* ENGL 0117a, Writing About Nature  Jill Campbell

This course considers writing as a means of responding to and engaging with nature and as a medium for sharing and reflecting on others’ experiences of nature through the act of reading. The course defines writing broadly, from personal journals, including sketching, to published memoirs, poetry, essays, and novels. It also defines nature broadly–from remote wildernesses to patches of green and urban birds and animals in cities such as New Haven. It combines a wide-ranging study of works of nature writing by diverse authors in multiple genres with activities meant to encourage class-members to slow down and practice close attention and observation. Writing assignments include regular journal entries, creative and critical responses to our readings, revisions of journal entries and essays, and a final project. Some class meetings are outdoors, and one longer field-trip may be scheduled. Enrollment limited to first-year students.  HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 0133a / LING 0330a, 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.  HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 0440b / ART 0740b, Writer as Designer, Designer as Writer  Rachel Kauder Nalebuff and Andrew Walsh-Lister

This seminar invites us to explore the boundaries between written and visual expression. Students with a background or interest in visual art learn to harness their voices as writers, and writers learn tools for how words take on new meaning through visual compositions. The course investigates the relationship between form and content through the creation of three projects—an interview, a manual, and an essay—each of which is written, designed, and physically produced using a variety of tools at our disposal. Through readings, in-class discussion and exercises, as well as workshops, we consider the ways language and ideas can be communicated to others through different media, and how that media in itself also carries meaning. The aim of the course is to playfully blur the categories of “writer” and “designer” so that we can be both at once: messengers. Previously ENGL 041. Enrollment limited to first-year students. This course does not count toward the Creative Writing Concentration for English majors.  HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 0767a / HIST 0267a, Reading Victorians  Stuart Semmel

The seminar’s heart is two big Victorian novels: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Many cultural observers feel that recent technological and pedagogical developments have created a crisis in humanities education. We also consider how these novels raise questions about Victorian political, social, and cultural history. We study nineteenth-century reading practices. Students do some research using contemporary newspapers and journals. We also take a step back to consider how 21st-century reading practices might distance us from 19th-century cultural products.  Enrollment limited to first-year students.  HU
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 0776a / CLCV 0595a / HIST 0289, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire  Andrew Johnston

This course, a discussion-oriented first-year seminar, explores through close readings the 18th-century British historian Edward Gibbon's magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with two main sets of questions in mind: Firstly, what is Gibbon's picture of the world of the Roman Empire and the processes of historical change, how do account for it, and how accurate is it?  And secondly, what is interesting and important about Gibbon's methodology, language, and rhetoric, how do we understand these elements of his work in his own intellectual and historical context, and what is the influence of his work upon the course of historical writing? Enrollment limited to first-year students. No knowledge of Roman history is required.    WR, HU
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 0813a / AMST 0013a / BLST 0213a, Counternarratives: Black Historical Fictions  Elleza Kelley

While historical records have long been the source from which we draw our picture of the past, it is with literature and art that we attempt to speculatively work out that which falls between the cracks of conventional archival documentation, that which cannot be contained by historical record—emotion, gesture, the sensory, the sonic, the inner life, the afterlife, the neglected and erased. This course examines how contemporary black writers have imagined and attempted to represent black life from the late 17th to the early 20th centuries, asking what fiction can tell us about history. Reading these works as alternative archives, or “counternarratives,” which index the excess and fugitive material of black histories in the Americas, we probe the uses, limits, and revelations of historical fictions, from the experimental and realist novel, to works of poetry and drama. Drawing on the work of various interdisciplinary scholars, we use these historical fictions to explore and enter into urgent and ongoing conversations around black life & death, African-American history & memory, black aesthetics, and the problem of “The Archive.” Enrollment limited to first-year students.  HU
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 0831a / FILM 0100a / HUMS 0125a, Love and Death in American Film  Moeko Fujii

How do we detect when love begins—or when it ends? This course explores film noir—perhaps the most “American” of film genres—where love is rarely safe and often fatal. Rather than celebrating the formation of the American couple, noir constructs triangles that unsettle the couple form. These complications challenge the ideal of romantic love and open the door to difference and uncertainty—an ambiguity that carries its own kind of erotic charge. Like the detectives who move through these dark worlds, we follow shifting figures such as the stranger, the femme fatale, the double, and the alien. We look at how race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect with drive and desire—who or what draws us toward finding love—and how these forces help shape ideas of both “the American” and American film itself. We study key works from classic Hollywood film alongside neo-noirs from New Hollywood and contemporary cinema that inherit and transform noir’s obsessions. Students develop skills in close film analysis and acquire a theoretical toolkit for thinking critically about cinema and desire. Enrollment limited to first-year students.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm, M 7pm-10pm

* ENGL 1014a 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. Formerly ENGL 114.  WR
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* ENGL 1015a 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
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* ENGL 1020a or b, Reading and Writing the Modern Essay  Staff

Close reading and discussion of exemplary modern essays prepares students to craft their own powerful creative nonfiction and also read like writers--deeply and carefully, with attention to a text's formal features, including its structure, narrator, rhetorical moves, and poetic effects. Among essayists commonly included are James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Roxane Gay, David Foster Wallace, Jia Tolentino, David Sedaris, Eula Biss, and Rachel Cusk. Assignments challenge students to hone their prose style and write in various modes, such as personal experience, portraits of people or places, cultural critique, and satire.  WR
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* ENGL 1021b, Styles of Professional Prose  Staff

