English (ENGL)
ENGL 0010 Study of a Medieval or Renaissance Author
This course introduces students to literary study through the works of a single, major author from the Medieval or Renaissance period. Reading an individual author across an entire career offers students the rare opportunity to examine works from several critical perspectives in a single course. What is the author's relation to his or her time? How do our author's works help us to understand literary history? And how might we understand our author's legacy through performance, tributes, adaptations, or sequels? Exposing students to a range of approaches and assignments, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0011 Study of a Woman Writer
This course introduces students to literary study through the works of a major woman writer Reading an individual author across an entire career offers students the rare opportunity to examine works from several critical perspectives in a single course. How do our author's works help us to understand literary and cultural history? And how might we understand our author's legacy through performance, tributes, adaptations, or sequels? Exposing students to a range of approaches and assignments, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 0011
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0012 Study of an African American Author
This course introduces students to literary study through the works of a major African American author. Reading an individual author across an entire career offers students the rare opportunity to examine works from several critical perspectives in a single course. How do our author's works help us to understand literary and cultural history? And how might we understand our author's legacy through performance, tributes, adaptations, or sequels? Exposing students to a range of approaches and assignments, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 0012
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0020 Study of a Literary Theme
This introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0021 Study of a Theme in Cinema
This introduction to literary study examines a compelling theme central to a set of cinematic texts. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within varying media technologies, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 0021, COML 0021
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0022 Study of a Theme in Global Literature
This introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme by attending to texts from around the globe. The theme's function within multiple historical and regional contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 0022
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0023 Study of a Theme Related to Gender & Sexuality
This introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme related to questions of gender and sexuality. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 0023
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0024 Study of a Theme: Monsters in Film and Literature
This course studies literature and film featuring a wide assortment of monsters across a range of genres, cultures, and time periods. It also serves as an introduction to film analysis and readings in cultural studies and literary theory. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 0024
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0030 Study of a Literary Genre
An introduction to literary study through a genre; whether it be the novel, drama, the short story, the graphic novel, or poetry. Versions of this course will vary widely in the selection of texts assigned. Some versions will begin with traditional texts, including a sampling of works in translation. Others will focus exclusively on modern and contemporary examples. This course is designed for the General Requirement, and is ideal for the students wishing to take an English course but not necessarily intending to major. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0038 Study of a Genre: World Autobiography
An introduction to literary study through world literature. The course will introduce you to the manifold connections between theories of world literature and fields such as globalization studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 0038
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0039 Narrative Across Cultures
The purpose of this course is to present a variety of narrative genres and to discuss and illustrate the modes whereby they can be analyzed. We will be looking at shorter types of narrative: short stories, novellas, and fables, and also some extracts from longer works such as autobiographies. While some works will come from the Anglo-American tradition, a larger number will be selected from European and non-Western cultural traditions and from earlier time-periods. The course will thus offer ample opportunity for the exploration of the translation of cultural values in a comparative perspective.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1025, NELC 1960, SAST 1124, THAR 1025
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0040 Study of a Literary Period
This is an introduction to literary study through a survey of works from a specific historical period. This course is ideal for students wishing to explore a significant era, and it presents a range of texts and contexts for understanding the cultural products of a period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0041 Study of a Period in Cinematic History
This is an introduction to the study of cinema and culture through a survey of works from a specific historical period. This course is ideal for students wishing to explore a significant era, and it presents a range of films and contexts for understanding the cultural products of a period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 0041, COML 0041
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0042 Study of a Period: Medieval/Renaissance
This is an introduction to literary study through a survey of works from a specific historical period--in this case, Medieval and/or Renaissance. This course is ideal for students wishing to explore a significant era, and it presents a range of texts and contexts for understanding the cultural products of a period. This course is designed for the General Requirement, and is ideal for the students wishing to take an English course but not necessarily intending to major. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0043 Study of a Period: Literature of the Long 18th Century
This is an introduction to literary study through a survey of works from a specific historical period--in this case, the Long 18th Century. This course is ideal for students wishing to explore a significant era, and it presents a range of texts and contexts for understanding the cultural products of a period. This course is designed for the General Requirement, and is ideal for the students wishing to take an English course but not necessarily intending to major. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0044 Study of a Period: The 19th Century
This is an introduction to literary study through a survey of works from a specific historical period--in this case, the 19th Century. This course is ideal for students wishing to explore a significant era, and it presents a range of texts and contexts for understanding the cultural products of a period. This course is designed for the General Requirement, and is ideal for the students wishing to take an English course but not necessarily intending to major. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0045 Study of a Period: The Twenty-First Century
This is an introduction to literary study through a survey of works from a specific historical period--in this case, Twenty-First Century literature. This course is ideal for students wishing to explore a significant era, and it presents a range of texts and contexts for understanding the cultural products of a period. This course is designed for the General Requirement, and is ideal for the students wishing to take an English course but not necessarily intending to major. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0050 History and Theory of Sexuality
What is sexuality? Does it exist in the body or in the mind? Is it a collection of actions, desires, and fantasies, or is it rather a disposition, a way of seeing oneself, an identity? Does what we want depend on who we are? Does what we do define who we are? This course will address such questions by introducing students to several classic texts in the history and theory of sexuality and by looking at key moments in the struggle for sexual and gender freedom. The history we trace will focus on the effects of the "invention of homosexuality" in the late-nineteenth century; the history of butch/femme community; the cultural moment of Stonewall and gay liberation; the "Sex Wars" of the 1980s; women of color and queer of color critiques; responses to HIV/AIDS; and the emergence of the transgender rights movement. We will also consider the meaning of "queer," global sexualities, same-sex marriage, the politics of emotion, and gay normalization.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0052 Literature and Society: Introduction to Psychoanalysis
The course will introduce students to the broad and ever-expanding spectrum of psychoanalytic ideas and techniques, through reading and discussion of major works by some of its most influential figures. We will also read some literary, historical, philosophical, and anthropological works that have special relevance to the psychoanalytic exploration of the human condition. In addition to the other requirements it satisfies, this course may also be counted toward completion of the Psychoanalytic Studies minor (http://web.sas.upenn.edu/psys/). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 0052
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0060 Introduction to Literature and Law
An introduction not only to representations of the law and legal processes in literary texts, but also to the theories of reading, representation, and interpretation that form the foundation of both legal and literary analysis. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of our current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0070 Literature and Medicine: 1650 to the Present
This course offers a comprehensive study of significant changes and continuities in the history of medicine from 1650 to the present day, alongside works of literature that exemplify the shifting notions of the doctor and sickness in the Western medical tradition. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0137 Penn Theatre in London--Penn English London Program
This course is the centerpiece of the Penn English London Program. As part of this course, you will study with a renowned theatre critic and make frequent theatre visits. London is one of the most exciting theatre centers in the world, and this course has a focus on live performance, providing an incomparable opportunity to learn about a wide range of dramatic forms, acting styles, theatrical conventions, and playing spaces. Students attend three performances each week, produced by companies such as the National Theatre, the Royal Court, and Shakespeare’s Globe. We will also see a diverse selection of pieces staged not only in the historic theatres of the West End, but also in smaller fringe theatres. Class meetings will include presentations on the theatres we visit, analysis of plays, and discussions about the productions we have seen. Readings for the class will include selected plays and contextual material to prepare us for theatre viewing; written work will consist of responses to performances. Field trips are likely to include a backstage tour of the National Theatre, and possibly a visit to the theatre collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0159 Gender and Society
This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 0002
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0160 Introduction to Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory
This course will introduce students to the historical and intellectual forces that led to the emergence of queer theory as a distinct field, as well as to recent and ongoing debates about gender, sexuality, embodiment, race, privacy, global power, and social norms. We will begin by tracing queer theory's conceptual heritage and prehistory in psychoanalysis, deconstruction and poststructuralism, the history of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, woman-of-color feminism, the feminist sex wars, and the AIDS crisis. We will then study the key terms and concepts of the foundational queer work of the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, we will turn to the new questions and issues that queer theory has addressed in roughly the past decade. Students will write several short papers.
Fall
Also Offered As: COML 0030, ENGL 2303, GSWS 0003
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0300 Medieval Worlds
In this freshman seminar, we will read a variety of premodern texts that try to take the whole world into account. We will trace the geographical imaginations and cultural encounters of early writers across different genres, from maps, to Islamic, Jewish, and Christian travel narratives, such as the account of John de Mandeville (one of Christopher Columbus's favorite writers); to monstrous encyclopedias and books of beasts, such as the "Wonders of the East"; to universal chronicles and Alexander the Great romances. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0301 First Year Seminar--Emotions
The field known as “History of the Emotions” has gained tremendous prominence in literary and cultural studies. But do emotions have a history? If so, what methods do we use for discovering and recounting that history? To what extent does history of the emotions borrow from other fields? These include all the fields that relate to what we call “emotions studies”: psychology, sociology, political theory, philosophy, and neuroscience. In this seminar we will explore some key methodologies and subject matters for history of the emotions. We’ll look at some philosophical reflections on emotion (including Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, as well as more recent moral philosophers); we’ll also look at political theorists, including Thomas Hobbes; we’ll explore psychoanalytic perspectives, historical research, and some of the work of neuroscientists; and we will take these ideas into explorations of art, literature, and music. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 0015
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0303 First Year Seminar: National Epics
In this course we will consider texts that become "national epics," texts that in some sense come to "represent" a nation. How and when might such imaginative texts emerge? Nations change, and old poems may no longer serve. Can the Song of Roland, once compulsory study for all schoolchildren in France, still be required reading today-- especially if I am French Muslim? What about El Cid in Spain? How do some texts-- such as the Mahabharata in India, or Journey to the West in China-- seem more adaptable than others? The course begins in western Europe, but then pivots across Eurasian space to become gradually more global. Most all of us have complex family histories: Chinese-American, French Canadian, Latino/a/x, Jewish American, Pennsylvania Dutch, Lenni Lenape. Some students may choose to investigate, for their final project, family histories (and hence their own, personal connection to "national epics").
Also Offered As: COML 0303
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0304 First Year Seminar: Dangerous Literature
This first-year seminar explores literary works that were called or perceived dangerous, revealing a literary history of censorship, prohibition, and book burning—be it for moral, political, or religious reasons. By studying dangerous literature closely and transhistorically, students will acquire knowledge about the texts as well as historical, aesthetic, and philosophical contexts from which they emerged. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0320 First Year Seminar: Black Queer Traditions
This first-year seminar provides a critical introduction to Black Queer literature, art, and politics. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: AFRC 0320, GSWS 0320
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0322 Freshman Seminar on Asian American Lit
An introduction to writing about Literature, with emphasis on Asian American literature and culture.
Also Offered As: ASAM 0010
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0333 First Year Seminar: Queer History and Theory
This course takes a historical approach to the study of queer theory. It considers how shifting definitions of queerness, under different guises and different terms, have shaped our understanding of sexual and gender identity today. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings
Also Offered As: GSWS 0333
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0350 First Year Seminar: Climate Fiction
This course introduces students to recent works of climatological science-fiction (cli-fi). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0365 Spiegel-Wilks First-Year Seminar
The primary goal of the first-year seminar program is to provide every first-year student the opportunity for a direct personal encounter with a faculty member in a small setting devoted to a significant intellectual endeavor. Specific topics are posted at the beginning of each academic year. This Spiegel-Wilks seminar focuses exclusively on contemporary art.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ARTH 0501
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0370 First Year Seminar: Fiction and Connectivity
This First Year Seminar explores the ways in which long narratives, from ancient epic to 21st-century TV serials, have always engaged their audiences by providing a sense of connection among individuals, and by modeling the relationship between individuals and society. This seminar will zero-in on this aspect of storytelling’s cultural function. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0372 First Year Seminar: Juvenilia
This course explores the childhood and adolescent writings of some of English literature’s most notable figures. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0375 Lyric Poetry and Life Writing
What kind of life writing is poetry? When we say that the raw expression of thought and feeling is not art, but a poem is, what do we mean? What is gained (and what lost) when writers give poetic form to experiences and emotions? In this seminar, we’ll investigate that question by reading a series of modern poets alongside other forms of life writing that they produced, including, for example, letters and diaries, autobiographies and memoirs, essays and fiction. We’ll start with some quick case studies on Wordsworth, Whitman, and Dickinson. For the remainder of the semester, we’ll work intensively on Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Bob Dylan, and Claudia Rankine.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0490 Latin American and Latinx Theatre and Performance
This course will examine contemporary Latin American and Latinx theatre and performance from a hemispheric perspective. In particular, we will study how Latin American and Latinx artists engage with notions of identity, nation, and geo-political and geo-cultural borders, asking how we might study "national" theatres in an age of transnational globalization. Our consideration of plays, performances, and theoretical texts will situate Latin American and Latinx theatre and performance within the context of its politics, culture, and history.
