Why study literature? In many contexts, including the contexts of most other academic disciplines, one reads in order to extract the gist of a text. By studying literature, we enable ourselves to do much more than that. Studying literature makes it possible to recover a relationship to language that we all once had, in which words and their interrelationships were new, strange, and rich with possibility. It makes it possible to develop a more acute awareness of the ongoing tension between language as units of meaning (words, phrases, sentences) and language as units of sound (the beat of syllables, the harmonization of one syllable with another). It even makes it possible for us to carry this sense of everything that is uncanny about language–the medium of our relationship to others and to ourselves–into our lives more generally, to recognize that in just about everything that we say, we mean more than we mean to mean. People who study literature are people who are capable of taking away from conversations, no less than from poems, much more than the gist, the summary, the bottom line. By dwelling on texts patiently, by slowing down the process of moving from mystery to certainty, by opening ourselves to the crosscurrents of potential meanings that are present at every moment in just about every sentence, it is possible for us to become more accurate and nuanced readers of just about everything that happens in our lives.
Eighteen seats reserved for first-year students. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Sanborn.
2023-24: Not offeredLiterature engages us. It moves us, it delights us, it makes us ask hard questions. How do we engage literature? How do we respond to it in conversation, in writing, in performance, and in our communities? How do we write about literature in a way that effectively engages others?
This course seeks to engage you in a process of seeing literature and your own writing process anew. We will engage with authors, in person, in public, and on the page. We will attend literary events and enter into conversations among writers: authors who are influenced and inspired by each other, literary critics who give us illuminating interpretations, and literary historians who open our eyes to contexts heretofore unseen. Students will practice writing about literature in a range of modes from the personal essay to the book review to the academic paper. Frequent writing workshops will be geared toward the process of revising in a collaborative environment. A first course in reading fictional, dramatic, lyric, and non-fiction texts, this course also challenges Amherst College students to think of themselves as writers.
Preference given to first-year students. Limited to 18 students. Ten seats reserved for first-year students. Omitted 2021-22. Professors Brooks and Mireles Christoff.
2023-24: Not offeredThis poetry workshop is made for buddies: the ones you build and the ones you bring. Although most poets love to go solo, the contemporary writers we will study in this course prove how writing can be better with friends.
In this course, we will look at contemporary poets who collaborate: to perform, to further their own collections, to create their passion projects. We will look at poetic movements that planted the seed for twenty-first century partnerships and examine contemporary collaborations that prove there’s poetic strength in numbers.
Requirements for this course include a desire to experiment with collaboration. Students are encouraged to register with a friend as a way to begin their writing partnership but will also be paired with a partner or group within the course to write with. Completion of this course will include the creation of two sets of collaborative work. Partners will decide if this means writing individual poems that are in conversation with each other, or writing work collectively. This is a great course for non-majors and good friends.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 18 students. Fall semester: Professor Lawson and Visiting Lecturer Dan Bernitt.
2023-24: Not offeredWhy do we laugh at some jokes but not others? What makes something funny? This class will explore humor as a core rhetorical concept to study audience, genre, purpose, context, and exigency. We will analyze how situational and language humor work in essays, stories, and visual media. Students will build their critical reading and writing skills through short, low-stakes weekly writing and three major papers. We will consider how the intersectional identities of authors and audiences (i.e.: how class, race, gender, and disability, among others) influence joke construction and reception. As we read, we will pay close attention to the way that writers use humor as a tool for social critique and to release tension. Students can expect to build a toolkit for creating arguments with evidence, and they will frequently revise the content, organization, and language in their work. We will work together to develop a community of writers who can mutually support each other through the writing process.
Preference given to first-year Amherst College students. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Lecturer Reardon.
2023-24: Not offeredUsing a variety of texts–novels, essays, short stories–this course will work to develop the reading and writing of difficult prose, paying particular attention to the kinds of evidence and authority, logic and structure that produce strong arguments. The authors we study may include Peter Singer, Aravind Adiga, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Charles Johnson, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, William Carlos Williams. This is an intensive writing course. Frequent short papers will be assigned.
Preference given to first-year Amherst College students. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Senior Lecturer Emeritus Lieber.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course explores human rights rhetoric through readings of a range of non-fiction briefs, academic articles, and reportage, alongside fictional works. It asks students, through critical writing, to come to terms with our responsibilities as global citizens for upholding a culture of dignity in our world. Together, we will examine the way that authors use the written word to push readers to empathize with others, reflect on the past, learn about injustices, and imagine new realities–as we do the same in our own writing. We will pay close attention to the way that writers build arguments, use evidence, organize texts, and edit their own work, with an eye on developing strategies for using these skills in class assignments, and transferring them to other classes as well. Through writing projects that analyze, challenge, and extend authors’ arguments about the universality of human rights and the pursuit of social and racial justice, we will evaluate the ways that words fuel and mitigate conflict–in both productive and destructive ways.
Preference given to first-year Amherst College students. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Reardon.
2023-24: Not offeredHow does migration transform identity? Which techniques do writers use to express and recreate this complex experience on the page? What role can language and narrative technique play in forging a sense of self and home? How might writing be related to refuge? Reading across genres of poetry, fiction and memoir, this class explores how writers have described the experience of locating themselves while departing, arriving or living in between. The course will cover topics such as alienation, assimilation, generational memory, survival, nostalgia, hybridity, and transformation. Students can expect a wide range of writing assignments, both analytical and creative. Readings may include Bapsi Sidhwa, Amitav Ghosh, Zadie Smith, José Olivarez, Warsan Shire, Suji Kwock Kim, Fady Joudah, Edwidge Danticat, Eduardo Corral and Ocean Vuong.
Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Visiting Writer Kapur.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2023, Spring 2025This course explores media literacy and the rhetoric of news through readings of a range of multimedia news and academic articles. It asks students, through critical writing, to come to terms with our responsibilities as engaged citizens for understanding, and acting on, the information we encounter in the news. Together, we will examine the way that journalists present the written word in print and digital spaces to inform, analyze, and present opinions–as we do the same in our own writing. We will pay close attention to the way that reporter teams explicitly and implicitly build arguments, use evidence, organize texts, and edit their own work, with an eye on developing strategies for using these skills in class assignments, and transferring them to other classes as well. Through writing projects that ask students to examine conversations on current events, particularly those relating to social and racial justice, students will develop skills to evaluate and contribute to the multimedia news landscape.
Preference given to first-year Amherst College students. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Reardon.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course we will weather famous storms featured in literary, artistic, and cinematic works from the nineteenth century through the present day. Together, we will make our way through snow, sleet, hurricanes, cyclones, tropical storms, superstorms, and everyday rain showers. This topic will provide a unifying thematic thread for a class focused on the fundamentals of close reading, viewing, writing, and revision. We will examine how various genres, narrative styles, and authorial voices engage this common topic in strikingly different ways. We will also use storms to learn about literary and aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, and to think about the basic building blocks of narrative. How do storms blur lines between setting, plot, characterization, suspense, and closure? What does it mean for a setting to come to life or function as a character?
Together, we will discuss: How do stories of environmental violence and human violence collide? Who gets to tell the story of a storm? What stories emerge on either side of the ostensibly rupturing event itself, before and after the storm? How do storms expose and exacerbate disparities along racial and socioeconomic lines? Can reading local storm stories provide a way of thinking about global climate change?
Some of our storms will be based upon actual events, including Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Irene; this will raise complex questions about the boundaries between history and art.
Possible works include paintings by J. M. W. Turner; short stories by Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Ben Marcus; novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Ben Lerner, and Jesmyn Ward; film by Behn Zeitlin, and documentary by Spike Lee.
Limited to 18 students. In the fall semester, ten seats reserved for first-year students. Fall and spring semesters. Professor Abramson.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 117 and EUST 117) [Before 1800] Knights, monsters, quests, and true love: these are the things we associate with King Arthur and tales of his court. Why has Arthurian literature proved so enchanting to centuries of poets, novelists, and recently, filmmakers? In this introductory English course, we will read and watch Arthurian legends from Chaucer to Monty Python, examining the ways in which they have been represented in different eras. Beginning with the historical foundations of the King Arthur legend, we will examine how it blossomed and took form in later eras. Our focus will be on close literary and visual analysis of British, American, and French (in translation) versions of these legends. We will also discuss what cultural forces lie behind the popularity of Arthurian legend in certain eras: later medieval England and France; the Victorian era; and twentieth-century England and America. There will be frequent writing assignments and presentations, as well as a final creative project.
Open to first-year students and sophomores. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Nelson.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2020, Spring 2022This is a class all about the art of noticing. Our primary texts fixate on what Amit Chaudhuri calls “the moment of noticing”: heightened attention to the small, the ordinary, the routine. Many readings will be “day-in-the-life” novels set over a 24-hour period; others dwell on single moments, fleeting impressions, or routine rhythms of daily life. And just as our primary authors practice the art of noticing, so will we adopt a similar stance of scrutiny and attention to detail in this course.
We will also discuss questions such as: How does the ordinary become extraordinary? How does the seemingly mundane or quotidian become infused with meaning? How does art make the familiar newly strange or fascinating? What happens to narrative conventions of plot and the event when writers are more interested in capturing the textures, rhythms, and background environments of everyday life? How does one narrate history in the making, as it unfolds in everyday life? How are major historical events and political structures felt over the course of a typical day? What happens when the ordinary and extraordinary change places?
We will look at short stories, novels, photography, and memoir. Possible authors include Mulk Raj Anand, Amit Chaudhuri, Teju Cole, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Henry James, Ian McEwan, Kathleen Stewart, and Virginia Woolf.
Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Abramson.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 120, AMST 220 and EDST 120) This course considers from many perspectives what it means to read and write and learn and teach both for ourselves and for others. As part of the work of this course, in addition to the usual class hours, students will serve as weekly tutors and classroom assistants in adult basic education centers in nearby towns. Thus this course consciously engages with the obstacles to and the power of education through course readings, through self-reflexive writing about our own varied educational experiences, and through weekly work in the community. Although this course presses participants to reflect a great deal about teaching, this course does not teach how to teach. Instead it offers an exploration of the contexts and processes of education, and of the politics and desires that suffuse learning. Course readings range across literary genres including essays, poems, autobiographies, and novels in which education and teaching figure centrally, as well as readings in ethnography, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. The writing assignments cross many genres as well.
Limited to 18 students. In the fall semester, eight seats reserved for first-year students. Fall semester: Professor Frank. Spring semester: Lecturer B. Sánchez-Eppler.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025(Offered as ENGL 121 and EDST 121) What does equity and access look like in college? What should it look like? In this course, students will learn to critique power structures that have created boundaries around higher education, and they will build their critical reading and writing skills through short, low-stakes weekly writing and three major papers that will be revised many times. We will consider how students’ intersectional identities (i.e.: how class, race, gender, and disability, among others) help them navigate college or create barriers to equity and access. We’ll learn how learning is shaped by cultural and rhetorical contexts. As we read, we will pay close attention to the way that writers build arguments to levy their own critiques with evidence, as well as how they organize texts and edit their own work, with an eye on developing our own strategies for using these skills in this course and others. We will work together to develop a community of writers who can mutually support each other through their own multifaceted college experiences.
Preference given to first-year Amherst College students. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Lecturer Reardon.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025With a focus on the skills of close reading and analytical writing, we will look at the ways in which writers imagine illness, how they try to make meaning out of illness, and how they use illness to explore other aspects of experience. This is not a course on the history of illness or the social construction of disease. We will discuss not only what writers say about illness but also how they say it: with what language and in what form they speak the experience of bodily and mental suffering. Readings may include drama by Sophocles, Molière and Margaret Edson; poetry by Donne and Mark Doty; fiction by José Saramago and Mark Haddon; and essays by Susan Sontag, Raphael Campo and Temple Grandin.
Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Bosman.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2014, Spring 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2025From Emily Dickinson to Robert Frost to Sonia Sánchez, Amherst is famous for its poets. More than twenty well-known poets have written, lived, studied and taught in the area surrounding the College. This introductory course is designed to welcome students who have not previously taken a college-level English course into the literary environment of Amherst, as well as into the literary community of poetry readers more broadly, by studying five or six Amherst poets very closely. Our main focus will be on the close-reading skills needed to engage with poetry of all kinds, and on the skills needed to write a college-level essay about literature. We will engage in frequent essay-writing workshops together, and there will be a chance to meet and engage with contemporary Amherst Poets on Zoom.
Limited to 18 students. Fifteen seats reserved for first-year students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Worsley.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 162 and BLST 162) African and African-descended people have a long-documented and intimate relationship to the natural world as a source of healing, nurture, and wealth. However, for a people who were stripped of their land in colonial Africa, exploited to work the land by European enslavers in the New World, and hung from trees in the American South, and who still have a precarious relationship to water in such places as Flint, Michigan, and post-Maria Puerto Rico, inhabiting the earth is complicated. How might we begin to tell this entangled history? What kinds of stories have Africans and their descendants developed to address their relationship with nature? What does the term “environmental justice” even mean to and for people of African descent today?
In this course, we will encounter a range of texts, including slave narratives, novels, poems, visual art, and performance written by and about Black subjects, to begin to understand how various authors, artists, and activists represent the rich relationship between blackness and the natural world. Readings may include works by Olaudah Equiano, W. E. B Du Bois, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Zora Neale Hurston, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, T. Dungy, Britt Rusert, Kimberly N. Ruffin, among others.
Limited to 18 students. Ten seats reserved for first-year students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Cobham-Sander.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 180 and FAMS 110) A first course in reading films and writing about them. A varied selection of films for study and criticism, partly to illustrate the main elements of film language and partly to pose challenging texts for reading and writing. Frequent short papers. Two class meetings and one screening per week.
Limited to 25 students. Twelve seats reserved for first-year students. Open to first-year and sophomore students. Fall semester. Professor Guilford.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as ENGL 182, EDST 182 and FAMS 182) How has childhood been imagined across the twentieth century and into our own present? Since the Victorian era, childhood and the experience of being a child have been associated with innocence (and experience), nostalgia (and regret), and a simpler (while deeply complex) time of life. Yet across literature and media, childhood is constructed after the fact, by adults whose perceptions are shaped by their understanding of childhood as a distinct and discrete set of experiences. In this course, we will explore constructions of British and American childhoods on page, stage, and screen, exploring two foundational late Victorian/Edwardian intermedial texts (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan), before venturing on a journey exploring cinematic depictions of childhood over the course of the twentieth century. We will examine twentieth-century films depicting children and popular genres designed to appeal to child audiences; how media texts represent children as they navigate conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and class; and children as both consumers and producers of media in the twenty-first century. Students will explore different genres and modes of expository writing, including personal essay and close textual analysis and do an independent, guided research project. Students will gain a familiarity with key terms and methodologies in English and Film & Media Studies; an ability to think and write critically about literary and cinematic texts; an awareness of historical, social and cultural perceptions of childhood in Britain and the United States; confidence in reading primary and secondary sources; and proficiency in analytical writing, including sentence-level clarity, building arguments, using evidence, and working with and appropriately citing a variety of sources.
This course is designed for entering first-year students. Non-English/FAMS majors and Five College students are welcome. Limited to 18 students. Eighteen seats reserved for first-year students. Fall semester. Visiting Professor Sanders.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 212 and ARHA 212) [Before 1800] This course will explore the major pictorial narrative traditions of Mesoamerica, focusing on manuscripts of the Aztec, Maya, and Mixtec peoples, as well as other media, including texts and images from murals, ceramics, monuments, and mirrors. These visual and narrative media continue to play important roles in the preservation of Indigenous identity, solidarity, and cultural identity within nation states; the course will examine public, popular, and fine arts reviving, repurposing, and supporting resistance using this imagery.
Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer Couch.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] Until the recent past, and still in high schools and many collegiate institutions, courses that intend to survey American literature represent that oeuvre as nearly exclusively the work of white male writers. In this survey we will often encounter writings by American Indians from different nations, by women, by African Americans, as well as more commonly taught writers like Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson.
Limited to 35 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Emeritus O’Connell.
2023-24: Not offeredSurvey courses have in our time increasingly disappeared, except in most high schools. Attempts to make them sufficiently inclusive have seemed impossible. The chosen approach in this course is to concentrate on the remarkable literatures created by African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, bi-national writers, and working-class writers. We will also read “classic” writers like Willa Cather and Fitzgerald along with some of the working-class writers from the Thirties.
Omitted 2021-22. Professor Emeritus O’Connell.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] What is “English Literature,” and how does one construct its history? What counts as “England” (especially in relation to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and to ancient Greece and Rome)? What is the relationship between histories of literature and political, social, religious and intellectual histories? What is the role of gender in the making of literature, and the making of its histories? These are the kinds of questions we will ask as we read texts from the seventh through the seventeenth centuries, including works such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in translation) and writers from Chaucer and Margery Kempe in the Middle Ages to Margaret Cavendish and John Milton in the Renaissance.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offeredThe Romantic period was one of unprecedented social and political change. Literature both represented, and helped to produce, these changes. This course will question how global political events in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century shaped British literature, and explore what these British writers gave back to the world. We will study how novels, plays, and poems both responded to, and helped to shape, momentous political events, such as the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and debates about the “Rights of Man” and the “Rights of Woman.” At the same time, we will also study the major revolutions in thought that this period witnessed. Massive changes occurred in the ways in which people began to think about equality, race, gender, the emotions, cognition, science, travel, children, animals, and the environment. Literary writers made many important contributions in each of these venues. The question of what literature itself was, and who it was designed for, was also suddenly under question. In discussions of texts by writers like Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, George Gordon Byron, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as in critical texts such as C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins and contemporary texts such as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, this course will contextualize both canonical and understudied works of Romantic literature in one of the most radical moments in history.
Limited to 35 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Worsley.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2023A first workshop in the writing of poetry. Class members will read and discuss each others’ work and will study the elements of prosody: the line, stanza forms, meter, free verse, and more. Open to anyone interested in writing poetry and learning about the rudiments of craft. Writing exercises weekly.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Fall semester: Visiting Writer Kapur. Spring semester: Merrill Visiting Poet Amy Dryansky.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025How can we re-imagine ourselves and the world through our deeply felt personal questions? This course will focus on using personal non-fiction narratives to consider larger themes of politics, history, current events, and our ever-changing social reality. The course welcomes beginning writers who want to learn how to write more creatively without limiting censors and unnecessary judgment. The class will function as a cooperative workshop to help all write more fluently and with greater joy.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22. Writer-in-Residence Lee.
2023-24: Not offeredA first course in writing fiction. Emphasis will be on experimentation as well as on developing skill and craft. Workshop (discussion) format.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Fall and spring semesters. Lecturer D. Sweeney.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025This introductory course explores a variety of approaches to digital storytelling, from branching narratives, to hypertext media and video games, to more recent developments in machine-generated poetry and also embodied and location-based narrative. A hands-on class, it will link conventional understandings of narrative form and content to contemporary conversations about interface and computation, and ask students to think about materiality and textuality by experimenting with digital composition.
Omitted 2021-22. Professors Frank and Parham.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 228 and THDA 251) In this course, we will explore theories and practices of “liveness.” What do we feel as alive in literature, drama, film, and television? How do we experience liveness across the forms of media? How does live media vs. recorded media influence our perceptions of its authenticity, and how do we express authenticity in each form? We will explore these questions as we examine works from drama, music, and dance; digital marketing, social media, and social networking; political protest, news broadcasts, and public relations.
With this theoretical and critical background in mind, we will also work on adapting between media by taking an existing creative work and transforming it into a dynamic live-streamed event. Works may be in creative writing, theatre, dance, music, or similar form, and they can be an original creation or a work by another author.
Technological Requirements: To fully participate in the final project, students will be expected to have regular access to an iPhone or Android smartphone with a working camera and a Mac or Windows computer with a working camera. If you lack either of these things, we will work with Academic Technology Services to ensure you have access to this technology during the January term.
Completion of this course will include a live in-class performance on the final day. Previous experience in any form of live performance is encouraged, but not required. Class will meet daily for 165 minutes.
Limited to 20 students. January term. Visiting Lecturer Bernitt.
2023-24: Not offeredHow small can drama get while remaining “dramatic”? During the first half of the twentieth century, it was not unusual for a stage in America (or anywhere in the English-speaking world) to be filled with dozens of actors. Over the last sixty years, though, the crowds onstage have thinned. Today, three-, two-, and even one-person plays are as common as twenty-person plays once were. In this course, we will study the work of playwrights who have found new inspiration within these tight constraints.
As a foundational course in drama, this course will teach you the special skills involved in reading plays. As texts meant to be interpreted and staged by theater-makers, plays are radically under-determined things. So, you cannot sit back and play the role of audience. You must also do the imaginative work of all those people–actors, directors, designers, etc.–who turn a play into a performance. This course will teach you the habits of mind that make this imaginative work possible.
Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Professor Grobe.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] Readings in the comedies, histories, and tragedies, with attention to their poetic language, dramatic structure, and power in performance. Texts and topics will vary by instructor.
Limited to 50 students. Fall semester. Professor Bosman.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2023, Spring 2025A first course in the critical reading of selected English-language poets, which gives students exposure to significant poets, poetic styles, and literary and cultural contexts for poetry from across the tradition. Attention will be given to prosody and poetic forms, and to different ways of reading poems.
Limited to 30 students. Spring semester. Professor Emeritus Sofield.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023An introduction to the study of the novel, through the exploration of a variety of critical terms (plot, character, point of view, tone, realism, identification, genre fiction, the book) and methodologies (structuralist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic). We will draw on a selection of novels in English to illustrate and complicate those terms; possible authors include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Emma Donoghue, David Foster Wallace, Monique Truong, Jennifer Egan.
Preference given to sophomores. Limited to 35 students. Fall semester. Professor Sanborn.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2023This course provides an introduction to literary modernism in two parts, each part in dialogue with the other. First, in their words: we will look at how early twentieth-century writers described their own formal experiments and aesthetic agendas. This section will pair modernist manifestos and critical essays with fiction and poetry written by those same authors. Second, in their worlds: we will examine the historical, geographical, and cultural dimensions of these famous literary experiments. This section pairs modernist primary works with brief readings focused on World War I, colonization and decolonization, the Harlem Renaissance, and urban technology. When it comes to the dynamic relationship between words and worlds, our goal will be synthesis rather than separation. How does historical change relate to changes in literary form?
Possible authors include Mulk Raj Anand, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Nella Larsen, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Abramson.
2023-24: Not offeredWhat has Orientalism got to do with speculative science fiction? How does the history of Asia intersect with French and British colonialism? What does the “Asian Century” have in store for us? This course surveys the emerging field of Transnational Asian Studies through the lens of gender, empire, capitalism and migration. The course traces the historical flows and contemporary exchanges rising out of the vast and diverse Asian continent through literary texts, scholarly writing, and visual media. The course will explore categories such as “Asian/American,” “Afro-Asian,” “coolie” and “transnational” among others, while critiquing early iterations of the field for its United States-centric focus.
Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Visiting Lecturer Gooptu.
2023-24: Not offeredThe participants in this online course will read letters and write letters. This course became radically enhanced with the distancing imposed as COVID-19 exiled us from campus last spring.
The course depends both on experiences and experiments with the letter as a complex instrument of communication, as literary artefact, as carrier of affect, intention and ideas, and as a record of individual and communal growth. Letter writing will be practiced as a performance that deploys persona, tone, voice, purpose, persuasion, transparency, and decorum. Your discoveries and the development of your thoughts will be circulated as letters written among a small circle of correspondence.
Readings will include letters written by Paul, Seneca, Martin Luther King, Biddy Martin, Dorothy Osborne, John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Robert Oppenheimer. The reading of epistolary novels will focus our attention on fictional uses of the form (Daddy Longlegs, Dangerous Liaisons, Screwtape Letters). We will also pay attention to the current evolution of letter writing in the time of e-mail and social media, and social isolation.
Capstone projects will be organized as researched and curated presentations of selected online manuscript letters, or as a compiled and analyzed collection of personal or family letters, or as epistolary fiction.
In addition to the expected use of Zoom and emergency uses of Skype, students are expected to become familiar with: Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides; Dropbox; Microsoft Word, Power Point, and Excel; Audible and Kindle; parabol.co; and ProQuest Ebook Central.
January. Lecturer B. Sánchez-Eppler.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2023Each of us lives in a world in which race, class and gender–complex and elusive terms–reflect multiple realities. In the last few years they have openly shaped public discourse in the US. They also affect individuals and groups differently: invisible to many, an inescapable felt presence for many others. Denial, controversy, struggle, pride, and hesitation are but some of peoples’ responses. A world of courses could not comprehend the responses or the terms themselves, the histories or the controversies. So this course must necessarily be exploratory and, beyond the usual, open to each participant, even in sharp disagreements.
Memoirs, novels and poems, lively and revelatory social science texts make up the readings. Short weekly writings and three essays complete the work of the course.
Limited to 35 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Emeritus O’Connell.
2023-24: Not offeredChildren’s books are a site of first encounter, a doorway to literacy and literature. This course will offer both a history of book production for child readers in England and the United States and an exploration of what these first books can teach us about the attractions, expectations, and responsibilities of reading.
Omitted 2021-22. Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offeredSherlock Holmes. Miss Marple. Judge Dee. Temperance Brennan. Precious Ramotswe. The Dude. Sam Spade. Batman. You might not know all these characters, but they share one thing in common: they have all been called detectives. Despite their other differences, they all seek to understand a problem; they are all in search of answers. It is probably this attempt to make sense of the world through a process of reasoning that makes the detective such an enduring figure in popular culture. In this course, we will model our own reading, writing, and thinking on the detective’s analytical processes. Through deep engagement with various media including film, television, books, and graphic novels, this course will attempt to understand the persistent fascination with the vibrant (and frequently difficult) figure that is the detective. Topics will include Sherlock Holmes (both early stories and recent BBC television adaptations), Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Gertrude Stein, The Big Lebowski, and more.
This intensive course will meet virtually two to three times per week (the precise frequency will be determined in the first two days of class meetings). As a literature-based and intensive course, expect to read up to 200 pages of a detective novel per week. Please contact the instructor with any questions.
Limited to 35 students. Omitted 2021-22. Visiting Professor Henrichs.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course is an introduction to the art, culture, and history of the Philippines through the narrative spaces of literature. While small in size, the 7,107 islands that make up the Philippines have played an important role in geopolitics, and the scars of a deeply conflicted history of occupation by the Spanish, Americans, and Japanese are evident in the literature. Reading a mixture of canonical and emerging authors will help us understand the complex legacies of colonialism in the islands and in the diaspora.
As a discipline, Asian American Studies has deep roots in social justice activism, and many of the texts we will read are responding to colonial and national structures of power. We will pay close attention to the ways in which art identifies, protests, resists, and survives structures of inequality within and between societies. By nature this is an interdisciplinary project, drawing from history, literature, fine art, and sociology to understand how the literature of the Philippines has changed over time. Our questions will consider the relationships between nation and space, diverse embodiments of national identity and ethnicity, and the cultural and historical contexts that inform these issues.
While the literature of the Philippines is written in many different languages, this course will be concerned with translated and English texts.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer Ocasion.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 278 and BLST 212 [A]) This course will examine how African writers incorporate digital technologies into their work when they publish traditional print texts, experiment with digital formats, or use the internet to redefine their relationship to local and international audiences. We will reflect on how words and values shift in response to new forms of mediation; on the limits these forms place on the bodies they represent, and on the protections they occasionally offer. Students will read fictional works in print, serialized narratives on blogs, as well as other literary products that circulate via social media. Students also will be introduced to a selection of digital humanities tools that will assist them in accessing, analyzing and responding to these works. Course materials include print, digital and hybrid publications by Oyono, Farah, Adichie, Cole, Maphoto, and Wainaina, among others.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Cobham-Sander.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 280 and FAMS 210) An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of key critical terms, together with a selection of various films (classic and contemporary, foreign and American, popular and avant-garde) for illustration and discussion. The terms for discussion may include, among others: modernity, montage, realism, visual pleasure, ethnography, choreography, streaming, and consumption. Two class meetings and one screening per week.
Limited to 35 students. Spring semester. Professor Guilford.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as ENGL 282 and FAMS 215) For better or worse, U.S. broadcast television is a cultural form that is not commonly associated with knowledge. This course will take what might seem a radical counter-position to such assumptions–looking at the ways television teaches us what it is and even trains us in potential critical practices for investigating it. By considering its formal structure, its textual definitions, and the means through which we see it, we will map out how it is that we come to know television.
Prior coursework in Film and Media Studies is recommended, but not required. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 45 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 283 and FAMS 234) What stories does television tell? And how does it tell them? This course will approach television’s narratives through a focus on both form and content. We will take into account issues of production, distribution, and exhibition, with attention both to historical developments and contemporary transformations to the medium. In this way, we will explore how shifts in programming, platforms, and viewing habits alter both televisual narration and consumption. By considering television’s specific form–whether commercial networks, cable TV, or subscription platforms like Netflix and Hulu–we will query how this specific media format enables or limits the ways it tells stories and what stories it tells. Each iteration of this course will focus on particular forms of narrative programming, through an emphasis on genre, format, historical eras, or cultural facets. Readings will include key critical works in Television Studies, essays on particular television series, and other works that situate television texts in a broader cultural framework and history. The goal of the course is to think through narrative form, representational systems, authorship, exhibition, and reception habits in order to define not just what television narrative is but also what it can be.
In spring 2021, “Television Narratives” focused on policing race, as represented in US television series, with some forays also in documentary programming and music videos from the late 1980s, early 1990s, and our contemporary period. We began with episodic police and detective series of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as The Mod Squad, Tenafly, and Shaft, when the role of the black detective merged social consciousness and contemporary style, sometimes treading the line between criminality and the law. We then turned to the hybrid episodic-serial format of Hill Street Blues, focusing on the representation of both African-American policing and criminality represented within the series. Our next case study, spanning the 1990s and early 2000s, considered the emergence of the police procedural as a dominant televisual form, with an emphasis on the long-running Law and Order franchise. Our final case study composed the latter half of the course, as we looked at mini series and limited season serials, including the docudrama When They See Us and the one-season series Seven Seconds. During this final unit, we also integrated queries into YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram to consider how the narratives of such series are extended through intertextual connections with clips, interviews, and productions by both fans and artists.
Two sections of this course were offered, each section limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 284 and FAMS 216) What do we mean when we talk about “the media”? Coming to Terms: Media will parse this question, approaching the media not as a shadowy monolith but as a complex and changing environment comprised of varied technologies, formats, practices, devices, and platforms (e.g.: photography, gramophone records, online dating, smartphones, Netflix). The course will introduce key terms and critical approaches for the study of modern media in their specificity in an era of digital mediation. We will ask questions such as: What are the formal and technical features of different media? How do they construct us as spectators or users, and shape our perception of the world we inhabit? How do our media practices produce experiences of space, time, and community? And crucially, what are the ideological impacts of these perceptions, constructions, and practices when it comes to race, sex, identity, and the circulation of power and capital?
Each week students will encounter important works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century media and cultural theory and will encounter concrete examples to flesh out the abstract concepts in the readings and engage in ample class participation. Assignments will encourage students to enter into a conversation with these texts as a way of exploring and constructing arguments about contemporary media. The course will provide a strong foundation for advanced work in film and media studies, and related disciplines.
This course has no prerequisites, but it is best suited to students who have completed a 100-level course dealing with the analysis of literature or film. Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Professor Rangan.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2023(Offered as ENGL 287 and FAMS 212) This course is designed to introduce students to key issues in film studies, focusing on the history of American cinema from 1895 to 1960. We will pay particular attention to the “golden age” of Hollywood, with forays into other national cinemas by way of comparison and critique. Screenings will range from actualities and trick films, to the early narrative features of D. W. Griffith, to the development of genres including film noir (Double Indemnity), the woman’s film of the 1940s (Now, Voyager), the western (Stagecoach) and the suspense film (Rear Window). Reading and writing assignments and in-class discussions will address how to interpret film on the formal/stylistic level (sequence analysis, close reading, visual language) as well as in the context of major trends and figures in film history. A weekly viewing journal will be expected, as a record of students’ critical responses to the films. In addition, three formal essays are required: a 3-5 page sequence analysis; a 6-8 page critical explication of a piece of film criticism (a scholarly article or book chapter) not already assigned for the course; and a final research paper (8-10 pages), to be revised in conjunction with a peer review workshop. By the end of the semester, students can expect to gain the following: a familiarity with key terms in film language and film analysis; an ability to think and write critically about film, its aesthetics, historical development, technology, and cultural context; an overview of some key films in American cinema history from the silent era to 1960; an appreciation of different film genres, their structure, iconic language, and ideological/cultural meanings; and confidence in reading critical/theoretical essays in film criticism and history.
Limited to 35 students. Fall semester. Visiting Professor Sanders.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 289 and FAMS 227) This course focuses on global cinema during the silent era (1895-1927). We will explore the wide range of films produced in cinema’s first three decades, including early actualities, animation, trick films, serials, melodrama, and experimental film. Readings in film history will assist us in investigating the rise of classical narrative, the studio system, star and fan culture, and the transition to sound. In addition to studying the work of Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, D. W. Griffith, Georges Méliès, and Dziga Vertov, the course will highlight filmmaking by women and people of color including Alice Guy-Blaché, Oscar Micheaux, and Lois Weber, among others. A weekly viewing journal will be expected, as a record of students’ critical responses to the films. In addition, three formal essays are required: a 3-5 page sequence analysis; a 5-6 page critical explication of a piece of film criticism (a scholarly article or book chapter) not already assigned for the course; and a final research paper (8-10 pages), to be revised in conjunction with a peer review workshop.
This course will run primarily online, with periodic small-group meetings for students who are in residence on campus and parallel small-group meetings for remote students. The additional evening time slot will provide opportunities for students to screen films and engage in structured small-group discussion synchronously, whether remotely or in person. There may be additional opportunities for in-person meetings (including office hours) as the semester progresses.
Recommended requisite: ENGL 180/FAMS 110, Film and Writing, or an equivalent 100-level course. Limited to 35 students. Omitted 2021-22. Visiting Professor Sanders.
2023-24: Not offeredWhy does it seem natural to read ourselves and other people in the same way that we read books? This course will introduce students to psychoanalytic thought and psychoanalytic literary interpretation. Freud famously reads Jensen’s short story Gradiva as a case history, but we will seek out ways of reading literature and psychoanalysis together that go beyond diagnosing characters or authors. How is psychoanalytic theory itself literary? How can it help to open up, rather than reduce, our reading experience? And how does literature in turn help to enrich, deepen, challenge and enliven psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation, language, and interpersonal relations? Putting psychoanalytic and fictional texts in conversation, topics of particular interest may include: dreams, desire, sexuality, mourning, trauma, the unconscious, the uncanny, anxiety, embodiment, racialization, paranoia and the reparative impulse. Psychoanalytic readings will be drawn from Freud, Klein, Lacan, Winnicott, Bollas, Khan, Phillips, Riviere, Fanon, Milner, Sedgwick, Felman, and others. Literary texts change from year to year.
Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Mireles Christoff.
2023-24: Not offeredThe premise of this course is that ecological thinking is now an essential foundation of literary studies. Our primary focus will be on the way in which literature interacts with biology–with, in Elizabeth Grosz’s words, “a system of (physical, chemical, organic) differences that engenders historical, social, cultural, and sexual differences.” Through a not-only-intellectual immersion in the reading and discussion of a range of literary works, including Frankenstein, Walden, Dickinson’s poems, Kafka’s stories, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Winter in the Blood, we will develop an understanding of literature as, among other things, an expression and extension of life as such. Along the way, we will ask questions like these: What happens to our understanding of literature if we accept that it has emerged from a non-personal, non-teleological process of evolution? What happens to our understanding of authorship if we accept that human animals are neither autonomous nor self-governing? And what might happen if we were to think of individual works of literature as ways of getting closer, conceptually and sensually, to life, to the difference-making process within which we all find ourselves?
Limited to 35 students. Spring semester. Professor Sanborn.
Books have a rich history in multiple cultures, and the experience of reading them is often bound up with their material form. In other words, the way we read books has arguably always been tied to how they look, and smell, and feel. So what happens to books in the digital age? What do books feel like when they are on the Internet? From the first printed text to the digital age and beyond, this course will consider the changing shapes, goals, and aims of books. Beginning with the earliest texts produced with moveable type and ending with experimental electronic literature, we will consider the intertwined histories of reading, books, and the technologies used to make them. This course will include sessions held in Frost Library’s Special Collections and one required field trip to Big Wheel Press in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Visiting Professor Henrichs.
2023-24: Not offeredIt’s possible to imagine people who have not yet suffered, who have not yet had a peculiarly intense and sustained experience of physical or psychic pain. Those imaginary people are, however, vulnerable to future suffering. Even more importantly, they live in a world in which many others suffer, so many that a refusal to attend to suffering amounts to a refusal of a meaningfully relational existence. Thinking and feeling in response to suffering is, accordingly, an inescapable aspect of what Henri Bergson describes as “a really living life.” But how do we respond to suffering, whether in others or in ourselves? How do we take it in without appropriating it? How do we express it without turning it into a spectacle? These questions and others like them are difficult, but the aim of this course is to generate an intellectual and emotional atmosphere in which we can be transformed by the process of taking them up. Readings include The Book of Job, King Lear, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Sanborn.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2023Readings and discussions centering on the work of Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. Some attention also to A.E. Housman, Edward Thomas, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.
Omitted 2021-22. Professor Emeritus Pritchard.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013, Spring 2016, Fall 2018, Fall 2023, Spring 2025[Before 1800] Imagine a world where the novel was truly a novel form, and where newspapers were a new idea, and where print had only recently been commercialized. The eighteenth century was a time of great flux in Britain and the US, not only in terms of political change and scientific discovery, but also in terms of the literary world. Poets were beginning to panic that their genre was no longer the dominant mode. Daily journals were changing how people perceived the way time passed. Testimonies from abroad were changing people’s awareness of the world at large. Women were reading in secret, since the men around them often tried to restrict which genres they had access to. Writers who wrote for profit were called “hacks.” Even the very idea of the professional author was under question. In this course, we will consider many different genres of writing, including novels, memoirs, newspapers, lectures, journal articles, travel narratives, plays, and poems, during a period when massive innovations were taking place. Although the majority of the texts we will discuss will be those published in the eighteenth century, we will begin the course with some seventeenth-century texts (such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Francis Bacon’s essays), in order to more fully understand the creative vision of eighteenth-century writers like Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Finch, Laurence Sterne, Phillis Wheatley, Jane Austen, and Olaudah Equiano. There will be an emphasis on engaging with these texts as they were originally printed, with a chance to engage with archival materials. The course will end with a consideration of how notions of the difference between authors of different genres still persist in the present day.
Recommended requisite: Previous English class preferred. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 35 students. Spring semester. Professor Worsley.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] What does a reader in 1620 have in common with a reader in 2020? They are both faced with an overwhelming explosion of textual information made possible by technology. In both 1620 and 2020 readers are confronted with massive quantities of information that threaten to overwhelm. The causes differ: in 1620s London, advances in printing and paper-making technologies made textual materials cheaply and widely available on an unprecedented scale. In 2020, we have the Internet.
This course proposes that the seventeenth- and twenty-first centuries share similar methods of controlling their new information environment; both use creative and figurative language to talk about it. Readers in 1620 used recently-Anglicized terms like metaphor or synecdoche, whereas readers in 2020 talk about uploading everything to the cloud. In this course, we will explore the humanist rhetorical handbooks of the English literary Renaissance as a means to two ends: one, to better understand the literary production of canonical authors like Shakespeare; and two, to engage with the rhetoric of digital creativity in the twenty-first century. We juxtapose readings from Renaissance rhetorical handbooks with poetry and essays from that period and with digital humanities scholarship. The final project of the course will ask students to perform individual research as part of a collaborative, multimodal guide to the information structures of the Internet.
Omitted 2021-22. Visiting Professor Henrichs.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013(Offered as ENGL 312 and SWAG 314) This course centers on writing by women at the turn of the nineteenth century. We will study the work of anglophone poets, novelists, and playwrights, alongside important works of literary criticism and feminist theory. Words like “feeling” and “sensibility” were heavily gendered in this period, meaning a study of some of the history of emotion and affect will constitute an important context for reading. At the same time, we will also pay careful attention to how these anglophone women writers have been represented more recently, in twentieth- and twenty-first century editions of their works, as well as in biographies, adaptations, and biopics. How have these women writers themselves been written? How have changing attitudes to issues of gender and sexuality also changed the way these women of the past are viewed? What might we intuit about our present moment, by studying the relation between nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of these women’s lives and works? The course will include authors such as Jane Austen, Colette, Mary Shelley, Madame de Staël, Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Sojourner Truth, Emily Dickinson, and Harriet Jacobs. We will also discuss recent films such as Jane Eyre (2011) and The Favourite (2018). For their final projects, students will study a text of their own choosing.
Limited to 35 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Worsley.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 316 and SWAG 316) “From whence comes my help?” “From where does your strength come?” The psalmist and Adrienne Rich ask these questions, which we will face while we read coming-of-age narratives that fit in a genre known by its German name, the Bildungsroman. These novels go beyond the pilgrimage out of adolescence, and into explicit representation of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual growth experienced in unison with sexual development, awakenings, thrills, mishaps, and marriage. We will pay attention to how we immerse ourselves into the condition of those who grow on the page; not to “identify” with the characters, but to accompany them. From our immersive accompaniment we will re-emerge–intentionally–to write about how we progress, digress, regress, and grow some more. As we read we will explore many terms and theoretical concerns: Erik Erickson on life stages; Donald Winnicott on holding environment and object relation; Jacques Lacan on mirrors and interminability of desire; Silvan Tomkins on affects and nuclear scripts; Shoshana Feldman on re-reading, un-learning, en-gendering, and–again–desire.
Readings will likely include: Plato, Phaedrus; Susan Choi, Trust Exercise; Lazarillo de Tormes; Teresa de Avila, Interior Castle; John Woolman, The Journal; Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot; Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook; Richard Powers, The Overstory.
Omitted 2021-22. Lecturer B. Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 318, BLST 362 [A/CLA], and LLAS 362) The course will concentrate on Caribbean authors. It explores the process of self-definition in literary works from Africa and the Caribbean that are built around child protagonists. We will examine the authors’ various methods of ordering experience through the choice of literary form and narrative technique, as well as the child/author’s perception of his or her society. French texts will be read in translation.
Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Cobham-Sander.
2023-24: Not offered"It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained." Salman Rushdie
What can we learn about the craft of poetry through the practice of translation? How can engaging with poetry in another language (even in translation) transform our own thinking and writing? This class will explore these questions by reading and translating poetry from around the world and across the centuries. Readings from Homer, Sappho, Catullus, Montale, Ghalib, Mir and a variety of contemporary Arab poets will be augmented with a mix of essays on the practical and theoretical aspects of translation. Students will experiment with a variety of translation-inspired writing exercises and design a final translation project of their choice. There is no language requirement.
Limited to 12 students. Spring semester. Visiting Writer Kapur.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2023, Spring 2025How do stories move? What are the uses and limitations of the term “plot” in describing movement or development in narrative? What culturally-specific assumptions and expectations about storytelling are bound up with conventional notions of plot, and how can we, as writers and readers, unravel them?
In this advanced fiction writing course, students will explore these questions and more through writing, reading, sharing, and thoughtfully critiquing fiction that challenges, resists, or forgoes linear or sequential narrative. Writers of all aesthetic styles, including plot-driven writers, are welcome. The aim of this course is to build a nurturing and inclusive classroom community where all students can cultivate confidence in their work and writing process.
Requisite: ENGL 226 Fiction Writing I. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Visiting Writer Myint.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as ENGL 330 and EUST 330) [Before 1800] By many accounts, a concept of “race” does not emerge in the West until the colonizing of the New World in the Renaissance. Yet medieval people had many ways of identifying, exoticizing, excluding, and discriminating against “others.” This was often framed in terms of religion (Christianity vs. Islam), but it also manifests in terms of physiognomic description and ideas of monstrosity in romance and quest narratives. In this course, we will explore how the “othering” of certain medieval peoples creates a racialized language and discourse at once specific to the Middle Ages and relevant to our current understanding of race. We will read from medieval travel narratives (The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Prester John, The Medieval Romance of Alexander) as well as literature by Chaucer and others, alongside critical race theory and historical scholarship to give context to our discussions. We will also explore how the Middle Ages have been racialized in contemporary political and popular discourse.
Format: If at least 5 in-person students register for this course, it will run in person, with hybrid options for remote students. Course meetings will include a combination of synchronous and asynchronous activities.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval masterwork, The Canterbury Tales, represents pilgrims from all walks of life, from peasants to artisans to nobility, telling tales that are comical, tragic, religious, and fantastical. In this course, we read almost the entirety of the Tales in its original language. The course aims to give the student rapid mastery of Chaucer’s English and an active appreciation of his poetry. Our focus will be on Chaucer’s poetry and the ethical and political questions this complex and delightful literary work raises, and how we can understand these questions within a modern context. No prior knowledge of Middle English is expected, although a knowledge of grammar in English or another Western language will be helpful.
Omitted 2021-22. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] An astonishing number of innovative literary masterpieces were produced in the later Middle Ages, including early attempts at auto-fiction, masterful elegiac poetry, bawdy plays, and searching explorations of mental health and the idea of selfhood. In this course, we will read from a selection of these works in the original Middle English. Featured works will include Pearl, an anonymous work of mourning for the author’s lost daughter; Hoccleve’s Series, a portrait of a mental and spiritual crisis; and William Langland’s Piers Plowman, one man’s encyclopedic journey for knowledge and wisdom through a series of dream visions. Throughout our readings, our driving question will be, what constitutes literature in the Middle Ages? What kinds of ideas of poetic style, character, and narrative inform medieval writers? How are these different from our modern ideas of literature, and how are they similar? We will learn to read Middle English together; prior knowledge of the language is helpful but not required.
Omitted 2021-22. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] A study of six classic writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Ben Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Samuel Johnson. Among the readings are: Jonson, poems and Volpone; Milton, Comus, “Lycidas” and Paradise Lost; Dryden, poems and critical prose; Pope, “The Rape of the Lock,” Essay on Man, The Dunciad; Swift, Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels, poems; Johnson, poems, Rasselas, Prefaces to Shakespeare and to the Dictionary, passages from Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
Omitted 2021-22. Professor Emeritus Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings in twentieth-century writers such as Henry James, Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, George Orwell, Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Omitted 2021-22. Professor Emeritus Pritchard.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course, we will be studying the relationship between the national acceleration toward war and the imaginative activities of US writers between 1830 and 1865. Through our readings of Emerson, Douglass, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Jacobs, and others, we will learn about what happened over the course of those 35 years and, at the same time, learn from the examples of those extraordinary writers. As the nation was doubling in size and getting closer to splitting in half, those writers kept trying to find, in pressurized, transfiguring language, a way of getting from where they were to somewhere better. In the increasingly warlike atmosphere of our times, there may be an even greater value to what they achieved.
Spring semester. Professor Sanborn.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 444 and AMST 364) “Experience is the Angled Road / Preferred against the Mind / By–Paradox–the Mind itself–” Emily Dickinson explained in one poem and in this course we will make use of the resources of the town of Amherst to play experience and mind off each other in our efforts to come to terms with her elusive poetry. The course will visit the Dickinson Homestead and the Evergreens (her brother Austen’s house, and a veritable time capsule), make use of Dickinson manuscripts in the Amherst College archives and special collections, local history materials at the Jones Library and the Amherst Historical Society, and set her work in the context of other nineteenth-century writers such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Jacobs. But as we explore how Dickinson’s poetry responds to her world, we will also ask how it can speak to our present. One major project of the course will be to develop exhibits and activities for the Emily Dickinson Museum that will help visitors engage with her poems.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 357 and BLST 365 [US]) When we say “race relations,” we are using a phrase drawn from early twentieth-century American sociology, a phrase that conjures up a scenario in which already-existing racial groups are separated by prejudice and misunderstanding. As many sociologists and historians have argued, we need a new paradigm, one that implies neither that race is a primordial reality nor that racism is merely an information problem. In this course, we will be using histories of the race-concept and theories emerging from the “relational turn” in psychoanalysis to explore the interplay of race and relationality in American literature written between the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The aim of this necessarily experimental course is to see what happens if we combine a historically informed understanding of the race-concept with a psychoanalytically informed understanding of relationality and bring both of those understandings to bear on works like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. All of the varieties of American racial identification will be part of our discussions but the focus will be on the literary evocations of white-black conjunctions.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Sanborn.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 359 and EDUC 359) Almost 60% of Americans now experience economic struggles. When they can they struggle to balance food, housing, medical care, clothing, and other needs. There are, at the same time, some 600 billionaires whose combined wealth exceeds that of all other Americans. Yet in 1970, a mere fifty years ago, the United States had the most equitable economic order in the world, and probably in history.
Our course moves around the country and among individuals and groups trying to survive scarcities of many kinds. This is not a literature course but one that does often engage language, how people speak their experience. It will be a journey in exploration.
Limited to 30 students. Fall semester. Professor Emeritus O’Connell.
2023-24: Not offeredIn Jenny Boully’s essay, “On the EEO Genre Sheet,” she writes, “I am sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet. My second book was published under the guise of fiction/poetry/essay. I find these categorizations odd: I’ve never felt anything but whole.” In this course we will read works by contemporary Asian-American authors that defy and/or exceed genre expectations and examine these texts’ relationship to wholeness and hybridity. How can we read experimental writing as a politically subversive act? How can we read as a politically subversive act? This is not an introductory course on “Asian-American literature,” but a course that will interrogate the term “Asian-American,” both as a marker of identity and of literary genre. Readings may include works by Mary-Kim Arnold, Jenny Boully, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lily Hoang, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Ocean Vuong.
This is a discussion-based course that will require your weekly synchronous attendance, as well as asynchronous group and individual work. Also, though this is an online course, I am open to the possibility of creating in-person opportunities for students on campus, especially as the semester progresses.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Visiting Writer Myint.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] What was magic in the early modern world? Why did it cause a crisis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How did that crisis shape the literature of its time? We will follow competing ideas about magic as they ran like wildfire through the imagination of artists, playwrights, and preachers from medieval Germany through Renaissance England to Puritan Massachusetts. We will ask how magic in its apparently beneficial forms, such as alchemy and astrology, might relate to the supposedly malevolent practices of witchcraft, which yielded notorious trials and brutal executions on both sides of the Atlantic. Why did cultures balanced between religion and science become obsessed with magic? How did the fear and wonder that it evoked find its way into art? And what can literary figures of witches and sorcerers still tell us about our modern fantasies of self-empowerment and the counter-threat of demonic possession?
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Bosman.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013, Fall 2022(Offered as ENGL 374 and FAMS 374) Gothic fictions are known for their ability to send shivers down the spine, evoking sensations of discomfort, fear, and horror. This interdisciplinary course will explore the genre of the Gothic from its roots in the late eighteenth century through the present, moving among literature, film, television, and digital media forms. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will be a key text; we will explore intermedial texts like Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and the course will end with twenty-first century incarnations of the Gothic (Get Out, Penny Dreadful). Throughout, we will discuss the tangled relationship between sexuality, race, and power that characterizes the genre. Students will develop a creative project, whether a piece of short fiction or a visual/digital exploration of Gothic themes, keep a weekly reading/viewing journal of their responses to the assigned texts, and facilitate discussion on a given text. In addition, students will write a 3- to 5-page close textual analysis, with a mandatory peer review workshop and revision, and a final research paper (10-12 pages) or creative project. Students will gain a familiarity with key literary and film/media studies terms and approaches; an understanding of major works in the Gothic and horror genres; an ability to think and write critically about Gothic literature and related media, in terms of aesthetics, historical development, and cultural context; confidence in reading critical/theoretical essays in literary studies, cultural studies, and film and media studies; and proficiency in various aspects of project-based work, including identifying a research topic, building arguments, using evidence, and working with and appropriately citing a variety of sources.
Requisite: A 200-level foundations course in English or Film & Media Studies, or equivalent. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Sanders.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 375 and FAMS 317) Ghosts, vampires, madwomen, and typists: what do these figures have in common? In this course, we will investigate the characters and events that made the Victorian period the age of sensation, from the rise of popular fiction and the illustrated newspaper to the introduction of new methods for viewing and experiencing the world on a global scale. The course will focus on nineteenth-century Britain, exploring the ways in which Victorian fiction, poetry, and print and visual media give voice to the period’s obsession with sensory experience. We will read Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, a tale of deception, mistaken identity and madness, alongside works by Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker, among others. Historians of “old” media–including telegraphy, photography, and early cinema–will assist us in exploring new technologies for communication in the nineteenth century, while media archaeologists and theorists of ephemerality, memory, and the archive will deepen our understanding of the relationship between past and present media cultures. Three formal essays will be required: a literary close reading (3-4 pages); a critical explication of a scholarly article (4-5 pages); and a final research project (a 10-12 page paper or a digital humanities project of similar length and scope).
Requisite: A 200-level foundations course in English. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Visiting Professor Sanders.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 376 and FAMS 355) Moving image and audiovisual media frequently assume a fully able subject despite the infinite variety of our embodied capacities and debilitations. This course will explore how this assumption has shaped the design, narrative forms, audiovisual poetics, exhibition contexts, and modes of spectatorship and engagement of a range of media forms, from cinema to digital interfaces. We will examine how critical, experimental, and therapeutic approaches to media, the uses of media by people with disabilities, and media made in collaboration with disabled makers and protagonists enable us to fundamentally rethink what media can be and do. Readings will draw from disability studies and film and media studies as well as philosophy, science and technology studies, performance studies, sound studies, and other areas. Topics may include: disability tropes and rehabilitation narratives in film and TV; prostheses and “assistive” technologies; subtitles, captions, and the politics of accessibility; inclusive product and interface design; staring as spectatorial mode; sound art and polymodal listening.
Prior coursework in ENGL or FAMS is recommended but not required. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Rangan.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 377 and FAMS 383) Documentary is one of the fastest-growing areas of media production today, enjoying unprecedented commercial success in theaters, on television, and online streaming services. What drives the urgent desire to represent reality? Where did this impulse originate, and how do documentarians continue to channel it today? This course focuses on the innovative forms and ethical dilemmas that have resulted from the pursuit of reality. We look at different approaches to documentary (ethnographic, personal, observational, interactive, essayistic, activist) and emerging forms such as fake news, true crime podcasts, mockumentaries, web-docs, and documentary art. Our discussions consider the shifting boundaries of the documentary genre, the unique ethical and political considerations involved in making documentaries, and the impact of technological and socio-cultural changes on historical trends in documentary.
Open to students with no prior film classes. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 35 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Rangan.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 378 and FAMS 382)
Calls to defund the police may have helped to cancel the notorious reality program COPS, but crime scenes, courtrooms, cops, lawyers, victims, and vigilantes dominate our media and our imaginations. This course asks what needs to be abolished—not just canceled—in our media environment in order for us to imagine a world without prisons. Abolition is, at its core, a transformative project that aims to change the very social relations, conditions, and logics that produce the harms for which police and prisons seem to serve as solutions. A project that once took on the seemingly impossible challenge of ending slavery, abolition has become a movement of interlinked struggles against systemic oppression. We will examine a range of media, historical and contemporary, cinematic and televisual, fictional and documentary, global and local, through the lens of abolition, deconstructing carceral scenarios and affects, and discovering and imagining transformative approaches to narrative, healing, and justice. Students enrolling in this course should be prepared to take on a range of activities including and beyond weekly readings, film/media viewing, and analytical writing, such as independent and collaborative research, site-based field work (if public health guidelines permit), and optional creative media assignments.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Rangan.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 380 and FAMS 313) What defines “television” today? And how have shifts in programming, platforms, and viewing habits altered how we see it? In order to explore these questions, this course will focus on television’s representation of detection and its work as an investigative medium itself. Thus, our focus on detection will play a dual role: as an inquiry into the development of a genre and as a metaphor for television’s own peculiar form. In order to develop our own investigatory practice, then, we will begin with historical examples of television detectives. Looking at series from the 1950s through the present day, the first part of the course will delineate the investigative habits of episodic programming. The course will then turn to three case studies of contemporary short-form serials that showcase the investigative form and, indeed, the powers of detection of television as a medium. Each of these cases–Rectify, When They See Us, and Unbelievable–focus on the processes of investigation of criminal and legal systems and of American culture. By thinking through narrative form, representational systems, authorship, exhibition, and reception habits, we will attempt to define not just what television is but also what it can be.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Hastie.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2023(Offered as ENGL 381 and FAMS 351) Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer declared that some of the first films showed “life at its least controllable and most unconscious moments, a jumble of transient, forever dissolving patterns accessible only to the camera.” This course will explore the ways contemporary narrative films aesthetically represent everyday life–capturing both its transience and our everyday ruminations. We will further consider the ways we incorporate film into our everyday lives through various modes of viewings (the arthouse, the multiplex, the DVD, the mp3), our means of perception, and in the kinds of souvenirs we keep. We will look at films by Chantal Akerman, Robert Altman, Marleen Gorris, Hirokazu Koreeda, Marzieh Makhmalbaf, Terrence Malick, Lynne Ramsay, Tsai Ming-liang, Agnès Varda, Wong Kar-wai, and Andy Warhol. Readings will include work by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Marlene Dietrich, Sigmund Freud, and various works in film and media studies. Three hours of lectures and three hours of film screening per week.
Not open to first-year students. Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 383 and FAMS 360] What’s intimate about cinema? And what, if anything, is cinematic about intimacy? Since its invention, cinema has been closely associated with intimate experience, though understandings of this association have shifted over time. For classical film theorists, cinema’s intimate devices (the close-up, the kiss, etc.) were often invested with revolutionary potential, though more recent cultural theorists have issued strong rejoinders to such claims. Isn’t intimacy crucial to the workings of modern power? Doesn’t cinema structure intimate relations in accordance with normative ideologies? Examining a range of intimate film cultures–from early cinema to surrealism, classical Hollywood, Black British film, and queer world cinema–this course will explore the intimate dimensions of filmic representation and reception, and the reasons cinema’s intimacy has been both celebrated and denounced. Assignments include in-class presentations, critical essays, and weekly entries in personal film journals.
Requisite: One 200-level ENGL or FAMS course, or consent of the instructor. Not open to first-year students. Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Professor Guilford.
2023-24: Not offeredThis is a class all about the art of noticing. Our primary texts fixate on what Amit Chaudhuri calls “the moment of noticing”: heightened attention to the (seemingly) small, the ordinary, the routine. Many readings will be “day-in-the-life” novels set over a 24-hour period; others dwell on single moments, fleeting impressions, or routine rhythms of daily life.
We will discuss questions such as: What formal and stylistic strategies do writers employ to capture everyday life? What happens to narrative conventions of plot and the event when writers are more interested in the textures, rhythms, and background environments of everyday life? How does the ordinary become extraordinary? How does one narrate history in the making, as it unfolds in everyday life? How are major historical events and political structures felt over the course of a typical day? Is it a privilege to think about the everyday as either boring or beautiful? Does it even make sense to talk about “everyday literature” when experiences of daily life are so diverse and varied?
This class will pair novels and short stories with select critical readings from affect theory, urban studies, modernist studies, cultural studies, and ecocriticism. Possible authors include James Baldwin, Amit Chaudhuri, Anton Chekhov, Christopher Isherwood, James Joyce, Kathleen Stewart, Madeleine Thien, and Virginia Woolf.
Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Professor Abramson.
2023-24: Not offeredWhen someone says that a politician is being “theatrical” or that a protestor is following a “script,” it is rarely meant as a compliment‒but why? The implication is that true politics is never theatrical, never scripted, never performed, never entangled with spectacle. Put so baldly, this claim is pretty hard to believe. If, instead, we take for granted that all politics is performed, we are left with several unanswered questions. What would an eye trained on performance (theater, dance, film, comedy, spoken word, etc.) see in our politics that someone else would not? Are there distinct performance traditions in politics, as there are in the performing arts? How do activists and office-holders enter these traditions, learn their ways, and apply them in everyday settings? How are citizens expected (or trained) to engage with this performance of politics‒either as spectators or co-performers? What are the key genres of political performance, and what should every citizen know about them? This class will teach you to see these as researchable questions‒and as part of an ongoing scholarly conversation in fields ranging from performance studies, art history, and media studies to sociology, anthropology, political theory, and history. Through reading and discussion, students will learn to think in interdisciplinary terms about politics, making connections across fields and methodologies. They will also study representations of political action and debate in film, television, and theater in order to uncover whatever lessons performing artists can teach us about contemporary political life.
January term. Professor Grobe.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 416 and AMST 367) Children’s books have always been part toy. The odd duality of all books–simultaneously object and text, commodity and meaning–is particularly evident in books made for children. Think how much more varied in the shape and size of volumes, the font and layout of print, the style and quantity of illustration are books intended for children compared to books for adults. Sites of innovation and experimentation in book production, children’s literature provides an excellent ground for studying book history. So too, book history provides a good gauge of shifts in cultural attitudes towards childhood. This course is interested in tracing both the history of childhood and the history of books, and what each can tell us about the other.
