English (ENGL-UA)

Open to English majors and minors only. Conducted in a seminar format. Introduces students to the demands and pleasures of university-level investigation of English literature. Students develop the tools necessary for advanced criticism, including close-reading skills, knowledge of generic conventions, mastery of critical terminology, and skill at a variety of modes of analysis, from the formal to the historical. Also emphasizes the writing process, with the production of four to five formal papers.

Survey of English literature from its origins in the Anglo-Saxon epic through Milton. Close reading of representative works, with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.

Survey of English literature from the Restoration to the 20th century. Close reading of representative works with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.

This course surveys the evolution of literary themes and forms from the period of European exploration of the Americas through the Civil War, tracing distinctive traditions of writing and thinking that have shaped the development of modern literature and thought in the United States. How, in particular, did this writing and thought address religious, political and economic conflict? How was it shaped by encounters between European and native American cultures; the arts of religious devotion and cosmopolitan enlightenment; the cultural politics of revolution and modern nationalism; responses to the expansion of capitalism and slavery; the development of print media and modern literary values; and the philosophy and aesthetics of American transcendentalism and sentimentalism?

An overview of English-language literary production as it expands and diversifies from 1900 onward. Includes topics such as international modernisms; literatures of imperialism, anti-colonialism and diaspora; race, ethnicity and representation; and the significance of English-language writing in an increasingly globalized cultural field.

Combines the study of drama as literary text with the study of theatre as its three-dimensional translation, both theoretically and practically. Drawing on the rich theatrical resources of New York City, approximately 12 plays are seen, covering classical to contemporary and traditional to experimental theatre. On occasion, films or videotapes of plays are used to supplement live performances. Readings include plays and essays in theory and criticism.

Interdisciplinary introduction to late medieval culture, using Dante, its foremost literary artist, as a focus. Attention is directed at literature, art, and music, in addition to political, religious, and social developments of the time. Emphasizes the continuity of Western tradition, especially the classical background of medieval culture and its transmission to the modern world.

An introduction to the history of New York through an exploration of fiction, poetry, plays, and films about the city, from Washington Irving?s A History of New York to Frank Miller?s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. Two lectures and one recitation section each week.

4 points, discussion/seminar. First offered spring 2016, and every semester thereafter. Prerequisite (or co-requisite): Literary Interpretation (ENGL-UA 200). This seminar is a class in creative as well as critical reading. This class posits reading as an activity and explores reading and writing as reciprocal activities: no strong writers are not also strong readers. What can we learn from a text's forms, modes, codes, and affects? What can we also learn from theories of literature (of poetry and poetics, or drama, of the novel or narrative in general)? How can we read both with and against the grain? And how can a profound engagement with criticism, commentary, and theory help us become better “makers” ourselves? This course assumes that writing is an effect of, and in a feedback loop with, reading: thus this seminar aims to strengthen your capacities for pattern recognition – i.e. sophistication about genre, style, mode. Regular assignments aim to provide a space for critical experiments in reading and writing; the syllabus offers models and goads for reflection and response. Students will direct and distill their inquiries into a substantial final paper (or project).

Study of theme and technique in the American short story through readings in Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Faulkner, Porter, and others, including representative regional writers.

Survey of major autobiographies, fiction, and poetry from the early national period to the eve of the New Negro Renaissance. Writers considered generally include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, and Harriet Wilson.

Prerequisite: V41.0185 or V41.0230. Survey of major texts?fiction, poetry, autobiography, and drama?from Du Bois?s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to contemporaries such as Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and its key figures, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison.

Focuses on major novels by African American writers from Richard Wright?s Native Son (1940) to the present. Readings generally include novels by Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Chester Hines as well as more recent fiction by Ernest Gaines, John Widerman, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and others.

Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s major poetry, with particular attention to The Canterbury Tales. General language training will be offered at the start of the course. Special attention will be given to Chaucer’s narrative skill, his techniques of characterization, style, varieties of formal invention, and particular thematic preoccupations. Students are also encouraged to explore Chaucer’s writing as a lens onto late medieval society and culture.

Introduction to the major writers of the 16th and early 17th centuries. Such representative works as More's Utopia, Sidney's Defense of Poetry, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and works of the lyric poets from Wyatt to Sidney are studied in relation to humanism and the Reformation.

Why is Shakespeare still a vital cultural force 400 years after his death? How was he able to speak both to us and to audiences of his own day? This course will survey Shakespeare’s major plays and poems, and will look at their historical, cultural and theatrical contexts. But we will also consider Shakespeare’s afterlife on stage and screen.

Intensive reading of six to eight plays of Shakespeare chosen from among the comedies, tragedies, and histories, with attention to formal, historical, and performance questions.

Introduction to the prose and poetry of the 17th century, an age of spiritual, scientific, and political crisis. Readings in Jonson, Donne, Bacon, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Browne, and others.

Prerequisite: V41.0210. Topic varies each term. Consult the department?s undergraduate Web site for further information.

Emphasis on the major poems (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes) with some attention to the early poems and the prose. Traces the poet's sense of vocation, analyzes the gradual development of the Miltonic style, and assesses Milton's position in the history of English literature, politics, and theology.

This survey of Jane Austen’s work examines her compact oeuvre of fiction, whose critical reception has been formative to the discipline of English literature itself. We will read Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and other classics to consider Austen’s deep, virtuosic inheritance of eighteenth-century narrative forms as well as their afterlives in contemporary culture, including popular film adaptations of Austen’s work (Clueless, Love and Friendship). Students will embark on a careful study of an author widely recognized as one of the master stylists of the English language.

Studies in the forms and contexts of the 19th-century English novel.

Topic varies each term. Consult the department?s undergraduate Web site for further information.

Examines the large variety of writing produced in North America between 1600 and 1800, from indigenous/European encounters through the American Revolution and its aftermath. Genres discussed in their cultural contexts include colonization, captivity, slave, and travel narratives; sermons; familiar correspondence; autobiographies; poetry; drama; and the novel.

Readings from major modern American, British, and Irish poets from the middle of the 19th century to the 1920s?specifically, from Whitman?s Leaves of Grass (1855) to T. S. Eliot?s The Waste Land (1922). Poets considered generally include Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Frost, Williams, and Eliot.

Prerequisite: V41.0220. Studies in contemporary British fiction, exploring postwar British culture in an era of profound political and economic change and social upheaval. Examines a range of avant-garde, neorealist, postcolonial, and popular texts that challenge received notions of ?Englishness.? Particular attention is paid to the interaction between literature and other cultural forms, such as cinema, popular music, and sport.

Covers the tumultuous period from the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, through the Easter Rising in 1916, and into the early years of national government in the 1930s. Readings in various genres (poetry, short story, novel, drama). Writers may include Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien.

Considers the imaginative ?logic? of James Joyce?s career and the extent to which the trajectory of his works constitutes a ?development? of forces posited in the early writings. Readings span the entire oeuvre, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, and include Joyce?s poetry and his play, Exiles.

Examination of representative works by contemporary novelists. Authors generally include Barthelme, Bellow, Ellison, Gaddis, Hawkes, Mailer, Malamud, Morrison, Nabokov, Oates, Pynchon, Roth, Updike, and Walker.

Study of the drama and theatre of America since 1900, including Eugene O?Neill, Susan Glaspell, the Group Theatre, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Maria Irene Fornes, and David Henry Hwang.

Major texts in critical theory from Plato to Derrida, considered in relation to literary practice. The first half of the course focuses on four major types of critical theory: mimetic, ethical, expressive, and formalist. The second half turns to 20th-century critical schools, such as Russian and American formalism, archetypal criticism, structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, reader theory, deconstruction, and historicism.

Historical and critical study of the idea and practice of tragedy from Greek times to the present.

America is not always the answer. This class offers an introduction to the many and varied fictions that have been produced by diasporic South Asians across the globe over the last 150 years: in Australia, Africa, Europe, Caribbean. Our exploration of the poetics and politics of immigration will attend to different types of traveller (inc. soldiers, students, athletes, medics, cosmonauts) and draw on a wide range of media (inc. literature, cinema and music). Particular attention will be paid to the diverse geographies of Asian migration - be they plantations, dance Floors, restaurants, call centres. Themes to be addressed include coolietude, globalization, the impact of 9/11 and techno-servitude.

Considers contemporary science fiction as literature, social commentary, prophecy, and a reflection of recent and possible future trends in technology and society. Writers considered include such authors as Isaac Asimov, J. G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Arthur C. Clark, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.

ENGL-UA 732: "Introduction to Book History" offers an introduction to the rapidly-expanding nexus of fields known as the History of the Book. Book History addresses more than just books: it investigates the production, dissemination, and readership of all kinds of textual materials, from papyrus to e-books. This course, aimed at those who want a broad, introductory overview to the field, offers a sweeping survey of key issues and historical moments and transformations from oral culture to manuscript to print to hypertext. Specific topics will vary from semester to semester, but what unites all book historians is the conviction that the material format of text itself matters. Hands-on workshops and field trips will allow all students to learn how to "read" and describe books, manuscripts, or other texts as meaningful artifacts in themselves (rather than as transparent vehicles of meaning). Other typical topics include major format changes and technological transitions in book production (e.g. the printing revolution) and their cultural impact, the history of censorship, copyright, and intellectual property, newspapers and periodicals, ephemera, Grub Street and the history of authorship, and the ways that digital texts, resources, and media, and computational tools and methods are currently transforming research in the humanities.

Topics vary from term to term.

Individual creative project for students completing the Creative Writing Track in the English Major. The student is guided through the development and writing of a substantial creative project by frequent conferences with the project director. The project typically results in one of the following: a novella, a poetry chapbook, a collection of short stories, or a work of a hybrid genre. Students enrolled in this course also enroll in the one-semester Creative Writing Capstone Colloquium (ENGL-UA 911 for 2 credit points). Proposals, approved by the student's faculty advisor, must be submitted in advance of the registration period for the term in which the Capstone Project is to be conducted.

Required of all students enrolled in ENGL-UA 910, Creative Writing Capstone Project. Meets approximately eight times each term to workshop writing projects and engage collectively in the writing process.

To complete the honors program, the student must write a thesis under the supervision of a faculty director in this individual tutorial course. The student chooses a topic (normally at the beginning of the senior year) and is guided through the research and writing by weekly conferences with the thesis director. Students enrolled in this course are also expected to attend a yearlong colloquium for thesis writers ENGL-UA 926). Students should consult the director of the honors program about the selection of a topic and a thesis director. Information about the length, format, and due date of the thesis is available on the department?s Web site.

Two terms required of all honors seniors. Meets approximately eight times each term.

Topic varies significantly each term. Consult the department's undergraduate website for further information.

Prerequisite: for majors, permission of the student?s departmental adviser; for minors, permission of the department?s internship director. May not be used to fulfill the minimum requirement of either the major or the minor. 2 or 4 points per term; 8 total internship points are the department maximum. Pass/fail. Requires a commitment of 8 to 12 hours of work per week in an unpaid position to be approved by the director of undergraduate studies. The intern?s duties on site should involve some substantive aspect of literary work, whether in research, writing, editing, or production (e.g., at an archive or publishing house, or with a literary agent or an arts administration group). A written evaluation is solicited from the intern?s supervisor at the end of the semester. The grade for the course is based on a final paper submitted to the faculty director.

This course bridges scholarly and professional training by providing students with an intensive introduction to the world of contemporary literature: its writers, its communities, and its organizations and institutions. Built around the English Department’s Contemporary Literature Series (CLS), which brings noted authors who are on course syllabi that semester to the NYU campus, the focus of the CLS Lab varies each semester depending on the featured authors. Some of the topics to be explored include: literary publishing, forums for literary discussion and criticism, literary organizations and institutions, and the possibilities and challenges of writing scholarly literary criticism about contemporary literature. By the end of the CLS Lab, students will have a firm grasp of the contemporary literary landscape and they will be better prepared to translate their interests and skills as English majors into the intellectual and professional contexts of the literary world in New York City and beyond.

Prerequisite: permission of the director of undergraduate studies. May not duplicate the content of a regularly offered course. Intended for qualified junior and senior English majors or minors, but may not be used to fulfill the minimum requirements of either the major or the minor. 2 or 4 points per term. Requires a paper of considerable length that should embody the result of a semester?s reading, thinking, and frequent conferences with the student?s director. The paper should show the student?s ability to investigate, collect, and evaluate material, finally drawing conclusions that are discussed in a sound and well-written argument. Proposals, approved by the student?s faculty director, must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies in advance of the registration period for the term in which the independent study is to be conducted.

This course, offered to every English major and minor, pairs students with a Faculty Mentor to create a supportive and vibrant mentoring experience beyond the classroom. Students will meet with their faculty mentor to help connect them with the English faculty, their knowledge and resources and discuss more informally their interests, plan of study and career goals. We know it can be challenging for students to know how to reach out or begin a conversation and build professional or academic relationships, and the mentoring program is designed to support and encourage students throughout their time in the department.

Gateway course to the major that introduces students to the demands and pleasures of university-level investigation of English literature. Develops the tools necessary for advanced criticism: close-reading skills, knowledge of generic conventions, mastery of critical terminology, and skill at a variety of modes of analysis, from the formal to the historical. Also emphasizes frequent writing.

Survey of literature in English from the British Isles and British Empire spanning from the Restoration through 1900. Close reading of representative works with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.

The course examines the main features of modern drama from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Each week there is a theatre visit to see plays from the period in a number of different venues across the city: for example, the National Theatre, the Royal Court, selected West End houses, non-theatre spaces converted for performance, and site specific locations. The productions are chosen to illustrate the immense variety of work produced in theatre during the twentieth century and current today. They also provide excellent examples of contemporary techniques in theatre making, ranging from interpretations of traditional dramas and comedies, new writing, physical theatre, musicals, cross media pieces, and other alternative forms. Significant aspects of modern drama are also considered in class through examples on DVDs, examination of critical reviews, and analysis of additional texts where appropriate.

This course explores how literary and cultural works address the state of perpetual war of the historical present. Focusing on Third World decolonisation contexts, we will consider how writers and artists interrogate the gender, racial, and national ideologies that fuel violence, and how literary cultural analysis contributes towards understanding the global unevenly distributed effects of war.

This course is an introduction to the literatures of Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on Indigenous, migrant and diasporic writing. In addition to major texts from Australia and New Zealand, we will also encounter a range of works from Singapore, Hawaii and other Pacific islands. Some questions we will tackle include: How have the cultural, historical, and economic processes of colonialism, diaspora and migration connected and shaped this diverse region? How have different authors addressed these processes in their literary works? How have issues of race and indigeneity been central to various discourses of nationalism? What is the place of these issues in early and more contemporary postcolonial literary works in English? What particular roles have Australia and New Zealand, as colonial powers in their own right, played in the region? Finally, what can the latest generation of migrant writing from Australia show us about new forms of interconnections across the globalising Asia-Pacific? Students in this course will examine novels, poetry, films and theoretical texts to develop their critical thinking, reading and writing skills. Along the way, they will gain a solid grounding in the concepts of post-colonialism, race, diaspora, indigeneity, nationalism and multiculturalism.

This course will study a variety of texts written at particular times in the history of London. The aims of the course are to encourage the student to think historically, in terms of the way London and representations of the city have changed and developed over time; and theoretically, in terms of the way the city is mediated through different forms and genres (e.g. poetry, novels, essays, film; satire, detective and crime fiction), and the interrelationship of literary and material spaces. We will also examine the significance of gender, the definition of the modern metropolis as a labyrinthine city of Babylon, the influence of metropolitan culture on Modernism and Modernity, assimilation versus multiculturalism, immigration, and the effects of new modern spaces on individuals.

This seminar is a class in creative as well as critical reading. This class posits reading as an activity and explores reading and writing as reciprocal activities: no strong writers are not also strong readers. What can we learn from a text's forms, modes, codes, and affects? What can we also learn from theories of literature (of poetry and poetics, or drama, of the novel or narrative in general)? How can we read both with and against the grain? And how can a profound engagement with criticism, commentary, and theory help us become better “makers” ourselves? This course assumes that writing is an effect of, and in a feedback loop with, reading: thus this seminar aims to strengthen your capacities for pattern recognition – i.e. sophistication about genre, style, mode. The focus of this course will vary by semester and instructor.

This course provides an introduction to the dramatic work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Students read and attend representative comedies, tragedies, and histories, their selection to be determined by the plays actually in production in and around London, particularly at the Barbican, New Globe, and Stratford to which at least one excursion will be made. Special attention will be given to the playhouses and the influence they had on the art of the theatre, actors' companies, and modes of production and performance. Lectures and discussions will focus on the aesthetic quality of the plays, their relationship with the audiences (then and now), the application of the diverse attitudes and assumptions of modern critical theory to the Elizabethan stage, the contrasting structures of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama, the new emphasis on selfhood and individuality, and the major themes of hierarchy, order, and justice, the conflict of Nature and Fortune, the role of Providence, the ideals of love, and the norms of social accord. Opportunities will be given to investigate the interrelations of the plays and other arts, including film, opera, and ballet.

The nineteenth century was the great age of the English novel. This course charts the evolution of the form during this period, exploring texts by major authors including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Close attention to narrative, questions of mimesis and publishing practices will combine with the exploration of a range of significant contemporary discourses relating to shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, religion, science, class, and race. These varied contexts will help us to consider formal, stylistic and thematic continuities as well as discontinuities and innovations. Taking advantage of our local surroundings, we will also explore changing representations of London and trace the enduring legacy of this period in the twenty-first-century city.

Studies in contemporary British fiction, exploring postwar British culture in an era of profound political and economic change and social upheaval. Examines a range of avant-garde, neorealist, postcolonial, and popular texts that challenge received notions of Englishness. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between literature and other cultural forms, such as cinema, popular music, and sport.

This course bridges scholarly and professional training by providing students with an intensive introduction to the world of contemporary literature: its writers, its communities, and its organizations and institutions. Built around the English Department's Contemporary Literature Series (CLS), which brings noted authors who are on course syllabi that semester to the NYU campus, the focus of the CLS Lab varies each semester depending on the featured authors. Some of the topics to be explored include: literary publishing, forums for literary discussion and criticism, literary organizations and institutions, and the possibilities and challenges of writing scholarly literary criticism about contemporary literature. By the end of the CLS Lab, students will have a firm grasp of the contemporary literary landscape and they will be better prepared to translate their interests and skills as English majors into the intellectual and professional contexts of the literary world.