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Courses

Related Courses

This page contains content from the 2008–09 academic year. For current information, visit the Harvard Extension School website at www.extension.harvard.edu.

English

ENGL E-102 Introduction to Old English Literature (12713) (Syllabus) (Printable version)
Daniel Donoghue, PhD, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $450, undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Fall term: Wednesdays beginning Sept. 17, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 110.

This course introduces the earliest English literature, including selections from Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, and various prose texts. Because the language has changed so much over the 1,000 years, Old English has to be learned as a foreign language (hence the emphasis on grammar) but by the end of one term of study, students read the most challenging and beautiful literature it has to offer. Secondary readings supplement the Old English texts. (4 credits)

ENGL E-106 Beowulf and Seamus Heaney (22758) (Website) (Printable version)
Daniel Donoghue, PhD, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University.
Graduate seminar. Course tuition: graduate credit $1,725. Limited enrollment.
Spring term: Wednesdays beginning Jan. 28, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 111.

Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf has provoked a renewed interest in the poem among the general public and, among medievalists, in his principles of translation. This seminar includes a detailed study of the Old English poem and a crash course on the language to allow students to translate set passages on their own. We put Heaney's translation in the context of his other poems and poetic translations. Prerequisite: prior knowledge of Old English is helpful but not required. (4 credits)

ENGL E-115b Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (13221) (Website) (Printable version)
Larry D. Benson, PhD, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $450, undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Fall term: Thursdays beginning Sept. 18, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 207.

This course is a reading in Middle English of selected tales. No previous knowledge of Middle English is assumed. The course makes considerable use of electronic resources on the course website. Students must have access to the Web. (4 credits)

ENGL E-121/W Masterworks of Western Drama (22890) (Website) (Printable version)
Sue Weaver Schopf, PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $450, undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Spring term: Wednesdays beginning Jan. 28, 5:30-7:30 pm, Harvard Hall, Room 104.

This course is an introduction to the drama as both performance and literary genre through an examination of some acknowledged masterpieces of Western playwriting. It covers social, historical, and religious origins; theories and patterns of tragedy and comedy from the classical theater to the present; the architecture of the theater; the psychology of the theatrical experience; changing notions of the protagonist from the hero to the modern anti-hero; the drama as both mirror and critic of society. Playwrights to be considered range from Sophocles to Martin McDonagh. An optional one-week theater tour of London in the company of the instructor is offered during spring break, featuring daily attendance at plays and backstage tours of several major theaters. (4 credits)

ENGL E-126 A Silk Road Course: Travel and Transformation on the High Seas—An Imaginary Journey in the Early Seventeenth Century (23064) (Website) (Printable version)
Stephen Greenblatt, PhD, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit and undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Spring term
Online only, beginning Jan. 30. See Distance Education. Lecture 1 video.

This is a course about global mobility, encounter, and exchange at the time that Harvard College was founded in 1636. Using the interactive resources of computer technology and drawing upon faculty experts from many disciplines, we follow imaginary voyages of three ships that leave England in 1633. Sites include London's Globe Theatre, Benin, Barbados, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Morocco, Istanbul, Venice, Virginia, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Topics include the slave trade, reconnaissance, colonization, conversion, geography, navigation, and literary culture. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course English 127. Prerequisite: Students enrolling for graduate credit should have completed three undergraduate literature courses, with one focusing on the period before 1800; HUMA E-100 is strongly recommended. Graduate-credit students should send a description of their experience to Melissa Pino,pino@fas.harvard.edu. Students must view sample online lectures before they register. (4 credits)

ENGL E-130 Shakespeare and Modern Culture (13186) (Website) (Printable version)
Marjorie Garber, PhD, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit and undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Fall term
Online only, beginning Sept. 15. See Distance Education. Lecture 1 video.

Beginning with the premise that Shakespeare makes "modernity" and that modernity makes "Shakespeare," the course considers works that interact with the culture of the late nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, the century of Freud and Marx, Brecht and Beckett, politics, film, and American popular culture. Probable readings to include Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest, plays that have had a major impact upon notions of character, personality, anomie, gender, sexuality, dissociation, politics, leadership, and other ideas by which modernity/post-modernity measures identity, essence, selfhood, and success. The recorded lectures are from the 2007 Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course English 125. Prerequisites: students must view sample online lectures before they register. Any student wishing to take this course for graduate credit should have an English or comparative literature degree with a B average or above; or HUMA E-100 and a college course in Shakespeare and a course in literary theory. Graduate-credit students are asked to submit a brief history of previous coursework the first week of the semester and are expected to be familiar with research and documentation methods. (4 credits)

ENGL E-132 Shakespeare in Slow Motion (23025) (Website) (Printable version)
Marjorie Garber, PhD, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University.
Graduate seminar. Course tuition: graduate credit $1,725. Limited enrollment.
Spring term
Mondays, beginning Feb. 2, 5:30-7:30pm, Barker Center for the Humanities, 018.

This course is a close reading of four or five plays by Shakespeare. Students are expected to familiarize themselves with the critical, historical, and editorial questions provoked by these plays, and to read some ancillary criticism and theory, but the seminar focuses on an intensive ("slow reading") attention to the text, including, but not limited to, questions of imagery, symbolism, allegorization, philology, nuance, gesture, and affect. Prerequisite: an undergraduate degree in English or other literary study, or in a related humanities discipline. Highly recommended: HUMA E-100 and a college course in Shakespeare. Students should send descriptions of their previous coursework to Melissa Pino, pino@fas.harvard.edu, before January 23. (4 credits)

ENGL E-151k/W Understanding Poetry (13031) (Syllabus) (Printable version)
Sue Weaver Schopf, PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $450, undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Fall term: Wednesdays beginning Sept. 17, 5:30-7:30 pm, Harvard Hall, Room 104. Required section meetings Wednesdays, 7:35-8:35 pm.

Of all the kinds of literature, poetry often seems the most intimidating and inaccessible; yet it has also been held in the highest esteem for thousands of years. How does poetic language differ from ordinary language? What devices do poets employ to give expression to their ideas and feelings? What are the great themes of poetry? How does the process of composition occur? What is the relationship between a poem's subject matter, purpose, and form? What are the inner and outer contexts of a poem? And how do we write about poetry? Emphasis is on the many forms of lyric poetry (chiefly in the British and American traditions), as well as some study of narrative and dramatic poetry. The course is designed to foster close reading skills, greater comprehension of poetry, and an appreciation for the unique way in which this medium communicates beauty and knowledge to the reader. (4 credits)

ENGL E-152/W Victorian Literature and Visual Culture (23063) (Website) (Printable version)
Michele Martinez, PhD.
Course tuition: noncredit $450, undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Spring term: Thursdays beginning Jan. 29, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 206.

This course explores the relationship between Victorian painting and writing, as well as the role of popular spectacles, photography, and exhibitions in literary texts. Authors and artists include Charlotte Brontë, Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, William Morris, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, William Thackeray, John Thomson, and Oscar Wilde. (4 credits)

ENGL E-159 Reading James Joyce (12778) (Syllabus) (Printable version)
Lewis H. Miller, Jr., PhD, Professor of English, Emeritus, Indiana University.
Course tuition: noncredit $450, undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Fall term: Tuesdays beginning Sept. 16, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 103.

This course is an exploration of Joyce's remarkable artistic achievements in "The Dead," A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially Ulysses, a close study of which occupies us for most of the semester. Our focus includes classical paradigms, Judeo-Christian ritual, Irish history, literary history, popular culture, Joyce's biography, and our own lives. Prerequisite: courses in close reading of fiction or poetry. Students should read "The Dead" before the first class meeting. Also, a prior familiarity with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would be helpful. (4 credits)

ENGL E-170 Classic American Novels: Rereadings and Reinterpretations (13032) (Website) (Printable version)
Michael Shinagel, PhD, Senior Lecturer on English, Harvard University.
Graduate seminar. Course tuition: graduate credit $1,725. Limited enrollment.
Fall term: Mondays beginning Sept. 15, 5:30-7:30 pm, 51 Brattle Street, Room 721.

This seminar explores the critical and aesthetic implications between first and later readings of classic American novels. Whereas first readings of major novels provide readers with excitement, suspense, and novelty, second readings enable us to appreciate the narrative strategies and complexities of character in a more informed and nuanced manner. The following novels are studied: The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, The Ambassadors, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, and Invisible Man. Prerequisites: courses on the novel, preferably American, and familiarity with most of the novels to be studied in the seminar. (4 credits)

ENGL E-175 Southern Literature and Culture in the United States (22941) (Website) (Printable version)
John Stauffer, PhD, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. Jason W. Stevens, PhD, Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit and undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Spring term
Online only, beginning Jan. 29. See Distance Education Lecture 1 video.

This interdisciplinary course examines the rich tradition of Southern literature and culture in the United States from slavery to the present. We construe culture widely to mean the ways of life as represented by fiction, biography, poetry, cinema, music, theater, photography, historiography, and religion. At least since the antebellum period, the South has defined itself in a defensive and sometimes belligerent posture in relation to the US. We explore the South, as imagined by Southerners, and focus on how the art of this region functions ideologically, rhetorically, aesthetically, and religiously in order to imagine constructions of Southern and national identities. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course English 173. Prerequisite: students must view sample online lectures before they register. (4 credits)

ENGL E-186 Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian: Sacred Violence in the American Novel (13030) (Syllabus) (Printable version)
Theoharis C. Theoharis, PhD, Associate in Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $450, undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Fall term: Mondays beginning Sept. 15, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 202.

Sacred violence—the idea that destruction creates and bestows absolute value—saturates the American imagination, especially American literature, in high and low forms. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian present this essential American theme in its classic and most heroic nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms. (4 credits)

ENGL E-196 American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac (13075) (Website) (Printable version)
John Stauffer, PhD, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. Timothy Patrick McCarthy, PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit and undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Fall term
Online only, beginning Sept. 16. See Distance Education. Optional sections to be arranged. Lecture 1 video.

This interdisciplinary course examines the rich tradition of protest literature in the United States from the American Revolution to the rise of hip hop and globalization. Using a broad definition of protest literature, it focuses on the production and consumption of dissent as a site of progressive social critique, using a wide variety of print, visual, and oral forms. We examine the historical links between modes of protest and meanings of literature, and explore how various expressions of dissent function as aesthetic, performative, rhetorical, and ideological texts within specific cultural contexts. "Readings" range from novels to photographs and music. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course Literature and Arts A-86. Prerequisite: students must view sample online lectures before they register. (4 credits)

ENGL E-202 American Dissent (13199) (Website) (Printable version)
Sacvan Bercovitch, PhD, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University.
Graduate seminar. Course tuition: graduate credit $1,725. Limited enrollment.
Fall term: Tuesdays beginning Sept. 16, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 112.

"Every young American," wrote Emerson, "is a natural dissenter." This seems a premonition of student activism in our time, but it is really an insight into our culture at large. This seminar explores the deep and abiding tradition of dissent in the US. For dissent here is not limited to the young; it is basic to our national identity. The American way encourages dissent. Indeed, we are heirs to a long history of dissent, from the revolutionary founders to the rhetoric of change in current politics—from the Declaration of Independence to The Audacity of Hope. But it is a peculiar history, centered on a paradox that is inherent in the very meaning of America. As a system of values or as an ideal, America has served as a summons both to independence and to conformity, to chauvinism as well as to radicalism. Dissent in the United States is not just protest. Rather, it is a richly ambiguous term, representing a call to resistance and/or an appeal to conservatism. We examine dissent from a literary-cultural perspective, through a variety of genres—the declaration, the essay, the memoir, film, the political manifesto, and the novel. By different aesthetic means, and within changing historical contexts, these works speak directly to the process of the country's development, and to the distinctive, vibrant, complex nature of American dissent. (4 credits)

ENGL E-215/W Cross-Cultural Studies in the Novel (22891) (Syllabus) (Printable version)
Sue Lonoff, PhD, Senior Associate, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $450, undergraduate credit $800, graduate credit $1,725.
Spring term: Tuesdays beginning Jan. 27, 5:30-7:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 214.

In this course, the reading and discussion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels from England, France, the United States, and India focus on a theme: ambition. We investigate the following questions: What kinds of ambition emerge in these texts? How do novels from different cultures represent the lures and costs of success? How does gender influence a character's objectives? What changes and what remains constant in the issues and in the novel form? Authors include Stendhal, Dickens, Hardy, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Larsen, and Mukherjee. (4 credits)

ENGL E-245 Approaches to the Practice and Profession of Literary Study (13009) (Website) (Printable version)
Marjorie Garber, PhD, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University.
Graduate seminar. Course tuition: graduate credit $1,725. Limited enrollment.
Fall term: Mondays beginning Sept. 15, 5:30-7:30 pm, Barker Center for the Humanities, Room 018.

This seminar covers developments in literary criticism and theory from the 1960s to the present (including historicism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, gender theory, postcoloniality, cultural studies, book history, and visual and performance studies), and provides an overview of the profession: publication, teaching, conferences, research, and other aspects of academic life. It is not a theory course, per se, but a course in the theories that have influenced literary studies over the past several decades. At least half of the readings are applied readings, in which literary critics work with theoretical paradigms in analyzing specific texts in English and American literature. Students are asked to choose a focal literary text (in English) and to work with it throughout the term. Prerequisite: an undergraduate degree in English or other literary study, or in a related humanities discipline. Highly recommended: HUMA E-100 or a college course in literary theory. Students should bring descriptions of their previous coursework to the first class meeting. (4 credits)