Literature Seminars
Watch a Video Introduction to ENGL 1015!
Fall 2025 Sections
01. Childhood and Books. Jill Campbell. TTh 11.35-12.50
What distinguishes the period we call childhood from other stages of life? Are children characterized by innocence and empathy, a tendency to violence, or an innate sense of justice that adults often lose? How have works of literature shaped our understanding of what children are like? What does the experience of reading books offer to children themselves?
This seminar will explore these questions by considering select works of literature both for children and about them from the late 18th century to 2023. We will read several classic works of children’s literature, including E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, as well as more recent favorites such as Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and Jerry Craft’s New Kid. We will investigate the intertwined histories of modern conceptions of childhood and of the children’s book trade, reading poems about childhood by Wordsworth and Blake and visiting the Beinecke to view early works of children’s literature. We will also sample memoirs of childhood, such as Pauli Murray’s Proud Shoes. Throughout, we will attend to how the meaning of childhood is shaped by categories of race, gender, and socioeconomic class.
Through focus on these questions and readings, the course, like other Engl 1015 sections, is designed to develop students’ writing skills systematically through a series of writing assignments, including informal assignments and drafts and rigorous revisions of four essays (see “Writing Assignments” in “Assessments and Grading” section below).
02. 19th-Century Novel Ideas. Julia Chin. TTh 1.00-2.15
What are novels for? Should novels reflect life as is, or envision a better world we long to see? Tracing the English novel across the 19th century, this course explores literary representations of dreams, ambitions, and ideals in the era’s shift from romance to realism, and how these connections shape our understanding of what constitutes an “ideal novel.” We’ll learn methods of literary analysis to question, interpret, and reimagine even the most apparently idealist novels, full of heroism, progress, and integrity. Alternatively, we’ll explore some very un-ideal types in fiction, asking what we can learn from those who are selfish, corrupt, and downright bleak. We’ll pay particular attention to themes of gender, class, marriage, and the individual, as well as moments when idealism triumphs, fails, or falls somewhere in between in the face of harsh social realities. Ultimately, we’ll think through ways in which novel reading and interpretation suggest a way of being in the world and consider what these 19th-century texts have to tell us about the role of hope, idealism, and dreams in our own 21st-century context. Possible authors include Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy.
*** Please note: 19th-century novels are often “large, loose, baggy monsters” as Henry James said, and students should be prepared to read 100-200 pages for each class session. It’s a worthwhile time commitment, just make sure you’re ready for some serious reading before we dive into this rich body of literature!
03. That’s Weird. Julian Durkin. MW 11.35-12.50
We like to describe our experiences. But what connects the thing I experience to the description I make of it? Why does Robert Browning write “so wore night,” rather than “the night passed,” and why does Elizabeth Bishop give us a Dogwood tree with “each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt”? Is the success of scientific description—clarity, taxonomic precision—different from the success of literary description? Can we even say that a literary description is successful, or is there no disputing about taste?
This class will focus as much on strange phenomena as on strange descriptions of ordinary things. We will read poetry from Alexander Pope to Marianne Moore, and we will read some fiction. Perhaps Daniel Defoe’s descriptive tour de force, Robinson Crusoe, or Henry James’s prolix late novels. TBD.
We will read scholarly writing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural sciences, on poetry and form, and on the realist novel. Throughout the semester we will tackle two related questions: 1) Why are descriptions in literature so weird? 2) What makes a description good? Tacked to this second question is the weird doubleness of literary description. Literature is both about something and is itself something that we experience. So, we will wonder what links weird description with writing well.
04. Black Shakespeare. Alana Edmondson. MW 1.00-2.15
What is ‘Black Shakespeare’? What does Shakespeare have to do with Blackness? Our course will explore the role played by the Shakespearean canon in the shaping of Western ideas about Blackness, in long-term processes of racial formation, and in global racial struggles from the early modern period to the present. We will read Shakespearean plays portraying Black characters (Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra) in conversation with African-American, Caribbean, and Post-colonial rewritings of those plays by playwrights such as Toni Morrison, Keith Hamilton Cobb, and Aimé Césaire. We will explore what happens when we read or adapt Shakespeare’s plays with Black characters in our contemporary moment.