ENGL 500a / LING 500a / MDVL 665a, Old English I  Emily Thornbury

The essentials of the language, some prose readings, and close study of several celebrated Old English poems.
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

ENGL 537a, The Gawain Poet  Jessica Brantley

The course offers a contextual study of four of the greatest (and most enigmatic) Middle English poems—Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At its center is British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, the single medieval book that contains them all. In addition to reading the poems closely in their manuscript context, we examine associated artworks, from the twelve illustrations in the Cotton MS that constitute a medieval reading of the poems, to St. Erkenwald, a poem preserved elsewhere that some argue was written by the same author. Finally, we think about the modern reception of the poems through a serious engagement with scholarly debate surrounding them, and also through comparative work with translations.
T 9:25am-11:15am

ENGL 551a / EMST 541a, Spenser's Readers  Catherine Nicholson

This course has two complementary, though sometimes divergent, objects of interest: the first is the poetry of Edmund Spenser, particularly his immense allegorical epic-romance, The Faerie Queene; the second is that poem's varied and often vexed reception history, from the late sixteenth century through the present. The Faerie Queene is a poem about interpretation—its pleasures and its discontents—and we often find ourselves reading over the shoulders of readers in the poem. But it is also possible to read the poem through the eyes of other historical readers, adopting their (often alien) expectations, ambitions, and preoccupations as a way of discovering new things in the text and of reflecting on the biases and assumptions of our own critical practices. In this sense, this is a course about readerly methods and the history of reading as well as a course about Spenser, and participants whose primary interests lie outside the English Renaissance are warmly welcomed.
M 9:25am-11:15am

ENGL 722a / EMST 572a, Transatlantic Literature, 1688–1818  Jill Campbell

Study of multiple genres in the literatures of Great Britain, North America, and the Caribbean from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, with twenty-first-century creative and critical works providing a range of contemporary responses. Special focus on the role of literature in advancing and contesting concepts of race and gender as features of identity and systems of power, with attention to the circulation of goods, people, ideas, and literary works among regions. Readings from the long eighteenth century to include works by Aphra Behn, Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occam, Olaudah Equiano, Omar Ibn Said, Leonora Sansay, and Maria Edgeworth. Twenty-first-century creative works by Biyi Bandele, Yaa Gyasi, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abel; with critical selections from Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, and Habiba Ibrahim.
W 10:30am-12:20pm

ENGL 858a / AMST 858a, Edgar Allan Poe and His Critics  Caleb Smith

A seminar on Poe’s work and how people think about it. We read Poe’s gothic tales, detective stories, Romantic poetry, book reviews, essays, satires, and hoaxes. We also take up some of his interlocutors, such as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Colin Dayan, Jacques Lacan, Mat Johnson, Toni Morrison, Emily Ogden, and Walt Whitman. Histories of slavery and empire, science and secularism, crime and punishment, magazine culture and the literary marketplace. Theories of consciousness, aesthetics, affect, power, guilt.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 889a / AFST 889a / CPLT 889a, Postcolonial Ecologies  Cajetan Iheka

This seminar examines the intersections of postcolonialism and ecocriticism as well as the tensions between these conceptual nodes, with readings drawn from across the global South. Topics of discussion include colonialism, development, resource extraction, globalization, ecological degradation, nonhuman agency, and indigenous cosmologies. The course is concerned with the narrative strategies affording the illumination of environmental ideas. We begin by engaging with the questions of postcolonial and world literature and return to these throughout the semester as we read primary texts, drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. We consider African ecologies in their complexity from colonial through post-colonial times. In the unit on the Caribbean, we take up the transformations of the landscape from slavery, through colonialism, and the contemporary era. Turning to Asian spaces, the seminar explores changes brought about by modernity and globalization as well as the effects on both humans and nonhumans. Readings include the writings of Zakes Mda, Aminatta Forna, Helon Habila, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Ishimure Michiko, and Amitav Ghosh. The course prepares students to respond to key issues in postcolonial ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, analyze the work of the major thinkers in the fields, and examine literary texts and other cultural productions from a postcolonial perspective. Course participants have the option of selecting from a variety of final projects. Students can craft an original essay that analyzes primary text from a postcolonial and/or ecocritical perspective. Such work should aim at producing new insight on a theoretical concept and/or the cultural text. They can also produce an undergraduate syllabus for a course at the intersection of postcolonialism and environmentalism or write a review essay discussing three recent monographs focused on postcolonial ecocriticism.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 902a, Elizabeth Bishop  Langdon Hammer

