English (ENGL)
How does literature matter? What use is figurative language? What truth can literature offer? This course teaches students how literary texts produce meaning through genre and form. Through frequent analytical writing assignments based on the readings, the course helps students learn to present complex arguments with clarity, logic, and persuasive style.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
Devoted to improving the student's writing through frequent revisions. Intensive work during the semester concentrates on the student's own writing, which is examined in class and in conference with the instructor.Class size limited to 12 students.
Enrollment limited to 1st year students only
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
The study of poetry is central to the study of literature, since it is in poetry that the power of language-play is at its most intense. This course investigates how poetry produces emotional and intellectual effects through language, sound, and form. Examining poems from a broad range of writers and periods, students will hone close reading skills as they engage with the devices poets use to prompt imaginative work in their readers. All sections will be writing-intensive, using the drafting process to develop and refine literary analysis and ultimately to present it in the form of persuasive critical arguments. The course is required for English majors, who are encouraged to take it as early as possible to prepare for more advanced literary study.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
An introductory course in the study of the form and technique of poetry. As readers of literature we study how a work of art and an artist's vision are pieced together; as aspiring writers of literature we come to have a hands-on understanding of how a poem is created. Emphasis is on the intensive reading of modern and contemporary poems, though the assignments are creative. Class size limited to 12 students.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
An introductory course in the study of the varied forms and techniques of fiction and non-fiction. Emphasis is on the intensive reading and writing of various prose forms. Lectures on form, language and finding material for inspiration. Class size limited to 12 students.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
A study of selected major works of British Literature. Non-majors only.
Prerequisite: Students who are English majors are unable to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Annually
A study of selected major works of American Literature. Non-majors only.
Prerequisite: Students who are English majors are unable to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Annually
Intensive reading and writing of expository essays to develop the student's authorial voice and style. Students for whom English is a second language or who come from a diverse or multicultural background will receive special help in some sections; consult the instructor. Permission of instructor required. Class size limited to 12.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
Focuses on the study and practice of various types of writing about scientific phenomena; considers fundamental questions about the relationship between scientific and humanistic modes of inquiry. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
Covers the fundamentals of screenwriting (format, characterization, narrative arcs) through original creative work and close reading of example screenplays. Students will adapt a literary work to learn form, as well as draft, workshop, and revise their own scripts. Class size limited to 12. Permission of instructor required.
Prerequisite: ENGL 141 or 142 or 143
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
This course examines the development of British literature from its beginnings to 1720, presenting at least six common texts while developing the close reading skills initiated at the introductory level of the major. Authors include Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Defoe. Should be taken after Poetry & Poetics and before any 300-level course.
Prerequisite: ENGL 130
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
This course examines the development of American literature from its beginnings to the present, presenting at least six common texts while developing the close reading skills initiated at the introductory level of the major. Authors include Poe, Douglass, Dickinson, Whitman, Faulkner, Morrison, and Alvarez. One of two courses that can fulfill the English major Touchstones 2 requirement. Should be taken after Poetry & Poetics and before any 300-level course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
This course examines the development of British literature from 1720 to the present, presenting at least six common texts while developing the close reading skills initiated at the introductory level of the major. Authors include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Beckett and Ishiguro. One of two courses that fulfill the Touchstones 2 requirement. Should be taken after Poetry & Poetics and before any 300-level course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
From the Greeks onward, ekphrasis, or the practice of writing vivid description about art, has provided an excellent foundation for the development of imaginative writing in all genres. In this unique creative writing course, students will work in a museum setting to produce ekphrastic responses to artworks in several genres. They will try their hand at poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, engaging their creativity as they learn the basic craft issues specific to each genre. No experience in creative writing or knowledge of visual art is required -- all students are welcome. This course will challenge your creativity and enlarge your understanding of both creative writing and visual art, but it will be rigorously playful, taking advantage of the creative environment of the Worcester Art Museum. Open to English majors and non-majors; no previous creative writing knowledge required; class size limited to 12.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Arts
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
For students who have taken any introductory creative writing course. A more advanced course on the reading and writing of poems with emphasis on prosody, writing in closed and open forms, and writing various types of poems. Lecture and workshop format with more attention to student writing. Class size limited to 12.
