Graduate Seminars
MA Students must take at least six graduate seminars (700 or higher)
PhD Students must take at least 13 graduate seminars (700 or higher)
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History of Literary Criticism I
A historical survey of western literary-critical standards from the earliest surviving formulations in classical Athens to the dawn of the twentieth century. Writers include Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Augustine, Dante, Sidney, Hume, Wordsworth, Marx, Nietzsche. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Aesthetic Exploration.
EN 604 A1 Francis
TR 5:00 – 6:15p
Critical Studies in Literary Genres:
Fall 2025 Topic: “The Artist Novel”
What is the relationship between an artist and their art? This course surveys novels that have tackled exactly that question. In this class, we examine one of the most important modernist subgenres, the Künstlerroman, or novel of the artist. We will identify the genre’s origins, chart its development, and consider its relationship to its precursor, the Bildungsroman. In doing so, we will learn how and why the twentieth century saw an explosion of artist novels. Through our readings, we will aim to understand the artistic sensibilities and social forces that shape the artist figure. We will also confront perennial questions about what it means to be an artist, such as the role of the artist in society; the relationship between the artist, their work, and the world; and the artist’s obligation to social, political, and national movements.
This course will be relevant to students who enjoy literature that captures inner life and experience as well as students interested in the following areas: genre studies, narrative theory, and literary theory; gender and sexuality studies, feminism, and masculinity; British, Irish, and American modernism; art, music, memoir, and creative writing. We will read novels and selections from the following authors: Alison Bechdel, Willa Cather, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Radclyffe Hall, Tomson Highway (Cree), James Weldon Johnson, James Joyce, W. Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, Richard Wright, and Virginia Woolf.
EN 674 A1 Hernández
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Critical Studies in Literature and Gender:
Medieval Romance: The Origin of Love
This course examines a central preoccupation of medieval poets: the nature, characteristics, and experience of love. Hundreds of stories of the tragic and adulterous affairs of figures such as Tristan and Isolde or Lancelot and Guinevere survive from the pre-modern period, intensely focused on a disquieting combination of illicit sex, ritualized violence, and quasi-mystical love. How do medieval romances negotiate conflicts between passion, marriage, family loyalty, and empire? How do our texts debate, reverse, or affirm gender and societal norms? Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Celtic, German and French romances (in translation) by Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Gottfried von Strassbourg, Hedris of Cornwall; Middle English romances including “Havelok the Dane,” “Sir Orfeo” (an English encounter with the Orpheus myth), “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and Thomas Malory’s “Morte D’Arthur” (“The Death of Arthur”), a series of linked prose stories set in Arthur’s court, composed during England’s fifteenth-century War of the Roses. As a “Methods” course, we will also examine historicist literary studies as a critical approach, and participants will have the opportunity to research and situate these primary works in their medieval context for their final projects.
EN 675 A1 Appleford
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
Critical Studies in Literature and Philosophy: Art, Selves, and Artificial Selves
“There is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” declared Socrates in Book 10 of Plato’s The Republic. What did Socrates mean? What understanding of the mind, of art, and of social life led him to say this? With Plato as our starting point, the rest of the semester will consider philosophers, critics, and artists from the last century whose work asks what we mean by “art,” what we mean by a “self,” and how these concepts intersect. Readings on aestheticism, formalism, tea ceremonies, cricket, film, religious “aura,” land art, “camp,” racial authenticity, pornography, cyborgs, social media, cultural identity, feminism, existentialism. Literary texts by Samuel Beckett, James Baldwin, Caryl Churchill, Ted Chiang. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Philosophical Inquiry and Life’s Meanings, Critical Thinking.
EN 697 A1 Chodat
TR 2:00 – 3:15p
Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
Fall 2025 Topic: Personification Allegory and Medieval Literature
What is personification allegory? This question has long attracted the attention of both theorists and historians of literature. Strictly speaking, “allegory” means to speak otherwise (from the Greek allos, ‘other’ + –agoria, ‘speaking’), while ”personification” links prosopopoeia — from the Greek prosopon, ‘person, face, mask’ — with poeiein, ‘to make’. As a mode of writing and of interpretation, personification allegory thus involves an encounter with flexible, and vivid textual bodies. Our course will meditate on this bold literary device as an entry point to explore the contours of embodiment and ideas of personhood in premodern literature. We will chart how personification allegory as a literary mode relates to ideas of narrative, characterization, metaphor and figural language more generally. We will also attend to how this mode interacts with premodern genres like the dream vision, morality or personification drama, and debate poetry. A key goal in this course is to understand how personification allegory is used not only for aesthetic effects, but also as a tool of social, political, and spiritual organization in the period. What might it mean to embody meaning and to allegorize the human figure? How does prosopopoeia, the work of conferring a face (prosopon), help us to read beyond the edges of the human body?
Reading foundational Latin and French works in translation (Prudentius’s Psychomachia; The Romance of the Rose) the course will explore the workings of personification allegory in a series of early English texts, including the The Owl and the Nightingale, the complex and influential dream vision, Piers Plowman, body and soul debates, and early drama such as Mankind.
EN 728 A1 Goodrich
R 12:30 – 3:15
Narrative and Literary Conceptions of Time 1750-1930
This interdisciplinary course pairs narrative theory with the history of science and technology to explore how literary texts play with time. How do writers from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf jolt their readers out of everyday temporal scales, setting millions of years or the lighting of candles next to the span of a human life? What forms of time become perceptible with Britains increasing use of coal and fossil fuels? How are empire, hierarchy, and exploitation intertwined with British theories of time and history? How do developments such as the discovery of dinosaurs, the invention of telegraphs, and the birth of moving pictures affect the structure of poems and novels? How do writers create the feeling of motion in their readers or make them aware of parallel perceptual worlds that ordinarily remain invisible? Authors include Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Alfred Tennyson, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, as well as a selection of theoretical and critical works, including narratological texts.
EN 743 A1 Henchman
T 12:30 – 3:15p
American Popular Writing, 1776-1900
Historically-informed survey of best-selling, steady-selling, and otherwise widely-embraced writing (fiction, poetry, journalism, and otherwise) from the American Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century. Questions to be considered will include the nature of “popularity,” particularly with respect to race, class, and gender; the power of literary conventionality and the problem of canonicity; the cultural work of sentimentalism, especially in the context of “reform”; the changing shape of the American literary marketplace. Possible authors include Paine, Rowson, Weems, Poe, Fern, Brown, Douglass, Alger, Longfellow, Keckley, and Baum.
EN 777 A1 Howell
M 2:30 – 5:15p
Postcolonial Studies and the Humanities
This class explores how postcolonial studies has analyzed the novel form and historical writing. We will begin by reading theoretical essays that situate the concerns of postcolonial (and anticolonial) theories. We will consider the degree to which such theories are aligned with the concerns of the novels we will read. This will require us to explore how works of fiction arose from the colonial reordering of institutions in the global periphery. We will also consider how anti-colonial nationalists, often shaped by western education, set forth powerful critiques of colonialism. But did such strategies result in an obscuring of the fractures within the newly independent nation? On this and other topics, we will examine in what ways the formal and thematic questions posed by postcolonial novels exist in tension with postcolonial and decolonial claims which are inspired by the rhetoric of decolonization. We are likely to discuss works of fiction by Chinua Achebe, V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dangarembga alongside critical and theoretical essays by Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, David Scott, Wang Hui, Franco Moretti, Walter Mignolo. Fulfills the Literature in English 1860 – Present requirement OR the Theory, Critical Method, History of Criticism requirement.
EN 795 A1 Krishnan
W 2:30 – 5:15P