An experiment in intensive author-centered reading, this course studies the life, writing, and visual art of Elizabeth Bishop using tools from biography, gender studies, queer theory, object relations psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. We read against chronology and the focus on single poems in conventional close reading. Topics for discussion include the pressures on and possibilities for a woman poet’s career in the mid-twentieth-century United States; the relations between poetry and painting, verse and prose, and private and public writing; the idea of minor literature, and the figure of the minor; Bishop in Brazil and as a hemispheric poet; houses; epistolarity; secularity and religion; the role of objects and the senses in subject formation; the ordinary, perverse, and fantastic; tourism, cosmopolitanism, and the local; the poetics of description. We use archives in the Yale Collection of American Literature at Beinecke Library and in Special Collections, Vassar College Library. In addition to Bishop, readings include, among others, Christopher Bollas, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Melanie Klein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marion Milner, and D.W. Winnicott.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

ENGL 906a / AMST 696a / ER&M 696a / HSHM 782a / RLST 630a / WGSS 696a, Michel Foucault I: The Works, The Interlocutors, The Critics  Greta LaFleur

This graduate-level course presents students with the opportunity to develop a thorough, extensive, and deep (though still not exhaustive!) understanding of the oeuvre of Michel Foucault, and his impact on late-twentieth-century criticism and intellectual history in the United States. Non-francophone and/or U.S. American scholars, as Lynne Huffer has argued, have engaged Foucault’s work unevenly and frequently in a piecemeal way, due to a combination of the overemphasis on The History of Sexuality, Vol 1 (to the exclusion of most of his other major works), and the lack of availability of English translations of most of his writings until the early twenty-first century. This course seeks to correct that trend and to re-introduce Foucault’s works to a generation of graduate students who, on the whole, do not have extensive experience with his oeuvre. In this course, we read almost all of Foucault’s published writings that have been translated into English (which is almost all of them, at this point). We read all of the monographs, and all of the Collège de France lectures, in chronological order. This lightens the reading load; we read a book per week, but the lectures are shorter and generally less dense than the monographs. [The benefit of a single author course is that the more time one spends reading Foucault’s work, the easier reading his work becomes.] We read as many of the essays he published in popular and more widely-circulated media as we can. The goal of the course is to give students both breadth and depth in their understanding of Foucault and his works, and to be able to situate his thinking in relation to the intellectual, social, and political histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alongside Foucault himself, we read Foucault’s mentors, interlocutors, and inheritors (Heidegger, Marx, Blanchot, Canguilhem, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, Bersani, Hartman, Angela Davis, etc); his critics (Mbembe, Weheliye, Butler, Said, etc.), and scholarship that situates his thought alongside contemporary social movements, including student, Black liberation, prison abolitionist, and anti-psychiatry movements. Instructor permission required.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 915a / CPLT 754a, Western and Postcolonial Marxist Cultural Theory  Joe Cleary

An introduction to classic twentieth-century Western and postcolonial Marxist theorists and texts focusing on historical and intellectual exchange between these critical formations. Reading theoretical works in conjunction with some selected literary texts, the course tracks how key Marxian concepts such as capital and class consciousness, modes of production, praxis and class struggles, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation have been developed across these traditions and considers how these concepts have been used to rethink literary and other cultural forms and their ongoing transformation in a changing world system. Writers discussed may include G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Perry Anderson, Giovanni Arrighi, Cornel West, and others. The object of the seminar is to provide students with a solid intellectual foundation in these still-developing hermeneutic traditions.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 928a / CPLT 933a / FILM 751a, British Cinema  Katie Trumpener

