2022-2023 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Courses
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EN 245 - Natural Resource Management
Is natural resource management about managing resources or managing people? In this course, students will examine contemporary topics and approaches in natural resource management including decentralization, governance, and community-based resource management both in theory and in practice. Through an examination of a range of natural resource management projects (i.e., land, climate change & REDD, forestry and protected area management, water and irrigation), students will consider the cultural politics of resource management, examine various stakeholder agendas, and assess the outcomes of a range of projects implemented around the world.
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EN 251 - Global Environmental Issues: Science, Technology and Policy
Many environmental problems are not only issues for a local region or even a country, but rather are pervasive problems affecting the entire planet. Persistent pollutants, air and water pollution, habitat loss, and species extinction were recognized early on, followed by truly global scope problems such as ozone depletion and climate change. Undergirding the increased focus on global problems were complex questions about resource scarcity, population and to what came to be known as sustainable development. This course investigates these global environmental problems, first by examining and assessing the science behind several of these issues, and then by situating each in its historical and policy context. In doing so, we establish both an understanding of the science and the basic elements of each issues as well as develop a critical perspective on how each issue overlaps with questions of development, security, equity, and environmental protection.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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EN 255 - Epidemiology and Biostatistics
This course will explore current issues in global health from a multidisciplinary perspective, with emphasis on the tools of epidemiology. At a time of immense global changes, we will examine the changing spatial and temporal patterns of disease in developing and industrialized countries; the major social, demographic, and environmental determinants of health and health disparities; and public-health approaches to global health problems at the population level. The course will prepare you to use the scientific and medical literature to research public-health problems; integrate a range of disciplinary perspectives on health; and analyze public-health problems from a population perspective. The course has a seminar format with class discussion and student presentations. Case studies will include problems related to environmental health, such as air pollution and respiratory conditions; infectious diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS; and chronic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall or Spring
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EN 258 - Food Production, Environment and Health
Agriculture and animal production have changed dramatically over the last century, bringing higher yields and less expensive food. The changes also brought considerable costs to the natural environment and human health. This course will investigate the causes and consequences of the transformation. We will explore economic and political determinants of the industrialization of food and animal production; the effects on farmland and on water resources; the politics of nutrition guidelines; the costs and benefits of genetically modified organisms; the nutrition transition and global rise in chronic disease; the over-use of antibiotics; the potential benefits and costs of corporate organic food; regional food systems and other alternatives. While many topics focus on the United States, we will also look at topics from a global perspective. The course has a seminar format. Advanced undergraduate course for juniors and seniors with instructor’s permission.
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EN 264 - Environmental and Social Epidemiology
Epidemiology investigates the distribution and determinants of health at the population level, in contrast to medicine, which traditionally has focused on health in individuals. Social epidemiology tries to understand how social and economic factors influence population health and contribute to disparities in health. This course will cover basic principles of epidemiology and social epidemiology and the use of epidemiologic methods to study the associations between environmental exposures and the risk of disease. We will also investigate how social and economic factors influence environmental exposures, particularly among susceptible populations. Lectures, discussions, problem solving.
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EN 265 - Cities, Regions, Climate Change & Health
Since 2007, our planet has become a majority urban-dwellers world, and the trend since then is strongly upward. Urbanization is particularly rapid in mid-sized cities in the so-called ‘developing world’, but mega-cities (>10M people) are also on the rise. Climate change can impact urban areas and surrounding regions in powerful ways: more intense, frequent rainstorms that cause flooding and mudslides; wildfires that consume forests and dwellings; droughts that imperil water and food security; and heat waves that stress humans and other organisms. All of these impacts directly and indirectly affect human health and wellbeing, comprising a complex conspiracy of risk factors that are poorly understood, and even more poorly mitigated. By considering not just cities but their surrounding regions, we will capture interactions between them (e.g. migrations of people, trade relations, knowledge exchange); such interactions are also poorly understood in terms of dynamic, shifting impacts. Cities/regions exemplify dynamic social-ecological systems to which climate change introduces unprecedented impacts and higher levels of uncertainty, demanding novel approaches to researh and practice.
Perspectives on the science side include the social and environmental determinants of health; and risks and hazards science. For the nexus of science and policy, we will use an enhanced approach to environmental impacts assessment (EIA). On the technology side, the basics of water supply and wastewater sanitation, and energy systems - both powerful ‘gateway sectors’ - are explained, and placed in the climate-change context. On the policy and practice side, an integrative collaborative project (ICP) model from Downs et al. (2017, 2020) being applied to Mexico City Region informs our analysis and provides the basis of integrative practice. The course includes a major Team Project with teams of 4-5 students investigating either a domestic or international city/region of their choosing, using the ICP approach. Two day-long field visits to New York City and Hudson Valley, Kingston, NY, are planned (note: differs from online description). This course is an IDCE collaborative final project (CFP) course for graduate students, and satisfies the following IDCE Concentrations: Climate Change Impacts & Adaptation; Conservation & Development; Healthy People/Healthy Planet.
Our 2020 class is generously supported by Clark’s Council for the Uncertain Human Future (CUHF), and is designated a CUHF Collaborative Course.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually- Spring
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EN 267 - Climate Change Adaptation
As atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to increase, humans must adapt to changing conditions and new extremes. Adaptation efforts are integral to addressing climate change and its impacts on people. Although the notion of adaptation might seem simple and clear, efforts to implement adaptation projects have raised important questions about the extent to which adaptation is possible. Furthermore, what it means to adapt to a changing climate depends greatly on who and where you are, which exacerbates the inequity of impacts. In this seminar-style course, students will investigate the concept of adaptation, its evolution in academic literature and climate policy, and its implications for agriculture, water resources, biodiversity, and gender relations. In addition, we will explore limits to adaptation, risk of maladaptation, and measures of adaptive capacity.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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EN 269 - Sustainable Communities
Communities around the world are taking a lead role responding to sustainability challenges, including climate change, by pursuing various forms of sustainable communities which seek to re-imagine the relationship between human societies, the built environment, and ecological systems. This course will explore the different approaches to sustainable community development and it will interrogate the assumptions, philosophies, and economic models that underlie these different approaches. It will investigate the many dimensions of sustainability that are valued in lived communities, including ecological integrity, economic security, empowerment, responsibility, and social well-being, and it will consider the extent to which different approaches to sustainable communities support these goals. Case studies will be drawn from around the world.
