At the end of the 5th century, after Roman occupation of Britain had ended, invaders from coastal Germany and the Netherlands settled in England and displaced the  Celtic-speaking population. The language these tribes spoke and wrote gives us the oldest witnesses of perhaps the most influential and widely-spoken language in the world today: English. In this class, we will learn to read the earliest records of English (c. 700-1100) by studying the grammar, vocabulary, and poetics of the period. We will explore the variety of surviving Old English texts - elegies, heroic epic, riddles, religious verse, Latin philosophy (translated in prose and verse), Biblical translation, sermons, charms, maxims, and more - as well as the history of book production during the period. By the end of the term, your new facility in Old English will enable you to read, understand, and translate some of the most beautiful poems ever written. No prerequisites for the course; as pre-1800 as you can get. 

Location

Morey Room 501 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

The principal works of Chaucer, in their historical and intellectual context. Readings in Middle English.

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 315 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

The properties of letters and numbers have been associated with the occult from ancient times on. This course will explore the creative development of this concept from Greek and Hebrew thought in medieval and early modern traditions where language served to hide, protect, conjure, and transform: the letters of the Paternoster that defeat the devil, Odin’s Mead of Poetry, Taliesin’s aretalogies, Germanic runes, riddles, charms, loricae, spells, ciphers (the indecipherable Voynich Manuscript, the banned Steganography by Trithemius of Sponheim), magic and foreign alphabets, deific languages (the Irish “Evernew Tongue”), glossolalia, demonic languages, invented languages (Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua Ignota), John Dee’s “language of the angels,” Enochian,” adopted by Aleister Crowley for his “Order of the Golden Dawn.” I want to discover what properties in language do more than just signify. Exercises, creative projects, and a final research paper.  

Location

Lattimore Room 413 (TR 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

This course focuses on drama written by Shakespeare's contemporaries.  Classes center around careful analysis of individual plays.  We discuss, among other topics, the plays' tragic and comic inflections, depictions of psychological interiority, meditations on love and desire, staging of death, use of props, fascination with sensational and often violent events, and insistent references to contemporary performance practices.  We also become familiar with a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theatrical spaces—their geographical locations and physical properties, the composition of their audiences, the training and performance practices of their actors, and the aesthetic, social, and political contexts of their productions. We consider plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Ford, Jonson, Kyd, Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster and, when possible, view scenes from recent staged productions. 

Satisfies the pre-1800 literature, the dramatic literature, the literature, and the 200-level literature requirements for various English major and minor tracks. Satisfies a requirement in the Humanities/English cluster, Plays, Playwrights, and Theater.  Appropriate for all students, from those in their first semester at the university to senior English majors. No restrictions -- all students welcome. 

Location

Hylan Building Room 203 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

This course will examine the literary career of one of the most accomplished, intriguing, and influential poets of the English language, John Milton. Milton thrived during a time when many of the most urgent conversations we are still having about democracy, empire, gender, race, individuality, religion, technology, work, and nature were first formulated. Keeping this context in mind, students will read Milton’s major lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry, focusing especially on Paradise Lost, his epic retelling of the primal rebellion of Satan against God, as well as a selection of his prose writings, including his influential attacks on state censorship and his still-radical defenses of revolutionary action. We will also examine Milton’s legacy, especially his profound importance for later writers like Phillis Wheatley, William Blake, and Mary Shelley. This course fulfills the Pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Location

Lattimore Room 413 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

We will investigate the peculiar quality of romanticism and the particular achievements of romantic writers in the United States during the period before the Civil War. Three capacious topics will organize discussions: nature and art, society and history, and individuals and communities. As part of each of these topics, we will also consider the pressures and controversies around slavery, race, and gender that were dividing the States in the decades before the Civil War. We will read works by Cooper, Childs, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Melville, Poe, Douglass, Jacobs, Hawthorne, Stowe, Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, and others. Of particular interest throughout the term will be the hopes and anxieties, allegiances and resistances, aesthetic triumphs and political frustrations that characters American romantic artists and have made the imagination a crucial part of the nation's life and an indispensable resource for its people even at moments when fundamental conflicts threatened to end the nation altogether.

Location

Morey Room 303 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

What is America? A country? A continent? A political ideal? A culture? This course traces the development of ideas about America, from its historical beginnings to our own time, from European fantasies about the New World and its possibilities to the experiences of settlers and citizens facing its realities. We will explore the competing and even contending narratives of America in a wide variety of cultural documents, from orations, sermons and political tracts to novels, poems, photographs, and films. The course is open to all interested students and required for all American Studies majors.

Location

Lechase Room 121 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

“Make it New” has generally been accepted as modernism’s battle cry, and 1922 has often been seen as the year modernism changed the world with the publication of key modernist masterpieces. But a century on, the novelty of its classics invites reinvestigation. We will explore how contemporary writers and filmmakers have recast and transformed iconic texts by writers like Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf for new times and new audiences, sometimes literally taking them apart and re-piecing them together. What happens when a novel is transposed to a new medium, genre, or point of view? What do the texts look like in transnational and multicultural settings? What happens when Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is refigured as a Vietnam era film or a graphic novel? What if Mrs. Dalloway is reduced to a five minute YouTube video? Looking at multiple versions of a few key texts, we will apply theories of adaptation and media studies, including ideas of remediation and remixing. We will also look at how digital technologies have produced new modernist artifacts, allowing us to explore multiple versions of a single text. 

Location

Lechase Room 104 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

In this course we discuss the literary qualities and social impulses that characterize utopian and dystopian writing. We focus on utopian and dystopian worlds imagined in British and American prose fiction from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century. We consider, among other topics, how this writing draws on Afrofuturism, journalism, naturalism, realism, romance, satire, science fiction, scientific and political treatises, and travel narratives. We read short stories and longer fiction (in entirety and in excerpt). Our authors include Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Francis Godwin, Margaret Cavendish, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, William Dean Howells, E.M. Forster, W.E.B Du Bois, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ken Liu. You have the option, in your essays, to focus on utopian or dystopian works beyond those on our syllabus. 

Satisfies both the pre-1800 and the post-1800 literature requirement in the English major. No restrictions -- all students welcome. 

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 315 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

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

Frederick Douglass Room 403 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course examines four science fiction writers—Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, and Michel Faber—who address the perilous issues of voyage into foreign terrain, calling upon post-colonial criticism to guide us. Clarke's novels Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End will be read in conjunction with Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. We will read Solaris by Lem and see one or both films made of it. Faber’s Under the Skin interrogates our treatment of animals by making us prey to aliens and The Book of Strange New Things tells the daring story about a minister who has been asked by a non-human race to continue his missionary work on Oasis, with no concept that his idea of Christianity doesn’t square with theirs. We end with Ted Chiang’s story and its film adaptation, Arrival, which investigates cultural barriers created by language, body, and foreign ground—matters that drive all stories about the Otherworld, and the complex problems of misreading each other.

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 269 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

In recent years, we have seen a virtual explosion of writing by women, with women’s novels constituting some of the most widely read and critically admired work being produced today. The global reach of both its authors and audiences has made contemporary women’s writing a truly international phenomenon. We will examine what makes this work especially innovative: its experimentation with new voices and narrative forms and its blurring of genre boundaries. We will look at the dialogue it has established with the past, where it often finds its inspiration, self-consciously appropriating earlier literary texts or rewriting history.  We will also consider what special challenges this work poses for its readers. Looking at works originating in a wide range of locations, this course, will explore the diverse shapes of contemporary women's imagination and attempt to account for the compelling interest of this new body of fiction.

Location

Lattimore Room 431 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

 This 4-credit intersession course will be conducted in London, UK, from December 26, 2022–January 7, 2023. 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 

Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course considers the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and the state of film conservation and preservation worldwide. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at film preservation in action, allowing us to consider analog film as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is art, entertainment, evidentiary document, and historical artifact. Weekly film assignments. Class meets on River Campus and at George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave, no admission fee but students provide their own transportation). No audits, no pre-requisites. Enrollment limited by hands-on nature of course.

Location

Wegmans Room 1009 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course explores three of Italy’s most prominent post-WWII directors, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani, who developed distinct cinemas and contributed radical representations to key cultural debates. Students will examine each filmmaker’s specific thematic and stylistic innovations, such as Fellini’s carnivalesque and dreamlike states, Antonioni’s use of space and color, and Cavani’s marginal figures and use of flashback. Students will also compare how their works address three of postwar Italy’s and the West’s most critical questions: modernization, the 1968 student protests and the legacy of Fascism. Films include: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Amarcord; Antonioni’s Red Desert and Zabriskie Point; and Cavani’s The Cannibals and The Night Porter. Assignments include: historical, biographical and critical readings, film screenings, short papers and a final essay. Readings will be in English and films will be shown with English subtitles.

Location

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

This course examines major historical movements and styles in the documentary film tradition, and explores the spread of documentary across a range of media platforms. We will study the expository documentary, ethnographic film, the direct cinema and cinéma vérité movements, documentary’s intersections with avant-garde film, mock documentary and hoax films, personal and autobiographical film and video, animated documentary, and digital interactive documentary media. 

Location

Morey Room 525 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course introduces students to the methods involved in turning real objects into virtual ones using cutting edge digital imaging technology and image rendering techniques. Focusing on manuscripts, paintings, maps, and 3D artifacts, students will learn the basics of multispectral imaging, photogrammetry, and Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and spectral image processing using ENVI and Photoshop. These skills will be applied to data from the ongoing research of the Lazarus Project as well as to local cultural heritage collections.

Location

Rettner Hall Room 307 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

Restricted to Selznick Students

Restricted to Selznick Students

Restricted to Selznick Students

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

Lechase Room 182 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

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. Please contact Professor Joanna Scott, jscott15@ur.rochester.edu, for permission to enroll.

Location

Morey Room 303 (T 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

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. In addition, this course will explore and attend to process, which may include questions of inspiration, generation, and revision. and Requirements: weekly writing and reading assignments, revisions of assignments, devoted participation in class discussions.

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room 226 (T 2:00PM - 4:50PM)

Advanced seminars focus on a particular body of works (literary or cinematic), a special research topic, or a particular critical or theoretical issue. One or more extended critical essays will be required. Open to junior and senior English majors. Others may be admitted by permission of instructor.

This course examines major critical issues surrounding the horror genre, through close study of Classical Hollywood, post-classical, and international horror films, and readings in critical theory. Issues to be explored include boundary transgression and bodily abjection in the construction of the horror monster; gender, pregnancy, and the monstrous-feminine; social Otherness (race, class, sexuality) as monstrosity; the figure of the serial killer and the shift from classic to modern horror; the grotesque and the blending of comedy and horror in the zombie film. As a research seminar, the course will involve the development of a substantial research project.

Location

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

We consider issues raised in Walter Ong's '82 study, "Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word." His account related the growth of writing & print to the development of science & modern rational thought, exploring possible changes in collective consciousness as a result of the shift of media emphasis. We'll examine classical sources, including Plato's suspicion of the power of oral poetry, & consider levels of literacy achieved in ancient society; we'll look at European medieval traditions. Discussions on the roles language & literature played in the lives of non-literate people as contrasted with literate. Study of the modern & contemporary periods focuses on practices as conversation, becoming literate, collection of oral accounts & their uses, uses of ethnographic writing, & different approaches to speech, writing, & language in African American & white communities. Key aim of the course is to show the politics, mutual dependency, & reciprocity of oral/literate uses of language in literary/nonliterary.

Location

Morey Room 205 (TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM)

Credit to be arranged.

Credit to be arranged.

Credit to be arranged.

Credit to be arranged.

Encountering early texts in their manuscript and print contexts, as the original readers would have, is a dramatically different experience from reading medieval and early modern literature today. Although differences in letter forms, bindings, ink, illumination practices, spelling, rubrication, punctuation, glossing, and page layout all contribute to this, perhaps the most significant difference is the way in which multiple texts were compiled and grouped into codices by medieval scribes and early modern printers. The miscellany, in fact, is the norm among vernacular books in England for most of its literary history. A medieval reader would have encountered Beowulf alongside a poetic translation of the Hebrew Bible’s Judith and the prose Letter of Alexander to Aristotle; readers of the codex in which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is found might instead have been more interested in Pearl or Cleanness; Wyatt first appeared to most Renaissance English readers fifteen years after his death in Tottel’s Miscellany. Yet today, Beowulf is nearly a household name, while its neighbors (copied by the same two scribes in London, British Library, MS Vitellius A.XV) are nearly forgotten. This research seminar will explore practices of compilation in several early books and recent scholarship examining important miscellanies; we will also read two late-medieval works (by the English poet Thomas Hoccleve and the German mystic Henry Suso) which dramatize the process of creating a collection of disparate texts. The term will conclude with student reports on individual miscellanies of particular interest to their own research, as well as some “pseudo-miscellanies” (such as the eighteenth-century Bog-House Miscellany, purporting to assemble poetry from the walls of public toilets across Britain).

Location

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

A seminar on the intersection between violence and literature. We’ll consider three types of writing and the relationships among them: a select archive of literary works (from classical epic and tragedy to contemporary lyric and fiction) that thematize violence in illuminating or challenging ways; some literary criticism which take violence as a privileged category of literary analysis (e.g., Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence); and some of the philosophical literature on the theory of violence (Nietzsche, Benjamin, Girard, Arendt, Fanon, Agamben, Butler).

Location

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

The modern histories of both racism and abolitionism can be traced to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, a period that witnessed genocidal trade wars in South Asia, the enslavement of millions of Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the deracination of many of the First Nations of the Americas. Writers at the time—those who glorified these and other atrocities, those who condemned them, and those who simply stood by as they happened—almost always interpreted these events within the conceptual vocabulary we now associate with religion: the language of soul, spirit, prophecy, witchcraft, apocalypse, redemption, salvation, damnation, angelic inspiration, and demonic possession. This course seeks to interrogate this connection. To what extent does an awareness of this spiritual dimension of the economic, social, and psychological histories of race illuminate past texts? Present circumstances? Future possibilities? While the course focuses on early modern Anglophone writers (including William Shakespeare, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano) it also emphasizes urgent scholarly and literary-critical writings of recent years which have sought both to interpret the world and to change it.

Location

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

Toril Moi, in her book, Revolution of the Ordinary (2017) has urged ordinary language as a framework for the study of literature. This sense of language highlights speakers and uses in all contexts. Moi and Rita Felskialso consider how this view of language overrides the traditional “hermeneutics of suspicion”--a way of reading that separates “meaning” from observable language, that meaning is occult, or that it needs to be recovered from texts and speech. Both critics urge a renewed respect for the experience and contexts of reading, for how different constituencies read and talk about literature through tropes of common sense, local interest, and collective purpose. We consider, in the light of 20th century criticism and theory, how this perspective on literary study has come about. We review New Criticism and early statements by feminist and critics of color that led to Moi’s and Felski’s proposals. Students are invited to propose texts to be read as “ordinary literature.”

Location

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

The yearlong practicum has two components, a practicum group, which is led by a 571 course instructor, and a mentor group, which is led by an experienced WSAP instructor. These two groups involve new instructors in a combination of small group meetings, class observations, individual meetings, and workshops designed to support and further educate new instructors. Small group meetings, classroom observations, and individual meetings offer new teachers a chance to gain different perspectives on their teaching, identify their teaching strengths, and work out solutions to teaching difficulties. The larger goal of all meetings is to encourage instructors to work with colleagues across the disciplines to create a supportive and intellectually challenging community, a community that they can call on throughout their career as educators.

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room G121A (M 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

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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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Credit to be arranged.

Credit to be arranged.

Shakespeare

Restoration Drama

Victorian Crime and Sexuality

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

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