A seminar and workshop in the conventions of good writing in a specific field. Each section focuses on one 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 department 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. ENGL 121 and ENGL 421 may not be taken for credit on the same topic. Prerequisite: ENGL 1014, 115, 120, or another writing-intensive course at Yale.  WR
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* ENGL 1023a 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
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* ENGL 1025a 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.  WR, HU
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* ENGL 1026a 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.  WR, HU
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* ENGL 1027a 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
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* ENGL 1028a 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, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, J. M. Coetzee, Brian Friel, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White, among others.  WR, HU
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* ENGL 1029a or b / CPLT 1680a or b / HUMS 1270a or b / TDPS 1005a 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. Formerly ENGL 129.  WR, HU
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* ENGL 1030a or b / CPLT 1690a or b / HUMS 1320a 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. Formerly ENGL 130.  WR, HU
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* ENGL 2011a / TDPS 3011a, Acting Shakespeare  James Bundy

Acting Shakespeare is a practical studio course based in close reading, rehearsal, and limited performance, as tools for exploring the central questions of his plays—in both form and content—from the actor’s perspective. The course focuses on the text as a source of given circumstances, actions, and a range of interpretations, with particular attention to techniques, in and out of rehearsal, that position actors to enliven their imaginations and take unique responsibility for elements of the story being told. We examine the use of language and typography as an imperfect and malleable literary road map including, but not limited to, argument, rhythm, tempo, and musicality, all of which actors may access and combine with their own craft to begin to unleash the works’ theatrical potential. Progressing from monologues and soliloquys, to scenes, and solo performance, the course also, to a limited degree, allows students to consider and deploy elements of stagecraft including properties, costumes, and music, especially in one short performance project at the end of the semester.  HU  RP
F 1:30pm-5:30pm

* ENGL 2013a or b, Writing and Editing for Magazines  Staff

A workshop and practicum in contemporary magazine writing and editing, taught by current editors of The Yale Review and housed at the Review’s offices. Students gain hands-on editorial experience at one of America's oldest literary and cultural magazines while developing their skills as readers, writers, and editors. The course treats writing and editing as deeply intertwined practices: students become better writers by learning to read as editors, and better editors by engaging with prose of their own. They will read fiction and nonfiction submissions from the Review's queue, discuss what makes a piece succeed or fail, and follow accepted work through the stages of editing, promotion, and publication. Students also explore what kinds of magazine writing can add lasting value to an increasingly fast-paced media landscape. Along the way, they may develop original pieces or generate editorial ideas and features. They emerge from the course as sharper readers, more confident writers, and more capable editors, with practical skills in 21st-century literary publishing. Formerly ENGL 413.
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ENGL 2100a / CPLT 1001a / DEVN 1150a / EDST 1116a / HUMS 1150a, Purposes of College Education  Staff

College is a crucial institution in which our society works through its expectations for young people. This course explores the purposes of college education through the first great book on the philosophy of education, Plato’s Republic. We read The Republic in conversation with other thinkers including Aristotle, Confucius, John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. For the 325th anniversary of Yale’s founding, we also explore the changing conception of college education at Yale over the centuries and read some of the college’s and the university’s key founding documents. Themes include the development of personal character, participation in a community, preparation for citizenship, and conversation with others on intellectual matters. We also explore some of the social and economic functions of college education. This course is offered as the DeVane lectures, open to the public  HU  0 Course cr
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* ENGL 2124a / AMST 2004a / CPLT 2410a / TDPS 2400a, Glamour  Hal Brooks

Glamour: you know it when you see it, but what is it? In this class, we try to figure that out by reading and watching various works that theorize and/or obsess over what glamour is and does. More questions we’ll consider include: what’s the relationship between glamour and performance, especially theatrical performance? What kind(s) of desire does glamour produce? Does glamour have an ethics, a politics? And/or is it the refusal of those things? What’s the role of the individual spectator, reader, writer, or performer in making glamour happen?  Actually, how does glamour happen? What would it take to make this class glamorous? Should we try? Readings will include work by Thorsten Veblen, Roland Barthes, Henrik Ibsen, Judith Brown, Edward Said, Lloyd Suh, Nella Larsen, and Zelda Fitzgerald, among others. We also spend several weeks studying the work of contemporary American playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Assignments include analytical exercises, in-class presentations, a “glamour memoir,” and a final project which may be either “creative” or analytical in its emphasis.   HU
Th 1pm-4pm

* ENGL 2143a / CPLT 4830a / HSHM 4760a / HUMS 3435a / PHIL 3361a, Thought Experiments: Connecting Literature, Philosophy and the Natural Sciences  Paul Grimstad

The course looks closely at the intersection of literature, philosophy and natural science through the lens of the thought experiment (suppositional reasoning about What If? scenarios). Do thought experiments yield new knowledge about the world? What role does narrative or scene setting play in thought experiments? Can works of literary fiction or films function as thought experiments?  Readings take up topics such as personal identity, artificial intelligence, meaning and intentionality, free will, time travel, the riddle of induction, “trolley problems” in ethics and the hard problem of consciousness. Authors may include Mary Shelley, Plato, Albert Einstein, Iris Murdoch, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lucretius, Franz Kafka, H.G. Wells, Nelson Goodman, Rene Descartes, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Derek Parfit, Rivka Galchen, Alan Turing, Daniel Dennett, Octavia Butler, as well as films (Oppenheimer) and television shows (Black Mirror).  Students should have taken at least one course involving close analysis of works of literature or philosophy.   WR, HU
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 2151a / FILM 2540a, Skin and Surface: Fashion and Culture  Moeko Fujii