Key films and topics in British cinema. Special attention to the provincial origins of British cinema; overlaps between filmic, literary, and visual modernism; attempts to build on the British literary and dramatic tradition; cinema’s role in the war effort and in redefining national identity; postwar auteur and experimental filmmaking; “heritage” films and alternative approaches to tradition. Accompanying readings in British film theorists, film sociology (including Mass Observation), and cultural studies accounts of film spectatorship and memories. Films by Mitchell and Kenyon, Maurice Elvey, Anthony Asquith, Len Lye, John Grierson, Alfred Hitchcock, Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphrey Jennings, Michael Powell, Carol Reed, David Lean, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Stanley Kubrick, Laura Mulvey, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway, Michael Winterbottom, Patrick Keiller, Steve McQueen.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm, M 7pm-10pm

ENGL 935a / AFAM 522a / AMST 721a, The Beautiful Struggle: Blackness, the Archive, and the Speculative  Daphne Brooks

This seminar takes its inspiration from concepts and questions centering theories that engage experimental methodological approaches to navigating the opacities of the archive: presumptively “lost” narratives of black life, obscure(d) histories, compromised voices and testimonials, contested (auto)biographies, anonymous testimonies, textual aporias, fabulist documents, confounding marginalia. The scholarly and aesthetic modes by which a range of critics and poets, novelists, dramatists, and historians have grappled with such material have given birth to new analytic lexicons—from Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to José Estaban Muñoz’s “ephemera as evidence” to Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afrofabulation.” Such strategies affirm the centrality of speculative thought and invention as vital and urgent forms of epistemic intervention in the hegemony of the archive and open new lines of inquiry in black studies. Our class explores a variety of texts that showcase these new queries and innovations, and we also actively center our efforts from within the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where a number of sessions are held and where we focus on Beinecke holdings that resonate with units of the course. Various sessions also feature distinguished guest interlocutors via Zoom, who are on hand to discuss the specifics of their research methods and improvisational experimentations in both archival exploration and approaches to their prose and poetic projects.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 938a / AFAM 510a, Black Geographic Thought  Elleza Kelley

This seminar focuses on classic and recent scholarship that constitute the interdisciplinary subfield of “black geographies.” Bearing in mind that black studies is not merely the study of black people but, as Alexander Weheliye puts it, “a substantial critique of Western modernity and a sizable archive of social, political, and cultural alternatives,” this seminar explores the critiques and alternatives that black studies brings to bear on the feeling, knowledge, representation, and politics of space and place. While we study scholarship across discipline (by geographers, architectural theorists, historians, etc.), we pay particular attention to how cultural production, like literature and visual art, articulates black geographic and spatial thought and how it might engage with, challenge, and enrich the fields of critical and literary geographies. Along the way, our study of literature is transformed by careful attention to the geographic, architectural, and ecological. We read the work of scholars like Katherine McKittrick, Clyde Woods, and AbdouMaliq Simone alongside creative works by poets, novelists, artists, filmmakers, architects, and more, from Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand to Torkwase Dyson and Mati Diop.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 979b / FREN 668b / HSAR 668b, Ekphrasis and Art Criticism  Carol Armstrong

Ekphrasis in its ancient Greek sense refers to the vivid description of an object, animal, person, place, scene, or event undertaken as an exercise in oral rhetoric. In that original context, the practice of ekphrasis was meant to “paint” a picture in the mind of the listener, and thus pointed to both the imagistic capacities of verbal language, and the integral link between the image and the imagination. In the twentieth century, ekphrasis acquired a narrower meaning: poetry addressed to or modeled on works of visual art. While informed by both of those understandings, this seminar considers ekphrasis both more broadly, in terms of genre, and more narrowly, in relation to a partial history of art criticism as a modern form of writing in the anglophone and European worlds, with a focus on the eighteenth through the twentieth century. It treats the different writerly modes now understood to be embraced by the term ekphrasis: not only poetry, but also the prose poem and the novel, as well as the Salon and art review. It also touches on such issues as the Renaissance inversion of the phrase ut pictura poesis; the competition between the arts of word and image; the presence or absence of illustrations; the modern relations between genres and mediums and the question of mediation; and the address of the different arts to the subjectivity of the reader/spectator. In addition to weekly presentations, a short preliminary paper, and a final research paper, students organize and contribute to a workshop on ekphrasis based on their own ekphrastic exercises, undertaken in the Yale Art Gallery. (Some class time is devoted to those exercises.) This seminar is the second of two (the first is HSAR 667); our hope is that students from both seminars will collaborate on this final event.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 992a, Advanced Pedagogy  Heather Klemann

Training for graduate students teaching introductory expository writing. Students plan a course of their own design on a topic of their own choosing, and they then put theories of writing instruction into practice by teaching a writing seminar. Prerequisite: open only to graduate students teaching ENGL 114.
HTBA

ENGL 993a, Prospectus Workshop  Naomi Levine

A workshop in which students develop, draft, revise, and present their dissertation prospectuses, open to all third-year Ph.D. students in English.
HTBA

ENGL 995a / ENGL 9095, Directed Reading  Staff

Designed to help fill gaps in students’ programs when there are corresponding gaps in the department’s offerings. By arrangement with faculty and with the approval of the DGS.
HTBA

ENGL 5197b / AMST 697b / ER&M 697b / HSHM 783b, Michel Foucault II: The Works, the Interlocutors, The Critics  Greta LaFleur

Continuing graduate-level course presents students with the opportunity to develop a thorough, extensive, and deep (though still not exhaustive!) understanding of the oeuvre of Michel Foucault, and his impact on late-twentieth-century criticism and intellectual history in the United States. Non-francophone and/or U.S. American scholars, as Lynne Huffer has argued, have engaged Foucault’s work unevenly and frequently in a piecemeal way, due to a combination of the overemphasis on The History of Sexuality, Vol 1 (to the exclusion of most of his other major works), and the lack of availability of English translations of most of his writings until the early twenty-first century. This course seeks to correct that trend and to re-introduce Foucault’s works to a generation of graduate students who, on the whole, do not have extensive experience with his oeuvre. In this course, we read almost all of Foucault’s published writings that have been translated into English (which is almost all of them, at this point). We read all of the monographs, and all of the Collège de France lectures, in chronological order. This lightens the reading load; we read a book per week, but the lectures are shorter and generally less dense than the monographs. [The benefit of a single author course is that the more time one spends reading Foucault’s work, the easier reading his work becomes.] We read as many of the essays he published in popular and more widely-circulated media as we can. The goal of the course is to give students both breadth and depth in their understanding of Foucault and his works, and to be able to situate his thinking in relation to the intellectual, social, and political histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alongside Foucault himself, we read Foucault’s mentors, interlocutors, and inheritors (Heidegger, Marx, Blanchot, Canguilhem, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, Bersani, Hartman, Angela Davis, etc); his critics (Mbembe, Weheliye, Butler, Said, etc.), and scholarship that situates his thought alongside contemporary social movements, including student, Black liberation, prison abolitionist, and anti-psychiatry movements. Previously ENGL 907.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

ENGL 5805b / CPLT 605b, Edward Said as Public Intellectual  Robyn Creswell

This seminar focuses on Edward Said’s reflections on the role and responsibilities of the intellectual, paying particular attention to his writings on Palestine, the politics and culture of the Arab world, and the discourse of expertise. We also examine the reception of Said’s ideas and example among Arab thinkers. Texts include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, After the Last Sky, Representations of the Intellectual, and numerous essays. Previously ENGL 905.
HTBA

ENGL 5865b / CPLT 665b / WGSS 665b, African Feminism and African Women Writers  Helen Yitah

This course looks at how major African women writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Nawal El Saadawi, Grace Ogot, and Chimamanda Adichie have represented African feminist concerns and aesthetics in their works. We explore some of their interrogation of sexism and patriarchal social structures, the thematization of gender relations, a rethinking of marginality, and the presentation of alternative frames of reference for (re)defining female subjectivities and identities by reading selected works through the lens of African feminist thought, including Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s stiwanism, Catherine Acholonu’s motherism, Obioma Nnaemeka’s nego-feminism, and Mary Kolawole’s and Chikwenye Ogunyemi’s versions of womanism.
W 9:25am-11:15am

ENGL 6137b / AFAM 850b / AFST 937b, African Urban Cultures: Mediations of the City  Stephanie Newell

This course approaches the study of African cities and urbanization through the medium of diverse texts, including fiction, nonfiction, popular culture, film, and the arts, as well as scholarly work on African cities. Through these cultural “texts,” attention is given to everyday conceptualizations of the body and the environment, as well as to theoretical engagements with the African city. We study urban relationships as depicted in literature and popular media in relation to Africa's long history of intercultural encounters, including materials dating back to the 1880s and the 1930s. Previously ENGL 937.
HTBA

