Extensive reading of works by a few major poets. Emphasizes the evolution of each poet's work and the questions of poetic influence and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Does Poetry Matter? Topic for Spring: Gender and Lyric Poetry.

Extensive reading of works by a few major poets. Emphasizes the evolution of each poet's work and the questions of poetic influence and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Does Poetry Matter? Topic for Spring: Gender and Lyric Poetry. The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don't work.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Taming of the Shrew" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "The Tempest" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

One of the most compelling novels of the twentieth century, Beloved by Toni Morrison has been read in classrooms across the country since its publication in 1987. The novel follows Sethe's escape to freedom, the murder of her child, and her difficult psychological journey as she copes with her past as a slave.  As both an historical account of the experiences of slavery and an insightful novel about a supernatural ghost, this text is ideal for upper level high school students and students in AP programs.

Aspects of the tragic as a mode of literature and a quality of lived experience pursued in readings that extend from the warfare of the ancient world to the experiences of modern life. Authors include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Conrad, Dinesen, Faulkner, and Camus. Includes viewing of at least two films. "Tragedy" is a name originally applied to a particular kind of dramatic art and subsequently to other literary forms; it has also been applied to particular events, often implying thereby a particular view of life. Throughout the history of Western literature it has sustained this double reference. Uniquely and insistently, the realm of the tragic encompasses both literature and life. Through careful, critical reading of literary texts, this subject will examine three aspects of the tragic experience: The scapegoat; The tragic hero; The ethical crisis. These aspects of the tragic will be pursued in readings that range in the reference of their materials from the warfare of the ancient world to the experience of the modern extermination camps.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Hamlet" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of King Lear to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Othello" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Twelfth Night" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

In this lesson, students explore the historical context of  Walt Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" by reading  his poetry and prose and by examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850.  Next, students will compare the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," and have an opportunity to apply similar concepts and techniques in creating a poem from their own experience.

This pass/fail seminar should be a fun setting where we can all enjoy a love of good books together. Students will read approximately one novel every two weeks, and the class will discuss each novel in a relaxed and interactive setting, with attention to whatever themes and issues interest them most about each book. We will read a wide mixture of classic and contemporary novels written by women, including: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Alice Walker, The Color Purple; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Sheri Reynolds, The Rapture of Canaan; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; and Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. Recurrent issues likely to be discussed include: gender, race, and class; romance, love, and marriage; depression and suicide; and conception, childbirth, and parenthood.

Students, scholars, bloggers, reviewers, fans, and book-group members write about literature, but so do authors themselves. Through the ways they engage with their own texts and those of other artists, sampling, remixing, and rethinking texts and genres, writers reflect on and inspire questions about the creative process. We will examine Mary Shelley's reshaping of Milton's Paradise Lost, German fairy tales, tales of scientific discovery, and her husband's poems to make Frankenstein (1818, 1831); Melville's redesign of a travel narrative into a Gothic novella in Benito Cereno (1856); and Alison Bechdel's rewriting of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in her graphic novel Fun Home (2006). Showings of film versions of some of these works will allow us to project forward in the remixing process as well.

This course is an introduction to the short story. Students will write stories and short descriptive sketches. Students will read great short stories and participate in class discussions of students' writing and the assigned stories in their historical and social contexts.

William Shakespeare didn't go to college. If he time-traveled like Dr. Who, he would be stunned to find his words on a university syllabus. However, he would not be surprised at the way we will be using those words in this class, because the study of rhetoric was essential to all education in his day. At Oxford, William Gager argued that drama allowed undergraduates "to try their voices and confirm their memories, and to frame their speech and conform it to convenient action": in other words, drama was useful. Shakespeare's fellow playwright Thomas Heywood similarly recalled: In the time of my residence in Cambridge, I have seen Tragedies, Comedies, Histories, Pastorals and Shows, publicly acted…: this is held necessary for the emboldening of their Junior scholars, to arm them with audacity, against they come to be employed in any public exercise, as in the reading of Dialectic, Rhetoric, Ethic, Mathematic, the Physic, or Metaphysic Lectures. Such practice made a student able to "frame a sufficient argument to prove his questions, or defend any axioma, to distinguish of any Dilemma and be able to moderate in any Argumentation whatsoever" (Apology for Actors, 1612). In this class, we will use Shakespeare's own words to arm you "with audacity" and a similar ability to make logical, compelling arguments, in speech and in writing. Shakespeare used his ears and eyes to learn the craft of telling stories to the public in the popular form of theater. He also published two long narrative poems, which he dedicated to an aristocrat, and wrote sonnets to share "among his private friends" (so wrote Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598). Varying his style to suit different audiences and occasions, and borrowing copiously from what he read, Shakespeare nevertheless found a voice all his own–so much so that his words are now, as his fellow playwright Ben Jonson foretold, "not of an age, but for all time." Reading, listening, analyzing, appreciating, criticizing, remembering: we will engage with these words in many ways, and will see how words can become ideas, habits of thought, indicators of emotion, and a means to transform the world.