What do we mean by fashion? This course explores the intimate relationship between film, fashion, and various modes of self-fashioning and unfashioning. By examining the sartorial—what, or whom, we wear—in literature and film, we consider the ramifications of style in discourses on race and gender. We study films, novels, and photography that focus on garments in ways that highlight the complex relationship among material histories, social fabrics, and notions of the corporeal and the human. Along the way, we unsettle the easy yet stubborn distinction between surface and interiority. From Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to Wendell B. Harris’s Chameleon Street, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary of department stores to Lee Bul’s cyborg sculptures, this course asks: how does fashion constitute—or unravel—our notions of the self and of the world as “surface” activity?  HU
W 4pm-5:55pm

* ENGL 2411a / FILM 3990a, The Craft of Graphic Narrative  Alison Bechdel

This class explores the ways that text and sequential images work together to tell stories. This class will be a roughly equal mix of theory and practice, of reading comics with a critical eye and making your own comics. We’ll study aspects of craft like voice, structure, point of view, description, and character development, as well as comics-specific elements such as page layout, panel transitions, and the abstract-to-realistic drawing style continuum. This is a beginner-level class. You don't need to be an experienced cartoonist, but an affinity for drawing will serve you well.  RP
TTh 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 2415b / CPLT 3048b / HUMS 1996b / JDST 3816b, 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. Previously ENGL 456.  HU
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 2421a, 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 406.  HU
W 4pm-5:55pm

* ENGL 2441a 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 or ENGL 404.  HU
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* ENGL 2455a / TDPS 2301a, 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 4pm-5:55pm

* ENGL 2505a / FREN 3050a, Medieval Biography  Ardis Butterfield

The sources, aims, and diversity of biographical forms in medieval literature. Analysis of the medieval world through the study of autobiography, hagiography, political martyrology, and literary biography; the challenges of viewing a historical period primarily through a single life. Includes a research trip to New York City. Reading will include French and Latin texts, but all will be available in translation.  HU
MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

* ENGL 2772a / HUMS 4372a, George Eliot's Middlemarch  Ruth Yeazell

An intensive study of George Eliot’s  Middlemarch (1871-72)—a work she called a “home epic” and Virginia Woolf  declared “one of the few English novels for grown-up people.”   Our close reading of Middlemarch itself is framed by a brief selection from George Eliot’s essays and short fiction, as well as by a more extended study of some critical responses, both Victorian and modern.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 2802a / CPLT 2004a / HUMS 2620a, Modernism and Domesticity  Katie Trumpener

This course explores turn-of-the-century European attempts to craft modernist lives: how new ideas of women’s roles, childhood, the family, the domestic shaped modernist literature and art—even as modernist designers tried to change people’s experience of daily surroundings. Reform drama (Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov), experimental novels and memoirs (Joyce, Woolf, Andrei Bely, Proust, Walter Benjamin) stage the house as bourgeois comfort zone and psychic trap, while modernist architects and designers envisioned aestheticized or communal housing, experimental furniture design, reform fashion changing the parameters of daily experience. Children too were to be raised as modernists, sleeping in constructivist cradles, imbibing avant-garde picture books. The course examines modernist literature, New Woman novels and children’s books (Robert Louis Stevenson, A.A. Milne, Mary Poppins) in relationship to modernist design, fashion, stage sets, paintings, film, exemplary artists’ houses as designs for living---and their present-day posterity (Karl Ove Knausgård; “shelter magazines”, IKEA).   WR, HU
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 2822b / BLST 3222b, Coming of Age in Black Literature  Sarah Mahurin

Phillip Atiba Goff’s 2014 study “The Essence of Innocence” confirmed that Black children are widely perceived as older than they actually are, and are presumed to be less innocent than their white classmates–often with devastating consequences. This course aims to challenge the “systematic adultification” so prevalent in American (mis)understandings of Black youth by centering narratives of Black childhood across literary genres. How do these texts disrupt conventional approaches to the bildungsroman, and what can these writers teach us about coming of age in America? Previously ENGL 360.  HU
W 9:25am-11:20am

* ENGL 2826a / AMST 2246a / PLSC 2846a, The Media and Democracy  Joanne Lipman

In an era of "fake news," when the media is under attack, misinformation is at epidemic levels, 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 span from 19th century Yellow Journalism to the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, to the rise of AI journalism and social media “news influencers.”  SO
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 2846a / ER&M 3046a, 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 4pm-5:15pm

* ENGL 3100a or b, Special Projects for Juniors or Seniors  Feisal Mohamed

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 https://english.yale.edu/undergraduate/courses/independent-study-courses. Formerly ENGL 488.
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* ENGL 3103b, 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. 18/19 Century with permission of instructor.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 3111a, Literary Skills Intensive  Joseph North

Most literature courses put the spotlight on specific works of literature. This course instead turns the spotlight on the capabilities we can learn by reading literature. If you love the books on your literature courses, but would like a bit more clarity about what exactly you are meant to be learning from those books, then this is the course for you. In this course we tour and practice some of the key capabilities literary education seeks to cultivate. These include (among many others!) the ability to imagine the minds and lives of other people; the ability to feel (i.e. not just think) deeply and precisely; the ability to reflect sophisticatedly on questions of value as distinct from questions of fact; the ability to use your practical life experience to help you hear the full implications of someone’s tone; the ability to listen so deeply to someone’s language that you hear almost everything they are trying to tell you, and maybe even a bit more. We enumerate these capabilities, find articulate ways to discuss them, and – most of all – we train them repeatedly via practical classroom exercises. On the way, we will have a lot of thoughtful fun.  WR, HU
TTh 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 3195a / CPLT 1540a / HUMS 3800a / JDST 3881a, 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 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 3400a or b, Tutorial in Writing  Feisal Mohamed

