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English

ENGL E-102 Introduction to Old English Literature (12713)

Fall term

Daniel Donoghue, PhD, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University.

Class times: Wednesdays beginning Sept. 2, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit $600, undergraduate credit $900, graduate credit $1,800.

This course introduces the earliest English literature, building up to selections from poems such as 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)

Spring term

Daniel Donoghue, PhD, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University.

Class times: Mondays beginning Jan. 25, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: graduate credit $1,800.

Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment.

Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf has provoked 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-112/W Masterpieces of Irish Literature (13291)

Fall term

Sue Weaver Schopf, PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University.

Class times: Wednesdays beginning Sept. 2, 5:30-7:30 pm. Optional film screenings Wednesdays, 7:35-9:35 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit and undergraduate credit $950, graduate credit $1,850.

Online option available. Lecture 1 video.

Writing-intensive course.

This course is an examination of works of poetry, prose, and drama in English by some of Ireland's greatest writers, primarily from the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As we explore these works we consider how Ireland has been depicted by insiders and outsiders, from tragic, comic, political, and social perspectives; and how conceptions of Irish identity have been represented, disguised, suppressed, and stereotyped. Readings include works by poets such as Moore, Mangan, Yeats, and Heaney; prose writers such as Somerville and Ross, Joyce, and Trevor; and dramatists such as Synge, Lady Gregory, Beckett, Behan, O'Casey, Friel, and McDonagh. Among the developments to be considered are the Celtic renaissance, the founding of the Abbey Theatre, and "The Troubles" as literary subject and inspiration. Occasional opportunities to view some of the finest film adaptations of these literary works, as well as films representing key events in Irish history, are offered after class. (4 credits)

ENGL E-113a The Bible as Literature (23326)

January session

Theoharis C. Theoharis, PhD.

Class times: Tuesdays, Thursdays beginning Jan. 5, 6-8:30 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit $300, undergraduate credit $450, graduate credit $900.

The Bible, although the world's most famous book, is not properly a book at all, but a collection of many kinds of writing, including written versions of ritual song. This anthological amalgam, created over 800 years in Hebrew and Greek, and finished in its current form in the third century CE, is not only an origin, but an ongoing authority and resource for imaginative, religious, historical, political, and oratorical writing of all kinds everywhere. It also has exerted an omnipresent influence on all forms of art, thought, and social order in the western tradition. This class focuses on those literary elements—the types of narrative and poetic form, and the styles of wisdom writing—that present the Bible's view of reality and man's place in it as divinely appointed. (2 credits)

ENGL E-115b Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (13221)

Fall term

Larry D. Benson, PhD, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University.

Class times: Thursdays beginning Sept. 3, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit $600, undergraduate credit $900, graduate credit $1,800.

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-130 Shakespeare and Modern Culture (23293)

Spring term

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 $950, graduate credit $1,850.

Online only, beginning Jan. 25.

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-133 Theater, Dream, Shakespeare (13449)

Fall term

Marjorie Garber, PhD, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University.
Diane Paulus, MFA, Professor of the Practice of Theatre and Artistic Director, American Repertory Theatre, Harvard University.

Course tuition: noncredit and undergraduate credit $950, graduate credit $1,850.

Online only, beginning Sept. 9. Please note: This course begins the second week of classes. Lecture 1 video.

This course considers three Shakespearean dream plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale, in immediate conjunction with the American Repertory Theatre fall season of productions based on those plays, as well as dream works from Shakespeare's time to the modern era. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course English 128. Prerequisites: 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-146 Classic English Fictions Reconsidered (13401)

Fall term

Michael Shinagel, PhD, Senior Lecturer on English, Harvard University.

Class times: Mondays beginning Aug. 31, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: graduate credit $1,800.

Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment.

This seminar is devoted to a close reading—in some cases a rereading—of classic works of English fiction, such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, as well as representative novels by Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, and Woolf, supplemented by extensive readings of literary and cultural criticism, to arrive at informed reinterpretations of each of these major works. Prerequisites: courses on the novel and criticism of fiction preferred. (4 credits)

ENGL E-151c/W Victorian Fiction and its Offshoots (23256)

Spring term

*** ENGL E-151c/W has been CANCELED. ***

ENGL E-156a Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture (23331)

Spring term

Matthew Kaiser, PhD, Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University.

Course tuition: noncredit and undergraduate credit $950, graduate credit $1,850.

Online only, beginning Jan. 27.

The Victorian middle classes were both titillated and repelled by transgression and abnormality: from Jack the Ripper to the Elephant Man, from venereal disease to self-murder. In an era marked by unprecedented prosperity and widespread poverty, the Victorians aggressively policed—and clandestinely crossed—increasingly porous and unstable boundaries. Across a range of literary genres, we map the nineteenth-century British obsession with crime and horror, with phenomena that rattle one's sense of self. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course English 156. (4 credits)

ENGL E-159 Reading James Joyce (23275)

Spring term

Lewis H. Miller, Jr., PhD, Professor of English, Emeritus, Indiana University.

Class times: Wednesdays beginning Jan. 27, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit $600, undergraduate credit $900, graduate credit $1,800.

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-175 Southern Literature and Culture in the United States (22941)

Spring term

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 $950, graduate credit $1,850.

Online only, beginning Jan. 26.

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. (4 credits)

ENGL E-182b Four American Poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W.C. Williams, Elizabeth Bishop (13312)

Fall term

Theoharis C. Theoharis, PhD.

