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CAS EN 220: Undergraduate Seminar in Literature
Academic Year 2025-2026, Semester I
Fundamentals of literary analysis, interpretation, and research. Intensive study of selected literary texts centered on a particular topic. Attention to different critical approaches. Frequent papers. Limited class size. Required of concentrators in English. Satisfies WR 150 requirement.
Fulfills BU Hub requirements: Writing, Research, and Inquiry, Oral and/or Signed Communication, and Research and Information Literacy.
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Topics for Fall 2025
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Modernism, Race, and Resistance
1922, the year that saw the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, has been called the “wonder year” of international modernism, but we have yet to comprehend how Black writers critically engaged the complex and enduring legacy of modernist stylistic innovation in order to represent and resist racist violence, segregation, and gender inequality in the US. This course will trace the emergence of American modernism in works by authors such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner, putting them in dialogue with Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and other Black authors who responsively revised modernism in their writings.
EN 220 A1 Patterson
TR 11:00 – 12:15p
Moral Choices
In this course we examine how literary works of the twentieth century dramatize moral valuation and choice in diverse historical contexts. We will focus on how such themes are elaborated in works written by authors from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
EN 220 C1 Krishnan
MWF 12:20 – 1:10p
Love and Death
Works Covered: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience”; Poetry by Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and others. Short stories by Franz Kafka and Shirley Jackson; Frida Kahlo’s Museum and Paintings; Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Ridley Scott, Thelma and Louise; Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
The aim of this course is to introduce the tools of literary and cultural criticism. The course will explore a variety of methods for interpreting a variety of classic works and help students learn how to select the method best suited to the concerns of works from different genres (essay, poetry, short story, painting, memoir, novel, comics, film). Since a key to good criticism is a strong narrative voice, we will focus on developing effective rhetorical strategies in weekly posts.
EN 220 D1 Mizruchi
TR 12:30 – 1:45p
City Lit
The hum of pedestrians, the clamor of construction, refracted sunlight bending between buildings, the ringing bell of the Green Line cruising down Commonwealth Avenue—these are just a few things you might experience on and around Boston University’s city campus. Often taken for granted, city life as we know it is a relatively new phenomenon in human history and one that fundamentally changed the course of literature. This section of Undergraduate Seminar in Literature reads works interested in the experience of the city, with all its beauty, frustrations, and rich sensory tableau. In this class, we ask: how do writers and artists experience the city, then and now? And how did literature and art help shape new ways of thinking about the city?
Throughout the course, we’ll study the birth of the modern, post-industrial city and the artistic responses that followed, featuring writing from and about Paris, London, Dublin, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Boston. This course likewise engages with multimedia representations of cities to glimpse their visual and sonic landscapes. To that end, we pair our literary readings with considerations of film, artwork, street photography, architecture, urban design, and musical albums. Along the way, we’ll study important concepts like class, industrialism, alienation, the crowd, and the flâneur as ways of better understanding the literary and artistic response to one of the most profound changes to human experience brought on by modernity.
EN 220 G1 Hernández
TR 12:30 – 1:45p