Advanced British Literature Program | Northwestern SPS - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

How do we better understand the conjuncture of digital technologies and the humanities? What kinds of thinking, research, teaching, politics, and cultural analysis can the digital enhance? How, in turn, do the fields that constitute the humanities (history, literary and language studies, philosophy, art history, musicology, cultural anthropology, media studies, etc.) offer guidance and grounding in today's wireless world? This course introduces students to the emerging field of critical digital studies, which looks at the intersection of digital technology and the humanities. Through a blending of weekly online engagements and three, Saturday afternoon face-to-face seminars, we address topics such as: what is the history of both the humanities and digital approaches to it as an interdisciplinary project? How can we address humanities questions today through new tactics of computational study found in informatics, statistical analysis, data visualization, and "big data" approaches? What new modes of publishing and scholarly communication do digital technologies make possible (multimedia presentation, podcasts, video, visualization, etc.)? How do we understand the ethics and politics of the digital world (surveillance, open source, net neutrality, sustainability, power)? Each week, students conduct readings and viewings, explore case studies, and complete online experiments. We pursue vigorous online discussion and convene in person for a seminar three times over the course of the quarter. Students pursue a final digital project in consultation with the instructor and in relation to individual interests and pursuits (graduate work, professional interests, digital humanities methodologies). Weekly topics include: digital annotation and database construction for close reading; "distant reading" tactics; digital mapping and timeline building; data and archives; network analysis; glitching and deformance for hermeneutic interpretation; and platforms and social media for humanities inquiry. (This course may count towards the American Studies, Chicago Studies, Digital Studies, History, Religious and Ethical Studies, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course is required of MALS and COAGS students, specializing in Digital Studies. But any interested graduate student may take the course as an elective. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on January 13, February 10, and March 17.)

This course approaches literary studies on a graduate level. We will examine the act of reading and literary interpretation, including various methodologies for producing and documenting literary criticism. We will also work to understand a range of literary theories and their suitable deployment through encounters with selected American realist, modernist, and postmodernist works by authors including Whitman, Twain, Cather, Dreiser, Hemingway, Eliot, Morrison, and DeLillo. We will survey various schools of criticism including Marxism, New Criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism, gender and queer theory, cultural studies, and the New York Intellectuals. (This course is required of all MALit students within the first year of study. This course may also count toward the American literature specialization.)

How do we interpret literary texts? What is a literary text? This course approaches literary studies on a graduate level, and it addresses various methodologies for reading and interpreting texts, as well as the practical skills needed to produce and document literary criticism. We will work to understand a range of literary theories and their suitable deployment through encounters with British writers including Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Bram Stoker, T. S. Eliot, A. S. Byatt, and Zadie Smith. Principal literary theories under review are formalism (New Criticism), historicism, Marxism, Freudian theory, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonialism. (This course is required of all MALit students within the first year of study. If taken previously, it may also count toward the British literature or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This course introduces students to graduate level work in literary and cultural analysis. The course draws its materials from the last hundred years of theoretical/critical writing on literature and other forms of cultural production such as films, political tracts, sermons, comics, games, rituals, architecture, blogs, podcasts and much else. We will examine a select set of theoretical positions and how they imagine and configure their objects of study, and devise methods and protocols for interpreting those objects (literary texts and cultural practices/artifacts). Such a theoretical/critical pedagogical approach poses and explores, among other things, the following questions: How is a literary text/cultural artifact isolated from or understood in relation to its social and historical context? What is the relationship between geopolitics and literature? How does the history of technologies of reading (and looking) relate to the texts and artifacts themselves? What is the status of literature in the digital age? Readings are drawn from literary theory, philosophy, film and media studies, and the humanistic social sciences. Specifically, we will focus on the literary/cultural theory and critical practice of the following thinkers/scholars: Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, Lauren Berlant, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Bourdieu, Fredric Jameson, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, and David Damrosch. (This course is a core requirement for MALS and MALit students. Students in the creative writing programs may also take this course to fulfill a literature or elective requirement.)

