* ENGL 011a / PLSC 025a, Lincoln in Thought and Action  David Bromwich

An intensive examination of the career, political thought, and speeches of Abraham Lincoln in their historical context. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
TTh 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 012a, Shakespeare and Popular Culture  Nicole Sheriko

How and why did Shakespeare become “popular”? Why is he still part of popular culture today? In this transhistorical and interdisciplinary course, we chart the history of Shakespeare’s celebrity, from the first publication of his works to their first adaptations in the Restoration, from Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee to the preservation of the Shakespeare Birthplace that he put on the map, from the recreation of the Globe Theatre to the role of Shakespeare in our contemporary cultural imagination. We read Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth alongside a wide range of adaptations and cultural objects they inspire, using television, film, graphic novels, short stories, advertising, toys and souvenirs, and even tumblr poetry to consider how Shakespeare’s legacy evolves to meet the needs of changing eras. By the end of the course, we curate a collection of contemporary Shakespeariana to consider what Shakespeare means to our popular imagination. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 031a / RLST 022a, Religion and Science Fiction  Maria Doerfler

Survey of contemporary science fiction with attention to its use and presentation of religious thought and practice. Focus on the ways in which different religious frameworks inform the literary imagination of this genre, and how science fiction in turn creates religious systems in both literature and society. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 033a / LING 033a, Words, Words, Words: The Structure and History of English Words  Peter Grund

Meggings. Perpendicular. Up. Ain’t. Eerily. Bae. The. These are all words in the English language, but, like all words, they have different meanings, functions, and social purposes; indeed, the meaning and function may be different for the same word depending on the context in which we use it (whether spoken or written). In this course, we explore the wonderful world of words. We look at how we create new words (and why), how we change the meaning of words, and how words have been lost (and revived) over time. As we do so, we look at debates over words and their meanings now (such as the feeling by some that ain’t is not a word at all) and historically (such as the distaste for subpeditals for ‘shoes’ in the sixteenth century), and how words can be manipulated to insult, hurt, and discriminate against others. We look at a wide range of texts by well-known authors (such as Shakespeare) as well as anonymous online bloggers, and we make use of online tools like the Google Ngram viewer and the Corpus of Historical American English to see how words change over time. At the end of the course, I hope you see how we make sophisticated use of words and how studying them opens up new ways for you to understand why other people use words the way they do and how you can use words for various purposes in your own speech and writing. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  HU
MW 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 063b, Vampires, Castles, and Werewolves  Heather Klemann

What happens when a mirror held up to our world reflects back something ominously and unreasonably distorted? How do the sublime, the uncanny, and the supernatural fashion and fracture our sense of self? Examining gothic novels from the 18th and 19th centuries—the stuff of craggy cliffs, mysterious dungeons, and their paranormal inhabitants—alongside 20th and 21st-century films, this course explores the historical origins and deep cultural legacy of literary responses to the so-called Age of Reason. As we tour medieval monasteries, shadowy back alleys of London, and abysmal realms of the subconscious, we consider how literary representations of unreason affirm and unsettle our understanding of lived experience and our faith in laws of science and logic. Gothic fiction has long provided fertile ground for cultivating ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism—special attention is given to these topics throughout the course. Readings include Frankenstein, Mexican Gothic, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula. Films include Peele’s Get Out, Bong’s Parasite, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 067b / AMST 070b / HUMS 067b, The Road in Literature and Film  Steven Shoemaker

Stories about journeys are at the heart of some of the most powerful works of art and literature that humankind has produced, from the time of Homer’s Odyssey onward, and the trope of the journey has played an especially prominent role in American literature and film. In this course, we look at modern and contemporary examples of books and films that explore “the road” both as a path to freedom and discovery and as a site of hardship and precarity. Along the way, we examine quests for personal enlightenment, flights from economic and political oppression, and attempts to locate some “elsewhere” that’s more exciting than home. Works of literature are likely to include Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. Films are likely to include Sullivan’s Travels, It Happened One Night, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, and Into the Wild.  WR, HU
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

* ENGL 114a or b, Writing Seminars  Staff

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war.  WR
HTBA

* ENGL 115a or b, Literature Seminars  Staff

Exploration of major themes in selected works of literature. Individual sections focus on topics such as war, justice, childhood, sex and gender, the supernatural, and the natural world. Emphasis on the development of writing skills and the analysis of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 120a or b, Reading and Writing the Modern Essay  Staff

Close reading of great nonfiction prepares students to develop mastery of the craft of powerful writing in the humanities and in all fields of human endeavor, within the university and beyond. Study of some of the finest essayists in the English language, including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Leslie Jamison, Jhumpa Lahiri, George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Woolf. Assignments challenge students to craft persuasive arguments from personal experience, to portray people and places, and to interpret fundamental aspects of modern culture.  WR
HTBA

* ENGL 123a or b, Introduction to Creative Writing  Staff

Introduction to the writing of fiction, poetry, and drama. Development of the basic skills used to create imaginative literature. Fundamentals of craft and composition; the distinct but related techniques used in the three genres. Story, scene, and character in fiction; sound, line, image, and voice in poetry; monologue, dialogue, and action in drama.  HU
HTBA

* ENGL 125a or b, Readings in English Poetry I  Staff

Introduction to the English literary tradition through close reading of select poems from the seventh through the seventeenth centuries. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse linguistic and social histories; and the many varieties of identity and authority in early literary cultures. Readings may include Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Middle English lyrics, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and poems by Isabella Whitney, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Amelia Lanyer, John Donne, and George Herbert, among others. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 126a or b, Readings in English Poetry II  Staff

Introduction to the English literary tradition through close reading of select poems from the eighteenth century through the present. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse genres and social histories; and modernity’s multiple canons and traditions. Authors may include Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott, among others. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 127a or b, Readings in American Literature  Staff

Introduction to the American literary tradition in a variety of poetic and narrative forms and in diverse historical contexts. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse linguistic and social histories; and the place of race, class, gender, and sexuality in American literary culture. Authors may include Phillis Wheatley, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Allen Ginsberg, Chang-Rae Lee, and Toni Morrison, among others.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 128a or b, Readings in Comparative World English Literatures  Staff