Also Offered As: COML 2086, LALS 2860, THAR 2860
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0500 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Classicism and Literature
This advanced seminar will examine the classical backgrounds to English poetry, in particular the Biblical and Greco-Roman antecedents to Renaissance lyric verse and verse drama (such as, preeminently, Shakespeare). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3703
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0501 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Old English
This seminar explores an aspect of Anglo-Saxon culture intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0502 BFS--Med/Red Dante in English: Creative Responses to the Divine Comedy
A cross-period and in-depth look at Dante's Divine Comedy and the many creative responses it has spawned across the globe and across languages. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 0502, ITAL 3335
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0503 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 17th-Century Literature
This course explores an aspect of 17th-Century literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0504 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 18th-Century Literature
This course explores an aspect of 18th-Century British literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0506 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Modernism
This course explores an aspect of literary modernism intensively, featuring the avant-garde, the politics of modernism, and its role in shaping poetry, music, and the visual arts. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0507 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 20th-Century Literature
The course explores an aspect of 20th-Century literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 0507
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0509 Dante's Divine Comedy
In this course we will read the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, focusing on a series of interrelated problems raised by the poem: authority, fiction, history, politics and language. Particular attention will be given to how the Commedia presents itself as Dante's autobiography, and to how the autobiographical narrative serves as a unifying thread for this supremely rich literary text. Supplementary readings will include Virgil's Aeneid and selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses. All readings and written work will be in English. Italian or Italian Studies credit will require reading Italian texts in their original language and writing about their themes in Italian. This course may be taken for graduate credit, but additional work and meetings with the instructor will be required.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 3330, ITAL 3330
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0510 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: National Epics (Med/Ren)
A course that traces how particular literary texts, very often medieval, are adopted to become foundational for national literatures. Key moments of emphasis will be the early nineteenth century, the 1930s, and (to some extent) the unfolding present. Some texts immediately suggest themselves for analysis. The Song of Roland, for example, has long been fought over between France and Germany; each new war inspires new editions on both sides. The French colonial education system, highly centralized, long made the Chanson de Roland a key text, with the theme of Islamic attack on the European mainland especially timely, it was thought, during the Algerian war of independence. Germany also sees the Niebelungenlied as a key text, aligning it with the Rhine as an impeccably Germanic: but the Danube, especially as envisioned by Stefan Zweig, offers an alternative, hybridized, highly hyphenated cultural vision in running its Germanic-Judaic-Slavic-Roman course to the Black Sea. The course will not be devoted exclusively to western Europe. Delicate issues arise as nations determine what their national epic needs to be. Russia, for example, needs the text known as The Song of Igor to be genuine, since it is the only Russian epic to predate the Mongol invasion. The text was discovered in 1797 and then promptly lost in Moscow's great fire of 1812; suggestions that it might have been a fake have to be handled with care in Putin's Russia. Similarly, discussing putative Mughal (Islamic) elements in so-called "Hindu epics" can also be a delicate matter. Some "uses of the medieval" have been exercised for reactionary and revisionist causes in the USA, but such use is much more extravagant east of Prague. And what, exactly, is the national epic of the USA?
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 0510
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0513 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 19th-Century American Literature
This course explores an aspect of 19th-Century American literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 0513
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0514 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 20th-Century American Literature
The course explores an aspect of 20th-Century American literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0515 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Modern American Literature
This course explores an aspect of Modern American literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0518 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Cinema and Globalization
In this seminar, we will study a number of films (mainly feature films, but also a few documentaries) that deal with the complicated nexus of issues that have come to be discussed under the rubric of “globalization.” See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 0518, COML 0518
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0519 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Postcolonial Literature
This course explores an aspect of Postcolonial literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SAST 0519
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0520 Capitalism, (Neo)Colonialism, Racism, and Resistance
This interdisciplinary seminar examines, from an international perspective, theory and artistic productions, including literature, films, and performance art, that analyze and critique capitalism, imperialism and (neo)colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 0520, LALS 0520
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0521 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 18th-Century Slavery and Abolition
This course examines how the slave trade was understood, justified, contested, and represented in British literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: AFRC 0521
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0531 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Gender, Sexuality, and Literature
This seminar focuses on literary, cultural, and political expressions of gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 0531
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0540 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: History of Literary Criticism
This is a course on the history of literary theory, a survey of major debates about literature, poetics, and ideas about what literary texts should do, from ancient Greece to examples of modern European thought. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3508, COML 0540
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0541 Psychoanalysis and Autobiography
Both psychoanalysis and autobiography are ways of re-telling a life. Psychoanalysis is often called "the talking cure" because, as patients tell the analyst more and more about their lives (their thoughts, dreams, memories, hopes, fears, relationships, jobs, and fantasies), they start to recognize themselves in new ways, and this can help them overcome conflicts, impasses, bad feelings, and even psychiatric illnesses that have kept them from flourishing. Autobiographers do something similar as they remember, re-examine, and re-tell their lives - though one very important difference is that they do so, not privately in a psychoanalyst's office, but publicly in books that anyone may read. This seminar is a comparative exploration of these different ways of a re-telling a life. This seminar is usually team-taught by a humanities scholar and a practicing psychoanalyst.
Fall
Also Offered As: COML 3097, GSWS 3890
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0549 Writing About Art Seminar
What does it mean to write about art? What are the historical origins of this undertaking? How does language mediate the intellectual, somatic, and cultural rapport between the viewing self and the physical object? As an initial response to these questions we will examine the writings of the Tuscan artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), the biographer of such renowned artists as Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo. We will also read the letters of famous artists from the early modern period, and examine the theoretical forays of artists such as Albrecht DÃ?rer, who attempted to sketch the relationship between the memory and the imagination. Finally, we will look to examples of works of art for how we might read visual images as expressive of theories about what are is and what it can do.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3510, GRMN 1302, ITAL 3610
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0572 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 18th-Century Novel
This course explores an aspect of 18th-Century novel intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 0572
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0573 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 19th-Century Novel
This course explores an aspect of the 19th-Century novel intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0575 The Novel and Marriage
The content of the course will vary from semester to semester. All works read in English. Please check the department's website for a description. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2500, ENGL 2799, FREN 2500, HIST 0722
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0578 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: The Contemporary Graphic Novel
This seminar explores the rise of Comics Studies through a focus on the contemporary graphic novel. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 0578
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0580 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Poetry and Poetics
This course explores an aspect of poetry and poetics intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0582 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: American Poetry
This course devotes itself to the in-depth study of twentieth-century American poetry. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0585 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Drama to 1660
This course explores an aspect of drama before 1660 intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0587 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Modern Drama
This course explores an aspect of Modern drama intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0590 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Film Studies
This course explores an aspect of film studies intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3890, CIMS 0590, COML 0590
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0591 The History Computer Animation
This course will look at computer animation as an art form, a series of technological innovations and an industry. We will explore the way in which artistic, technical, historical, and cultural conditions have shaped the development of computer animation. Topics will include the impact of early motion graphics experiments in the sixties, the contributions of university- and corporation-funded research, commercial production, and the rise of Pixar. We will consider the companies and personalities in computer animation who have shaped the art form and continue to influence it, the contributions to computer animation from visionaries around the world, and current day applications of animated imagery. Throughout the course, we will screen important works from the canon of computer animation, including the earliest computer-animated shorts, scenes from Beauty and the Beast, the first Pixar shorts, Toy Story, Final Fantasy and works done internationally to forward the art and the industry.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3871, CIMS 3201, FNAR 3182
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0593 The Animation Of Disney
No organization has exerted as much influence on popular culture and the art form of animation as The Walt Disney Company. For decades, Disney films were the standard by which all other animated films were measured. This course will examine the biography and philosophy of founder Walt Disney, as well as The Walt Disney Company’s impact on animation art, storytelling and technology, the entertainment industry, and American popular culture. We will consider Disney's most influential early films, look at the 1960s when Disney’s importance in popular culture began to erode, and analyze the films that led to the Disney renaissance of the late 1980s/early 1990s. We will also assess the subsequent purchase of Pixar Animation Studios and the overall impact Pixar has had on Disney. The class will also look at recent trends and innovations, including live-action remakes and Disney+.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3873, CIMS 3203, FNAR 3184
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0594 History Children's TV
This course will survey the history of children’s television from the invention of television through the present, with an emphasis on series development and production, artistry, and the colorful personalities who built this industry. We’ll consider important figures including Fred Rogers, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Joan Ganz Cooney, Jim Henson and Walt Disney. We will discuss the history of animated cartoons that were made specifically for television, Saturday morning production, the rise of Japanese cartoons from the 1960s through Pokemon, and the growth of children’s cable channels in the 90s, as well as other landmark moments. We’ll also assess the impact of streaming platforms on television and the future of children’s media.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3874, CIMS 3204, FNAR 3185
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0595 Global TV
This course explores a broad media landscape through new critical and conceptual approaches. It is designated as a Benjamin Franklin Seminar. This course maps the footprints of television at a global scale. Adopting comparative approaches, we will be studying TV's formation of national and global discourses, and thereby recognizing not only television's impact on processes of globalization, but also the ability of television to matter globally. Working through concepts of "broadcasting," "flow," "circulation," and "circumvention," the course examines the movement of (and blocks encountered by) television programs and signals across national borders and cultures. The course particularly focuses on how global television cultures have been transformed due to shifts from broadcasting technologies to (Internet) streaming services? Navigating from United States and Cuba to India and Egypt, the readings in the course illuminate how particular televisual genres, institutions, and reception practices emerged in various countries during specific historical periods. We shall be addressing a range of questions: what kind of global phenomenon is television? Can we study television in countries where we do not know the existing local languages? In what different ways (through what platforms, interfaces, and screens) do people in different continents access televisual content? What explains the growing transnational exports of Turkish and Korean TV dramas? What is the need to historically trace the infrastructural systems like satellites (and optical fiber cables) that made (and continue to make) transmission of television programming possible across the world? How do fans circumvent geo-blocking to watch live sporting events? Assignments include submitting weekly discussion questions and a final paper. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 3781
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0596 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Charles Chaplin’s Films and the Politics of Silence
This BFS seminar focuses on the variety pantomime inherited by twentieth-century film from the Commedia dell’Arte and European Music Hall stages. Emphasis will be placed on how pantomime was used by filmmaker Charles Chaplin between the years 1914–1940. We shall consider important moments in the history of European pantomime that preceded and influenced Chaplin, then concentrate on how the tradition coalesced in his silent films.
Also Offered As: CIMS 0596
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0599 Cinema and Civil Rights
This undergraduate seminar will examine key moments in the history of civil rights through a cinematic lens. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how filmmakers have depicted the lives, aspirations, and strategies of those who have struggled for equal rights; how different struggles have intersected with each other; what aesthetic strategies have been adopted to represent freedom and the denial of it; and how effective cinematic efforts to contribute to increased freedom have been as well as what criteria we use to evaluate success or failure in the first place. Each week, we will watch a film and read a series of texts that will be drawn from a variety of arenas, including histories of civil rights; civil rights pamphlets and speeches; filmmaker interviews; film and media theory; memoirs; and theories of race, gender and sexuality. Course requirements: mutual respect; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; a final project that can be a research paper, film, art project, or community-based initiative.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3930, ARTH 3930, CIMS 3930, GSWS 3930
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0700 Critical-Creative Approaches to Literature
This course enables students to think and write creatively as a means to the critical understanding of literary texts. It seeks to advance students understanding of literature, its formal elements, and its relationship to culture and history through the use of creative projects instead of or alongside more traditional critical writing. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0720 Critical-Creative: Contemporary Black Feminism: Saidiya Hartman and Gayl Jones
This critical-creative seminar on contemporary black feminism considers collaborative writing as an element of black feminist practice and offers students the chance to immerse themselves in the works of philosopher Saidiya Hartman and novelist Gayl Jones, as well as weave an essay together throughout the semester. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0755 Listening in Troubled Times (SNF Paideia Program Course)
In this course, we will explore histories and theories of listening and the power of listening as a means to connect with other times and spaces. This course is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Paideia Program. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ANTH 1755
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0759 Critical Creative Seminar: Ecology in New Wave Science Fiction
This critical-creative seminar explores the rise of New Wave science fiction to explore the interrelations between gender, colonialism, language and ecology. Students will also have an opportunity to write their own ecological speculative fiction. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0765 Podcasting
This creative-critical seminar situates the podcast historically, analyzes current instantiations of the genre, and teaches hands-on skills to create your own podcasts. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0766 Virtual Bodies, Virtual Worlds
This is a critical and creative seminar in which we will read major literary works about virtual worlds while creatively interpreting those works using Extended Reality (XR) tools and methods. No previous knowledge of AR/VR or experience is necessary. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0767 Poetry, Music, and the Sounds of the Twentieth Century
The twentieth century saw the rise and refinement of commercial sound recording, which gave rise to a proliferation of sound-based artistry. This course will examine the how music, sound recording, and poetry influenced each other throughout the century. In addition, you will learn some audio editing skills and will have the opportunity to make your own poetry-music remix. No experience with poetry or sound editing is required, only an interest in experimenting with sound. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0775 Modern Children's Literature
This course studies the evolution and convolution of Children's Literature from the 19th to 21st centuries in order to best understand why these books are not just fabric of our youth, but of critical cultural, literary, and scholarly importance. As a Critical-Creative seminar, final assignments can be either critical analysis or a creative project. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0776 Young Adult Literature
In this course, we will explore Young Adult Literature in depth to trace where adolescence and society cross, clash, mesh. We will read (and watch) across era and genre, exploring literature of the long adolescence through two-and-a-half centuries, prose narrative to graphic novel to forays into Instagram and TikTok. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: GSWS 0776
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0785 Queer Archives, Aesthetics, and Performance
This course focuses on questions of how to represent the queer past, which it approaches from several angles: through training in archival methods and in scholarly debates about historiographical ethics (or, in the words of David Halperin, "how to do the history of homosexuality"); through engagement with the work of artists who make archives central to their practice; and through lab-based training that aims to represent encounters with queer history through embodied performance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall, odd numbered years only
Also Offered As: THAR 0785
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0792 Graphic Nonfiction
This critical-creative seminar traces the rise of graphic nonfiction in a variety of genres: graphic memoir, graphic journalism, graphic essay, graphic self-help, and so on. Through a combination of critical and creative tasks, the course asks: how do we think and write not just with images but through images? No prior experience with comics or drawing is necessary. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0900 Artist in Residence
This course offers students the opportunity to study with a major figure in contemporary literature, culture, and the arts. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0984 Transfer Credit & Credit Away
Reserved for Transfer Credit and Credit Away electives (to be used in XCAT).
