Description: Disney films have remained outside the critical landscape because they have been considered either beneath artistic attention or beyond reproach. The goal of this course will be to explore the issues presented in such Disney films as The Lion King, Aladdin, Prince of Egypt, and Pocahontas. To do this, we will read source material (The Arabian Nights, Hamlet, tales about Pocahontas, Bible stories about Moses, Exodus, etc.) and secondary studies.
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 115N TuTh 12:00 Noon-01:15PM
Time Category: Afternoon
Used Seats: 28 / Total Seats: 20
Description: This course offers an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of American culture with an emphasis on questions of difference, justice, and power. We will concentrate on approaches, methods, and themes of interest as we assemble critical skills for making interpretive arguments about aspects of culture in their historical moment. While assembling a toolkit of interpretive moves we can make on American culture and working to build stronger analyses, we will also consider how American society and culture have been defined by differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, religion, and other socio-cultural categories. We will consider how American Studies scholars have combined theory and praxis in order to expose injustice in the nations past and present; form communities based on principles of inclusion and solidarity; and create just conditions for citizenship and humanity. The materials we analyze will include examples from film, television, music, literature, theater, comics, photography, advertising, among others. Each unit will be organized around a question that generates further questions, analysis, and discussion. The questions include, for instance, Why is Indigenous Studies central to American Studies?, What does visual culture tell us about race in modern America?, and How do we see race and religion after 9/11? During the semester, we will also attend a number of events sponsored by American Studies, AADS, and other interdisciplinary departments, centers, and programs that represent a variety of interests, subjects, and approaches. This course satisfies the university Cultural Diversity requirement. For English majors this course also satisfies the Literature Across Worlds requirement.Note for American Studies Minors: Students can take either ENGL2278 or or ENGL 2277: Introduction to American Studies to satisfy the introductory course requirement. (Students cannot receive credit for both courses.)
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 401N TuTh 03:00PM-04:15PM
Time Category: Evening
Used Seats: 23 / Total Seats: 24
Description: TBD
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 117N TuTh 12:00 Noon-01:15PM
Time Category: Afternoon
Used Seats: 12 / Total Seats: 15
Description: In this one-credit seminar we will read five novels by twentieth and twenty-first century women writers that suggest the mystery genre has much to offer in the way of literary analysis and enjoyment. Authors will include: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Barbara Neely, Maj Sjowall, and Louise Penny. We will consider violence as a literary theme, gender norms in the genre (and their subversions), geography and journey as a central aspect of the works, as well as the allusive elements of myth and legend undergirding their structure.
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 476S W 03:00PM-04:25PM
Time Category: Evening
Used Seats: 12 / Total Seats: 15
Description: Fulfills the pre-1700 requirement. In this class, we will read and discuss Shakespeare's plays with an emphasis on their status as performed texts with a variety of potential interpretations. How were these plays performed in Elizabethan England, and what shape do they take today? How might conventions of contemporary film and television empower us to reinterpret Shakespeare's genre and style? In addition to traditional readings and assignments, this course will involve in-class performance experiments and a creative project. Texts will likely include Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Cymbeline.
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 113S TuTh 10:30AM-11:45AM
Time Category: Morning
Used Seats: 30 / Total Seats: 30
Description: Fulfills the pre-1900 requirement. From “Dickensian” workhouses to shady financiers, Victorian literature has provided touchstones for discussions of inequality today. This course will investigate how writers responded to the experience of inequality in Victorian Britain during an era of revolution and reaction, industrialization and urbanization, and empire building. Considering multiple axes of inequality, we will explore topics such as poverty and class conflict, social mobility, urbanization, gender, education, Empire, and labor. We will read novels, poetry, and nonfiction prose; authors include Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Elizabeth Gaskell; Charles Dickens; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Mary Prince; Arthur Morrison; and Thomas Hardy.
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 103N MWF 11:00AM-11:50AM
Time Category: Morning
Used Seats: 25 / Total Seats: 30
Description: In this course, we will study the great works of modernism with an eye toward the ways in which this revolution in the arts became our own tradition. Though we will focus on British modernism in particular, the global character of modernism will necessitate some attention to American and Continental European influences. We will also have the opportunity to compare literary modernism to developments in architecture, film, and painting. Authors to be discussed include Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, H.D., T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf.
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 103N TuTh 03:00PM-04:15PM
Time Category: Evening
Used Seats: 7 / Total Seats: 30
Description: In this course, we will study fiction and non-fiction texts by Asian American writers exploring the Asian American experience of immigration, exclusion, and engagement. The course will focus on texts that deal with Asian American experience and reflection on inter-ethnic alliance, social justice and activism. Asian American writers we will study include, among others, Sui Sin Far, Maxine Hong Kingston, Carlos Bulosan, Viet Thanh Nguyen.The course will include a module on Asian American community-based initiatives on the issue of Bostons Chinatown and gentrification. This course fulfills the core Cultural Diversity (Engaging Diversity and Justice) requirement.For English Majors, this course satisfies the Race, Blackness, and Language requirement.
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 103N MWF 09:00AM-09:50AM
Time Category: Morning
Used Seats: 30 / Total Seats: 30
Description: Focusing on the long nineteenth century, we will consider formative American texts that were wildly popular in their time, as well as others that were overlooked for a variety of historical, social, and aesthetic reasons. We will ask what cultural factors contributed to a books popularity, enduring appeal, or dismissal. We will further explore how these texts confirmed or challenged dominant ideologies, and how reading them now can allow us to reflect on the desires, fears, and struggles of our own historical moment. Possible texts include: Hannah Webster Fosters The Coquette, Benjamin Franklins Autobiography, Lydia Maria Childs Hobomok, Frederick Douglasss Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Wilsons Our Nig, Herman Melvilles Moby Dick; Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin, Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Upton Sinclairs The Jungle.
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 117S TuTh 01:30PM-02:45PM
Time Category: Evening
Used Seats: 24 / Total Seats: 30
Description: How do we tell stories about a crisis that is becoming ever more ordinary?This course explores how writers and filmmakers have addressed the Great Acceleration: a sharp, post-1945 turn within the Anthropocene--the proposed geological epoch defined by human impact upon the earth--witnessing exponential growth in human populations, economies, and resource consumption that has pushed earth systems into dangerous unsustainability.Together we will analyze fictions that take up urgent questions of this moment,for instance how nature is conceptualized differently over time, how capitalism becomes naturalized through the working of the land, and how we understand the paradox of natural disasters as a term.Works may include novels such as Carlos BulosansAmerica is in the Heart(1946), Thomas PynchonsThe Crying of Lot 49(1966), Octavia ButlersThe Parable of the Sower(1993), and Tommy OrangesThere There(2018), and films such asChinatown(1974),The Day After Tomorrow(2004), andSorry to Bother You(2018).
Professors: (BC Email Needed)
Location and Time: Stokes Hall 215N TuTh 09:00AM-10:15AM
Time Category: Morning
Used Seats: 11 / Total Seats: 20