Courses

English 111: english Composition I

This course equips students with the writing skills to build a strong academic essay. We will break down the components of essay writing, from forming a thesis, to organizing logical arguments, to evaluating sources and incorporating evidence. Shorter lessons and workshops on grammar, structure and style will culminate in four graded essays and one major exam. Readings and discussions will center around the theme of the American dream, particularly identity, education and freedom. 

ENGLISH 121: ENGLISH COMPOSITION II

This course is a continuation of ENG 111, focusing on the final product of a well-researched academic research essay. In the first several weeks of the course, we will work together as a class to model the research process, first homing in on an appropriate question of debate, exploring the existing critical conversation surrounding the topic, aggregating related articles and books, evaluating sources, and finally learning to posit what is deemed a scholarly contribution. Our model of texts will center around issues of social justice, the role of the police and its relationship to urban citizens, violence in media and society, and sociological effects of social order and disorder. From several assigned seed texts, students will work together to present create their own annotated bibliographies and in turn use these as a basis for their research paper on any topic that suits their interest. 

English 222: LITERARY gENRES

In this course, students will receive an introduction to literary forms, genres, and the critical methods appropriate to their study. Focusing on drama, poetry, short stories, and novellas, we will learn to analyze representative works of the Western canon, exploring central themes and considering historical contexts.  Readings include works by Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Kafka, Hughes, Dickinson, Melville, Baldwin and Hemingway.

ENGlish / Women’s STudies 234: Women in Literature

This seminar, cross-listed with Women’s Studies, is a seminar for non-majors. The seminar explores major women writers and feminist theory through the ages. Readings include works by Joy Harjo, Maxine Hong Kingston, E. Pauline Johnson, Phyllis Wheatley, Juana Inés de la Cruz, Christina Rossetti, Julia de Burgos, Nella Larsen, Audre Lorde, Michael Field, Murasaki Shikibu, Virginia Woolf, bell hooks, and others.

ENGlish 300: Introduction to Literary Study

Required of all departmental majors, ENG 300 offers an intensive introduction to the discipline. We will focus on major works of literary criticism and interpretation and develop skills for close reading, contextualizing, researching, and writing within the field of literature studies.

English 302: English Literature II - "Restoration through Revolutions"

This course is a survey of British literature from 1660 to 1815 for departmental majors. We will cover major authors of the "long eighteenth century," considering religious, political and social contexts from the time of the British Civil Wars to the Napoleonic Wars. Texts are read chronologically and at a swift pace. Readings include poems, plays and essays by Behn, Pope, Milton, Dryden, Defoe, Swift, Johnson, Fielding, and Burney. 

eNGLISH 303: eNGLISH lITERATURE iii - "rOMANTIC THROUGH MODERN"

This course is a survey of British literature from 1780 to 1945 for departmental majors. We will cover major authors of the Romantic, Victorian and Modernist eras and the historical contexts surrounding the literature. Texts are read chronologically and at a swift pace. Readings include poems, plays and essays by Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Woolf and Joyce. 

ENG 350: senior seminar - "Keats at 200: ARchives & afterlives"

In this seminar, we will explore the life and works of John Keats through archives and afterlives: how his words have been preserved for us as literary scholars and how he continues to live in the world’s popular and public imagination today. On the occasion of the bicentenary of Keats’ 1817 Poems, we will place special emphasis on first-hand manuscript research. As it happens, several of the world’s most interesting Keats materials are housed in the special collections of libraries in the New York City area. After immersing ourselves in Keats’s poems and letters in the classroom, we will see letters, manuscripts, and first-edition books through private tours of the NYPL’s Pforzheimer and Berg Collections, NYU’s Fales Collection, and Princeton Firestone’s Rare Books Library. We will prepare for these trips and practice our manuscript research skills by working closely with the Harvard Keats Archive online. The “Afterlives” section of this course will culminate in an end-of-the-semester digital research project, where students are invited to trace patterns of connections and influence between Keats and contemporary writers today, choosing texts from diverse traditions of writing.

ENG 356/LSP 351: Exploring the archives: research seminar in Rare Books and special collections 

This senior seminar introduces literature students to the world of rare books and manuscripts. The course will bring you face to face with priceless Shakespeare folios, an original edition of Leaves of Grass gifted from Whitman to Thoreau, and even locks of hair of Pre-Raphaelite models. But how does one study these things? We will learn practices of literary study beyond just close reading -- dealing with manuscripts, working with print and material culture, writing official bibliographic entries, and learning methods of authentication and handwriting analysis -- to better understand the authors and texts we thought we knew. 

ENGLISH 385: Technology of the book

Introduction to book studies in the western tradition from 1500 to 1900. Focus on the history of the book, from the hand press period to the machine press period, and on the analysis of books as technology and as media. We will cover units on paper making, illustration processes, type, presswork, bookbinding, and book history. This course incorporates trips to various libraries and special collections, auction houses, museums, and artists’ workshops in New York City.

ENGLISH 463: Seminar in Literature: Theory & Criticism

Exploration of traditional and contemporary ways of theorizing about literature and literary or cultural study. A selective survey of structuralist, postmodernist, psychoanalytic, feminist, lesbian/gay, Marxist, new historical and cultural materialist, and/or postcolonial approaches.

ENGLISH 482: Honors Colloquium

Weekly gathering of seniors doing independent tutorial work with a faculty mentor on their English Honors projects. Students meet with Colloquium instructor to discuss critical and creative ideas, modes of research, deadlines and progress, editing and revising. Written work submitted regularly for review. PREREQ: Departmental permission; English Honors Program students only.

ENGLISH 742: Studies in Nineteenth-Century English Literature: Pedagogical Approaches to the Brontës

Study of major works by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the juvenilia (Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal.)  We will consider these texts through feminist, postcolonial, and disabilities approaches. This seminar will also be devoted to developing research assignments and crafting effective lesson plans, drawing on novel and film adaptations from adolescent and children’s literature. As such, this course will be of special interest to student teachers or teaching fellows, MHSE candidates, and future Ph.D students who will TA literature sections as part of their teaching requirements.