Prerequisite: ENGL 141 or 142.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall
For students who have taken any introductory creative writing course. A more advanced course on the reading and writing of the short story with emphasis on refining the skills learned in the introductory course. Workshop format with lectures and readings. Class size limited to 12.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
For students who have taken any introductory creative writing course. A more advanced course on the reading and writing of essays with emphasis on the structural composition of longer, more investigative pieces. Class size limited to 12.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Spring
This course centers literature by writers whose identities have marked them as historically other to a predominantly white European body of works, including African American, Asian American, Indigenous, and Latinx authors, among others. Through our reading, discussion, and student research, our class will consider how literature influences and responds to complex conversations about race, ethnicity, nationality, and identity. Together we will ask what brings together multi-ethnic literature as a field, as well as how variations across authors, content, and form resist easy categorization. Alongside discussion of major and lesser-known works of multi-ethnic literature, we will contextualize our reading with the crucial role of activism in the development of this field and of ethnic studies programs. Our class will bridge the fields history and contemporary moment through multi-ethnic U.S. writers reflections of their roles in education and publishing today via trends like #OwnVoices and the We Need Diverse Books organization. We will examine these concepts through and with attention to various forms, including but not limited to comics, creative nonfiction, novels, poetry, and short stories, from multiple genres.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Literature
This course examines how women writers from varying class, racial, ethnic, religious, regional, and national backgrounds represent female adolescence. Exploring a range of novels and memoirs, as well as several films, we will investigate the literary, cultural, and political contexts that shape both the works themselves and the situation of women writers. In addition to learning to read and analyze a wide range of texts, the course also offers significant opportunities to strengthen your writing skills through a variety of informal and formal writing assignments. Writing includes informal responses, three essays, and a coming-of-age memoir.
Prerequisite: Students who are English majors are unable to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
What can you learn from the worlds literatures for your own creative writing? In this course, you will read contemporary literature (prose) in translation to learn about writing craft for your own fiction. You will write and workshop your own stories; if you have another language you wish to use for creative work, you have the option to do so and to present a literary translation for workshop. As globalization transforms our worldincluding its literary cultureby reading beyond English language literature your perspective of what fiction can be is enlarged. You will likely discover writing techniques from other cultures that are less common in English to apply to your own creative work. Reading assignments include translated literatures, about 60% to 65% from Asian languages the other 35% to 40% from Western languages, along with examples from less-translated Asian languages. Written assignments include creative work and critical essays responding to and comparing the reading assignments and a reflective journal; a final portfolio of writing is required.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Literature
Everyones heard of Shakespeares Globe, the theater he wrote for: the name already tells you a lot about how he thought of the plays being performed there and what they could do. Four hundred years later, the names are reversed: Shakespeare now belongs to the globe, with his plays produced and adapted in virtually every corner of our world. Yet that dissemination raises important questions, which this class will take up. To what extent are reproductions and inspired works meant to convey the real Shakespeare, and to what extent is Shakespeare a kind of language other cultures can use to tell their own stories? Do we learn about the past or the present in studying Shakespeare, and how does his global reception change that question? We will read five pairs of plays with contemporary works adapting or inspired by them, from around the world. Our goal is to investigate the plays for what they can tell us about what the globe meant in Shakespeares day and our own, and the ways this increasingly-important concept is inflected by gender, race, nation, language, and medium.
GPA units: 1
During the twentieth century, four Irish writers won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But the early decades of the twenty-first century have seen an equally astonishing array of impressive publications and performances. Already, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, and Paul Lynch have each won the Booker Prize, and the novels of Sally Rooney have captivated an international readership. These years have been described as the golden age of Irish prose: fiction (particularly novels and short stories authored by Irish women) and non-fiction prose (such as the personal essay) have earned critical and commercial success. But poetry and drama continue to thrive. As we read, well consider how contemporary Irish writing carries the legacies of longer traditions, even as it captures recent dramatic social and cultural changes across Ireland and Northern Ireland: well study, for example, new voices from previously underrepresented populations, emergent forms such as rap poetry, and the changed shape of political humor in television shows such as Derry Girls.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Irish Topics focuses on different subjects, ranging from themes like sex and literary activism to forms like drama or the short story, and employs Irish and Northern Irish literature and culture to hone skills in critical reading and writing.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
This course guides us in learning about disability through the critical and creative works of disabled writers. We will examine how physical, mental, and emotional disability have been portrayed across U.S. literature and popular culturehistorically, often without the input of disabled people themselves. At the same time, we will draw upon the critical writing of disabled writers to help us consider the benefits and damages of such representations of disabled people in the public imaginary, while simultaneously reflecting on our own roles as learners and creators in our own communities. Our course discussions and materials will situate these conversations within the development of disability rights in the U.S., including the 20th-century Disability Rights Movement, anti-psychiatry/Mad Pride, the autism rights movement, and Disability Justice. Students will practice attending to embodiment in literature and rhetoric with an intersectional awareness of access, emotion, and movement. In addition to conventional academic writing, students in this class will work toward a culminating project that engages disability within the Holy Cross and Worcester communities.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
This is an intermediate-level fiction course focusing on flash fiction (brief stories ranging from several sentences to several pages long). Together, we will explore the fundamentals of fiction writing, including characterization and point of view, dialogue and description, plot and idea, setting and tone, and momentum-generating openings and surprising yet inevitable endings. In-class exercises and weekly assignments will let you try your hand at writing many different kinds of stories. Regular workshops will help you hone your skills as a reader as well as provide you with constructive feedback on your work. By the end of the semester, you will have produced a chapbook of sudden fiction as well as had the opportunity to submit at least two stories to literary magazines.
