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BASIC COURSES IN LITERATURE
The following courses are recommended to all students interested in literature as a foundation for the study of the humanities. No previous college course work in literature assumed. These courses may not be used toward the minimum requirements for the English major.
Major British Writers
V41.0060 Offered each term. 4 points.
Major writers of 19th to 20th centuries, including the romantic poetry of Keats and Shelley, the industrialized British empire celebrated and criticized in the works of Victorian writers like Dickens and Tennyson, to the modernist writers Eliot, Yeats, and Joyce, Woolf, and contemporary writers.
Major American Writers
V41.0065 Offered each term. 4 points.
Acquaints the student with major texts in American literature as aesthetic achievements and as documents of dramatic points in the development of American culture. From the optimism of Emerson and Thoreau and the darker anticipations of Hawthorne and Melville to the Civil War poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, through the work of Twain, Crane, and Dreiser to the modernism of Eliot and Faulkner, literature has provided both the timeless pleasure of art and insight into the historical moment.
Film as Literature
V41.0070 Formerly V41.0170. Identical to V30.0501. Offered each year. 4 points.
The development of the film as a major art form and its relationship to other art forms. Particular attention to the language of cinema, the director and screenwriter as authors, and the problems of translating literature into film, with extensive discussion of the potentials and limitations of each art form. Milestone films are viewed and analyzed.
CORE COURSES FOR MAJORS AND MINORS
Offered each term. Required for English majors: V41.0200, V41.0210, V41.0220, and V41.0230. Required for English minors: V41.0200. Open to nonmajors who have fulfilled the College’s expository writing requirement.
Literary Interpretation
V41.0200 4 points.
Introduction to the interpretation of literary texts. Teaches the student to talk and write about literature. Through study of the various forms of poetry, the short story, the novel, and the drama, students develop a critical language and approach appropriate to the experience of each work. Students must receive a grade of C+ or better in V41.0200 in order to continue as English majors.
British Literature I
V41.0210 Prerequisite or corequisite: V41.0200 or equivalent approved by the course instructor. 4 points.
Survey of English literature from its origins in the Anglo-Saxon epic through Milton. Close reading of representative works, with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.
British Literature II
V41.0220 Prerequisite: V41.0210 or equivalent approved by the course instructor. 4 points.
Survey of English literature from the Restoration to the 20th century. Close reading of representative works with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.
American Literature I
V41.0230 Prerequisite: V41.0200 or equivalent approved by the course instructor. 4 points.
A survey of American literature and literary history, from the early colonial period to the eve of the Civil War. The goal is to acquire a grasp of the expanding canon of American literature by reading both established, canonical masterpieces and texts that have been traditionally considered to be marginal. Topics to be considered include the relation between history and cultural mythology; the rise of “literature” as a discipline unto itself; the meaning of American individualism; the mythology of American exceptionalism; the dialectic of freedom and slavery in American rhetoric; the American obsession with race; the ideology of domesticity and its link to the sentimental; and the nature of the “American Renaissance.”
COURSES IN LITERATURE FOR MAJORS AND MINORS OPEN TO ALL UNDERGRADUATES
The following courses are open to all undergraduates who have fulfilled the College’s expository writing requirement.
Theory of Drama
V41.0130 Identical to V30.0130. Offered each year. 4 points.
Explores the relationship between two kinds of theories: theories of meaning and theories of performance. Among the theories of meaning to be studied are semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and postmodernism. Theories of practice include naturalism, dadaism, futurism, epic theatre, theatre of cruelty, poor theatre, and environmental theatre. Theories are examined through theoretical essays and representative plays.
Drama in Performance in New York
V41.0132 Identical to V30.0300. Offered each year. 4 points.
Combines the study of drama as literary text with the study of theatre as its three-dimensional translation, both theoretically and practically. Drawing on the rich theatrical resources of New York City, approximately 12 plays are seen, covering classical to contemporary and traditional to experimental theatre. On occasion, films or videotapes of plays are used to supplement live performances. Readings include plays and essays in theory and criticism.
Dante and His World
V41.0143 Identical to V65.0801 and V59.0160. 4 points.
See description under Medieval and Renaissance Studies (65).
Writing New York
V41.0180 Identical to V13.0180 and V99.0180. Prerequisite: V55.04XX. Offered each year. 4 points.