An introduction to the literary traditions of the Anglophone world in a variety of poetic and narrative forms and historical contexts. Emphasis on developing skills of literary interpretation and critical writing; diverse linguistic, cultural and racial histories; and on the politics of empire and liberation struggles. Authors may include Daniel Defoe, Mary Prince, J. M. Synge, James Joyce, C. L. R. James, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Yvonne Vera, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, J. M. Coetzee, Brian Friel, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White, among others. Preregistration required; see under English Department.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 129a or b / HUMS 127a or b / LITR 168a or b / THST 129a or b, Tragedy in the European Literary Tradition  Staff

The genre of tragedy from its origins in ancient Greece and Rome through the European Renaissance to the present day. Themes of justice, religion, free will, family, gender, race, and dramaturgy. Works might include Aristotle's Poetics or Homer's Iliad and plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Hrotsvitha, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Racine, Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Wedekind, Synge, Lorca, Brecht, Beckett, Soyinka, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Lynn Nottage. Focus on textual analysis and on developing the craft of persuasive argument through writing.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 130a or b / LITR 169a or b, Epic in the European Literary Tradition  Staff

The epic tradition traced from its foundations in ancient Greece and Rome to the modern novel. The creation of cultural values and identities; exile and homecoming; the heroic in times of war and of peace; the role of the individual within society; memory and history; politics of gender, race, and religion. Works include Homer's Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, Cervantes's Don Quixote, and Joyce's Ulysses. Focus on textual analysis and on developing the craft of persuasive argument through writing.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 149b / LING 109b, History of the English Language  Peter Grund

The evolution of English from its beginnings nearly 1500 years ago to the language of Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, Melville, Twain, Langston Hughes, Bernie Sanders, Maya Angelou, and Cardi B. An overview of the 'Englishes' that populate our globe, including a look at the ways that technology affects language.  HU
MW 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 150a / LING 150a, Old English  Emily Thornbury

An introduction to the language, literature, and culture of earliest England. A selection of prose and verse, including riddles, heroic poetry, meditations on loss, a dream vision, and excerpts from Beowulf, which are read in the original Old English.  HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

ENGL 154a / FREN 216a / HUMS 134a / LITR 194a, The Multicultural Middle Ages  Staff

Introduction to medieval English literature and culture in its European and Mediterranean context, before it became monolingual, canonical, or author-bound. Genres include travel writing, epic, dream visions, mysticism, the lyric, and autobiography, from the Crusades to the Hundred Years War, from the troubadours to Dante, from the Chanson de Roland to Chaucer. Formerly ENGL 189.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

ENGL 158a, Shakespeare: Page, Stage, and Screen  Staff

A lively and wide-ranging introduction to the plays of William Shakespeare: comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances, in print, on stage, and as adapted for television, film, and other media, from the early modern period to the present. In addition to giving novices and Shakespeare buffs alike a thorough grounding in the content and contexts of the plays themselves, this course aims at developing students' abilities to analyze, interpret, and take pleasure in linguistic complexity, to think critically and creatively about the relationship between text and performance, to experiment with reading like an actor, a director, a costume designer, a queer theorist, an anti-theatrical Puritan, or a sixteenth-century playgoer, and to explore enduring issues of identity, family, sexuality, race, religion, power, ambition, violence, and desire. Lectures are complemented by weekly discussion sections, conversations with practicing theater artists, a trip to the Beinecke Rare Books Library, and opportunities to see plays in performance.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

ENGL 183b, Poetry since 1950  Langdon Hammer

An introduction to poetry in English from the mid-twentieth century to the age of Trump and Black Lives Matter, including major figures and movements in the United States, England, Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the Caribbean. Special attention to poetic form and meaning and to themes of personal identity, home and homelessness, gender, sexuality, and race, in the context of consumerism, the Cold War, second wave feminism, decolonization, and the AIDS epidemic. Poets include Bishop, Lowell, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Plath, Baraka, Rich, Brooks, Gunn, Larkin, Heaney, Walcott, Brathwaite, and Rankine.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

ENGL 194a / WGSS 194a, Queer Modernisms  Staff

Study of modernist literature and the historical formation of homosexual identity from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Topics include: sexology as a medical and disciplinary practice; decadence and theories of degeneration; the criminalization of homosexuality in the Wilde and Pemberton-Billing trials; cross-dressing and drag balls in Harlem; transsexuality and sex-reassignment surgery; lesbian periodical cultures; nightlife and cruising; gay Berlin and the rise of fascism; colonial narratives of same-sex desire; and the salon cultures of expatriate Paris.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

ENGL 196b / FILM 160b, Introduction to Media  Staff

Introduction to the long history of media.  Focus on taken-for-granted infrastructures as the deep background for the digital age.  History will be our major resource for understanding the present.  We move through strategically selected case studies including technologies for controlling space and time, writing in its many forms, visual and auditory media, and digital media.  Media theory will be taught alongside case studies.   WR, HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

* ENGL 200b, Laboring through the Middle Ages  Emily Thornbury

Society is stratified, and the Haves seem to inhabit a different world than the Have-Nots. The work you do—or don’t do—determines not just the way you live, but your value as a human being. And then a pandemic arrives, and in its aftermath society and its rules for work don’t seem so natural after all...This is the 2020s, but it’s also the 1350s, when the Black Death laid waste to Europe’s population and caused both revolt and retrenchment. In the generation after the plague, society both changed and didn’t; and those who survived produced some of the greatest literary art of the Middle Ages. In this junior seminar, we explore the ideology of work (and its opposite, idleness) across the Middle Ages in England. We consider big questions, like: are you different from what you do? Is art work? Is prayer? Should you have to work to get into heaven? And why does anyone have to work at all? This course covers a time period that is both very different from and eerily similar to our own. Students experience some great works of visual and verbal art, and the manuscripts and artifacts in which they’re embodied—the visible, tangible result of medieval labor. Students develop perspective on what labor meant in the Middle Ages, and means to us today.  WR, HU
MW 1pm-2:15pm

* ENGL 205a / HUMS 200a / LITR 195a / MUSI 462a, Medieval Songlines  Ardis Butterfield

Introduction to medieval song in England via modern poetic theory, material culture, affect theory, and sound studies. Song is studied through foregrounding music as well as words, words as well as music.  WR, HU
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 211a / THST 315a, Acting Shakespeare  James Bundy

A practicum in acting verse drama, focusing on tools to mine the printed text for given circumstances, character, objective, and action; noting the opportunities and limitations that the printed play script presents; and promoting both the expressive freedom and responsibility of the actor as an interpretive and collaborative artist in rehearsal. The course will include work on sonnets, monologues, and scenes. Admission by audition. Preference to seniors and juniors; open to nonmajors. See Canvas for application.  HU  RP
F 1:30pm-5:20pm