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EN 277 - Sustainable Consumption and Production
The increasingly unsustainable pressure on the Earth’s natural systems calls for radical changes in the way people in the industrialized and in the rapidly growing economies satisfy their appetite for goods and services. Some believe that innovation in technologies is our great hope, while others emphasize the need to change the consumption patterns of individuals and societies. Both necessitate changes in institutions, values, and social arrangements. This advanced seminar examines the role that changes in technology, institutions and culture might play in bringing about the necessary change toward more environmentally sustainable development. Four types of innovation are discussed: in the production process, in product design, in function delivery by way of products and services, and in a larger sociotechnical system. The course draws on theories of technological innovation, consumer behavior and institutionalism as well as empirical case studies from the United States, Europe and some developing countries. The course considers the key drivers of change, such as government policy, market forces, cultural norms, activities of mission-oriented organizations, social movements and others.
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EN 282 - U.S. Environmental Pollution Policy
In this course, we study approaches to regulating pollutants in air, water, and land in the United States. The course will provide an in depth review of the process of environmental policymaking in the U.S., while exploring the pros and cons of different regulatory approaches. The course has four primary objectives: (1) examining the trades-offs inherent in crafting pollution policy; (2) the role of science in the policy making process; (3) the different approaches used to motivate various societal players to act in ways that minimize the release of environmental pollutants; and (4) business perspectives on environmental policy and risks. The course draws on a wide range of academic and professional materials, including economic theories, political science, environmental law and policy, and technical/scientific information.
The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are two of the major environmental statues in the United States, which we will explore as part of the course. Each law has spurned a wide range of regulations and standards, which have been shaped and modified by subsequent legal decisions, new scientific data, and changing administrations. We study these laws by studying their key provisions and the resulting regulations, and by analyzing their implementation in specific cases. The following key questions are addressed: At what point in the pollution generation process to intervene? What type of intervention to take? What societal issues to consider in the regulatory decision? At what level of government to regulate? How to apportion the responsibilities among different levels of government? What scientific data to use and what analytical methods to apply? How to motivate polluters to comply with the regulations?
In addition to these major media-based statutes, we will also focus on emerging environmental issues, including the environmental risks and debate surrounding the expanded role of “fracking” in oil and natural gas production in the United States, and the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Because of the advanced and ever-changing nature of the material for this course the readings are taken from many sources: excerpts from books, published articles, the web, the Federal Register, internal reports from research organizations, and so on. In addition, students perform independent research on specific topics, especially recent relevant case studies.
The course has a seminar format. Students have regular writing assignments, give presentations in class, and are expected to actively participate in class discussions. Attendance is mandatory except for well justified personal hardship cases. In addition to the weekly seminars, the course will include a seminar on environmental databases, data manipulation, and data presentation. The seminar will include instruction on some of the advanced functions and features of Microsoft Excel.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall or Spring
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EN 290 - Capstone Research
A required course for senior environmental science and policy majors, this seminar offers an opportunity to integrate the strands of the environmental science and policy major. The product will be a completed research project and a poster presentation. A research proposal for an honors project or a master’s thesis is optional but strongly encouraged. Specific topics for investigation are chosen largely on the basis of student interest from a broad array including global environment threats, energy and other resource issues, community brownfields, and technological risk assessment and management. Unlike a regular course, student presentations constitute a major portion of class meetings, with the instructor as a facilitator of discussion and as a general resource for the group.
Prerequisites: Students must be seniors or second-semester juniors and must have completed a substantial fraction of their major requirements.
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EN 298 - Internships
Academic experience taking place in the field with an opportunity to earn credit.
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EN 299 - Directed Study
Students construct an independent study course on a topic approved and directed by a faculty member. Offered for variable credit.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
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ENG 006 - College Writing
This course is designed to support entering first-year students to explore, practice, and challenge academic writing. To that end, we will read a range of texts (e.g., peer-reviewed research articles; autobiographical essays written by academics; conceptual or theoretical pieces), and try on different genres of academic writing (e.g., synthesis papers, personal narratives, thesis or argument-driven papers, abstracts or synthesis papers of a longer text)-with the goal of developing and honing different techniques and strategies that will prepare you for the demands of reading and writing in university classrooms. In that process, we will also engage with our own identities as readers and writers (as well as young people of color in the academy), and question the norms and commonplace beliefs about academic writing.
Throughout the course we will wrestle with the following questions:
• What makes academic writing “academic”?
• What is my “voice” as a writer? How can I develop multiple voices?
• What is the relationship between reading and writing academic texts?
• What are some differences in writing across academic disciplines? (e.g., writing in biology versus writing in sociology?)
• What role does audience play in how I write?
• What are some resources – as a reader and writer of academic texts– that I am bringing to the university?
• What are some of my fears and concerns about academic writing?
• What are some common or popular genres/format of academic writing?
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every
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ENG 090 - Technology, Personhood, and the Future
Speculative fiction serves as a vital tool for investigating the contemporary issues we face both as individuals and as a community. In this course, we take up questions and concerns surrounding technology. Technology impact human life in a myriad of ways. It shapes our health, finances, culture, climate, and lifestyle. Technology informs the ways in which we conceptual what it is to a person and the character of our society. We will examine works of science fiction literature as a vehicle for exploring the way technology influences us now and ways it might influence us in the
future. Particular topics we address include questions about artificial intelligence, artificial life, the nature of virtual reality, the effects of technology on our biology, psychology, government, and environment. This is a Clark Commons course for first-year students only. It is an interdisciplinary, team-taught course that approaches a “big topic” from multiple disciplinary lenses and methodologies. Students will have the opportunity to examine the course topics with both the primary instructors of the course as well as several visiting professors from other disciplines.
Course Designation/Attribute: VP
Anticipated Terms Offered: undetermined - pilot course
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ENG 102 - From Cli-Fi to Frankenstein: Reading and Writing Climate Narrative
Stories of social disruption, restructuring, and transformation have long been at the heart of literature’s ways of radically re-imagining what ails us. In this course, we explore “nature” at large and climate change specifically, as a phenomenon affecting our transformations. We will reflect, individually and collaboratively, through a series of assignments, on narratives about climate change, environmental justice and sustainability, to name a few, and their effects upon our experiences of the everyday. We will engage with fiction, scholarly essay, creative nonfiction, memoir, journalism and ecopoetics. We will write imaginatively and critically, and along the way, explore both contemporary and historical writings of race, class and ethnicities, including indigenous populations, humans, animals, nature and the sacred.Offered periodically.
Prerequisites: VE Placement or IDND 018
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 105 - News Writing
Covers the basics of news writing, from reporting an event to writing an obituary. Students learn how to collect information, conduct interviews and organize writing into crisp news copy. Class work includes weekly deadline writing assignments. Homework: weekly writing exercises based on textbook examples and field assignments, as well as readings from texts and daily newspapers. This course does not count toward the English major, English minor, or Creative Writing minor.