An introduction to the history of New York through an exploration of fiction, poetry, plays, and films about the city, from Washington Irving’s A History of New York to Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. Two lectures and one recitation section each week.
African American Literary Cultures
V41.0185 Identical to V99.0185. Prerequisite: V55.04XX. Offered every other year. 4 points.
This course surveys African Americans’ engagement with literacy—as readers, writers, and purveyors of verbal-expressive materials—from the 18th century to the present. The focus is not simply on literary reflection of black peoples’ experiences but on the various uses to which African American populations have put the modes of literacy to which they have had access. Considering such forms as verse and addresses from the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, abolitionist tracts and uplift novels from the Antebellum era and Reconstruction, realist and modernist literary fiction from the Harlem Renaissance and after, and such contemporary pop-cultural genres as slam poetry and cinematic depictions of the writing life, the course exposes students to African American literary culture in its most wide-ranging manifestations.
The American Short Story
V41.0240 Offered periodically. 4 points.
Study of theme and technique in the American short story through readings in Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Faulkner, Porter, and others, including representative regional writers.
The Renaissance in England
V41.0400 Offered every year. 4 points.
Introduction to the major writers of the 16th and early 17th centuries. Such representative works as More’s Utopia, Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and works of the lyric poets from Wyatt to Sidney are studied as unique artistic achievements within the cultural crosscurrents of humanism and the Reformation.
American Literature II
V41.0235 Offered each year. 4 points.
Survey of American literature from the Civil War to the present. Close reading of representative works, with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.
Shakespeare I, II
V41.0410, 0411 Identical to V30.0225, 0226. Either term may be taken alone for credit. Offered each year. 4 points per term.
Introduction to the reading of Shakespeare. Examines approximately 10 plays each term. The first term covers the early comedies, tragedies, and histories up to Hamlet. The second term covers the later tragedies, the problem plays, and the romances, concluding with The Tempest.
17th-Century English Literature
V41.0440 Offered every other year. 4 points.
Introduction to the prose and poetry of the 17th century—an age of spiritual, scientific, and political crisis. Readings in Jonson, Donne, Bacon, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Browne, and others.
The 18th-Century English Novel
V41.0510 Offered every other year. 4 points.
Study of the major 18th-century novelists, including Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Burney.
The English Novel in the 19th Century
V41.0530 Offered each year. 4 points.
Studies in the forms and contexts of the 19th-century English novel.
Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost
V41.0555 Offered every other year. 4 points.
With the appearance of Emerson, American literature entered a new epoch. In departing from the New England religious tradition, Emerson redefined in transcendental terms the ordering principle of the universe, the nature of the self, and the work of the poet. These concepts remain central to the work of Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, who, in responding to the issues Emerson raised, explored the possibilities of a genuinely native American poetry. Some previous experience in reading and writing about poetry is desirable.
The British Novel in the 20th Century
V41.0605 Offered every other year. 4 points.
Studies in the forms and contexts of the 20th-century English novel.
20th-Century British Literature
V41.0606 Offered every other year. 4 points.
Poetry, fiction, and drama since World War I. Selected major texts of modernism. Writers generally include Beckett, Eliot, Forster, Pinter, Woolf, and Yeats.
American Fiction from 1900 to World War II
V41.0635 Offered each year. 4 points.
Close reading of fictional works by Dreiser, Anderson, Stein, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, West, Wright, Hurston, Faulkner, and others. Studies the texts in light of traditional critical approaches and recent developments in literary theory. Some of the perspectives that enter into discussion of the texts are the cultural and aesthetic background, the writer’s biography, and the articulation of distinctively American themes.
American Fiction Since World War II
V41.0640 Offered each year. 4 points.
Examination of representative works by contemporary novelists. Authors generally include Barthelme, Bellow, Ellison, Gaddis, Hawkes, Mailer, Malamud, Morrison, Nabokov, Oates, Pynchon, Roth, Updike, and Walker.
Tragedy
V41.0720 Identical to V30.0200 and V29.0110. 4 points.
See description under Comparative Literature (29).
Comedy
V41.0725 Identical to V30.0205 and V29.0111. 4 points.
See description under Comparative Literature (29).
Science Fiction
V41.0728 Offered periodically. 4 points.
