Academic Writing Courses

Below are the course descriptions for the English courses offered for Fall 2023. Click the course title to read the full description and see the book list for each course. 

EN 1000 Sections

EN 1000A: ALTERED STATES with Professor GUNN, Daniel

This EN1000 course will look at different ways in which literature has represented “altered states”. What are the different sorts of state to which literature can give access, and how does it help to define or reinterpret notions of normality? Among the different sorts of “ecstasy” which we shall look at are those induced by love, by rage, by madness, by alienation, and by repression. And underlying our enquiry will be always the concern for how the written word can give access to greater realms of thought and of feeling than are usually recognised.

Texts:

  • Georges Perec, W or The Memory of Childhood
  • Franz Kafka, Selected stories
  • Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
  • Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
  • Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat
  • Various: Blackboard
EN 1000B: TBA with Professor MOTT, Ann

By engaging with major works of World Literature, you will be able to understand writing as a series of stages (drafting, revising, editing) and as a learning process involving textual comprehension, intellectual discussion and the crafting of solid academic arguments.      

EN 1000C: THE AMERICAN EXERIENCE with Professor TRESILIAN, David

What might it mean to be an American? Ever since the foundation of the United States in the late 18th century, Americans have been asking questions about their identity and role in the world, including about the differences between the United States and other parts of the world, notably Europe. This course examines texts by American writers, starting in the late 19th century with Henry James and others and ending with the post-Second World War boom. Issues looked at include developing conceptions of American identity and the contrasts between the United States and Europe, as well as the role of the American writer in society and the formation of a characteristically American literature. A range of forms is examined, including the novel, plays, film adaptations, poetry and short stories.

Texts: Selected novels, plays, film adaptations, poetry and short stories

EN 1000D: ON THE MOVE with Professor RAST, Rebekah

People move. We change homes, schools, jobs or sometimes countries. We leave one neighbourhood, city, region or country for another, and in so doing we confront new habits, traditions, cultures and languages. We move into worlds that welcome, worlds that ignore, worlds that reject, or worlds that show indifference. One place may feel suddenly foreign, while another feels like home. Personal journeys take place during these moves, creating life stories. In this course we will contemplate these life stories and the implications of personal journeys on individual and collective experience and identity. Based on films and readings, we will experiment with academic, journalistic and creative writing, always working towards developing your own voice in written and spoken English. 

 

Texts: 

  • Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun
  • Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor was Divine 
  • Additional readings and films

EN 1010 Sections

EN 1010A: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  
 

EN 1010B: A BRIEF HISTORY OF SMALL FORMS with Professor MEDIN, Daniel

Concision has long been a hallmark of good writing. In addition to teaching you how to prune your own prose, this course will explore a variety of economical literary forms from antiquity to the present, among them the epigram, sonnet, aphorism, and short story. We will pay particular attention to the relation between content and form in each of these little forms, and study their respective strategies of compression. As in all EN 1010 courses, students will be required to read and discuss the set texts, as well as to reflect on writing more generally.

Texts:

  • Martial - selected epigrams
  • William Shakespeare - selected sonnets
  • Chamfort - selected aphorisms
  • Johann Peter Hebel - selected calendar stories
  • Emily Dickinson - selected poems
  • Lydia Davis - selected short prose
  • Eric Chevillard - micro-essays in Museum Visits
  • Mariana Enriquez - short story
  • Samanta Schweblin - short story
EN 1010C: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 1010D: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement. 

EN 1010 E: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 1010 F: OPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 1010 G: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.   

EN 1010 H: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 1010 I: QUESTIONING THE SELF with Professor TRESILIAN, David

This course looks at ideas of self and other as these are expressed in selected literary texts. It starts with ideas of otherness, sexual and cultural, as expressed in a major work of ancient Greek tragedy, Euripides’s Medea, before moving on to the representation of cultural and racial otherness in Shakespeare’s Othello, one of the English Renaissance dramatist’s four major tragedies. Longer prose works read in the course, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Stoker’s Dracula, examine the possibilities and anxieties associated with the opening up of the wider world. Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,’ his case of Dora, probes otherness within, raising the possibility that all of us are ultimately strangers to ourselves, while Kafka’s The Trial conjures up a nightmare world in which there are apparently no meeting points between self and society. Finally, Salih’s Season of Migration to the North reverses the gaze, entering into a complex relationship with Shakespeare’s Othello.

Texts:

  • Sophocles, Theban Plays
  • William Shakespeare, Othello.
  • Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.
  • Franz Kafka, The Trial.
  • Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North.
  • Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works Volume Seven.
EN 1010 J: TOPIC TBA with Professor HOBART, Brenton

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 1010 K: TOPIC TBA with Professor Staff

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN1010 L: THE CREATIVE SELF with Professor MARTZ, Linda

However pleasurable we may find them, the creative arts require discipline, focus, and commitment to achieve excellence. How do people fall in love with their art? What pushes them to make the sacrifices necessary to excel in creative fields? What does it mean to make art if what you want to express with it challenges the values of your community? The texts for this course explore the motivations of artists, dancers, musicians and actors with fiction set in a variety of contexts, from post-war Japan to 19th century Denmark to contemporary Brooklyn, and by a range of creator protagonists including Afro-Caribbean Londoners, Soviet Kyrgyz villagers, and a Hassidic Jew.  

Texts:

  • Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress
  • Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
  • Chingiz Aitmantov, Jamilia
  • Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
  • Zadie Smith, Swing Time
  • Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang
EN1010 M: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN1010 N: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN1010 O – TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 Sections

EN 2020 A: THINKING WITH THE BODY with Professor GILBERT, Geoffrey

We tend to locate thought in the brain, but we know that human thought is inconceivable without a body. At the same time, the body has often been imagined to obstruct efficient or ‘pure’ thought, as an unruly presence whose lusts, rages, and fatigues cloud our judgment and upset our calculation. The ways that the body is imagined, and the ways that we think about the relations among the body and the mind and the world, are variable across histories and cultures: we will consider a series of historical and cultural moments, from Greek tragedy through to contemporary poetry. We will think about the status of bodily knowledge: about desiring and violent approaches to the world; about horror, lust, and touch; about gender, sexuality, and racial embodiments. These works represent the body: we are intensely aware of the minute details of how Rankine’s narrator is forced to experience her bodily presence, or how the shame of Giovanni's position spreads through his own body and through that of the narrator David; you may have nightmares about Titus Andronicus’s bloody severed hand; Paul Preciado details affectively the political economy of the trans body; Aimé Césaire gathers the force of the resistant post-colonial body. But as well as representing the body, they also invoke the body of the reader: constituting it as nervous, excited, desiring, perhaps producing physical shock, sweat, blushing, and tremor. We shall discuss whether these reactions are beside the point, mere distractions from the serious business of conceiving and communicating ideas and concepts; or whether, on the contrary, they provide a particular cognitive grasp on the world and on human experience.

Texts:

  • James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
  • Euripides, Medea and other plays
  • William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
  • Aimé Césaire, Journal of a Homecoming
  • Paul Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?
EN 2020 B: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 C: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 D: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 E: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 F: THINKING WITH THE BODY with Professor GILBERT, Geoffrey

We tend to locate thought in the brain, but we know that human thought is inconceivable without a body. At the same time, the body has often been imagined to obstruct efficient or ‘pure’ thought, as an unruly presence whose lusts, rages, and fatigues cloud our judgment and upset our calculation. The ways that the body is imagined, and the ways that we think about the relations among the body and the mind and the world, are variable across histories and cultures: we will consider a series of historical and cultural moments, from Greek tragedy through to contemporary poetry. We will think about the status of bodily knowledge: about desiring and violent approaches to the world; about horror, lust, and touch; about gender, sexuality, and racial embodiments. These works represent the body: we are intensely aware of the minute details of how Rankine’s narrator is forced to experience her bodily presence, or how the shame of Giovanni's position spreads through his own body and through that of the narrator David; you may have nightmares about Titus Andronicus’s bloody severed hand; Paul Preciado details affectively the political economy of the trans body; Aimé Césaire gathers the force of the resistant post-colonial body. But as well as representing the body, they also invoke the body of the reader: constituting it as nervous, excited, desiring, perhaps producing physical shock, sweat, blushing, and tremor. We shall discuss whether these reactions are beside the point, mere distractions from the serious business of conceiving and communicating ideas and concepts; or whether, on the contrary, they provide a particular cognitive grasp on the world and on human experience.

Texts:

  • James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
  • Euripides, Medea and other plays
  • William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
  • Aimé Césaire, Journal of a Homecoming
  • Paul Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?
EN 2020 G: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 H: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 I: NORMALITY AND TRANSGRESSION with Professor HARDING, Adrian

Notions of what is normal and what is abnormal are at the heart of our experience of reading, as of our experience of the world. To what extent transgression, the violation of laws, is a necessary component of ‘original’ experience, to what extent it remains outside what we think we desire, or should desire, are central components of the texts on our course. We begin with Homer’s epic of human identity, where transgression metamorphoses into a mode of fate as the human world defines itself in centrifugal translations through time and space, with "powers to draw a man to ruin.” Carroll’s classic exploration of the limits of “normality” in Wonderland, lived through the eyes of a young girl, leads us to the Japanese “heart of things” in one of the world’s great novels of the inner life, Soseki’s Kokoro. We read two English feminist writers on the intensely repressive or liberating experience of transgression, in May Sinclair’s miniature life of Harriet Frean, and Woolf’s transgender, transhistorical fantasy Orlando. We go to Nigeria to a tale that scandalized the normalizing literary establishment in the postcolonial transition, and end with the deceptively casual freedoms of the great American poet Frank O’Hara.

Texts:

  • Homer, The Odyssey
  • Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
  • Natsume Soseki, Kokoro
  • May Sinclair, Life and Death of Harriet Frean
  • Virginia Woolf, Orlando
  • Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard
  • Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems
EN 2020 J: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 K: FASHION AND STYLE with Professor ROY, Sneharika

This course explores the material and metaphorical dimensions of fashion across cultures and time periods. Pairing texts and cultural theories of fashion, we will explore ancient Buddhism’s ambivalence towards make-up as a sign of beauty and of cosmetic artificiality in Ashvaghosh’s Handsome Nanda. The high fashion of the Japanese Heian court will be the focus of our study of Genji, in which dress signifies both power and desire. Androgyny and cross-dressing will structure our analysis of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which also plays with concepts of illusion and reality. Reading with and against Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey will teach us how the appearance of muslin revolutionised fashion in England (it was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the synthetics revolution in the twentieth century). It also marked a key moment in the history of global capitalism (muslin was supplied by Britain’s Indian colonies). By the time we arrive at Lisa Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractal and recent music videos, we will have come to look upon fashion not only as a system of arbitrary signs, but as a fold in the fabric of time itself, perceptible in vintage clothing. In the course of our investigations of cochineal eyeliner and kimono sleeves, breeches and cross-garters, we will style ourselves as textual dressmakers, choosing materials (sources), imagining a design (argument), working the fabric (writing), and adding the final flourish of accessories to the crown the effect (style).

Texts:

  • Ashvaghosh, Handsome Nanda
  • Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
  • Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
  • Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
  • Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal
  • Selected poems and music videos
EN 2020 L: FASHION AND STYLE with Professor ROY, Sneharika

This course explores the material and metaphorical dimensions of fashion across cultures and time periods. Pairing texts and cultural theories of fashion, we will explore ancient Buddhism’s ambivalence towards make-up as a sign of beauty and of cosmetic artificiality in Ashvaghosh’s Handsome Nanda. The high fashion of the Japanese Heian court will be the focus of our study of Genji, in which dress signifies both power and desire. Androgyny and cross-dressing will structure our analysis of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which also plays with concepts of illusion and reality. Reading with and against Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey will teach us how the appearance of muslin revolutionised fashion in England (it was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the synthetics revolution in the twentieth century). It also marked a key moment in the history of global capitalism (muslin was supplied by Britain’s Indian colonies). By the time we arrive at Lisa Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractal and recent music videos, we will have come to look upon fashion not only as a system of arbitrary signs, but as a fold in the fabric of time itself, perceptible in vintage articles of clothing. In the course of our investigations of cochineal eyeliner and kimono sleeves, breeches, cross-garters and even undergarments, we will style ourselves as textual dressmakers, choosing materials (sources), imagining a design (argument), working the fabric (writing), and adding the final flourish of accessories to the crown the effect (style).

Texts:

  • Ashvaghosh, Handsome Nanda
  • Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
  • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
  • Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
  • Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal
  • Selected poems and music videos
EN 2020 M: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 N: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN 2020 O: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.   

EN2020 P: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

EN2020 Q: TOPIC TBA with Professor STAFF

By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.