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0985 Study Abroad with Theory and Poetics
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 1 Theory and Poetics of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0986 Study Abroad with Difference and Diaspora
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 2 Difference and Diaspora of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0987 Study Abroad with Medieval/Renaissance
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 3 Medieval/Renaissance of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0988 Study Abroad with Literature of the Long 18th Century
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 4 Literature of the Long 18th Century of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0989 Study Abroad with 19th Century Literature
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 5 19th Century Literature of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0990 Study Abroad with 20th-21st Century Literature
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 6 20th & 21st Century Literature of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0991 Transfer Credit & Credit Away with Theory and Poetics
Transfer Credit & Credit Away number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 1 Theory and Poetics of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0992 Transfer Credit & Credit Away with Difference and Diaspora
Transfer Credit & Credit Away number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 2 Difference and Diaspora of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0993 Transfer Credit & Credit Away with Medieval/Renaissance
Transfer Credit & Credit Away number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 3 Medieval/Renaissance of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0994 Transfer Credit & Credit Away with Literature of the Long 18C
Transfer Credit & Credit Away number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 4 Literature of the Long 18th Century of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0995 Transfer Credit & Credit Away with 19th Century Literature
Transfer Credit & Credit Away number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 5 19th Century Literature of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0996 Transfer Credit & Credit Away with 20th/21st Century Literature
Transfer Credit & Credit Away number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 6 20th/21st Century Literature of the English major
1 Course Unit
ENGL 0999 Independent Study in Language and Literature
Supervised reading and research.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1002 The Bible As Literature
Successive generations have found the Bible to be a text which requires - even demands - extensive interpretation. This course explores the Bible as literature, considering such matters as the artistic arrangement and stylistic qualities of individual episodes as well as the larger thematic patterns of both the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha. A good part of the course is spent looking at the place of the Bible in cultural and literary history and the influence of such biblical figures as Adam and Eve, David, and Susanna on writers of poetry, drama, and fiction in the English and American literary traditions. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1009 Classical Traditions
A broad consideration of the ways in which writers and artists from the early modern era to the present day have responded to the classical tradition, borrowing from, imitating, questioning, and challenging their classical predecessors. Through modern reworkings of ancient epic, tragedy, biography, and lyric by authors ranging from Shakespeare and Racine to contemporary poets, painters, and filmmakers, we will ask what the terms "classical" and "tradition" might mean and will track the continuities and differences between antiquity and the modern world. Should we see ancient Greek and Roman culture as an inheritance, a valuable source of wealth bequeathed to the modern age? Or is there something wrong with that picture? How do ancient texts have to be adapted and transformed if they are to speak to modern conditions and concerns? This is an introductory-level course open to anyone who cares about the relationship between the present and the past.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 1700
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1010 Old English
This course introduces students to the powerful and influential corpus of Old English literature. We will read a wide variety of texts: short poems such as The Wonderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament and the passionate religious poem The Dream of The Rood; chronicles such as The Battle Of Maldon Against The Vikings, The Old Testament, Exodus and Bede's Conversion Of The English; and selections from the greatest of all English epics, Beowulf. Readings will be in Old English, and the first few weeks of the course will be devoted to mastering Old English prosody, vocabulary, and grammar (as well as a crash course on the early history of the English language). During the last few weeks we may read modern criticism of Old English poetry, or we will consider the modern poetic reception of Old English literature and explore theories and problems of translation, reading translations of Old English poems by Yeats, Auden, Tolkien, and Heaney. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1011 Medieval Literature and Culture
This course introduces students to four hundred years of English literary culture, from approximately 1100 to 1500. This period was marked by major transformations, not only with respect to government, law, religious practice, intellectual life, England's relation to the Continent (during the 100 Years War), the organization of society (especially after the Black Death), the circulation of literary texts, and the status of authors. Topics may include medieval women writers, manuscript production, literatures of revolt, courtly culture, Crusades, cross-Channel influences, and religious controversy. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1012 Romance
This course will focus on what is arguably the most extravagant, adventuresome, and fantastical of the literary genres: the Romance. We will read a number of medieval and renaissance romance narratives, in verse and prose, beginning with the Arthurian romances (Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Sir Gawain And The Green Knight) and continuing with as many (and as much) of the great renaissance romances as time will allow: Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, and Lady Mary Wroth's Urania. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1013 Chaucer: Poetry, Voice, and Interpretation
Watching Chaucer at work, modern poet Lavinia Greenlaw says, is like meeting English "before the paint has dried." Before rules (even of spelling) have hardened. Before live oral performance is subordinated to written record. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1013
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1014 King Arthur: Medieval to Modern
In this course, we will study nearly 1000 years of literature about King Arthur from around the world. We will think about what Arthurian legends mean to the way we write history and the ways in which we view our collective pasts (and futures). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 1014
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1015 Sagas and Skalds: Old Norse Literature in Translation
This course introduces students to the powerful and influential corpus of Old Norse literature and to the cultural and historical landscape of Viking and medieval Scandinavia. Students will explore mythological and heroic verse, court poetry, law codes, runic inscriptions, and the famed Icelandic sagas to develop a deeper understanding of one of the most significant literary traditions in high medieval Europe, and to myth-bust popular misconceptions about who 'the Vikings' were and how they lived. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1015
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1020 Literature Before 1660
This course will introduce students to key works of English literature written before 1660. It will explore the major literary genres of this period, as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. The course will examine how literature texts articulate changes in language and form, as well as in concepts of family, nation, and community during the medieval and early modern periods. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 1043
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1021 Introduction to Renaissance Literature and Culture
This course will survey the cultural history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Interdisciplinary in nature and drawing on the latest methodologies and insights of English studies, we will explore how aesthetics, politics, and social traditions shaped literature at this vital and turbulent time of English history. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1021
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1022 The Age of Milton
This course explores the literature of the 17th Century through the works of John Milton's major works (selected sonnets, Comus, Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes), and his contemporaries. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1030 18th-Century British Literature
An introduction to British literary and cultural history in the eighteenth century. Typically, this course will contain materials from the later seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries--from the Restoration and Glorious Revolution through the Englightenment, the American and French Revolutions, and the Napoloeonic Wars--though it need not cover the entire period. We will read plays, poetry and prose in order to understand the aesthetic, intellectual, social and political issues of literary production and achievement in this period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1040 The Romantic Period
This course offers an introduction to the literature of the Romantic period (ca. 1770-1830). Some versions of this course will incorporate European romantic writers, while others will focus exclusively on Anglo-American romanticism, and survey authors such as Austen, Blake, Brockden Brown, Byron, Coleridge, Emerson, Irving, Keats, Radcliffe, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 1041
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1045 Romantic and Victorian Poetry
This course will focus on (mostly) British poetry from the early Romantic period through the late Victorian era on the edge of modernism. We will practice different ways of reading as we discuss major and minor works in various forms, meters, and genres, along with significant movements in poetics and the social worlds that made them. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1051 19th-Century British Literature
In 1815 in the wake of the battle of Waterloo, Great Britain controlled a staggering quarter of the world's landmass and half of its gross national product. This course will begin with the Napoleonic Wars and this Regency aftermath to survey a century of British literature -- from Romanticism through the revolutions of 1848 and the Victorian and Edwardian periods to the beginning of the first World War. Most versions of this course will read both novels and poetry, often focusing on the relation between the two and their function within nineteenth century culture. Others may incorporate drama and non-fiction prose. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1052 19th-Century American Literature
A consideration of outstanding literary treatments of American culture from the early Federalist period to the beginnings of the First World War. We will traverse literary genres, reading autobiographies and travel accounts as well as fiction and poetry. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1055 Books on Film: Adapting the Victorians
This course considers how stories are told differently through different media and to different audiences, and how such differences inform the many decisions involved in the translation of works across media and across time. To do so, we will consider key literary works (novels, stories, plays) from Victorian literature as well as their adaptations for film and television. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 1055
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1056 Sherlock in the Multiverse
This course will consider the transmedia phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes. We will begin with his detective antecedents, we’ll then dive into Conan Doyle’s Victorian-era Sherlock, and finally explore Sherlock’s contemporary life in new novels, short stories, screenplays, tv series and computer games. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 1056
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1070 Modernisms and Modernities
This class explores the international emergence of modernism, typically from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. We will examine the links between modernity, the avant-garde, and various national modernisms that emerged alongside them. Resolutely transatlantic and open to French, Spanish, Italian, German, or Russian influences, this course assumes the very concept of Modernism to necessitate an international perspective focusing on the new in literature and the arts -- including film, the theatre, music, and the visual arts. The philosophies of modernism will also be surveyed and concise introductions provided to important thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, Sorel, Bergson, Freud, and Benjamin. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1070
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1071 Fashion and Modernity
In this class we will study the emergence of the Modernist concept of the "new" as a term also understood as "new fashion." We will move back and forth in time so as to analyze today’s changing scene with a view to identify contemporary accounts of the "new" in the context of the fashion industry. Our texts will include poetry, novels, and films. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ARTH 2889, COML 1072, FREN 1071, GRMN 1065
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1081 20th-Century British Literature
This course introduces major works in twentieth-century British literature. We will read across a range of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays, and will consider aesthetic movements such as modernism as well as historical contexts including the two World Wars, the decline of empire, and racial and sexual conflict. Authors treated might include: Conrad, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Forster, Shaw, Woolf, Auden, Orwell, Beckett, Achebe, Rhys, Synge, Naipaul, Rushdie, Heaney, and Walcott. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1081
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1092 Contemporary American Literature
The readings for this course expose students to a wide range of American fiction and poetry since World War II, giving considerable attention to recent work. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1092, CIMS 1092
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1093 Contemporary US Poetry and Experimental Writing
This course introduces students to Contemporary US Poetry and Experimental Writing. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1094 Literature as Marketplace
An introduction to contemporary American and British literature with a focus on the economic dimensions of the literary world. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1095 Novel to Film Adaptation
This is an intermediate-level course centered on the study of novels and their film adaptations. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1111 Irish Literature
This course will provide an introduction to modern Irish literature, focusing on the tension between Ireland's violent history and its heroic mythology. This tension leaves its mark not only on the ravaged landscape, but also on the English language, which displays its "foreignness" most strongly in the hands of Irish writers. Readings will span the genres of poetry, drama, fiction, and history, and will include works by Sommerville and Ross, Yeats, George Moore, Joyce, Synge, O'Casey, Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and Brian Friel. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1120 Literature of the Americas to 1900
This course examines U.S. literature and culture in the context of the global history of the Americas. Historical moments informing the course will range from the origins of the Caribbean slave-and-sugar trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the U.S.-Mexico and Spanish-American wars. Readings will include works by authors such as Frances Calderon de la Barca, Frederick Douglass, Helen Hunt Jackson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jose Marti, Herman Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Felix Varela. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 1202
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1130 American Fiction
Some versions of this course survey the American novel from its beginnings to the present, focusing on the development of the form, while others concentrate on the development of American fiction in one or two periods. Readings may include novels by writers such as Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Wharton, Morrison, Twain, James, Adams, Chopin, Howells, Norris, Whitman, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Ellison, and Nabokov. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1131 Crime and Criminality in Early America
This seminar examines the complex cultural history of crime and criminality in early America. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 1131, GSWS 1131
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1140 Modern America
This course is concerned with American literature and cultural life from the turn of the century until about 1950. The course emphasizes the period between the two World Wars and emphasizes as well the intellectual and cultural milieu in which the writers found themselves. Works by the following writers are usually included: James, Eliot, Frost, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, West, Stevens, DuBois, Williams, Wharton, Stein, West, Moore, and Hemingway. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1145 Rewriting American Classics
This course will examine the way of number of classic American literary works, by authors ranging from Melville and Dickinson to Faulkner, have been vividly rewritten by contemporary writers and filmmakers. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1179 World Literature
How do we think 'the world' as such? Globalizing economic paradigms encourage one model that, while it connects distant regions with the ease of a finger-tap, also homogenizes the world, manufacturing patterns of sameness behind simulations of diversity. Our current world-political situation encourages another model, in which fundamental differences are held to warrant the consolidation of borders between Us and Them, "our world" and "theirs." This course begins with the proposal that there are other ways to encounter the world, that are politically compelling, ethically important, and personally enriching--and that the study of literature can help tease out these new paths. Through the idea of World Literature, this course introduces students to the appreciation and critical analysis of literary texts, with the aim of navigating calls for universality or particularity (and perhaps both) in fiction and film. "World literature" here refers not merely to the usual definition of "books written in places other than the US and Europe, "but any form of cultural production that explores and pushes at the limits of a particular world, that steps between and beyond worlds, or that heralds the coming of new worlds still within us, waiting to be born. And though, as we read and discuss our texts, we will glide about in space and time from the inner landscape of a private mind to the reaches of the farthest galaxies, knowledge of languages other than English will not be required, and neither will any prior familiary with the literary humanities. In the company of drunken kings, botanical witches, ambisexual alien lifeforms, and storytellers who've lost their voice, we will reflect on, and collectively navigate, our encounters with the faraway and the familiar--and thus train to think through the challenges of concepts such as translation, narrative, and ideology. Texts include Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. LeGuin, Salman Rushdie, Werner Herzog, Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Hoban, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Arundhathi Roy, and Abbas Kiarostami.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CLST 1602, COML 1191
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1190 Introduction to Postcolonial Literature
English is a global language with a distinctly imperial history, and this course serves as an essential introduction to literary works produced in or about the former European colonies. The focus will be poetry, film, fiction and non fiction and at least two geographic areas spanning the Americas, South Asia, the Caribbean and Africa as they reflect the impact of colonial rule on the cultural representations of identity, nationalism, race, class and gender. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 1190, COML 1190
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1191 Community, Freedom, Violence: Writing the South Asian City
The South Asian city—as space, symbol, and memory—is the subject of this course. Through a range of readings in English and in translation, we will gain a sense for the history of the city and the ways in which it is a setting for protest and nostalgia, social transformation and solitary wandering. We will see reflections of the city in the detective novels sold in its train stations, the stories scribbled in its cafes, and films produced in its backlots. Readings will attempt to address urban spaces across South Asia through a range of works, which we will examine in the context of secondary readings, including histories and ethnological works that take up life in the modern city. Students will finish this course prepared to pursue projects dealing with the urban from multiple disciplinary perspectives. This course is suitable for anyone interested in the culture, society, or literature of South Asia, and assumes no background in South Asian languages.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1121, SAST 1120, URBS 1120
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1200 African-American Literature
An introduction to African-American literature, ranging across a wide spectrum of moments, methodologies, and ideological postures, from Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1200, GSWS 1201
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1210 Literatures of Jazz
That modernism is steeped as much in the rituals of race as of innovation is most evident in the emergence of the music we have come to know as jazz, which results from collaborations and confrontations taking place both across and within the color line. In this course we will look at jazz and the literary representations it engendered in order to understand modern American culture. We will explore a dizzying variety of forms, including autobiography and album liner notes, biography, poetry, fiction, and cinema. We'll examine how race, gender, and class influenced the development of jazz music, and then will use jazz music to develop critical approaches to literary form. Students are not required to have a critical understanding of music. Class will involve visits from musicians and critics, as well as field trips to some of Philadelphia's most vibrant jazz venues. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1210
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1220 Caribbean Literature
This course will introduce students to Caribbean literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 0082, COML 0082
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1260 Latinx Literature and Culture
This course offers a broad introduction to the study of Latinx culture. We will examine literature, theater, visual art, and popular cultural forms, including murals, poster art, graffiti, guerrilla urban interventions, novels, poetry, short stories, and film. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality as they shape Latinx experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course will include immigration and border policy, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, Latinx feminisms, queer latinidades, ideology, identity formation, and social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2679, COML 1260, GSWS 1260, LALS 1260
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1270 Asian American Literature
An overview of Asian American literature from its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century to the present. This course covers a wide range of Asian American novels, plays, and poems, situating them in the contexts of American history and minority communities and considering the variety of formal strategies these different texts take. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ASAM 0103
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1271 American Musical Theatre
The American musical is an unapologetically popular art form, but many of the works that come from this tradition have advanced and contributed to the canon of theatre as a whole. In this course we will focus on both music and texts to explore ways in which the musical builds on existing theatrical traditions, as well as alters and reshapes them. Finally, it is precisely because the musical is a popular theatrical form that we can discuss changing public tastes, and the financial pressures inherent in mounting a production. Beginning with early roots in operetta, we will survey the works of prominent writers in the American musical theatre, including Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Hart, Hammerstein, Bernstein, Sondheim and others. Class lecture/discussions will be illustrated with recorded examples.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 1271, THAR 1271
Mutually Exclusive: THAR 0271
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1272 Topics in Asian American Literature and Culture
This seminar explores Asian American literature and culture intensively; specific course topics will vary from year to year. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ASAM 1210
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1273 Dark Comedy in Theatre and Film
This course will examine the "troublesome genre" of dark comedy by looking at the ways in which theatre and film use comic and tragic structures and traditions to explore concepts and stories seemingly at odds with those traditions. Although not always organized chronologically in time, we will examine the formal and structural characteristics of tragicomedy by tracing its development, from some of its earliest roots in Roman comedy, to its manifestation in contemporary films and plays. Aside from close readings of plays and analysis of films, we will read selected critical essays and theory to enhance our understanding of how dark comedies subvert categories and expectations. We will look at how dark comedies affect audiences and read sections of plays aloud in class. Issues to be considered include comparing the way the genre translates across theatre and film (adaptation) and examining the unique placement of the genre at the heart of contemporary American culture. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with creating tragicomic effect through performance in their presentations. The class is a seminar, with required participation in discussions. Other assignments include an 8-10 page paper and a presentation. We will read plays by authors as diverse as Plautus, Anton Chekhov, and Lynn Nottage, and filmmakers including Charlie Chaplin, Sofia Coppola, and Bong Joon-ho.
