Special Topics Courses Fall 2025

ENGL4330: Shakespeare II: Special Topics (62659)

Description

The poet and rival playwright Ben Jonson famously described the late departed Shakespeare in a memorial sonnet published in the 1623 first edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays, the First Folio as “Not of an age, but for all time.” But how have Shakespeare’s plays and poems survived the test of time? And how do his works engage with the complexities and conundrums of the passage and keeping of time? It might be said that early modern playwrights and poets were hyper-aware of time. In a period when human understanding and reckoning of the passage of time experienced radical changes, both in scientific and technological forms of measurement, and cultural shifts in time-keeping dependent on changes in religious and political experience; in an historical moment suddenly profoundly aware of its own historicity, of the ephemerality of the present, and vexed by its relationship to the near and distant past, works of drama and literature reflected, challenged, critiqued, cultural attitudes towards time while simultaneously desperately attempting to preserve their work from the ravages of time, to carve a space for themselves in the literary pantheon and chronicles of history. 

From sonnets and narrative poems to comedies, tragedies, and everything in-between and far afield, this course will examine the question and role of time in Shakespeare's writings. We will also look at how contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare in various forms of media (everything from film, comics, and tv) comment on Shakespearean issues of timeliness, immortality, history, and brevity. 

In addition to 2 or 3 writing assginments, over the course of the semester, you will work closely in a group of approximately six students to present your take on a scene or a play with specific attention to staging and performance. You may sign up to present a “treatment” of a production you would imagine staging, co-author and perform a new “missing” scene, or present an adaptation of a play in a new media format. How you present this project is up to you, but in the past students have performed in class, provided power-point presentations, and shown videos of performances. You might even choose to lead a discussion on performance while asking other class members to act out a scene according to your specifications. The important thing with this presentation is that it involves the entire class interactively and that you demonstrate that you have taken the time to research performance history and develop a clear concept regarding your interpretation of the play or scene. 

ENGL4695: Topics in Postcolonial Lit (62665) and ENGL4899: Topics in Science Fiction (62681)

Topics in Postcolonial Literature—Exploring Postcolonial Worlds: Science Fiction and Postcolonial Identity

Tentative Course Description:

The 20th century postcolonial British and American novels and the science and speculative fiction of Britain and America from the same period share similar trajectories. The analyses of cultural identities, (im)emigration and relocation, as well as the redefinition of historical narrative in the context of discoveries and encounters with an alien, cultural, or simply un-relatable ‘other’ are often at the very heart of both science fiction and postcolonial studies. Far from identifying this as simple coincidence or convergence, this course will aim to describe and investigate the particular ability of science and speculative fiction works and authors to address traditional postcolonial themes in provocative and creative ways, sometimes freeing the discussions from the intensely political and therefore agenda-driven confines of more ‘traditional’ postcolonial works. Students will have the opportunity to explore both fiction and film in addition to secondary materials relative in both direct and indirect ways to the composition and reception of these works and will explore the rise of popular science fiction in Britain and the US and the role this fiction plays in the multi-cultural movements of the 20th century.

Some of the questions we will ask in this course:

• What is postcolonial studies?
• What are the reasons for reading ‘postcolonial theory’?
• What makes a written work ‘postcolonial’?
• What is science fiction?
• Why read science fiction?
• What makes a science fiction work ‘postcolonial’?
• What makes science fiction particularly adept at addressing many of the themes of postcolonial studies?
• Why would an author/filmmaker choose SF as a way of addressing contemporary concerns about cultural disparities, gender disparities, social inequities, and/or race?
• Can science fiction works effectively address contemporary issues?

Sample Texts (final reading list may vary):

• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), ISBN: 978-0060850524
• C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), ISBN: 978-0743234900
• Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1953), ISBN: 978-0451457998
• Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), ISBN: 978-0345404473
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), ISBN: 978-0441007318
• Octavia Butler, Mind of My Mind (1977), ISBN: 978-0446361880
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), ISBN: 978-0385490818
• Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan (Eds.), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004), ISBN: 978-1551521589
• China Miéville, Embassytown (2011), ISBN: 978-0345524508

ENGL4790: Topics in American Literature (59638)

MISS MACINTOSH, MY DARLING

This seminar will be devoted to Marguerite Young’s 1965 novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which she described as “an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, [and] errors of judgment in individual lives.” Among the longest novels ever written, the book took two decades to write. A critic for the Nashville Banner praised it as “The most important work in American literature since Moby-Dick,” while Nona Balakian heralded it as “the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves.” The New Yorker claimed that, “Young’s sentences, which marry the breadth of Whitman to the opulence of Nabokov, are among the most virtuosic ever produced by an American novelist.” And Kurt Vonnegut called its author (who was friends with Anaïs Nin, Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote and Carson McCullers) “unquestionably a genius.”

Dalkey Archive Press, who have reissued the book, describe it this way:

            This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel—a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young’s method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness, she tests the nature of her characters—and the nature of reality.

We will read a hundred pages a week, in order to make our way all the way through. Only students ready to sprint a marathon should enroll. The only text we’ll need for the seminar, the novel is available for $30 in paperback, as an e-book for $10.

ENGL4825: Topics in Literary Theory (59645)

Introduction to Posthumanism

This course will provide an introduction to the recent conversations decentering the “human” in critical theory over the past 20 years. We will analyze how humanity changes in light of technological and scientific advances, and how modernity constructs “the human” in opposition to mechanical and animal others. In this process, our conversations will touch on concerns in postcolonialism and race, media thinking, animal studies, and other fields of inquiry in critical theory.
      
We will read two primary texts to center our conversation in Literature:
  
   H.G. Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. ISBN: 978-0141441023
  
    Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021). New York: Vintage, 2021. ISBN: 978-0593311295. 
     
The novels will help us frame and understand the lineages of posthumanist thought, which will constitute the bulk of the reading this semester: classical critical theory essays by Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, and Jacques Derrida, as well as more recent works by Cary Wolfe, N. Katherine Hayles, Fatimah Tobing Rony, Kalpana Seshadri, Dominic Pettman, and others.