Literature of Plague and Pandemic

Some forays into fictional narratives are escapist; they allow us an imaginative respite from our daily reality. Other narrative adventures run in the opposite direction: through fiction, they allow us to engage with the difficulties of our present reality with greater insight; acuity; context; and (perhaps most importantly) company, reminding us that we are not the first to face even seemingly unprecedented terrors. This course will look to literary narratives of plague and pandemic as a way to contextualize, historicize, and deepen our comprehension of the way the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our social, economic, cultural, and imaginative realities. Texts may include Boccaccio's Decameron (1348–53); selections from the pamphlets of Thomas Dekker (early 17th century); selections from The Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Wortley Montagu (1763); Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826); Edgar Allan Poe's "Mask of the Red Death" (1842); Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912); Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912, in translation); Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse (1938); Albert Camus's La Peste (1947, in translation); José Sarmago's Blindness (1995); Yuri Herrera's The Transmigration of Bodies (2016); and Karen Walker Thompson's The Dreamers (2019). (This course may count towards the American Literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Note: This course is an online, asynchronous course.

How do we better understand the conjuncture of digital technologies and the humanities? What kinds of thinking, research, teaching, politics, and cultural analysis can the digital enhance? How, in turn, do the fields that constitute the humanities (history, literary and language studies, philosophy, art history, musicology, cultural anthropology, media studies, etc.) offer guidance and grounding in today's wireless world? This course introduces students to the emerging field of critical digital studies, which looks at the intersection of digital technology and the humanities. Through a blending of weekly online engagements and three, Saturday afternoon face-to-face seminars, we address topics such as: what is the history of both the humanities and digital approaches to it as an interdisciplinary project? How can we address humanities questions today through new tactics of computational study found in informatics, statistical analysis, data visualization, and "big data" approaches? What new modes of publishing and scholarly communication do digital technologies make possible (multimedia presentation, podcasts, video, visualization, etc.)? How do we understand the ethics and politics of the digital world (surveillance, open source, net neutrality, sustainability, power)? Each week, students conduct readings and viewings, explore case studies, and complete online experiments. We pursue vigorous online discussion and convene in person for a seminar three times over the course of the quarter. Students pursue a final digital project in consultation with the instructor and in relation to individual interests and pursuits (graduate work, professional interests, digital humanities methodologies). Weekly topics include: digital annotation and database construction for close reading; "distant reading" tactics; digital mapping and timeline building; data and archives; network analysis; glitching and deformance for hermeneutic interpretation; and platforms and social media for humanities inquiry.

One comes to this course with a willingness to question the relationships between parents and children, beginning with Georgian England and continuing to those of contemporary times, in literature, art and film. While these relationships can be loving, they also can be deeply disturbing, even abusive; in Dame Iris Murdoch's work, for example, the young are often sacrificial lambs for the older generation, sacrificed even to death. Causes of discord between the generations are often more numerous than causes for agreement and harmony. To unpack these relationships and explore these themes, we will read novels, view films and works of art and photography. Some of the work we will examine point out areas of disagreement between parents and children that come with one generation's shock when a child's homosexuality is revealed, as in Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun; political disagreement between generations can be equally difficult in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons; looking at Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, while viewing the photographs he took of the young child he used as the model for Alice can give us another view of adults and children in Victorian England, for example. Our list will be wide-ranging. (This course may count towards the History or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Between the so-called "Victorian" and "modern" periods we find a substantial slice of literary life roughly correlating with the reign of Edward VII (1901-1910), and it is fair to say that the novels of the twentieth century's first decade do not always comfortably fit either Victorian or modern labels. Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy are often cited as the "Big Three," but other writers must also be considered, including Rudyard Kipling (Kim, 1901), Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, 1902; The Secret Agent, 1907) E. M. Forster (Howards End, 1910), and Max Beerbohm (Zuleika Dobson, 1911). Suffragette writing of the period is especially intense, as consciousness of the New Woman and the violent tactics of the Pankhursts take hold in the popular imagination. As George Dangerfield so eloquently argued in his 1935 work The Strange Death of Liberal England, the period was marked by upheaval, including labor and Irish unrest as well as feminist fury trying to stir a complacent Liberal administration to reform. If we still associate the Edwardian period with high tea on the grand estate, or a pleasure-loving king beautifully memorialized on cigar boxes, then we do well to acquaint ourselves with Edwardian writing. Counts toward the British Literature specialization. (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the writing programs.)

The label of “decadence” was deployed by both detractors and champions of British literature in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Social critics of decadence associated it with degeneracy and decline. Those writers and artists who identified with the movement claimed it as a badge of distinction, and its flagship literary magazine, The Yellow Book, set the tone with its devotion to transgressive behavior. Some influence can be traced to the work of the French symbolist poets as well as Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel A rebours (“Against the Grain”), was dubbed the “breviary” of decadence. Looking further back, the mid-Victorian visual art and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood must also be considered formative. Much of the period's writing still has the power to shock. Thomas Hardy, the last of the great Victorian novelists, and a writer who never self-identified as decadent, nevertheless ceased writing novels after critics lambasted both Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as sexually immoral. One critic called the latter "Jude the Obscene.” William Butler Yeats began his career in the company of the Rhymers' Club, a group of aesthetes more remembered for their drug habits than their poetic output. Bram Stoker wrote his influential masterpiece, Dracula, in 1897, and to this day his delicious tale of pansexual vampires has been endlessly generative in popular culture, as well as influential in rethinking the terms of feminism and sexuality more generally. The New Woman was a principal theme. George Gissing's The Odd Women and George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession both appeared in 1893. Still, it was Oscar Wilde, playwright and author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), who most vividly dominates the decade. Put on trial, found guilty, and imprisoned on charges of "gross indecency," Wilde ushered in a new age when he referred to "the love that dare not speak its name." (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on specific TBA dates.)

In this seminar we will study two landmark novelists whose works still reverberate around the globe: the Irish expatriate James Joyce and the English writer and critic Virginia Woolf (each 1882-1941). Living and writing in a period of accelerating scientific, technological, social, political, and economic change as well as civil and world war, each created radically new narrative forms to register modern time and modern times from the antithetical vantage points, respectively, of colonial Dublin and the imperial London metropolis. Through a selection of each author’s major works, we’ll explore their creative interventions in literary genres (e.g., short story, autobiographical fiction, epic, elegy, the novel) in light of a host of influences; among others, theories of the unconscious and “the psychopathology of everyday life”; scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; relations among bodies, desire, gender, representational strategies; performance (studied and unconscious) and theatricality; loss and elegy; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life of comedy and humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as keys to political authority; the powers and pleasures of language in their modernist medleys of voices and styles: interior monologue, dialogue, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation, non-English words, silence. We will approach these challenging, exhilarating, deeply rewarding books in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, each of us seeking singular revelations with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.

Requirements: Active, informed participation; short weekly analytic and interpretive exercises; oral presentation; proposal and seminar project.

(This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, Comparative and World Literature, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

Henry James wrote his illustrious fictions at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, just as the technology of cinema was being perfected and its artistic potentials were first realized. To an uncanny degree, James’s central concerns as a writer were also those of cinema: the mysteries of personality and behavior; the tension between the old world and the new; the contrasting traditions of Europe and America; the revelation of character through objects, environments, and reckless impulses; and the various problems posed across the social ladder by sex, gender, money, death, and the supernatural. Comparing some of James’s short stories and novels to their film adaptations shows us how his plots and themes have been differently understood over time, and how film’s capabilities for rendering psychology, conflict, love, horror, aesthetics, and thought have also evolved. Students will learn key techniques of film analysis, will absorb some core ideas and innovations in the work of a dazzling author, and will braid these two areas of knowledge in their own sophisticated essays. (This course may count toward the American literature, British literature, or Literature film and visual culture specialization in MALit or the American studies specialization in MALS.)

British author and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch explores this intriguing question in much of her fiction, introducing it, in part in her mid-career novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, an allegorical tale of the perennial struggle between good and evil. Having begun life as a practicing Anglican, and ending it (before the onset of Alzheimer's disease) as an agnostic, Dame Iris touches upon this subject in much of her fiction, in particular posing the age-old human question, who or what is responsible for evil and suffering in the universe if there is no God? If there is no God, can you have Good? It is important to remember that she began life as a philosopher.

Many of Murdoch's characters are caught in this dilemma; some seem to be "evil", using the term rather loosely, and some too good to be true. The young are often sacrificial lambs for the older generation. This course will examine Murdoch's universal themes and her very topical writing for today's world. She is a writer who needs to be remembered and respected.

Texts will include A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Sovereignty of Good, A Severed Head, The Sea, The Sea, The Black Prince and The Book and The Brotherhood, among possible others. Course will feature some lecture, active discussion and short papers as well as one final longer paper.

(This course may count toward the British literature specialization. It may also count toward the Religion and ethical studies specialization in MALS. It may also count toward any of these specialization certificate programs.)

Great poets, according to Coleridge, have to create the taste by which they are enjoyed; they make new readers as well as original poems. During an age of revolutions, Romantic poets tried to transform not only the world of poetry but also the world outside it. This course will explore the projects of Romantic poetry by reading poems that challenge the reader to reimagine literature and life. Through a variety of critical approaches, we will try to enter the moment when each poet sought to answer radical, personal questions: what has been done in poetry? what has been left for me to do? Those poets will include such major figures as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, as well as many less well known, such as Charlotte Smith and John Clare. The course will begin by looking at responses of Romantic poems to earlier poetry, and it will end by looking at the presence of Romantic poems in later poetry. (This course may count toward the British literature specialization. It may also count toward the British literature specialization certificate program.)

This course considers the distinct and complementary ways in which literature and psychoanalysis have inquired into the structure and constitution of the human mind. Historically, literature and psychoanalysis have a long-standing, intimate, and sometimes fraught relationship. Beginning with its founding father Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis has founded its theories based on the observation of not only of real-life patients but also literary characters. And literary critics have drawn on the work of Freud and later psychoanalysts to afford insight into the structure, imagery, language, and characterizations of literary texts. This course will consider how literature and psychoanalysis offer alternative ways of representing the human psyche—sometimes complementarily, sometimes contradictorily. Texts will include foundational works of psychoanalytic theory by Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva; and literary texts that have been influential for, and/or influentially interpreted by, psychoanalysis. Students will gain fluency in the discourse of psychoanalysis; competency in using psychoanalytic concepts to interpret literary texts; and an appreciation for both the possibilities and the limits of such interpretative strategies.  (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

When Stéphane Mallarmé spoke at Oxford and Cambridge in 1894, he claimed that he was bringing news--"the most amazing and unprecedented news. . . . We have been experimenting with verse." But Mallarmé spoke in French. Twenty years would pass before the news took hold in England and America. Yet when it did, it sparked an outburst of profound experiments, a revolution that we still call modern poetry.

This course will explore the flowering and triumph of that revolution. Focusing on English and American poetry between the two world wars, we will read poems by a galaxy of modern masters, including William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, HD, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and W. H. Auden. Together, their experiments transformed ideas of what poetry could be. The object of this course will be to recapture, through close and creative readings, the freshness and the energy of that time, when modern poetry came into its own.

(This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This seminar will explore Victorian travel and crime fiction, looking at the interpenetration of popular and serious literature during the rise of the British Empire and the expansion of the United States. We will examine several important literary narratives that develop the concept of travel—as a form of escape, as a search for knowledge, as a source of adventure, and as an instrument in empire-building—in order to address its role in forming the identity of both individuals and nations. We will also discuss the growing importance of sensational (mystery and crime) fiction, examining its cultural and historical contexts, as well as its influence on serious writers such as Dickens, Conrad, and James. (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Why is mystery fiction (aka detective or crime fiction) such a popular genre, read across social strata and generating material for film and TV? What are the ways in which mysteries have influenced serious literary fiction? To address these questions we will explore the development of Anglo-American crime fiction from its mid-nineteenth-century origins to its global expansion today. We will examine the historical and social conditions for the emergence and development of the popular genre (urbanization of Europe and America; rise of the British Empire; importance of the inter-war period; Cold War, etc.). This will allow us to discuss the structure and evolution of formula fiction and its role in popular and high culture, its reflection of the preoccupations of Western societies, and the ways in which canonical writers have used elements of mystery fiction in their own literature. Readings will include works by representative mystery writers (Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Chandler), as well as literary fiction by Pynchon, O’Brien and Atkinson. (This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the liberal studies graduate and advanced graduate study certificate programs. )

This course will consider representations of the seven deadly sins in Renaissance thought, art, and literature of the western European tradition, with a particular focus on the English canon. Texts will include both visual and textual artifacts, including paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch; narrative poetry by John Skelton and Edmund Spenser; lyric poetry by Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell; and prose sermons and essays by John Donne and Michel de Montaigne. (All texts will be provided in translation.) To complement the Renaissance texts, we will read contemporary essays about the conception and practice of the seven deadly sins in contemporary secular culture. By comparing early modern and contemporary conceptions of the sins, we will foster a larger conversation about the cultural history of western ethics and morality. (This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Religious and Ethical Studies or Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Forthcoming.

"Elitist"; "obscurantist"; "formalist"; "autonomous" with respect to its surrounding social worlds: what's wrong with this picture? Against the outdated view that a "formalist" modernism, "autonomous" in respect to social reality, superseded and opposed "realist" modes of aesthetic representation, we'll begin with the premise that modernist realisms bear witness to historical actualities and human experience in the rapidly shrinking world of the early twentieth century. In an era of accelerating technological change, racialized imperialism, machine warfare, and tremendous social upheaval across national borders, all fueled and/or provoked by capitalist expansion, there emerged worldly, engaged, groundbreaking modernist artworks by such boundary-crossing international artists as the Norwegian Ibsen, the Anglo-Indian Kipling, the Polish Conrad witnessing the depredation of Congo by Belgium's King Leopold; the "semicolonial" or postcolonial Irish Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, Caribbean Jean Rhys, New Zealander Katherine Mansfield; Americans expatriates Pound and Eliot; and English-born travelers D. H, Lawrence and Virginia Woolf--both critical "outsiders within" their native Britain.

We'll begin with Ibsen's influential play A Doll's House, which helped to launch modernism's critical struggle against the nineteenth-century imperative that art offer "moral uplift" to confirm the existing social order. Then, depending on class members' background and interests, we'll study later instances of that critical struggle, choosing from works such as Kipling's Kim, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Mansfield's "An Indiscreet Journey," Yeats's "The Second Coming," Joyce's "The Dead" and Ulysses's "Penelope" episode, Eliot's Waste Land, Lawrence's "Odor of Chrysanthemums," Woolf's Between the Acts, Pound's Cathay or passages of The Pisan Cantos, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

(This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the writing programs.)

This blended online/face-to-face course will survey a range of ideas, attitudes, and ideologies about the human body as represented in literary texts of the western European Renaissance, with a concentration on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Topics of particular attention will include the four humors, medical dissection, sex and gender, race, the grotesque body, the body in pain, the Eucharist, and the animal body. To learn about these diverse topics, we will read and analyze a wide variety of materials, including Renaissance poetry, plays, medical texts, and works of visual art; contemporary works of literary criticism; and contemporary literary theory. In addition to reading assignments, students will contribute to online discussion boards and submit videos, recording their responses to the readings in both written and oral form. The culmination of the course will take the form of a mini-conference at which students will present their final papers and entertain questions about their original research.

(This course may count towards the British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature program. It may count towards the Digital Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature course or elective in graduate writing programs. Additionally, it may count towards certificates of graduate studies. Please note, this course is a hybrid which will meet in person on April 6, May 11, and June 8).

Our culture privileges originality. We laud biologists who innovate with new pharmaceuticals; we praise books for their imagination; and we ask students to develop “original” arguments. Shakespeare’s culture had no such qualms. His plots were largely adapted from extant sources; he held no copyright on his written work; and he earned his living not from the composition of plays but from acting in and producing those plays in London. This course takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a case study in adaptation to interrogate ideas of intellectual property, artistic innovation, and originality. We will read Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (one source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet), the play itself (in both the first and second quartos), and multiple rewritings of the play by contemporary authors. Texts may include Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius, Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, David Wrobleski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, and several film adaptations. (This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program. NOTE: This course will be taught remotely on Zoom each week during the time designated.)

This course will trace the development of the English novel from travel narrative, Gothic and sentimental fiction to the realism of Jane Austen. We will read selections from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), usually considered the first English novel, and from 18th-C. Gothic and sentimental fiction to compare these to Austen’s realistic comedies of manners. The course will focus on Austen’s novels, from her parody of Gothic and sentimental romances in Northanger Abbey to her satire of British society in Persuasion. We will also look at the enduring popularity and afterlife of Jane Austen’s oeuvre and current “Austenmania” with its plethora of film adaptations, sequels, and parodies, including a more serious treatment of Austen’s fictional world in Jo Baker’s 2013 novel Longbourn, the story of Pride and Prejudice told from the perspective of the servants. (This course may count towards the British Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the creative writing program.)

Courses in literature-to-film adaptation often emphasize canonical and historically distant works by such authors as Shakespeare, Austen, or the Victorians. This course instead centers on contemporary novels and short stories as well as their film adaptations, mostly but not exclusively produced in Hollywood. Beyond simply comparing these texts in terms of story or style, we will ask how literary fiction has itself changed in a 21st-century media environment where film rights are often sold before novels get finished, and where financing, production, media circulation, and creative processes constantly change. We will read American stories that have been adapted differently by U.S. and international filmmakers, and we will contemplate the politics that appear to motivate which texts get adapted -- and which themes are considered "literary," "prestigious," or globally marketable in an era when comic books, video games, and prior movies inspire more adaptations than do recent novels or plays. Along the way, we will master key skills of formal analysis and thematic argument regarding both literature and film. Key texts are likely to include "Brokeback Mountain" (Proulx), Children of Men (James), No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), "So Much Water So Close to Home" (Carver), Oil! (Sinclair), Atonement (McEwan), "Lust, Caution" (Zhang), The Reader (Schlink), and Persepolis (Satrapi), as well as the movies derived from these texts.  (This course may count towards the American literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature, and Visual Culture or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs.)

This seminar takes its impetus from the hotly awaited dystopian sequel The Testaments (publication date September 10, 2019), Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to her acclaimed novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale envisions a near-future American dystopia in which a dwindling population of fertile women are forced into reproductive service for the ruling cadre of men. As you are no doubt aware, we have witnessed a resurgence of interest in The Handmaid’s Tale, from the currently streaming Hulu series to real-life feminist activists wearing the Handmaid uniform of red robes and white bonnets. Why, we will ask, has Atwood’s speculative fiction—her term for her imaginative rendition of catastrophic near futurity—proved so meaningful for us? How does The Handmaid’s Tale invite us to think about the status of women, in history and today, as a critical index of societal function and dysfunction? What might Atwood’s book teach us about our own capacities as agents of acceptance and resistance? Finally, are there problems with Atwood’s portrait of dystopian America, whether in relation to our history, our present, or our profoundly embattled future?

We’ll read Atwood’s book closely, with attention to the political and cultural climate in 1985, the year of its publication. Then we’ll turn to its sequel, as well as to other dystopian visions that imagine women’s key role in social, ecological, ethical, and species catastrophe and possible regeneration. Along with The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, our reading list includes: Margaret Atwood’s later dystopia The Year of the Flood; Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring; Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves; Naomi Alderman, The Power; Aliya Whiteley, The Beauty; Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. We will also add one or two items to the syllabus based on class consensus—another dystopian fiction, novella, or story; and/ or a dystopian feminist film (for example, “Mad Max: Fury Road”); and/ or a female-centered fantasy comic (for example, Paper Girls, Saga, or Monstress). For required writing in this class, you will have the opportunity to generate analytic essays as well as your own creative visions of near-future dystopia.

Please note: several of the assigned texts contain graphic descriptions of violence, including sexual violence.

(This course may count towards the American Literature, British Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master's in literature and advanced graduate study certificate programs. This course may also count towards the American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies and advanced graduate study certificate programs. It may also count as a literature course or elective in the writing programs. Additionally, this course may count towards certificates of graduate studies)

What are the ways that the idea of “world-making” has been approached and reinvented by writers intrigued by the contours of epic? This course analyzes the large themes invited by the genre of epic as they become illuminated in modern and contemporary literature, focusing on three specific works—James Joyce’s Ulysses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.. (This course may count towards the American Literature, British Literature, Comparative and World Literature, Film, Literature and Visual Culture, or Interdisciplinary Studies specializations in the master of arts in literature program. This course may count towards the Interdisciplinary Studies specialization in the master of arts in liberal studies program. It may also count as a literature requirement or elective in the creative writing program. Additionally, this course may count towards certain certificates of graduate studies.)