Undergraduate courses
Major American Authors: Realist to Modern (English 252)
This course is an introduction to the most influential American writers from late nineteenth century to the present. It aims to encompass a wide chronological range of literature while devoting ample time to selected individual authors. In our reading and writing, we will ask questions about the characteristics that distinguish American literature from literature written in England or elsewhere; study the major issues and debates of the period, as well as the various literary movements and schools that assembled around them; and address the specific questions associated with literature as an art form and field of study. By the end of the semester, students will be able to (1) identify the unique style of each of the authors whom we will study, (2) write clearly about those writers’ styles and thematic concerns, and (3) discuss the broader issues, aims, and cultural contexts of American literature in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first centuries.
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Modern Poetry (English 358)
This course introduces students to the poetry and poetic theories of the major poets writing in America, England, and Ireland during the latter part of the nineteenth and the whole of the twentieth centuries. Poets typically use verbal style to create the effect of a feeling, thinking “self” uttering the lines of the poem. We will explore how modern and contemporary poets thought about the psychological make-up of this projected self (especially its emotional life), how their stylistic experiments fit into the history of lyric poetry, and how the different “schools” of poetry helped to set the stage for contemporary poetic practice. By the end of the semester, students should be able to (1) identify the unique styles of the poets whom we will study, (2) write clearly about those poets’ styles and thematic concerns, and (3) discuss the broader issues and theoretical questions associated with poetry as an art form.
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Dante in English (English 335)
This course introduces students to Dante Alighieri's epic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, a harrowing three-part journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven set in the year 1300. Students will also examine and interpret Dante’s minor works; study the historical, political, and religious contexts of his writings; and investigate his literary antecedents and contemporaries. Texts will be studied in English translation, so no understanding of Latin or Italian is necessary. The course will conclude with works by English-language authors influenced by Dante, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, and Seamus Heaney.
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Graduate courses
T. S. Eliot and Contemporary Poetry, Studies in Modernism (English 725)
This course will examine the work of T. S. Eliot and its influence on poetry and poetics after 1945 in England, America,and Ireland. We will devote the first half of the semester to an in-depth reading of Eliot's entire corpus, from the earliest lyrics in the Inventions of the March Hare manuscript to the his late, uncollected interviews and letters, including his largely unknown correspondence with Groucho Marx. Readings will also include the most influential Eliot scholarship of the last fifty years. In the second half of the course, we will examine the ways in which post-WWII poets--including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney--discovered their earliest creative voices by both submitting to and resisting Eliot's influence. Our methodological emphasis be primarily on literary history and criticism, poetic theory, and biography.
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American Poetry and Poetics, 1913-1935:
Studies in American Literature (English 730)
This course focuses on American poetry and poetic theory, from the publication of Robert Frost’s first volume in 1913 through the appearance of the last part of H. D.’s WWII sequence, Trilogy, in 1946. We will pay particular attention to modernism’s place in the history of the lyric genre and to the ways that modern poets both revised and resisted the ideas about poetic form, affective intensity, and the lyric subject that they inherited from Dickinson, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Students will engage with a wide range of primary sources, gauge the tensions between the various schools of American modernism (represented by Pound, Williams, and Stevens, among others), and examine the literary commerce between the transatlantic centers of modernism, including Chicago, New York, London, and Paris. _______________________________________________________________________________________