Fall 2022
Introduction to Old English Literature
Daniel Donoghue PhD, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University
This course introduces the earliest English literature, building up to selections from poems such as The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, The Battle of Maldon, and various prose texts. 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 2023
Beowulf and Seamus Heaney
Daniel Donoghue PhD, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University
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.
Prerequisites: Prior knowledge of Old English is helpful but not required.
January 2023
Shakespeare and Game of Thrones
Jeffrey Robert Wilson PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
The hit franchise Game of Thrones is based on the Wars of the Roses, a bloody fifteenth-century civil war between feuding English families. This intensive January session course shows how that connection was mediated by William Shakespeare, and how a knowledge of the Shakespearean context enriches our understanding of the literary elements of Game of Thrones. On the one hand, Shakespeare influenced Game of Thrones indirectly because his history plays significantly shaped the way the Wars of the Roses are now remembered, including the modern histories and historical fictions George R.R. Martin drew upon. On the other, Game of Thrones also responds to Shakespeare's first tetralogy directly by adapting several of its literary strategies (such as shifting perspectives, mixed genres, and metatheater) and tropes (including the stigmatized protagonist and the prince who was promised). By comparing contextual circumstances of composition, such as collaborative authorship and political currents, this course also lodges a series of provocations about writing and acting for the stage in the Elizabethan age and for the screen in the twenty-first century. Readings and viewings include some of Shakespeare's history plays, selections from Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, episodes of HBO's Game of Thrones, and key criticism and theory that illuminate our texts.
Fall 2022
Decadence, Degeneration, 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 beginning of the twentieth century; its literature, however, was increasingly haunted by decline. This course explores why, by way of writers like Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, T.S. Eliot, and Graham Greene. The focus of our analysis is the novel's response to three kinds of breakdown: aesthetic decadence, imperial decline, and aristocratic degeneration. We draw on contemporary periodicals, paintings, films, and poetry to understand what makes these narratives so good for literary business. We also think about decline as a shaper of modernism, the relationship between decline and nationalism, and the cultural afterlives of the texts we encounter.
Spring 2023
World Shakespeare
David Nee PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
How did the son of a glove-maker from a small town in rural England come to be one of the world's best-known writers, read and performed internationally four hundred years after his death? The answer to this question is complex. Some of the causes for William Shakespeare's rise to global prominence are historical, like the unique conditions of commercial theater in Shakespeare's day, the eighteenth-century cult of bardolatry and Shakespeare worship, or the intertwinement of Shakespeare with British colonialism. Other causes could be called aesthetic and intrinsic, stemming from the poetic and dramatic qualities which give Shakespeare's plays their lasting power to move and astonish. Still other grounds for Shakespeare's global success lie in the myriad ways actors, writers, and directors from around the world have adapted Shakespeare's plays, combining them with local theatrical and literary traditions. This course explores these and other reasons for Shakespeare's status as a global playwright in the twenty-first century, while also providing an introduction to some of Shakespeare's greatest plays and to a small selection of modern adaptations from around the world. Plays read in the class may include Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Modern adaptations read may include West Side Story, Aim C saire's Une Temp te, Akira Kurosawa's Ran, Toni Morrison's Desdemona, and Vishal Bhardwal's Maqbool.
Fall 2022
Reading James Joyce's Ulysses
Theoharis C. Theoharis PhD, Associate Scholar, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
James Joyce's Ulysses is the most admired novel of the twentieth century in English. In this course, we try to see why that is true by reading the book closely, chapter by chapter, looking at how Joyce made one story on one day in Dublin the universal story of how humane men and women prevail over the violence bent on destroying them. We pay special attention to how Joyce elaborately combined detailed realistic story lines and characters with symbolism, allusion, references, and off-kilter comparisons, such as the book's title, which names an obscure and peaceful man after a notoriously sly and vindictive one, Ulysses.
Spring 2023
Poetry in America: From the Civil War through Modernism
Elisa New PhD, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University - Jesse Benjamin Raber PhD
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 2022
Poetry in America: From the Mayflower to Emerson
Elisa New PhD, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University - Jesse Benjamin Raber PhD
This course covers American poetry in cultural context through the year 1850. The course begins with Puritan poets, some orthodox, some rebel spirits, who wrote and lived in early New England. Focusing on Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Michael Wigglesworth, among others, we explore the interplay between mortal and immortal, Europe and wilderness, solitude and sociality in English North America. The second part of the course spans the poetry of America's early years, directly before and after the creation of the Republic. We examine the creation of a national identity through the lens of an emerging national literature, focusing on such poets as Phillis Wheatley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Distinguished guest discussants include writer Michael Pollan, economist Larry Summers, Vice President Al Gore, Mayor Tom Menino, and others.
Spring 2023
Poetry in America: Whitman and Dickinson
Elisa New PhD, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University - Jesse Benjamin Raber PhD
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.
Spring 2023
Seeing Nature in the Twentieth Century
Collier Brown PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
In this course, students survey important American contributions to modern American environmental nonfiction. From the founding of the National Park Service (1916) to the first Earth Day (1970) and onward to America's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, we consider the diverse ways in which modern Americans have grappled with environmental issues. Our readings include writers like Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Evelyn White.
Spring 2023
The Lives of Women Portrayed by Women in the 20th Century American Novel
Theoharis C. Theoharis PhD, Associate Scholar, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
From 1905, when Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth was published, until 1991, when How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez, was published, the lives of women in America had in many ways changed drastically. From not being able to vote or own substantial property at the beginning of the century, women had moved to wielding power in the highest ranks of professional and corporate life and of elected office. All this change disrupted but did not dislodge traditional social and cultural norms which drew a firm boundary around women's lives, locating their value and happiness exclusively in the domestic world as men's wives and mothers to their children; "angels of the house," as the clich put it. What kind of lives were possible for women who broke through that boundary, or who tried to, make up the stories Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Alice Walker, and Julia Alvarez tell in the novels comprising this course: The Song of the Lark (1915), The House of Mirth (1905), The Color Purple (1982), and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991).
Fall 2022
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 2023
The Post-Apocalyptic Novel
Sue Weaver Schopf PhD, Distinguished Service Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
Doomsday scenarios forecasting the end of civilization and the emergence of frightening dystopias have been with us since ancient times. But with the advent of the nuclear age in the twentieth century, the number of works in literature and film that envision the apocalypse and its aftermath has increased with every passing decade. Twenty-first century anxieties about environmental disasters; food, water, and energy shortages; pandemics and biological warfare; impact events; cyberattacks; financial meltdowns; and scientific experiments gone awry have spawned a veritable post-apocalyptic industry. Literary works in this genre typically grapple with four challenging issues: how will our world be destroyed? How do the survivors reconstruct society out of such enormous wreckage? Under conditions of extreme deprivation and fear, what truths do we discover about human nature and about what we value most as individuals and as social groups? What do such stories tell us about the role of power in the formation, sustainability, and endangerment of a society? This intensive January session course considers both early and more recent post-apocalyptic works such as Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Max Brooks' World War Z.
Fall 2022
Art of the Personal Essay
Collier Brown PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University
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.
Fall 2022
Myth and Mystery in Post-World War II US Fiction
Patrick Whitmarsh PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course focuses on expressions of mystery and the unknown in post-World War II US fiction and how these expressions address the American mythos: the nation's self-constructed history of exceptionalism and progress. After the triumphal sensationalism of Allied victory in the war and the accompanying economic boom in the US, there began a period of cultural uncertainty with the dawn of the cold war, the civil rights movement, and the uneven rise of global financial markets. Moving chronologically through a mixture of canonical and popular texts including novels by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and others we explore the ways that literature taps into this uncertainty. Some central questions this course asks are: what does it mean to think of America as a myth? How does mythic imagery inform national identity? How do different literary genres (science fiction, the detective novel, and the neo-slave narrative) offer unique expressions of the ambiguities that reside in American history and culture? We rely heavily on in-class activities and discussion, complemented by mini-lectures to expand on historical context and background. Assignments include periodic journal reflections, short essays, and a final project.
Fall 2022
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 Benjamin Raber PhD
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 2022
English Precapstone: The Novel and Its Contexts
Duncan E. 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, capstone track, who are in their penultimate semester. Prospective candidates and students with pending admission applications are not eligible. Candidates must be in good academic standing and in the process of successfully completing all degree requirements except the capstone, ENGL E-599, which they must enroll in the upcoming spring term as their final course. Candidates who do not meet these degree requirements are dropped from the course.
Spring 2023
English Capstone: The Novel and Its Contexts
Duncan E. 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.