ENGL 6152b / FILM 652b, Media Theory  John Peters

This course provides an intensive introduction to foundational texts in media theory old and new. (It supplements rather than replicate FILM 601, Foundations in Film and Media.) This course focuses either on influential articles of the past five decades or notable books of the last decade or so (or both). In either case, the aim is to gain a familiarity with key ideas, figures, traditions, questions, and methods in media theory. Previously ENGL 923.
HTBA

ENGL 6157b / AFAM 860b / MHHR 708b, Ecologies of Black Print  Jacqueline Goldsby

A survey of history of the book scholarship germane to African American literature and the ecosystems that have sustained black print cultures over time. Secondary works consider eighteenth- to twenty-first-century black print culture practices, print object production, modes of circulation, consumption, and reception. Students write critical review essays, design research projects, and write fellowship proposals based on archival work at the Beinecke Library, Schomburg Center, and other regional sites (e.g., the Sterling A. Brown papers at Williams College). Previously ENGL 957.
HTBA

ENGL 6501b / MDVL 666b, Old English II  Emily Thornbury

Readings in a variety of pre-Conquest vernacular genres, varying regularly, with supplementary reading in current scholarship. Current topic: Old English devotional literature, especially poetry; our readings explore early medieval strategies for cultivating emotion and understanding. Formerly ENGL 502.
HTBA

ENGL 6545b / CPLT 582b / FREN 802b / MDVL 502b, Chaucer and Translation  Ardis Butterfield

An exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400), brilliant writer and translator. Using modern postcolonial as well as medieval theories of translation, memory, and bilingualism, we investigate how texts in French, Latin, and Italian are transformed, cited, and reinvented in his writings. Some key questions include: What happens to language under the pressure of crosslingual reading practices? What happens to the notion of translation in a multilingual culture? How are ideas of literary history affected by understanding Chaucer’s English in relation to the other more prestigious language worlds in which his poetry was enmeshed? Texts include material in French, Middle English, Latin, and Italian. Proficiency in any one or more of these languages is welcome, but every effort is made to use texts available in modern English translation, so as to include as wide a participation as possible in the course. Formerly ENGL 545.
HTBA

ENGL 6768b / CPLT 597b, The Birth of Aesthetics  Jonathan Kramnick

This is a course on the emergence of aesthetic theory in Enlightenment and Romantic era Europe. We'll examine how a new language of art and nature focused on the experience of the beholder and track evolving categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque in key texts of philosophy and literature. We'll connect ideas of aesthetic judgment and autonomy to central institutions and ideologies of the modern era, including the public sphere, secularism, the private subject, racial capitalism, and the market. Readings begin with empirical philosophies of perception and early accounts of the aesthetic in Locke, Addison, Hutcheson, Pope, Hume, and Burke and continue through the watershed moment of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kant, and Schiller. The seminar ends with a consideration of aesthetic theory in the long contemporary period of Adorno, Scarry, Rancière, and Ngai. Previously ENGL 768.
HTBA

ENGL 6873b / FILM 973b, Modernity and the Time of Literature  John Williams

This course examines transformations in temporality that occurred in the sciences and arts during the twentieth century. From the arrival of Einsteinian relativity to more contemporary proofs on quantum nonlocality, the question of time in the twentieth century threatened to overturn some of our oldest assumptions about cause and effect, duration, history, presentness, and futurity. These new temporalities were as scientifically and philosophically vexing as they were rife with spiritual and aesthetic possibility—a dynamic reflected in the literary and artistic forms that were central to these transformations. Our reading reflects this deeply cross-cultural and interdisciplinary trajectory, including histories of science and technology (Peter Galison, N. Katherine Hayles, David Kaiser), philosophies of time (Heidegger, Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, McLuhan, Luhmann), critical theories of temporal form (Derrida, Adorno, Jameson, Pamela Lee, Kojin Karatani), a wide array of literary texts (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom McCarthy, and others), as well as important cinematic innovations (Jodorowsky, Godard, Kubrick). What is the “time” of literature? of film? How does art transform or reinforce theories of temporal flow? How do new technologies of composition and circulation alter the temporal effects of a given work? What was the “End of History”? Previously ENGL 973.
HTBA