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 https://english.yale.edu/undergraduate/courses/independent-study-courses. Formerly ENGL 487. Prerequisites: two courses in writing.
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* ENGL 3412b, Writing About Faith  Danielle Chapman

Writing about Faith takes on the challenge of articulating spiritual reality, and the quest toward it, at a time when hunger for meaning at its height, yet shared religious language is often fraught or nonexistent. Students will discover how contemporary writers in various genres— nonfiction, poetry, and fiction— dramatize encounters with God and God’s absence, and students will write their own work based on prompts from the reading. We will explore three major phases of the spiritual quest, “Attentiveness,” “Devotion/Vocation,” and “Revelation/Redemption.” In both our reading and writing, we will search for compelling, authentic expressions of ideas and experiences that are often considered “untranslatable.” We will read primarily American writers, with examples from different religions and cultures, alongside atheist and agnostic authors interested in ultimate meanings. Each week, readings will be paired with writing prompts, and at the end of each of the three thematic units, students will submit a piece of writing in one of the three genres we explore. At the end of the course, students will submit a culminating work in the genre of their choice.
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* ENGL 3421b, 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 408.  RP
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* ENGL 3431a / TDPS 3400a, 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 3432a / TDPS 3402a, 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 4pm-5:55pm

* ENGL 3433b, Narrative Podcasts  Aaron Tracy

A seminar on the craft of narrative podcast creation. Each week we conduct an intensive review of one form or genre of podcast writing, using scripts and recordings of prestige audio dramas and narrative non-fiction series. We read and listen to serialized and procedural episodic shows to demonstrate the elements being studied and employ weekly writing exercises (both in class and by assignment) to hone our skills. Students learn how to craft character and dialogue, how to develop structure and plot, themes and motifs, plus series bibles, story areas, outlines, and scripts. Formerly ENGL 436.
W 4pm-5:55pm

* ENGL 3434a 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.
HTBA

* ENGL 3435a, American Horror Stories  Brian Price

From its earliest days, the horror genre, although often denigrated, has remained a persistent presence in our culture. This course investigates the reasons for this hold on the imagination and the social function it has provided, helping navigate questions of identity, gender, sexuality, violence, grief, loss, and otherness. Texts include films, short fiction, and critical essays. An exciting blend of creative and critical writing, this course tracks the genre's evolution and explores various subgenres and thematic points of interest through both scholarly engagement and weekly creative writing responses that culminate in a longer creative project that explores the ideas arising from the semester’s discussions.   HU
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 3436a / HUMS 3026a / TDPS 3026a, Archives Into Drama  Toni Dorfman

A theoretical and practical exploration of the process of creating drama out of the lives of real people.What event(s) in a person’s s life – personal and/or political – might inspire a play?  What discovery, crisis, epiphany, or other turning point might grab you enough to bring characters to life and write a script? Using Yale's archives of letters, memoirs, diaries, interviews, ship's logs, articles of clothing, and photographs, students write two monologues, two scenes, and, as a final project, a play to be presented at the end of the semester as a rehearsed reading.  Discussion topics include story, plot, suspense, the world of the play, characterization, and secrets.  The third class session meets in the Beinecke Library to discuss search methods in the archives and privacy concerns with archived materials. One course in acting, directing, or playwriting; and one reading course in drama (plays and performances)  HU  RP
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 3441a, Fiction Writing  Staff

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 407.
HTBA

* ENGL 3442b, 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 428.
HTBA

* ENGL 3443b, Writing Fiction from the Archives  R Clifton Spargo

Working with university curators and librarians, students use Yale’s collections to generate material for their short stories. In weekly writing exercises, we consider how craft elements—setting, dialogue, descriptive detail, and characterization—can become vehicles for integrating this research into fiction. Close readings of contemporary research-based fiction supplement our conversations. We look at examples of historical fiction (Zadie Smith), new journalism (Tom Wolfe), autobiographical fiction (Isabel Allende), and speculative fiction (Colson Whitehead), alongside the sources their authors drew from. While curiosity is the only prerequisite for this course, students are encouraged to come to class with a sense of the research subject they would like to focus on throughout the semester. Formerly 438.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 3444b, Speculative Fiction Workshop  Marie-Helene Bertino

Perhaps no form of fiction responds to the surreality of our contemporary society more directly than speculative fiction. Whether it is by imagining a structure whose rooms are inhabited by a couple’s most intimate vulnerabilities (Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House), a society where men bear children (Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”), or one in which the memory of household items is policed by a shadowy entity (Yoko Ogawa’s Memory Police), speculative fiction tells the truth under uncanny circumstances. In this writing intensive course, we reimagine and employ fiction’s tools through a speculative lens to render a realistic experience. What is the difference between building an entirely fabricated world and placing one discreet supernatural element into an otherwise realistic story? How can we manipulate time on the page to most effectively express life’s most extraordinary experiences? Our focus is on peer review of student stories produced in tandem with craft lessons that address the concerns of the uncanny and speculative-based writing prompts. With space saved for character building, intentional information dispersal, and sound. We borrow tools from other genres (film, painting, poetry) to help us break the laws of physics in fiction and build a more inclusive space and lexicon for the study of speculative worlds. Formerly ENGL 439.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 3450b, Daily Themes  Kim Shirkhani

Writing of prose at the intermediate level. Daily assignments of c. 300 words, a weekly lecture, and a weekly tutorial. Formerly ENGL 450. Application open to all undergraduates. Counts as a nonfiction course in the writing concentration.  WR
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* ENGL 3452b, Creative Nonfiction Writing: Voice and Structure  Richard Deming

A creative writing workshop focusing on the craft of nonfiction writing as an art. Emphasis on structure and the development of a clear, distinctive voice. Study of texts that may suggest modes, voices, forms, and styles for nonfiction pieces. Frequent writing projects and revisions.  WR  RP
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 3453b / FILM 3970b / TDPS 2302b, 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 and ENGL 423.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 3454a / HSAR 4460a / HUMS 1850a, 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.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 3459b, 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 and ENGL 429. Recommended preparation: ENGL 120.  WR
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 3461a or b, Nonfiction Writing  Staff

A seminar and workshop in the craft of nonfiction writing as pertains to a given subcategory or genre. Each section focuses on a different form of nonfiction writing and explores its distinctive features through a variety of written and oral assignments. Students read key texts as models and analyze their compositional strategies. They then practice the fundamentals of nonfiction in writing and revising their own essays. Section topics, which change yearly, are listed at the beginning of each term on the English department website. This course may be repeated for credit in a section that treats a different genre or style of writing; ENGL 121 and ENGL 3461 may not be taken for credit on the same topic. Formerly ENGL 421.  WR, HU
HTBA

* ENGL 3467b / EVST 3224b, Writing About The Environment  Staff

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. Previously ENGL 418.. 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-11:20am

* ENGL 3474b / COSM 3000b / HIST 2705b / HUMS 1740b, Writing from the Archive: Imagining the Real  Adina Hoffman

Where do the dry, who-what-which details set down on a census form meet the far messier and richer reality of the people whose names are scrawled there? And how might a writer bring that meeting about? What can a shoebox of doodle-filled letters tell us about the ways that friendship, art, war, sex, and politics struck a couple of New York novelists, c. 1941? How do we respond as writers and as a culture when faced with the lack of such inky particulars? Blending seminar and workshop, this class is meant for students who want to write literary non-fiction based on archival materials. In an intensive, hands-on fashion, we’ll dig into documents of all sorts as we read essays and excerpts from belletristic works that wrestle with the sometimes slippery fact of the archive. Throughout, we’ll ask how best to bring vital prose into being. Weekly writing experiments that draw from various Yale collections and beyond will encourage students to see and respond to archival discoveries freshly and for themselves. A semester-long writing project will take shape as an extension of that seeing and responding. While no previous archival experience is required, this class calls for a serious commitment to the written word. By permission of instructor. Limit 12.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 3501b / LING 1500b, Old English  Emily Thornbury

An introduction to the language, literature, and culture of earliest England. A selection of both major and less-studied works of prose and verse, including charms, saints' lives, meditations on loss, a dream vision, and heroic verse, which are read in the original Old English. No prior knowledge of Old English is expected.  WR, HU
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 3504b, Knights, Travelers, and Mystics  Marcel Elias

This course explores the literary worlds and real-life worldviews of medieval knights, travelers, and mystics. We first delve into chivalric romance, narrative poetry populated by proud knights and ingenious princesses, fierce giants and cannibal kings, and obsessed with the history of the Crusades and Europe’s myriad engagements with Islamic societies. Next, we immerse ourselves in the experiences of travelers and pilgrims as they move through a world of miraculous wonders and destabilizing encounters. Finally, we explore the mystical lives of holy women, marked by visions of heavenly glory, hell and purgatory, and union with God. Throughout the course, English writings are brought into conversation with continental European and Arabic works of poetry and prose (offered in translation).  WR, HU
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

ENGL 3530b, Chaucer: Thrones, Rivalries and Women of Substance  Ardis Butterfield

Chaucer's writings explored through the intense rivalries of medieval city life, the violent and glamorous world of aristocratic politics and war with Kings and Dukes of France, and the role of women as lovers, patrons, sharp business managers, and religious recluses. The crowds, sounds, and visual stimuli of medieval London and Westminster, of palaces, gardens, cathedrals and nunneries, examined alongside the vast array of his literary genres including dream visions, love epic, lyrics, and comic, satiric, and religious narrative. Chaucer's sense of the writer's craft as a means of depicting the comic as well as emotional resonance of precarious living in a time of plague, war and civil rebellion.  WR, HU
MW 1:30pm-2:20pm

* ENGL 3576b / CPLT 1760b / WGSS 1171b, Medieval Women Writers and Readers  Jessica Brantley

This course explores writings by and for women in medieval Britain, with attention to questions of authorship, authority, and audience. Readings include the Lais of Marie de France, Ancrene Wisse, The Life of Christina of Markyate, the Showings of Julian of Norwich, The Book of Margery Kempe, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, and the Paston letters. Formerly ENGL 202.  WR, HU
MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

* ENGL 3577a / TDPS 2028a, Medieval Drama  Jessica Brantley

An exploration of medieval dramatic traditions in the context of other medieval and modern performative practices, including pageantry, song, spectacle, recitation, liturgy, and meditative reading. Texts include the York plays, Everyman, Mankind, the Digby Mary Magdalene, Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Everybody.  WR, HU
TTh 1:05pm-2:20pm

ENGL 3610a, 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 3618b / TDPS 3058b, Renaissance Clowning  Nicole Sheriko

Stage clowns and fools have long been recognized as essential figures for understanding early performance. They had virtuosic talent for humor (of course) as well as singing, dancing, tumbling, fencing, improvisation, and working with animals. As England’s first celebrity performers, they also took on mythic status in Renaissance culture; the grandfather of English clowning, Richard Tarlton, became so famous that people used his face on tavern signs. Some audiences skipped the whole play to turn up just in time for the clown’s post-show entertainment. What made clowns so influential? What exactly does a clown do? What can clowns teach us about the conditions of making and enjoying performance? To tackle these questions and more, this course examines clown characters across late medieval and Renaissance plays alongside writing by and about clown actors (jestbooks, biographies, ballads), and theories of laughter, authorship, and celebrity.  WR, HU
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 3708a, Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Age of Empires  Olivia Lingyi Xu

This course situates nineteenth-century British literature within a context of global transimperial geopolitics, a period when empires (including but not limited to the British) were competing, collaborating, and colliding with one another. While British imperialism reached its height in the long nineteenth century, it did so in constant negotiation with other imperial formations, including French, Ottoman, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, as well as anti-colonial resistance movements across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Rather than treating “Victorian literature” as a self-contained national tradition, we read it as embedded within networks of trade, migration, war, diplomacy, and translation that reshaped the modern world. Possible authors include Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 3714a / HUMS 4363a, Herman Melville and Moby-Dick  David Bromwich

We focus on the interpretation of a single book, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, in the context of Melville's career and literary environment. Other readings include Typee, The Encantadas, Billy Budd, poems from Battle Pieces, and selected writings of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman.  WR, HU
MW 4pm-5:15pm

* ENGL 3751b / WGSS 2251b, 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
HTBA

* ENGL 3766a, Keats, Rossetti, Millay  Naomi Levine

An immersive study of the poetry, lives, and myths of three icons of the lyric tradition: the Romantic poet John Keats, the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, and the modernist poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Although separated by time and literary-historical periodization, all three have been known, loved, and judged for their lyric intensity: the melancholy and ecstasy of their poetic personae, the sensuous worlds their poems conjure, and the virtuosity and beauty of their prosodic forms. As we read the major and minor works of each poet, we'll consider broader questions about the nature of lyric; the vagaries of literary reputation and taste; and the roles of biography, feeling, gender, faith, and form in poetry and poetic analysis.  HU
TTh 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 3775b, 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. Formerly ENGL 275.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* ENGL 3805a / AMST 3319a, 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 3807b / HUMS 3807b, The European Novel and Empire  Joe Cleary and Christopher McGowan

A study of major European fiction engaging with the decline of British, French, Austro-Hungarian and other European empires and with the rise of the United States, Soviet Union, and China to global ascendancy. Topics include the relationship between empire, finance capital, and cultural capital; modernism, realism, and the Cold War; literary geopolitics; rhetorics of degeneration and decline; late imperial romance and post-imperial melancholy; orientalism, exoticism and expatriation.  HU
W 4pm-5:55pm

* ENGL 3811a / AMST 3333a, American Strangeness  Sarah Mahurin and Aaron Magloire

This course examines various elements of strangeness – the uncanny, the macabre, the absurd, the shocking – as seen in and through modern and contemporary American literature.  How do authors depict, and how do readers contend with, bizarre phenomena? What is the role of readerly expectation (met and unmet)?  How do concepts of “form” and “genre” react to and against competing concepts of strangeness? We will examine convention and its breaking, mysticism and supernaturality, and our changing sense of what counts as weird.  HU
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

* ENGL 3820a / AFAM 3820 / AMST 2286a / BLST 3820a / HUMS 2410a, James Baldwin's American Scene  Staff

In-depth examination of James Baldwin's canon, tracking his work as an American artist, citizen, and witness to United States society, politics, and culture during the Cold War, the Civil Rights era, and the Black Arts Movement.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

ENGL 3880a, The American Novel since 1945  Staff

This lecture course offers an introduction to the American novel from 1945 to the present, tracing how writers have responded to the cultural, aesthetic, and political transformations of the past eight decades. Beginning in the aftermath of World War II, we explore how novelists interrogate ideas of identity, memory, and nation while experimenting with new forms of storytelling. Readings move through major literary movements—including postwar realism, postmodernism, minoritarian and diasporic fiction, and emergent contemporary genres—to consider how the novel continually reinvents itself in response to shifting histories. Across the semester, we consider questions including: What does it mean to represent “America”? How do novelists challenge inherited narratives about belonging, power, and community? And how have authors expanded the possibilities of the novel as a form? Through lectures, close reading exercises, short critical responses, and contextual study, students develop skills in literary analysis while gaining a broad understanding of the American novel’s evolution since 1945. The selection of the final novel we read this semester is made by the students in the class.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

* ENGL 4100a or b, The Senior Essay I  Marcel Elias and Feisal Mohamed

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 https://english.yale.edu/undergraduate/courses/independent-study-courses. 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 4101a or b, The Senior Essay II  Feisal Mohamed

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 https://english.yale.edu/undergraduate/courses/independent-study-courses. After ENGL 490.
HTBA

* ENGL 4400a or b, The Creative Writing Concentration Senior Project  Danielle Chapman and Feisal Mohamed

A term-long project in writing, under tutorial supervision, aimed at producing a single longer work (or a collection of related shorter works). The creative 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 https://english.yale.edu/undergraduate/courses/independent-study-courses.
HTBA

* ENGL 4411a / FILM 4670a, Making Comics  Alison Bechdel

This advanced class will explore the alchemy of combining words and pictures into the visual language of comics. We’ll touch on some history and theory of comics, but this is a hands-on writing/drawing class, and the focus will be on practice: how to write, draw, design, and produce your own work. We'll be looking at different formats like single panel comics, strips, and minicomics, as well as full-length graphic novels, memoirs, and journalism. You’ll keep a sketchbook and develop a daily drawing practice. For most of the second half of the semester, you'll be working on your own minicomic. Some cartooning experience or drawing ability will be helpful.
T 1pm-4pm

* ENGL 4421a, Advanced Poetry Writing  Danielle Chapman

A seminar and workshop in the writing of verse. May be repeated for credit with a different instructor.  RP
HTBA

* ENGL 4432a / TDPS 3403a, Advanced Playwriting  Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

A seminar and workshop in advanced playwriting that furthers the development of an individual voice. Study of contemporary and classical plays to understand new and traditional forms. Students write two drafts of an original one-act play or adaptation for critique in workshop sessions. Familiarity with basic playwriting tools is assumed. Open to juniors and seniors, nonmajors as well as majors, on the basis of their work; priority to Theater Studies majors. Writing samples should be submitted to the instructor before the first class meeting. Prerequisite: TDPS 3400, TDPS 3402, or a college seminar in playwriting, or equivalent experience.  RP
M 1pm-4pm

* ENGL 4434a, 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.  Prerequisites: No previous study required, but ENGL 3434 (formerly 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.
HTBA

* ENGL 4441a, Advanced Fiction Writing  Caryl Phillips

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

* ENGL 4451a, Sentence-Level Style  Staff

A workshop focused on writing style at the level of the sentence. We will explore how sentence-level choices enable experiments with form, genre, voice, and argument. Relevant for students interested in writing, editing, and close reading/criticism. Will include weekly writing assignments.  HU
Th 9:25am-11:20am

* ENGL 4459a / EVST 4469a / MB&B 4590a, Writing about Science, Medicine, and the Environment  Carl Zimmer

Advanced non-fiction workshop in which students write about science, medicine, and the environment for a broad public audience. Students read exemplary work, ranging from newspaper articles to book excerpts, to learn how to translate complex subjects into compelling prose. Admission by permission of the instructor only. Please see Class notes for application details.  WR
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 4460a, 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 4464a, The Others: Writing Literary Conflict  Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

In this class, we consider how literary non-fiction articulates or imagines difference, disdain, conflict, and dislike. To deepen and enrich our reporting and interviewing, we discuss the more technical and stylistic elements present in strong non-fiction. As we read and write, we put these theoretical concerns into practice and play by writing two or three profiles about people you do not like, a place you don’t care for, an idea you oppose, or an object whose value eludes you. Your writing might be about someone who haunts you without your permission or whatever else gets under your skin, but ideally, your subject makes you uncomfortable, troubles you, and confounds you. Some examples of the writing that we read are Guy Debord, Lucille Clifton, C.L.R. James, Pascale Casanova, W.G. Sebald, Jayne Cortez, AbouMaliq Simone, Greg Tate, Annie Ernaux, Edward Said, Mark Twain, Jacqueline Rose, Toni Morrison, Julia Kristeva, and Ryszard Kapuscinski.  HU
Th 4pm-5:55pm

* ENGL 4469a, 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 4637b / HUMS 1790b, Shakespeare's Political Plays  David Bromwich

Interpretation of selected histories and tragedies from Richard II to The Tempest, with emphasis on the tension between common sympathies or affections and the quest for political power.  WR, HU
TTh 9am-10:15am

* ENGL 4721a, Novel Feelings  Anastasia Eccles

This course studies the emergence of the modern novel as an event in the history of emotions. The long eighteenth-century saw the rise of the novel as we know it as well as a major intellectual shift in how the passions and emotions were conceptualized. We investigate the relationship between these developments, particularly as they converged in the cultural movement of sentimentalism. With our focus on this historical nexus, we take up broader questions about the ways that aesthetic form mediates the emotions, and the ways that emotion responds to social realities like capitalism, imperialism, secularization and patriarchy. Our focus is on those feelings that might be considered distinctively novelistic—feelings that have influentially served to theorize the novel as a genre (interest for the German romantics; desire for psychoanalytic accounts of narrative), and that novels of the period helped codify and theorize (embarrassment, sympathy, wonder, happiness, complicity). Authors include Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Frances Burney, William Beckford, William Godwin, and Jane Austen.   WR, HU
F 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 4736a, Charles Dickens and George Eliot  Stefanie Markovits

Overview of the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot through exploration of a series of paired texts that allow perspective on two different approaches to a variety of novelistic modes, including the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, and the political novel. Prior course work on Victorian literature and on the novel is recommended.  WR, HU
M 9:25am-11:20am