Prerequisites: VE Prerequisite
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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ENG 106 - Creative Writing: Fiction
For students who are inspired to write short or long stories. Equal emphasis on writing well and creating boldly, with focus on giving and receiving criticism in the workshop format. Students will be encouraged to “find their voices” by experimenting with style, genre and structure. This course counts towards the Creative Writing minor. It does not count towards the English major or English minor.
Prerequisites: VE Placement
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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ENG 112 - Creating Character
Anna Karenina, Holden Caulfield, Sethe, Gregor Samsa, Irene Redford, Dorian Gray, Humbert
Humbert, Clarissa Dalloway-what makes a character memorable? This course is a deep dive into
creating dynamic characters. After all, characters are both the seed and the vehicle for a story. We will
build characters layer by layer, considering motivation, backstory, conflict, point of view, and voice.
We will also “read as writers” to unpack examples of particularly lively characters. Classes will be
taught in seminar fashion and will include a combination of writing exercises, short lectures, class
discussion, and workshops. You will also learn how to submit your work to literary journals. The final
consists of revised creative work. This course counts toward the Creative Writing minor.
Prerequisites: IDND 018 or VE Placement
Course Designation/Attribute: D&I, AP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually.
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ENG 114 - Banned Books Behaving Badly
Banned books often push societal boundaries by exploring complex, realistic, topical, or taboo topics. Although many of these literary works eventually become classics in the English canon, they are usually first labeled as forbidden, transgressive, provocative, or vulgar. As a result, this course explores sexuality, violence, substance abuse, genocide, and racism. Students will engage in a variety of banned texts to help them cultivate skills and methods of rhetorical analysis. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-2 requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: HP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 115 - Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction (more popularly known as science fiction) entertains the “what if” and presents alternative conceptions of history, society, and identity. Committed to exploring the possibilities and limitations of the alternative and the different, these works interrogate established boundaries of identities and provide critical perspectives on prevailing beliefs and ideologies. The course moves chronologically through works that fall loosely under the speculative fiction subgenres of fantasy/horror, alternative histories, future dystopias, and political allegories. We will also devote some attention to formal analysis, specifically the ways in which speculative fiction narratives experiment with and break from traditional literary conventions to offer new ways of perceiving, constructing, and deconstructing our social realities. Authors include Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ted Chiang. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement Required
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 116 - The Secret Lives of Books
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, not to mention judging by its ink and paper, by its typeface and layout, even by damage or by marks left by earlier readers. Books tell stories with the words printed inside them, of course, but they also tell stories just by being physical objects. In this course, students will learn to become book sleuths. Readings and seminar discussions on the history and theory of the book will be enhanced by a series of hands-on workshops at Special Collections as well as off-campus field trips. While the full scope of the class extends from the earliest periods of the written word through current-day digital advances, emphasis will be given to specific historical periods (the development of moveable type, the proliferation of print in the early hand-press period, mechanization during the Industrial Revolution, changing paradigms of electronic textuality today) in order to understand the interplay of technology, culture, and society over time.
Course Designation/Attribute: HP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every 3 years or so.
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ENG 120 - Introduction to Shakespeare
This course takes a deep dive into 16th and 17th Century culture by way of an introduction to the works of William Shakespeare. We will read small selections of poetry as well as plays covering the genres of history, tragedy, romance, and comedy. Our discussions will explore topics of gender, sexuality, disability, race, religion, and class and, as such, will develop your skills of literary analysis. We will also use our readings to examine the ways that Shakespeare has expanded into a modern cultural phenomenon in film and theatre. Your short writing assignments will serve to supplement our discussions, while a general introduction to archival methods and digitized rare books will help provide some context to Shakespeare’s era. For English majors, this course satisfies the D-1 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Prerequisite
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 131 - Border Crossings: Narratives of Travel, Exile, and Immigration
The course examines contemporary narratives of travel, exile, and immigration from around the world. Close readings of texts will ground our interrogation of borderlands, diaspora, exile, code-switching, identity, race, class and gender. The course will be run as a seminar with student presentations, group work, and research projects as key components. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement Required
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 133 - Women Writers I
Examines how women writers before 1900 address, confront, avoid, subvert and question traditional notions of gender, culture, domesticity, history, ethnicity and sexuality. Close attention is paid to textual reading, the historical and intellectual context of works, and different critical approaches to women’s writing. Authors include Behn, Burney, Austen, Sedgwick, Chopin, Gilman, Foster and Wilson. For English majors, this course satisfies the B-1 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement or IDND 018
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 134 - Survey of Women Writers II
Examines developments in British and American prose fiction by women in the 20th century. Authors include Cather, Woolf, Lessing, Rhys, Silko, Morrison, Winterson, Cisneros and Kincaid. Close attention is paid to textual reading and defining, revising and challenging traditional definitions and expectations of women’s writing on various levels: thematic, linguistic and formal. The course also addresses current critical approaches to women’s writing. For undergraduate English majors, this course satisfies the B-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: IDND 018 or VE Placement
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 135 - The Short Story
This course involves intensive reading of stories that exemplify a variety of fictional methods and affords the student some knowledge of the history of this literary type. Attention will be paid to the international scope of the short story, particularly in the 20th century. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement or IDND 018
Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every year
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ENG 139 - Queer Literature
From the coded sighs of “the love that dare not speak its name” to the out and proud writers of the present moment, this course traces a non-linear history of literary engagement with queerness. “Queer,” in this context, is more than an umbrella term for LGBTQ+; it constellates a range of identities, ideas, and experiences, and it encompasses both political and aesthetic interventions. In this course, we will read works by queer authors and works that depict queer life, developing a set of queer reading practices and considering the essential questions of what it means for literature itself to be queer, and how queerness might be an element of literary form. For English majors, this course may satisfy the B-2 or C-2 requirement but cannot double count.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 140 - British Literature I
What does it mean to belong? How do people inhabit spaces and negotiate identities? These questions are relevant today but were also relevant for writers in the long medieval and early modern periods in England. This course provides a foundational and historical study of English literature up to the late 17th century. We will discuss prose, poetry, and drama by such writers as Chaucer, Marie de France, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Wroth, Donne, Africanus, and Behn while interrogating their cultural, political, and social contexts. While the course traditionally employs the lecture style, our sessions will often mix this format with more interactive student-led discussions, presentations, and writing workshops.
For English majors, this course may satisfy the B-1 or D-1 requirements but cannot double count. For English minors, this course satisfies the B-1 requirement.
Prerequisites: IDND 018 or VE Placement
Course Designation/Attribute: HP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 141 - British Literature II
Taking a historical approach to British Literature from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present, this course interrogates the relationship between the shifting boundaries of Britain and the British Empire and the construction of its national literary canon. Paying special attention to the intersections of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, we will discuss how literary form evolves in concert with the nation’s sense of itself and in response to historical realities that include colonialism, the slave trade, and two world wars. Readings will vary in genre and canonicity, including novels, poems, short stories, and plays by authors ranging from famous to anonymous.
For English majors, this course satisfies the B-2 requirement. For English minors, this course satisfies the B-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement or IDND 018
Course Designation/Attribute: VE, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 143 - Terrible Beauty: The Art of Tragedy
This course examines the historical evolution of tragedy and its central place in Western literary expression. Beginning with the three classical exemplars, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we trace tragedy through Roman closet drama (Seneca), Renaissance masters (Shakespeare) and European interpretations (Racine, Schiller), to both modern experimental tragedy (Miller) and modern attempts to revive the classical model (Eliot). For English majors, this course may satisfy the C-2 or D-1 requirements but cannot double count.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 144 - Mona Lisas and Madhatters: The Art of Comedy
This course introduces students to the genre of comedy in the Western tradition, from its ancient origins in Greek culture to the 21st century. While dramatic comedy is emphasized, consideration also will be given to its manifestations in fiction and other media. Authors read may include Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, Shakespeare, Jonson, Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Synge, and Stoppard.
As a complement to departmental offerings in other genres (tragedy, romance, epic, short story, and gothic), for English majors, this course satisfies the C-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: IDND 018 or VE Placement
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 145 - Fabulae: The Genre of Romance
This course examines the tradition of the romance genre, from classical antiquity to the present. Texts read range from early Greek “novels” and Medieval metrical romances, through the Gothic tale and Romantic poetry to contemporary forms such as science fiction, fantasy and horror. Along the way, students will be able to see how the general conservative elements of a given literary form are transmuted to accommodate a number of specific contexts. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Prerequisite
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 164 - The Gothic
The Gothic, one of the most popular genres in nineteenth-century Britain, explores the dominant culture through its dark underside. In detailing both individual and national transgressions, this literature responds to significant cultural movements of the time, such as the advent of psychology and the explosion of revolutionary politics. This course traces Gothic literature from its origins in representations of fear and pain to its culmination in portrayals of alienation and monstrosity. To fully understand the genre, we will read a wide range of authors including Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as critical literature on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of psychology and politics. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 165 - American Ethnic Writers
This course surveys literature written by African American, Asian American, Native American, and Latinx American writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will read from a range of genres, including novels, short stories, poetry, memoir, and graphic storytelling. In the course, we will discuss works that speak to confronting and navigating the following themes: war, racism, migration, alienation, sexuality, community, and resistance. For English majors, this course satisfies the B-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Prerequisite
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 180 - Major American Writers I
The sequence ENG 180-ENG 181 takes an historical approach to American literature from Puritanism to the present. This course concentrates on early American literature, circa 1620-1860, by authors such as Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Edwards, Franklin, Emerson, Douglass, Dickinson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and others. For English majors and English minors, this course satisfies the B-1 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement or IDND 018
Course Designation/Attribute: VE, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 181 - Major American Writers II
The sequence ENG 180 - ENG 181 takes an historical approach to American literature from Puritanism to the present. This course traces the evolution of American literature and its major aesthetic movements from circa 1860 to the present. Writers and poets include Melville, Twain, Crane, Wharton, James, Williams, Eliot, Hughes, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Pynchon, and Morrison. For English majors and minors, this course satisfies the B-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement or IDND 018
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 182 - African American Literature I
Addresses major periods and principal authors of the African American canon. Readings may cover a historical span that could range from the 18th century to the present or could represent focused concern with select authors and/or a given literary movement. Students are expected to gain a historically as well as a culturally contextual appreciation of the literature produced by writers of African descent in the Americas. For English majors and English minors, this course satisfies the B-1 requirement.
Course Designation/Attribute: HP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 183 - African American Literature II
Explores the aesthetic modes configuring the evolution of African American literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially the novel. Focus is on the experimental and innovative sensibilities regulating the evolving canon of postmodern writing produced by Americans of African descent. Authors studied may include David Anthony Durham, Percival Everett, Minister Faust, Edward P. Jones, Gayl Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, John Ridley, Fran Ross, Carl Hancock Rux, Olympia Vernon, Colson Whitehead and Kevin Young. For English majors and English minors, this course satisfies the B-2 requirement.
Prerequisites: VE Placement or IDND 018
Course Designation/Attribute: VE
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 201 - Peer Learning Assistant
Peer Learning Assistants (PLAs) are undergraduate students who are selected by a faculty member to facilitate teaching and learning activities. These activities may include: providing feedback on drafts of writing assignments, leading small group discussions, working with individual students who are having difficulty, and facilitating group project work (in or out of class & online).
Registration is by instructor permission only
Anticipated Terms Offered: Fall/Spring
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ENG 203 - Creative Writing Genre Study: Hybrid Selves - Using Hybrid Forms to Explore Race, Gender, and Sexuality
In this class we will examine and produce works of literary art that challenge our definition of genre. Whatever you want to call them-and we will, of course, wade into the mires of nomenclature-slipstream or hybrid literary art forms such as flash fiction, prose poems, lyric essays, hyperfictions, etc. have become increasingly visible in contemporary literature. Writers such as Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Layli Long Soldier and others are using these forms to explore questions of race, gender, sexuality and all the other ways we exist, and are defined, as people in the world. Our goal will be to approach these texts as scholars and artists for the purposes of understanding how challenging traditional formal expectations allows us new ways to discover, celebrate, express, explode, chart (and many other verbs!!) personal, communal, and national identities in our work.
So, simply, what are hybrid forms? To start, and we can reconsider this as we explore, a hybrid work is a literary object that merges elements of different traditional forms-as in the prose-poem or the lyric essay or the academic memoir. And, of course, even weirder mashups are possible: collage texts, graphic novels, hyperfictions, and bafflers such as Anne Carson’s “fictional essays in poetry.” As Clarkies know, labels can be pretty flimsy definitions and obviously designating such pieces ‘hybrid’ implies reductive/conventional definitions of genre. In this class we will investigate what conspicuous awareness or transgression of these formal boundaries exposes and allows.
This course counts towards the Creative Writing minor.
Prerequisites: Any 100-level English class or instructor permission
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 207 - Creative Writing: Advanced Fiction
This advanced creative writing workshop in fiction offers students who are serious about writing fiction a supportive seminar setting to present their work for discussion and suggestions, to learn how to critique the writings of others, and to participate in discussions about the art and craft of writing fiction, including the use of characterization, setting, plot, conflict, and dialogue. This course counts towards the Creative Writing minor.
Prerequisites: ENG 101, 106, 107, 111, or permission of the Instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 208 - Writing the Borderlands
In this bilingual Spanish/English creative writing course, students will write poems, stories, and/or nonfiction pieces in either or both languages. We will examine several texts by Latinx authors as we consider questions of translation, code-switching, audience, and the political choices these writers make when writing in both languages. The first two-thirds of the course will focus on textual analysis, craft lessons, a translation project, and generating new writing, while the last third will be dedicated to writing workshops. Students also learn how to submit work to literary journals for publication. The final consists of a Chapbook (small book) of revised writing. There are no language requirements, though some familiarity with Spanish will enrich your experience of the texts. This course counts toward the Creative Writing minor and the Spanish minor, as well as the Latin American and Latinx Studies Concentration.
Prerequisites: VE Placement or IDND 018
Course Designation/Attribute: VE, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 211 - Creative Writing: Advanced Poetry
ENG 211 Creative Writing: Advanced Poetry/Workshop: While a significant part of the class will be dedicated to exploring each student’s poetry through a constructive workshop approach, this course also requires in-depth critical feedback in every class and a series of annotations that address elements of craft. We will look closely at the work of established poets, especially contemporary poets, and trace lineages and influences from particular poets’ work back to their roots. In addition to assigned readings and exercises, a new poem a week is expected. As the semester progresses, students will experiment with revision and create a portfolio of poems representing their best work. This course counts towards the Creative Writing minor. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-1 requirement. For English minors, this course counts for the poetry requirement.
Prerequisites: ENG 107 or permission of the Instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 212 - The Making (and Breaking) of Poetic Style
Using the early and most recent work of several modern and contemporary poets, we will trace their stylistic development as well as use their work as prompts for our own writing. Part literary study, part workshop, this course will identify the characteristics that constitute “style” and how a style might change over time.
This course counts towards the Creative Writing minor. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-1 requirement. For English minors, this course counts for the poetry requirement.
Prerequisites: ENG 107 or ENG 211 or permission of instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 213 - Utopias/Dystopias: Writing Resistance and Identity
In her 2014 National Book Award speech, science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin said, “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society… writers who can remember freedom - realists of a larger reality.” In this class we will strive to be the writers Le Guin called for. Animated by the question “What if?”, speculative fiction interrogates received ideologies and questions the naturalness or inevitability of social structures and systems of power, “reality” as we know it. This course considers how minority groups have used speculative fiction as a vehicle for writing alternative conceptions of history, society, and identity. Ranging from visionary utopias to nightmarish yet strangely familiar dystopias, these stories make space for those relegated to the margins, pointing not only to what can be but to what already is. Science fiction, in its circuitous way, does not predict, so much as describe. This creative writing class will involve weekly writing exercises, discussion of science fiction texts, and workshop, and will culminate in a novelette-length speculative fiction final project. Students also learn how to submit work to literary journals for publication. This course counts towards the Creative Writing minor.
Prerequisites: Any 100-level English class or instructor permission
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 214 - Creative Writing Capstone: Multi-genre Advanced Workshop
In this advanced creative writing course, students will spend the semester working on individual writing projects in their chosen genre (poetry, fiction, and/or creative nonfiction, which includes memoir). Central to this class is the workshop, where students will present their ongoing writing for supportive feedback and discussion. Outside readings in literature and on craft will be assigned which correlate with student work. Recommended as the final course for students pursuing a minor in Creative Writing. Prerequisites include any introductory creative writing course and one other creative writing course, or permission of the instructor. For Creative Writing minors, this course fulfills the Capstone requirement.
Prerequisites: One introductory course (ENG 101 , ENG 106 , ENG 107 , or ENG 111 ) and one advanced course (ENG 206 , ENG 207 , or ENG 211 ) or permission of the Instructor. Seniors only.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 225 - American Print Culture 1700-1900
The years from 1700 to 1900 witnessed a transformation of print culture from the handpress period to an age of mechanical reproduction. The rapidly increasing availability of inexpensive print technologies had a tremendous impact on habits of publishing, of writing, and of reading itself. In this course, students will examine how the material contexts of print culture in early America affected and were affected by notions of authorship, readership, gender, genre, and popular and elite taste. Some sessions will be conducted at the American Antiquarian Society where students will be able to examine archival material in hands-on workshops. For the final research paper, students will be encouraged to use resources from the AAS, from Goddard Library Special Collections, and/or from the many new digital humanities archives now available online.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-2 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Course Designation/Attribute: POP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 227 - The Book in the Early Modern World
The rise of the printed book in early modern Europe is associated with corresponding renewal and innovation in science, letters, and theology. As with so many widely accepted narratives, however, the story turns out to be messier, more complicated, and ultimately more interesting than broadly understood. In this seminar, hands-on laboratory assignments with rare material from the Jonas Clark collection at Goddard Library’s Archives and Special Collections supplement readings as students explore major topics in early modern book history-the emergence of the codex; moveable type and the persistence of manuscript; the technology of the early hand press; design issues from typography to bindings; communications circuits; histories of reading; bibliographic identity. Toward the end of the semester, the class holds a Rare Book Open House with exhibits and demonstrations of material from Archives and Special Collections. No previous knowledge is required or expected, but an interest in books as material and technological objects is strongly recommended. The course may be of particular interest to students in English; History; Cultural Studies and Communication; Media, Culture and the Arts; Comparative Literature; Ancient Civilization; Studio Art; and Art History.
For English majors, this course may satisfy the D1 or E requirements but cannot double count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 230 - Reading Voraciously: Food and Literature in the 20th Century
To claim that “cooking can produce something that approaches an aesthetic emotion,” was daring in 1954, when Alice Toklas situated herself among the modernists with the bold claim that cooking was a form of art. Yet she was also situating herself within a long literary and philosophical tradition of thinking aesthetic taste alongside gustatory taste. Taking up the idea of food as an aesthetic phenomenon, this course traces a transnational history of literary thinking about food within the long twentieth century, with special attention to the relationship between food and such identity categories as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.
For English majors, this course may satisfy the D-3 or E requirements but cannot double count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 231 - Queer Modernisms
Modernist writers often use the term “queer” with what feels like a knowing wink. This is not an anachronism; though the field of queer theory brought the term into wider usage in the 1990s, the rise of literary modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century coincided with a shift in its connotations, as “queer” came to encompass not just difference or oddity, but difference of a specifically sexual variety. In this course we will explore queer modernism from multiple angles, reading works by authors who both lived and wrote about queer lives, tracing their engagement with emerging social and medical discourses of sexuality, and interrogating the role of queerness within modernist innovations in literary form. Taking an intersectional approach to the field, we will also consider how queerness overlapped with and complicated other discourses of difference, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class.
In addition to canonical queer modernists such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, we will read authors who have been relegated to the margins of the field, including Richard Bruce Nugent, Eliot Bliss, and Gale Wilhelm, as we consider the relationship between queerness and canonicity. Our transnational approach will reveal both multiple models of modernism and a wide range of experiences of queerness. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, we will read widely in contemporary queer theory, focusing especially on texts that see difference as a site of potential solidarity and emphasize literature’s power to challenge multiple, overlapping systems of oppression.
For English majors, this course may satisfy the D-3 or E requirement but cannot double-count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 232 - Modernist Literature
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that, “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” In this class, we will test that claim, thinking about what it means to “be modern,” what it means to “be modernist,” and what the two have to do with each other. We will also consider the many meanings of “modernism,” understood variously as a literary movement that flourished within coteries like Bloomsbury, the salons of 1920’s Paris, and the Harlem Renaissance; a literary style governed by the imperative to “make it new” and an embrace of aesthetic difficulty; and the literature of the period between the two World Wars. Taking a transnational approach to the field, we will juxtapose texts from the margins of modernism with more canonical work in order to investigate modernism’s relationship with mass culture, politics, and everyday life.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-3 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 234 - Virginia Woolf
Most famous as a novelist and a feminist, Virginia Woolf was also an essayist, a pacifist, a biographer, an anti-imperialist, and a diarist. In this class, we will read Woolf in multiple genres, delving into the relationship between literary form and political thought, and exploring her theorization of everyday life. As we read chronologically through her major novels and literary and cultural criticism, students will take a self-directed path through her essays and letters, highlighting connections between her life and her work, as well as recurring ideas and images. Above all, we will follow her advice on how to read a book, to “open your mind as widely as possible.”
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-3 requirment. For undergraduate English majors, this course also counts toward the Specialization in British Literature or the Specialization in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 245 - Mythopoetics
This course examines modes and qualities of literary expression where we will find that narratives and poetry convey different expectations, which are also embedded in a variety of worldviews. Frequently, however, authors will attempt to craft these expectations and worldviews to accommodate nontraditional visions. Toward this end, we will read works by authors who strive to come to grips with their own experiences of the world.
For English majors, this course satisfies the E requirement. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 248 - Contemporary Literary Theory
Investigates and develops several theoretical approaches to literature in the late-20th and 21st century, attempting to provide glimpses into the range of theoretical issues and concerns. We look particularly at identity formation in contemporary literary, political, economic, cultural and social arenas. May also look at a literary text in relation to theory. General areas of study are selected from among the following: textual criticism, new criticism, psychoanalysis/reader response, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, gay and lesbian theory and Cultural Studies.
For English majors, this course satisfies the E requirement. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
Placement Guidelines
N/A
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ENG 250 - Medieval Literature
Explores medieval literary culture of Western Europe by means of literary theoretical and classical texts. Themes vary each year, and the seminar can be taken more than once for credit, as long as each time a different theme is chosen.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-1 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 253 - Advanced Studies in Shakespeare
This Shakespeare seminar examines how language and power influence emerging notions of race, gender, class, disability, nationality, and religion in the early modern world. The course explores recent trends in Shakespeare studies such as critical race studies, health humanities, sexuality studies, ecocriticism, border studies, and more that allow us to understand and critique the place of Shakespeare in our world today.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-1 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Prerequisites: ENG 120 , ENG 140, or TA 214 and IDND 018 or VE Placement, or permission of the Instructor.
Course Designation/Attribute: VE, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 254 - History of the English Language
English language and culture share a 1500-year history of interaction and mutual influence. We will begin this course with some of the basic concepts of language and language change, including semantics (how words mean), syntax (sentence structure), phonology (where sounds come from and how they are made), orthography (the bizarre English spelling system and how it came to be), and morphology (how words are put together). From there we will move to the prehistory of English, including the Indo-European language family and where English fits into it. Then we will work chronologically, moving through Old English (before 1100), Middle English (12th-15th centuries), Early Modern English (16th-18th centuries), and Modern English (18th century-present). We will look at issues of language use, such as the notion of linguistic correctness, the construction of “standard” and “non-standard” English, “literary” language, simplified or plain language, spelling reform, pidgins and creoles, the increasing hegemony of English on a world scale, and the important variations of English around the world. Along the way, we will read historical events such as invasions, political and intellectual revolutions, immigration, emigration and cultural assimilation as shaping forces in the living entity of the language. No previous background in early English is required, and there will be enough language instruction to allow you to delight in the difference of more youthful Englishes.
For English majors, this course may satisfy the D1 or E requirements but cannot double count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually or biannually
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ENG 255 - Studies in the Renaissance
WORKING MY NERVES: EMOTIONS IN THE RENAISSANCE
Have you ever used your feelings to get something you really wanted or needed? This course goes beyond Shakespeare and revisits the English Renaissance by examining the work of emotions in literature. I mention “work” intentionally because that is precisely what emotions do - they bring people together and drive them apart; they work upon our own hearts, bodies, and minds. Our course analyzes poetry, prose, and drama to develop an understanding of how happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise stand at the intersection of personal experience and historical or scientific fact. We will discuss texts by writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Elizabeth Cary, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. Wear your heart on your sleeve and bring your feelings along for the ride. It’s going to be an emotional rollercoaster.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-1 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 256 - Ecologies in Crisis
This course asks participants to explore the idea of `ecology’ in a broad philosophical perspective, with particular consideration to literary responses to climate change in different cultural and political contexts. We will think comparatively about the representation of ecological crises, and about likenesses and differences in literary portrayals of environmental thought-including relationships between human and non-human species and objects. The course will explore the cultural and philosophical frameworks that govern dominant modes of extraction and commodification, regimes of energy and power, understandings of waste and disposability, and the existential crisis posed by mass extinctions. As we question the larger social, cultural, and psychological origins of the climate crisis, we will consider the philosophical foundations of `anthropocentrism’ (a world order that prioritizes human experience), questions of ontology and modern ways-of-being, cross-cultural models for understanding the idea of nature, and tensions within enlightenment and premodern modes of knowledge regarding the environment. Readings will be divided between literary fiction and non-fiction and social theory. Students should enjoy reading social theory and working with abstract ideas (more than 50% of the readings will be theoretical).
For English majors, this course may satisfy the Period D-3 or the E requirement, but cannot double count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Prerequisites: Open to Juniors and Seniors. First-years and sophomores should email Prof. Levin for permission to enroll.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 262 - Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature
Special Topics in 19th-Century British Literature.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-2 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar. This course can be repeated with a different topic.
SPECIAL TOPICS FOR S’2023
ENG 262.01 “Tomes of Solid Witchcraft”: Major Women Poets.
This course examines how women speak poetically to each other across time, beyond the confines of what Virginia Woolf called the “private house.” We view them as originators of meaning, thematically broaching issues of identity, society, religion, politics, and what it means to be intelligent, articulate, and transcendent of cultural circumstance and restraint. Poems read will be drawn from Charlotte Smith, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and Joy Harjo.
ENG 262.02 Monsters and Monstrosity
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that the monster is “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment-of a time, a feeling, a place.” This seminar reads literary monsters - and/or the merely “monstrous” - with a view to how such characters reflect and trouble the values, fears, and anxieties of 19th century Britain. In doing so, we will interrogate the construction of monstrosity in an age of industrialization, colonization, and rapid technological developments. Topics for discussion will include issues of gender, sexuality, class, race, and empire in texts such as Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dracula.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 263 - Traumatic Tales: National Trauma in Romantic Literature
The course examines the formation of British national identity through its troubling origins in women’s subordination, class hierarchy, slavery, colonial rule and imperialism. Focusing on the slave narrative, confessional poetry and the political and domestic novel, this seminar will explore the ways in which Romantic writers attempted (and often failed) to articulate an alternative national narrative against the national hegemony, which erased state acts of exploitation and terror. To better understand the concept of national trauma, we will also read extensively in psychoanalytic and critical social theory related to genocide, accidents and torture.
For English majors, this course may satisfy the D-2 or E requirement but cannot double count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 264 - Queer Victorians
The Victorian period was full of writers addressing what we now consider themes of “queer” sexuality and gender. Often, however, these themes have gone unrecognized. Victorian texts, which hold a multivalent emphasis on kinship, desire, matrimony, domesticity, and familial life, stand as a rich resource for analyses of same-sex desire, gendered and sexual subjectivities, and closeting and homophobia. Through texts by authors such as Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, and Charles Dickens we will look at depictions of nonnormative desires and identities and resistance to heteronormativity. We will also explore gender and sexuality through intersectional frameworks that consider how class, race and nationality impacts gender and sexual identities. To provide a theoretical context for this exploration, we will deploy queer theory to understand the way power works to institutionalize and legitimate certain forms and expressions of sexuality and gender while stigmatizing others. Through this “disruptive” knowledge, we will question norms of sexuality and gender and the oppression and violence that such hegemonic norms justify.
For English majors, this course may satisfy the Period D-2 or E requirements but cannot double-count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 272 - Radicalism and the Black Arts Movement
1966 to 1967
The Black Arts Movement remains the most radical realization of a literary culture in the history of the United States. Resulting from centuries of racial oppression, this movement is to be understood as black Americans’ revolutionary use of art to express deep-seated existential rage and political critique in order to generate social change and psychological reconstruction. Accordingly, this course will examine the historical factors responsible for the emergence of the Black Arts Movement and will pay special attention to the thinkers and writers responsible for the articulation of its aesthetic manifestos and the production of its literary canon.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-3 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 273 - Black-Asian Solidarities: A Literary Exploration of Racial Constructions in America
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the viral racism that communities of color face in the United States. In particular, media narratives about the spike in anti-Asian discrimination in the US are dominated by a fiction of antagonism between Black and Asian Americans. This course will investigate how this narrative originates and persists, and counter it by examining the long histories of solidarity and intimacy between Blacks and Asians in the US. Understanding social experiences of marginalization require an understanding of their ideological basis. In tandem with the literature we study, it is necessary to unpack the legal constructions of personhood and citizenship as they evolve throughout US history, from founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution through key legislation and executive orders that regulate public and private lives, including but not limited to immigration, naturalization, and citizenship; enslavement and labor; and marriage and family. With this knowledge about legal narrative informing our readings of literary and cultural productions, students will develop tools and strategies to demystify the cultural folklore that sustains institutionalized racism in America. In doing so, students will fill their anti-racist toolkits with strategies, resources, and community connections necessary to begin the work of facilitating courageous conversations around race and racism at Clark and beyond: students will deliver primers on Black-Asian solidarities and lead conversations about shared texts with high school students and grassroots organizations in Massachusetts.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-3 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Course Designation/Attribute: DI, POP
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 275 - Fictions of Empire: Studies in Global English Literature
This seminar provides an introduction to contemporary global literature in English. The writers we will discuss come from very different backgrounds-from South Asia to Africa to the Caribbean-but they are all engaged with making sense of the legacy of colonialism and the emergence of something we might call global culture. These texts are exciting stylistically because of their inventive uses of language and narrative structure: their experiments with form capture the sense of new nations coming into being, new approaches to cultural tradition, and the new status of English as a global language. The stories they tell entertain while also providing original perspectives on histories of empire marked by political struggle, violent conflict, and global inequalities. Topics we will consider include: the idea of the “postcolonial”; the relationship between literature and political resistance; the transformation of metropolitan English writing and language; “subalternity” and problems of representation; writing from a position of displacement, exile, and diasporization; and the persistence of colonial narratives in contemporary forms of imperialism. The specific focus of this course will change from year to year, but authors to be discussed may include Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, J.M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Derek Walcott, and Zadie Smith.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-3 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 276 - Ethnic America: Literature, Theory, Politics
In “The Race for Theory,” Barbara Christian asks who “Theory” is for and suggests that the drive to continuously invent “new” and “original” theories about “Literature” is rather a tool to maintain exclusive and elite boundaries around the academy, boundaries which ultimately constrain our imaginations of how we study literature. Taking seriously Christian’s proposal that creative work is itself media for theorizing, especially for artists from marginalized backgrounds, this course examines 20th century and contemporary Asian American, African American, Native American, and Latinx American cultural productions. We ask how these works theorize the historical and present-day geopolitics that shape the how racial and ethnic “Others” come to be in relationship with the United States and the forces that define their belonging within and/or exclusion from the physical and imagined boundaries of the nation, national and cultural citizenship, and political participation. Surveying a broad spectrum of literature, film, memoir, poetry, and theory, students will familiarize themselves with signal debates in studies of race, ethnicity, and migration and gain a foundation in contemporary Ethnic American literature.
For English majors, this course may satisfy the D-3 or E requirement but cannot double count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Prerequisites: VE Placement
Course Designation/Attribute: DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 279 - Fictions of Asian America
With particular emphasis on the multiple meanings of “fiction,” this seminar examines the ways in which the Asian American identity is constructed, imagined and contested in American literature and popular culture. Analyses will focus primarily on how texts and films produced within the last decade maintain or challenge established boundaries of the Asian American identity. Specific issues to be investigated include the model minority discourse and the demands of assimilation and citizenship; ethnic authenticity and hybridity; gender roles and sexual anxieties; cultural memory and nostalgia; and the commodification of Asian cultures and identities.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-3 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 281 - Special Topics in 19th-C American Literature
Special topics in 19th-century literature through the Civil War invite in-depth consideration of how extraordinary cultural, political, and technological changes made this one of the most vibrant and studied periods of the American literature.
For English majors this course satisfies the D-2 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar. May be repeatable for credit.
F’22 SPECIAL TOPIC: TRANSPACIFIC CROSSINGS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
What desires, curiosities, and fears first motivated US exploration and commercial ventures in east Asia and the Pacific? How have writers supported the cause of anti-imperialism in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia? Who were the earliest Asian American writers? This seminar evokes such questions as part of a broader reconsideration of the history of nineteenth-century North American literature. Although this literature is commonly understood in terms of the continent’s transatlantic relations with Europe and Africa, we will prioritize transpacific geopolitics and cultural exchanges to broaden our perspective on its complex development. With this goal in mind, we will read works by some canonical US authors, such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, but also those of lesser-known writers of color, such as Lili’uokalani, Wong Chin Foo, José Rizal, and Edith Maude Eaton (a.k.a. Sui Sin Far). Additionally, we will examine more recent theoretical and creative works by scholars and artists to help us analyze nineteenth-century sources in terms of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, the environment, and social class, while also working to uncover an instructive “history of the present” in transpacific relations of a past era.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 283 - Visions of Representation
Explores the problematic assumptions of literary representation underlying American realism through selected works of American writers. Conventional interpretations of realist writing are often challenged by issues of race, class, gender, and cultural contexts. Examines works by Twain, Howells, James, Dreiser, Jewett, Cather, Cooke, Chopin, and others.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-2 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English seminar.
Anticipated Terms Offered: N/A
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ENG 285 - Topics in Seventeenth-Century Literature
Explores topics in the literary history of the seventeenth century with emphasis in changing ideas in science, history, politics, culture, and science. Depending on the special topic, course may include canonical as well as non-canonical, English as well as New England writing, and texts in a diversity of genres and disciplines.
For English majors, this course satisfies the D-1 requirement. May be repeatable for credit, depending on topic.
SPECIAL TOPIC FOR S’2023: Milk and Honey: Charting Early Modern Utopias
What is utopia and whom does it serve? Utopia has been understood as a fantasy or ideal beyond the reach of place and time, thus free from the weight of reality. Perhaps the word conjures images of freedom and safety, harmony and abundance. But in these notions of a Promised Land rich with “milk and honey”, who and what gets displaced, disciplined, or destroyed in the pursuit of such a promise? What kinds of national, self, and racial identities interplay with notions of geography and fantasy? This advanced seminar explores the possibilities and parameters of utopia as represented in 17th Century British literature and the broader Atlantic world. We will discuss texts by well and lesser-known writers in the wide British literary tradition, including writers of prose, drama, poetry, religion, science, and travel. Shaping our discussions and essays will be historical contexts and contemporary scholarship in critical race, gender, disability, and queer studies. Class discussions may be complemented by excursions to the archives here at Clark and in the area, such as the American Antiquarian Society, Boston Public Library, and the Worcester Art Museum.
For S’23, undergraduate enrollment is limited to Jr’s and Sr’s.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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ENG 292 - Toni Morrison
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison forever reconfigured how the world studies literature and race. Reading her novels, poetry, and non-fiction, we will examine how Morrison’s writing enhances African American literary theory by critiquing the role race plays within the literary canon and society as a whole. Implementing Morrison’s strategies such as removing the white gaze and discovering the Africanist presence, we will explore the historical and psychological themes of race, colorism, the ancestor, motherhood, multigenerational trauma, and love. The course is discussion and inquiry-based, so students must read, participate, moderate, and challenge themselves to think critically.
For English majors, this course may satifsy the D-3 or E requirements, but cannot double-count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Course Designation/Attribute: AP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually
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ENG 293 - Special Topics in African American Literature
Special Topics in African American Literature. For English majors, this course satisfies the D-3 requirement. For English minors, this course counts as a 200-level English course. May be repeatable for credit.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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ENG 294 - African American Literary and Critical Race Theory
Utilizing the theoretical approaches found in African American literary criticism of the 20th and 21st century, this course will evaluate the complex relationship of racial thought in African American literary theory. Creating an understanding of the relationship of literature to the larger experience of African Americans, students will analyze the dialogue of racial identity, Black feminist/womanist thought, Poststructuralism, queer theory, intersectionality, cultural studies, essentialism, and critical race theory from the 1920s to today.
For English majors, this course satisfies the E requirement. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.
Course Designation/Attribute: AP, DI
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 296 - Writing the Thesis
This course is designed to guide students through the thesis-writing process, focusing on the technical and structural challenges involved in crafting a multi-part argument. We’ll think about how to make sure ideas are expressed clearly, cogently, persuasively, and within the standards of the discipline. Our approach will emphasize both the writing process and the finished product, combining reading and discussion with peer workshops. This course is required for all English Honors and MA thesis writers planning to complete their theses this semester.
Corequisites: ENG 297 - Honors
Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually
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ENG 297 - Honors
Honors in English Senior Year
Invited and interested students are asked to identify an area of interest with an adviser and apply in writing to the department chair with a brief description of the project in the spring of their junior year. Once accepted into the Honors program, and with the adviser’s approval, students register for ENG 297 Honors in English for one credit in each of the two semesters of their senior year. The adviser and the student will agree on the project’s stages; the final thesis is due at the end of the spring semester. A second reader, chosen by the student and the adviser, participates in the final evaluation. Details are available in the handbook for English majors.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year
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