291 - 300 of 388 results for: ENGLISH

In this class, students learn to read prose and poetry written in the earliest recorded form of English, which we call Old English (~450-1100) in its original language. Genres on the syllabus include riddles, history, magical spells, chronicles, and travel stories. To prepare for class, students will make translations. We'll check these as a group as we discuss the text's literary qualities and cultural/historical contexts - and how these are intertwined with the details of the Old English language.

In this class, students will read the entirety of the Old English poem Beowulf in its original language. In class we will work through our translations and discuss, among other things, the poem's poetic style and accomplishment, its fusion of Christian and Germanic pagan elements, its place in the broader tradition of early medieval Germanic literature, and the manuscript it appears in.

How have imaginative works shaped the human connection to the oceans in Western modernity? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by ocean practice, ranging from work and science of the sea to forced migration, the slave trade, maritime piracy and leisure pursuits? This course addresses these questions by looking at influential depictions of oceanic realms in literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries. It also offers an introduction to key concepts in the ocean or blue humanities, a vibrant interdisciplinary field that brings humanities tools to understand humans' connection to the largest and most unknown system on the planet vital to sustaining life. Primary literature may include such works as Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, and Rivers Solomon's The Deep. Films screened may include such works as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jaws, Point Break, The Abyss, the surrealist films of Jean Painlevé and Man Ray, and science communication from contemporary research cruise media output.

Looking at the generation before the 'Lost Generation,' this course explores a period in which 'modernistic' techniques and representations were unfolding from the jangling dissonances, the jarring juxtapositions, and the tumbling orthodoxies that accompanied the tectonic technological and social shifts around the turn of the century. Topics and contexts include: immigration, urbanization, race, the 'New Woman,' cultural developments (vaudeville, cinema, ragtime and the blues), and contemporaneous theories of consciousness and sexuality.

This seminar explores the rich and enduring tradition of the Tristan and Isolde story, from its medieval imagining to modern retellings. We will examine how different versions of the story - literary, visual, and operatic - construct and complicate the story's themes of love, loyalty, betrayal, and fate, among others. Through close readings of key texts from authors such as Beroul, Gottfried of Strassburg, and Thomas of Britain, as well as the operatic adaptation by Richard Wagner, we will interrogate how different themes are shaped by cultural expectations and ideological tensions. Students are invited to consider critical perspectives from feminist, psychoanalytic, queer, and other theory to illuminate the texts. No prior knowledge of medieval literature is required, but a willingness to wrestle with challenging texts and complex questions is essential. Students are also encouraged to explore retellings of the Tristan and Isolde story in other cultural traditions. This seminar concludes with a one-day conference at which students will present their work.

Comedy has been used to shine a no-holds-barred light on everything from the rise of fascism to the inanities of fashion. Over the decades, it has raised a number of questions. Some of these are ethical. What can we legitimately find funny or make fun of? Are there things we shouldn't laugh at? Can and should comedy be delimited or censored? When does comedy become abuse? When does it become hate speech? Some of the questions we will consider are more general: does comedy change through history? Is it culturally specific? Is it gender-specific? Is it racially or religiously specific? Is there a point at which these specificities give way to the possibility of a form of humor common to us all and the unique role laughter plays in uniting us across these differences? Finally, we will explore the expressive forms of comedy, including parody, satire, slapstick, tragicomedy, stand-up, and physical comedy, which raises the question of whether comedy can be said to reside in the body. This question is central to the content and practice of stand-up as it is to the fiction we'll be reading in this class. It encompasses the categories of race, gender, and disability, as well as the politics of exclusion, violence, and censorship.

What might it mean to travel through eternity? This course will consider the question through the literary and visual lenses of allegorical pilgrimage, symbolic pilgrims, and schematic pilgriming. Perspectives on allegory, symbol, figura, and diagram from Eric Auerbach, Samuel T. Coleridge, Stephen W. Hawking, David Bohm, and John M. Sullivan of The Optiverse. Supplementary material from the Bible, Dante, Chaucer, and a short video, Outside In: How to Turn a Sphere Inside Out. We will focus on the paintings, poems, and illuminated books of William Blake, from ballads and The Gates of Paradise to A Vision of the Last Judgment, The Book of Thel, The Book of Urizen, and Jerusalem.

This seminar investigates literature as a practice of freedom, taking as its theoretical foundation Richard Rorty's revolutionary claim that human liberation comes not through discovering truth but through redescription. For Rorty, literature's unique power lies in its capacity to provide new vocabularies, metaphors, and narratives that allow us to reimagine ourselves and our possibilities. By showing us that our deepest assumptions about identity, society, and meaning are contingent rather than necessary, literature opens spaces for transformation - both personal and collective. Through intensive engagement with contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Miranda July - we will explore how literary redescription works in practice. These writers demonstrate how reimagining the languages we use to narrate experience can fundamentally alter what that experience can become. Their innovations in form and voice reveal writing as a tool for escaping what Rorty calls our "final vocabularies," those inherited descriptions that ordinarily constrain our sense of the possible. We will examine how their work challenges conventional boundaries between fiction and philosophy, self and other, private and public, creating new modes of attention and understanding. The course situates Rorty's pragmatist vision of literature within a broader philosophical conversation about freedom, drawing on Nietzsche's perspectivism, Heidegger's poetics of dwelling, and Arendt's conception of narrative identity. Together, these thinkers help us understand how literary redescription operates as ethical and political practice: not by prescribing how we should live, but by expanding our imaginative resources for conceiving how we might live. Through close reading and creative response, students will engage with literature as a liberating force - one that doesn't reveal hidden truths but creates new possibilities for human flourishing.

Why is it that the aesthetic pleasures resulting from artistic representation so often depart from the "pure" ideal of beauty? Is tainted beauty more, or less, than beautiful? Is there any such thing as a "pure" aesthetic category, after all, or is all experience in relation to the arts hybrid? Pain may enhance pleasure in the case of the sublime, but where does disgust fit in? or does it? And what about ugliness? Campiness? Grotesqueness? The uncanny? This course is designed to put literary, psychoanalytic, sociological, architectural, post structural, and queer theory as well as philosophical and art historical writings in conversation with poetry, narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, and film, in order to develop a critical skill set designed not only to address such questions but, more critically for an active mind, to posit new ones.