GPA units: 1
This 200-level course for non-majors will examine fictional explorations of the relationship between humans and non-humans in literature and in film. The course will explore the power of narrative in shaping and changing our relationship to the non-human world. Well examine texts and films that think about our relationship to animals, monsters, and aliens, and explore topics including gender, sexuality, race, class, science, and culture.Well look at narratives in which monsters test humanitys virtue and courage in the chivalric romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its 2021 adaptation The Green Knight, as well as Colson Whiteheads zombie apocalypse novel, Zone One. Well consider science fiction narratives in which aliens save humanity from itself in Octavia Butlers novel Dawn and the 2016 film Arrival. And well think about our relationship to the animal world in Adam Robertss speculative novel Bête, in which domestic animals are injected with artificial intelligence, and the 2021 folk horror film Lamb, in which a bereaved couple take in an animal-human hybrid.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Arts, Literature
A study of the flowering of the Romance genre in late medieval England. Exploration of Continental and Middle Eastern origins; focus on popular subject matters of Romance in England, including Robin Hood and King Arthur.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A reading and critical discussion of the complete Middle English text of The Canterbury Tales and selected minor poems.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Annually
An exploration of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages in popular works of Arthurian romance, warrior epic, and saint's life, as well as in letters and trial records. The course also draws on classical, medieval and modern gender theory relevant to topics under discussion, such as virginity, homosexuality, chivalry, and romantic love.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
The novel is a literary genre that has unique capacities to represent the modern world, in all its complexity. This course explores how novels from around the globe have done so from 1945 to the present, a period of profound historical transformation, when processes of modernization, decolonization, and global interconnection remade the world to an extent that is perhaps unique in human history. During this period, English came into its own as a global literary language, animating new traditions from Africa to Asia, the Caribbean to the Pacific and making the novel in English a powerful medium for rendering diverse experiences of contemporary life. Examining major works by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, and Arundhati Roy, this course will help students become better readers of the contemporary novel and the world at large.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
This course explores the literature of Renaissance England through its fascination with romance. Knights, dragons, magic, adventure, fair queens and foul seductresses, even a werewolf all fill the pages, stages, and entertainments of the day. The course will consider how such excesses came to have value in an age that privileged classical learning and Reformed faith. Readings include texts by Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Nashe, Jonson, Bacon, Wroth, and more.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the golden age of English Renaissance literature. The course explores how imaginative texts helped create the Virgin Queen, courtly culture, the cosmopolitan city of London, the English nation, and the New World. Readings include works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Harriot, Nashe, and Elizabeth Tudor herself.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of Milton's early poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, and selections from the prose.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
As we continue to move into the twenty-first century, how will we ensure that everyone can enjoy nature in peaceful, safe, and healthy ways? This course aims to broaden students' understanding of the literary history informing these questions. "Georgic and Pastoral" asks students to consider poetry that explores the relationship between the human being and the natural world. As pastoral and georgic modes move through the late antique, medieval, early modern, and modern periods, they differ from one another in fairly consistent ways: pastoral poetry usually focuses on the lives of shepherds and rural deities living in a peaceful, natural space. Georgic poetry, on the other hand, takes up the subject of work, and tends to retain its didactic tone. Both modes, however, use these fundamental premises to engage with larger questions about human life and culture: who has the right to access land? Who has the right to evict someone else? What are the dangers of all-consuming love? What can the process of cultivation help us understand about creativity, humility, and perseverance?
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
Charles Dickenss novels have been so widely read for almost two hundred years that his name has come to describe any novel with a convoluted plot, urban setting, criminals, coincidences, and comically grotesque characters. This course pairs several of Dickenss novels with contemporary descendants such as Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead and Peter Careys Jack Maggs, as we identify the characteristics of this unique subset of British fiction. Given the length of Victorian novels and the courses focus on nineteenth-century narrative conventions and their legacy, this course satisfies the Group B requirement for the English major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A look at playwrights who are often dwarfed by Shakespeare, but who legitimately competed with him for that greatness. Other topics will include early modern notions of rivalry and collaboration, as well as the increasingtension between governing authorities and the theatre. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
A one-semester survey of the major works of Shakespeare, focusing on individual texts as representative of the stages in his dramatic development, with some discussion of Shakespearean stage techniques.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
Designed for English majors, non-English majors and Environmental Studies Concentrators this course offers students an overview of writing in response to nature in American literature with an emphasis upon environmental history, narratives of eco-criticism and the role of literature in the formation of the American environmental movement from the 19th century onward. The course begins with the writings of Thoreau and Emerson , then moves to consider works by writers such as Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, John McPhee, Bill McKibben, Lauret Savoy, Elizabeth Kolbert and others. The course finishes with the study of contemporary writing that challenges ways we view the environment in the face of climate change and climate instability in the 21st century. No previous study in environmental history or American literature is required -- all students are welcome. This course will challenge you with new ideas and lots of reading, but it will incorporate creative approaches to writing assignments.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Spring
A close examination of the novel as formal prose narrative. Novels by Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Smollet, the Gothic novelists, Sterne, and Austen are considered in detail with collateral readings.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
A study of the development of 18th-century English poetry from the canonical Augustans-Dryden, Pope, Swift, Anne Finch, and Lady Montagu - through the mid-century and later work of Gray, Collins, the Wartons, Smart, Cowper, Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, and Anna Seward, ending with Blake's lyrics.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
The course will focus on a variety of 18th-century prose, dramatic, and verse satires, including works by Defoe, Swift, Pope, and others. Special attention will be given to modes of satire (burlesque, parody, travesty, mock epic, etc.) as well as to the objectives of satire (amendment, punishment).
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A survey of English drama from Dryden to Sheridan, including heroic drama, Restoration comedy, sentimental developments of the 18th century, and the re-emergence of laughing comedy.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of selected writers from the Caribbean whose texts help to address the ways in which Caribbean literary thought and culture has evolved from the colonial times to the present.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the major writers of the Romantic movement -- Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, Keats, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
A study of novels, poetry, and prose writings by women writing during and after the Romantic Movement - Frances Burney, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others. One unit.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
A study of the British poetry and poetic theory composed during Queen Victoria's reign (1837 - 1901). Authors treated may include Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, D. G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manly Hopkins.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A close examination of the British novel in the 19th century, including novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, and Hardy.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the evolution of contemporary American non-fiction narrative, which traces its roots to the 19th-century writing of Emerson and Thoreau.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the development of cultural contact between Native Americans and Europeans, the Puritan experiment, and the founding of the nation from 1600 - 1830.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
We will study Thoreau's works and their legacy today. The first half of the semester will focus on Thoreau's most influential texts from the more literary (his wonderful Journals, Walden, and Civil Disobedience), to the more scientific (Dispersion of Seeds and his land and river surveys). The second half of the course will explore how people use Thoreau's ideas today including the Tiny House movement, and the writings of Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingsolver, and more recent examples. To contrast Thoreau's own non-survivalist approach to nature, we will read Christopher MacCandless's experiment in Alaska as reported by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild. To inscribe Thoreau more deeply in our own experience, we will make several field trips to Thoreau sites (up to 3 required, beyond that the trips are optional). We will read from Walden at Walden Pond, from his Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers while we canoe the Concord River, and perhaps hike Mt. Wachusett after reading Thoreau's A Walk to Wachusett.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the rise of variant expressions of realism, its evolution into naturalism, the revival of local color and the flowering of regionalism, all in response to the changing American scene through immigration, segregation, business, technology and other forces between the Civil War and World War I.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of various genres in which 19th-century women engaged restrictive definitions of a woman's sphere. Authors treated may include Davis, Child, Stowe, Alcott, Dickinson, Phelps, and Wharton.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A survey of how the Civil War and Reconstruction periods have been described in American literature, from both the northern and southern perspective. Possible works include selected Civil War poetry and speeches, Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.
Prerequisite: ENGL 251 or ENGL 293. ENGL 283 is recommended.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
This course examines Poe's contribution as editor and critic; as pioneer of short fiction and science fiction; as inventor of the detective story; as author of strange and powerful poems; and as master of horror. It surveys recurrent topics such as doubleness, death, and insoluble mystery in Poe's poems, essays, tales, and novel, within the broader context of 19th-century American culture.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
American Immigrant Narratives traces the development of the genre across the 20th century. While outlining and theorizing the tropes, settings, and expectations of this genre, we will keep an eye towards how particular authors make use of the genre to respond to or explore U.S. racial and social discourses concerning immigration in play at the time. We will focus on authors from various literary traditions, such as Mary Antin, Cristina García, and Gish Jen, while blending in work from popular culture, such as Mark Waid's Superman: Birthright, Lin Manuel-Miranda's Hamilton, and James Mangold's 2017 film Logan.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
A close analysis of the development of American poetry from the early 20th century up to the contemporary period, including such poets as Pound, Eliot, Williams, Crane, Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and others.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the emergence of Modernism and other currents in the American novel from 1900 to the contemporary period.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
In this course, you'll explore the rich, vibrant history of African American poetry, from its beginnings in colonial America to influential cultural moments such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary advocacy for justice and human rights. We'll read poems by Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and many others, including Black poets associated with Worcester (Etheridge Knight and Chris Gilbert) and contemporary poets such as Terrance Hayes, Harryette Mullen, and Natasha Trethewey.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A close study of Eliot's poetry, criticism, and drama, including unpublished and lesser-known writings.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A close study of Joyce's modernist epic novel Ulysses as an experimental narrative; preceded by a close reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the prose, poetry, and drama produced in Northern Ireland and the Republic from the last quarter of the 20th century to the present. Writers studied include Boland, Doyle, Friel, Heaney, and Ni Dhomhnaill as well as those less familiar to American readers, and readings are explored in light of relevant contemporary cultural concerns such as sectarianism, gender, the Celtic Tiger, and post-colonial identity.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the major British poets in the 20th century, including Hardy, the Georgians, the Imagists, Lawrence, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Dylan Thomas.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of developments in the British novel from 1900 - 1950, with an emphasis on Modernist texts, through an examination of works by novelists such as Forster, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Rhys, Greene, and Waugh.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
This class will consider a variety of Latino/a texts both for their narrative content and their historical context. This course examines how each author struggles with their own sense of cultural identity while locating themselves in a fraught U.S. racial landscape. We will closely examine the narrative content of each text, as well as consider how the role of genre shapes each story. Furthermore, we will also consider the role of the specific national histories and their incumbent relationships to gender, race, class, religion, war, and diaspora for each individual text.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
This course will examine works in the African American literary tradition from its beginnings in antebellum poetry and the slave narrative, through the flourishing of the New Negro Movement, to the Black Arts Movement and its influence on the late twentieth century. These works struggle with declarations of personhood, the battle for equality, and most of all, the creation of an African American voice. We will read a wide range of influential African American texts in a variety of genres and situate them in their literary, historical, and/or political contexts.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Annually
A study of developments in drama from 1890 to 1960 in England, America, and on the Continent through an examination of selected works of such playwrights as Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, O'Neill, Brecht, Williams, and Beckett.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A study of the major genres of modernist writing (fiction & poetry) in the context of global modernity. Includes works by writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Mulk Raj Anand.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
An investigation of literature by African American authors dating from the 1970's to the present day in the genres of science fiction/fantasy, mystery, memoir, novels exploring gender and sexuality, and cultural theory, with emphasis on the issues of visibility and invisibility as well as the theme of the American Dream.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
This course will examine contemporary African American drama and highlight long-running traditions in the genre as well as revisions and sequels to some of its most canonical plays. Through the plays, additional readings, and performances, we will explore questions of slang, dialect, and accent; how history is presented and challenged on stage; the relationship between social justice and drama; debates about colorblind versus color-conscious casting; and audience reception.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A survey of representative Asian American literature from early twentieth-century immigrant narratives to contemporary writings. Examines Asian American literary production and its main literary themes.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
Rather than provide a survey of environmental literature, this course will explore how various literary texts imagine a relation (or non-relation) between the human being and the non-human world. We will consider works from multiple genres and time periods alongside longstanding and recent theoretical approaches to the question of nature. How do imaginative writers represent the place of the human being in the larger, "natural" world? Do their texts have an ethical or political valence? What kind of local and global environments do they represent, or attempt to bring into being? What place does human labor, or human indolence, have in shaping the world? What role does the animal take in human imagining? Assignments are designed to help students frame these and other questions for themselves while attending closely to questions of literary form.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
Explores award-winning British and American literature of the new millennium in an attempt to take the pulse of what's going on in our most contemporary literature. Texts are read in the contexts of late 20th-century literary and theoretical movements such as: postmodernism, post-colonialism, gender studies, and multiculturalism.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
Course explores a variety of American ethnic authors' engagement with Chrsitiantiy in the context of racial strife, uplift, and hierarchy in the United States. Spanning multiple genres and communities of faith, this course examines how literature confronts racial injustice with Christianity or within Christianity. Our task will be to examine these confrontations and how they intersect with related issues concerning sexuality, gender, class, revolution, and many others.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
A consideration of rhetorical theory in the classical texts of Plato and Aristotle, an analysis of some famous examples of persuasive eloquence, and the student's own exercise of persuasive speech on subjects of public concern.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Annually
Built upon but departing from the identity-based approach of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Studies, Queer Theory critically investigates cultural normativities related to sexuality, sex, and gender. This highly theoretical course will introduce students to the foundational thinkers of the field, including Foucault, Sedgwick, and Butler. We will also consider literary works that enact queer theory.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
An examination of major directions in 20th-century feminist literary theory, with study of works by writers such as Charlotte Bronte, Chopin, Gilman, Woolf, Atwood, and Morrison. Theory may address such issues as gendered reading and writing, representation of the body and sexuality, gender/race/class, feminism and ideology.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
Literary Theory is a unique English class: rather than spending the semester reading works of literature (of the kind you might expect to find in a typical English course), we will be studying some of the major ways in which human beings have sought to understandor theorizewhat literature is, what it does, and what it might teach us. Though we will begin by studying some of Western intellectual history's foundational literary theorists (including Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche), the bulk of the course will be devoted to considering major movements that have emerged in contemporary literary studies (from, roughly, the mid-twentieth century through to the present). These include New Criticism, an approach thatdespite its namehas come to be viewed as outdated but which nonetheless gave us the widespread practice of close reading; Post-Structuralism, an approach that focuses on challenging or deconstructing seemingly stable binary oppositions; and the distinct but related fields of Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonialism, Gender Studies, and Queer Theory, all of which urge us to place renewed focus on authors and characters identities and on the cultural and political environments in which texts were produced. Key questions running throughout the course will include: What, if anything, is unique or special about literature? Can literature give us knowledge of the worldor only of itself? Can reading literature make us better people? And if so, how? Can reading literature make us worse people? And if so, should we keep doing it anyway?
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Annually
An investigation of how people learn to write, and how they can be helped to write better. Topics include individual composing processes, academic discourse constraints, and cultural influences on writing. This by-permission course is required for all students who wish to become peer tutors in the Holy Cross Writer's Workshop.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall
An advanced multi-genre workshop. Only those who have completed at least one introductory-level and one intermediate-level creative writing course will be considered. Specialization in one genre and completion of the creative writing concentration are both recommended. Permission of the instructor required.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
This course explores histories, theories, and cultures of rhetoric in and beyond the Western world. Possible topics include Queer Rhetorics, Digital Writing, Rhetoric and Gender, Native American/Indigenous Rhetorics, Transgender Rhetorics, Multimodal Rhetoric, and American Political Rhetoric.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Annually
This course explores the theory and practice of composition. Students will explore writing in a variety of contexts from academic to professional with a particular focus on digital and multimodal composition.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Annually
This course examines the relationship between African American literature and urban spaces in the twentieth century. While the majority of the nineteenth-century African American population lived in the South, by World War I the "Great Migration" northward had begun. The assigned works tackle issues such as segregation and "the ghetto," the alienation of city living, and the influence of "the city" on music, sexuality, art, and crime.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
The field of religion and literature once focused upon tracing religious themes and patterns within literary works. Today, however, the field is more concerned with literary works as sites of religious insight, of revelation happening anew. A number of developments in both religious and literary studies have brought about this change. For example, biblical exegetes take seriously the literary forms at work in the Scripturesnarratives, poems, etc. These, and not later doctrinal forms, are understood as the primordial sites articulating the truths of revelation. Students of literature, in turn, understand religious works to be enacting a poetics of revelation. They make the meaning and truth of revelation happen afresh in new historical situations.In this course we will examine the poetics of revelation happening in works by such poets as Dante, Milton, Herbert, Hopkins, and Eliot. We will also consider the assumptions about interpretation that underlie this approach to religious literature.
GPA units: 1
This course considers poets from multiple historical periods, focusing on the way in which poetry and popular song express the agonies of love, relationships, and personal crisis. Poets will range from Shakespeare to the Beatles to Eminem to Taylor Swift. Fulfills Group B (19th-Century Literature) and D (Theories & Methodologies) for the English major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
This course is a survey of 20th and 21st century American drama. Together we will ask: how has theater evolved as a narrative form, an artistic practice, and a forum for examining American society? As we investigate the relationship between language on the page and writing as its staged, we will pursue the possibilities and pleasures, even the dangers, of dramatic form. Dynamics of class, race, gender, and sexuality will be centered in discussion of works by playwrights both classic and contemporary. Fulfills Group C (Marginalized Voices) for the English major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Irish Literary Activism explores how literature and writers act as effective agents of social and political change. Using modern and contemporary Ireland and Northern Ireland as a case study, the course looks to writers who have influenced culture in meaningful ways. We start by studying the early twentieth-century Irish Literary Revival, thinking about Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and others who imagined poetry and drama might help the Irish obtain political independence. Their ideas worked: books and plays and other cultural objects and practices really did inspire the Irish to fight for and ultimately gain their freedom from England. Since partition in 1921, Irish writers have continued to intervene effectively in public culture to make us think harder about terrorism, clerical abuses, financial crimes, feminism, same-sex marriage, xenophobia, racism, disability rights, and abortion, among other momentous social concerns. By looking at new theoretical work on activism in tandem with riveting texts from all literary genres, this course will study books and aesthetic practices that have meaningfully influenced Irish culture by asking citizens to think critically about "real life.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
The Enlightenment moment is characterized by revolution. In this class we will explore the triangular exchanges between Europe, America, and the Caribbean through the literature of the period. Far-flung Atlantic writing will be focused through moments of revolution, American, French, and Haitian. Well read novels, plays, and poetry, as well as letters and political pamphlets, and well think about the ways in which these texts participated in, and precipitated the politics of the period.Some of the questions well seek to answer: How did writing and literature construct and sustain the revolutionary subject? How do the experiences of women and enslaved persons shape and undermine the articulation of revolutionary ideals? What do historical texts have to do with literary texts? How did the revolutionary period change literary writing?
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
This course will trace the rise of medieval romance from the twelfth century to the late fifteenth century. We will also explore other historical and literary sources, including its origins from the East.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
For the better part of a millenium, the city of London has served as an epicenter of English literary culture. In this course we will read texts across historical periods and genres (including music and visual media) to explore the ways in which London has been imagined, represented, depicted, engaged, critiqued, marketed, loved and hated by writers, recording artists, and filmmakers. Authors may include Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Bram Stoker, Virginia Wolf, David Lean, The Beatles, Nancy Meyers, Zadie Smith, and Linton Kwesi Johnson.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
A study of major American modern novels.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
GPA units: 1
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Literature
Permission of the instructor and/or the department chair ordinarily required for such courses. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
Advanced seminars offer students an opportunity to pursue an ambitious independent project and to take more responsibility for class experience. Recent seminars have included: Tolkien, Dickens, Catholicism in Irish Literature, Transgender Memoir, American Historical Romance, Global Modernism, Graphic Novel, Jane Austen, Shakespeare's Christian Humanism, and Medieval Otherworlds. One unit each semester.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
Two semesters' credit, granted at end of second semester. Candidates selected from invited applicants to the English Honors Committee.
GPA units: 0
Typically Offered: Fall
Two semesters' credit, granted at end of second semester. Candidates selected from invited applicants to the English Honors Committee. One unit each semester.
GPA units: 2
Typically Offered: Spring
English Honors thesis students and College Honors English thesis students. One-half credit, granted at end of second semester.
GPA units: 0.5
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring