Genre
Genre courses address a single literary/cinematic genre or “kind.”-- such as tragedy, autobiography, lyric, romance, etc.-- with the purpose of teaching students to read and perform critical, formal analyses of literary, cinematic, and cultural texts. These courses help prepare students for the backbone of our curriculum: the Foundations of the English Major sequence (ENG 301-2-3).
Genre courses focus on particular genres and forms crucial for the study of English, American, and Anglophone literature and culture and are aimed primarily at English majors. This course on tragedy traces the historical development and transformation of the genre and places strong emphasis on... (read more)
This course will survey the long history of stories about the creation of artificial people. We’ll look at the desires expressed by this genre, most of all, the desire to perfect or eliminate what is most human. Familiar questions – can robots feel? can we tell who is a robot? what traits are... (read more)
In this class we’ll consider life-writing as a form, focusing on auto/biography and memoir. We’ll read a selection of life stories by modernist writers, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys, and explore how they present... (read more)
Captivity Narrative was the earliest popular genre in American literature, in the seventeenth century. Its roots go back to the Old Testament stories of Moses, Daniel and Jonah, and these archetypes have influenced centuries of confrontations between people of different faiths and cultures, and... (read more)
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Captivity Narrative was the earliest popular genre in American literature, in the seventeenth century. Its roots go back to the Old Testament stories of Moses, Daniel and Jonah, and these archetypes have influenced centuries of confrontations between people of different faiths and cultures, and... (read more)
Since antiquity, for a variety of reasons, people have left home and hit the road. Journeys have always been a part of life, and travel writing has... (read more)
Though signifying idealized notions of love in popular parlance, romance is about more than the transcendent power and emotional magic... (read more)
This course is an introduction to the genre of comedy. It surveys examples of comedy across a long historical range—from classical... (read more)
This course will introduce students to the genre of testimonial literary discourse, or testimonio: an authentic narrative, told... (read more)
Though the slave narrative genre reached its peak in the mid-19... (read more)
This course examines the pithy praise appearing on book jackets and other product packaging. Blurbs are quick descriptions. They... (read more)
This course will introduce students to the genre of testimonial literary discourse, or testimonio: an authentic narrative, told... (read more)
This genre course revolves around key figures of fantasy literature such as magic, mythical beasts, supernatural powers, bodily transformation, portals,... (read more)
Though the slave narrative genre reached its peak in the mid-19th century, this mode of autobiography has a history that stretches from the 1700s to the... (read more)
Comedy as a genre has long been associated with low forms of pleasure, whether the delight we take in bodily functions and malfunctions, shameful and... (read more)
Since remote antiquity, for all sorts of reasons, people of many kinds have left home and hit the road. Journeys have always been a part of life, and travel writing has a long and varied history. We will read a wide range of travel accounts while asking what shared features define travel writing... (read more)
Time travel through the history of the science fiction genre from the early modern era to the current moment as we learn about how Sci Fi came to be what is arguably the most socially engaged form of fiction. We'll consider Sci Fi that draws on the hard sciences, on the social sciences, and... (read more)
This course will survey the long history of stories about the creation of artificial men and women. We’ll look at the desires expressed by this genre, most of all, the desire to perfect or eliminate what is most human. Familiar questions – can robots feel? can we tell who is a robot? – will be... (read more)
Genre courses focus on particular genres and forms crucial for the study of English, American, and Anglophone literature and culture and are aimed primarily at English majors. This course on tragedy traces the historical development and transformation of the genre and places strong emphasis on... (read more)
This course will examine the development of autobiography as a literary genre from the spiritual narratives of medieval women mystics to the graphic memoirs of twenty-first century writers. Along the way we will consider a range of autobiographical forms, including slave narrative, immigrant... (read more)
From the Early Modern lyric poetry of Shakespeare and Donne through the “lyrical ballads,” songs, and odes of British Romanticism and the American lyrical experiments of Dickinson and Whitman and the work of modernist and post-modernist lyric poets to the “lyrics” of our contemporary popular... (read more)