Also Offered As: CIMS 1273, THAR 1273
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1279 Women in Theatre and Performance
What is feminist theatre? How do artists use live performance to provoke not only thought and feeling, but also social, personal, and political change? This course will examine a wide array of plays and performances by and about women; these pieces are, in turn, serious, hilarious, outrageous, poignant--and always provocative. Our focus will be on English-language works from the late 20th century to the present (#metoo) moment. We will read these performance texts and/or view them on stage/screen; we will also read essays that provide contextual background on feminist theatre theory and history. Throughout the semester, we will engage diverse perspectives on women and race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender identity; the issues we encounter will also include marriage and motherhood, career and community, feminism and friendship, and patriarchy and power. The class will take full advantage of any related events occurring on campus or in the city, and will feature visits with guest speakers. Students will have the opportunity to pursue research on their own areas of interest (some recent examples are "women in comedy," trans performance, drag kings, feminist directing, etc.).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 1279, THAR 1279
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1289 Jewish Films and Literature
From the 1922 silent film "Hungry Hearts" through the first "talkie," "The Jazz Singer," produced in 1927, and beyond "Schindler's List," Jewish characters have confronted the problems of their Jewishness on the silver screen for a general American audience. Alongside this Hollywood tradition of Jewish film, Yiddish film blossomed from independent producers between 1911 and 1939, and interpreted literary masterpieces, from Shakespeare's "King Lear" to Sholom Aleichem's "Teyve the Dairyman," primarily for an immigrant, urban Jewish audience. In this course, we will study a number of films and their literary sources (in fiction and drama), focusing on English language and Yiddish films within the framework of three dilemmas of interpretation: a) the different ways we "read" literature and film, b) the various ways that the media of fiction, drama, and film "translate" Jewish culture, and c) how these translations of Jewish culture affect and are affected by their implied audience.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1090, GRMN 1090, JWST 1090
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1295 Italian History on the Table
"Mangia, mangia!" is an expression commonly associated with the American stereotype of Italians, whose cuisine is popular throughout the world. But is the perceived Italian love of food the same in the United States and in Italy? Is it an issue of quantity or quality? Of socioeconomics, politics, education, health ...? Global, local or maybe, glocal? In this course, we will explore the role of food in Italian culture and in the shaping of the Italic identity, in Italy and abroad since antiquity. We will trace its evolution through literary documents, works of art, music and film, as well as family recipes and cooking tools; from ancient Rome to Dante and Boccaccio, to Stanley Tucci's Big Night; from court banquets to food trucks that, while always a feature at Italian fairs and open air markets, are now being "Americanized" under the influence of American cooking shows on Italian television. This course will be taught in English. It is an OBL (Object Based Learning) Course and will include class visits, in person and/or virtual, to the Penn Museum and to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It counts also as a credit for the minor in Global Medieval Studies.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ITAL 1920
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1296 Black Italy: Transnational Identities and Narratives in Afro-Italian Literature
This course focuses on how the migration movements to Italy, mainly from the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa in the '80s and '90s contributed to change Italy's status and image. From a country of emigration to other parts of the world, Italy became - as many historians, geographers, and scholars have observed - an immigration site, playing a pivotal role in the African diaspora. In the shadow of Italy's colonialist heritage (a past that Italy still has not fully confronted), these phenomena of mass migration challenge, complicate, and develop the notion of Italian-ness and undermine the fixity of an Italian identity in favor of multicultural and transnational identities. This course focuses on several Black Italian artists, writers, filmmakers, and activists of Somali, Eritrean, Tunisian, Ethiopian, and Egyptian origins (e.g. migrants or children of immigrants who were born or raised in Italy and children of mixed-race unions) who contribute to broaden the definition of Italian-ness and to challenge its racial, social, and cultural boundaries. Students will analyze short stories, novels, documentaries, songs, blogs, journal articles by Igiaba Scego, Cristina Ali Farah, Gabriella Ghermandi, Medhin Paolos, Fred Kudjo Kuwornu, Amir Issaa, Amara Lakhous, Pap Khouma, and Kaha Mohamed Aden, among others. They describe their multicultural identities, their senses of belonging, their feelings for the place that is depriving them of foundational rights (such as citizenship or a legal status), their nostalgia for their homeland or the countries where their parents were born, their fights to find or create a social and literal space where being recognized not as foreigners or worse as "clandestini." Their works offer an original, complex, and multilayered depiction of contemporary Italy and its social and cultural changes, where the African community is becoming larger and better represented. Some questions this course will ask include: what are the historical and geographical components of blackness in Italy? How, if at all, have these phenomena of migration changed Italian identity? How do black Italians live within the context of anti-blackness? How do these Italian writers and artists relate to African American histories and experiences of diaspora? How can African Italian literature contribute to a deeper understanding of the Black diaspora in Europe and elsewhere? The course will pursue answers to these questions by exploring issues of race, color, gender, class, nationality, identity, citizenship, social justice in post- colonial Italy while drawing on related disciplines such as Geography, Mediterranean Studies, Diaspora Studies, Post-Colonialism, and Media and Cultural Studies. Course taught in English. Course Material in English.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2084, ITAL 2510
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1299 First-Year Seminar: Italian American Studies
Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 0090, GSWS 0090, ITAL 0090
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1300 Theories of Gender and Sexuality
What makes men and women different? What is the nature of desire? This course introduces students to a long history of speculation about the meaning and nature of gender and sexuality -- a history fundamental to literary representation and the business of making meaning. We will consider theories from Aristophane's speech in Plato's Symposium to recent feminist and queer theory. Authors treated might include: Plato, Shakespeare, J. S. Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Catherine MacKinnon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Leo Bersani, Gloria Anzaldua, David Halperin, Cherrie Moraga, Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak, Diana Fuss, Rosemary Hennesy, Chandra Tadpole Mohanty, and Susan Stryker. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 1300
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1310 Gender, Sexuality, and Literature
This course will focus on questions of gender difference and of sexual desire in a range of literary works, paying special attention to works by women and treatments of same-sex desire. More fundamentally, the course will introduce students to questions about the relation between identity and representation. We will attend in particular to intersections between gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation, and will choose from a rich vein of authors. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1310, GSWS 1310
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1330 Writing Women, Part 1
This is a sophomore-level course designed for students who are curious about the literary and social history of women’s writing between 1660 and 1700. We’ll survey the work of influential writers of the time period who identified as female, and add a few texts by men writing about women. We’ll consider how women's writing participated in the many worlds from which women were excluded — the worlds of inherited literary tradition, formal education, commerce, religious debate, and contemporary politics, to name a few. The course focuses on authors resident in “Great Britain” (a national entity still under development during this time, as we shall see) between the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the turn of the eighteenth century. Another course, ENGL 1331, focuses on 1700-1790. Students may take one or both of these stand-alone courses. No prerequisites required. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: GSWS 1330
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1331 Writing Women, Part 2: Sexuality and Power, 1700-1799
"Sexuality and Power” is an intermediate-level course organized as a collaborative seminar. The eighteenth century (1700-1799) in Britain was an exciting time. Literacy's long-policed borders were being relaxed, and publication was allowed to flourish largely free of censorship. As the set of those allowed to participate in public discourse slowly expanded, new opportunities arose for literate women. We will focus on the work of important female-identified writers from the period. Students from all disciplines are welcome. There are no prerequisites. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: GSWS 1331
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1395 Gender and Popular Culture
This course examines the representation of gender in American popular culture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine texts across television and film, pop music, popular print media, social media, advertising, and fashion, and we will engage the historic relationship between these pop texts and sociopolitical movements. We will also read critical texts from the feminist and queer tradition on desire and sexuality, race, religion, and political power. And we will consider how the methods and modalities of gender studies can inform our understanding of pop culture. Students are responsible for three short papers of 3-5 pages and a final paper of 10-15 pages that showcase their original research around the themes of the class.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2400
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1400 Introduction to Literary Theory
This course introduces students to major issues in the history of literary theory, and provides an excellent foundation for the English major or minor. Treating the work of Plato and Aristotle as well as contemporary criticism, we will consider the fundamental issues that arise from representation, making meaning, appropriation and adaptation, categorization and genre, historicity and genealogy, and historicity and temporality. We will consider major movements in the history of theory including the "New" Criticism of the 1920's and 30's, structuralism and post-structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis, feminism, cultural studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1400, GRMN 1303
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1409 Introduction to Literary Study
This course has three broad aims: first, it will introduce students to a selection of compelling contemporary narratives; second, it will provide prospective students of literature and film, as well as interested students headed for other majors, with fundamental skills in literary, visual, and cultural analysis; and, third, it will encourage a meditation on the function of literature and culture in our world, where commodities, people, and ideas have been constantly in motion. Questions for discussion will therefore include: the meaning of terms like "globalization," "translation," and "world literature"; the transnational reach and circulation of texts; migration and engagement with "others"; violence, trauma, and memory; terrorism and the state; and the ethic of cosmopolitanism. Our collective endeavor will be to think about narrative forms as modes of mediating and engaging with the vast and complex world we inhabit today. See COML website for current semester's description at https://complit.sas.upenn.edu/course-list/2019A
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1000
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1425 Freud's Objects
How do we look at objects? And which stories can objects tell? These are questions that have been asked quite regularly by Art Historians or Museum Curators, but they take a central place within the context of psychoanalytic studies as well. The seminar "Freud's Objects" will offer an introduction to Sigmund Freud's life and times, as well as to psychoanalytic studies. We will focus on objects owned by Freud that he imbued with special significance, and on Freud's writings that focus on specific objects. Finally, we will deal with a re-interpretation of the "object" in psychoanalytic theory, via a discussion of texts by British psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3560, CLST 3509, COML 2052, GRMN 1015
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1427 Wild Things: Children’s Literature and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child
This course, framed as a psychoanalytic study of the child, focuses on English-language children’s literature from the 19th Century to the present. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 1427, GSWS 1427
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1445 Universal Language: From the Tower of Babel to Artifical Intelligence
This is a course in European intellectual history. It explores the historical trajectory, from antiquity to the present day, of the idea that there once was, and again could be, a universal and perfect language among the human race. If recovered, it can explain the origins and meaning of human experience, and can enable universal understanding and world peace. The tantalizing question of the possibility of a universal language have been vital and thought-provoking throughout the history of humanity. The idea that the language spoken by Adam and Eve was a language which perfectly expressed the nature of all earthly objects and concepts has occupied the minds of intellectuals for almost two millennia. In defiance of the Christian biblical myth of the confusion of languages and nations at the Tower of Babel, they have over and over tried to overcome divine punishment and discover the path back to harmonious existence. By recovering or recreating a universal language, theologians hoped to be able to experience the divine; philosophers believed that it would enable apprehension of the laws of nature, while mystic cabbalists saw in it direct access to hidden knowledge. In reconstructing a proto-language, 19th-century Indo-Europeanist philologists saw the means to study the early stages of human development. Even in the 20th century, romantic idealists, such as the inventor of Esperanto Ludwik Zamenhof, strived to construct languages to enable understanding among estranged nations. For writers and poets of all times, from Cyrano de Bergerac to Velimir Khlebnikov, the idea of a universal and perfect language has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Today, this idea echoes in theories of universal and generative grammars, in approaching English as a global tongue, and in various attempts to create artificial languages, even a language for cosmic communication. Each week we address a particular period and set of theories to learn about universal language projects, but above all, the course examines fundamental questions of what language is and how it functions in human society.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 0095, HIST 0822, REES 1177
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1449 War and Representation
This class will explore complications of representing war in the 20th and 21st centuries. War poses problems of perception, knowledge, and language. The notional "fog of war" describes a disturbing discrepancy between agents and actions of war; the extreme nature of the violence of warfare tests the limits of cognition, emotion, and memory; war's traditional dependence on declaration is often warped by language games--"police action," "military intervention," "nation-building," or palpably unnamed and unacknowledged state violence. Faced with the radical uncertainty that forms of war bring, modern and contemporary authors have experimented in historically, geographically, experientially and artistically particular ways, forcing us to reconsider even seemingly basic definitions of what a war story can be. Where does a war narrative happen? On the battlefield, in the internment camp, in the suburbs, in the ocean, in the ruins of cities, in the bloodstream? Who narrates war? Soldiers, refugees, gossips, economists, witnesses, bureaucrats, survivors, children, journalists, descendants and inheritors of trauma, historians, those who were never there? How does literature respond to the rise of terrorist or ideology war, the philosophical and material consequences of biological and cyber wars, the role of the nuclear state? How does the problem of war and representation disturb the difference between fiction and non-fiction? How do utilitarian practices of representation--propaganda, nationalist messaging, memorialization, xenophobic depiction--affect the approaches we use to study art? Finally, is it possible to read a narrative barely touched or merely contextualized by war and attend to the question of war's shaping influence? The class will concentrate on literary objects--short stories, and graphic novels--as well as film and television. Students of every level and major are welcome in and encouraged to join this class, regardless of literary experience.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1050, REES 1179
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1509 Science and Literature
Science fiction has become the mythology of modern technological civilization, providing vivid means for imagining (and proclaiming) the shape of things to come. This interdisciplinary seminar will consider SF in multiple manifestations -- literature, film and TV shows, visual art and architecture. We will debate how the genre has shaped ideas about scientific knowledge, the position of humans in the universe, and our possible futures by examining themes including time travel, robots and androids, alien encounters, extraterrestrial journeys, and the nature of intelligent life. This seminar will consider SF from the perspective of the history of science and technology: critically and comparatively, with a primary focus on social and cultural contexts in addition to literary aspects.
Spring
Also Offered As: STSC 1101
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1521 In Dark Times: The Dystopian Imagination in Literature and Film
This CWiC course will offer a guided introduction to the one of the most resilient genres of the human imagination: dystopian and apocalyptic fiction. Like a group of survivors huddled around a campfire, we will turn to literature and cinema to debate some of the big questions about the future of science, technology, religion, and capitalism. This course is designed as a Critical Speaking Seminar, and the majority of class assignments will be devoted to oral presentations: including a Parliamentary-style debate and a video essay. We will begin by reading some of the early, influential works in the dystopian genre by authors like Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley. Next, we will explore the paranoid, schizophrenic world of Cold-War-era dystopias by J.G Ballard, Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler. We will conclude by reading contemporary climate fiction by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Kim Stanley Robinson. Alongside the literary material, we will also track the changing nature of dystopian cinema-- from classics like Metropolis (1927) and La Jetee (1962) to the latest Zombie film. By the end of course, students will have a firm grasp of the history of the genre and will be able to draw on this knowledge to effectively debate issues related to privacy, big business, animal rights, climate change, migration etc.
Also Offered As: CIMS 0050
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1579 Sustainability & Utopianism
This seminar explores how the humanities can contribute to discussions of sustainability. We begin by investigating the contested term itself, paying close attention to critics and activists who deplore the very idea that we should try to sustain our, in their eyes, dystopian present, one marked by environmental catastrophe as well as by an assault on the educational ideals long embodied in the humanities. We then turn to classic humanist texts on utopia, beginning with More's fictive island of 1517. The "origins of environmentalism" lie in such depictions of island edens (Richard Grove), and our course proceeds to analyze classic utopian tests from American, English, and German literatures. Readings extend to utopian visions from Europe and America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as literary and visual texts that deal with contemporary nuclear and flood catastrophes. Authors include: Bill McKibben, Jill Kerr Conway, Christopher Newfield, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Owens, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ayn Rand, Christa Wolf, and others.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1160, ENVS 1050, GRMN 1160, STSC 1160
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1589 Liquid Histories and Floating Archives
Climate change transforms the natural and built environments, and it is re-shaping how we understand, make sense, and care for our past. Climate changes history. This course explores the Anthropocene, the age when humans are remaking earth's systems, from an on-water perspective. In on-line dialogue and video conferences with research teams in port cities on four continents, this undergraduate course focuses on Philadelphia as one case study of how rising waters are transfiguring urban history, as well as its present and future. Students projects take them into the archives at the Independence Seaport Museum and at Bartram's Garden. Field trips by boat on the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers and on land to the Port of Philadelphia and to the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge invite transhistorical dialogues about how colonial and then industrial-era energy and port infrastructure transformed the region's vast tidal marshlands wetlands. Excursions also help document how extreme rain events, storms, and rising waters are re-making the built environment, redrawing lines that had demarcated land from water. In dialogue with one another and invited guest artists, writers, and landscape architects, students final projects consider how our waters might themselves be read and investigated as archives. What do rising seas subsume and hold? Whose stories do they tell? What floats to the surface?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 1440, COML 1140, ENVS 1440, GRMN 1140, HIST 0872
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1595 Ecocritical Lit: Nature, Ecology and the Literary Imagination
This course introduces students to ecocritical literature. It is an exploration of how language and literature engages with and shapes our relations to and our understandings of the natural world. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ENVS 1410
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1599 Spirituality in the Age of Global Warming: Designing a Digital Mapping Project in Scalar
We are living in the midst of one of the most severe crises in the Earth's history. Science confirms the glaciers are melting, hurricanes are growing more intense, and the oceans are rising. But there is also a deeply spiritual dimension to global warming that does not factor into the scientific explanations of the Anthropocene. "Spirituality" will be defined not in terms of one particular religion, but in relationship to a passionate study of the environment and nature. Readings will include materials from both the sciences and the humanities such as Donella Meadows's Thinking in Systems, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, and films such as Black Fish and Wale Rider. The theoretical focus of the course will be how "multispecies partnerships" can help us better understand and mitigate the effects of Climate Change. This class will work collaboratively on a digital archive with an interactive mapping interface designed in Scalar. This newly developed platform allows for the creation of multimedia exhibits that will document how Global Warming is affecting coral reefs in the tropics, glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic, rainforests in the Amazon and rivers of Philadelphia. Students will also work individually to design interactive maps on the Scalar platform documenting their own more personal interactions with the environment.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENVS 2430, RELS 2460
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1600 Cultures of The Book
The impact of various technologies (from writing to various forms of manuscript to print to electronics) on the way the written word gives shape to a culture. The emphasis is on western cultures from Plato to the present, but participation by students with interest or expertise in non-western cultures will be of great value to the group as a whole. The course offers an ideal perspective from which students can consider meta-issues surrounding their own special interests in a wide variety of fields, as well as learn to think about the way in which traditional fields of study are linked by common inherited cultural practices and constructions. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1609 Introduction to Print Culture
This course examines the writing, printing, dissemination, interpretation, and censorship of specific works in Early modern England, France, Italy, Spain and America. The course is an introduction to the history of authorship, publishing, and reading at the age of print culture from Gutenberg to Franklin. All the texts analyzed in the course (the Bible, Montaigne's Essays, Shakespeare's plays, Don Quixote, Pamela among them) are available in English but the course pays particular attention to the massive range of translations in early modern period. its main focus are the relation between the "printing revolution" and scribal culture, censorship and transgression, the birth of the author and collaborative writing, and reading practices from humanist techniques to reading of the novels. The course is based on the exceptional collections of rare books and manuscripts at Penn and in Philadelphia and it is taught in the Van Pelt Library.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 2203
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1650 Introduction to Digital Humanities
This course provides an introduction to foundational skills common in digital humanities (DH). It covers a range of new technologies and methods and will empower scholars in literary studies and across humanities disciplines to take advantage of established and emerging digital research tools. Students will learn basic coding techniques that will enable them to work with a range data including literary texts and utilize techniques such as text mining, network analysis, and other computational approaches. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1650, HIST 0870
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1670 Data Science for the Humanities
This course will provide you with a practical introduction to data-driven inquiry in the humanities, with a focus on statistical analysis in the Python programming language. (No prior knowledge of programming is required or expected). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Spring
Mutually Exclusive: PHYS 1100
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1710 Rise of the Novel
This course explores the history of the British novel and the diverse strategie of style, structure, characterization, and narrative techniques it has deployed since the late seventeenth century. While works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will form the core of the reading, some versions of this course will include twentieth-century works. All will provide students with the opportunity to test the advantages and limitations of a variety of critical approaches to the novel as a genre. Readings may include works by Behn, Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Lennox, Smollett, Burney, Scott, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Rhys, Greene, Naipaul, Carter, Rushdie, and Coetzee. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1720 18th-Century Novel
This survey of the novel addresses key questions about the novel's "rise" in the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as attending to the cultural conditions that attended this new literary from. How did the concurrent "rise" of the middle classes and the emergence of an increasingly female reading public affect the form and preoccupations of early novels? What role did institutions like literary reviews, libraries, and the church play in the novel's early reception? While readings will vary from course to course, students should expect to read such authors as Austen, Behn, Brockden Brown, Burney, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Rowlandson, Rowson, Scott, and Smollett. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1730 19th-Century Novel
During the nineteenth century the novel became the dominant literary form of its day, supplanting poetry and drama on both sides of the Atlantic. In this introduction to the novelists of the period, we will read the writers who secured the novel's cultural respectability and economic prominence. Likely authors will include Austen, the Brontes, Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thackeray, Scott, and Stowe. The course will explore the themes, techniques, and styles of the nineteeth-century novel. It will focus not only on the large structural and thematic patterns and problems within each novel but also on the act of reading as a historically specific cultural ritual in itself. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1740 20th-Century British Novel
This course traces the development of the novel across the twentieth-century. The course will consider the formal innovations of the modern novel (challenges to realism, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, etc.) in relation to major historical shifts in the period. Authors treated might include: Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Forster, Woolf, Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, Achebe, Greene, Rhys, Baldwin, Naipaul, Pynchon, Rushdie, and Morrison. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1740
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1745 Writing the Self: Life-Writing, Fiction, Representation
This course investigates how people try to understand who they are by writing about their lives. It will cover a broad range of forms, including memoirs, novels, essay films, and even celebrity autobiographies. The course will be international and in focus and will ask how the notion of self may shift, not only according to the demands of different genres, but in different literary, linguistic, and social contexts. Questions probed will include the following: How does a writer's language--or languages--shape how they think of themselves? To what extent is a sense of self and identity shaped by exclusion and othering? Is self-writing a form of translation and performance, especially in multilingual contexts? What can memoir teach us about the ways writers navigate global literary institutions that shape our knowledge of World Literature? How do various forms of life-writing enable people on the margins, whether sexual, gendered, or racial, to craft narratives that encapsulate their experience? Can telling one's own story bring joy, affirmation, and greater transcultural or even global understanding? In sum, this course proposes to illuminate the many ways in which writing becomes meaningful for those who take it up. The format of the seminar will require students to offer oral presentations on the readings and invite them to craft their own experiences and memories in inventive narrative forms.
