English Courses

This EN1000 course will look at different ways in which literature has represented “altered states”. What are the different sorts of state to which literature can give access, and how does it help to define or reinterpret notions of normality? Among the different sorts of “ecstasy” which we shall look at are those induced by love, by rage, by madness, by alienation, and by repression. And underlying our enquiry will be always the concern for how the written word can give access to greater realms of thought and of feeling than are usually recognized.

Books:

• Georges Perec, W or The Memory of Childhood (Godine)
• Franz Kafka, Selected stories (Everyman)
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Penguin)
• Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (New Cambridge)
• Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (Penguin)

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” These lines by Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina point to the often contorted, always intense connection between individuals and the families to which they belong and oftentimes distance themselves. Is the 'happy' family simply a myth, especially when jealousy, poverty, social exclusion or politics and policing rear their ugly heads? Or when children and spouses are mistreated and neglected? What prompts young individuals to (re)create family with their peers instead of their families? This College Writing course will explore, through film and literature, the countless ways different characters respond to the family pressures which alternately define, nourish, and sometimes smother them.  Depending on the social norms and culture, family breakdowns may occur in the form of violence, intimidation, drug addiction and alcoholism, crime and corruption. Each work we study this term will offer rare glimpses into both traditional and contemporary family structures inviting us to investigate the different ways we ‘know’ ourselves and family, and the many ways we deceive ourselves about we think we know. Primarily, though, this is a WRITING course, and so writing is what we will do, a lot. Students will learn that writing is a process of forming and refining ideas, honing your prose and enjoying every single minute of doing so.

Books / films:

• Tennessee Williams, Streetcar Named Desire
• Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
• James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” “Two Kinds,” Amy Tam
• Alice Walker, “Everyday Use”
• Wes Anderson, The Royal Tenenbaums

People move. We change homes, schools, jobs or sometimes countries. We leave one neighbourhood, city, region or country for another, and in so doing we confront new habits, traditions, cultures and languages. We move into worlds that welcome, worlds that ignore, worlds that reject, or worlds that show indifference. One place may feel suddenly foreign, while another feels like home. Personal journeys take place during these moves, creating life stories. In this course we will contemplate these life stories and the implications of personal journeys on individual and collective experience and identity. Based on films and readings, we will experiment with academic, journalistic and creative writing, always working towards developing your own voice in written and spoken English. 

Books: 

• Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun
• Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor was Divine 
• Additional readings and films

EN1000: Emphasizes the stages required to produce a polished, articulate essay by practicing the necessary components of excellent academic writing: sharpening critical thinking skills, organizing ideas, choosing appropriate and dynamic words, varying prose style, editing, refining, and proofreading.

EN1010: Are authors inextricably connected to the books they write? Does it matter if a text was AI generated, or written by a woman under a pseudonymous male name in the 1800s? This course will critically examine ‘the death of the author’, asking who has the final word on what a text means.

Books:

• Plato, The Last Days of Socrates
• Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre 
• Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier
• Jean Rhys, Wild Sargasso Sea  
   

In this course, we will explore the ways in which the bizarre and the unexpected enter people’s thoughts by tracking different understandings and occurrences of the “uncanny.” The “uncanny” is a key aesthetical and cognitive concept that stretches across the humanities and allows us to approach some of the undercurrents of the mind. It has been tentatively defined by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud as a way for the mind to respond to the fear of the world, or the return of a trauma.  

Aided by the possibilities of the fantastic, myths, and modern novels, in this course we will investigate the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, the human and the non-human, the harmless and the threatening, the everyday and the unusual to question our relationship to things, androids, and our environment. More specifically, we will track the internal psyche of characters who often depart from reality and are repeatedly haunted by doubt, disorientation, and anxieties. To do so, we will analyze major pieces of literature, from the short stories “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Man of the Crowd” by Edgar Allan Poe, and “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant to Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute and the modern novel A Moment of True Feeling by Peter Handke. 

Books:

• Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
• E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales 
• Guy de Maupassant, A Parisian Affair and Other Stories
• Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
• Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms
• Peter Handke, A Moment of True Feeling: A Novel 

In this course, we will explore the ways in which the bizarre and the unexpected enter people’s thoughts by tracking different understandings and occurrences of the “uncanny.” The “uncanny” is a key aesthetical and cognitive concept that stretches across the humanities and allows us to approach some of the undercurrents of the mind. It has been tentatively defined by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud as a way for the mind to respond to the fear of the world, or the return of a trauma.  

Aided by the possibilities of the fantastic, myths, and modern novels, in this course we will investigate the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, the human and the non-human, the harmless and the threatening, the everyday and the unusual to question our relationship to things, androids, and our environment. More specifically, we will track the internal psyche of characters who often depart from reality and are repeatedly haunted by doubt, disorientation, and anxieties. To do so, we will analyze major pieces of literature, from the short stories “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Man of the Crowd” by Edgar Allan Poe, and “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant to Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute and the modern novel A Moment of True Feeling by Peter Handke. 

Books:

• Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny 
• E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales  
• Guy de Maupassant, A Parisian Affair and Other Stories 
• Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel 
• Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms 
• Peter Handke, A Moment of True Feeling: A Novel 

“Animals are good to think with,” observes the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. We will think about concepts like animal/human, nature/culture, body/mind, chaos/order by examining the representation of animals across a range of contexts and traditions – Hindu and Buddhist folk tales (Panchatantra, Jataka Tales), the Chinese novel Journey to the West (also known as Monkey), Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a biography of a cocker spaniel, and contemporary rewritings of oral Native American animal-trickster myths. We will see how the place we give (or don’t give) to animals creates a structured view of the world based on constructed relations between different forms of life. Ultimately, we will be asking: What makes us human – politically, socially, economically, anthropologically, philosophically, aesthetically? Is the line between human and animal clear-cut? What do “human” rights mean? What are “the humanities”? Does “the human” exist? 

EN1010: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

Books:

• Vishnusharma, The Panchatantra
• The Jataka Tales
• Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West
• Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
• Virginia Woolf, Flush
• Thomas King, One Good Story, That One

One of COVID’s most disorienting symptoms is the loss of taste and smell. Even for those fortunate enough not to catch the virus, months of confinement and isolation during the pandemic dulled the spirit and anaesthetized affect. The aim of this class is to reawaken and interrogate the senses, exploring the historical, epistemological, medical, cultural, and creative framings of embodied experience. Through close reading and analysis, we will take stock of the meanings we derive from our encounters with the material world and learn to craft our critiques and interpretations to stimulate our reader’s own desire to discover, listen, feel, and respond 

Books:

• Aristotle, De Anima 
• Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew 
• Denis Diderot, The Nun  
• Patrick Suskind, Perfume  
• Other readings on BlackBoard 

This course looks at ideas of self and other as these are expressed in selected literary texts. It starts with ideas of otherness, sexual and cultural, as expressed in a major work of ancient Greek tragedy, Euripides’s Medea, before moving on to the representation of cultural and racial otherness in Shakespeare’s Othello, one of the English Renaissance dramatist’s four major tragedies. The course examines how the other or outsider can be seen as at once seductive and disruptive, forcing a reconsideration of hierarchies of sex and power. Longer prose works read in the course, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Stoker’s Dracula, examine the possibilities and anxieties associated with the opening up of the wider world. While Defoe is writing during the heroic phase of early capitalist expansion, his lonely protagonist exploiting and reordering the non-European world, Stoker’s wildly popular horror novel dramatizes late-Victorian anxieties of invasion in lurid and melodramatic terms. Kafka’s The Trial presents a world in which the individual is alienated and alone in the face of a thoroughly modern style of bureaucracy, while Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, a Sudanese rewriting of themes from Othello, reverses the gaze of Shakespeare’s play in a twentieth-century tale of otherness at home and abroad.

EN1010: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

Books:

• Euripides, Medea and Other Plays
• Salih, Season of Migration to the North 
• Shakespeare, Othello
• Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• Stoker, Dracula
• Kafka, The Trial

EN1010: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

When we read, we enter a different world, travelling in an unknown country where some things are familiar, others strange and new; our adjustment to this theatre of the real reconstructs our own world, emotionally, morally, politically. Empathy arises in the midst of this strangeness, and we find ourselves (in many senses) in the place of the other. As our contemporary world is more and more violently tested, our course looks at this intensely powerful creative process. We begin with one of the greatest and freshest theatrical representations of emotional exploration, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, reading substantially from the point of view of the actor exploring a role. Xavier de Maistre’s playfully profound conversation with himself in his Voyage Around My Room, written under house arrest in 1790 with no intention of publication, announces the ironic solitude of nineteenth century Romanticism, but speaks volumes to our own experience of lockdown. We enter the surreal, grotesque and poignant world of Russia’s encounter with modernity in Gogol’s tales. We end with three very different, fragmented narratives of life in the twentieth century, from Persian and Japanese explorations of the imaginary and the real, of worlds inner and outer, and somewhere in between, to our final text, a selection of Carver’s short stories, turned into a memorable film by Robert Altman, with which we shall finish our course.

EN1010: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

Books:

• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
• Xavier de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room
• Nikolai Gogol, Collected Tales
• Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories
• Yasunari Kawabata, Palm of the Hand Stories
• Sadegh Hedayat, Three Drops of Blood
• Raymond Carver, Short Cuts

When we read, we enter a different world, travelling in an unknown country where some things are familiar, others strange and new; our adjustment to this theatre of the real reconstructs our own world, emotionally, morally, politically. Empathy arises in the midst of this strangeness, and we find ourselves (in many senses) in the place of the other. As our contemporary world is more and more violently tested, our course looks at this intensely powerful creative process. We begin with one of the greatest and freshest theatrical representations of emotional exploration, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, reading substantially from the point of view of the actor exploring a role. Xavier de Maistre’s playfully profound conversation with himself in his Voyage Around My Room, written under house arrest in 1790 with no intention of publication, announces the ironic solitude of nineteenth century Romanticism, but speaks volumes to our own experience of lockdown. We enter the surreal, grotesque and poignant world of Russia’s encounter with modernity in Gogol’s tales. We end with three very different, fragmented narratives of life in the twentieth century, from Persian and Japanese explorations of the imaginary and the real, of worlds inner and outer, and somewhere in between, to our final text, a selection of Carver’s short stories, turned into a memorable film by Robert Altman, with which we shall finish our course.

EN1010: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to read critically, recognise historical contexts, and craft well-structured academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN1010 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

Books:

• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
• Xavier de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room
• Nikolai Gogol, Collected Tales
• Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories
• Yasunari Kawabata, Palm of the Hand Stories
• Sadegh Hedayat, Three Drops of Blood
• Raymond Carver, Short Cuts

As she disobeys kingly orders to offer her brother a proper burial, Antigone stands out as a paradigmatic example in a series of insubordinate characters who defy authorities. Focusing on such disobedient figures in a variety of contexts, this course explores the literary and political potential of insubordination in world literature through close-reading of dramatic masterpieces and close-watching of recent adaptations. We will study how fiction may suggest an alternative to established social structures and how theater puts this alternative into action. Drawing on the examples of disobedient characters, students will hone their writing skills in different genres and learn how to identify and question narrative structures, dramatic illusions, and how to comment on works of art through informed, persuasive, and original argumentation. 

Books:

• Sophocles, Antigone  
• Shudraka, The Little Clay Cart  
• Guan Hanqing, Snow in Midsummer  
• Molière, Tartuffe  
• Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman  

As she disobeys kingly orders to offer her brother a proper burial, Antigone stands out as a paradigmatic example in a series of insubordinate characters who defy authorities. Focusing on such disobedient figures in a variety of contexts, this course explores the literary and political potential of insubordination in world literature through close-reading of dramatic masterpieces and close-watching of recent adaptations. We will study how fiction may suggest an alternative to established social structures and how theater puts this alternative into action. Drawing on the examples of disobedient characters, students will hone their writing skills in different genres and learn how to identify and question narrative structures, dramatic illusions, and how to comment on works of art through informed, persuasive, and original argumentation. 

Books:

• Sophocles, Antigone  
• Shudraka, The Little Clay Cart  
• Guan Hanqing, Snow in Midsummer  
• Molière, Tartuffe  
• Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman 

This course invites students to consider the role of cruelty in our encounters with literary and literary-journalistic works. As a concept that defines a relation to suffering, cruelty demands reexamination of many notions we have about ourselves. What can literature and other narrative forms show us about how we respond—or fail to respond—to the pain of others? How do texts mediate our perceptions of others and of our relationships or obligations to others? How do fictional works complicate our efforts to distance ourselves from cruelty? Is there something distinctive about how cruelty functions in narrative texts? In examining a range of works from Renaissance England to Depression-era America, from post-war France to postcolonial India, we will see how encounters with literary cruelty might alter our awareness of the ethical stakes of reading.

EN2020: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

Books:

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Albert Camus, The Outsider
• Richard Wright, Native Son
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Can a person, community, or society bear witness to trauma through literary texts? How, why, and with what consequences or ethical limits?  Exploring these broad questions, we will focus on slavery, war, and genocide as historical traumas. Required course texts will engage with multiple periods and cultural locations, including: the Peloponnesian War, eighteenth-century Atlantic slavery, the Shoah, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, the Syrian Civil War, and the Russian-Ukrainian War.   

Books:

• Aida Bašić, “Trauma Market.”    
• Yevgenia Belorusets, Lucky Breaks.  
• Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce, by Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa.”   
• Slavenka. S Drakulić, A Novel about the Balkans. Trans. Marko Ivić.  
• Euripides, The Trojan Women 
• Yasmine Fedda (director), Queens of Syria 
• Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz.  
• Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, “Motherhoods”  
• Esther Mujawayo and Souâd Belhaddad, “A Coward’s Repentance.” Trans. Elizabeth Applegate 
• Scholastique Mukasonga, Our Lady of the Nile 

This Writing and Criticism course will look at various ways in which children and their parents have interacted through the ages. Why is childhood so important to writers, and has this importance changed over the centuries or remained constant? Certain works will focus on a child’s view of the universe, others on adults’ feelings in relation to both their childhood and their own children. Childhood is perhaps best understood when it is disappearing, in adolescence, hence certain of our texts will deal with the teenage years and experience. Children will be seen as engendering both love and hate in parents. In turn, parents will be seen as longing after their childhood, either as a time of innocence or as a time of freedom. A series of important texts will highlight these and other themes. As in all EN 2020 courses, students will be required to read and discuss the set texts, as well as to reflect on writing more generally.

EN2020: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

Books:

• Marguerite Duras, The Lover
• Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Sophocles, Antigone
• Shaespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

EN2020: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

What is the relationship between the author, their autobiographical self, and the work they produce? How do writers draw from, and work with, texts that came before to create new works of literature, and how do they challenge or expand our ideas about authorship and originality? Our critical reading will focus on the language, images, and styles employed to express such novel relationships in literary texts. Through independent research we will gain a contextual understanding of the social and political climate of the time during which texts were written. We will also pay particular attention to the relations between form and content in these texts. How does the inclusion of stories from the margins of gender, society, or history influence the form in which these stories are told? Through our readings we will discover how literary experimentation has enabled a broader range of modes of being in relationship with each other.

EN2020: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

Books:

• Tom Phillips, A Humument
• Sappho, If Not, Winter,
• Shakespeare, Sonnets
• Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Can a person, community, or society bear witness to trauma through literary texts? How, why, and with what consequences or ethical limits?  Exploring these broad questions, we will focus on slavery, war, and genocide as historical traumas. Required course texts will engage with multiple periods and cultural locations, including: the Peloponnesian War, eighteenth-century Atlantic slavery, the Shoah, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, the Syrian Civil War, and the Russian-Ukrainian War.   

Books:

• Aida Bašić, “Trauma Market.”    
• Yevgenia Belorusets, Lucky Breaks.  
• Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce, by Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa.”   
• Slavenka. S Drakulić, A Novel about the Balkans. Trans. Marko Ivić.  
• Euripides, The Trojan Women 
• Yasmine Fedda (director), Queens of Syria 
• Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz.  
• Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, “Motherhoods”  
• Esther Mujawayo and Souâd Belhaddad, “A Coward’s Repentance.” Trans. Elizabeth Applegate 
• Scholastique Mukasonga, Our Lady of the Nile 

‘What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension how like a god.’ Hamlet’s words from Shakespeare’s play express optimism about human possibilities, ironically placing them in the mouth of one of the dramatist’s most self-conflicted protagonists. This course will look at a range of works with such self-questioning in mind. Who am I? What am I? What kinds of relationship do I have with others? Even with myself? It starts with ‘Antigone,’ a work of ancient Greek tragedy having much to say about social and moral bonds. ‘Hamlet’ introduces the liberal themes of self and society, separating private conscience from public roles and the range of selves presented to others. Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, written against the background of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the growth of the factory system, poses the question of human possibilities anew, this time in terms of scientific discovery.  Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ and Woolf’s ‘Room of One’s Own’ present new ways of writing about the self, whether in terms of psychoanalysis or against the background of political and social change, while Sartre’s Nausea draws together themes of self and society, personal identity and social relations, in the context of an elaborate philosophical system.

EN2020: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

Books:

• Sophocles, Theban Plays
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.  
• William Shakespeare, Hamlet.  
• Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own.  
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea  
• Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works Volume Seven.

One of the foundational narratives for Western literature is the story of a man who just wants to go home. Who wants to go home? Who gets to? What would it be to get there? What, or who, makes a home? Is home a place, a time, an idea, a feeling, a language? How is it configured by power, politics, kinship, friendship, or love? Taking Homer's Odyssey as a central reference, this course will consider some literary answers to these questions. We will explore ancient codes of hospitality and today's refugee crisis, sixteenth century depictions of philia and recent gender politics, classical accounts of the household and contemporary explorations in kinship as we seek to identify the tropes with which we negotiate paradoxical relations to home.  

Books:

• Homer, The Odyssey 
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse 
• Jenny, Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone 
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home 

EN2020: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.  

One of the foundational narratives for Western literature is the story of a man who just wants to go home. Who wants to go home? Who gets to? What would it be to get there? What, or who, makes a home? Is home a place, a time, an idea, a feeling, a language? How is it configured by power, politics, kinship, friendship, or love? Taking Homer's Odyssey as a central reference, this course will consider some literary answers to these questions. We will explore ancient codes of hospitality and today's refugee crisis, sixteenth century depictions of philia and recent gender politics, classical accounts of the household and contemporary explorations in kinship as we seek to identify the tropes with which we negotiate paradoxical relations to home.  

Books:

• Homer, The Odyssey 
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse 
• Jenny, Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone 
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home 

EN2020: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.    

Stories fuelled by romantic desire have shaped the arc of literary history. How do these texts represent human desire and its ability to transform us? Our class will explore desire’s transformative faculties—and its impact on literary form—through myths, fairy tales, poetry, novels, and film. 

Books:

• Ovid, Metamorphoses  
• Selection of French fairy tales by François Perrault, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, and Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont  
• William Shakespeare, Sonnets  
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 
• Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road 
• Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic" from Sister/Outsider  
• François Ozon, La robe d'été (short film) 

The recent controversies in the press surrounding the recently ‘expurgated’ editions of Roald Dahl’s and Enid Blyton’s children’s books have provoked lively debates on the question of literary value. What is the place of literature in today’s society? How is the value of literary works gaged, by whom and to what end? We used to think that literature could change its readers and now we try to change literature to adapt it to contemporary readership. Why are certain previously popular literary works considered problematic today? How can we engage with them on their own terms and avoid anachronistic readings? And should we? It seems timely to reflect on the emotional and intellectual labour of reading texts from the past - even those that are still deemed relevant and acceptable by our current standards. In this course, we will use a historicist approach to discuss a variety of texts and study how their authors engaged with questions of time and space. We will move from an attention to the material conditions of production of these texts to their aesthetic reception in order to reflect on the paradox of literary texts as ‘timeless cultural products of their time’. 

Books:

• Aristophanes, Frogs, Assemblywomen, Wealth  
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, the Rover and Other Works  
• Virginia Woolf, A Room’s of One’s Own and Three Guineas  
• Nadine Gordimer, Jump and Other Stories 
• Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde 

Stories fuelled by romantic desire have shaped the arc of literary history. How do these texts represent human desire and its ability to transform us? Our class will explore desire’s transformative faculties—and its impact on literary form—through myths, fairy tales, poetry, novels, and film.

EN2020: By engaging with major works of World Literature across genres, time-periods and cultures, you will be able to sharpen your critical reading skills, compare historical contexts, and craft independent, well-researched academic arguments in oral and written form. All EN2020 classes help you fulfil the “Critical Inquiry and Expression” core curriculum requirement.