Fall 2024
Introduction to Old English Language and Literature
Daniel Donoghue PhD, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University
This course introduces the earliest English literature, starting with basic grammar and building up to selections from various prose texts and poems such as The Wanderer and The Dream of the Rood. Because the language has changed so much over 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.
Spring 2025
Tolkien's Library
Daniel Donoghue PhD, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University
J. R. R. Tolkien's creative imagination was famously inspired by his wide reading in medieval texts from northwestern Europe, drawing from Old English, Old Icelandic, and other vernacular literatures. This course reads across the genres of literature familiar to Tolkien, including Beowulf and other Old English literature, Nj ls Saga and other Icelandic sagas, excerpts from the Finnish Kalevala, and Irish literature like the T in B C ailnge. The readings are in translation, with facing-page original texts where possible (especially Old English). Primary texts are supplemented by relevant works of criticism. We also dip into Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and his other high fantasy to note parallels.
Spring 2025
Shakespeare's Tragedies
Elliott Turley PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
This course surveys William Shakespeare's tragedies, including famous works such as Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, as well as less produced plays like Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus. Although the primary focus of study is the plays themselves, we also use them as launching points to consider a variety of topics and questions. Discussions and supplemental readings address the nature of tragedy and its purpose(s), the historical and political context for these plays in early modern England, their performance history and afterlives on stage and screen, and the role of Shakespeare as a cultural touchstone.
Fall 2024
Decadence, Degeneration, and Decline: The Popular British Novel
Margaret Deli PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
The British Empire controlled roughly a quarter of the world by the end of the nineteenth century; its literature, however, was increasingly haunted by decline. This course explores why, by way of some of the writers and texts most responsible for shaping what it means to be British in our pop-cultural consciousness. Focusing on three kinds of breakdown aesthetic decadence, aristocratic degeneration, and imperial decline our course links popular texts like Dracula (1897), Brideshead Revisited (1945), and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) to the emergence of a new kind of British power based on myth and nostalgia. We also think about decline as a shaper of modernism, the political power of decline, and the cultural afterlives of the texts we encounter.
Fall 2024
Finnegans Wake and Comparative Literature
John T. Hamilton PhD, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University
The course undertakes a close examination of James Joyce's major work with an emphasis on Finnegans Wake, read in view of comparative literary theories and methods.
Spring 2025
Hemingway: A Survey
Margaret Deli PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
When Ernest Hemingway died in 1961, his work was already beginning to fall out of critical favor and off university syllabi. And yet he was indisputably the most famous writer in the world: the winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature and the best-selling author of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. The ensuing decades have done little to dampen Hemingway's popular appeal (there are Hemingway writing contests, Hemingway drinking contests, and even a Hemingway furniture line). What are we to make of the longstanding rift between Hemingway's critical fortunes and his contemporary celebrity? Our course takes a broad view of Hemingway's life and work to explore these and other questions related to his literary craftsmanship and popular appeal. Students should expect to read extensively, not just the novels and short stories of Ernest Hemingway but the work of mentors and rivals like Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.
Spring 2025
Poetry in America: From the Civil War through Modernism
Elisa New PhD, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University - Jesse Raber PhD, Writer
This course spans a critical era in American literature, beginning with antebellum and Civil War poetry, entering the twentieth century, and traversing the transformative modernist era. This course begins with the poetry of the American Civil War and the series of major events and social movements that followed it including Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, and Manifest Destiny. Encountering such poets as Herman Melville, Julia Ward Howe, Walt Whitman, Edward Arlington Robinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Emma Lazarus, and W.E.B. DuBois, we examine the language of patriotism, pride, violence, loss, and memory inspired by the nation's greatest conflict. As we enter the twentieth century, we encounter modernism, a movement that spanned the decades from the 1910s to the mid-1940s, and whose poetry marked a clear break from past traditions and past forms. We read such poets as Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Dorothy Parker, and Wallace Stevens. We study how these poets employed the language of rejection and revolution, of making and remaking, of artistic appropriation and cultural emancipation. Traveling to the homes and workplaces of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens; to the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, where the institution of American modernism was born; and even exploring the River Thames in the London of Eliot's The Waste Land, we see the sites that witnessed and cultivated the rise of American modernism.
Fall 2024
Poetry in America: Whitman and Dickinson
Elisa New PhD, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University - Jesse Raber PhD, Writer
This course focuses on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two influential and iconic American poets of the nineteenth century. First, we encounter Walt Whitman, a quintessentially American writer whose work continues to bear heavily upon the American poetic tradition. We explore Whitman's relationship to the city, the self, and the body through his life and poetry. Then, we turn to Emily Dickinson, one of America's most distinctive and prolific poets. While Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems during her lifetime, she chose never to publish, opting instead to revisit and revise her works throughout her lifetime. Keeping this dynamic of self-revision in mind, we consider a number of Dickinson's poems concerned with nature, art, the self, and darkness. We travel to the Dickinson Collection at Harvard's Houghton Library, and to Amherst, Massachusetts, paying a visit to the house in which the poet lived and wrote until her death in 1886.
Fall 2024
Seeing Nature in the Twentieth Century
Collier Brown PhD, Research Advisor in Social Science and Humanities, Harvard Extension School
In this course, students survey important contributions to modern American environmental literature. From the gritty social realism of the early 1900s to the post-pastoral lyricism of the early 2000s, we consider the diverse ways in which Americans have grappled with environmental issues in fiction, poetry, and even some photography. Our readings include writers like Mary Austin, Annie Dillard, Leslie Marmon Silko, Helena Mar a Viramontes, and Rachel Carson.
Spring 2025
Poetry at the End of the World
Collier Brown PhD, Research Advisor in Social Science and Humanities, Harvard Extension School
In this era of global environmental degradation what we are growing accustomed to calling the later Anthropocene many poets have turned their attention to the subject of human kinship and interdependency with the non-human world. And in this course, we read a number of poets, from the early twentieth century to the present, from A.R. Ammons to Ada Lim n, whose poems insist on a different way on an ecological way of seeing and talking about nature. This course may interest not only poetry enthusiasts but students of the environmental humanities more broadly: sustainability, literature, history, theater, and creative writing.
Fall 2024
Adapting Myth in Modern and Contemporary Drama
Elliott Turley PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
Although the term myth suggests very old stories, mythologies themselves continue to grow and change over time. This course examines how modern and contemporary playwrights adapt mythic materials to new contexts, not only drawing on myth but also changing the nature of myth itself. Several of the plays we examine reinterpret Greek myth, including Marina Carr's and Cherr e Moraga's Medea adaptations By the Bog of Cats and The Hungry Woman (respectively), Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice, and Suzan-Lori Parks' Odyssey-inspired Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, and 3), but we also draw upon other mythic traditions as well, as in works by Wole Soyinka, Girish Karnad, and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. In addition to gaining familiarity with several important works of the modern stage, the course interrogates what exactly makes something a myth and how mythology continues to operate in the present day.
Fall 2024
The Culture of Capitalism
Martin Puchner PhD, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University
The course asks how cultural products, including literature, theater, and film have captured the spirit of capitalism fueling its fantasies, contemplating its effects, and chronicling its crises. More than just an economic system, capitalism created new habits of life and mind as well as new values, forged and distilled by new forms of art. Core readings by Franklin, O'Neill, Rand, Miller, and Mamet and background readings by Smith, Marx, Taylor, Weber, Keynes, and Schumpeter.
January 2025
The Scientist Meets the Monster: From Frankenstein to Einstein
Sue Weaver Schopf PhD, Distinguished Service Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
When does science go too far? What are (or should be) its limitations? The scientist in literature is often represented as mad because of his willingness to go to any length to advance the cause of science and never more so than when experiments have unintended consequences or escape the scientist's control. This fear of science and the scientist becomes a serious literary preoccupation during the nineteenth century, when experiments in electricity, reanimation, chemistry, surgery, vivisection, the use of new technologies, and the implications of Darwinism were being widely discussed and their morality questioned. With the birth of the nuclear age in the twentieth century, public anxiety about science and its uses only intensified and continues to this day. This course examines five works that dramatize the dilemma of the scientist when confronting the monstrosities he creates or those over which science appears to be powerless: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), and C.P. Snow's The New Men (1954). We investigate the medical and scientific backgrounds of these works, the controversies they precipitated, and the authors' unusual storytelling devices. On some occasions, we may consider the filmed versions of these works and how they, too, have contributed to the image of science and the scientist that lurks in the popular imagination.
Fall 2024
The Novella: A Global History
Morgan Day Frank PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
Shorter than a novel but longer than a short story, the novella is one of the major prose forms in global literary culture today. This course takes students through almost seven centuries of cultural history to understand the novella's evolution into its now recognizable form. We begin with early examples, including stories from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron and Miguel de Cervantes's Exemplary Novellas, and then move on to modern works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment. How do formal categories like character and plot operate in a genre that is out of step with our normal sense of narrative scale? How have external conditions in literary culture for instance, the emergence of mass magazines at the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of the creative writing program after World War II influenced the writing of novellas? What even is a novella? What unifies this unruly tradition? These sorts of questions guide us as we grapple with thirteen classic novellas over the course of the semester.
Spring 2025
Art of the Personal Essay
Collier Brown PhD, Research Advisor in Social Science and Humanities, Harvard Extension School
In this course, we look at the art of the essay from the sixteenth-century to the present, making important stops along the way at the works of Michel de Montaigne (who first popularized the genre), William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf, and James Baldwin, right up to today's most innovative essayists writers like Rebecca Solnit, Janet Malcolm, and Ross Gay. This course would be of interest to nonfiction writers curious about the history of their craft and the evolution of the form over time.
Spring 2025
What Was American Transcendentalism?
Ross Martin PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
The transcendentalists can be described in a word: firebrands. From civil disobedience to heresy, from abolitionism to utopianism, this course explores how transcendentalism takes root in New England to generate some of the most radical experiments in Antebellum America life. However, regardless of transcendentalism's fame, or how illustrious its members, or how canonical its texts, we have no satisfactory way to define the movement or its achievements. What does it even mean to transcend? Transcend what and to where? In this course, we attempt to figure out what transcendentalism is and why it matters by traversing its theological, historical, and literary contexts. Tracing (or perhaps dissolving) the boundary between human, world, and god, we investigate how intellectual and social revolution happens without distinguishing poetry from science, religion from politics, accident from fate, and perhaps even transcendence from immanence. We ask, among other questions, what are our obligations to ourselves and our neighbors or to animals and plants? Are we bound to respect what violates our conscience? How do we embrace both individualism and collectivism? All said, what do the transcendentalists teach us about rights and responsibilities in our own time?
Spring 2025
Campus Literature
Ian Shank MFA, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
For generations, writers of all stripes have looked to the college campus as both a window into the future and an invented setting from which to reimagine it. In this course, we do the same. Moving from John Williams' Stoner to Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind, we examine the evolving history of American higher education over the past century through the lens of its accompanying literature, with a particular emphasis on the campus novel. In doing so, our goal is to not only understand why the modern American university looks and operates the way it does, but also explore where it goes from here. Along the way, we also consider the ways that different writers have used the setting of the college campus to advance a range of political and aesthetic agendas, and then use what we learn to craft compelling campus literature of our own. Prior guest speakers for this course have included several of the novelists we study, as well as prominent historians and literary critics from The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Fall 2024
George Saunders: A Survey
Ian Shank MFA, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
In just over two decades, George Saunders has achieved the kind of literary prominence that eludes most writers for life. Widely recognized as the best short-story writer in English alive today, Saunders has won the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship not to mention four National Magazine Awards among numerous other accolades for his fiction, nonfiction, and teaching. In this course, we take a broad view of Saunders' life and work, asking ourselves what his writing can teach us about voice, prose style, and the state of contemporary American literature more broadly. Over the term, students should expect to read extensively in service to a final creative or analytical essay on a related topic of their choosing.
Fall 2024
Dante's Divine Comedy: What Love Makes of Life and Learning
Theoharis C. Theoharis PhD, Associate Scholar, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, written during his 20-year exile from Florence and finished in 1320, is a vast, encyclopedic study of world history, scientific knowledge, political theory, poetics, and Christian metaphysics in medieval Europe. This learned adventure of the mind discovering reality is also an intimately personal love story, showing how Dante's life went disastrously wrong when he lost his beloved, Beatrice, and how he put it right again by traveling, alive, through the three realms of the afterlife inferno, purgatory, and paradise to find her again. One life and the life of the world coincide in that redemptive journey. In every encounter with every soul he meets in the afterlife, Dante portrays the soul flourishing when desire aligns with reality and perishing when it does not. Analyzing Dante's epic, systematic portrayal of the soul's choice for bliss or woe is the main work in this course.
January 2025
Illustration in American Children's Literature
Emily Gowen PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
This course traces the history of illustrated books for children from early colonial America to the present, inviting students to explore intersections between a text's visual elements and its didactic aims. Beginning with the New England Primer, we work chronologically through a range of pamphlets, chapbooks, dime novels, comic books, fairy tales, toy books, and early readers in order to develop an understanding of the history and evolution of one of literature's most beloved and familiar forms. What is the relationship between illustration and literacy education? How do images affect the way books are bought and sold? What kinds of reading do illustrations invite children and their caregivers to perform? What do works published by Isaiah Thomas (an eighteenth-century publisher who popularized children's literature in New England) have in common with stories by Margaret Wise Brown, Ezra Jack Keats, and Christian Robinson? How do the first books we encounter shape us and what can they help us understand about the culture at large? We explore these and other questions throughout our time together, as we map the relationship between today's market for children's books and the rich and contested history of the form.
Spring 2025
Masters of the Modernist Short Story: Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Eudora Welty, and Alice Munro
Theoharis C. Theoharis PhD, Associate Scholar, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Anton Chekhov and James Joyce were innovators whose short masterpieces in large part created the style and vision that was named modernist in the twentieth century. Eudora Welty and Alice Munro continued innovative portrayal of the humane irony and the moral acuteness present in Chekhov's and Joyce's vision of life, and added new comedy and intimacy to plot structure, character portrayal, and unified effect, the technical matters that comprise the artistic pleasure found in the modernist short story's style. All four writers in the course focus their tales on ordinary circumstances which give rise to poignant, startling revelations of how we make, and are made, what we are in the world. The course's aim is to understand how these revelations arise when a writer masters what Chekhov called "the compactness that makes things alive."
Spring 2025
Poetry in America for Teachers: The City from Whitman to Hip Hop
Elisa New PhD, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University - Jesse Raber PhD, Writer
In this course, we consider those American poets whose themes, forms, and voices have given expression to visions of the city since 1850. Beginning with Walt Whitman, the great poet of nineteenth-century New York, we explore the diverse and ever-changing environment of the modern city from Chicago to London, from San Francisco to Detroit through the eyes of such poets as Carl Sandburg, Emma Lazarus, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Frank O'Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, and Robert Pinsky, as well as contemporary hip hop and spoken word artists. This course introduces content and techniques intended to help students and educators learn how to read texts of increasing complexity. Readings and activities were chosen and designed with the Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) standards in grades six through 12 in mind. Enrollment is not limited to teachers. Students with an interest in education, or with the poets and poems covered in this course, are welcome to enroll.
Fall 2024
Poetry in America for Teachers: Earth, Sea, Sky
Elisa New PhD, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University - Jesse Raber PhD, Writer
This course is designed specifically for secondary school educators interested in deepening their expertise as readers and teachers of literature. In the course, we consider the evolving relationship of American poets to the environment from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Emily Dickinson, whose poems on the landscape of rural Massachusetts from the 1850s to 1880s drew from the science and the incipient environmental movements of that century, is a touchstone for the course. But her sparse lyrics are only one of the poetic technologies of looking at, caring for, and mourning the destruction of, the natural world that we explore together: from haiku, to African American poems of exploitative agrarianism and fantastical gardening, to poems that expand the scope of nature from the vast and inhuman to the birdcalls echoing in urban backyards. Through field trips, classroom visits, and conversations with ecologists, scientists, gardeners, farmers and other guest interpreters, this course familiarizes students with a variety of canonical and contemporary American poets: Robert Frost, Jean Toomer, Lorine Niedecker, Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Robinson Jeffers, Juliana Spahr, Ross Gay, and more.
Fall 2024
English Precapstone: The Novel and Its Contexts
Duncan White DPhil, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
This course prepares students to write their Master of Liberal Arts (ALM) capstone project. We read novels from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that both reflected and shaped the historical moment of their creation. In doing so we attended to the history and evolution of the novel as a form while also exploring the different approaches literary critics have taken to interpreting and analyzing works of narrative fiction. As we read these novels closely, we think about how they raise pressing social, economic, and political questions, consider their circulation and reception, and reflect on the role of representation, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. By the end of the semester, students are equipped with the critical tools to embark on writing an independent scholarly research paper for their capstone project in the spring semester.
Prerequisites: Registration is limited to officially admitted candidates in Master of Liberal Arts, English, who are in their penultimate semester. Prospective candidates and students with pending admission applications are not eligible. Candidates must be in good academic standing, have completed the engaging in scholarly conversation series (if required), and be in the process of successfully completing all other degree requirements. Candidates must enroll in the capstone, ENGL E-599, in the upcoming spring term as their one and only final course (no other course registration is allowed simultaneously with the capstone). Candidates who do not meet these degree requirements are dropped from the course.
Spring 2025
English Capstone: The Novel and Its Contexts
Duncan White DPhil, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
This course guides students through every step of writing their independent research paper. Building on the work done in the prior precapstone course, students work through the progressive stages of writing a research paper, incorporating peer workshop feedback, and skill-building exercises to help them produce work that reaches the high standards of an academic journal article. Students write proposals, conduct a literature review, develop theses and scholarly interventions, and work through multiple drafts, before producing their final capstone paper.
Prerequisites: Registration is limited to officially admitted capstone track candidates in the Master of Liberal Arts, English, capstone track. Candidates must be in good academic standing, ready to graduate in May with only the capstone left to complete (no other course registration is allowed simultaneously with the capstone), and have successfully completed the precapstone course, ENGL E-597, in the previous fall term. Candidates who do not meet these requirements are dropped from the course.