* ENGL 222b / THST 390b, Modern European Drama  Marc Robinson

Intensive study of the major playwrights of modern European drama—Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Shaw, Brecht, Genet, and Beckett—along with pertinent theater theory. Recent plays and performances that respond to canonical texts supplement the primary readings.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 226a / WGSS 224a, Race and Gender in Transatlantic Literature, 1819 to the Present  Margaret Homans

Construction of race and gender in literatures of Great Britain, North America, and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth century to the present. Focus on the role of literature in advancing and contesting concepts of race and gender as features of identity and systems of power, with particular attention to the circulation of goods, people, ideas, and literary works among regions. Some authors include Charlotte Bronte, Sojourner Truth, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Chimimanda Adichie, and Kabe Wilson. Second of a two-term sequence; each term may be taken independently.  WR, HU
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 229b, What Was Reading?  Catherine Nicholson

This course takes a long and curious view of the history of reading, using primary sources, material objects, historical records, and contemporary debates to unsettle our assumptions about what reading is and does. How have ideas about the meaning and purpose of reading changed over time? What methods or goals have fallen out of favor, and which continue to shape our ideologies of reading today? What relation is there between the reading we do in a Yale English class, and the reading we do on the beach, or at synagogue, or online―and where do those different sorts of reading come from? The syllabus focuses on early modern English literature, but it also engages ongoing debates about reading in the present, seeking both to link them to and distinguish them from earlier controversies. For instance, a unit on reading as religion raises questions about the morally improving (or morally destabilizing) effects of scriptural interpretation that then haunt later debates about the merits and limitations of anti-racist reading, as James Baldwin argues; similarly, early arguments about the effeminating influence of certain books--especially those aimed at women or young readers--give rise to assumptions about gender and genre that still shape our ambivalence toward reading for pleasure. As we explore these older efforts to shape, inform, regulate, or liberate reading, we’ll also experiment with our own readerly practices, using forgotten or neglected forms like the commonplace book, the moral commentary, or the meditation as foils to the more usual modes of academic writing.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 234a / AFAM 206a, Literature of the Black South  Sarah Mahurin

Examination of the intersections between African American and Southern literatures, with consideration of the ways in which the American South remains a space that simultaneously represents and repels an African American ethos.  HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 235a / AMST 346a / HUMS 252a, Poetry and Objects  Karin Roffman

This course on 20th and 21st century poetry studies the non-symbolic use of familiar objects in poems. We meet alternating weeks in the Beinecke library archives and the Yale Art Gallery objects study classroom to discover literary, material, and biographical histories of poems and objects. Additionally, there are scheduled readings and discussions with contemporary poets. Assignments include both analytical essays and the creation of online exhibitions.  WR, HU
Th 12pm-3pm

* ENGL 236b / AMST 330b, Dystopic and Utopian Fictions  James Berger

Attempts since the late nineteenth century to imagine, in literature, cinema, and social theory, a world different from the existing world. The merging of political critique with desire and anxiety; the nature and effects of social power; forms of authority, submission, and resistance.  HU
T 9:25am-11:15am

* ENGL 245a / HUMS 347a, Land, Liberty, and Slavery from Hobbes to Defoe  Feisal Mohamed

This course considers together several phenomena often considered separately: the conversion of arable land to pasture; the central place of property in seventeenth-century English formulations of political liberty; and the increasing racialization of forced labor in the period. We read seminal works of political theory produced in England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, namely those of Hobbes and Locke. We also explore how transformations of labor and property necessarily exert influence in literature, focusing on Andrew Marvell, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and Daniel Defoe.  WR, HU
M 9:25am-11:15am

* ENGL 246a / AMST 245a / PLSC 247a, The Media and Democracy  Joanne Lipman

In an era of "fake news," when trust in mainstream media is declining, social platforms are enabling the spread of misinformation, and new technologies are transforming the way we consume news, how do journalists hold power to account? What is the media’s role in promoting and protecting democracy? Students explore topics including objectivity versus advocacy and hate speech versus First Amendment speech protections. Case studies will span from 19th century yellow journalism to the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and the advent of AI journalism.   SO
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* ENGL 251a / WGSS 251a, Experiments in the Novel: The Eighteenth Century  Jill Campbell

The course provides an introduction to English-language novels of the long eighteenth century (1688-1818), the period in which the novel has traditionally been understood to have "risen." Emphasizing the experimental nature of novel-writing in this early period of its history, the course foregrounds persistent questions about the genre as well as a literary-historical survey: What is the status of fictional characters? How does narrative sequence impart political or moral implications? How do conventions of the novel form shape our experience of gender? What kind of being is a narrator? Likely authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 262a / HUMS 410a, Modernities: Nineteenth-Century Historical Narratives  Stefanie Markovits and Stuart Semmel

British historical narratives in the nineteenth century, an age often cited as the crucible of modern historical consciousness. How a period of industrialization and democratization grounded itself in imagined pasts—whether recent or distant, domestic or foreign—in both historical novels and works by historians who presented programmatic statements about the nature of historical development.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 267a, Love and Desire in the Nineteenth Century  Naomi Levine

Exploration of forms of love and desire in Victorian literature, with attention to their philosophical, historical, and aesthetic contexts. How history licensed or constrained the Victorian erotic imagination; how the pleasures of reading and looking shaped nineteenth-century aesthetics; how desire drives literary genres such as the sonnet sequence, the sensation novel, elegy, the love letter, aestheticist prose. Authors may include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde, with additional readings in Sappho, Dante, Hegel, Stendhal, and Freud. Visits to the Yale art collections inform discussion.  WR, HU
TTh 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 268b / HUMS 254b / LITR 463b / PHIL 227b, Literature and Philosophy, Revolution to Romanticism  Jonathan Kramnick

This is a course on the interrelations between philosophical and literary writing beginning with the English Revolution and ending with the beginnings of Romanticism. We read major works in empiricism, political philosophy, and ethics alongside poetry and fiction in several genres. Topics include the mind/body problem, political ideology, subjectivity and gender, and aesthetic experience as they take philosophical and literary form during a long moment of historical change.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 269b / HUMS 262b / LITR 204b, Modernism and Domesticity  Katie Trumpener

