionary appropriations of his plays by contemporary Indian cinema and postcolonial literary texts. Our discussions will be informed by postcolonial scholarship on revision and translation as forms of transformation and subversion and theories of cinematic and literary adaptations. Assignments will include informal written and oral presentations and formal writing assignments on the literary, theoretical, and cinematic texts and film viewings. This course is required for the “From Bombay to Cairo: Cinema and Social Change” StudiOC Learning Community. Pre-1800.
Prerequisites & Notes: This course requires students to also take HIST 247: Cinema, Social Movements and Revolution in Egypt. As a ‘globally connected course’ it is also connected with a course in Comparative Literature offered at the American University in Cairo (AUC): ‘Literature and Cinema: Writing Back/Filming Back.’
This course is cross-listed with CMPL 247OC
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ENGL 249 - Introduction to Book Studies FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
This course introduces students to key approaches and concepts in the discipline of Book Studies. Book Studies encompasses printed and handwritten paper objects, but also ancient clay tablets and contemporary electronic media. This interdisciplinary course lays the groundwork for students to study the social and cultural history of books as historical, aesthetic, religious, and visual artifacts in Book Studies courses throughout Oberlin?s curriculum. Students will have hands-on experience in the Letterpress Studio, Art Museum, College Library and Conservatory collections with text-and-image-objects from the West, East Asia and the Islamic world. This course is required for the Book Studies Concentration and prepares students for Book Studies courses throughout the College and Conservatory.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
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ENGL 253 - Pens and Needles: Gender and Media in Early America FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
This course will explore the complex relationship between gender, race, and media in the Americas before 1865. Our syllabus takes as its starting point expansive understandings of the term ‘media.’ We will read the written word alongside lives and experiences recorded through media such as quilts, samplers, Native American quill work, songs, and recipes. Examining the different authorial roles available to early Americans, we will consider how gender, race, and ethnicity structure one’s relationship to alphabetic letters, and explore the diverse ways in which people used various media to carve out identities for themselves and to enter public discourse. Pre-1800.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanitites. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
This course is cross-listed with GSFS 253
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ENGL 254 - Nineteenth-Century New York: Writing the Modern City FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
When and more importantly where did we become what we might call “modern”? This seminar takes New York City as its focal point, exploring how authors wrote about profound changes taking place in the nineteenth century. Global immigration, industrialization, changes in domestic ideology, urbanization, the rise of consumer culture, and re-definitions of political subjecthood had a critical impact on how people inhabited their various subject positions as well as their city. Authors may include: Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Jacobs, Israel Zangwill, Fanny Fern, William Apess, and Abraham Cahan. American, 1700-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section, “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 255 - In Search of America: The Concept of Nature in Early American Literature FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
An exploration of different perspectives on the natural world in early American literature, this course also introduces students to research skills and information technology. Texts will include sermons, promotional tracts, descriptions of the land and its inhabitants, captivity narratives, American Indian responses to European encounters, poetry, autobiography, philosophical and political treatises, and fiction. By connecting today’s “information landscape’” with the writings of early America, we will investigate the meaning of “nature” in the New World. American, 1700-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 258 - August Wilson: The Century Cycle FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
August Wilson’s cycle of plays set in each decade of the 20th century is the most ambitious dramatic project depicting the African American experience, and this course surveys the cycle with a critically “syncretic” approach. We will supplement readings of the plays with (self-identified) primary influences on Wilson’s work – Baraka, Blues, Borges, Bearden – in order to describe the unique sense of form and ritual he brings to the collective project of representing the black experience. American, Diversity, Post-1900. Field trips required.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level Courses.”
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ENGL 260 - Black Humor and Irony: Modern Literary Experiments FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
African American humor has until recently received little academic study. But the many anthologies of folk humor and the visibility of stand-up comedy invite us to examine the presence and rhetorical role of humor, comedy, and irony in African American literature. This course thus centers on a representative group of modern black humorists and explores various approaches (functional, structural, and cultural) for interpreting their works. Authors will include Chesnutt, Hurston, Hughes, Ellison, and Reed. American.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-Level courses.”
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ENGL 261 - Constructing the Subject: African American Women and Auto/Biography FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
Self-discovery and -report have been foundational to the Black intellectual and literary tradition in general. This course focuses particularly on ways in which African-American women have re-conceptualized autobiographical and disciplinary norms and boundaries as well as their own subjectivity (e.g., as actors, thinkers, and citizens) in genre-bending “auto-texts.” Authors will include Jacobs, Wells, Hurston, Brooks, Angelou, Lorde, Williams, and Souljah; we will also read theoretical and critical studies exploring common and uncommon features of autobiographical writing. American, Diversity, Post-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “200-level Courses.”
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ENGL 263 - Black English and Voice: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
Sociolinguistics studies the relationship between language and society and/or language variation by group and location. Given that it is a highly developed ‘dialect’ that was central to definition of the field, this course examines regularities of Black English (sometimes called Ebonics, to indicate both speaker and sound). Along the way, students will be introduced to key concepts of sociolinguistics (e.g., speech community and speech act as well as semantics, morphology, and phonetics/phonology). The course also re-visits the 1997 debates involving Oakland?s intention to feature Ebonics in English education and culminates with consideration of differently stylized ‘literary’ renderings of Black speech. Field trips possible.
Prerequisites & Notes: AAST 101, one 200-Level English course, or equivalent.
This course is cross-listed with AAST 263
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ENGL 267 - Ethnic Experiments FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
This course considers the experimental aesthetics writers have used to develop ways of reading race and ethnicity in contemporary American literature. In what ways do avant-garde techniques enable different kinds of questions to ask about racialized life in the US? Whether playing with point of view, parallel universes, or poetic meter, such texts demand a startling attention to the site where culture in its semantic richness resides.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled ‘200-Level Courses.’
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ENGL 271 - Imagining America: Experimental Contemporary Ethnic American Literature FC ARHU CD
4 credits
How do contemporary authors of color use literary form to investigate, explore, subvert, or re-imagine the mythos of “America” and what it means to be American? In this course, we will be reading texts in African American, Asian American, Chicanx, Iranian American, and Latinx literatures. We will consider how these authors experiment with form in order to engage with issues including transatlantic slavery, migration, diaspora, home, war, and citizenship, among other topics. While each text may be differently experimental, they all use experimental forms to “imagine” the project of America and issues related to national . American, Diversity, Post-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, refer to the English Program section titled, “200-Level Courses”.
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ENGL 275 - Introduction to Comparative Literature FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
Comparative Literature is the study of literature, theory, and criticism across the boundaries of language, nation, culture, artistic medium and historical period. This course examines the nature and scope of the discipline, focusing both on its theoretical assumptions and its practical applications. Texts and topics reflect curricular strengths of the college and include literary theory, literature & the other arts, World Literature, European languages and literatures, and translation.
Prerequisites & Notes: An introductory literature course in any language. Note: Comparative Literature majors should take this course by the sophomore year.
This course is cross-listed with CMPL 200
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ENGL 277 - American Drama FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
Selected works of major American playwrights. Emphasis will be placed on close reading, as well as on the significance of each play in regard to political and social movements of the time and the evolution of the American theater. Among the playwrights to be considered: Odets, O’Neill, Williams, Hellman, Albee, Shepard, Baraka, Bullins, Fornes, Kushner. Please note: Not open to students who have taken ENGL 365.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent. Not opened if student took ENGL 365 Counts toward Critical Inquiry portion of Theater Major
This course is cross-listed with THEA 277
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ENGL 279 - Imagining Borders FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
This course seeks to address the conceptual, cultural, historical, and political formation of borders in contemporary global society. By examining how literature and other forms of cultural production imagine and negotiate borders - the borders of a self and body, of a community, and of a civilization - students will obtain a stronger sense of the critical role that borders play, which will contribute to their development both intellectually and civically. Given the prominent visibility that the U.S.-Mexico border occupies in today’s media along with its historical importance in terms of organizing the cultural geography of the hemisphere, this border serves as a rich and foundational site for the course.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
This course is cross-listed with CAST 279
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ENGL 282 - Shifting Scenes: Drama Survey FC ARHU CD WINT
4 credits
This course will study the development of drama from the ancient Greeks to the present with the aim of promoting understanding and analysis of dramatic texts. By studying the major forms of drama – tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy – within their historical and cultural contexts, we will explore the elements common to all dramatic works, as well as the way in which those elements vary and evolve from one time and place to another.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent. Counts towards Critical Inquiry portion of Theater Major.
This course is cross-listed with THEA 282
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ENGL 290 - Shakespearean Comedy and Social Justice FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
Traditional comedy is a problem: its happy endings often superficial, exclusionary, and cruel. We first consider how Shakespeare himself has been a problem, appropriated to serve retrograde cultural values and white supremacy. Products of their time, Shakespeare’s comedies nonetheless resisted convention and emphasized injustice. As we explore how they grapple with misogyny, xenophobia, racism, and tyranny, we aim to illuminate our own moment. Our virtual classroom will value creativity, intellectual engagement, diverse voices, and action.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanitites. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
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ENGL 291 - Introduction to the Advanced Study of Cinema FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This course focuses on ways to engage critically with cinema. We examine elements of film form, style, and technique and explore how these produce meaning. Through theoretical and critical readings we consider cinema as art, industry, technology, and politics. We also study approaches to watching and assessing movies, concepts and contexts in cinema studies as a discipline, and film in relation to other media. We also pay special attention to writing about cinema.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
This course is cross-listed with CINE 290
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ENGL 293 - Acquired Taste: Literature and Colonial American Foodways FC ARHU
4 credits
This course offers a food history of settler colonialism in the Americas. It examines how invasion and occupation disrupted Indigenous foodways but also how Indigenous American foods (from tomatoes, hot peppers, and potatoes, to chocolate and peanuts) globalized European, African, and Asian tastes. Often following the routes of the Atlantic slave trade and back again, American foods and their preparation represent global histories of dispossession as well as resistance and adaptation. Students will read a range of literary genres, recipes, and food histories that shaped European and settler appetites for American foods but with an eye to how they represent the production, preparation knowledge, and creativity of Black and Indigenous Americans. Assignments include a critical making lab component where students recreate early modern recipes, weekly potluck dinner, and the compilation of a class cookbook/food history as the final project.
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ENGL 299 - What is Literature: Introduction to the Advanced Study of Literature FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This course will introduce students to fundamental issues, approaches, and methods in the study of literature. We will do a lot of reading and writing, but above all we will ask a lot of questions: What makes a text “literary,” and how does it matter to our reading experience? What questions should we ask about literary texts, and why? Who gets to say what a text “means,” and how many meanings does a text have? What are the relationships between texts and the social world? How do literary scholars read a poem, a play, a film, a novel, or a cereal box, and why? This course is for anyone with an interest in literature, but it is strongly recommended for English majors.
Prerequisites & Notes: Students should have completed a Writing Intensive course or gained Writing Certification in any course in the humanities. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent. For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled 200-Level Courses. This course is intended to prepare students for the English major and advanced work in literary study. Students who are interested in majoring in English are strongly encouraged to take this course by the end of their sophomore year and before they declare the English major.
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ENGL 300 - Race and Visual Culture in the 20th and 21st Centuries FC ARHU CD
4 credits
How does American culture visualize race? How is racial meaning produced, explored, and circulated in visual culture? This course will explore how race is “seen” in American literature and culture from the early twentieth century into our contemporary moment. We will examine a broad range of literary and visual texts, including novels, poetry, plays, paintings, performance art, and popular culture. We will consider concepts such as racial classification, stereotype, representation, fetish, abstraction, and social and political transformation. We will ask, why is race so strongly associated with the visual? How does the visual narrow or expand cultural understandings of race?
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ENGL 301 - Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
Twenty-nine pilgrims set off down the road to Canterbury. To pass the time, they devise a storytelling contest. This is The Canterbury Tales: both a great compilation of medieval genres-from chivalric romance to raunchy comedy to beast fable-and a sustained exploration of how stories work and what they do in the world. It is about pleasure and interpretation, authority and rebellion, sex, chickens, and the meaning of life. There is a reason people have been reading it for 600 years. Students will learn to read Middle English, which is hard but fun. Pre-1800.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled ‘Advanced Courses.’
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ENGL 304 - Shakespeare and Metamorphosis FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This course will examine several Shakespeare plays in conversation with classical myths and their major themes of transformation, sexuality, suffering, artistic creation, coming of age, wisdom, love, loss. Shakespearean works include “Venus and Adonis,” Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, paired with myths by Apuleius, Plato, and Ovid; retellings by Rilke, Auden, Zimmerman, and Bidart; and works of visual art. We will also explore theoretical approaches to myth-making, and myths’ relationship to other “fictional” literary forms. British, Pre-1800.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section “Advanced Courses.”
This course is cross-listed with CMPL 304
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ENGL 306 - Literature and the Scientific Revolution FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
What is our relationship to the natural world, to knowledge, to imagination, and to discovery? During the early modern era, emerging scientific practices offered a dazzling array of new strategies for discovering truth – challenging, and in turn being challenged by – the imaginative works of Renaissance authors such as Donne, Milton, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Cavendish. We will study the history of science during its ‘revolution,’ through its relationship with poetry, drama, and rhetoric. Pre-1800
Prerequisites & Notes: Field trips required. This course may also count towards the major in CMPL. For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled `Advanced Courses.’
This course is cross-listed with CMPL 306
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ENGL 308 - Visuality, Materiality, and Renaissance Literature FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This course will consider the relationship between the verbal, visual, and material in early modern culture and literature. Renaissance printed books, portraits, jewelry, perspective paintings, automatons, anatomy theaters, machines, maps, stage sets, costumes and more will be read alongside the works of authors like Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Ralegh, Milton, Jonson, Webster, Carew, Middleton, and Wroth, incorporating a range of theoretical perspectives. Class will include regular visits to Special Collections and the AMAM. Pre-1800. Field trips required.
Prerequisites & Notes: ENGL 299 or two 200-Level courses. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
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ENGL 309 - The Poetry of Love and Seduction in the Renaissance FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
From love sonnets to pornographic narratives, from carpe diem seductions to marriage odes, early modern poets employed a dazzling array of literary resources for writing about love, sex, gender, and desire – often disguising darker explorations of skepticism, political transgression, religious defiance, and fear of death. This course will trace the development of erotic literature in Renaissance England and beyond, with attention to its rich cultural, intellectual, artistic, and historical contexts. British, Pre-1700.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled Advanced Courses.
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ENGL 310 - Early Medieval Literature: From Virgil to Dante FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This course will explore the birth of modern European literatures in the post-Roman world. We will examine various collisions of cultures and values in an age of migration, invasion, and conversion. We will trace the influence of Arabic culture and the rise of secular romance traditions in French-speaking courts. And we will conclude with Dante’s Inferno and its ambitious new claims for the power and value of poetry. All texts in English translation.
Prerequisites & Notes: ENGL 299 or two 200-level course. Requirements can be waived with instructor consent.
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ENGL 317 - Postapocalyptic Pacific Rim FC ARHU CD WADV
4 credits
This course explores the Pacific Rim as a geographical entity created out of practices of empire, nationalism, and globalization. Many writers, filmmakers, and artists have charted this space through the genre of the postapocalyptic, imagining the futures of world history as carnage, wreckage, and global devastation. What is at stake in this genre, and in particular its rendering of sites along the Pacific Rim? The course will examine metafictions, speculative fictions, and magical realisms that together represent what is otherwise an unmarked territory.
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ENGL 318 - From Don Quixote to Persepolis: History of the Novel FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
By marking the historical stages by which the novel developed from its beginnings as an ?upstart? genre in the late seventeenth century to its modernist incarnations and post-modernist and post-colonial reconfigurations, this course will demonstrate how a genre develops in response to most prominent developments in literary history. This genre has helped shape modern consciousness: What distinguishes the novel from other literary forms, and why did this genre arise when it did? Under what grounds do novels claim the authority and power to teach, to question, and to accommodate changing definitions of nation, class, family, and personal and political identity? Pre-1800.
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ENGL 319 - Charting Globalization in Diaspora Films and Novels FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
Identifying the origins of present-day globalization in the colonial era, this course will engage with literary and cinematic texts that explore the connection between globalization and diaspora to discuss the broader phenomenon of nation formation, geopolitical conflict, migration and shifting everyday human interactions across race, class and gender. In addition to discussing novels by Amitav Ghosh, Tahmina Anam, and Sahar Mustafah, we will also view films by Mira Nair, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Jon M. Chu. Our discussions will be framed by the critical work of Arjun Appadurai, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Gayatri Spivak.
This course is cross-listed with CMPL 319
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ENGL 320 - From Frankenstein to Dracula: At the Margins of 19th-Century Britain FC ARHU WADV
4 credits
Nineteenth-century novels strive to recreate what one critic called ‘knowable’ communities. In this course, we’ll study texts that explore that which is situated at the very edges of culture, at the limits of knowable and, often, at the borders of the human. Our course will be rooted in the nineteenth century, the age not just of Frankenstein’s monster and the blood-thirsty Dracula, but also of Darwinian evolution. We’ll think about how authors from this period conceive of identity and difference, self and other, and we’ll ask just how they define what is ‘normal’ and what lies outside of it. British, Diversity, 1700-1900.
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ENGL 322 - Imagining Immanence FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
From the vantage point of a seemingly triumphant scientific modernism, Freud declared religion’s fate to be ‘the future of an illusion.’ How, then, do we make sense of the persistence and flourishing of theological concerns in contemporary culture? In exploring this complex question, we will focus on works of literature and cinema (perhaps other arts) that explore questions of meaning in broad, deep and specific terms. American, Post-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled ‘Advanced Courses.’ Also acceptable: CINE 110 or CINE 111 and a Cinematic Traditions Course, OR CINE 290 or CINE 299.
This course is cross-listed with CINE 325
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ENGL 323 - Six Poets: 1855-1955 FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
An inquiry into the affinities and tensions between Romanticism, Late Romanticism, and Modernism. What constitutes the new? What is our relationship to tradition? Does art bind us to or divide us from the objects of our passion, love, and belief? Whitman, Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Moore, Stevens. American Post-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled ‘Advanced Courses.’
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ENGL 324 - Six Poets: 1945-Present FC ARHU WINT
4 credits
This course will seek to describe the work of six poets and the problem of literary art in a world overshadowed by unthinkable acts and unspeakable experience. Students should be prepared to read closely, write with precision, and revise with rigor. Auden, Bishop, Larkin, Plath, Ashbery, Graham. American, Post-1900.
Prerequisites & Notes: For complete prerequisites, please refer to the English Program section titled “Advanced Courses.”
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