The course will provide an extraordinary opportunity for original archival research in the world’s finest collection of early American children’s literature. Half of the course meetings will be held at the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, granting students access to one of America’s premier research libraries and enabling students to work directly with the rare materials housed there and with the society’s knowledgeable curators and librarians. This research will culminate in a substantial independent project.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. This course meets for 180 minutes. On days when the class meets at the American Antiquarian Society students should expect to leave Amherst at 1 p.m. and return by 6:30 p.m. Omitted 2021-22. Professor K. Sánchez-Eppler.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] In 1623, what we now call Shakespeare’s First Folio was printed. As a printed book, it represented an object made with some of that culture’s very latest media technology, namely the printing press. Shakespeare’s plays depict technologies: characters use compasses and astronomical charts, for example. His plays were also staged using technology: set design included pyrotechnics, costuming, and the other necessities of putting on a good show. This course will ask, how did Shakespeare’s plays both represent technology in fiction and require it in performance? In order to investigate Early Modern technologies of performance, we will read selections from Shakespearean plays and poems, as well as Renaissance treatises on science and technology.
Of course, technology plays a large role in modern productions. Whether through discussing the advent of electric lights in playhouses, to film adaptations and high-budget productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company, to digital editions of the plays, to experimental augmented reality interfaces, we will critically engage with the technologies of Shakespearean performance in the past, present, and even future. As a final project, students will complete a multimedia project on a chosen play, combining historical research with digital, creative, and experimental practices.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Visiting Professor Henrichs.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 435 and THDA 335) We don’t just think, speak, or write our ideas; we perform them, too. Think TED Talks. Think political movements. Think 400-level seminars in English. In this course, you will read plays that are fueled by an argument and arguments that look an awful lot like plays. Readings will range from ancient philosophical dialogues to modern “plays of ideas”–from essays on pedagogy to works of social theory. As the semester wears on, you will begin to research your own angle on our central theme: Ideas performed. Your final project will be a mock prospectus, in which you imagine this “angle” turning into a thesis project–creative, critical, or a mixture of the two.
Previous experience with drama or performance theory might help, but is hardly required for enrollment. As a matter of fact, this course works best when students from a wide range of majors enroll. The reading load isn’t heavy, but expectations are high that you will turn up to class prepared to engage in an active discussion. I mean, would you show up to a performance not knowing your lines, or fail to speak when you heard your cue? I didn’t think so. See you there.
As a small, advanced seminar, this course will proceed mainly through synchronous small-group discussions of shared texts, videos, and images. Students will also take part in synchronous workshops (during regular course meeting times) on research skills, oral presentations, and the craft of proposing a thesis. Those not proposing a thesis–or who are already writing one–will have the choice to work instead on collaborative final projects in lieu of submitting a mock prospectus.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Grobe.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2013, Spring 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2021(Offered as ENGL 441 and EUST 374) [Before 1800] In this course, we read a selection of English and other European lyrics (in translation) from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries. An exciting, fertile era in poetic innovation, these centuries see the dawn of the first romantic love poetry in these languages, the invention of new forms like the sonnet, and the invention of the lyric “anthology.” Reading the lyrics of the French troubadour poets, Chaucer, Petrarch, Wyatt, Donne, Shakespeare, and the many brilliant anonymous poets of medieval England, we will examine both the text and contexts of these short poems. Close readings will be put in dialogue with cultural contexts (such as the volatile court of Henry VIII, in which Thomas Wyatt wrote), and the material contexts of the lyrics (the medieval and early modern manuscripts and books in which they first appeared). We will further think about how the term “lyric” emerges as a privileged poetic category, by reading contemporary “defenses” of poetry and thinking about why the word “lyric” only appears in the sixteenth century. Does the “lyric” poem change once it is defined? How do later works speak to the earlier tradition?
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Nelson.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2016, Spring 2020, Spring 2022Can reading poetry change our understanding of our environment? How might the way we perceive nature be conditioned by the ways in which writers have imagined it? In turn, how might the way we perceive our own imaginations be conditioned by ideas about the natural world? Although “nature” might seem like a universal and unchanging concept, British Romantic writers did much to invent our modern ideas about it. Notions of perception, cognition, and the imagination changed alongside our ideas about nature. We will debate what impact this history has had on current environmental discourse, contemporary ethics, and the Green movement. Some critics have argued, for instance, that the Romantics’ reverence for nature is more destructive than it might at first seem. Might it be more environmentally responsible to get rid of the Romantic concept of “nature” altogether? This course gives students a thorough grounding in Romantic Poetry, the philosophy of aesthetics, and literary theory, while also giving them a chance to follow their own research interests in a final project.
The majority of this course will revolve around discussion in various formats, though there will be opportunities for visits to museums and archives in smaller groups. Since research and individual projects will be a central feature of this class, students will receive individual attention and feedback on their work. Students will also have a chance to engage with scholars working in this area.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Worsley.
2023-24: Not offered[Before 1800] As long as there have been poets, there have been theories of poetry. In this course, we read classic and emerging theories of poetry, centering our inquiries on the Western tradition and exploring more recent poetic theory that puts that tradition in a global perspective. We will read Classical poetic theory by Horace and Longinus that treats poetry for its aesthetic and ethical value; medieval handbooks that emphasize rhetoric and the structure of poetry; early Modern neo-Classical poetic theory by Sir Philip Sidney and others; Romantic lyric theory by poets like William Wordsworth that puts the experience of the self at the center of the poetic endeavor; and contemporary scholars and poets who challenge the centrality of English lyric to our theories of poetry. Although most of the course will consist of prose readings, students will be encouraged to put these theories into dialogue with poems they know or discover during the course.
Recommended requisite: A background in English poetry, such as a previous course. Open to junior and senior English majors and to sophomore English majors with consent of the instructor. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offeredWriting is the landscape through which poets explore the human body. The fluidity of a text often mirrors our relationship to memory–the recollection of the sensory discovering harmony with the fluidity of a poem’s language and syntax. But what happens when a disruption in one’s fundamental experience of being alters the ways in which we experience the world?
In spaces of distress, poetry often makes courageous leaps in formal reinvention. As opposed to dwelling heavily on the subject of physical disruption, this course will examine ways contemporary writers have discovered, or reimagined, prosody as a way to explore the human experience through vulnerability and authenticity. The course will include close-readings of four to six collections of poetry, some creative writing, and discussions on mindfulness practices–all culminating in a critical/personal essay exploring a selected poem of your choice.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Lawson.
2023-24: Not offeredAvant-garde poetry resists definition. In this course, we will explore poetry that defies convention, be it formal (exploding the poetic verse line), material (appearing outside of the conventional venues of the published, mass-produced book), or linguistic (using everyday language rather than poetic diction). We will read widely from a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century poets as well as important nineteenth-century forebears. The course will center on the movements and schools of avant-garde poetry in the Anglo-American tradition, such as modernism (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein); the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson); the Beat Poets (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder); the New York School (Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan); the Black Arts poets (Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni); the Language Poets (Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein); and contemporary poets (Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley). We will also look at artists’ books, broadsides, and other poetry that makes interesting use of the conventional materials and layout of poetry and poetic books. We will ask, how do these poets and movements challenge the aesthetic and poetic conventions of their time(s)? How do they expand or challenge the boundaries of poetic forms and subjects? What opportunities and constraints do avant-garde approaches offer to poets of color and/or women poets?
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Nelson.
2023-24: Not offeredWhy, Rita Felski asks, are people “willing to drive five hundred miles to hear a band playing a certain song, or spend years in graduate school puzzling over a single novel?” Concepts like “cultural capital,” “the hegemonic media industry,” or “interpretive communities” do not fully explain “why it is this particular tune that plays over and over in our heads, why it is Virginia Woolf alone who becomes an object of obsession.” Something else has to be involved, a “rogue something,” in the words of Toni Morrison’s narrator in Jazz, that you “have to figure in before you can figure it out.” In this seminar, students will first explore the phenomenon of aesthetic valuation, then turn to a consideration of when, why, and for whom literary experiences are valuable, and finally embark on independent research projects in which each of them studies a single author in depth and experiments with ways of articulating (in a class presentation and in a final essay) the kinds of value that that author may be said to have.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Sanborn.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 458 and AMST 358) [Before 1800] This course will delve deeply into Indigenous literatures of “Turtle Island,” or North America. The Kiché Maya Popol Wuj (Council Book), the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Great Law of Peace, the Wabanaki creation cycle, and Salish Coyote Stories are rooted in longstanding, complex oral narratives of emergence and transformation, which were recorded by Indigenous authors and scribes. These texts will enable us to consider how the temporal and spatial boundaries of America are both defined and extended by colonization, and disrupted by Indigenous texts and decolonial theory. We will close read these major epics as works of classical literature, narratives of tribal history, and living political constitutions, which embed ecological and cultural adaptation.
Reading each long text (in English translation) over several weeks, we will study the tribally and regionally-specific contexts of each epic narrative as well as the “intellectual trade routes” that link them together. We will also consider the place of these epics within American literature and history and their contributions to historical and contemporary decolonization. We will discuss the ways in which the narratives challenge conceptual boundaries, considering categories such as land/place, gender, sexuality, and other-than-human beings.
Open to juniors and seniors, and to sophomores with consent of the instructor. Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Brooks.
2023-24: Not offeredPoetry is often a study of density and lineation but, as the expectations of genre continue to bend, more and more poets are exploring the lyric nature of the personal essay. In this course, we will assess the expansion of poetic form to include “the lyric essay,” reading essays written by poets and lyric memoirs written by essayists. The course will be primarily generative, with students selecting a specific topic to explore throughout the semester as they build their own, long-form, poetic project.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Lawson.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this upper-level course, we will read literary and theoretical texts that, although loosely grouped in terms of period, geography, and style, are all driven by the same set of questions: Is decolonial love possible? What does it look and feel like? We will read scholars and writers who describe the ways that imperialism, capitalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy structure conventional ways of loving, caring, and forming social bonds, as well as conventional ways of telling stories and writing novels. And we will follow these writers as they imagine alternatives to these conventional structures, asking how we might alter the aspects of ourselves and our worlds that seem as fundamental and as intractable as our aesthetics, our desires, our very pleasures. As a class, we will build transportable definitions of colonialism, anticolonialism, and decoloniality from the texts we study and the contexts in which they were written and that they reflect. We will investigate the power of these analytic categories to interrogate aspects of personal as well as geopolitical experience, particularly aspects of experience that we have sometimes mistakenly believed to be without historical or sociological determinants. Possible texts include: Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back; Stevenson, Life Beside Itself; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic”; Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun; Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs; Cole, Open City; Sollett, Raising Victor Vargas; Lee, BlacKkKlansman; Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Mireles Christoff.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2023, Spring 2025Giorgio Agamben writes in Remnants of Auschwitz that “trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during, and no after.” In this seminar, we will study texts from different genres–poetry, fiction, and memoir–that attempt to narrativize the timeless, ubiquitous, and haunted event that is a military dictatorship. How do these texts undertake the task of remembering or reimagining the past? How do they fill the gap between memory and history, between testimony and literature, and between past and present? What does or can literature do with a legacy of violence and oppression? Readings may include works by Argentinian-Mexican visual artist and novelist Verónica Gerber Bicecci, the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, the Padaung (Burmese) memoirist Pascal Khoo Thwe, and the Ghanaian-born novelist Ayesha Harruna Attah.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Visiting Writer Myint.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014The non-traditional texts of writers like Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Alison Bechdel have garnered great success that has introduced new audiences to the world of hybrid forms. Through close reading and a study of works at the apex of literary deconstruction, we will erase the lines drawn between poetry and prose, image and memoir, percentage graph and fiction and will embark on an expedition through contemporary hybrid texts, asking what dictates how we define genre.
Completion of this course will include a collaborative oral presentation guiding the reading of one of the semester’s assigned texts and a final critical research project presented in a hybrid form that breaks the boundaries of expected academia. Use of hybridity in the construction of all class assignments (short essays, personal responses, reflections, etc.) will be strongly encouraged.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Lawson and Visiting Lecturer Bernitt.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 475 and FAMS 431) Fashion has long been associated with frivolity, ephemerality, and triviality. Yet trends in clothing and design are irrevocably linked to politics, technology, society, and cultural change–from hats to hemlines to heels, fashion can reveal the transformations of an era. How has fashion evolved in the modern age, and what is its relationship to literature, film, and other media forms? What can fashion teach us about our past, present, and future? This advanced seminar will delve into the interdisciplinary field of fashion studies to examine the vicissitudes of fashion from the nineteenth century onward, focusing on Britain, Europe, and the United States, with an eye toward the role of imperialism, Orientalism, and cultural appropriation in shaping fashion’s tangled histories. Students will study literary texts; film and television; print, visual, and digital media; and material culture. Potential case studies include the dandy, the New Woman, and the flapper; wartime fashions; subcultural style; the wedding gown; the sneaker; among other topics. Students will do independent research, culminating in a written research project and/or curated digital exhibit; keep a weekly reading/viewing journal recording their critical responses to the assigned texts; and facilitate discussion on a given topic. Students can expect to gain: a familiarity with key terms and approaches in fashion studies, media studies, and cultural studies; an ability to think and write critically about fashion and fashion media, in terms of aesthetics, historical development, and cultural context; confidence in reading critical/theoretical essays; and proficiency in various aspects of project-based work, including identifying a research topic, building arguments, using evidence, and working with and appropriately citing a variety of sources.
Requisite: At least one 200-level foundations course in English, Film & Media Studies, Art & the History of Art, History, Theater and Dance, and/or Sexuality, Women’s & Gender Studies. Upper-level coursework in one or more of these fields is strongly recommended. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Sanders.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 480 and FAMS 411) The “essay” derives its meaning from the original French essayer: to try or attempt. In its attempts to work through and experiment with new ideas, the essay form becomes a manifestation of observation, experience, and transformation. Originally developed through the written form, the essay has also taken shape in visual work–photographic, installation, and, of course, cinematic. The “essay film” is exploratory, digressive, subjective; the “video essay” is similarly personal and simultaneously transformative. The “film essay” has the capacity to be all of these things, though in the past few decades this form has become arguably schematic. Working against the conventions of the “academic” or college essay and inspired by visual experimentation, this course will explore film through a variety of manifestations of the written essay. After all, since film comes in multiple forms and offers multiple experiences, it demands multiple possibilities of rhetorical exploration.
The models for writing in this course will come from both visual and written works. Course readings will be collected from a range of historical periods and will run a gamut of approaches to film: theoretical and experiential, critical and poetic, autobiographical and historical. Class screenings will similarly come from a variety of historical eras, genres, and national spaces. Because writing assignments will often explore the cultural experience of the movies, we will visit a variety of screening venues, including a film festival, “archival” and repertory houses, art cinemas, and commercial theaters. Though it will include some lectures to contextualize readings, this course will primarily be discussion-oriented, with attentive writing workshops. Thus experimenting with method and form, students will produce weekly writings, two extended essays, and a collaboratively-produced project.
Requisite: a 200-level foundations course in ENGL or FAMS. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 481, ARHA 481, and FAMS 481) Experimental film is a vital area of contemporary media culture where artists engage the moving image from a wide range of creative approaches, exploring film as an aesthetic, poetic, or political medium, rather than a commercial enterprise. By departing from the conventions of mainstream film, experimental filmmakers present their audience with a stimulating challenge, asking viewers to develop new critical frameworks through which to assess films that often resist classification and traditional interpretive approaches.
In this seminar, students will take up this challenge by exploring different ways of entering into conversation with the work of experimental filmmakers. Through weekly screenings, in-class visits by contemporary filmmakers, and group discussions of course readings (such as artists’ writings, interviews, and related theoretical material), we will develop critical and creative vocabularies that help us to analyze and respond to an array of experimental films and videos. Along with completing writing assignments and in-class presentations, students will plan and execute a final project that can assume a number of critical or creative forms, such as an interview with a filmmaker, a short video, or an analytical essay.
Requisite: At least one foundational course in FAMS, ARHA, or ENGL. Open to juniors and seniors, and to sophomores with consent of the instructor. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Guilford.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 484 and FAMS 424) Sometimes referred to as the “silver era” of US film production, the 1970s were a period of aesthetic, technological, and cultural transformation. New “auteurs” emerged as both mavericks and commercial success stories. Independence reigned supreme for some, while others helped to usher in the contemporary blockbuster. At the same time, scholarly study of film was steadily increasing, experimenting with new disciplinary methods, waging debates, and often distancing itself from popular critical writings. All told, such narratives of the era have meant that the 1970s looms large in our cultural imagination of film production. This course will trace film history to consider how narratives of the era have been written and how, in recent years, they have been written anew.
The first half of the course will explore several canonical works, while the second half of the course will consider films that have been recently excavated and/or remade. By intermixing popular critical writings (including reviews, interviews, and essays), academic writings of the era, and recent historical studies, we will consider historical and historiographical methods of film studies scholarship. Moreover, in our discussion of newly excavated or historically underrepresented cases–including works directed by women, examples of Blaxploitation cinema, and independent drama–we will explore how canons are both designed and remade, functioning as emblems of the time of their own critical production. Students will work with primary archival materials along with contemporaneous critical or theoretical models in order to develop their own historical narratives of 1970s film.
Requisite: Prior FAMS coursework or, alternatively, prior 200-level courses in ENGL. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Hastie.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 485 and FAMS 438) This course examines the role of the city in shaping modern experience. We will study literary works by Charles Baudelaire, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Virginia Woolf alongside a number of early films, reading these texts against historical and critical discussions of everyday life in the urban environment. Among other themes, we will take up the debate over “flanerie” as a spatial and social practice, investigating the class and gender dynamics of urban and cinematic spectatorship. Our conversations will be shaped by an awareness of the city as a geographically locatable space to be mapped and traversed, but also as a site for imaginary projections of individual and collective experience. In addition to a short creative assignment, two formal essays are required: a midterm paper (5-7 pages) involving close textual analysis of a primary source; and a final research paper (12-15 pages), with a draft to be revised in conjunction with a peer review workshop.
This course will run primarily online, with periodic small-group meetings for students who are in residence on campus and parallel small-group meetings for remote students. The additional evening time slot will provide opportunities for students to screen films and engage in structured small-group discussion synchronously, whether remotely or in person. There may be additional opportunities for in-person meetings (including office hours) as the semester progresses.
Requisite: A 200-level foundations course in English or equivalent. Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Visiting Professor Sanders.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ENGL 487 and FAMS 425) In the years following World War II, a series of rapid and far-reaching transformations–economic, technological, social, political–dramatically reconfigured American life. Throughout this period of change, cinema served as both mirror and catalyst, reflecting national crises and upheavals while also contributing to the transformation of American culture. This seminar explores both sides of this dynamic, examining how postwar American filmmakers devised innovative strategies for representing the dilemmas of their time, and how artists, studios, and lawmakers sought to intervene in such dilemmas via the moving image. We will view and discuss key examples of popular Hollywood genres from this period–film noir, science fiction, the western, etc.–as well as independent, documentary, and avant-garde films created by countercultural, feminist, queer, and Black artists. Weekly readings will engage such subjects as: nuclear anxiety; suburban domesticity and surveillance; Beat culture and spontaneity; totalitarianism; racial prejudice and civil rights; urban renewal and queer desire; gender and consumer culture; blacklisting, and others. Students will explore such issues through in-class presentations, critical essays, and individual research projects.
Requisite: At least one foundational course in ENGL or FAMS. Open to juniors and seniors and to sophomores with consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Guilford.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2014, Fall 2021Independent reading courses.
Fall and spring semester. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023This is a non-required course for English majors who are currently working on a creative writing or hybrid thesis project. It is meant to offer guidance and a sense of community to these writers as they embark on what can feel like a formidable process. In this course, we will discuss and analyze examples of senior theses in various forms, and discuss issues peculiar to the task of planning, researching, and writing a project of this scope. We will read together to help writers identify models and understand the literary tradition(s) they are working in. We will also talk about the kinds of research that each project invites and requires, and about how to conduct and use that research.
Guided writing in class will play a key role in working through issues of technique, structure, and inspiration. Most important, this course offers students the chance to present and critique work-in-progress with a group of their peers.
Please note: This course does not replace ENGL-498, the Senior Tutorial, which covers students’ independent work under the tutelage of a thesis advisor.
Open to senior majors currently writing a creative or hybrid thesis. Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Frank.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Fall 2023What does it mean to talk about literature as “global”? How do writers engage the idea of the globe politically, aesthetically, and environmentally?
This is a class about problems of scale and scope. We will consider how contemporary writers represent phenomena that cross national borders: particular attention will be paid to climate change, migration and immigration, the idea of the “global city,” war and terrorism, and the living legacies of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora. What are the formal and ethical challenges of thinking on a global scale? When thinking globally, how can we preserve awareness of local and historical differences? What are literary theorists saying about these questions today? Our readings will pair late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction with critical and theoretical work drawn from ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and so-called new global modernisms. This class will also emphasize the process and skills involved in upper-level literary analysis and research: we will experiment with a range of strategies for note-taking, making sense of dense texts, framing research questions, and finding openings and opportunities to engage in ongoing critical debates and conversations.
Possible authors include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Arundhati Roy, and W. G. Sebald.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Abramson.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course puts modernist formal innovation in conversation with theories of violence and trauma. We will examine the complex intersection between shattering historical violence and modernist formal and aesthetic techniques, including fragmentation, impressionism, collage, empty centers, rupture, abstraction, and multiperspectivalism. We will pay particular attention to what happens when language and literary form run up against the unspeakable, the unimaginable, the blank, the empty.
Critical readings will be drawn from a range of theoretical works on violence and trauma (postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, and affect theory). These textual pairings will provide a case study for how close reading can be enriched by theoretical and historical scaffolding. We will focus on the ways that war and violence overspill boundaries–beyond the battlefield, beyond the moment of impact, beyond what is visible, beyond national borders, beyond the signing of peace treaties. We will consider violence done to individual bodies and minds, as well as the ways that the shocks of world wars reverberate historically and around the globe. How do modernist texts blur lines between front-lines/home front, victim/perpetrator, and civilian/combatant?
Possible authors include Edmund Blunden, Cathy Caruth, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, W. G. Sebald, and Virginia Woolf.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Abramson.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course introduces students to the basic concepts and methods of literary and critical theory, a body of work that explores and critiques modern assumptions about truth, culture, power, language, representation, subject-formation, and identity. Surveying a wide range of authors and approaches (postcolonial, gender studies and queer theory, critical race theory, psychoanalytic, etc.), students will grapple with complex theoretical texts, consider the place of theory in literary studies and in film, media, and cultural studies as well, and begin to imagine ways of putting theoretical ideas to work for themselves.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Bosman.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2023This is a non-required course for English majors who are currently working on a critical or hybrid (i.e., not pure creative writing) thesis project. It is meant to offer guidance and a sense of scholarly community to students as they embark on what can feel like a formidable (and often lonely) process. In this course, we will discuss and analyze examples of the thesis form. We will analyze and practice some of the many subgenres theses contain (e.g., the introduction, the literature review, the methodological statement, and various ways of incorporating the voices of other critics, historians, or theorists). We will also read a representative range of recent criticism in the field, discussing critical methods, rhetorical tactics, and writerly voices employed in that work. And we will discuss issues peculiar to the task of planning, researching, and writing a long critical thesis. Most important, as in an advanced creative writing workshop, this course offers students the chance to present and critique work-in-progress with a group of their peers.
Please note: This course does not replace ENGL-498, the Senior Tutorial, which covers students’ independent work under the tutelage of a thesis advisor.
A major goal of this course is to foster mutual care and support among English Department thesis writers. With that in mind, the main mode of instruction for this course will be discussion–sometimes about shared readings, sometimes about other students’ writing, and sometimes about the writing process itself. Guided writing in class will play a key role in making the writing process available for discussion. Additionally, students will meet one-on-one (or in small groups) with the professor to discuss their own thesis progress. Finally, students will have the opportunity to take part in structured co-writing sessions outside of class.
Open to juniors and seniors. Preference given to English majors currently writing a critical thesis. Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Grobe.
2023-24: Not offeredStudents intending to continue independent work begun in ENGL 498 are required to submit a five-page prospectus describing in detail the shape of the intended project along with a substantial writing sample from the work completed in ENGL 498. Students beginning a new project who wish to apply for ENGL 499 must submit a five-page description and rationale for the proposed independent study. Those who propose projects in fiction, verse, playwriting, or autobiography must submit a substantial sample of work in the appropriate mode; students wishing to undertake critical projects must include a tentative bibliography with their proposal. Please consult the English Department website for deadlines and for more information on the senior honors process.
Preregistration is not allowed. Admission with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023An introduction to movement as a language and to dance and performance composition. Students will explore and expand their individual movement vocabularies by working improvisationally with weight, posture, gesture, patterns, rhythm, space, and relationship of body parts. We will ask what these vocabularies might communicate about emotion, thought, physical structures, cultural/social traditions, and aesthetic preferences. In addition, we will use observations of movement in our everyday situations and environments, as well as from staged and filmed events, as inspiration for individual and group compositions. Selected readings and viewing of video and films will be included to give students a broad overview of dance and movement practices and tools with which to observe and analyze movement.
Attention will be drawn to issues of race, class, gender and culture in looking at diverse languages of movement. In addition to two two-hour class meetings per week, students participate in the equivalent of a two-hour per week laboratory experience coordinated with the department’s production season.
Limited to 20 students. Six seats reserved for first-year students. Spring semester. Professor Woodson.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025An introduction to methods of visual research and visual creativity for textual, narrative, and performance interpretation. The course is conducted in a format combining discussions, creative play, student presentations, and collaborative critique. Class discussions and readings include the theoretical basis of a range of historical theatrical conventions, from Aristotle through Robert Wilson. Class exercises in perception and analysis build skills culminating in the realization of three-dimensional and story-boarding projects. In addition to two two-hour class meetings per week, students participate in the equivalent of a two-hour per week laboratory experience coordinated with the department’s production season.
Limited to 12 students per section. Spring semester. Resident Lighting Designer Couch.
2023-24: Not offeredA first college-level course in the fundamentals of acting, with an emphasis on the connections between dramatic action and character. Students learn how to analyze dramatic texts and bring them to life through a collaborative process, and by using body, voice and imagination. Classwork includes regular exercises designed to develop acting craft. Homework includes memorization, regular rehearsals and relevant reading, alongside practical research and short writing in various modes. Assignments progress toward realizing performed scenes. In addition to two two-hour class meetings per week, students participate in the equivalent of a two-hour per week laboratory experience coordinated with the department’s production season.
Limited to 20 students. Eight seats reserved for first-year students. Fall semester. Visiting Assistant Professor Sandy.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025This course will focus on case studies of selected works and artists of contemporary performance over the last century as a means of placing the creation and practice of theater and dance in context. We will closely consider these case studies as reflective of important aesthetic traditions and experiments in contemporary performance. In addition, we will seek connections between the different case study examples and the social, cultural and political environments that fostered them. We will reflect on issues of race, gender, identity, political activism, individual expression and differing collaborative structures in our encounters with these case studies. We will also look to historical precedents and sources that inform our understanding of artistic innovations and processes. Required of Theater and Dance majors.
This foundation course in the history/theory of performance is open to all students. Limited to 30 students. Omitted 2020-2021.
2023-24: Not offeredThis is an introductory course in contemporary dance technique with a primary focus on movement practice. Using the studio as a laboratory, we will investigate the fundamentals of body awareness, alignment, flexibility, coordination, strength, musical phrasing and the expressive potential of movement. Additionally, contemporary dance’s roots and influences will be introduced and applied through movement exploration. These include the borrowing and fusing of movement vocabularies from jazz, modern, hip hop and improvisational dance forms like Contact Improvisation. Occasional writing assignments will allow us to reflect on our movement histories and articulate personal progress within the course. This course meets twice a week. Because the study of dance technique requires ongoing practice, this course may be repeated for credit.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Riegel.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018This is an intermediate-level course in contemporary dance technique with a primary focus on movement practice. Using the studio as a laboratory, we will embody increasingly complex and dynamic movement that investigates clarity, freedom, adaptability, and artistry and challenges stamina. Additionally, contemporary dance’s roots and influences will be acknowledged and applied through movement exploration. These include the borrowing and fusing of movement vocabularies from jazz, modern, hip hop and improvisational dance forms like Contact Improvisation. Occasional writing assignments will allow us to reflect on our movement histories and articulate personal progress within the course. This course meets twice a week. Pre-requisite: two or more college-level courses in dance techniques, or equivalent experience. Because the study of dance technique requires ongoing practice, this course may be repeated for credit.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Visiting Instructor Konner.
2023-24: Not offeredThis online, intermediate-level dance technique course will highlight the influences of Black artists on American contemporary dance forms. Co-taught by Five College Dance faculty, including Molly Christie González (UMass), Aston McCullough (UMass) and Jenna Riegel (Amherst College), this course will give students the opportunity to learn from and engage with faculty from other campuses and assimilate various forms of contemporary dance including Katherine Dunham technique and philosophies, jazz techniques, and the choreographies and techniques of the Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane Company. Our physical practice will be enhanced with visits from guest artists, readings and viewings. This course is designed for students with previous movement experience.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Riegel.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. Objectives include the intellectual and physical introduction to this discipline as well as increased body awareness, alignment, flexibility, coordination, strength, musical phrasing and the expressive potential of movement. The course material is presented at the beginning/intermediate level. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Omitted 2021-2022.
2023-24: Not offeredThis intermediate course is designed to focus on the movement aspect of hip hop culture. Dance in the tradition of B-Boys and B-girls while learning a wide variety of hip hop movement. From the old school "bronx" style to commercial hip hop, learn a wide range of hip-hop vocabulary in a course emphasizing group choreography, floor work, and partner work. Class will incorporate funk, street, b-boy/b-girl, and house elements to stretch and tone the body. Class will include across the floor and center combinations which will ask the dancers to find their relationship to musicality, athleticism, dynamics, and articulation of the body.
Spring semester. Lecturer Lites.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit. Objectives include the intellectual and physical introduction to this discipline as well as increased body awareness, alignment, flexibility, coordination, strength, musical phrasing and the expressive potential of movement. The course material is presented at the beginning/intermediate level.
Omitted 2021-22. The Department.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 144H and LLAS 144H) This class introduces students to beginner-level salsa technique. We will explore the New York Mambo style of salsa, the Caracas street style, as well as elements of the Cuban Casino style. Students will master variations of the salsa basic step, turns, connecting steps, and arm work. Although we will mostly focus on solo practice, we will learn some essential concepts of partnering work based on the principles of leading and following. Toward the end of the semester, students will be able to use the acquired salsa vocabulary as the basis for improvising and choreographing combinations.
Through the study of salsa’s history, political dimensions, lyrical content, and matrilineal legacy, students will develop an understanding of this artistic expression not only as a dance form or musical genre, but also as a unifying voice of resistance and liberation for Caribbean and Latino cultures. Students will be able to recognize the voices of some of the most iconic Salsa artists and appreciate the contributions of some of the most important female Cuban and Cuban-American performers. We will investigate the legacy of Celia Cruz, paying close attention to the design and performance elements that defined her as The Queen of Salsa. Class discussions and brief writing assignments will serve as opportunities to reflect upon readings, documentaries and other information that will expand our understanding of the form.
Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2021-22.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 154 and CLAS 154) How can we look back to classic plays that were written one or two millennia ago and use them as the basis for a new piece of art that will be relevant and inspiring to a contemporary audience?
This course will explore how artists from various media—theater, film, TV, dance, music, painting—have interpreted and re-authored classical texts. We will discuss western classics as well as canonical texts from Japan, India, Africa and Latin America.
Are there any shared fundamental human elements among these very different continents and cultures? What made these texts enter the eternal dramatic canon of our civilization? Why are artists from various disciplines constantly attracted to re-authoring these classics? How can we build upon these works of the past to create something new, personal and relevant to our time?
This course will examine these questions using a variety of audio-visual examples, dramatic and critical texts, and studio exercises. Students will also re-author a classical text as a contemporary piece, in various artistic media.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2021-2022.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 155, BLST 144, and SWAG 155) In this introductory course we will look at dance performance as reflective of culture, gender, race and politics. Class sessions will incorporate viewings of recorded performances and in-depth discussions; attendance at live performances will also be part of the course. Selected readings in gender, critical race and queer theories (among others) will be assigned and used to develop a critical understanding of the relationship between bodies and performance, both on and off stage. Selected readings for this course include Judith Butler, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, and Jose Esteban Munoz, among others. Selected choreographers include Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, Faye Driscoll, William Forsythe, and Martha Graham.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2021-2022.
2023-24: Not offeredThis is a course in intermediate-level contemporary dance as a technique practice and as a topic of cultural study. Using the studio as a laboratory, we will embody increasingly complex and dynamic movement that investigates clarity, freedom, adaptability, and artistry and challenges stamina. Additionally, contemporary dance’s roots and influences will be recognized, explored, and discussed. These include the borrowing and fusing of movement vocabularies from jazz, modern, hip hop, and improvisational dance forms like Contact Improvisation. Weekly readings from such authors as Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Takiyah Nur Amin, and Ann Cooper Albright will serve to deepen our understanding of contemporary dance’s history, evolution, and value as a humanistic endeavor. Regular writing assignments will allow us to reflect on our movement histories and articulate personal goals and progress within the course. This course meets four times per week. Pre-requisite: two or more college-level courses in dance techniques, or equivalent experience. Because the study of dance technique requires ongoing practice, this course may be repeated for credit.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Riegel.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will include studio sessions in contemporary modern/jazz dance technique at the intermediate level and rehearsal sessions to create original choreography; the completed piece(s) will be presented in concert at the end of the semester. The emphasis in the course will be to increase expressive range, technical skills and performance versatility of the dancer through the practice, creation and performance of technique and choreography. In addition, the course will include required readings, the viewing of dance videos and live performances to give an increased understanding of the historical and contemporary context for the work.
Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2021-2022. Assistant Professor Riegel.
2023-24: Not offeredThe actors bring characters to life, through text, physicality and voice. Using their own bodies, they transform the words from a play’s pages in order to become another live being onstage. This art requires not only technique, but more importantly, an original and personal interpretation of the text, its characters, and their actions.
One of the goals of this course is to nourish each actor’s capacity for personal and original interpretation, or what might be called the elusive “artist’s voice". Another goal is developing independent skills to rehearse a scene. Working toward these goals, we will work in a lab environment, rehearsing scenes and monologues from various playwright’s scripts. We will employ physical and analytical tools, which will enrich the actor's palette of skills, foster their artist’s voice and advance their way of rehearsing a play. The class meets three times per week for two hours.
Requisite: THDA 111, THDA 113, or a prior course in acting at the college level, or by consent of the instructor. Limited to 16 students.Omitted 2021-2022.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course, we will engage in a collaborative, creative process to generate an original choreographic work. We will utilize both embodied and traditional scholarly research to inform and support the emergence of our collective creation and locate our work within a broader historical and cultural context. Students will have the opportunity to increase their expressive range, technical skills, and versatility as performers while also deepening their understanding of shared artistic processes. The course experience will culminate in a presentation of our work either in concert or in digital form at the end of the semester.
Limited to 18 students. Auditions will be conducted during the first class meeting. Spring semester. Professor Riegel.
2023-24: Not offeredThe study and practice of contemporary movement vocabularies, including regional dance forms, contact improvisation and various modern dance techniques. Objectives include the intellectual and physical introduction to this discipline as well as increased body awareness, alignment, flexibility, coordination, strength, musical phrasing and the expressive potential of movement. The course material is presented at the intermediate/advanced level. A half course. Because the specific genres and techniques will vary from semester to semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Requisite: Ballet 1/2 or Ballet 2/3. Omitted 2021-2022.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course, we will engage in a collaborative, creative process to generate an original choreographic work. We will utilize both embodied and traditional scholarly research to inform and support the emergence of our collective creation and locate our work within a broader historical and cultural context. Students will have the opportunity to increase their expressive range, technical skills, and versatility as performers while also deepening their understanding of shared artistic processes. The course experience will culminate in a presentation of our work either in concert or in digital form at the end of the semester.
Limited to 18 students. Auditions will be conducted during the first class meeting. Spring semester. Professor Riegel.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024In an atmosphere of curiosity, warmth and constructive risk-taking, this course investigates the dynamic possibilities of the moving relationships of our dancing bodies. We will practice and develop deep kinesthetic sensitivity and listening as we explore both an intellectual and embodied understanding of contemporary dance partnering basics such as weight sharing, momentum, counterbalance, force, fulcrums, tone and resistance. Directing our attention to cause and effect, our experimentation with different choices will guide our learning process. Skills to build trust and open communication, pillars of healthy dance partnering practices, are folded into every class. A half course. Because the specific techniques will vary each semester, the course may be repeated for credit.
Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2021-2022. Assistant Professor Jenna Riegel.
How has the theater text changed to accommodate new performance practices? What can be called a “play” today? In this course, we will explore contemporary theater texts from around the world. By reading plays from authors such as Samuel Beckett, Heiner Muller, Caryl Churchill, Young Jean Lee, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Meng Jinghui, among others, we will learn to adopt a “dramaturgical lens” to approach theater and text for performance. Suitable for aspiring professionals in all roles in theater, as well as theater lovers in general, this course also includes practical creative exercises in dramaturgy. Open to first-year students.
Omitted 2021-2022.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 223, BLST 113, and ENGL 371) What is meant by “the African-American experience” within the context of the U.S. American theater? What do the crafting and thematic concerns of plays penned by significant African-descendent writers in the United States tell us about the history of African-American theatrical performance and the larger issues of Black personhood, community, culture, and citizenship it reflects? This course is a thematic and critical survey of pivotal African-American plays from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Through practical dramaturgy and textual analysis we will study these playwrights’ deployment of their creative voice within social conditions that have evolved over the aforementioned period, from state-sanctioned exclusion to conditioned acceptance within U.S. American socio-cultural discourses. We will also examine how the civic work of these plays (and their writers) meet, intersect and coexist with that of other identity-based advocacy movements. Themes explored include slavery, segregation, nationality, class, religion, gender, sexual identity, among others. Playwrights studied may include Ira Aldridge, Angelina Grimke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Fuller, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, George C. Wolfe, August Wilson, Ntzoke Shange, and others.
Visiting Assistant Professor Jude Sandy. Fall semester.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 224, BLST 124, and ENGL 379) What is the “African” in “African-American?” From the point of view of U.S. American theater, what is the relationship between African-American theatrical practices and those of a global African diaspora? Grounded in Paul Gilroy’s and other theorists’ positing of “The Black Atlantic,” this course will examine how notions of shared and distinct cultural heritages collide and co-mingle across the theatrical performance worlds of African and other African-descendant peoples. Our point of reference will be canonical and contemporary plays and dance-theater works by African-American artists like Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Katherine Dunham, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Ronald K. Brown, Marcus Gardley, Jackie Sibblies-Drury, Danai Gurira, and others. We will examine how the conflicts, solidarities and assertions of identity and heritage in these artists’ works relate to that of such African-continental, -Caribbean, -European and trans-national figures as Pearl Primus, Wole Soyinka, Germaine Acogny, Ama Ata Aidoo, Femi Osofisan, Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, Trevor Rhone, Natasha Gordon and others. This comparative study will be situated against the seminal backdrop of diaspora cultures of ceremonial performance practices still evident throughout the Black world.
Visiting Assistant Professor Jude Sandy. Spring semester. 2021-2022.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this second course in the craft of speaking, students learn to shape and speak text to powerful effect. Students build on prior work to extend vocal range and capacity while learning component principles of spoken expression. Articulation, inflection, methods of contrast and interpretation, tone, verbal imaging and aural structures of poetry and rhetoric are practiced in a studio setting. Emphasis is placed on personal engagement and presence to others while speaking. Assignments in text scoring and memorization support class work. The course culminates in presentations of prepared texts. Two class meetings per week.
Requisite: THDA 125H. Omitted 2021-2022. Professor Bashford.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2023, Spring 2025When we experience a performance, we synthesize a rich array of sensations and information at once, and through time. Yet, artists employ a variety of different means to create their work, building it bit by bit. This course explores various elements that practioners use in the making of theater and dance, with an emphasis on the role perception plays in audience experience of meaning and feeling. Elements of performance will include basic “building blocks” of audience perception (temporal, spatial, visual, aural), leading to consideration of more complex tools and conventions, such as ritual, language, movement, music, design, and performing techniques. This class will study larger formal conventions used in the structure of whole performances as they reflect artists' possible intentions.
Students will develop analytical skills in the interpretation of multi-layered performance works, and in doing so, extend their own artistic possibilities and appreciation as audience members. In particular, we will investigate how artists build performances to challenge audiences and their society. Activities include reading and viewing, discussion, targeted writing assignments, and creative exercises to develop experiential understanding.
We will encounter influential theorists and artists (performers, playwrights, directors, choreographers, designers, etc.), including women, queer artists, and artists of color. Authors and artists under consideration for this course include Aristotle, Stanislavsky, Grotowski, Beckett, Pinter, Churchill, Brook, Kushner, Bausch, Cunningham, Ailey, Bogart, Bill T. Jones, Lehman, Jawole Zollar, and Anna Deavere Smith, among others. Guest Theater and Dance faculty will join class discussions as related to their areas of expertise. Two class meetings per week, with additional collaborative time outside of class required for some creative exercises.
Open to first-year students. Professor Bashford. Omitted 2021-22.
2023-24: Not offeredTheater making is a collaborative process, in which all participants contribute to the creation of the theatrical event. A good collaboration in theater brings together the personal voice of each and every collaborator and requires participants to listen and give room to all other voices during the creative process. This course encourages diversity of interests among the students: writing, researching, acting, designing and directing. It will offer various tools and approaches towards collaboration in theater, as being practiced by contemporary groups like The Wooster Group, Tectonic Theater Project, Kneehigh Theater and Anne Bogart.
The course will have a few “steps” in collaboration: we will start with simple and short pieces, in pairs or small groups. Halfway through the semester we will start devising a theater piece that everyone will work on. We will begin to see written drafts and rough drawings and models, and work our way through rehearsals towards a realized production. We will present the piece in front of an audience at the end of the semester.
Class will meet twice a week for two hours. In addition, 4-6 hours per week of rehearsals and/or reading and research are expected outside of class times. Previous experience in theater is welcomed but is not required. First-year students are encouraged to enroll, as well as students with past experience.
Limited to 20 students. Five seats reserved for first-year students. Omitted 2021-2022.
2023-24: Not offeredHow do actors offer vigorous contributions towards ensemble storytelling, while refining their own interpretive capacities? How do we shape and deploy the full energy and specificity of our individual, relational, and collective performance possibilities? How do we work together in manipulating myriad dynamics to hold and shape space, direct focus, orchestrate sound and rhythm, build and release tension, all towards distinctive group playmaking? This intermediate studio course builds on foundations of THDA 113: Action and Character as it continues to hone skills in voice, textual interpretation and embodiment of character towards more fully realized creative partnerships. A progression of study employs elements of Linklater Voice Training, Alexander Technique, Viewpoints, theater games and other practices to deepen each actor’s connective capabilities, while introducing approaches for collaboration towards more deeply shared interpretations of ensemble scene-work. Students will be guided through frameworks for experimenting, crafting, and directing themselves and their peers through increasingly challenging performance propositions, while taking on heightened texts and embodying epic theatrical roles that demand individual and collective commitment, facility, dynamism, and power.
Limited to 14 students. Spring semester. Visiting Assistant Professor Jude Sandy.
2023-24: Not offeredAthletes taking a knee, bodies marching in the street, dance movements that go viral… How can Dance Studies and Performance Studies help us understand the urgency of movement in our current moment? At the same time, how does dance challenge normative conceptualizations of history and politics? Exploring embodied politics in global perspective, this course works from the framework of “Critical Moves” proposed by late dance theorist Randy Martin: “Critical moves. Steps we must take. Movement that informs critical consciousness.” The interrelationship between theory and practice are emphasized through reading, writing, movement exercises and creative workshops. Students will be expected to regularly read, write, create and move; view and discuss performances; pursue a final research project through embodied, visual, and text-based methods; and work on a collective performance intervention that will take place on campus toward the end of the semester. No dance or performance experience necessary; students should bring an openness to engage with embodied practice and a bodily perspective.
Omitted 2021-2022.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2023, Fall 2023(Offered as THDA 236 and SWAG 234) This dance history course locates the intersections between dance, music, film, and identity politics by analyzing the cultural phenomenon of the American “music video” from the early 1980s to now. By considering American dance history from 1900 to the present, alongside film analysis work, students will gain an introductory understanding of how the moving body on screen intersects with identity politics related to race, class, sex, sexuality, and gender. Students will explore the course topic through readings on dance, music, film, and critical theory; in-class film viewings of music videos, dance for camera, and other visual media; in-class discussions dissecting critical theory for analysis purposes; and written analysis of film and video.
Omitted 2021-22.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 240 and SWAG 249) Using a seminar format, this course will ask students to choose a topic and explore the relationship between culture and clothing in historical context, addressing issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and their connection to the aesthetics of self-expression. In addition, students will develop their own contemporary fashion ideas and participate in labs, conducted by Emily Hoem, professional cutter draper for the Theater and Dance Department, who will teach the necessary technical skills needed to fabricate a garment.
This course will be conducted in a hybrid format, with both in-person and on-line components as needed, supported by appropriate technology. Options for online-only participation will be available for those students unable to participate in person.
Limited to 10 students. Omitted 2021-2022. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course, students conduct rehearsal investigations into the work of a particular playwright, and explore ways in which coordinated action renders dramatic writing in theatrical form. In addition to examining selected plays and background material, students will develop ensemble techniques of play, improvisation, and staging. Emphasis is placed on the communicative means required to develop a shared vision, and to particular acting and directing techniques relevant to the work of the selected playwright. This course is open to students interested in any aspect of play production, but all students should expect to act, co-direct, conduct research, and explore basic visual design implications together. The course will culminate in a workshop-style performance; group rehearsals outside of class meeting times are required. The playwright for fall 2020 is Molière.
Requisite: A prior college-level course in theater or permission of the instructor. Open to first-year students with permission. Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-2022. Professor Bashford.
2023-24: Not offeredHow do artists invent, reinvent, reinforce, or challenge racial identities through performance? Can race and racism be thought of as performance? What can citizen-performers do to construct a broader and more equitable social narrative? In this course, we will explore key concepts in performance and race studies, and consider them alongside intersecting identities, such as gender, sexuality, class, and disability. We will examine the work of modern and contemporary theater and dance artists of color, such as Suzan-Lori Parks, Larissa Fasthorse, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bill T. Jones, Eiko & Koma, Ananya Chatterjea, Miguel Gutierrez, and Ni’ja Whitson, through a lens of racially-defined
In an atmosphere of curiosity, warmth and constructive risk-taking, this course investigates the dynamic possibilities of the moving relationships of our dancing bodies. We practice and develop deep kinesthetic sensitivity and listening as we explore both an intellectual and embodied understanding of contemporary partnering basics such as weight sharing, momentum, counterbalance, force, fulcrums, tone and resistance. Directing our attention to cause and effect, our experimentation with different choices guides our learning. Skills to build trust and open communication, pillars of healthy partnering practices, are folded into our classes. We discuss and embrace the intersections and influences of our personal identities, cultural backgrounds, compositional habits, and aesthetic sensibilities on our movement making. The creation of unique duet or ensemble dances through inventive and improvisational processes culminate in a public showing. Selected readings and viewings of partnering practices utilized across different cultures and performance groups and the ensuing discussions supplement our physical practice.
Requisite: A previous movement course or consent of the instructor. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2021-2022. Professor Riegel.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 252, FAMS 342 and ARHA 252) This course is designed for students in dance, theater, film/video, art, music and creative writing who want to explore the challenges and potentials in creating performances and events outside of traditional "frames" or venues (e.g., the theater, the gallery, the concert halls, the lecture hall, the page). In the first part of the semester we will experiment with different techniques for working together and for developing responses to different spaces. We will conduct a series of informal performance actions in numerous sites that are available to us, working with different media according to student interest and experience. A special emphasis will be placed on considering issues of access when we make choices about where and how to perform and create work. How can we encourage inclusive events that foster interaction and response with communities both near and far? What are possible relationships between art and community? How can we integrate important social and cultural issues into our art making? How might we collaborate with and make work for sites we are distanced from? What are crucial limitations to consider in creating site specific events, and how do we allow these limitations to inspire? The semester will culminate in a series of public final projects developed throughout the semester for online and live viewing.
Recommended requisite: Previous experience in improvisation and/or composition in dance, theater, performance, film/video, music/sound, installation, creative writing, and/or design is required. Limited to 8 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredThis studio course in intermediate composition will provide structures and approaches for creating original choreography, performance pieces and events. An emphasis will be placed on interdisciplinary and experimental approaches to composition, choreography, and performance making. We will investigate multiple interactions between different media and see how they can inform each other. For example, we will see how text can create movement and vice versa, how sound can be created as a response to or impetus for text and movement and how visual design and environments can serve as inspiration for or be incorporated into performance. Students will create and perform dance, theater, or performance art pieces for both traditional theater spaces and for found (indoor and outdoor) spaces.
This course is open to dancers, actors, musicians and visual art students as well as interested students from other disciplines. Two two-hour class meetings per week and weekly lab/rehearsal sessions. Consent of the instructor is required for students with no experience in improvisation or composition.
Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 254, FAMS 332 and MUSI 254) What is the role of sound in live performance, and how is it designed and produced? This course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of sound design in live performance contexts from both technical and artistic perspectives. Throughout the term we will work towards developing skills that lead to a greater awareness and understanding of sound in theatre, media, and our everyday lives. Students will explore the fundamentals of audio production and acoustics through a series of short projects, covering a range of topics from foley art, to digital field recording, to various digital sound-editing software applications, to live sound reinforcement principles.
Special consideration will be given to software environments and applications (QLab, Ableton Live, Borderlands, Max Msp) dedicated to live playback and design of acoustic spaces, and we will examine strategies for developing an efficient, real-world approach to the technical rehearsal process. Throughout the course, we will consider the creative and technical toolkit needed for imagining sound design opportunities in various script, video, dance, art installation and performance-oriented collaborations.
Recommended requisite: One prior practice-of-arts course in theater and dance, music or studio art, or equivalent experience. Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2021-2022.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2023(Offered as THDA 255, ENGL 223, and MUSI 255) This studio course is designed as an interactive laboratory for dancers, composers, actors, writers/poets, vocalists, and sound artists to work together to create meaningful interactions between sound, movement, and text. Working individually and in collaborative groups, students will create original material in the various media and experiment with multiple ways to craft interesting exchanges and dialogues between word, sound, and movement or to create hybrid forms. The emphasis in the course will be to work with exercises and structures that engender deep listening, looking, and imagining. Some of the questions that inform the course include: How do music, voices, electronic, digital, and natural sounds create a sonic world for live performance and vice versa? How can movement inform the writing of text and vice-versa? How can we successfully communicate and collaborate across and between the different languages of sounds, words, and movement? We will have a series of informal studio performances, events, and installations throughout the semester with a culminating final showing/listening at the end of the semester.
Requisite: Previous experience in composition in one or more of the central media, or consent of the instructors. Limited to 16 students. Omitted 2021-2022. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offeredAn introduction to the analytical methods and skills necessary for the creation of costumes for theater and dance with emphasis on the integration of costume with other visual elements. This course will study western costume history and will include lab work in costume construction.
Requisite: THDA 112 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 8 students. Omitted. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredAn introduction to the theory and techniques of lighting for performance, with emphasis on the aesthetic, historical, cultural, and practical aspects of the art form. Students' practice of the techniques will be grounded in the deepening of understanding the way light acts upon the body and, thus, shapes our perceptions, our meaning-making, and our lived experiences.
Requisite: THDA 112 or consent of the instructor. Lab work in lighting technology. Fall semester. Resident Lighting Designer Couch.
2023-24: Not offeredThe materials, techniques and concepts which underlie the design and creation of the theatrical environment.
In Fall 2020, students will collaborate with THDA 261: Lighting Design to explore the interactions between the two forms.
This course will be conducted in a hybrid format, with both in-person and on-line components as needed, supported by appropriate technology. Options for online-only participation will be available for those students unable to participate in person.
Requisite: THDA 112 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 8 students, with priority given to majors. Non-majors need consent from instructor. Omitted 2021-2022. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredThis advanced studio course is designed for students who want to develop their skills as dance/theater artists by participating in the creation of a student dance company that is viable and sustainable in a liberal arts environment. Students enrolled in this course will be part of an ensemble and perform regularly in different sites in the Five College Community. In addition to the ongoing practice of technique, class times will focus on learning and creating different repertory with the instructor of the course, guest artists and the students who are enrolled in the course.
In addition, we will examine different professional dance company models as inspiration in the formation of the ensemble as well as research diverse examples for community engagement and the arts. Questions that will inform the work include: What does it mean to be part of a performing ensemble in a liberal arts setting? How do performance art making and community intersect? What are potential structures for organizing an ensemble performance company to ensure flexibility as well as sustainability? What are some of the challenges in keeping a collaborative body together and viable Three two-hour meetings per week plus lab TBA.
Requisite: Previous performance experience in dance/theater. Limited to 10 students. Admission with consent of the instructor after audition. Omitted 2021-2022.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2023, Fall 2024(Offered as THDA 270 and ENGL 222) This course explores key aspects of writing for the theater in a workshop style, from a transcultural perspective. Through writing exercises, analysis of scenes, feedback sessions, and the rewriting of materials produced, participants will experience the creative process and start developing their own voice as playwrights.
Open to first-year students with consent of the instructor. Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Visiting Artist Carneiro.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 272 and ENGL 323) This course is an exploration of writing for performance using interdisciplinary and experimental approaches. By exposing students to contemporary manifestations of performance across cultures – including those by Rodrigo Garcia, Rimini Protokoll, Romeo Castelluci, Robert Lepage, Carolina Vivas, and Gebing Tian – this course will lead to a new understanding of the art and practice of writing for the theater. In dialogue with other artforms such as literature, music, dance, and cinema, as well as performance theory, we will creatively explore dynamics involving words, bodies, spaces, objects, and media. Through imagining, devising, writing, and performing exercises, participants will develop their own original pieces that will be showcased as works-in-progress at the end of the semester.
Limited to 18 students. Spring Semester. Visiting Artist Carneiro.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022(Offered as THDA 275, ENGL 325 and SWAG 275) Western text-based theatre has historically hushed the voices of women and those from marginalized communities. This course will focus on examples of such voices, paying special attention to artists, writers, and thinkers who challenge and deconstruct aesthetics that privilege the male gaze. In dialogue with feminist theories of gender and identity, we will read plays and study works by women and gender non-conforming artists, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Juana Ines de la Cruz, Susan Glaspell, Adrienne Kennedy, Marina Abramovich, and Taylor Mac. Finally, we will also inquire into new forms of gender-inspired “artivism,” such as The Kilroy’s, the Guerilla girls, Pussy Riot, and the #MeToo movement in theatres around the world. During this course, students are expected to pursue an individual writing or performance project that will further explore the concepts discussed. For this purpose, we will study the Theater of the Oppressed methodology as applied by contemporary Latinx feminist theater-makers.
Limited to 18 students. Omitted 2021-2022. Visiting Artist Carneiro.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 353 and FAMS 345) This is an advanced course in making performance in dance, theater, video and/or hybrid forms. Each student will create, rehearse and produce an original performance piece in his/her/their preferred medium. Due to Covid 19 restrictions, these pieces will be shared on digital platforms as ongoing works in progress (with students in the class) and as final projects with a wider audience at the end of the semester. Different strategies, tools and philosophies will be given and explored with an emphasis on taking creative advantage of found spaces and available resources. Improvisational and interactive structures and approaches among and within media will be investigated.
Two ninety-minute class sessions per week and rehearsal/production sessions as required.
Requisite: An intermediate departmental course in performance-making and consent of the instructor. Limited to 8 students. Spring semester. Professor Woodson.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 354, FAMS 354 and MUSI 354) Building on the concepts learned in THDA 254/MUSI 254, this studio course further develops the student’s work in sound design through an intensive focus on hands-on practice. Students will participate as sound designers in the Amherst Theater & Dance production program, the Five-College production program, and in other collaborative sound design and compositional opportunities with filmmakers, visual artists, installation artists, game designers, and podcasters. Throughout the term, students will expand and deepen their relationship to the toolkit introduced in Sound Design I, while we examine strategies for developing an efficient, real-world approach to the creative and technical rehearsal processes in various modes of live performance and art making. Limited to twelve students.
Requisite: THDA 254/MUSI 254 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2021-2022.
In this studio course, we will explore different skills and approaches towards creating solo performance. We will examine examples of historical and contemporary solo performances in theater, dance, video, music, radio plays, street, stand up and in political/social arenas to inform and ask what makes these effective (or not). We will use what we learn from these examples to inspire our own solo material. We will also develop additional techniques (through improvisational trial and error) that enliven and engage our different voices, stories, imaginations and emotions. An emphasis will be placed on exploring and crafting dynamic relationships within and between different media and modes of expression in order to create confident and compelling solo presentations for live and virtual arenas. We will consider the solo as both a personal vehicle of expression and as a means of giving voice to experiences of others. In the process of making compositional choices, we will consider the personal and social implications of these choices. The semester will culminate in public performances of final solos.
Requisite: Previous experience in performance and/or video--whether in the arts or public presentations in other disciplines/contexts. Open to juniors and seniors. Admission with consent of the instructor. Limited to 10 students. Spring semester. Professor Woodson.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2013, Spring 2023, Spring 2025An advanced course in the arts of theatrical design. Primary focus is on the communication of design ideas and concepts with other theater artists. Also considered is the process by which developing theatrical ideas and images are realized. Students will undertake specific projects in scenic, costume and/or lighting design and execute them in the context of the Department’s production program or in other approved circumstances. Examples of possible assignments include designing workshop productions, and assisting faculty and staff designers with major responsibilities in full-scale production. In all cases, detailed analysis of the text and responsible collaboration will provide the basis of the working method.
Requisite: THDA 260, 261, 263 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course is a continuation of THDA 360, an advanced course in the arts of theatrical design. Primary focus is on the communication of design ideas and concepts with other theater artists. Also considered is the process by which developing theatrical ideas and images are realized. Students will undertake specific projects in scenic, costume and/or lighting design and execute them in the context of the department’s production program or in other approved circumstances. Students in this course will design for a full-scale production. In all cases, detailed analysis of the text and responsible collaboration will provide the basis of the working method.
Requisite: THDA 360 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2021-22. Professor Dougan.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as THDA 370 and ENGL 322) A workshop for writers who want to complete a full-length play or series of shorter plays. Emphasis will be on bringing a script to a level at which it is ready for the stage. The majority of class time will be devoted to reading and commenting on developing works-in-progress. In addition, we will also hone playwriting skills through class exercises, and study exemplary plays by established writers as a means of exploring a range of dramatic vocabularies.
Requisite: THDA 270, 272, or the equivalent. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Visiting Artist Carneiro.
2023-24: Not offeredA course in integrating previously studied skills, while developing collaborative and leadership roles in the making of Theater and Dance works, within the Department’s producing structure. With permission, enrolled student will accept a specific assignment within a departmental production team. A half course.
Admission with consent of the Chair. Not open to first-year students. Fall and spring semesters. Professor Woodson.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025Independent reading course.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025For Honors candidates in Theater and Dance.
Open only to senior Theater and Dance majors. Spring semester. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2024A beginning studio course in the development of voice for speaking. Students develop range and tone through regular physical exercises in relaxation, breathing technique, placement, and presence. Individual attention focuses on helping each student develop the physical, mental, and emotional self-awareness needed for expressive vocal production. Practice is oriented toward acting for the stage, but students with a primary interest in public speaking, teaching, or improved interpersonal communication will find this course valuable. A modicum of reading and written reflection is required. Three class meetings per week. A half course.
Limited to 28 students. Six spaces reserved for first-year students. Omitted 2021-2022. Professor Bashford.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024This course is designed to focus on the movement aspect of hip hop culture. Dance in the tradition of B-Boys and B-girls while learning a wide variety of hip hop movement. From the old school "bronx" style to commercial hip hop, learn a wide range of hip-hop vocabulary in a course emphasizing group choreography, floor work, and partner work. No previous dance experience is necessary. Class will incorporate funk, street, b-boy/b-girl, and house elements to stretch and tone the body. Class will include across the floor and center combinations which will ask the dancers to find their relationship to musicality, athleticism, dynamics, and articulation of the body.
Fall semester and spring semesters. Lecturer Lites.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2025This is a studio course in collaboration leading to completed theatrical creations. Students produce a portfolio of short projects, using published text or through rehearsal devising. Readings, writing, and class discussion are devoted to the shared practices of acting and directing, and to individual problems and approaches. Topics include the articulation of artistic vision, advanced textual analysis, and the use of space, sound and light. Studio exercises are employed to support relevant techniques. In addition, applicable organizational and research methods will be employed. When possible, students may collaborate with others enrolled in a related course in design. Two class meetings per week. Students should expect to schedule a significant amount of rehearsal time outside of class meetings for the successful completion of projects.
In Spring 2021, remote instruction will be combined with in-person interactions and the use of video, streaming, and other technology as appropriate to the needs of physical distancing and artistic goals.
Requisite: One 100-level THDA course, and an appropriate intermediate, 200-level course in THDA, or equivalent college-level experience with consent of the instructor. Omitted 2021-2022. Professor Bashford.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2019, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2025