The first of a sequence of two, the course approaches 'The Divine Comedy' both as a poetic masterpiece and as an encyclopedia of medieval culture. Through a close textual analysis of 'Inferno,' and the first half of 'Purgatorio,' students learn how to approach Dantes poetry as a vehicle for thought, an instrument of self-discovery, and a way to understand and affect the historical reality. They also gain a perspective on the Biblical, Christian, and Classical traditions as they intersect with the multiple levels of Dantes concern, ranging from literature to history, from politics to government, from philosophy to theology. A visual component, including illustrations of the 'Comedy' and multiple artworks pertinent to the narrative, complements the course. Class format includes lectures, discussion, and a weekly recitation session. Intensive class participation is encouraged. Dante I can be taken independently from Dante II. No prerequisites. Freshmen are welcome. Part of the Dante Humanities Cluster.

Location

Gavett Hall Room 310 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

What is the FAIRY? An ever-changing entity that emerges from various oral and literary sources. Demons? Fallen angels?, Elementals? This course examines the figure of the Fairy in antiquity, medieval, renaissance, and twentieth-century texts for the liminality, category crisis, gender, poetic inspiration and allegory this figure inspires, as well as its social, political, and religious controversies in early English and Celtic ballads and romances. The Fairy signals both instability and literary self-fashioning in the grafting of histories and genealogies upon fairy ancestors (Melusine, The Fairie Queene) care-takers of “nature” (Midsummer Night's Dream); and both childhood and loss in later poetry (Keats, Yeats, Conan Doyle) Throughout time, readers have been fascinated by a “hidden people” not entirely foreign, evil, or human who abduct them, deceive them, seduce them, and make them poets. Forget the pretty Hallmark cards. These entities were sexy, devious, and scary!

Location

Hylan Building Room 105 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

The nineteenth-century novel is usually associated with Victorian values: happy marriage; wholesome homes; moral propriety; properly channeled emotions and ambitions. Many of the most popular novels, however, paint a very different picture: with madwomen locked in attics and asylums; monsters, real and imagined, lurking behind the façade of propriety; genteel homes harboring opium addicts; fallen women walking the streets; and sexual transgression and degeneracy popping up everywhere. Indeed, for novels centrally structured around marriage and society, madness and monstrosity appear with alarming regularity. The intertwining of these tropes suggests some of the cultural anxieties unleashed by the new body of women writers and women readers. We will begin with Frankenstein and end with Dracula, two novels from opposite ends of the century. We will also consider such classic marriage plot novels as Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and some popular sensation fiction of the 1860s. 

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 270 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

In this class we will ask what U. S. literature and art of the first half of the nineteenth century has to say to readers today.  This period has often been described as the first moment of greatness in American culture.  Like today, it was a period of great political strife.  In the nineteenth century that strife culminated in a catastrophic Civil War.  Like today, the nation was riven by deep regional and ideological divisions and struggling to reconcile its many contradictions.  Dedicated to principles of liberty but dependent on enslaved labor, celebrating equality but denying women’s rights and holding black Americans in bondage, championing justice for all but expropriating Native lands, promising a more perfect union but increasingly pulling apart along sectional and class lines, pursuing happiness but increasingly in doubt about how one should live.  In the midst of these controversies and tensions, writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe and Lydia Maria Child and Abraham Lincoln as well as a generation of American painters created fiction and poetry, essays and speeches and paintings of great power and inventiveness that also wrestled with the political and ethical crises of its day. The hopes that these artists invested in art’s power to inspire and guide national and reform personal redemption is one way they remain relevant today.

Location

Hylan Building Room 305 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

The explosion of black culture during the early Twentieth Century known as the “Harlem” or (more broadly) “New Negro” Renaissance included the emergence of some of the most important works of the African American literary tradition. This course will provide a survey of the literature and culture that reflect the spirit of that era. In addition, the course will consider recent African-American fiction in order to ascertain what the Harlem Renaissance has meant for subsequent writers and artists. Special attention will be paid to the following topics: migration, jazz, the Blues, literary modernism, theories of black identity, and difference within black America. Readings include works by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, Samuel R. Delany, and more. Requirements include class participation, six 1-page reading responses, and two 6-8-page formal writing assignments.
 
 

Location

Meliora Room 219 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

This course will provide an opportunity to sample an exciting body of contemporary literature, some written by authors already widely acclaimed when they received the Nobel Prize and some by writers suddenly catapulted into fame and international recognition. A central focus of the course will be the literature itself, but we will also look at some of the controversies the prize has generated – including the recent sex scandal that led to the prize’s temporary suspension. We will consider how receipt of the prize changed writers' lives and literary reputations, and we will track the announcement of a new prize-winner in October 2024. In the U.S., where less than 5% of the literature published each year is literature in translation, Nobel prize-winning literature is often the only modern literature Americans read in translation. This raises the question of translation and the role of the Nobel Prize in creating and promoting an international literature. We will also consider the special challenges this literature poses for its readers in speaking to both local and global audiences. Some of the readings for the class will be chosen by the students.

Location

Goergen Hall Room 110 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course addresses questions such as these: Do species have “origins”? Does the universe have a beginning? What is meant by “creation”? Are “fundamental” particles related to religious fundamentalism? Is cognitive science connected to the “tree of knowledge”? Are “knowledge” and “truth” key terms in both science and religion? Are there “higher” and “lower” organisms? Do mothers have “instincts”? Are people smarter than other animals? Have “instincts” and “intelligence” been identified by science? Does a sperm “penetrate” or “fertilize” an egg? Do either God or Nature have “laws”? Is “the invisible hand” a religious idea? Is “the great chain of being” a religious idea, and did Darwin overtake it? Do people need to be “saved”? Is “evil” a “problem”? How do people describe the practices of circumcision and communion? Readings are taken from the bible, history of science, feminist critiques of religion and science, and literature. Emphasis is on common language usages and their political valences.

Location

Frederick Douglass Room 403 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

Charles Dickens is considered one of the great novelists in the English language. There are few novelists whose name alone conjures a distinctive style. But when we refer to a novel as “Dickensian,” it elicits numerous associations—intricate plots, labyrinthine depictions of cityscape and social life, comedic characterizations, social satire, and sentimentalism, to name a few. In this course we will read a variety of Dickens’s major novels in order to appreciate his vision and style as a writer and thus learn, first hand, what it means to describe a novel as Dickensian. The course will situate Dickens’s novels in their biographical, aesthetic, and historical contexts, but it will also examine stylistic aspects of Dickens’s writing (e.g. descriptive language, narrative voice, characterization). We will address Dickens’s influence on other nineteenth-century novelists and conclude with a twentieth-century novel that critics have labeled Dickensian. Fulfills the post-1800 requirement. No prerequisites.

Location

Hylan Room 301 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

More broadly, a study of the gray zone between short story and novel, containing many ambiguous labels (long short story, novella, short novel). The course will interrogate various boundaries – When does a short story become a novella? When does a novella become a novel? – 
and locate answers not merely in word count, but in reader experience and expectation. Because of the (relative) brevity of these in-between texts, the course will cover much stylistic and geographic ground. Author list may include: Franz Kafka, Victor LaValle, Don DeLillo, Carson McCullers, Nathanael West, Gabriel García Márquez, Henry James, Danielle Evans, George Saunders, Garth Greenwell, Mieko Kawakami, Aleksandar Hemon, William Gass, and Cynthia Ozick. 
 

Location

Lechase Room 104 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This 4-credit intersession course will be conducted in London, UK, from December 26, 2024–January 8, 2025. Attending two plays per day with a seminar discussion each morning, students in this course are exposed to a full range of theatre experiences, from intimate theatre-in-the-round to monumental productions at the National Theatre, and from West End spectaculars to cutting-edge works mounted in post-industrial spaces. See the link on the English Department homepage to find the course's website, which describes the program in greater detail and contains syllabi from the past 25+ years. Need-based financial aid is available. The fee total is $2850 

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

This course surveys the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. We will explore the diverse forms cinema took and functions it performed during this period by looking closely at a range of films and writings about films and film culture. We will also examine contexts within which these films were produced and experienced as well as theorizations of cinema that emerged concurrently with them. The course thus introduces students to the study of film history as well as a key national and international trends in making and thinking about cinema as it rose to prominence as a vital component of the art and culture of the twentieth century. Previous coursework in film is recommended, though not required; please contact the professor if this will be your first experience studying film in an academic setting.

Location

Hylan Building Room 102 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

A transnational survey of film history, examining the technical and formal aspects of the medium in its production and exhibition. As we explore the development of cinema, we will address aesthetic and technological issues. i.e. how did the development of sound technology affect film form? How did it affect Cross-cultural cinematic exchange? What is the significance of genre across various film traditions? What did the studio system contribute to Hollywood's success in the international market? How did immigrant and exiled film personnel shape the industries they joined? Weekly screenings and film journals required.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

A focused study of Godzilla on film, from the original 1954 film that defined Japan's kaiju film to today. Broader course context includes an investigation of the 1950s science fiction/horror/creature-feature genre popularized during the heyday of the Cold War nuclear age but dating back to silent cinema, and a comparative study of the visual culture of war from WWII to today. Seminal sci-fi titles influencing the Godzilla film paradigm and close readings of select Godzilla universe films reveal the historical and social contexts for the Godzilla franchise's erratic trajectory since 1954. We watch both dubbed and subtitled original Japanese language versions of select titles to better understand how different culturally generated perspectives of Godzilla emerge. No prerequisites, no audits.

Location

Meliora Room 218 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course explores Hollywood's fascination with race and gender as social issues and as spectacles. In particular, we will focus on the ways that social difference have become the sites of conflicted narrative and visual interactions in our films. To examine competing representations of racial difference and sexual difference in US culture, we analyze popular films from the 1950s to the present.

Location

Morey Room 504 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

3/4 Per CS no meeting pattern needed and should be 4 credits ca

Restricted to Selznick Students

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Restricted to Selznick Students

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Restricted to Selznick Students

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. Also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students expected to write and revise at least three original stories or three sections of a longer work of fiction.

Location

Morey Room 504 (T 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

This workshop is for advanced fiction writers who have completed ENG 121 or have permission from the instructor. The course emphasizes the development of each student's individual style and imagination, as well as the practical and technical concerns of a fiction writer's craft. Readings will be drawn from a wide variety of modern and contemporary writers. Students will be expected to write three original short stories as well as to revise extensively in order to explore the full range of the story's potential. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing. 

Location

Morey Room 501 (W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Prerequisites; English 122 or equivalent; instructor permission. Students are to submit 3-5 typed poems to jennifer.grotz@rochester.edu to obtain permission to register.

Poems, as William Carlos Williams once said, are machines made out of words, and in this advanced poetry workshop we will work on making the most gorgeous, gripping, and efficient machines possible. To that end, we will read both one another's poems and poems by established authors, in either case paying attention to the ways in which the authors harness aspects of their medium, the English language: syntax, diction, rhythm. The poems we write may take any shape, any form, but we will work towards understanding why a particular poem must take the shape it has; we will pay attention not so much to what the poems say as to how they say it. Requirements: weekly writing and reading assignments, revisions of assignments, devoted participation in class discussions, a final project.

Permission of instructor is required. Students are to submit 3-5 typed poems to jennifer.grotz@rochester.edu in order to apply.

Please note that this course is only being offered in Fall for the 24/25 academic year

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room 226 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course will introduce students to the theoretical backgrounds, practical challenges, and creative activity of literary translation. We will consider varied descriptions by translators of what it is they believe they are doing and what they hope to accomplish by doing it; and we will study specific translations into English from a variety of sources to investigate the strategies and choices translators make and the implication of those choices for our developing sense of what kinds of texts translations are. Finally, students will undertake a translation project of their own. By the end of this class each student should have a working knowledge of both the theory and the craft of literary translation.

Location

Hylan Building Room 303 (W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Introduction to Graduate Studies in English is a semester-long introduction to doctoral study in English.

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

The disciplines of book history and textual criticism have long been at the heart of literary study, and have continued to shape the field in recent decades. This seminar introduces graduate students to the study of manuscripts and early printed books through readings in paleography and codicology, along with workshops in the Robbins Library and Rare Books; although our collective focus will be on the textual history and modern afterlives of The Canterbury Tales and the Bible in English, students will also be encouraged to apply themselves to archival research relating to their own research interests. We will then consider the ongoing study of book history during our current age of digitization, working within a variety of archives and projects, with particular attention to the University of Rochester's Middle English Text Series and other major digital initiatives.

Location

Morey Room 403 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course considers the emergence in the last decade or so of an interdisciplinary approach which sometimes calls itself “weird studies.” It applies this approach to an amenable period for hunters after weirdness: the Renaissance or early modern era. The following questions will lay the groundwork for our conversations. How is the term “weird” used in this field of research? How does one “weird” a text? In what ways is this approach related to and different from established approaches like affect theory, queer theory, secularity studies, and new materialisms? How might this approach build upon or challenge the academic study of literature as currently practiced? How does this weird turn follow from or comment upon the weird times we are experiencing in the 21st century? Alongside texts written by advocates and critics of this approach, we will focus on a range of case studies, including works by William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish, David Hume, and Ottobah Cugoano. 

Location

Morey Room 403 (W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

The horror film has consistently put on spectacular, fantastic display a range of historically and
culturally specific fears and anxieties. The genre has been especially generative for theorists
seeking to understand the somatic and affective capacities of the cinematic medium, and scholars
have explored the complex and contradictory politics of the genre’s visceral effects. This seminar
does not present a cultural history of the horror film or trace the evolution of the genre. Rather,
we will examine theories of horror as they have developed in relation to other approaches in
film/media studies and critical theory, including psychoanalysis, Marxism, queer theory,
disability studies, and affect theory. The seminar is organized into two alternating conceptual
groupings: gender, sexuality, and the body; horror as political allegory.
 

Location

Morey Room 403 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

“Utopia” commonly refers to an ideal society; this course presents “utopia” as a (para-)literary genre, an occasion of societal modeling, and as a cognitive mode, attitude, and process. The course addresses literary representations of utopias throughout the tradition of literature in English. Topics for discussion include the relationship between utopia and dystopia (including “critical” utopias and dystopias), utopian literature’s influence on and representation in modern science fiction, the politics of utopias, and intersections with the history of intentional communities. Readings include primary texts by Thomas More, Edward Bellamy, George Orwell, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, and more; featured criticism and scholarly essays include work by Lyman Tower Sargent, Tom Moylan, Fredric Jameson, Hannah Arendt, and more. Course requirements include a seminar paper, an in-class presentation on a critical reading, and class participation.

Location

Morey Room 403 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Restriction: Instructor's permission required

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room G121B (MWF 11:30AM - 2:30PM)

Under the direction of English Department Faculty and staff of George Eastman Museum’s Moving Image Department, the student will plan and undertake a significant project designed to challenge her/his abilities to function at a professional level in the moving image archive field. Examples of potential projects include: archival projection, public programming and exhibitions, collection management, video and digital preservation techniques, processing and conservation of motion picture related materials, acquisitions, access and cataloging.
 

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

topic specific training/study in film preservation work.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

No description

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arranged.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Shakespeare

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Restoration Drama

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Victorian Crime and Sexuality

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Credit to be arrangedThe following courses may be taken for four hours of graduate credit.

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( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

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