Literature Seminars
*Please note that English courses will have new 4-digit numbers effective Spring 2025. ENGL 115 will become ENGL 1015.
Watch a Video Introduction to ENGL 1015!
Spring 2025 Sections
01. Despair. MW 11.35-12.50
What does Emily Dickinson mean when she calls despair a “formal feeling”? What’s the different between sadness, grief, and despondency? This course is a literary introduction to despair. We’ll look at the ways that writers, artists, and theorists represent this state of feeling, and we’ll think together about how these ways of talking about despair shape our understandings of agency, subjectivity, and political responsibility. Is despair actually the death knoll of climate revolution? Or can our despondency be both paralyzing and productive? Does despair move us closer to life or to death? Is it an accurate or distorted way of thinking? Is it a psychiatric condition? An aesthetic one? Political? Spiritual? Together we will learn to read closely in order to ask how despair operates as both a literary and existential form. Authors may include Brooks, Dickinson, Kierkegaard, Cha, and Sexton.
02. Genres of Black History. TTh 2.30-3.45
This class proposes that multiple genres of writing have long been integral to the historical record of Black life. African Americans have been denied the ability and means to create institutions for archiving, preserving, and memorializing their pasts—from the days of chattel slavery when literacy was illegal, to the Dunning School of history that undergirded Jim Crow, up to the recent attacks on the teaching of African American history in primary education. Despite this deeply entrenched suppression, Black writers have found ways to ensure their lives were part of the written record. Through historical fiction, plays, visual art, and poetry, Black writers have done the deep archeological work to recover their own history and animate it anew. Our class will develop a vocabulary for this tradition. We will trace this aesthetic practice at the moments of its making and across time, from the antebellum era to the present day, asking what these texts allow us to envision for a more just future.
03. Thinking with Animals. TTh 1.00-2.15
This course surveys some of the myriad ways animals have been represented in English literature. We will read broadly across history and forms, seeking to understand how both the broad category of ‘the animal’ has been constructed and understood, as well as how various specific animals and animal types have been thought about and with.
Drawing from the growing field of critical animal studies, as well as millennia-long conversations about animals and ethics, we will not only explore the moral status of the animal, but also how thought about animals has shaped our current ethics and ideology regarding life and the environment. Wrapped up in discourses about animals is the discourse of humanity; along the way, we will consider how the figurative use of animals complicates the active construction of the human identity.