Class times: Mondays beginning Aug. 31, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit $600, undergraduate credit $900, graduate credit $1,800.

Lyric poetry traditionally treats intense personal experiences of God, love, and nature. American lyric poetry from the nineteenth century forward has always included writers who transformed that tradition radically, especially by infusing conceptual and intellectual rigor into their poetry of self-expression and self-examination. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop are four of the most prominent experimental transformers of the lyric form in American literature. Studying them amounts to studying American culture in its most crucial formative moments. (4 credits)

ENGL E-196 American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac (13075)

Fall term

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 $950, graduate credit $1,850.

Online only, beginning Sept. 2. 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 2008 Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course Literature and Arts A-86. (4 credits)

ENGL E-202 American Dissent (23334)

Spring term

Sacvan Bercovitch, PhD, Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature, Harvard University.

Class times: Tuesdays beginning Jan. 26, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: graduate credit $1,800.

Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment.

"Every young American," wrote Emerson, "is a natural dissenter." This seminar explores the deep and abiding tradition of dissent in the United States. The American way encourages dissent. Indeed, we are heirs to a long history of dissent, from the revolutionary founders to the current rhetoric of change. 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 and radicalism alike. 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, the sermon, poetry, 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-204 American Fiction and its Discontents (13478)

Fall term

Sacvan Bercovitch, PhD, Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature, Harvard University.

Class times: Thursdays beginning Sept. 3, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: graduate credit $1,800.

Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment.

America is known as the country of hope. Optimism and opportunity are its cultural keywords. And yet many major works of American literature sound a tone of negation. The keywords for that tradition in prose fiction, from Poe to the present, are oppression and despair, violence and the grotesque. This seminar examines that tradition, aesthetically and culturally, with special emphasis on twentieth-century texts. Authors include Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Salinger, Bellow, and Morrison, among others. (4 credits)

ENGL E-210/W 1890-1915: An Era of Cultural Explosion (23362)

Spring term

Sue Lonoff, PhD, Senior Associate, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University.

Class times: Thursdays beginning Jan. 28, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit $600, undergraduate credit $900, graduate credit $1,800.

Writing-intensive course.

In the 25 years between 1890 and 1915, literary movements flourished. Innovation and experimentation permeated the culture, high as well as low. Writers rebelled against tradition, revitalized established genres, and brought the margins to bear upon the mainstream, in their own time and in ours. In this course, we examine representative English, Irish, and American literature associated with the movements of this era. We also consider the contexts in which these works developed and, as time permits, trace correspondences to the other arts of the period. Readings include works by Oscar Wilde, Stephen Crane, Conan Doyle, H.G. Welles, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and others. (4 credits)

ENGL E-230 The Rhetoric of Belief (13296)

Fall term

Robert Kiely, PhD, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Research Professor of English, Harvard University.

Class times: Tuesdays beginning Sept. 1, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: graduate credit $1,800.

Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment.

This seminar examines the lives and writings of men and women who have devoted themselves to belief in a religious, political, or personal ideal. Writers include Thoreau, Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Monette. (4 credits)

ENGL E-232/W Orientalism in British Literature and Visual Culture (23159)

Spring term

Sue Weaver Schopf, PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University.

Class times: Wednesdays beginning Jan. 27, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: noncredit $600, undergraduate credit $900, graduate credit $1,800.

Writing-intensive course.

In his controversial 1978 book, Orientalism, Edward Said maintained that much of the West's dealings with the Middle East have been shaped by cultural misrepresentations that can be traced to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rise of Orientalism in Britain during this period can be attributed to a variety of causes: increased travel to exotic locales in Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt; published memoirs recounting these journeys and imaginative literature with Eastern settings; translation of The Arabian Nights tales into French and English; a revolution in studies of the Bible and ancient languages; military campaigns that also brought back scientific specimens, drawings of monuments, and magnificent artifacts; romantic paintings of harem women, turbaned carpet merchants, and camel caravans. Collectively, these writings and artworks presented a view of the East that combined fact and fantasy, admiration and revulsion, and a complex of ideas often serving darker political motives rooted in the notion of Western superiority. This course examines a range of texts, genres, and visual media—largely British, but including a few key French works as well—reflecting Orientalist influence and the "Egyptomania" inspired by Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. Works by authors such as Beckford, Johnson, Moore, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, Flaubert, Burton, and Lawrence; and painters such as Ingres, Delacroix, David Robert, William Holman Hunt, and John Frederick Lewis are examined as we attempt to unearth the meanings, motives, and implications of these diverse representations. To experience more directly the monuments and landscapes that influenced this phenomenon, an optional 11-day trip to Egypt, in the company of the instructor, is offered at spring break. Tour details and course website available after August 1. (4 credits)

ENGL E-291 Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Study (23294)

Spring term

Marjorie Garber, PhD, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University.

Class times: Mondays beginning Jan. 25, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Course tuition: graduate credit $1,800.

Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment.

This seminar examines the major writings of Sigmund Freud in English translation, together with relevant works of literature and culture. Additional readings from Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Zizek, and Edelman, among others. Psychoanalysis is considered as a reading practice, a master narrative, an allegorical structure, a theatrical and cinematic mode, and a political intervention. Students develop their own approach to Freud and psychoanalysis in a final seminar paper. Prerequisites: 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)



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