341 - 350 of 387 results for: ENGLISH

Controversies over phrases like "mother tongue," "national language," and "native speaker" reflect the deep investments people bring to issues of language. How might literature become a privileged site for these explorations? In other words, how does the literary engage with the language(s) in which it is written or read? And how do one's poetics aver or betray one's allegiances - racial, cultural, national, and familial? In this course, we will read texts that help us theorize how language vouchsafes one's entry into certain social formations and ideological inclinations. We will also explore how language becomes a unique way to connect literary formations for whom linguistic medium has long been paramount: postcolonial studies, global anglophone literature, ethnic studies, and comparative literature. This course aims to give students a space to experiment with vocabulary for discussing the kinds of strategies and theoretical implications of multilingualism, translation, and race/ethnicity discourse in various literary fields.

[Optional enrollment for the CESTA Digital Humanities Scholars Residency] Participants develop their own digital humanities research projects using methods like text analysis, digital archiving, data visualization and network analysis. They join a dynamic community of practice, engaging in hands-on workshops, seminars with leading DH experts, works-in-progress presentations, and a graduate reading group. Scholars receive dedicated support from undergraduate research interns aligned with their projects, fostering collaboration and innovation. Weekly cohort meetings provide space to build skills, share ideas, and refine research, creating a transformative experience that connects scholars across disciplines.

Human history is one of diasporas collective and individual, and representations of exile both literary and theoretical are as various as the phenomenon of exile itself: statelessness, homelessness, as well as a state of mind Edward Said called metaphorical exile and Georg Lukacs called transcendental homelessness. In this course, we will examine novelistic, autobiographical and theoretical accounts of the experience of exile.

Among the formal qualities of the text important to literary study, style has become the most central. And yet, style has also proven surprisingly tractable to the large language models at the heart of AI platforms. In this course, we will study how style assumed its importance and how to assess it computationally and critically. Through a series of experiments with large language models, we will put pressure on what it is and what it means to literary theory today.

In this course we will examine the rise of the Gothic in England [including Scotland and Ireland] and the American colonies/United States. While the Gothic as a recognized narrative subgenre begins with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), we will challenge a view of this genre as a one-way literary transmission from Britain to the pre- and post-revolutionary United State. In the process, we will consider the historical association of the realist and Gothic novels, and the transatlantic literary connections that fostered the growth and cultural ramifications of the form. We will look closely at a number of interrelated issues: The political uses of the Gothic in the context of revolution (French, American, and Haitian), nation-building; The paranoia associated with racial violence, the infiltration of transatlantic secret societies intended to undermine social and political stability; The patriarchy and forms of sexual violence, including the imprisonment of women; The uncanny and its manifestations: literature, environment, architecture, etc; Anti-Catholicism and other forms of religious violence; The unmaking of social stratifications.

In this course we will examine the complex relationship between elite and 'popular' forms - old forms and new - in the 18th-century English literary imagination. We will consider, for example, the way new so-called popular or 'low' genres - criminal biography, travel literature, political tracts, newspapers, cartoons, broadsheets, conduct books and the like - typically produced for a newly-literate, largely middle-class audience, eager for 'entertainment' - began shaping so-called 'mainstream' Augustan literature more and more over the century. At the same time we will track the declining fortunes of the traditional so-called 'neoclassical' literary ideals represented in the works of Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and other 'elite' writers of the period, all of whom had absorbed and wished to preserve an active reverence for the works of classical antiquity. But we will also be concerned with the 'real-world' implications of the contemporary imaginative split between "high life" and "low life." By examining literary representations of various subcultures - and exemplary new social types such as the Criminal, the Hack, the Whore and the Madman - we will attempt to describe the historic significance of the high-low dialectic in classic eighteenth-century works, and the underlying and increasingly 'modern' and dynamic system of social, philosophical and ideological relations that gave rise to it.

This course reads through the poetry and prose of a writer whose whole course of life was given, as one critic puts it, to "pursuing practical ways of restoring paradise." Non-specialists are welcome; Milton arguably represents the single best figure from the English literary past with whom to think about the problem of poetry as a vocation. Depending on participant interest, a portion of this seminar may be set aside for joint preparation towards the departments comprehensive exam.

This course will look at classic writings on cultures and subcultures, publics and counterpublics/"intimate publics," highbrow and lowbrow, both to map some basics about representations and corresponding cultural identities -- and to begin a practical project of inviting graduate students to research and write about contemporary subcultures after the transition to the internet.

What was premodern aesthetics? The question itself ensures raised eyebrows and accusations of anachronism. "Aesthetics" identifies a post-Enlightenment body of theory that subjects issues of beauty and taste to philosophical inquiry; following Kant's Third Critique, the "aesthetic judgment" is necessarily disinterested, and therefore at odds with the devotional, didactic, and political aims of much literature and visual art produced in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. In this seminar, we will discern the vocabulary and concepts with which premodern thinkers understood the category of beauty and its relationship to perception. To do so, we will examine an array of literary, theological, and philosophical works written from classical antiquity to the sixteenth century - among them, rhetorical treatises, biblical commentaries, and vernacular poetry and prose - that aim to describe, make sense of, and produce aesthetic experience. All assigned readings, except for those written in accessible Middle English, will be available in modern English translation. No prior knowledge of medieval literature is required.