Considers contemporary science fiction as literature, social commentary, prophecy, and a reflection of recent and possible future trends in technology and society. Writers considered include such authors as Isaac Asimov, J. G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Arthur C. Clark, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.
The Theory of the Avant-Garde, East and West, 1890-1930
V41.0730 Identical to V29.0841 and V91.0841. 4 points.
See description under Russian and Slavic Studies (91).
Queer Literature
V41.0749 Identical to V97.0749. 4 points.
See description under Gender and Sexuality Studies (97).
Topics in Irish Literature
V41.0761 Identical to V58.0761. 4 points.
See description under Irish Studies (58).
Topics in Irish Fiction and Poetry
V41.0762 Identical to V58.0762. 4 points.
See description under Irish Studies (58).
Topics in Irish Drama
V41.0763 Identical to V58.0763. 4 points.
See description under Irish Studies (58).
Introduction to Postcolonial Studies
V41.0780 Prerequisite: Literary Interpretation. Given every fall.
What is "postcolonial"? How can we understand the mixture of cultures and peoples that seems to define our "globalized" age? How has the legacy of colonialism and imperialism informed and influenced such experiences and interactions, and in what way have writers, artists and critics represented and challenged these forces? The rise of interest in the postcolonial condition has been marked by a body of work that engages questions relating to empire and decolonization and creates new models for the analyses of power, indentity, gender, resistance, nation and diaspora. In this class, we will examine novels, poems, political writings and films from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and their diasporic communities. Our aim will be to understrand both the ways in which these texts provide new models of analysis and have changed the traditional study of literature in the academy.
Topics in Caribbean Literature and Society
V41.0704 Identical to V11.0132 and V29.0132. 4 points.
See description under Comparative Literature (29).
Colonialism and the Rise of Modern African Literature
V41.0707 Identical to V29.0850. 4 points.
See description under Comparative Literature (29).
ADVANCED COURSES IN LITERATURE
The following courses have departmental prerequisites. Colloquia are restricted to majors only. Qualified nonmajors may enroll with the permission of the instructor.
18th- and 19th-Century African American Literature
V41.0250 Identical to V11.0159. Prerequisite: V41.0185 or V41.0230. Offered periodically. 4 points.
Survey of major autobiographies, fiction, and poetry from the early national period to the eve of the New Negro Renaissance. Writers considered generally include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, and Harriet Wilson.
20th-Century African American Literature
V41.0251 Identical to V11.0160. Prerequisite: V41.0185 or V41.0230. Offered periodically. 4 points.
Survey of major texts—fiction, poetry, autobiography, and drama—from Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to contemporaries such as Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and its key figures, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison.
Contemporary African American Fiction
V41.0254 Identical to V11.0162. Prerequisite: V41.0185 or V41.0230. Offered periodically. 4 points.
Focuses on major novels by African American writers from Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) to the present. Readings generally include novels by Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Chester Hines as well as more recent fiction by Ernest Gaines, John Widerman, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and others.
Medieval Literature in Translation
V41.0310 Prerequisite: V41.0210. Offered periodically. 4 points.
Major texts and genres of the Middle Ages, including Beowulf, Boethius, Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian romances, Marie de France, Tristan and Isolde, Dante, Boccaccio, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Christine de Pisan, and Malory.
Colloquium: Chaucer
V41.0320 Prerequisite: V41.0210. Offered each year. 4 points.
Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s major poetry, with particular attention to The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s language and versification are studied briefly but intensively so that students are able to read his 14th-century London dialect with comprehension and pleasure. Special critical attention is given to his narrative skills, methods of characterization, wide range of styles and forms, and other rhetorical strategies. Students are also encouraged to explore Chaucer’s artistry as a reflection of late medieval social and cultural history.
Colloquium: Shakespeare
V41.0415 Identical to V30.0230. Prerequisite: V41.0210 or V41.0125. Offered periodically. 4 points.
Explores the richness and variety of Shakespearean drama through an intensive study of selected major plays. Approximately six to eight plays are read intensively and thoroughly examined in class.
Colloquium: The Renaissance Writer
V41.0445 Prerequisite: V41.0210. Offered periodically. 4 points.
Topic varies each term. Consult the department’s undergraduate Web site for further information.
Colloquium: Milton
V41.0450 Prerequisite: V41.0210. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Emphasis on the major poems—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—with some attention to the early poems and the prose. Traces the poet’s sense of vocation, analyzes the gradual development of the Miltonic style, and assesses Milton’s position in the history of English literature, politics, and theology.
Restoration and 18th-Century Literature
V41.0500 Prerequisite: V41.0210. Offered periodically. 4 points.
The poetry, prose, and drama from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the death of Pope in 1744. Readings generally include texts by Dryden, Rochester, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Wycherley, Etherege, Gay, Congreve, Behn, and Richardson.
Restoration and 18th-Century Drama
V41.0505 Identical to V30.0235. Prerequisite: V41.0210 or V41.0125. Offered periodically. 4 points.
Development of English drama from 1660 to 1780, illustrating the comedy of manners (both sentimental and laughing), the heroic play, and tragedy. Playwrights generally include Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Goldsmith, and Sheridan.
Colloquium: The 18th-Century Writer
V41.0515 Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Topic varies each term. Consult the department’s undergraduate Web site for further information.
The Romantic Movement
V41.0520 Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered each year. 4 points.
Representative works from the first generation of Romantics (Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth), focusing on the influence of the French Revolution and the themes of nature, the self, and visionary poetry, as expressed in new literary forms. Analysis of selections from Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The major themes of their poetry—the meaning of selfhood, humankind’s relation to nature, and the poet’s role in society—against the larger background of romantic, psychological, philosophical, and political thought.
Major British Writers: 1832-1870
V41.0525 Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Readings in the major poets and essayists of the Victorian period (Carlyle, Tennyson, the Brownings, Dickens, Arnold, Ruskin, and Swinburne), with emphasis on the crises of ideas and society. Special attention is given to writers’ invention of new forms, or recovery of old ones, to express the new issues of their changing age and psyches.
English Literature of the Transition: 1870-1914
V41.0540 Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Survey of late Victorian and early modern literature and a reassessment of the notions of transition and modernity. Readings drawn from such major novelists, essayists, and poets as Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Pater, Wilde, Strachey, and Eliot.
Colloquium: The 19th-Century British Writer
V41.0545 Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Topic varies each term. Consult the department’s undergraduate Web site for further information.
Early American Literature
V41.0548 Prerequisite: V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Examines the large variety of writing produced in North America between 1600 and 1800, from indigenous/European encounters through the American Revolution and its aftermath. Genres discussed in their cultural contexts include colonization, captivity, slave, and travel narratives; sermons; familiar correspondence; autobiographies; poetry; drama; and the novel.
American Romanticism
V41.0551 Prerequisite: V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Readings in Irving, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Lectures emphasize their varying attempts to reconcile “nature” with “civilization” and to grant expression to instinct, whim, and passion while preserving the traditions and institutions that hold society together. Various expressions of the nature/civilization conflict are considered: frontier/city; America/ Europe; heart/head; natural law/ social law; organic forms/traditional genres; and literary nationalism/the republic of letters.
19th-Century American Poetry
V41.0550 Prerequisite: V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
A survey of 19th-century American verse. Considers both popular (that is, forgotten) and acknowledged major poets of the period, with an eye toward discerning the conventions that bind them to and separate them from one another.
American Realism
V41.0560 Prerequisite: V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
In-depth study of the characteristic work of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Henry Adams. Emphasizes literary realism and naturalism as an aesthetic response to the changing psychological, social, and political conditions of 19th-century America.
Colloquium: The 19th-Century American Writer
V41.0565 Prerequisite: V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Topic varies each term. Consult the department’s undergraduate Web site for further information.
Modern British and American Poetry
V41.0600 Prerequisite: V41.0210, V41.0220, or V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Readings from major modern American, British, and Irish poets from the middle of the 19th century to the 1920s—specifically, from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Poets considered generally include Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Frost, Williams, and Eliot.
Contemporary British and American Poetry
V41.0601 Prerequisite: V41.0210, V41.0220, or V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Readings in modern American, British, and Irish poets from 1922 to the present. Poets considered generally include the middle and later T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, William Empson, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, John Ashbery, and others.
Contemporary British Literature and Culture
V41.0607 Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Studies in contemporary British fiction. Examines a range of avant-garde, postcolonial, and “low” texts that challenge received notions of “Englishness.” Particular attention is paid to the interaction between literature and other cultural forms such as cinema, popular music, and sport.
Modern British Drama
V41.0614 Identical to V30.0245. Prerequisite: V41.0220 or V41.0126. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Studies in the modern drama of England and Ireland, always focusing on a specific period, a specific group of playwrights, a specific dramatic movement of theatre, or a specific topic. Among playwrights covered at different times are Shaw, Synge, O’Casey, Behan, Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard, Bond, Friel, Storey, Hare, Adgar, Brenton, Gems, Churchill, and Daniels.
The Irish Renaissance
V41.0621 Identical to V58.0621. Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Examines the extraordinary achievements of Irish writers during the tumultuous period from the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, through the Easter Rising in 1916, and into the early years of national government in the 1930s. Readings in several genres—poetry, short story, novel, drama—by Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Gregory, Synge, O’Casey, Beckett, O’Brien, and others.
American Poetry from 1900 to the Present
V41.0630 Prerequisite: V41.0230 or V41.0550. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Survey of the development of 20th-century American poetry. A selection of readings from such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Robert Bly, and Denise Levertov.
Faulkner and Hemingway
V41.0645 Prerequisite: V41.0230. Offered every year. 4 points.
In-depth study of the major fiction of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, emphasizing theme, style, and contexts.
Modern American Drama
V41.0650 Identical to V30.0250. Prerequisite: V41.0125, V41.0126 or V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Study of the drama and theatre of America since 1900, including Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, the Group Theatre, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Maria Irene Fornes, and David Henry Hwang.
Colloquium: Joyce
V41.0625 Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered each year. 4 points.
Considers the imaginative “logic” of James Joyce’s career and the extent to which the trajectory of his works constitutes a “development” of forces posited in the early writings. Readings span the entire oeuvre, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, and include Joyce’s poetry and his play, Exiles.
Colloquium: The Modern American Writer
V41.0626 Prerequisite: V41.0230. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Topic varies each term. Consult the department’s undergraduate Web site for further information.
Narratology
V41.0710 Prerequisite: V41.0200. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Examines the nature of discourse, with focus on the novel and special emphasis on contemporary critical theory (e.g., semiotics, deconstruction) and the status of nonliterary prose discourse (usually Freud) as narrative in its own right. Readings survey the history of English and American fiction and critically examine the notion of literary history.
Major Texts in Critical Theory
V41.0712 Prerequisite: V41.0200. Offered each year. 4 points.
Major texts in critical theory from Plato to Derrida, considered in relation to literary practice. The first half of the course focuses on four major types of critical theory: mimetic, ethical, expressive, and formalist. The second half turns to 20th-century critical schools—such as Russian and American formalism, archetypal criticism, structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, reader theory, deconstruction, and historicism.
Literature and Psychology
V41.0715 Prerequisite: V41.0200. Offered periodically. 4 points.
Freudian and post-Freudian psychological approaches to the reading and analysis of literary works. Covers manifest and latent meaning, the unconscious, childhood as a source of subject matter, sublimation, and gender and sexuality. Readings are chosen from such writers as Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Melville, James, Woolf, and Faulkner.
Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory
V41.0735 Prerequisite: V41.0200. Offered every year. 4 points.
Topics vary from term to term.
Representations of Women
V41.0755 Identical to V97.0755. Prerequisite: V41.0200. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Selected readings in British and American poetry and fiction provide the focus for an exploration of woman’s place in the writings of such authors as Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Lillian Hellman, Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and others.
South Asian Literature in English
V41.0721 Prerequisite: V41.0220. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Explores the rich cross-cultural perspectives of 20th-century Indian English literature. Moving from the classic British writers about India (Kipling and Forster) to the contemporary voices of Salmon Rushdie, R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Bapsi Sidhwa, Sarah Suleri, Vikram Seth, Bharati Mukherjee, and others, the course focuses on key experiences of empire, partition of India and Pakistan, and diaspora. Themes of identity, memory, alienation, assimilation, and resistance and of encountering and crossing boundaries define culture, nation, and language in complex interrelations and link Indian English literature to writing in other colonial/postcolonial settings in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
SEMINARS
All majors must take one of the following courses to fulfill the seminar requirement.
These courses offer research, criticism, and class discussion in a seminar format. Topics and instructors vary from term to term. Students should consult the department’s on-line listing of courses to determine which courses and what topics are being offered each term. Prerequisites: V41.0200, V41.0210, V41.0220, V41.0230, or permission of the instructor.
Topics: Medieval Literature
V41.0950 4 points.
Topics: Renaissance Literature
V41.0951 4 points.
Topics: 17th-Century British Literature
V41.0952 4 points.
Topics: 18th-Century British Literature
V41.0953 4 points.
Topics: 19th-Century British Literature
V41.0954 4 points.
Topics: 20th-Century British Literature
V41.0955 4 points.
Topics: Early American Literature
V41.0960 4 points.
Topics: 19th-Century American Literature
V41.0961 4 points.
Topics: 20th-Century American Literature
V41.0962 4 points.
Topics: African American Literature
V41.0963 4 points.
Topics: Emergent American Literatures
V41.0964 4 points.
Topics: Transatlantic Literature
V41.0965 4 points.
Topics: Critical Theories and Methods
V41.0970 4 points.
Topics: Dramatic Literature
V41.0971 4 points.
Topics: Genre Studies
V41.0972 4 points.
Topics: Interdisciplinary Study
V41.0973 4 points.
Topics: Poetry and Poetics
V41.0974 4 points.
Topics: World Literature in English
V41.0975 4 points.
Topics: New York Literature and Culture
V41.0976 4 points.
HONORS COURSES
Junior Honors Seminar
V41.0905, 0906 Prerequisite: admission to the department’s honors program. One seminar is required for honors majors. 4 points.
Research, criticism, and class discussion in a seminar format. The subject—the works of a major writer or writers, or a critical issue—varies each term at the instructor’s choice. A final paper of about 20 pages prepares the student for the senior thesis.
Senior Honors Thesis
V41.0925 Prerequisites: successful completion of either V41.0905 or 0906, and permission of the director of undergraduate studies. 4 points.
To complete the honors program, the student must write a thesis under the supervision of a faculty director in this individual tutorial course. The student chooses a topic (normally at the beginning of the senior year) and is guided through the research and writing by weekly conferences with the thesis director. Students enrolled in this course are also expected to attend a year-long colloquium for thesis-writers (V41.0926). Students should consult the director of the honors program about the selection of a topic and a thesis director. Information about the length, format, and due date of the thesis is available on the department’s Web site.
Senior Honors Colloquium
V41.0926 Prerequisite: successful completion of either V41.0905 or 0906, and permission of the director of undergraduate studies. 2 or 4 points.
Two terms required of all honors seniors. Meets approximately eight times each term.
INTERNSHIP
Internship
V41.0980, 0981 Prerequisite: for majors, permission of the student’s departmental adviser; for minors, permission of the department’s internship director. May not be used to fulfill the minimum requirement of either the major or the minor. 2 or 4 points per term; 8 total internship points are the department maximum. Pass/fail.
Requires a commitment of eight to 12 hours of work per week in an unpaid position to be approved by the director of undergraduate studies. The intern’s duties onsite should involve some substantive aspect of literary work, whether in research, writing, editing, or production (e.g., at an archive or publishing house or with a literary agent or an arts administration group). A written evaluation is solicited from the intern’s supervisor at the end of the semester. The grade for the course is based on a final paper submitted to the faculty director.
INDEPENDENT STUDY
Independent Study
V41.0997, 0998 Prerequisite: permission of the director of undergraduate studies. May not duplicate the content of a regularly offered course. Intended for qualified junior and senior English majors or minors, but may not be used to fulfill the minimum requirements of either the major or the minor. 2 or 4 points per term.
Requires a paper of considerable length that should embody the result of a semester’s reading, thinking, and frequent conferences with the student’s director. The paper should show the student’s ability to investigate, collect, and evaluate material, finally drawing conclusions that are discussed in a sound and well-written argument. Proposals, approved by the student’s faculty director, must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies in advance of the registration period for the term in which the independent study is to be conducted.
GRADUATE COURSES OPEN TO UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH MAJORS
Junior and senior English majors may take 1000-level G41 courses in the Graduate School of Arts and Science with permission from the director of undergraduate studies. Consult the department’s graduate Web site for descriptions of 1000-level courses being offered in a given term.
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