Exploration of turn-of-the-century European attempts to craft modernist lives: how new ideas of women’s roles, childhood, and the family shaped modernist literature and art—even as modernist designers tried to change people’s experience of daily surroundings. Topics include a range of New Woman novels, modernist design, fashion, and stage sets, exemplary artists’ houses (Carl and Karen Larson, Vanessa and Duncan Grant), reform fashions, portraits and family portraits, experimental fiction, memoirs (Andrej Bely, Walter Benjamin, Joyce, Woolf), and children’s books as designs for living. Students will have the opportunity to research in modernist periodicals or contribute to the upcoming Beinecke Text/Textile exhibit.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 275b, Emerson, Dickinson, and Melville  Richard Deming

Study of central works by three foundational writers of the nineteenth century. Cultural and historical context; questions concerning American identity, ethics, and culture, as well as the function of literature; the authors' views on the intersections of philosophy and religious belief, culture, race, gender, and aesthetics. Readings include novels, poems, short fiction, and essays.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 278b / AMST 281b, Antebellum American Literature  Michael Warner

Introduction to writing from the period leading up to and through the Civil War. The growth of African American writing in an antislavery context; the national book market and its association with national culture; emergence of a language of environment; romantic ecology and American pastoral; the "ecological Indian"; evangelicalism and the secular; sentimentalism and gender; the emergence of sexuality; poetics.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 287a, Literature and the Future, 1887 to the Present  John Williams

A survey of literature's role in anticipating and constructing potential futures since 1887. Early Anglo-American and European futurism during the years leading up to World War I; futures of speculative fiction during the Cold War; futuristic dreams of contemporary cyberpunk. What literature can reveal about the human need to understand both what is coming and how to respond to it.  WR, HU
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

* ENGL 290b / LITR 261b, The Canon in the Colony: How Literature Made the British Empire  Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

Exploration of the life of English literature in the colonial and postcolonial world, from the nineteenth century to the present. Close reading of literary texts, publishing statistics, school textbooks, film, and postcolonial theory. Topics include canon formation, education reform, colonial publishing, gender and education, global Shakespeare.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 292b / HUMS 237b, Past and Present in Fiction since 1789  Katja Lindskog

Drawing on English-language literature, art, and history-writing since 1800, this class explores how the past can illuminate and complicate the ways we perceive the present. We begin with the geopolitical and social revolutions of the 1800s as seen through essays and fictions by Charles Dickens, Alice Meynell, and Thomas Carlyle, and end with the memoir-as-history of Hazel Carby's Imperial Intimacies (2019). Along the way, we explore a variety of approaches to making the past come alive in the present; through the “what if” posed by alternate history speculations, through didactic history in fact and fiction imagined for children, the use of the past as a site of romance, and through visual media like paintings and cinema. Throughout the course, we address questions like: how does fiction work to interpret the past? How does our interpretation of the past reflect and help us process present day concerns? Is the past best imagined as a foreign country full of exotic difference to the present, as a mirror to ourselves?  HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 302b, Chaucer  Ardis Butterfield

An exploration of the extraordinary breadth of Chaucer's writings in their original Middle English. Includes dream visions, lyrics, and the great love epic Troilus and Criseyde, as well as the comic, satiric, and religious narratives of his brilliant Canterbury Tales. Attention to the way his writings on love, hatred, on race, gender and sexuality, psychology, death, war, art, beauty, finance, corruption, laughter, and religion speak to our current moment. Training will be given in Middle English; Modern English translations available.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 303b, Consciousness in the Novel from Austen to Woolf  Ruth Yeazell

Close study of selected novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, with particular attention to the representation of consciousness and the development of free indirect discourse, as well as recent speculations about so-called theory of mind. Readings supplemented by narrative theory. Pre-1900 with permission of instructor.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 306a / HUMS 405a, Interpretations Seminar: William Blake  Riley Soles

This course explores the world of William Blake’s poetry, with an emphasis on the longer prophetic poems, in conversation with his artistic output. We locate Blake in his historical moment, responding in his poetry and art to a variety of political, philosophical, and aesthetic movements in England and elsewhere. We also see Blake as part of an evolving literary tradition, paying particular attention to his relationship with his poetic precursor John Milton, and to Romantic contemporaries such as William Wordsworth. Trips to the Beinecke Library and the Yale Center for British Art allow us to see firsthand and to think deeply about the materiality of Blake’s works, as well as the complex relationships in them between text and image. Finally, we consider Blake as a radical religious thinker and innovator by analyzing his poetry’s connections to modes of Biblical vision, prophecy, and apocalypse.  HU
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 326b / AMST 406b, The Spectacle of Disability  James Berger

Examination of how people with disabilities are represented in U.S. literature and culture. Ways in which these representations, along with the material realities of disabled people, frame society's understanding of disability; the consequences of such formulations. Various media, including fiction, nonfiction, film, television, and memoirs, viewed through a wide range of analytical lenses.  WR, HU  RP
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 327a / AMST 319a, The Modernist Novel in the 1920s  Joe Cleary

Many of the classics of modernist fiction were published between 1920 and 1930. These novels did not come into the world as “modernist”; that term was later conferred on narrative experiments often considered bizarre at the time. As writers, the “modernists” did not conform to pre-existing social conceptions of “the writer” nor work with established systems of narrative genres; rather, they tried to remake the novel as form and bend it to new purposes. This course invites students to consider diverse morphologies of the Anglophone modernist novel in this decade and to reflect on its consequences for later developments in twentieth-century fiction. The seminar encourages careful analyses of individual texts but engages also with literary markets, patronage systems, changing world literary systems, the rise of cinema and mass and consumer cultures, and later Cold War constructions of the ideology of modernism.  WR, HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 330a, Henry James  Ruth Yeazell

Selected novels by Henry James, from Roderick Hudson through The Golden Bowl. Particular attention to the international theme and to the ways in which James's later novels revisit and transform the matter of his earlier ones. Formerly ENGL 435.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 333b / THST 337b, Global Encounters on the English Stage, 1650-1800  Jill Campbell and Caitlin Hubbard

