Course Offerings by term

From the Romantic period, covers major examples of: prose - the transition from the 19th century models to Modernist experimentation; poetry - the development of modern poetic form and the fortunes of European hermetic influence in an increasingly politicized century; and drama - examples of absurdist and left-wing drama which have dominated the British stage since the 1950s.

In this course, students practice writing fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry while exploring the boundaries between genres. The workshop format includes guided peer critique of sketches, poems, and full-length works presented in class and discussion and analysis of literary models. In Fall, students concentrate on writing techniques. In Spring, the workshop is theme-driven. May be taken twice for credit.

This course considers how the language of film can sometimes unlock the secrets of Shakespeare's world and help us to understand his contribution to the evolution of art cinema as well as to blockbuster culture. Focus is given to close readings of Shakespeare's plays, analysis of cinematic adaptations and a study of films such as Al Pacino's Looking for Richard or Shakespeare in Love. Directors Kozintsev, Welles, Godard, Olivier and Kurosawa are also studied.

Approaches Western political discourses through major texts of 19th-century literature. Provides an introduction to socialism, anarchism, liberalism, and communism, and relates them to questions of literary production, arguing that the literary and the political imaginations are intimately related. Literary texts studied include fiction by Zola, Gaskell, Dickens, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, and Conrad, and poetry by French and British writers.