English (B.A.)

Courses

* ENGL 010a, Jane Austen  Stefanie Markovits

Close study of Austen's novels, with special attention to the critique of social and literary convention. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 023b / HUMS 072b, Reading Recent North American Short Fiction  Joseph Gordon

The short story is generally considered to be North American in origin. As one of its goals, the course examines the ways in which the genre has developed in recent decades into a vehicle for storytelling from marginalized or subaltern voices such as those of people of color, women, LGBT people, immigrants and refugees, war veterans, students, and children. The course also explores how collections of stories gathered by a single author may resemble but yet be distinguishable from novels, and examines some very recent short stories that are influenced by nontraditional forms of writing, such as graphic fiction, self-help manuals, and social media. Authors are likely to include: Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, Lucia Berlin, Sherman Alexie, Tao Lin, Lydia David, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward P. Jones, Elizabeth Strout, Junot Diaz, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Alison Bechdel, Nathan Englander, Kristen Rupenian, Jennifer Egan, and Teju Cole. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 025a / LITR 023a / SAST 059a, Modern South Asian Literature, 1857-2017  Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

Exploration of literary texts from South Asia, 1857 to the present. Close reading of literary texts from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, alongside political speeches, autobiographies, and oral narratives. Topics include colonialism, history writing, migration, language, caste, gender and desire, translation, politics and the novel. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration is required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
MW 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 027a, Poetry and Protest in America  Alanna Hickey

Survey of poetry’s work within social movements form the 1960s to today. Readings range from the Civil Rights, Third World, and Women’s Liberation movements of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s to more recent writing from Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and climate change activists. What radical thinking does poetry make possible within activist contexts? How can we recover and engage in poetry’s life off of the page and within workshops, sit-ins, public readings, or artistic collaborations? How might a longer timeline of activist work enrich our understanding of politically-informed poetic composition today?  WR, HU
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 028b / AFST 028b / LITR 025b, African Literature in the World  Cajetan Iheka

This seminar introduces students to a subset of African literature that has entered the canon of world literature. Bookended by the writings of Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie, we explore the marks of regional specificity in these works and how they transcend local geographical markers to become worldly artifacts. Our considerations include why certain texts cross the boundaries of nation and region while others remain confined within territorial bounds. We also examine advantages of the global circulation of African literary works and the pitfalls of a global readership. The class moves from an introductory unit that orients students to African and world literature to focus on close reading of primary texts informed by historical and theoretical nuances. From analyzing works responding to the colonial condition and the articulation of anticolonial sensibilities, to those narrating the African nation at independence and the postcolonial disillusionment that followed, the seminar attends to the formal and thematic implications of globalization for African literary writing. Authors include Chinua Achebe, Mariama Ba, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mbolo Mbue, NoViolet Bulawayo, Taiye Selasie, and Chimamanda Adichie.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 030b / HUMS 083b, Fantasy in Literature and Film  Alfred Guy

Study of how fantasy ideas about race and gender, good and evil, and religion and culture reflect and influence changing ideas about what it means to be human. Authors include Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, & Nalo Hopkinson. Major fantasy films include Prisoner of Azkeban and Get Out. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 114a or b, Writing Seminars  Staff

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR
HTBA

* ENGL 115a or b, Literature Seminars  Staff

Exploration of major themes in selected works of literature. Individual sections focus on topics such as war, justice, childhood, sex and gender, the supernatural, and the natural world. Emphasis on the development of writing skills and the analysis of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 120a or b, Reading and Writing the Modern Essay  Staff

Close reading of great nonfiction prepares students to develop mastery of the craft of powerful writing in the humanities and in all fields of human endeavor, within the university and beyond. Study of some of the finest essayists in the English language, including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Leslie Jamison, Jhumpa Lahiri, George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Woolf. Assignments challenge students to craft persuasive arguments from personal experience, to portray people and places, and to interpret fundamental aspects of modern culture. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR
HTBA

