ENROLL

Jessica L Leiman

This course explores the history and form of the British novel, tracing its development from a strange, sensational experiment in the eighteenth century to a dominant literary genre today. Among the questions that we will consider: What is a novel? What makes it such a popular form of entertainment? How does the novel participate in ongoing conversations about family, sex, class, race, and nation? How did a genre once considered a source of moral corruption become a legitimate literary form? Authors include: Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, and Jackie Kay.

George G Shuffelton

This class will focus on three of the most popular and closely connected modes of narrative enjoyed by medieval audiences: the epic, the romance, and the saint's life. Readings, drawn primarily from the English and French traditions, will include Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, and legends of St. Alexis and St. Margaret. We will consider how each narrative mode influenced the other, as we encounter warriors and lovers who suffer like saints, and saints who triumph like warriors and lovers. Readings will be in translation or highly accessible modernizations.

Pierre Hecker

1st 5 weeks

Pierre Hecker

Shakespeare’s plays have been reimagined and repurposed all over the world, performed on seven continents, and translated into over 100 languages. The course explores how issues of globalization, nationalism, translation (both cultural and linguistic), and (de)colonization inform our understanding of these wonderfully varied adaptations and appropriations. We will examine the social, political, and aesthetic implications of a range of international stage, film, and literary versions as we consider how other cultures respond to the hegemonic original. No prior experience with Shakespeare is necessary.

Second 5 weeks

Constance Walker

Constance Walker

What can and should be the role of literature in times of bitter political conflict? Caught in partisan strife, Irish writers have grappled personally and painfully with the question. We will read works by Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney, among others, and watch films (Bloody Sunday, Hunger) that confront the deep and ongoing divisions in Irish political life.

Peter J Balaam

Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises helping students to explore cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text over the last two millenia. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?

Prerequisite: Participation in OCS London Program

For students participating in OCS London Program

Jessica L Leiman

This course traces the development of a sensational, morally dubious genre that emerged in the eighteenth-century: the novel. We will read some of the most entertaining, best-selling novels written during the first hundred years of the form, paying particular attention to the novel’s concern with courtship and marriage, writing and reading, the real and the fantastic. Among the questions we will ask: What is a novel? What distinguished the early novel from autobiography, history, travel narrative, and pornography? How did this genre come to be associated with women? How did early novelists respond to eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of reading fiction? Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen.

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course

Peter J Balaam

Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises helping students to explore cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text over the last two millenia. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course or permission of instructor

For students pariticipating in OCS London Program