In the aftermath of the English Civil War, when England began heavily prioritizing its imperial ambitions, the theater responded with an expanding repertoire of plays set in world empires: the Ottoman and Chinese Empires; the Aztec and Incan Empires; the empires of Morocco and Russia and India. This theatrical fascination with global empires, and with England’s own imperial expansions in North America, dominated the stage deep into the eighteenth century. In this course, we analyze this repertoire to interrogate the role of the stage in establishing and promoting—as well as questioning and problematizing—the categories of cultural and racial difference used to justify and determine England’s expanding, and often violent, global mercantile empire. In addition to close-reading of the play-texts, particular emphasis is placed on stagecraft and spectacle (including music, costumes, and scenery); on actor/actress studies; and on performance and adaptation history. We also look at how the English theater’s history of racial and cultural categorization still persists in Anglo-American theater today and ask how knowledge of this history can inform current conversations on the moral complexities of staging pre-modern plays.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 335a / AMST 308a / HUMS 275a, Literatures of the Plague  James Berger

In a new era of pandemic, we have seen how widespread medical crisis has profound effects on individual life and consciousness, and on political and economic institutions and practices. Our material and psychic supply chains grow tenuous. All of life changes even as we try to preserve what we deem most valuable. We must rethink what we consider to be “essential.” Yet this is far from being a new condition. Infectious disease has been part of the human social world probably since the beginnings of urban life. The Bible describes plagues sent by God as punishment. The earliest historical depiction was by Thucydides shortly after the plague in Athens in 430 BCE. At each occasion, people have tried to witness and to understand these “visitations,” as Daniel Defoe called them. The Plague is always a medical, political, economic and an interpretive crisis. It is also a moral crisis, as people must not only try to understand but also determine how to act. This course studies accounts of pandemics, from Thucydides in Athens up to our ongoing Coronavirus outbreaks. We trace the histories of understanding that accompanied pandemics: religious, scientific, philosophical, ethical, literary. It seems to be the case that these vast, horrifying penetrations of death into the fabric of life have inspired some of our fragile and resilient species’ most strange and profound meditations.
    
   HU
Th 9:25am-11:15am

* ENGL 337b / HUMS 179b, Shakespeare's Political Plays  David Bromwich

Reading and interpretation of selected histories and tragedies from Richard II to The Tempest with emphasis on the tension between individual freedom and political obligation.  WR, HU  Tr
TTh 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 345b, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell  Langdon Hammer

Intensive study of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, with a focus on their poetry, personal correspondence, and literary friendship, in the context of key conflicts in American literature and society. Opportunities for archival study and creative writing in addition to literary analysis.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 350b, Literary Sound Studies  Benjamin Glaser

Following recent theoretical turns in media studies, music theory, African American studies, and literary studies, this course teaches close listening to the soundscapes of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. We study both written and performed texts across genres, as well as musical lyrics, to ask what social and aesthetic value lies in the production and reception of sound. Primary emphasis is on sound’s racial construction, especially in dialect and musical performance. Additional topics include the relation of voice and gender, sonic expressions of colonialism and migration, and the influence of recording technology on poetry and its performance traditions.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 356b, The Young Adult Novel  Juno Richards

Survey of young adult fiction across the twentieth century, with a focus on American writers. Topics include environmental apocalypse, biopolitics, youth indebtedness, juvenile sentencing, queer adolescence, and racial profiling. Creative and critical writing components.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 363b / FILM 445b / LITR 450b, Film and Fiction in Interaction  Dudley Andrew

Beyond adaptations of complex fiction (Henry James, James Joyce) literature may underlie “original” film masterpieces (Rules of the Game, Voyage to Italy). What about the reverse? Famous novelists moonlighted in the film world (Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene). Others developed styles in contact with cinema (Marguerite Duras, Eileen Chang, Kazuo Ishiguro). Today are these art forms evolving in parallel and in parity under new cultural conditions?  HU
HTBA

* ENGL 365a, Donne  Catherine Nicholson

Depending on whom you ask, the seventeenth-century writer and cleric John Donne was either England's greatest love poet or a total misogynist dirtbag, a man devoted to God or a heretical apostate, an upwardly mobile striver or the victim of his own passionate idealism, the author of some of the most beautiful lines of poetry and prose in the English language or the man who took that language and nearly broke it. In this class, we won’t try to decide any of these arguments—though you are always welcome to pick a side—but to explore the brilliant, weird, fascinatingly complex body of writing that set them in motion.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 366a / THST 398a, American Experimental Theater  Marc Robinson

Topics include the Living Theater, Happenings, Cunningham/Cage, Open Theater, Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, Bread and Puppet Theater, Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Meredith Monk, Mabou Mines, Robert Wilson, and the Wooster Group. Open to junior and senior Theater Studies majors, and to nonmajors with permission of the instructor.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 372a, The Colonial Encounter  Caryl Phillips

Study of the various ways in which contemporary literature has represented the encounter between the center and the periphery, with special attention paid to how this operates in the context of the British Empire.  WR, HU
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 376a, Theories and Histories of the Western Novel  Joe Cleary

Widely considered the ‘youngest,’ most protean, and major literary form of the modern era, the novel has been associated variously with the disenchantment of premodern sacred orders, the rise of the European middle classes, the cultural articulation of the nation-state and other imagined communities, the criticism or reproduction of society, and many other purposes. This seminar offers an advanced introduction to twentieth-century theories and histories of the Western novel and considerations of the genres, techniques, and sociocultural functions associated with the novel form as it has evolved in Europe and the Americas between the eighteenth century and the present. Students taking this seminar for senior credit will write a substantial essay (20-25 pages) with a basis in research.  This project should demonstrate an ability to assemble an appropriately specific reading list and engage thoughtfully with wider scholarship.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 381b / AFAM 426b / AMST 443b, Toni Morrison & the Matter of Black Life  Daphne Brooks

This seminar examines key texts in the Toni Morrison canon that resonate as literary masterworks, innovative in narrative and aesthetic structure as well as content, and also as historical studies, expansive and probing in their interrogations of past struggles and future possibilities for African American communities and the American body politic more broadly. We consider how her novels explore the ongoing disasters that were and are settler colonialism, the Middle Passage and the Atlantic slave trade, the systemic violence of Jim Crow segregation, the violence of patriarchy, the traumas of war and American empire, and the insidious presence of misogyny in the everyday lives of her characters. But, we also look closely at the richness of love and intimacy, the radical roots of self-fashioning, and the insurgent potentiality of mobility and aesthetic creativity coursing through the lives of her protagonists who cut a fugitive path out of slavery, ride the waves of Reconstruction, the Great Migration, Civil Rights era hope and organizing, and post-Soul searching. We read key scholarship in direct conversation with Morrison’s oeuvre, and we examine her robust and demanding critical essays on American literature, on contemporary events, and on the topic of writing.  HU  RP
HTBA

* ENGL 383b, What is Criticism For?  Joseph North

Literary and art criticism sometimes seem a bit hard to justify. Why spend so much time discussing books and artworks? What does it achieve? The same is sometimes said of literary and artistic education. What use is an English major? Do artsy types perform any useful social function? Many sophisticated thinkers have tried to answer these questions, and in this course we read some of the most interesting of them. We focus on thinkers who were writing between 1850 and 1950, and on two traditions of thought in particular: an English Liberal tradition (represented by figures such as John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf, and E.M. Forster), and a European Marxist one (represented by figures such as Karl Marx, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Antonio Gramsci). Their answers are often surprising. Judging by these thinkers, it seems that if you want to understand what criticism is good for, then you need to develop nothing less than a thoroughgoing account of the whole of human life–a big ask! By the end of the course, we should be in a better position to think seriously about the social function of literary criticism, art criticism, and aesthetic education.   HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 387b, Fantasy as Genre  Joseph North

A brief tour of fantasy as a novelistic genre, in company with a rigorous study of the concept of ‘genre’ itself. Authors may include J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison, William Morris, Hope Mirrlees, Robert E. Howard, George R.R. Martin, and Patricia A. McKillip. A warning: this is a course about fantasy, but it is also very much a course about genre, so please don’t sign up unless you are really committed to undertaking a rigorous literary-critical investigation of that concept. The problems of genre are many and vexing, and we grapple with them in a serious manner by asking questions such as: what are genres? What kinds of factors lead to new genres arising, and old ones transforming or dying away? When genres change, are these changes primarily due to factors internal to the genre itself, such as the presence of unexplored possibilities inherent in its existing formal structures, or are they primarily due to external factors such as economic, political, and/or cultural upheavals in the society at large? What are ‘genre systems,’ and what conditions lead to changes in them? And so on. My point: by all means come for the dragons, but please be prepared to stay for the genre. Welcoming professor, significant reading load.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 388a, English Poetry in the Long 19th Century  David Bromwich

Survey of a wide range of English lyric poetry from Wordsworth to Edward Thomas. Among the authors: Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Eliot. Discussions each week focus on a few poems, closely considered. Prerequisite: ENGL 125, or other previous experience in interpreting major poetry.  HU
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

* ENGL 389a / ER&M 346a, Critical Reading Methods in Indigenous Literatures  Tarren Andrews

This course focuses on developing critical readings skills grounded in the embodied and place-based reading practices encouraged by Indigenous literatures. Students are expected to think critically about their reading practices and environments to consciously cultivate place-based reading strategies across a variety of genres including: fiction and non-fiction, sci-fi, poetry, comic books, criticism, theory, film, and other new media. Students are required to keep a reading journal and regularly present critical reflections on their reading process, as well as engage in group annotations of primary and secondary reading materials.  This course is offered during the fall and spring term and may be taken both terms for credit. During the fall term the focus is on Indigenous literatures and new media from North America produced primarily in the 21st century. Critical readings include some historical context, both pre- and post-contact, as well as Indigenous literary theory. During the spring term, the focus becomes Indigenous literatures and games in a global context with emphasis on Indigenous land relations and ecocriticism across the 20th and 21st centuries.   WR, HU
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 395a / HUMS 380a / LITR 154a, The Bible as a Literature  Leslie Brisman

Study of the Bible as a literature—a collection of works exhibiting a variety of attitudes toward the conflicting claims of tradition and originality, historicity and literariness.  WR, HU  RP
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 404a or b, The Craft of Fiction  Staff

Fundamentals of the craft of fiction writing explored through readings from classic and contemporary short stories and novels. Focus on how each author has used the fundamentals of craft. Writing exercises emphasize elements such as voice, structure, point of view, character, and tone. Formerly ENGL 134.  HU
HTBA

* ENGL 406b, The Craft of Poetry  Maggie Millner

An introduction to reading and writing poetry. Classic examples from Shakespeare and Milton, the modernist poetics of Stein, Pound, Moore, and Stevens, and recent work in a variety of forms and traditions. Students develop a portfolio of poems and write an essay on the poetic craft of poets who have influenced their work. Formerly ENGL 135.  HU
HTBA

* ENGL 407a or b, Fiction Writing  Marie-Helene Bertino

An intensive study of the craft of fiction, designed for aspiring creative writers. Focus on the fundamentals of narrative technique and peer review. Formerly ENGL 245.
HTBA

* ENGL 408a, Poetry Writing  Cynthia Zarin

An intensive study of the craft of poetry, designed for aspiring creative writers. Focus on the fundamentals of poetic technique and peer review Formerly ENGL 246.  RP
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

* ENGL 412a, Literary Production: Poetry  Maggie Millner

This course provides students an in-depth look into contemporary literary production from all sides of the publishing process: that of the writer, the reader, and the editor. Under the instruction of current editors of the Yale Review, and housed at the Review’s offices, this course offers students invaluable hands-on experience at a state-of-the-art literary and cultural magazine, from which they emerge with a deep understanding of how poetry is composed, read, edited, and circulated today. Reading as a magazine editor teaches students about the contemporary literary landscape and leaves them with a deeper understanding of style, form, aesthetics, and genre—as well as the hands-on practical skills involved in 21st-century publishing. Students read submissions from our queue, as well as published work by some of the submitting writers; they then discuss which pieces may merit eventual publication and why. Students also follow drafts of pieces as they go through the process of acceptance, editing, promotion, and publication. Alongside the editorial process, students compose and revise their own original poems, becoming sharper poets by learning to read—and think—as discerning editors.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 413a or b, Literary Production: Prose  Staff

This course provides students with an in-depth look into contemporary literary production from all sides of the publishing process: writing, reading, and editing. Taught by current editors of The Yale Review, and housed at the Review’s offices, this course offers students invaluable hands-on experience at a state-of-the-art literary and cultural magazine. They’ll emerge from it equipped with a new set of skills, making them sharper readers, bolder creative writers, and better editors. Reading as an editor offers students a unique perspective on today’s literary landscape, deepens their understanding of style, form, and genre—and gives them practical skills involved in 21st-century publishing. Students are introduced to the concept of assigning pieces and thinking about what kind of magazine stories can add value to an ever-more fast-paced and reactive media landscape. They read fiction and nonfiction submissions from our queue and discuss which pieces might be worth publishing, and why. And they follow and work on drafts of pieces as they go through the process of editing, promotion, and publication. Along the way, they may also write and revise a creative piece of their own, becoming better writers by learning to read and think as editors.
HTBA

* ENGL 418a / EVST 224a, Writing About The Environment  Alan Burdick

Exploration of ways in which the environment and the natural world can be channeled for literary expression. Reading and discussion of essays, reportage, and book-length works, by scientists and non-scientists alike. Students learn how to create narrative tension while also conveying complex—sometimes highly technical—information; the role of the first person in this type of writing; and where the human environment ends and the non-human one begins. Formerly ENGL 241. Admission by permission of the instructor only. Students interested in the course should email the instructor at alan.burdick@gmail.com with the following information: 1.) A few paragraphs describing your interest in taking the class. 2.) A non-academic writing sample that best represents you.  WR
T 9:25am-11:15am

* ENGL 419a / HSAR 460a / HUMS 185a, Writing about Contemporary Figurative Art  Margaret Spillane

A workshop on journalistic strategies for looking at and writing about contemporary paintings of the human figure. Practitioners and theorists of figurative painting; controversies, partisans, and opponents. Includes field trips to museums and galleries in New York City. Formerly ENGL 247.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 421a or b / ARCH 386a or b, Styles of Academic and Professional Prose  Staff

A seminar and workshop in the conventions of good writing in a specific field. Each section focuses on one academic or professional kind of writing and explores its distinctive features through a variety of written and oral assignments, in which students both analyze and practice writing in the field. Section topics, which change yearly, are listed at the beginning of each term on the English departmental website. This course may be repeated for credit in a section that treats a different genre or style of writing; may not be repeated for credit toward the major. Formerly ENGL 121. Prerequisite: ENGL 114, 115, 120, or another writing-intensive course at Yale.  WR
HTBA

* ENGL 423b / FILM 397b / THST 228b, Writing about the Performing Arts  Margaret Spillane

Introduction to journalistic reporting on performances as current events, with attention to writing in newspapers, magazines, and the blogosphere. The idea of the audience explored in relation to both a live act or screening and a piece of writing about such an event. Students attend screenings and live professional performances of plays, music concerts, and dance events. Formerly ENGL 244.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 425a or b, Writing the Television Drama  Staff

Crafting the television drama with a strong emphasis on creating and developing an original concept from premise to pilot; with consideration that the finest television dramas being created today aspire to literary quality. Students read original scripts of current and recent critically acclaimed series and create a series document which will include formal story and world descriptions, orchestrated character biographies, a detailed pilot outline, and two or more acts of an original series pilot. Formerly ENGL 248.
HTBA

* ENGL 428b, Young Adult Writing  Jacob Halpern

A course on the craft of fiction writing for young adult readers. At the start of the semester, we read widely in the genre to identify the principles of craft at the sentence—and narrative—level, with the aim of creating a style that is original and a story narrative that is powerful. In the second half of the semester, students read and critique one another’s fiction. Open to writers of all levels and abilities. Formerly ENGL 259.
HTBA

* ENGL 429b, Writing Humor  Ryan Wepler

Skills essential to humor writing, with an emphasis on texture, tone, character, and narrative. Students read the work of classmates and pieces by professional humor writers with the goal of generating an ever-expanding set of techniques for both reading humor and writing humorously. Formerly ENGL 255. Recommended preparation: ENGL 120.  WR
HTBA

* ENGL 434a / THST 215a, Writing Dance  Brian Seibert

The esteemed choreographer Merce Cunningham once compared writing about dance to trying to nail Jello-O to the wall. This seminar and workshop takes on the challenge. Taught by a dance critic for the New York Times, the course uses a close reading of exemplary dance writing to introduce approaches that students then try themselves, in response to filmed dance and live performances in New York City, in the widest possible variety of genres. No previous knowledge of dance is required.  WR, HU
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

* ENGL 447a, Shakespeare and the Craft of Writing Poetry  Danielle Chapman

Shakespeare’s Craft brings students into conversation with Shakespeare's plays and his sonnets; and teaches students how to draw from his many modes when writing their own poems—without attempting to sound "Shakespearean." Over the course of the semester, we read three plays and a selection of the sonnets, pairing close readings with contemporary poems that use similar techniques. We also watch performances and learn how actors and directors find personal ways into Shakespeare's protean language and meanings. Weekly assignments include both critical responses and creative assignments, focusing on specific craft elements, such as: "The Outlandish List: How to Keep Anaphora Interesting," "Verbs: How to Hurtle a Poem Forward," "Concrete Nouns and Death-defying Descriptions," "The Poet as Culture Vulture: Collecting Contemporary Details," "Exciting Enjambments and Measured Meter" and "Finis: How to Make a Poem End." This hybrid course is an exciting blend of creative and critical writing. Students decide before midterm whether they want to take the course as a Renaissance Literature or Creative Writing Credit, and this determines whether their final project is a creative portfolio or critical paper.   
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 450b, Daily Themes  Andrew Ehrgood

Writing of prose at the intermediate level. Daily assignments of c. 300 words, a weekly lecture, and a weekly tutorial. Application open to all undergraduates. Counts as a nonfiction course in the writing concentration.  WR
HTBA

* ENGL 453a / THST 320a, Playwriting  Donald Margulies

A seminar and workshop on reading for craft and writing for the stage. In addition to weekly prompts and exercises, readings include modern American and British plays by Pinter, Mamet, Churchill, Kushner, Nottage, Williams, Hansberry, Hwang, Vogel, and Wilder. Emphasis on play structure, character, and conflict.  RP
T 1:30pm-4:30pm

* ENGL 455b, Writing about Oneself  Anne Fadiman

A seminar/workshop/lecture in first-person writing. Students explore a series of themes (e.g., family, love, loss, identity) both by writing about their own lives and by reading American and British memoirs, autobiographies, personal essays, and letters. An older work, often from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, is paired each week with a more recent one on the same theme.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 456b / HUMS 427b / JDST 316b / LITR 348b, The Practice of Literary Translation  Peter Cole

This course combines a seminar on the history and theory of translation (Tuesdays) with a hands-on workshop (Thursdays). The readings lead us through a series of case studies comparing, on the one hand, multiple translations of given literary works and, on the other, classic statements about translation—by translators themselves and prominent theorists. We consider both poetry and prose from the Bible, selections from Chinese, Greek, and Latin verse, classical Arabic and Persian literature, prose by Cervantes, Borges, and others, and modern European poetry (including Pushkin, Baudelaire, and Rilke). Students are expected to prepare short class presentations, participate in a weekly workshop, try their hand at a series of translation exercises, and undertake an intensive, semester-long translation project. Proficiency in a foreign language is required.  HU
TTh 2:30pm-3:45pm

* ENGL 461a, The Art and Craft of Television Drama  Derek Green

This is an advanced seminar on the craft of dramatic television writing. Each week we’ll conduct an intensive review of one or two elements of craft, using scripts from the contemporary era of prestige drama. We’ll read full and partial scripts to demonstrate the element of craft being studied, and employ weekly writing exercises (both in-class and by assignment) to hone our skills on the particular elements under consideration.  Students learn how to develop character backstories, series bibles, story areas, and outlines. The final assignment for the class is the completion of a working draft of a full-length script for an original series pilot.  ENGL 425 and at least one other intro-level creative writing course are highly recommended. Permission of instructor or an application is required for enrollment.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

* ENGL 465a, Advanced Fiction Writing  Staff

An advanced workshop in the craft of writing fiction. May be repeated for credit with a different instructor.
HTBA

* ENGL 467a / PLSC 253a, Journalism  Steven Brill

Examination of the practices, methods, and impact of journalism, with focus on reporting and writing; consideration of how others have done it, what works, and what doesn’t. Students learn how to improve story drafts, follow best practices in journalism, improve methods for obtaining, skeptically evaluating, and assessing information, as well as writing a story for others to read. The core course for Yale Journalism Scholars. No prerequisites.  WR
M 9am-10:50am

* ENGL 469a, Advanced Nonfiction Writing  Anne Fadiman

A seminar and workshop with the theme "At Home in America." Students consider the varied ways in which modern American literary journalists write about people and places, and address the theme themselves in both reportorial and first-person work. Application required in advance; see the English website for deadline and instructions.  WR, HU
Th 2:30pm-5:30pm

* ENGL 474a, The Genre of the Sentence  Verlyn Klinkenborg

A workshop that explores the sentence as the basic unit of writing and the smallest unit of perception. The importance of the sentence itself versus that of form or genre. Writing as an act of discovery. Includes weekly writing assignments. Not open to first-years.  HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 477a / THST 321a, Production Seminar: Playwriting  Deborah Margolin

A seminar and workshop in playwriting with an emphasis on exploring language and image as a vehicle for “theatricality.” Together we will use assigned readings, our own creative work, and group discussions to interrogate concepts such as “liveness,” what is “dramatic” versus “undramatic,” representation, and the uses and abuses of discomfort.
MW 3:30pm-5:20pm

* ENGL 484a, Writing Across Literary Genres  Cynthia Zarin

Students in this writing workshop explore three out of four literary genres over the semester: creative nonfiction (including personal essays and reporting), poetry, playwriting, and fiction. The first half of the semester is devoted to experimentation in three different genres; the second half is spent developing an experimental piece into a longer final project: a one act play, a long poem or set of poems, a short story, or a longer essay. We discuss the work of writers—including Shakespeare, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Walcott, Zadie Smith, Maggie Nelson, and Leanne Shapton—who addressed an idea from two or more perspectives.  HU
W 9:25am-11:15am

* ENGL 487a or b, Tutorial in Writing  Staff

A writing tutorial in fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, or nonfiction for students who have already taken writing courses at the intermediate and advanced levels. Conducted with a faculty member after approval by the director of undergraduate studies. Proposals must be submitted to the DUS in the previous term; deadlines and instructions are posted at english.yale.edu/undergraduate/applications-and-deadlines. Prerequisites: two courses in writing.
HTBA

* ENGL 488a or b, Special Projects for Juniors or Seniors  Staff

Special projects set up by the student in an area of particular interest with the help of a faculty adviser and the director of undergraduate studies, intended to enable the student to cover material not otherwise offered by the department. The course may be used for research or for directed reading, but in either case a term paper or its equivalent is normally required. The student meets regularly with the faculty adviser. Proposals must be signed by the faculty adviser and submitted to the DUS in the previous term; deadlines and instructions are posted at english.yale.edu/undergraduate/applications-and-deadlines.
HTBA

* ENGL 489a or b, The Creative Writing Concentration Senior Project  Cynthia Zarin

A term-long project in writing, under tutorial supervision, aimed at producing a single longer work (or a collection of related shorter works). The writing concentration accepts students with demonstrated commitment to creative writing at the end of the junior year or, occasionally, in the first term of senior year. Proposals for the writing concentration should be submitted during the designated sign-up period in the term before enrollment is intended. The project is due by the end of the last week of classes (fall term), or the end of the next-to-last week of classes (spring term). Proposal instructions and deadlines are posted at english.yale.edu/undergraduate/applications-and-deadlines.
HTBA

* ENGL 490a or b, The Senior Essay I  Jill Campbell

Students wishing to undertake an independent senior essay in English must submit a proposal to the DUS in the previous term; deadlines and instructions are posted at english.yale.edu/undergraduate/applications-and-deadlines. For one-term senior essays, the essay itself is due in the office of the director of undergraduate studies according to the following schedule: (1) end of the fourth week of classes: five to ten pages of writing and/or an annotated bibliography; (2) end of the ninth week of classes: a rough draft of the complete essay; (3) end of the last week of classes (fall term) or end of the next-to-last week of classes (spring term): the completed essay. Consult the director of undergraduate studies regarding the schedule for submission of the yearlong senior essay.
HTBA

* ENGL 491b, The Senior Essay II  Jill Campbell

Second term of the optional yearlong senior essay. Students may begin the yearlong essay in the spring term of the junior year, allowing for significant summer research, with permission of the instructor. Students must submit a proposal to the DUS in the previous term; deadlines and instructions are posted at english.yale.edu/undergraduate/applications-and-deadlines. After ENGL 490.
HTBA

* ENGL 499a, The Iseman Seminar in Poetry  Richard Deming and Louise Gluck

The Iseman Poetry Seminar provides the opportunity for students to work closely on the craft of writing original poetry with the Iseman Professor of Poetry. Discussions, feedback, assigned readings, and writing assignments are designed to deepen the student’s understanding of the craft of writing and to hone their abilities in light of students’ individual strengths and needs. Discussion-oriented writing workshops at the opening of the term transition to one-on-one tutorials for the rest of the semester, culminating in a final reconvening of the group at the end of the semester. The main component of the course will be weekly writing assignments, which will receive written and oral feedback from the instructor.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm