Old Major: C-Literature 1789-Present
Literature, 1789 to the present courses focus on literary work produced over more than two centuries -- from the period of British romanticism and the early republic of the United States up to now -- in order to foster familiarity with key works in British and American literary history. Literary history illustrates how literary works reflect, address, and resist the social and political environments in which they are produced as well as other works that have preceded them.
22068
The Black Fantastic
In 2020, against the backdrop of a pandemic, wildfires, anti-Black violence, a global wave of protests and social unrest, and political upheaval, Octavia Butler’s 1993 Afrofuturist novel, Parable of the Sower, reached the New York Times bestseller... (read more)
22075
In the last two decades, comics journalism has become one of the most provocative forms of creative nonfiction and an essential field of comics art. University of Oregon alum Joe Sacco, who received his BA in journalism in 1981, effectively founded contemporary comics journalism through his... (read more)
22085
In this course, we will study poetry of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in its literary, political, and cultural contexts. BAM is the cultural arm of the Black Power Movement and was at its peak from about 1965 to about 1976. BAM writers are diverse in terms of form, genre, gender, geography, and... (read more)
26411
La Malinche. Pocahontas. Sacagawea. These are likely the only Indigenous women with whom many are familiar. Though real historical figures, these Indigenous women are often depicted in popular literature along a rigid spectrum as race traitors or colonial sympathizers, virtuous princesses or... (read more)
26417
British Romantic Writers
This course will be a sustained examination of the question: “What is Romanticism? This is a question which has no single or ultimate answer given that there seem to be as many answers as there are “askers.” There is, however, a rich and complex body of literature... (read more)
26419
Once upon a time, the four-color world of the superhero was a comfortingly simple place. Whether they came from distant galaxies or our home planet, the super-powered beings of the 1940s and 50s were secure in their sense of righteousness and generally saw no contradiction between truth,... (read more)
12481
... (read more)
16893
... (read more)
16907
... (read more)
41840
Escape! Whether we’re reading for pleasure or entertainment, the novel has been a means of escape for readers: an escape from reality, from the anxieties or doldrums of everyday life and into other lives and worlds. For nineteenth-century American readers who craved a fictional escape,... (read more)
41842
After the end of the world
after death
I found myself in the midst of life
creating myself
building life
--“In the Midst of Life,” Tadeusz Rózewicz
After the cataclysm of WWII, the old order was beginning to crumble. In this aftermath, many artists viewed the... (read more)
32171
In this seminar, we will examine the form of sequential art we call comic books. The course is composed of two parts: close reading of landmark... (read more)
32177
This course could be called “The Thoreau You Don’t Know.” Although commonly known as an insufferable hermit, a strange guy who turned his back on... (read more)
36488
How do the genres of ... (read more)
36489
Narrating the Sunset of the British Empire: The Twentieth-Century Novel from Modernism to Postmodernism
... (read more)
36490
Latinx Comics and Graphic Narratives
... (read more)
36495
Identity fraud! “America” as place, myth, and dream has long been imagined as where people can be whatever they want to be and are free to... (read more)
36498
We are in unprecedented times, and what matters to me about this course is that we read together, talk about books together, and bring the authors... (read more)
36908
This course explores sexuality and self-expression by studying transgender comedy, including in poetry, novels, and digital performance. We will... (read more)
36913
On the back of Broken Harbor (in the Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French, of which we’re reading the first installment), a reviewer’s comment reads: “It’s literature masquerading as police procedural.” While the overlapping genres of detective fiction, mystery, and psychological... (read more)
37090
Contemporary Culture: “What the End is For”
... (read more)
22253
How can artists ethically represent war? Are certain media predisposed to certain kinds of narratives and interpretations of war? Do... (read more)
22256
Wherever slavery existed, there were those who resisted it, many of whom paid with their lives. This course examines the literature of... (read more)
26554
Hallucinations, Prophecies, and the Supernatural. Working from the 19th century to the present, this course will consider African... (read more)
26556
This course presents a survey of American novels in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It will cover a variety of styles and... (read more)
26557
“Things Fall Apart”: Revolution, Reaction and Renewal in Early Twentieth Century Culture (1895-1945)... (read more)
26570
According to Wendell Berry, “You don’t know who you are until you know where you are.” Yet, as we know from the fierce... (read more)
26666
This course focuses on fictional constructions of nation in British novels of the nineteenth century. In an era embracing massive... (read more)
26988
What makes a poem modern or a poet a modernist? The history of modern poetry, like that of any literary period, is a ... (read more)
16438
In recent years Jewish fiction and non-fiction writers have turned to the archive quest narrative to explore family secrets, confusing histories, and lost or... (read more)
16440
Writers and scholars of the American novel have for some time denigrated sentimentalism by affiliating it with a weak, weepy sense of femininity. But... (read more)
16793
This course will delve deeply into George Eliot’s last multi-plot novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of her birth, the course will... (read more)
16941
This course will survey several of the greatest literary hits of nineteenth-century America, including poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, and the novel. Some... (read more)
41035
This class will explore the intersections between race, literature, and film. We will study poetry, fiction, essays, and comics that... (read more)
41038
The novel as a newer literary genre was a powerful, even potentially dangerous force in the newly-formed American nation. One 1838... (read more)
41039
We will read four novels that span the time period from the early twentieth century to the present day, interpreting each novel in... (read more)
41040
ENG 395 provides selective survey of contemporary literature between 1945 and the present. The course incorporates works of prose,... (read more)
42467
This course will explore multicultural youth literature, covering literature for ages 0 to young adult. Students will engage with... (read more)
31990
Time, Memory, and Identity
... (read more)
31993
This course begins with the question of what is the American novel? It is a question asked and answered by some of the most ingenious and challenging thinkers... (read more)
32007
This course will explore the remarkable literary legacy of W.B. Yeats whose groundbreaking work charted the turmoil of revolution, war, and the collapse of a... (read more)
32008
In this seminar, we will examine the form of sequential art we call comic books. The course is composed of two parts: close reading of landmark graphic novels... (read more)
36104
On soggy spring days, book lovers in the Pacific Northwest feel most at home curled up with a blanket and cup of coffee while reading our favorite novels and... (read more)
36142
“Things Fall Apart”: Revolution, Reaction and Renewal in Early Twentieth Century Culture (1895-1945)
... (read more)
36178
This course will examine the cultural and literary discourses emerging from the locus of the U.S./Mexico border, a space of postnational political conflict... (read more)
36437
In this course we study car collecting and customizing as vernacular art traditions, and survey of some of the astonishing... (read more)
22809
Writers and scholars of the American novel have for some time denigrated sentimentalism by affiliating it with a weak, weepy sense of... (read more)
22824
This course examines U.S. culture of the "jazz age" (1910-1935), a period of dramatic social change and lively experimentation in multiple forms of culture. We... (read more)
27084
Students in this class will read and discuss the major works of Samuel L. Clemens, aka Mark Twain. Readings will include Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom... (read more)
27112
What is “Black marxism”: How does such a perspective define “marxism,” and what makes Black radicalism different? How does the latter define, and how is... (read more)
27692
Reading important writers of Asian American descent, this class is concerned with the following: 1. Where is Asian America? 2. What is an Asian American? Is it... (read more)
27698
This course will explore multicultural youth literature, covering literature for ages 0 to young adult. Students will engage with literature that represents a... (read more)
12186
This course will examine a variety of texts that engage the modern state–its functions and possibilities; its ability to repress and coerce; its ability to forge new and enduring kinds of social connection; and what place, if any, it allows for literary culture.
It will examine some of the... (read more)
16085
Novels written by the Brontë sisters—Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1818-1848), and Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1820-1849)—have remained a significant part of... (read more)
16458
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, it was illegal for slaves to learn how to read or write. It was illegal for them to testify in court, except against each other or to confess a crime. In the North, free African Americans often did not fare much better: there they were susceptible to... (read more)
16459
According to Wendell Berry, “You don’t know who you are until you know where you are.” Yet, for other people in our history and in our own day, the lived experience of place that Berry rightly values varies according to who other people think you are and where they think you should... (read more)
17023
Liminal Form(s): Ethnic American Short Fiction
This course will examine Ethnic American short fiction, paying particular attention to the ways its structure and content uphold and contest literary, corporeal, and national form(s).... (read more)
40804
Who is the American “I”? Rugged individualism has long been central to American identity and culture, but what perspectives and possibilities are excluded from the “I” crafted by male writers like Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Ernest Hemingway? In our course we... (read more)
40808
ENG 392 is the second of two-part, upper division chronological survey of the American novel from its beginnings in the 19th century to the present. ENG 392 covers the period from the early 20th century to the present. No prerequisites are required, but students should be capable of advanced... (read more)
42251
The novel as a newer literary genre was a powerful, even potentially dangerous force in the newly-formed American nation. One 1838 critic declared that “the object of novelists in general appears to be to seize the public mind, and hold it with a sort of enchantment.” What captivated and... (read more)
42252
This class explores how black women writers of the twentieth century have taken up the themes of time, memory, and identity. These writers often conceived of literature as a project of memory and recovery, a place, as Ntzoake Shange puts it in Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo, for... (read more)
42458
ENG 395 provides selective survey of contemporary literature between 1945 and the present. The course incorporates works of prose, poetry, and drama, and attends closely to philosophical, political, and cultural events that run parallel to developments in twentieth-century literary history. No... (read more)
42459
This class will focus on crime noir, a somewhat loosely defined genre of fiction, comic, and film. Unlike detective fiction, hardboiled crime noir centers on criminal protagonists, often of the "career" variety. Tracing the trajectory of such a genre from its inception in 1920s hardboiled pulp... (read more)
32040
Credited with inaugurating the Harlem Renaissance and inspiring the Negrítude movement, Claude McKay is best known as America’s most important protest sonneteer. McKay’s storied literary career documents the life of a black expatriate modern and his sense of the Black Atlantic experience during... (read more)
35968
This course will explore multicultural youth literature, covering literature for ages 0 to young adult. Students will engage with literature that represents a diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds, primarily in the American context. We will read books such as Brown Girl... (read more)
35969
This course will examine Native women’s fiction, paying particular attention to the ways its form and content uphold and contest terms like “feminism,” “fiction,” and “native.” The central concern of this course is Native women’s textual representations of their bodies and voices, both physical... (read more)
35970
African American Authors of the Harlem Renaissance
This course will examine the work of three major African American authors: Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. These three did much to set the tone of the flourishing of black literary culture after World World One known... (read more)
35971
This class is a selective and sweeping reading of four novels that span from the 1920s to 2000. It covers the geographic regions of American northeast and the Deep South by authors of black, white, and Jewish descent. Nearly all of the texts on the reading list are classic and canonical 20th... (read more)
35974
This course begins with the question of what is the American novel? It is a question asked and answered by some of the most ingenious and challenging thinkers of the 20th century, who, as it turns out, were novelists. But for these thinkers who thought in the form of novels, the 20th century was... (read more)
35991
In this course, we will study selected writings of Toni Morrison in their historical, political, and literary contexts. In addition to Morrison’s work as a novelist, we will consider her work as a literary scholar, editor, and advocate for and representative of contemporary African American... (read more)
35994
In this class we will map the path of the American comic book superhero and explore the ways in which that journey reflects larger processes of social change. We will consider these superheroes not only as expressions of an ancient mythic heroic tradition, but also as distinctly “modern”... (read more)
36674
The Language of Novels
This course will focus on the politics of language in nineteenth-century novels, exploring elements such as translation, “primitive” language, philology, the spoken/unspoken, and different registers of dialogue. We will encounter novels that imagine various... (read more)
36676
This course will be a sustained examination of the question: “What is Romanticism? This is a question which has no single or ultimate answer given that there seem to be as many answers as there are “askers.” There is, however, a rich and complex body of literature and critical commentary to... (read more)
36757
In this online course, we will read four novels that span the time period from the early twentieth century to the present day, interpreting each novel in relation to its historical and cultural contexts. While the selected novels cannot fully represent the vast range of ethnically and culturally... (read more)
22743
Cherokee/Choctaw scholar Louis Owens declared that all Native novels are centrally occupied with recovering and (re)articulating an Indigenous sense of identity from within the discursive and linguistic contexts of colonialism. For Owens, this inherently dialogic process draws heavily on... (read more)
22758
Students in ENG 407, “Poetry and Pragmatism,” the St. Louis Seminar in Poetry, will read, discuss, and write about major American poetry of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries using the philosophical lens of pragmatism to guide their inquiry. The course will prioritize poetry by Emily Dickinson... (read more)
26833
This course will explore multicultural youth literature, covering literature for ages 0 to young adult. Students will engage with literature that represents a diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds, primarily in the American context. We will read books such as Brown Girl... (read more)
26841
Latinx Literary Environmentalisms
Latinx literature and culture sit at the cutting edge of contemporary environmental thought. This class examines the intertwining of social and environmental justice in contemporary Latinx literature and cultural production, including fiction, film, and... (read more)
26842
Secret Agency: Navigating Race and Identity in Passing Fictions
While nineteenth-century America touted itself as a place where people could reinvent themselves as self-made, prosperous, fully enfranchised citizens, it was also the period when categories like race, gender, and class became... (read more)
26843
This course develops appreciation and understanding of 20th Century American novels by examining provocative samples exemplifying notable trends. We will explore both modernist roots reshaping the American novel and contemporary highlights challenging the novel’s form and complicating American... (read more)
26851
This is a single author study course on Jonathan Franzen, arguably the most important contemporary American novelist, one of the few who has made the cover of Time Magazine. Franzen shall visit our class in person towards the end of the term, and give a public reading as the Collins... (read more)
36667
We will study the literary production of early Black writers and the representation of slavery in the Anglophone literature of the Atlantic Rim, including historical contexts and influential critical approaches. Primary materials include travel narratives, slave narratives, planter histories,... (read more)
26958
This course will explore literary and cultural engagements with questions of nationhood, sovereignty, story, and place across a variety of genres and forms, from oral traditions, dramas, and critical essays, to visual art, op-editorials, new media productions, and texts that defy generic... (read more)
26972
Together with ENG 391, ENG 392 forms a chronological upper-division survey of the American novel from the 19th to the 20th century. These courses can be taken as a sequence, or they can be taken individually. No prerequisites are required, but students should be capable of advanced university-... (read more)
27109
This course provides a survey of American literature since 1900 with a focus on American literature in the world. We consider what happens when American writers (and characters) travel, how American writers use cultural and linguistic resources from around the world, as well as what America and... (read more)
