A survey of extraordinary writing, ideas, characters, and voices from the medieval period through the 18th century. We read diversely from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Milton, Austen and others, to trace the origins of our own modernity. What did reading and writing mean in the early modern world? Are they different today? We examine England in relation to the globe, and we ask who gets included and excluded from "great books." What do people, places and situations that existed on the margins of early English society and literature teach us about the problems we currently face? Does seeing things their way help us view our own world differently?

This course introduces students to the range of the essay form as it has developed from the early modern period to our own. The class will be organized, for the most part, chronologically, beginning with the likes of Bacon and Hobbes, and ending with some contemporary examples of and reflections on the form. It will consider how writers as various as Sidney, Hume, Johnson, Emerson, Woolf, C.L.R. James, and Stephen Jay Gould have defined and revised The Essay. Two lectures, one 50-minute preceptorial.

This seminar explores how poetry sounds, in itself and in relation to other forms of sound-making, including singing, talking, laughing, and crying; the voices of animals, objects, and wind in the trees. We will study the disciplines of prosody and phonetics; consider accents, dialects, and the changing sounds of English over time and across the globe; and experiment with analog and digital techniques for analyzing and manipulating the acoustic properties of poetic language. Work for the course will consist of weekly experiments that split (or ignore) the difference between analysis and imagination.

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of psychoanalysis as a literary-critical and philosophical tradition of thought. In addition to classic texts by Freud, Lacan, Fanon, and Klein, we will read contemporary writers influenced by psychoanalysis (Cheng, Zupancic, Scott). Topics include interpretation of dreams, Freudo-Marxism, the psychology of colonialism and race, and sexual difference.

How do you write about a world that seems to be failing, even when you still love it? Does literature get in the way of changing the world, or does it imagine a way forward? That's the question that drives the two great medieval English works The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Piers Plowman, by his contemporary William Langland. Both works are learned, beautiful, hilarious and urgent--but in very different ways.

This class considers short poems of the 16th and 17th centuries that are variously concerned with love, desire, and sexual intimacy. What are the modes of address in the erotic lyric? How do poems represent the subject and object of desire, and how do they represent the ethics of the erotic encounter? What is the social, political, and philosophical work of a personal and intimate poetry? Alongside a wide range of poems (including at least one contemporary collection placed in dialogue with the earlier poems), the course will include several short theoretical readings on the representation of desire.

This class covers the second half of Shakespeare's career, with a focus on the major tragedies and late comedies.

Feeling lost? This course links two key forms that shape the spaces we dwell in, cross through, and imagine: medieval maps and travel narratives. Though these constructions are head-shaking artifacts to behold, each episteme also indexes familiar categories of imaginative geography like excluded difference, included identity, and fantasies of power and control. We will query what these forms make: cultural diffusion and exchange, phenomena of wonder and curiosity, collaborations of word and image, and tales of travel, a genre that is definitionally transgressive.

John Milton's writings reflect a lifelong effort to unite the aims of literary, intellectual and political experimentation. This class explores Milton's major works, especially his masterpiece epic Paradise Lost. We'll consider Milton's highly original characters, especially Satan, with whom we are invited to sympathize, but also Adam, Eve and Samson. We'll encounter Milton's startling poetic innovations, and his daring attempts to redefine human beings and their potential. We'll compare Milton's writings with other genres, such as early theology and medicine, and see his influence in recent sci-fi, crime fiction, rock and metal.

This course examines the major works of Aldous Huxley as vital contributions to the emerging 20th century canon of modernism, internationalism, pacifism, spiritualism, and the psychology of consciousness. The course probes Huxley's writings in the context of evolutionary, secular thought, while also reading them as strivings towards models of world peace. This course is intended to be of importance to students interested in the intersections of 20th century British literature and non-Western philosophical and religious systems, as well as to students interested in an intensive study of one of the 20th century's most prolific authors.

"Revenge my foul and most unnatural murder!" A ghost compels his conflicted son, Hamlet, to address something rotten in the state of Denmark with these words in Shakespeare's great tragedy. Whether or not you have read Hamlet, or have seen it performed, you probably know the story. This course aims to recontextualize Hamlet in early modern English theater history. Through study of other "revenge tragedy" plays from this period, seminar participants will gain new perspective on Hamlet's embeddedness in a culture and an art form probing the ethics of seeking justice through violence.

This course will look to understand the current and historical role of Indigenous people as a trope in both Western culture and in American culture more specifically, the material effects of such representations and the longstanding resistance to them among Indigenous people, and work toward developing ways of supporting Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. It will include a cross-disciplinary program of learning that will work closely with the Indigenous holdings in Firestone Library.

The modern movement in English fiction from Henry James, Conrad, Joyce and Woolf to Nabokov and Muriel Spark, writers who changed our sense of what a novel is what it can say and how it can say it.

The first quarter of the 21st-century is just behind us. Since Y2K we've seen extraordinary, seemingly unprecedented change, globally. Wars, famines, climate disasters, scientific breakthroughs and technological transformation. Just ask your parents what the internet was like in 2000! Has literature kept pace with these changes? Can fiction teach us what human intelligence is and should become? As future leaders of your generation, whatever leadership will call for - how can the literature of the present help you find our way?

The wilderness tale is one of North America's most enduring literary genres. Stories of misfortune, hardship, and heroism in the continent's untamed landscapes have long entertained readers with both the romance and the realism of human encounters with the wild. This diverse literary tradition encompasses survival sagas, adventure tales, exploration thrillers, pioneer stories, escape fantasies, and animal yarns. What exactly is wilderness, and how have American and Canadian fiction writers shaped our thinking about the wild?

How can literature and film bring to life ideals of environmental justice and the lived experience of environmental injustice? This seminar will explore how diverse communities across the globe are unequally exposed to risks like climate change and toxicity and how communities have unequal access to the resources vital to sustaining life. Issues we will address include: climate justice, the Anthropocene, water security, deforestation, the commons, indigenous movements, the environmentalism of the poor, the gendered and racial dimensions of environmental justice, and the imaginative role of filmmakers and writer-activists.

African literature has been a global literature for several millennia. Some of the most important writers and thinkers of the classical era and late antiquity were Africans (Augustine, for instance). We'll start with those early writers, then move on to texts by the medieval inventor of sociology, Ibn Khaldun; the epic of the medieval Mali empire, Sundiata; a medieval Ethiopian saint's life; colonial writing about Africa by Europeans, and colonial-era literature by African writers; the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka and others that confront the legacy of colonialism; and recent Africanfuturist art, film, and literature.

This seminar will explore a wide range of modern drama, poetry, and fiction by Irish authors. We will read plays by John M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Brian Friel, and Eva O'Connor; fiction by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Anna Burns, and Sally Rooney; and poetry by W.B. Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, and Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi. We will probe the roles of Irish history, culture, and law in shaping Irish authors and their writings. Themes will include sexual identity and sex crimes; human rights; contracts, blackmail, and defamation; political and domestic violence; masculinity; and abortion rights.

How does literature embody law, both as a principle of literary construction and as an examination of justice? Can literature represent law persuasively? Can it cure the ills from which law suffers? This precepted course will stress interdisciplinary analysis of literature and law; offer overviews of law and social justice in history and different cultures; examine gender, race, and religion in their relation to law and its depictions; and highlight close reading of rich, complex literary texts. Students pursuing literature-related course study as well as students interested in law school or legal studies will benefit from the course.

Nearly half of Hollywood films are adaptations of plays, novels, and stories. Indeed, most people encounter Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens in screen versions rather than the original sources. Yet few viewers ponder the necessary changes involved in translating words into images and narrative perspectives to cinematic frames. And discussions of a film's success often bog down in questions of "fidelity," "imitation," and "contemporary influences." We will survey a brief history of important literary texts adapted for the big screen, to understand better what is gained and lost in any process of adaptation.

A course about reading for writers and a course about writing for readers. The first novels in English were written around 1700 and soon became the most popular literary form. We study the novel's evolution from early experiments like Robinson Crusoe to the genre-making masterpiece Pride and Prejudice. How do key aspects of the novelist's craft emerge: voice, point of view, setting, character, and plot? We'll learn how novels are made, and we'll come to understand why they were made then and what novels did that no other literary form had been able to do. Each week, we do short creative writing exercises.

"Money, money, money, and what money can make of life!", a woman laments in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. We will read four novels in this class, two by Charles Dickens (Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend), one by Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White) and one by George Eliot (Silas Marner) to see how money and the need for it penetrate souls and societies in these works. We will consider how conceptions of gender, intrigues of sexuality and fears of foreigners shape the imagination of the power and limit of money in the world that these three eminent Victorians inhabit and illuminate.

This course examines the selected non-fiction writings of one of America's most influential essayists and public intellectuals: James Baldwin. Attention will be given to his views on ethics, art, and politics--with a particular consideration given to his critical reflections on race and democracy.

This course explores the evolution of New World African and African American literature and literary culture from its beginnings in the middle of the 18th century to the turn of the twentieth century. Moving across a range of genres-including slave narratives, poetry, fiction, autobiographies, and essays-and media-from the periodical to the bound novel-we will interrogate the relationship among literary form, cultural politics, and historical phenomena, while developing a deep understanding of the emergence of an African American literary tradition.

This course we will undertake the deceptively simple question: how do we read Toni Morrison? In taking up this task, we will devote our attention to various scenes and sites of reading across Morrison's oeuvre, asking how Morrison is encouraging us to read history, slavery, violence, geography, time, space, gender, and friendship. We will also engage with Morrison's own status as a reader by considering her work as an editor and literary critic. Through regular engagement with the Toni Morrison Papers housed at Firestone we will consider what it means to be able to read Morrison in such close proximity to these archival materials.

An interdisciplinary navigation into the field of narratology, the structure of (hi)stories, centering creation myths and origin stories. African mythogenesis paves our primary path of investigation, but we also consider the universality of myth, and students will write to their interests and experiences. This creative nonfiction class combines ethnographic research, critical reading, and literary hybridity. A polished 10-page piece presents an original, research-intensive mythscape alongside informed analysis and careful contextualization. Every person has a story we should hear. This unconventional class equips Tigers to tell theirs.

This class introduces the historic diversity of socialisms through readings in classic socialist philosophy, literature and political writings. We are guided by these questions: How does socialism relate to communism and capitalism? How does it define democracy, equality, freedom, individuality, and collectivity? How does socialism relate to struggles for racial, gender and ecological justice? Are socialist ethics connected to religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam that teach human equality? What is the "social" in socialism? How may we understand injustices committed in socialism's name alongside its striving for social justice?

Fairy tales are among the first stories we encounter, often before we can read. They present themselves as timeless--"Once upon a time..." - yet are essentially modern. They are often presented as children's literature, yet are filled with sex and violence. They have been interpreted as archetypal patterns of the subconscious mind or of deep cultural origins, yet perform the work of shaping contemporary culture. They circulate in myriad oral variations, and are written down in new ones by the most sophisticated literary authors. In this course we will explore the fantasy, enchantment, labor, and violence wrought by fairy tales.

This course traces the social and literary history of maritime rebellion. From Pirates of the Caribbean to the specter of "Somali hijacking", Wikileaks, and the Orca uprising, seafaring (or web-surfing) agitators are back. Tracking the figure of the pirate in novels, ethnographies, films, comics, and counter-histories from the 16th century to the present, this course will approach piracy from three angles: "enemies of all mankind" and the making of international political orders; pirate predation and rebellion in the circuits of capital and Empire; mutiny, slave revolt and the new social orders that emerge out of pirate utopias.

Can poetry supplement for the dead? Atone for the ravages of love lost? What is the relationship between mourning and eros? This course will focus on a single genre- the elegy from antiquity until today- in order to explore: lyric's love affair with absence; whether desire is directed toward the physical or the phantasmatic, sensuality or sublimation; the tensions between individual and collective mourning; and the politics of gender and sexuality in lyric address. Through careful attention to individual poems, students will learn the art of close reading and how the finer points of rhetoric and poetic form relate to broader social questions.

Since its advent in the 19th century, photography has been a privileged figure in literature's efforts to reflect upon its own modes of representation. This seminar will trace the history of the rapport between literature and photography by looking closely at a number of literary and theoretical texts that differently address questions central to both literature and photography: questions about the nature of representation, reproduction, memory and forgetting, history, images, perception, and knowledge.

This workshop will expose participants to some of the most dynamic, adventurous environmental nonfiction writers while also giving students the opportunity to develop their own voices as environmental writers. We'll be looking at the environmental essay, the memoir, opinion writing, and investigative journalism. In the process we'll discuss the imaginative strategies deployed by leading environmental writers and seek to adapt some of those strategies in our own writing. Readings will engage urgent concerns of our time, like climate change, extinction, race, gender and the environment, and relations between humans and other life forms.

Why does sex work raise some of the most fascinating, controversial and often taboo questions of our time? The course explores the intricate lives and intimate narratives of sex workers from the perspective of sex workers themselves, as they engage in myriad varieties of global sex work: pornography, prostitution, erotic dance, escorting, street work, camming, commercial fetishism, and sex tourism. Themes include: the 'whore stigma,' race, class and queer dynamics; law, labor and money; technologies of desire and spectacle; dirt, marriage and monogamy; carceral modernity; violence, agency and, above all, strategies for social transformation.

Data and data-empowered algorithms shape our professional, personal, and political realities. They also increasingly shape how we are able to access and tell stories about the past. This course introduces students to the history of data practices so as to better understand the future we are building together as scholars, scientists, and citizens. In covering the history of the human use of data, we will learn how data are used to reveal insight and support decisions, how data-driven practices make historical and literary arguments, and how data and culture are fundamentally intertwined.

Nostalgia is one of the most pervasive and multifaceted feelings of our time; an engine of artistic production, it informs the works of Homer and James Joyce. One can be nostalgic for childhood or for a time when one's country was different. Fashion and music are imbued with nostalgic feelings, as are countless videos on our feeds. This class studies nostalgia from an interdisciplinary and global perspective: leveraging literature, cinema, philosophy, history, and cultural studies, it will explore how nostalgia is formed, and its role in the arts and society.

This course looks closely at how contemporary Latinx artists are reimagining photographic encounters and arrangements. The longer history of photography is traditionally told in terms of documentation, truth claims, the democratization of art, and colonial surveillance regimes. This course gives pride of place to Latinx artists who use the medium and its iterations (e.g. video installations, cyanotypes, photo collage, repurposing archival prints) to figure unconventional notions of intimacy, diaspora, identity, archives, revolution, futures, and immediacy.

The new play development process has become a critical aspect of the professional theater landscape, but is often confounding to artists. This is a practical course that will introduce the basic processes of developing new plays for the stage, offering theater makers an understanding of their unique role in the critical moments of a new play's early life. The class is for actors eager to hone the skills of originating a role; for directors eager to explore working with a living writer; and for playwrights eager to gain experience navigating the development process, from table readings to workshops to staged readings.

This course is an acting intensive offering students the opportunity to engage in a rigorous rehearsal process with a professional theater director. The course emphasizes exploration and embodiment of character, and culminates in a staged production with simple technical elements, the focus on THE ensemble. This semester, the topic of A Midsummer Night's Dream will be explored through an immersive production staged in the Drapkin Studio in April. This production will explore the dynamics of queer identity using the complex backdrop of a contemporary Texas nightclub scene. The course is inclusive for every identity and ability.