* ENGL 4747a / HUMS 4347a, Wordsworth  Nancy Yousef

Among the most important writers of the Romantic era, William Wordsworth proposed radically innovative ways understanding the world through writing poetry, reading poetry, and thinking poetically. Centered on close reading of the revolution in poetics undertaken in Lyrical Ballads and the remarkable autobiographical project undertaken in The Prelude, this seminar provides the opportunity for immersive study of Wordsworth and of preoccupations central to Romanticism, including the ethics of art, the power of the imagination, and the relationship between self-consciousness and social belonging. Reading of Wordsworth’s poetry will be supplemented by important critical work on Wordsworth from the early reviews to more recent landmarks in literary theory. At least one previous course in English literature or the equivalent.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 4827a / AMST 4027a / ER&M 3554a, After Asian America  Sunny Xiang

Why does “Asian America” seem so 1968, a platform for political mobilization that’s hyperspecific to a particular time and place? Conversely, why does “Asian America” continue to be so elusive, a speculative identity that we’re still searching for? To be after Asian America is to feel nostalgia, embarrassment, desire, and frustration—perhaps all at once. To be after Asian America is to experience uncertainty about the object provoking such feelings. This course is “after Asian America” in all these ways. Through literary, aesthetic, cultural, and scholarly texts, we will develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing the range of identifications and disidentifications that inform Asian American culture, politics, and thought. In prioritizing temporal disorientation over historical chronology, this course shows how affect and sensation can surface alternate genealogies of power and difference. That is, our interest in the ambivalences of an already dated yet perpetually emergent racial formation will incite us to treat feeling as a vital form of knowledge about war, colonialism, capitalism, ecology, and being. While we will certainly discuss regimes of perception through primary and secondary texts, I hope we can also approach our own thinking, reading, speaking, and writing as collectively embodied and temporally contingent acts.   WR, HU
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 4835a / AFAM 4249 / AFST 4449a / BLST 4249a, Challenges to Realism in Contemporary African Fiction  Stephanie Newell

Introduction to experimental African novels that challenge realist and documentary modes of representation. Topics include mythology, gender subversion, politics, the city, migration, and the self. Ways of reading African and postcolonial literature through the lenses of identity, history, and nation. Formerly ENGL 449.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* ENGL 4838a / HIST 3441a / SAST 4740a, The Novel and the Nation: Reading India in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy  Priyasha Mukhopadhyay and Rohit De

This course pairs two interconnected phenomena: the rise of the Indian Republic and the birth of the postcolonial novel. Over the course of the semester, we read a single primary text: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993). Set in the 1950s in the aftermath of India’s Independence and Partition, Seth’s encyclopaedic novel is the story of four families brought together by a mother’s search for a “suitable boy” for her daughter to marry. In the process, it builds a microcosm of an Indian society coming to terms with postcolonial statehood and weighing the aftereffects of British colonialism. Entwined in its plot about marriage, love, and relationships are some of the most urgent cultural and political concerns facing the new nation: legislative changes and land reforms, the violent aftermath of the Partition, secularism tainted by communal tensions, the disintegration of courtly forms of sociality, the reconstruction of city life, and the fate of the English novel in the postcolonial classroom. We read A Suitable Boy as literary critics and historians, pairing close readings of language and literary form with historical scholarship. Over the course of our discussions, we address the following questions: what is the relationship between the nation, the novel, and identity in the postcolonial world? How do we read narratives of “nation building” as literary and cultural constructions? What do we make of “literature” and “history” as disciplinary categories and formations? The seminar introduces students to methods of literary criticism and textual studies, and teaches them how to read a range of primary sources, from legislative debates, bureaucratic reports, newspapers, poetry, cinema, and radio.  HU
T 9:25am-11:20am

* ENGL 4850a, Word and Image from William Blake to Claudia Rankine  Langdon Hammer

This course investigates a visionary tradition of British and American poets and artists who find in the interface of visual art and poetry a space for political dissent, aesthetic experiment, spiritual quest, and utopian vision, in which word and image collaborate to enlarge the range of implication and possibility in both literature and art. Classes draw on collections at the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and Beinecke Library. Writers and artists studied include William Blake, Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, Joseph Cornell, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Susan Howe, and Claudia Rankine. For English majors, a junior seminar. For majors in other departments, an upper-level course in English, preferably in poetry.  WR, HU
Th 9:25am-11:20am

* ENGL 4877a, Contemporary British Fiction  Caryl Phillips

A study of literature that responds to a changing post–World War II Britain, with attention to the problem of who "belongs" and who is an "outsider." Authors include William Trevor, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jean Rhys, Samuel Selvon, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and John Osborne. Formerly ENGL 416.  WR, HU  RP
T 9:25am-11:20am

* ENGL 4889a / AFAM 2289 / BLST 2289a, Counternarratives: Black Historical Fictions  Elleza Kelley

While historical records have long been the source from which we draw our picture of the past, it is with literature and art that we attempt to speculatively work out that which falls between the cracks of conventional archival documentation, that which cannot be contained by historical record—emotion, gesture, the sensory, the sonic, the inner life, the afterlife, the neglected and erased. This course examines how contemporary black writers have imagined and attempted to represent black life from the late 17th to the early 20th centuries, it asks what fiction can tell us about history. Reading these works as alternative archives, or “counterarchives,” which index the excess and fugitive material of black histories in the Americas, we probe the uses, limits, and revelations of historical fictions, from the experimental and realist novel, to works of poetry and drama. Drawing on the work of various interdisciplinary scholars, we use these historical fictions to explore and enter into urgent and ongoing conversations around black life & death, African-American history & memory, black aesthetics, and the problem of “The Archive.” Some familiarity with the events and themes of African American history is strongly recommended, but not required. This course is not open to students who have already take AFAM 013/ENGL 005.  HU
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm