English Courses

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.  

Works:   

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

There is something uniquely fascinating about peeking behind the curtain to see how another family functions, even if they are fictional . . .

This College Writing course will do just that --peek behind the curtain -- and explore family dynamics, for better or worse , and how families define, nourish and sometimes smother each other.  Can families truly be ‘happy’? Maybe so, but what happens when desertion and neglect, betrayal, jealousy and disapproval rear their ugly heads?  What, if anything, do family members owe each other? The texts and films for this course explore families set in a variety of contexts, from 16th century Spain to Victorian England to1950s Harlem to contemporary Iran, and by a range of protagonists including orphans, mad scientists, vampires, and heroin addicts. Close reading will be encouraged, and we will work extensively on the skills involved in constructing strong academic papers.

Works:

• Lazarillo de Tormes, anonymous
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
• “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin

Films:

• A Separation, Ashghar Farhadi
• Moonlight, Barry Jenkins

There is something uniquely fascinating about peeking behind the curtain to see how another family functions, even if they are fictional . . .

This College Writing course will do just that --peek behind the curtain -- and explore family dynamics, for better or worse , and how families define, nourish and sometimes smother each other.  Can families truly be ‘happy’? Maybe so, but what happens when desertion and neglect, betrayal, jealousy and disapproval rear their ugly heads?  What, if anything, do family members owe each other? The texts and films for this course explore families set in a variety of contexts, from 16th century Spain to Victorian England to1950s Harlem to contemporary Iran, and by a range of protagonists including orphans, mad scientists, vampires, and heroin addicts. Close reading will be encouraged, and we will work extensively on the skills involved in constructing strong academic papers.

Works:

• Lazarillo de Tormes, anonymous
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
• “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin

Films:

• A Separation, Ashghar Farhadi
• Moonlight, Barry Jenkins

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.  

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.  

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.  

This course explores the material and metaphorical dimensions of fashion across cultures and time periods. Pairing texts and cultural theories of fashion, we will examine 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 in an exquisite, arbitrary system of silks, screens and signs. Crossdressing will structure our analysis of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a play whose preoccupation with clothes and fabric reflects prevailing sumptuary laws as well as gender. 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). Fashion is central to redesigning identity in clothesline poems of a selection of First Nation, diasporic and postcolonial writers as well as in the lush, provocative music videos of Francophone icon Mylène Farmer. In the course of our investigations of cochineal eyeliner, 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).

Works:

• Ashvaghosh, Handsome Nanda
• Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji  
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (paired with Trevor Nunn’s 1996 cinematic adaptation) 
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
• Selected poems and music videos 

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.

This course explores the material and metaphorical dimensions of fashion across cultures and time periods. Pairing texts and cultural theories of fashion, we will examine 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 in an exquisite, arbitrary system of silks, screens and signs. Crossdressing will structure our analysis of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a play whose preoccupation with clothes and fabric reflects prevailing sumptuary laws as well as gender. 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). Fashion is central to redesigning identity in clothesline poems of a selection of First Nation, diasporic and postcolonial writers as well as in the lush, provocative music videos of Francophone icon Mylène Farmer. In the course of our investigations of cochineal eyeliner, 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).

Works:

• Ashvaghosh, Handsome Nanda
• Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji  
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (paired with Trevor Nunn’s 1996 cinematic adaptation) 
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
• Selected poems and music videos 

In this course, students will explore the ways in which the visual and the written word interact. We will examine the connections between literary texts and visual images through different lenses. How can the written word exist alongside a work of art? What does it mean when both occupy the same space, and how can the literary text help us understand a visual work of art? 

We will begin with a survey of ancient Indian and Arabic texts, the poetry of Sappho, as well as illuminated manuscripts from the Medieval period to familiarize themselves with the various ways in which books have existed throughout history. Then, we will explore new ideas of the book that incorporate both visual and written elements. These explorations will be interspersed with trips to museums in Paris and readings in art criticism and ekphrastic writing.

Students will experiment with both academic and more creative modes of critical writing, building a portfolio that includes writings about museum exhibitions, films, paintings, and other forms of creative expression, along with a final paper. This course includes an extra visiting period on Thursdays, allowing students to attend exhibitions and gallery openings.

Works:

• Tom Phillips, A Humument (online)
• Sappho/Anne Carson, If Not, Winter
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing
• Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty
• Bell Hooks, Art on my Mind
• Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The Writing and Criticism courses aim to refine the skills of critical reading and academic writing through a series of written exercises, and the careful consideration of a range of literary and other texts from the ancient world to the present day.

This section, entitled “Reading Matter, Writing Matter”, offers a genealogy for thinking a crucial question of our time, namely the question of materialism. Some commentators on our ‘postmodern’ condition, since the 1980s, have stressed the de-materialisation of our age. Our realities have, in this account, become digital and virtual, and our bodies, our pleasures, our thoughts, and our economies depend less than even before on the matter of the world. This kind of thought has started to look increasingly limited recently as we face up to ecological catastrophe, and it is clear that we need to find new ways of conceiving and imagining the distribution and social reality of the stuff of the world, the matter in which and by which we live. The boundary between ‘ideas’ and ‘material reality’ is hard to place, and hard to police, in the digital world.

This course will explore some elements of this idea, and look to the resources of literature  and of the history of ideas for ways of thinking freshly about matter. We start with Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean thinker. His book-length poem on “The Nature of Things” links sensual experience to an atomic theory of matter and an account of the cosmos; we shall look to the great modernist novelist, Virginia Woolf, and the important contemporary ecological poet, Juliana Spahr, to consider how desire and memory might inform, and be informed by, the way we think of the material world. A politics emerges when we consider that our identities are traversed and constructed by material processes. German playwright Bertolt Brecht and his contemporary, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, address the question of the politics of materialism directly. Recently, ecological thinking has developed a ‘new materialism’, in which our participation in nature is the condition of our experience – we’ll look at the challenges of imagining ourselves in this way, at the time of ecological crisis, through the work of a range of writers, including Amitav Gosh. Throughout, we shall also, in our critical reading and in our creative and academic practice, be paying attention to the matter of language - to the sense that words are material, and imbued with weight and history. We will consider this question very directly as we read a selection of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

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.

‘What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension how like a god.’ Hamlet’s words from Shakespeare’s play express optimism about human possibilities, ironically placing them in the mouth of one of the dramatist’s most self-conflicted protagonists. This course will look at a range of works with such self-questioning in mind. Who am I? What am I? What kinds of relationship do I have with others? Even with myself?

It starts with ‘Antigone,’ a work of ancient Greek tragedy having much to say about social and moral bonds. ‘Hamlet’ introduces the liberal themes of self and society, separating private conscience from public roles and the range of selves presented to others. Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, written against the background of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the growth of the factory system, poses the question of human possibilities anew, this time in terms of scientific discovery. Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ and Woolf’s ‘Room of One’s Own’ present new ways of writing about the self, whether in terms of psychoanalysis or against the background of political and social change, while Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ draws together themes of self and society, personal identity and social relations, in the context of an elaborate philosophical system.

Books:

• S. Freud, Complete Psychological Works Volume Seven                       
• Sophocles, Theban Plays                    
• M. Shelley, Frankenstein
• W. Shakespeare, Hamlet         
• V. Woolf, A Room of One's Own
• J.-P. Sartre, Nausea    

When we read, we enter a different world, travelling in an unknown country where some things are familiar, others strange and new; our adjustment to this theatre of the real reconstructs our own world, emotionally, morally, politically. Empathy arises in the midst of this strangeness, and we find ourselves (in many senses) in the place of the other. As our contemporary world is more and more violently tested, our course looks at this intensely powerful creative process. We begin with one of the greatest and freshest theatrical representations of emotional exploration, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, reading substantially from the point of view of the actor exploring a role. Xavier de Maistre’s playfully profound conversation with himself in his Voyage Around My Room, written under house arrest in 1790 with no intention of publication, announces the ironic solitude of nineteenth century Romanticism, but speaks volumes to our own experience of lockdown. We enter the surreal, grotesque and poignant world of Russia’s encounter with modernity in Gogol’s tales. We end with three very different, fragmented narratives of life in the twentieth century, from Persian and Japanese explorations of the imaginary and the real, of worlds inner and outer, and somewhere in between, to our final text, a selection of Carver’s short stories, turned into a memorable film by Robert Altman, with which we shall finish our course.

Works:

• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
• Xavier de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room
• Nikolai Gogol, Collected Tales
• Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories
• Yasunari Kawabata, Palm of the Hand Stories
• Sadegh Hedayat, Three Drops of Blood
• Raymond Carver, Short Cuts

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 and Death of Harriett Frean, and Woolf’s transgender, transhistorical fantasy Orlando. We go to Nigeria, to Amos Tutuola’s tale The Palm Wine Drinkard 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.

Works:

• Homer, The Odyssey
• Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
• Natsume Soseki, Kokoro
• May Sinclair, Life and Death of Harriett Frean
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando
• Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard
• Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems

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.

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.

‘What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension how like a god.’ Hamlet’s words from Shakespeare’s play express optimism about human possibilities, ironically placing them in the mouth of one of the dramatist’s most self-conflicted protagonists. This course will look at a range of works with such self-questioning in mind. Who am I? What am I? What kinds of relationship do I have with others? Even with myself?

It starts with ‘Antigone,’ a work of ancient Greek tragedy having much to say about social and moral bonds. ‘Hamlet’ introduces the liberal themes of self and society, separating private conscience from public roles and the range of selves presented to others. Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, written against the background of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the growth of the factory system, poses the question of human possibilities anew, this time in terms of scientific discovery. Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ and Woolf’s ‘Room of One’s Own’ present new ways of writing about the self, whether in terms of psychoanalysis or against the background of political and social change, while Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ draws together themes of self and society, personal identity and social relations, in the context of an elaborate philosophical system.

Books:

• S. Freud, Complete Psychological Works Volume Seven                       
• Sophocles, Theban Plays                    
• M. Shelley, Frankenstein
• W. Shakespeare, Hamlet         
• V. Woolf, A Room of One's Own
• J.-P. Sartre, Nausea    

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.