* ENGL 121b, Styles of Academic and Professional Prose  Staff

A seminar and workshop in the conventions of good writing in a specific field. Each section focuses on one academic or professional kind of writing and explores its distinctive features through a variety of written and oral assignments, in which students both analyze and practice writing in the field. Section topics, which change yearly, are listed at the beginning of each term on the English departmental website. This course may be repeated for credit in a section that treats a different genre or style of writing; may not be repeated for credit toward the major. Preregistration required; see under English Department. Prerequisite: ENGL 114, 115, 120, or another writing-intensive course at Yale.  WR
HTBA

* ENGL 123a, Introduction to Creative Writing  Staff

Introduction to the writing of fiction, poetry, and drama. Development of the basic skills used to create imaginative literature. Fundamentals of craft and composition; the distinct but related techniques used in the three genres. Story, scene, and character in fiction; sound, line, image, and voice in poetry; monologue, dialogue, and action in drama. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  HU
HTBA

* ENGL 125a, Readings in English Poetry I  Staff

Introduction to the English literary tradition through close reading of select poems from the seventh through the seventeenth centuries. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse linguistic and social histories; and the many varieties of identity and authority in early literary cultures. Readings may include Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Middle English lyrics, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and poems by Isabella Whitney, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Amelia Lanyer, John Donne, and George Herbert, among others. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 126a or b, Readings in English Poetry II  Staff

Introduction to the English literary tradition through close reading of select poems from the eighteenth century through the present. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse genres and social histories; and modernity’s multiple canons and traditions. Authors may include Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott, among others. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 127a or b, Readings in American Literature  Staff

Introduction to the American literary tradition in a variety of poetic and narrative forms and in diverse historical contexts. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse linguistic and social histories; and the place of race, class, gender, and sexuality in American literary culture. Authors may include Phillis Wheatley, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Alan Ginsberg, Chang-Rae Lee, and Toni Morrison, among others. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 128a or b, Readings in Comparative World English Literatures  Staff

An introduction to the literary traditions of the Anglophone world in a variety of poetic and narrative forms and historical contexts. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse linguistic, cultural and racial histories; and on the politics of empire and liberation struggles. Authors may include Daniel Defoe, Mary Prince, J. M. Synge, James Joyce, C. L. R. James, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Yvonne Vera, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, J. M. Coetzee, Brian Friel, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White, among others. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 129a / LITR 168a, Tragedy in the European Literary Tradition  Staff

The genre of tragedy from its origins in ancient Greece and Rome through the European Renaissance to the present day. Themes of justice, religion, free will, family, gender, race, and dramaturgy. Works include Homer's Iliad and plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, and Soyinka. Focus on textual analysis and on developing the craft of persuasive argument through writing. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 130b / LITR 169b, Epic in the European Literary Tradition  Staff

The epic tradition traced from its foundations in ancient Greece and Rome to the modern novel. The creation of cultural values and identities; exile and homecoming; the heroic in times of war and of peace; the role of the individual within society; memory and history; politics of gender, race, and religion. Works include Homer's Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, Cervantes's Don Quixote, and Joyce's Ulysses. Focus on textual analysis and on developing the craft of persuasive argument through writing. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 150a / LING 150a, Old English  Alexandra Reider

An introduction to the language, literature, and culture of earliest England. A selection of prose and verse, including riddles, heroic poetry, meditations on loss, a dream vision, and excerpts from Beowulf, which are read in the original Old English.  HU
HTBA

ENGL 154a / FREN 216a / HUMS 134a / LITR 194a, The Multicultural Middle Ages  Ardis Butterfield

Introduction to medieval English literature and culture in its European and Mediterranean context, before it became monolingual, canonical, or author-bound. Genres include travel writing, epic, dream visions, mysticism, the lyric, and autobiography, from the Crusades to the Hundred Years War, from the troubadours to Dante, from the Chanson de Roland to Chaucer.  HU
MW 9:25am-10:15am

ENGL 160b, Milton  John Rogers

A study of John Milton’s poetry, his engagement with the cultural, social, political, and philosophical struggles of the seventeenth century, and the surprising influence of Paradise Lost on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American letters and religion.  WR, HU
MW 1:30pm-2:20pm

ENGL 163b, Vampires, Castles, and Werewolves  Heather Klemann

Study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic fiction and the persistence, resurgence, and adaptation of gothic tropes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century film, television, and prose. Readings include Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula. Films and TV include Inception, Black Swan, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and episodes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Prerequisite: Freshmen must have taken a WR seminar course in the fall term.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

* ENGL 182b / AFAM 182b / HUMS 456b, James Baldwin's American Scene  Jacqueline Goldsby

In-depth examination of James Baldwin's canon, tracking his work as an American artist, citizen, and witness to United States society, politics, and culture during the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements.  WR, HU
TTh 2:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 191a / LITR 318a / NELC 201a, The Arabian Nights, Then and Now  Shawkat Toorawa

Exploration of Arabian Nights, a classic of world literature. Topics include antecedents, themes and later prose, and graphic and film adaptations.  HU
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

ENGL 194a / WGSS 194a, Queer Modernisms  Jill Richards

Study of modernist literature and the historical formation of homosexual identity from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Topics include: sexology as a medical and disciplinary practice; decadence and theories of degeneration; the criminalization of homosexuality in the Wilde and Pemberton-Billing trials; cross-dressing and drag balls in Harlem; transsexuality and sex-reassignment surgery; lesbian periodical cultures; nightlife and cruising; gay Berlin and the rise of fascism; colonial narratives of same-sex desire in Arabia and the South Pacific; Caribbean sexual morality; and the salon cultures of expatriate Paris.  WR, HU
TTh 10:30am-11:20am

ENGL 196a / FILM 160a, Introduction to Media  Robert Williams

Introduction to the long history of media as understood in classical and foundational (and even more recent experimental) theories. Topics involve the technologies of modernity, reproduction, and commodity, as well as questions regarding knowledge, representation, public spheres, and spectatorship. Special attention given to philosophies of language, visuality, and the environment, including how digital culture continues to shape these realms.  WR, HU
MW 1pm-2:15pm

* ENGL 209a, Renaissance Lyric  Lawrence Manley

A survey of English lyric poetry from the early sixteenth century through the mid-seventeenth, focusing on poetic forms and traditions and the place of poetry in the social, political, and religious life of the time. Authors include Wyatt, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Aemylia Lanyer, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Milton, Lovelace, and Marvell.  WR, HU  RP
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 210a / HUMS 204a, The Drama of Justice and Mercy  Lawrence Manley

An examination of justice, mercy, and the law in drama, film, and writings from disciplines at the intersection of literature, law, ethics, and religion. Reconsidering the usual binaries of convict and victim, self and other, judgment and forgiveness from antiquity to the present, the seminar gives voice to enduring questions about the brokenness of freedom, human rights, and the status of religious belief. Plays by Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Soyinka, and Peter Brook; films by Sidney Lumet, Gavin Hood, and Martin Scorsese; selected readings in philosophy and religion from Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Montaigne, Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum, and Howard Lesnick; and recent publications on the mass incarceration crisis in the U.S. (Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy; John Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration; Danielle Allen’s Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.). The seminar modesl a gracious and inclusive learning community, seeking to move past the paralysis that often occurs in well-meaning conversations on politics and controversial social issues. To this end, we welcome students of all backgrounds and majors: theater/performance majors, English majors, non-majors, those with long-standing opinions and insights, and/or those with fresh eyes and genuine interest.  WR, HU
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 211a / THST 315a, Acting Shakespeare  James Bundy

of our own).  HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 308a / FILM 242a / HUMS 454a / LITR 398a, Interpreting Film...