Spring, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: COML 0015, GSWS 0051
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1800 Intro to Poetry and Poetics
What is poetry and what place does it have among literary forms? What is its relation to culture, history, and our sense of speakers and audiences? This course will focus on various problems in poetic practice and theory, ranging from ancient theories of poetry of Plato and Aristotle to contemporary problems in poetics. In some semesters a particular school of poets may be the focus; in others a historical issue of literary transmission, or a problem of poetic genres, such as lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetry, may be emphasized. The course will provide a basic knowledge of scansion in English with some sense of the historical development of metrics. This course is a good foundation for those who want to continue to study poetry in literary history and for creative writers concentrating on poetry. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1810 Sounding Poetry
Never before has poetry been so inescapable. Hip hop, the soundtrack of our times, has made rhyme, meter, and word-play part of our daily lives. How did this happen? This course ranges through oral and lyric traditions in Europe, the Americas, and the Commonwealth. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 1810, COML 1810
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1820 British Poetry 1660 - 1914
This course provides students with a survey of British poetry and poetics from the Restoration to the Modern period, and usually will include writers ranging from Aphra Behn and Alexander Pope to Thomas Hardy. Typically, this course will contain materials from the later seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries--from the Restoration and Glorious Revolution through the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, and the Napoloeonic Wars--though it need not cover the entire period. We will read plays, poetry and prose in order to understand the aesthetic, intellectual, social and political issues of literary production and achievement in this period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1830 American Poetry
Some versions of this course survey American poetry from the colonial period to the present, while others begin with Whitman and Dickinson and move directly into the 20th century and beyond. Typically students read and discuss the poetry of Williams, Stein, Niedecker, H.D., Pound, Stevens, Fearing, Rakoksi, McKay, Cullen, Wilbur, Plath, Rich, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Waldman, Creeley, Ashberry, O'Hara, Corman, Bernstein, Howe, Perelman, Silliman, and Retallack. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1840 20th-Century Poetry
From abstraction to beat, from socialism to negritude, from expressionism to ecopoetry, from surrealism to visual poetry, from collage to digital poetry, the poetry of the twentieth century has been characterized by both the varieties of its forms and the range of its practitioners. This course will offer a broad overview of many of the major trends and a few minor eddies in the immensely rich, wonderfully varied, ideologically and aesthetically charged field. The course will cover many of the radical poetry movements and individual innovations, along with the more conventional and idiosyncratic work, and will provide examples of political, social, ethnic, and national poetries, both in the Americas and Europe, and beyond to the rest of the world. While most of the poetry covered will be in English, works in translation, and indeed the art of translation, will be an essential component the course. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1840
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1859 The Play: Structure, Style, Meaning
How does one read a play? Theatre, as a discipline, focuses on the traditions of live performance. In those traditions, a play text must be read not only as a piece of literature, but as a kind of "blueprint" from which productions are built. This course will introduce students to a variety of approaches to reading plays and performance pieces. Drawing on a wide range of dramatic texts from different periods and places, we will examine how plays are made, considering issues such as structure, genre, style, character, and language, as well as the use of time, space, and theatrical effects. Although the course is devoted to the reading and analysis of plays, we will also view selected live and/or filmed versions of several of the scripts we study, assessing their translation from page to stage.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1859, THAR 0103
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1860 Early Drama
Early drama in English had its roots as much in Christianity as in Classical antiquity. What grew into the theater of Shakespeare began as networks of strolling players and church authorities in market towns sponsoring cycles of "miracle" and "mystery" plays. This course will introduce students to major dramatic works of the medieval and early modern periods, including plays written for the public stage, closet dramas, masques, mayoral pageants and other kinds of performances. The course will also pay attention to the development of different dramatic genres during these periods, as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. Students thus will explore the history of drama in English through the renaissance to the closing of the theaters in 1641 and their eventual reopening in 1660. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1870 Drama from 1660 - 1840
This course surveys drama from the Restoration through the Romantic period, and in so doing explores arguably the most tumultuous period of British and American Theater history. These years saw the reopening of the theaters in London in 1660 after their having been closed through two decades of Civil War and Puritan rule. They witnessed the introduction of actresses to the stage, the development of scenery and the modern drop-apron stage, the establishment of theatrical monopolies in 1660 and stringent censorship in 1737, and the gradual introduction, acceptance, and eventual celebration of the stage in America. Perhaps most importantly, they oversaw some of the best comedies and farces in the English language, the introduction of pantomime and the two-show evening, sustained experimentation with music and spectacle on stage, and the transformation of tragedy into a star vehicle for actors and actresses like David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, John Philip Kemble, and Edmund Kean. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1875 Theatre, History, Culture II: Romantics, Realists and Revolutionaries
This course investigates the history of theatre practice from the end of the Eighteenth-Century to the present, with an emphasis on interplay of mainstream practices with the newly emerging aesthetics of acting, scenography, and theatrical theory, and the interplay of popular entertainment and audiences with the self-defined aesthetic elitism of the Avant Garde. Among the aesthetics and phenomena we will examine are romanticism and melodrama; bourgeois realism and revolutionary naturalism; emotional-realist acting; the reaction against realism; political theatre; physical theatre; theatre and media; non-dramatic theatre; and theatre that challenges long-standing categories of national identity, empire, gender, and sexuality.
Also Offered As: THAR 0102
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1880 African American Drama: From the 1920's to the present
This course will introduce students to Pulitzer-prize winning plays such as Lynn Nottage's Sweat, groundbreaking plays such as Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, as well as less known plays that show the wide range of form and themes in 20th and 21st century African American drama. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1880, THAR 1880
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1890 On the Stage and in the Streets: An Introduction to Performance Studies
What do Hamilton, RuPaul’s Drag Race, political protest, TikTok Ratatouille, and Queen Elizabeth’s funeral have in common? They all compose repertoires of performance. From artistic performances in theatres, galleries, and concert halls to an individual’s comportment in everyday life, to sporting events, celebrations, courtroom proceedings, performance studies explores what happens when embodied activities are repeatable and given to be seen. In this course we ask: what is performance? How do we describe, analyze, and interpret it? What do theatre and everyday life have in common? How does performance legitimize or challenge the exercise of power? How has social media shifted our understanding of the relationship of our daily lives to performance? How does culture shape what is considered to be performance and how it functions? What isn’t performance? Throughout the semester students will apply key readings in performance theory to case studies drawn from global repertoires of contemporary and historical performance. In addition to analyzing artistic performances, we will also consider sporting events, celebrations, political events, and the performance of everyday life. We will attend to the challenges provoked by performance’s embodied, ephemeral, affective, effective, relational, and contingent aspects. Coursework will include discussion posts, class facilitation, and the opportunity to choose between a research paper or creative project for the final assessment.
Also Offered As: ANTH 1104, COML 0104, THAR 0104
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1891 Broadway Musicals in the 21st Century
Wicked, Spring Awakening, Dear Evan Hansen, Hadestown. And of course, Hamilton. The innovations we see in Broadway musicals since 2000 are particularly fascinating in that they, so to speak, boldly go where no musicals have gone before—while at the same time honoring and building on the long-standing traditions of this beloved form. From the powerfully romantic Light in the Piazza, which nods to roots in European operetta, to the boundary-defying Black queerness of A Strange Loop... and everything in between. In this course, we will go year by through musical theater from the quarter-century, to see where the form has gone recently… and where it’s headed. In addition to the works already mentioned, we’ll look at Caroline or Change, The Color Purple, In the Heights, Fun Home, and more. This course will also consider some recent “revisals,” like director Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma!, and Marianne Elliott’s gender-reassigned Company: reinterpretations of classic American musicals that imagine them in more contemporary light.
Also Offered As: CIMS 1275, THAR 1272
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1896 Backstage Drama in Theatre and Film
Inviting audiences into a special relationship with illusion, backstage dramas (whether on film or on stage) and plays-within-plays reach beyond and alongside traditional plot-driven narratives, to reflect on the process of representation itself. Drawing from classical debates about the relationships between reality, illusion, representation, and imitation (mimesis), we will examine a variety of plays and films as we articulate the complex network of responses and underlying assumptions (whether cultural, political, or social), about art and life, that these works engage.
Fall, odd numbered years only
Also Offered As: CIMS 2830, THAR 2830
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1900 World Film History to 1945
This course surveys the history of world film from cinema's precursors to 1945. We will develop methods for analyzing film while examining the growth of film as an art, an industry, a technology, and a political instrument. Topics include the emergence of film technology and early film audiences, the rise of narrative film and birth of Hollywood, national film industries and movements, African-American independent film, the emergence of the genre film (the western, film noir, and romantic comedies), ethnographic and documentary film, animated films, censorship, the MPPDA and Hays Code, and the introduction of sound. We will conclude with the transformation of several film industries into propaganda tools during World War II (including the Nazi, Soviet, and US film industries). In addition to contemporary theories that investigate the development of cinema and visual culture during the first half of the 20th century, we will read key texts that contributed to the emergence of film theory. There are no prerequisites. Students are required to attend screenings or watch films on their own.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ARTH 1080, CIMS 1010, COML 1011
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1901 World Film History 1945-Present
Focusing on movies made after 1945, this course allows students to learn and to sharpen methods, terminologies, and tools needed for the critical analysis of film. Beginning with the cinematic revolution signaled by the Italian Neo-Realism (of Rossellini and De Sica), we will follow the evolution of postwar cinema through the French New Wave (of Godard, Resnais, and Varda), American movies of the 1950s and 1960s (including the New Hollywood cinema of Coppola and Scorsese), and the various other new wave movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (such as the New German Cinema). We will then selectively examine some of the most important films of the last two decades, including those of U.S. independent film movement and movies from Iran, China, and elsewhere in an expanding global cinema culture. There will be precise attention paid to formal and stylistic techniques in editing, mise-en-scene, and sound, as well as to the narrative, non-narrative, and generic organizations of film. At the same time, those formal features will be closely linked to historical and cultural distinctions and changes, ranging from the Paramount Decision of 1948 to the digital convergences that are defining screen culture today. There are no perquisites. Requirements will include readings in film history and film analysis, an analytical essay, a research paper, a final exam, and active participation.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ARTH 1090, CIMS 1020, COML 1022
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1950 Television and New Media
How and when do media become digital? What does digitization afford and what is lost as television and cinema become digitized? As lots of things around us turn digital, have we started telling stories, sharing experiences, and replaying memories differently? What has happened to television and life after New Media ? How have television audiences been transformed by algorithmic cultures of Netflix and Hulu? How have (social) media transformed socialities as ephemeral snaps and swiped intimacies become part of the "new" digital/phone cultures? This is an introductory survey course and we discuss a wide variety of media technologies and phenomena that include: cloud computing, Internet of Things, trolls, distribution platforms, optical fiber cables, surveillance tactics, social media, and race in cyberspace. We also examine emerging mobile phone cultures in the Global South and the environmental impact of digitization. Course activities include Tumblr blog posts and Instagram curations. The final project could take the form of either a critical essay (of 2000 words) or a media project.
Spring
Also Offered As: ARTH 1070, CIMS 1030, COML 1031
1 Course Unit
ENGL 1951 The City in Literature and Film
This course focuses on the central place of the city through the history of cinema. The city in question may change depending on the term this course is being offered. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 1051, URBS 1051
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2000 Topics In Classicism and Literature: Epic Tradition
This advanced seminar will examine the classical backgrounds of western medieval literature, in particular the reception of classical myth and epic in the literature of the Middle Ages. Different versions of the course will have different emphases on Greek or Latin backgrounds and on medieval literary genres. Major authors to be covered include Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 3708, COML 2000, GSWS 2000
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2010 Old English Seminar
This seminar explores an aspect of Anglo-Saxon culture intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2011 Medieval Literature Seminar
This seminar explores an aspect of medieval literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2012 Romance Seminar
This seminar explores an aspect of epic or romance intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2013 Chaucer Seminar
This course explores an aspect of Chaucer's writings intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2014 Medieval Literature Seminar: Premodern Animals
This course introduces students to critical animal studies via medieval literature and culture. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 2014, RELS 2014
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2020 17th-Century Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of 17th-century literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2021 Topics in Renaissance Literature
This course explores an aspect of renaissance literature intensively; specific topics will vary from year to year. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. See our ENGL catalog, go to ENGL 2310: https://catalog.upenn.edu/courses/engl/
Also Offered As: GSWS 2021
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2030 18th-Century British Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of 18th-century British literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2031 18th-Century Seminar: China in the English Imagination
This course explores the material culture of china-mania that spread across England and Europe in the eighteenth century, from chinoiserie vogues in fashion, tea, porcelain, and luxury goods, to the idealization of Confucius by Enlightenment philosophers. The course texts include travel writing, poetry, essays, and plays, and is designed to provide historical background to contemporary problems of Orientalism, Sinophilia, and Sinophobia. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ASAM 2310, COML 2031, EALC 1321
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2041 Romanticism Seminar
This course explores an aspect of Romantic literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2050 19th-Century Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of 19th-century literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2051 Environmental Studies Seminar: Coming of Age in the Anthropocene
This seminar combines studies in the 18th and 19th century novel form with environmental studies. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2052 19th-Century American Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of 19th-century American literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2070 Modernism Seminar
This course explores an aspect of literary modernism intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2071 Global Modernism Seminar
This course explores literary modernism as a global and cross-cultural phenomenon. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3850, COML 2071, GRMN 1304
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2072 Modernism Seminar on Gender & Sexuality
This course explores literary modernism through questions of gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 2072
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2073 Modernist Animals: How to Rethink the Human-Animal Divide
This course explores literary modernism through the lens of Animal Studies. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2073, COML 2073
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2080 20th-Century Literature Seminar
The course explores an aspect of 20th-century literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2080, JWST 2080
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2082 20th-Century American Literature Seminar
The course explores an aspect of 20th-century American literature intensively; specific course topics will vary from year to year. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2082
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2083 Faking it: Liars, Imitators and Cheats in Literature and Film
Deception and lies are a constant theme and a mechanism of narrative art. For a genre literally synonymous with falsehood, fiction has always been touchy about its relationship to truth: Does the novel neutrally represent reality or does it recreate it? Are characters like living, breathing real people, or are they mere simulations? And if they’re just words on a page (or images on a screen), why are we so moved by their adventures, loves and misfortunes? In this class, we will explore and expand on these questions by focusing on novels and films that deal explicitly and exclusively with fakers, shapeshifters and doppelgangers, lies of necessity and of opportunity, as well as with works that revel in exposing their own manipulative artificiality. We will read psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers, and postcolonial thinkers and ask, What does it mean to be authentic? How malleable are our individual identity, race, gender and sexuality? What forces shape it, and how constant is this shape? Are we the same selves when we have a conversation as when we give a presentation? Do we remain ourselves when we talk to customers at our service jobs, to teachers, to students? When we “pass” as a different race? When we speak in a different accent? How do we reconcile the conflicting demands of “be yourself” and “fake it till you make it”? What is the relation between our presentation of ourselves and our selves? Novels and shorts stories for discussion might include classics like Nella Larsen’s Passing, Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as movies like Gaslight, The Battle of Algiers, The Yes Men, and American Psycho. While much of the weekly work in this class will be reading-and-discussion based, oral presentations – keenly aware of their own artifice – will count toward half of the final grade. A final oral presentation will be based on a creative project in conversation with class materials. The course would satisfy those interested in fulfilling the Advanced Film and Literature and Global Literature and Film requirements. This is a CWiC course, Communication Within the Curriculum.
Spring, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: CIMS 2083, COML 2083
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2085 Nuclear Fictions
The novel and the nuclear, the book and the Bomb: in this course we’ll explore how fiction has grappled with the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the prospect of nuclear apocalypse, and the present-tense violence of nuclear colonialism. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2091 The Novel in the Age of the Audiobook
This class is both a critical survey of important recent English-language novels, and a history of the audiobook and its effects on authors, readers, and literary markets. See the English Department website’s at: www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2092 Kelly Writers House Fellows Seminar
This seminar features visits by eminent writers as "Fellows" of the Kelly Writers House, the student-conceived writing arts collaborative at 3805 Locust Walk. Throughout the semester we will study the work of these writers—and some of the materials "around" them that make the particular contemporary context in which each operates so compelling. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 2092
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2110 Paris Modern: Spiral City
Paris has been shaped by a mixture of organic development, which is still today perceptible in the "snail" pattern of its arrondissements whose numbers, from 1 to 20, coil around a central island several times so as to exemplify a "spiral city," and of the violent cuts, interruptions and sudden transformations that again and again forced it to catch up with modern times, the most visible of which was Baron Haussmann's destruction of medieval sections of the city to make room for huge boulevards. Thus Parisian modernism has always consisted in a negotiation between the old and the new, and a specific meaning of modernity allegorized for Louis Aragon, the Surrealists and Walter Benjamin consisted in old-fashioned arcades built in the middle of the 19th century and obsolete by the time they turned into icons of Paris. The aim of the class will be to provide conceptual and pragmatic (visual, experiential) links between a number of texts, theories and films deploying various concepts of the modern in Paris, with a guided tour of the main places discussed. The course that Professors Jean Michel Rabate (English) and Ken Lum (Fine Arts) will lead studies Paris as a work of science-fiction where its many futures are embedded in its many pasts, where discontinuity is a continuous process and where the curving line of the snail's shell is a line of ceaseless curling resulting in a perennial oscillation where an outside converts into an inside and an inside then converts to an outside. The course will travel to Paris over spring break to get an in-depth look at the topics discussed in class.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: FNAR 3100
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2111 Irish Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of modern Irish literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2120 American Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of American literature intensively; specific course topics will vary, and have included "American Authors and the Imagined Past" and "American Gothic." See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 2120
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2130 Early American Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of early American literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2135 Trash: The Dime Novel
This seminar explores the rise of the “dime novel” across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: LALS 2135
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2140 Modern American Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of Modern American literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2145 Failure to Communicate (SNF Paideia Program Course)
This seminar examines “failure to communicate” in a variety of cultural areas, among them literature, romance, politics, theater, law, science, war, and education. Materials will include literary fiction, plays, poetry, film, TV, and assorted nonfiction, journalism and scholarship. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2145
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2150 Trans-Atlantic Literature Seminar
This course examines in-depth trans-Atlantic literature that emerges from and deals with the links and tensions between Europe and the Americas. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2179 The Mediterranean and the World, 1450-1700
Using as our guides the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Michael de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Baldassare Castiglione, Antonio de Sosa, Elias al-Musili, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Aḥmad ibn Qāsim Ibn al-Ḥajarī, Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, and many others, this seminar will analyze the social mutations, religious confrontations, political conflicts, cultural productions and circulation of books and ideas that characterized the Mediterranean world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Based on a close reading of the authors mentioned above, this seminar will focus on the study of the central transformations – political, religious, cultural, and literary – in the early modern Mediterranean world. Students will also be introduced to original materials belonging to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collections of the Library: early modern editions of some of the books read in the class, printed ephemera, or manuscript documents belonging to the Lea Collection. Students are expected to be active participants in this class; class attendance, participation, and oral presentations will be required. Students will write a final paper, around 15 pages. Students majoring in History can opt to write a research paper (20 pages) using original primary sources, to fulfill the department research requirement.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 3602
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 2602
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2180 Literature of Africa and the African Diaspora
This course explores an aspect of the literature of Africa and the African Diaspora intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2180
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2190 Postcolonial Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of Postcolonial literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2190
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2191 The Dictator Novel as Global Form
In this seminar, we will explore the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers across the globe have responded to tyrants and tyrannical regimes. Our focus will be a set of outstanding contemporary novels from Latin America, Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 2191
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2192 Narrating Survival
This course critically examines the way in which "survival" has been/continues to be defined as individual triumph in the 20th and 21st century. The intent here is to dig deeper into current buzzwords like "resilience," "wellness," "grit," and "care" to ask how such concepts have been constructed in different socio-historical moments, by and for whom, and towards what (social, cultural, political, economic) ends. We will pay special attention to the central role that the child plays in these discourses as an icon of both ultimate vulnerability and idealized resilience, and we'll consider the burdens and privileges that such centering might confer upon real-life children. We engage with a generically diverse body of contemporary multiethnic and transnational literature featuring children and young people in crisis, including texts from Black, Latine, Native, Asian and White U.S. writers as well as Dutch, Argentine, Iranian, Malaysian, and Afghan authors. All non-English texts will be read in English translation, with the option for students to read in the original language if they wish and are able. Learning to dialogue across cultures and learning from such interactions with these texts and one other will be an essential part of our approach to exploring these complex questions.
Also Offered As: ASAM 1211, COML 2192
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2200 African-American Literature Seminar
In this advanced seminar, students will be introduced to a variety of approaches to African American literatures, and to a wide spectrum of methodologies and ideological postures (for example, The Black Arts Movement). The course will present an assortment of emphases, some of them focused on geography (for example, the Harlem Renaissance), others focused on genre (autobiography, poetry or drama), the politics of gender and class, or a particular grouping of authors. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2200
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2210 (T)rap Music
This course examines the coming to pass of trap music from several perspectives: 1) that of its technological foundations and innovations (the Roland 808, Auto-tune, FL Studio (FruityLoops), etc.); 2) that of its masters/mastery (its transformation of stardom through the figures of the producer (Metro Boomin) and the rock star (Future)); 3) that of its interpretability and effects (what does the music say and do to us). We will thus engage with this music as a practice of art and form of techno-sociality that manifests uncanny and maximal attunement with the now. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2211
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2222 August Wilson and Beyond
"The people need to know the story. See how they fit into it. See what part they play.” - August Wilson, King Hedley II If you want to get to know community members from West Philadelphia, collaborate deeply with classmates, gain deeper and more nuanced understandings of African American history and culture, engage in a wide range of learning methods, and explore some of the most treasured plays in the American theatre, then this is the course for you. No previous experience required, just curiosity and willingness to engage. In this intergenerational seminar, Penn students together with older community members read groundbreaking playwright August Wilson's American Century Cycle: ten plays that form an iconic picture of African American traditions, traumas, and triumphs through the decades, nearly all told through the lens of Pittsburgh's Hill District neighborhood. (Two of Wilson’s plays are receiving fresh attention with recent acclaimed film versions: Fences with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with Davis and Chadwick Boseman.) Class participants develop relationships with one other while exploring the history and culture that shaped these powerful plays. As an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course, the class plans and hosts events for a multigenerational, West Philadelphia-focused audience with community partners West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance / Paul Robeson House & Museum, and Theatre in the X. Class members come to a deeper understanding of Black life in Philadelphia through stories community members share in oral history interviews. These stories form the basis for an original performance the class creates, presented at an end-of-semester gathering. Wilson's plays provide the bridge between class members from various generations and backgrounds. The group embodies collaborative service through the art and connection-building conversations it offers to the community.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 2325, THAR 2325
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2250 Race and Ethnicity Seminar
This course explores an aspect of race and ethnicity intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2251
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2260 Latinx Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of Latinx literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 2260
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2261 Capitalism, (Neo)Colonialism, Racism, and Resistance
This interdisciplinary seminar examines theory and artistic productions, including literature, films, and performance art, that analyze and critique capitalism, imperialism and (neo)colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. It examines history and culture from an international perspective, giving particular attention to works from the Global South (and from Latin America, especially) as well as works addressing the history of racialized groups within the Global North. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 2261
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2270 Asian American Literature Seminar
This course is an advanced-level seminar on Asian American culture and politics. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ASAM 2200
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2272 In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique
This interdisciplinary seminar examines how popular cultural representations frame Asian Americans as either invisible or hypervisible—our explorations will move across race and national origin, language and class, gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ARTH 3749, ASAM 2272, GSWS 2272
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2275 The Chinese Body and Spatial Consumption in Chinatown
This is a primarily an art and planning course that centers on the representation of the oriental, specifically the Chinese, in both its historical and present contexts.The localization of the Chinese throughout the Americas within Chinatown precincts were also subject to representational imaginings that were negotiated through the lens of civic planning. This course will study the often fraught negotiation between representation and planning. The hyper-urbanization of China over the past several decades has radically altered traditional conceptions of public space in China. Mass migration from rural to urban areas has meant very high population densities in Chinese cities. Traditional courtyards surrounded by housing and other modestly scaled buildings are rapidly disappearing, incongruent with the demands of heated property development Moreover, Chinese cities have comparatively little public green space per resident compared to equivalents in the West. Zoning in Chinese cities is also much more varied for any given area than what one would find in cities such as New York, Paris, and London. Intensifying density of urban areas precludes the construction of large public squares. Furthermore, large public squares tend to be either intensively congested and overcrowded or underused due to their oversight by government that render such spaces somewhat opprobrious in terms of use. Historically, the urban courtyards of temples, native place associations, and provincial guilds served as public spaces of gathering. They were also sites of festivals and the conducting of neighbourhood and civic business. These spaces have become increasingly privatized or commodified with entrance fees. The air-conditioned concourses of enclosed shopping malls or busy outdoor market streets have become de facto public spaces in China where collective window shopping or promenading is the primary activity rather than bodily repose as one might find in a public space in a large Western city. The seminar/studio will investigate the meaning of the term public in the constitution of Chinese space, audience and critical voice through firstly the enclave of Chinatown and secondly through examples from China. The course will look into the changing conceptualization of public space in Chinatown as it has declined in its traditional form and become reinvented in the form of high-end shopping centered districts. This flux has its roots in post 1979 China as well as the post 1997 reversion of Hong Kong to China. As such, the course will examine the situation of rapid urbanization in China and the concomitant relationship to new Chinese (and Asian) districts in the North American urban and suburban landscape ie Vancouver, Toronto, Arlington (Virginia), Oakland, Los Angeles valley and Queens (Flushing), New York. In what ways can artists and designers respond to and challenge these conceptualizations of the old and the new within the context of urban change? What of the changing formations of the Chinese subject through the experiences of embodiment? How is public space produced through an ethnically bracketed bodily presence. Findings will be translated by the student as tools for design and public art imaginings This course will include a week s trip to San Francisco to study how intense growth in the city has all but usurped old Chinatown while new and more vibrant Chinese centers have emerged in multiple other districts within the city and the suburbs.
Also Offered As: ASAM 3130, FNAR 3060
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2299 Italian American Studies
Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3400, ITAL 3400
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2310 Gender, Sexuality, and Literature Seminar
This advanced seminar focuses on literary, cultural, and political expressions of gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2310, COML 2310, GSWS 2310
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2315 Gender and Sexuality in the Medieval Imaginary
This course will explore some of the most fascinating uses of gender and sexuality in medieval English literature, from Old English epic poetry to Arthurian romance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2315
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2321 Criminality and Gender Deviance in Early America
This advanced seminar explores literary, cultural, and political expressions of gender and sexuality, with special foci on criminality and deviance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2321
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2390 Clarice Lispector
This seminar focuses on the work of Clarice Lispector, the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer (1920-1977). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 2390, GSWS 2390, LALS 2390, PRTG 0090
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2400 Literary Theory Seminar
This course explores an aspect of literary theory intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2410, GSWS 2960
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2401 Literature and Theory Seminar: Theories of World Literature
This course is an introduction to efforts—beginning in the nineteenth century, but with special attention to the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries—to develop theoretical models and corresponding critical practices for the comprehensive study of world literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 2401
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2402 What is Capitalism? Theories of Marx and Marxism
At their root, Marx and Marxisms try to examine the problems with both capitalism and the political and economic discourses that justify or ignore those problems. Today, many around the globe are also reflecting on capitalism’s problems, in the hope of imagining and realizing a better future. This course will trace some of the origins of that renewed inquiry, and examine its limits and possibilities in today’s world. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 2402, GSWS 2410
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2403 Marx's Century
This course will introduce you to Karl Marx in the context of his century, and it will consider the nineteenth century in turn through the lens of his revolutionary social analysis. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 2403
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2405 Global Feminisms
Feminism has both united women and also generated debates between women of different races, locations and sexual orientations, across the world, and also within the US. Feminism means both understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in society, and challenging the oppressive structures that constrain people of all genders. As such, there can be no single feminism that is globally relevant. How should we, located in a prestigious US university, locate our own ideas about gender and sexuality in a global framework? Each week we will engage with a piece of work—fiction, autobiography, film, historical or activist writing--from a different part of the world. Through them we will explore how histories of colonialism, slavery and race, nation-making and war have led to very different conceptions of the family, sexuality, gender identities the body, labor, and agency around the world. Texts and films will likely include: Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, Let Me Speak; Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Veronique Tadjo, Queen Pokou; Saidiya Hartmann, Lose Your Mother; Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil; Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman, The Odyssey of Indenture; Marjane Satrapi Persepolis; Marijie Meerman, Chain of Love; Ousmane Sembene Moolade; A. Revathi, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story; Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy. Satisfies the Cross-Cultural Requirement of the College's General Education Curriculum; Fulfills Sectors 1 and 2 of the English major.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2405
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2420 Cultural Studies Seminar
This course explores an aspect of cultural studies intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2930, CIMS 2420, COML 2420
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2460 Law and Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of law and literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2460
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2521 Apocalypse and the Anthropocene
In this class we will explore the narrative mode of the apocalypse in the context of the geologic designation of the Anthropocene. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2541 Caravaggio
This lecture course explores the artistic culture of Baroque Rome, with focus on the life and career of Caravaggio.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2541, ITAL 2541
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2542 Brazilian Baroque
This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2542, ARTH 2542, LALS 2542
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2570 On Thoughts Occasioned By
The Essay Film is an important tradition within the various genres that constitute the field of Film and Video Art. Through the element of time it differentiates itself from its literary and photographic antecedents. It borrows selectively from both narrative fiction and documentary - highly subjective and occasionally poetic but without perhaps the burden of truth. The Essay Film is an attempt to dimensionalize our experience of the world and our place in it. It represents an argument, a meditation, a critical engagement with a place, a time or a subject. This is a combination seminar/studio course. Through readings, screenings and discussion students will gain an historical perspective on the genre. The core assignment is for each student to complete a short film (20 minutes max.) in the tradition of the Essay Film.
Also Offered As: FNAR 3040
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2595 Imagining Environmental Justice
Advanced seminar in Environmental Humanities centered around issues of international environmental justice. Sustained engagement with Indigenous North American, African American, Palestinian, and South African imaginary traditions will highlight diverse ways of relating to land, water and nonhuman animals challenge that challenge capitalist and colonial logics of extraction. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 3390, COML 2595
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2596 Ecocritical Seminar: Remediating the Environment
In this course, we will interrogate the term “remediation” as meaning both environmental restoration and media representation. Students will be introduced to the fields of ecocriticism and ecomedia by examining how a variety of materials—from bestselling books to billboards, documentaries, and websites—have informed the cultural imagination of the environment. Students will also discover how media communications and publications can help to remediate the environment in the face of climate catastrophe. This course can be counted as an elective toward the Environmental Humanities minor and as fulfilling the minor's public engagement component. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2506
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2603 Writing, Publishing, and Reading in Early Modern Europe and the Americas
In this course we will consider the writing, publication, and reading of texts created on both sides of the Atlantic in early modern times, from the era of Gutenberg to that of Franklin, and in many languages. The seminar will be held in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in Van Pelt Library and make substantial use of its exceptional, multilingual collections, including early manuscripts, illustrated books, plays marked for performance, and censored books. Any written or printed object can be said to have a double nature: both textual and material. We will introduce this approach and related methodologies: the history of the book; the history of reading; connected history; bibliography; and textual criticism. We will focus on particular case studies and also think broadly about the global history of written culture, and about relations between scribal and print culture, between writing and reading, between national traditions, and between what is and what is not “literature.” We encourage students with diverse linguistic backgrounds to enroll. As part of the seminar, students will engage in a research project which can be based in the primary source collections of the Kislak Center. History Majors or Minors may use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, or Latin America geographic requirement if that region is the focus of their research paper.
Also Offered As: COML 3603, HIST 3603
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2604 American Books/Books in America
This course investigates book histories and the worlds of readers, printers, publishers, and libraries in the Americas, from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: HIST 2104
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2605 The Mediterranean World in the Age of Don Quixote
Using as our guides the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Baldassare Castiglione, Antonio de Sosa, Elias al-Musili, and many others, this seminar will analyze the social mutations, religious confrontations, political conflicts, cultural productions and circulation of books, ideas and goods that characterized the Mediterranean world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Based on close readings of primary and secondary sources, this seminar will focus on the study of the main transformations—political, economic, religious, cultural, and literary—in the early modern Mediterranean world. Students will also be introduced to and learn to analyze original materials from the Library’s Kislak Center, where the class will meet, including early modern editions of books we will discuss, maps, ephemera, and manuscript documents. *History Majors will have the opportunity to write a 15-page paper to fulfill the Major research requirement*
Also Offered As: HIST 2602
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 3602
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2621 Prints and Politics: From the Early Modern Era to Our Times
By the late fifteenth century, mechanically reproducible images were reshaping the social world. Connecting new audiences across geographies through access to the same visual information, prints launched propagandistic missions, fomented rebellion against authorities, and built networks of progressive thinkers who could envision alternative futures. Prints played a key role in developing what constituted news. Mass-distributed images delivered the mistreatment of the “Indians” by the Spanish and portrayed the packing of Africans on a slave ship. Goya’s etchings protested the repression of the Second of May uprising, while the silkscreens of Andy Warhol repeated the image of police dogs attacking civil rights activists in Birmingham. Covering a five-hundred-year history, this course will focus on how printed images created communities and acted as exclusionary devices. We will train our eyes on examples from local collections.
Also Offered As: ARTH 3621
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2639 Art Now
One of the most striking features of today's art world is the conspicuous place occupied in it by the photographic image. Large-scale color photographs and time-based installations in projections are everywhere. Looking back, we can see that much of the art making of the past 60 years has also been defined by this medium, regardless of the form it takes. Photographic images have inspired countless paintings, appeared in combines and installations, morphed into sculptures, drawings and performances, and served both as the object and the vehicle of institutional critique. They are also an increasinglyimportant exhibition site: where most of us go to see earthworks, happenings and body-art. This course is a three-part exploration of our photographic present.
Spring
Also Offered As: ARTH 2940, GSWS 2940, VLST 2360
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2663 Spiegel-Wilks Seminar
Topic varies from semester to semester. While not having any specific pre-requisites, this seminar in contemporary art is designed for junior and senior majors in art history with some knowledge in the field. When appropriate, it may feature special guests from the art world, international travel, and/or curatorial opportunities.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3970
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2665 Fakes, Forgeries and Forensics in Digital Media
Fake images on social media are just one of the latest examples of fabrications and modifications that have taken media into dubious territory throughout history. This course will analyze the history of fakes and forgeries and consider whether they devalue the original or not, or even have value in themselves. Along the way, students will learn how fakes and forgeries have been created, what tools can be used to counter the onslaught of illicit creations, and the arts and humanities debates that have arisen surrounding them. After evaluating the ways various media have been modified over time, this course will show students how to use photo manipulation tools to modify digital media. It will also show students how to perform various detailed analyses of digital media to determine their legitimacy. A final project will bring these tools together, as groups of students create a fake or forgery, consider its implications and evaluate a tool’s ability to detect it.
Fall
Also Offered As: CIMS 2665
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2700 Novel Seminar
This course explores an aspect of the novel intensively, asking how novels work and what they do to us and for us. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2720 18th-Century Novel Seminar
This course explores an aspect of 18th-century novel intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 2720
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2730 19th-Century Novel Seminar
This course explores an aspect of the 19th-century novel intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2740 20th-Century Novel Seminar
This course explores an aspect of the 20th-century novel intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2751 The Novel: Fiction and Connectivity
This seminar explores the ways in which long narratives, from ancient epic to 21st-century TV serials, have always engaged their audiences by providing a sense of connection among individuals, and by modeling the relationship between individuals and society. The course will zero-in on this aspect of storytelling’s cultural function. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2800 Poetry and Poetics Seminar
This course explores an aspect of poetry and poetics intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2800
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2801 The Person in the Poem
Through the study of a wide variety of poems from the Renaissance to the present, students in this seminar will expand their familiarity with modern English-language poetry and will develop a understanding of fundamental poetic concepts—especially those concepts related to the question of “the person in the poem”: “author,” “voice,” “persona,” “address,” “personification,” “representation,” and “referentiality.” See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2810 Poetry and Sound Seminar: Music and Literature
The seminar explores the relationship of poetry and music intensively.See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2810
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2830 American Poetry Seminar
This course devotes itself to the in-depth study of American poetry. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2831 Walt Whitman and the People's Press
Walt Whitman and the People's Press: A Course to Design and Program a Mobile Printing Space as a Public Art Project. Inspired by Whitman at 200, a region-wide celebration of Walt Whitman, this hands-on and collaborative course will engage students with artists, writers, community leaders and the public to design and program a mobile poetry printing facility that recognizes the complicated legacy of Walt Whitman in the 21st Century. To do this students and instructors will consider Whitman's poetry as well as in his historical period and his place in Philadelphia and Camden. At the same time students will learn to use a press, design materials and create their own multimedia responses to Whitman. Students in this course should expect to read a great deal of poetry but also to be ready to work with their classmates to create responses to Whitman and to see and experience Philadelphia and Camden in new ways.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2840 20th-Century Poetry Seminar
The course explores an aspect of 20th-century poetry intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2840
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2841 Mourning and Sexuality in the English Elegy
From antiquity to the present, poets have written elegies to express their diverse experiences of the mingling of love and loss. In this advanced seminar on poetic history, genre, and form, we’ll explore a major poetic genre—the elegy—in relation to its two, intertwined themes: death and sex. All of the elegies we’ll read raise challenging questions about desire, identification, reproduction, gender, and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2841
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2850 The Black Arts Movement: Theatre and Performance
This course examines the Theatre and Performance practices of the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.The Black Arts Movement (BAM) emerges in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia among other locations, as a cultural component of the Black Power Movement, and its legacy continues to this day. BAM artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, dancers, producers, directors, and teachers, shared a goal to develop an alternative theatre based in Africanist and Black aesthetics combining poetry, music, and dance in a non-linear fashion allowing stories to emerge through alternative and abstract structures that are activist in nature. We will ground our examination of the period in a growing global black consciousness, as well as the relationship between black aesthetics and self-determination. The course will explore a breadth of mid twentieth century Black experimental theatre ranging from Jean Genet’s The Blacks and Imamu Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater and School, to Ntozake Shange’s Choreopoems, and the performance poetry Jayne Cortez. The course culminates in the work of present-day performance artists that have taken up and evolved the form. The course is designed to incorporate theory and practice through play and poetry readings, movement investigations, student presentations of Theatre/Performance Artists, and viewing performances either virtually or in person. Students will develop either a choreopoem of their own or curate an imagined Black Arts Movement theatre festival or season.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2852, THAR 2850
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2860 Drama to 1660 Seminar
This course explores an aspect of drama before 1660 intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 2860
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2874 The Musical Theatre of Stephen Sondheim
Just days before Stephen Sondheim died in November 2021, he attended a revival of Assassins at Classic Stage Company, as well as a radical rethinking of Company that had transferred from London to New York. A few days later, a public performance of the song “Sunday” was organized in Duffy Square by Lin-Manuel Miranda. A new production of Into the Woods is currently on Broadway, and another of Sweeney Todd is planned for February 2023. Though it’s been nearly 15 years since Sondheim’s final new musical, he is very much part of our theatrical present—through his own works, which continue to be produced internationally, and through his influence on several generations of composers, lyricists, and more. Still today, among theatre critics and a large sector of the public, Sondheim is generally considered the most significant composer and lyricist in the contemporary theatre; he is, in fact, accorded the kind of serious consideration generally reserved for “legitimate” playwrights. In this seminar, we will examine in detail Stephen Sondheim’s writing over six decades. We’ll begin with Sondheim’s earliest work as a lyricist, collaborating with composers Jule Styne (Gypsy), Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story), and later, Richard Rodgers (Do I Hear a Waltz?). Beginning in 1970, Sondheim – now both composer and lyricist – in partnership with director Harold Prince produced a series of musicals (including Company, Follies and Sweeney Todd,) still thought to be among the most innovative and substantial in the history of the genre. We will also focus on Sondheim's musicals after his 1981 break with Prince. These later works, created with writers and directors including James Lapine (Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Passion), Jerry Zaks (Assassins), and John Doyle (Road Show) are often smaller in scale, intensely personal, and incorporate elements of performance art and popular culture. Finally, we will consider revival productions of Sondheim’s work, which often are reconceived from their original form, often with Sondheim’s involvement and occasional rewriting. This course is open to all students interested in theatre and musical theatre. The ability to read music is not required.
Also Offered As: CIMS 1274, THAR 1274
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2879 Acting Shakespeare
All the world’s a stage and Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed on it. In this open-level acting course we’ll explore the performance of three of Shakespeare’s greatest dramatic works (Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet). We’ll dive deep into the language, verse, rhetoric, and dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s texts to create performances that are passionate, spontaneous, and real. Through acting exercises, text analysis, scene study, and vocal training, we will develop the skills needed to bring Shakespeare’s dramatic works to their most impactful life. Students will leave the course not only with techniques to perform and appreciate Shakespeare’s work, but with expressive tools that will serve them in all kinds of performance or public speaking.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: THAR 2236
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2880 Theatre and Politics
This course will examine the relationship between theatre and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do theatre artists navigate their artistic and political aims? How do we distinguish between art and propaganda? Throughout the semester we will ask how the unique components of theatre--its poetic structure, engagement with spectators, aesthetics of representation, relationship to reality, and rehearsal process--contribute to its political capacity. Students will read a variety of plays drawn from late twentieth century and contemporary global theatre practice alongside political and aesthetic theory to interrogate the relationship between artistic production, power, and resistance. We will conclude with a consideration of the ways politics is itself a performance, considering how power is supported by theatrical means and how performance functions in resistance movements.
Also Offered As: COML 2820, LALS 2820, THAR 2820
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2881 The Threat of Climate Change and Theatre
Can theatre save the world? In the face of the climate crisis, this question feels especially urgent. This course will consider the relationship of theatre to the environment and climate change, looking at how we got to this point, and where we might go from here. We will consider how ideas about the environment have been spread through classic texts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. We’ll compare how non-western performances offer different relationships with the environment. And we’ll analyze how performance has responded to climate anxiety; through visions of dystopia and an end of the world, as in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play; through arts activism; and through experimental performance like environmental and immersive theatre. This course is for anyone who is concerned about climate change and interested in how the arts could respond. Most sessions will function as seminar, with short lectures and in-depth discussion about artistic and theoretical texts. We will also workshop different ideas on their feet. The aim is for students to become comfortable enough with this artistic and theoretical mode that they can critique performances across genres from this perspective, articulate their own relationship to it, and see how it might inform their own work.
Also Offered As: THAR 2825
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2882 Method Acting: From Self to Stage and Screen
What, exactly, is “method acting”? Jeremy Strong became notorious on television’s Succession for “staying in character” while filming, to the great irritation of his castmates. Jared Leto “transformed” himself by gaining sixty pounds for a role in Chapter 27, then losing another thirty for a role in Dallas Buyer’s Club. Are such approaches really “method” acting? Are they healthy and sustainable? And do they produce truly compelling performances? This course aims to demystify “the method” through a combination of historical inquiry and hands-on acting work. We will explore the cultural phenomenon of “the method” by tracing its historical, theatrical roots, from the core theories and practices of Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky through the American Group Theatre experiments of the 1930s, the heyday of New York’s Actors Studio in the 1950s, and its culmination in iconic stage and film performances. (One prime example is Marlon Brando’s famed portrayal of Stanley in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, as directed by Elia Kazan). Our studies will involve reading historical, theoretical, and dramatic texts, viewing selected films, and practicing acting exercises. Course assessment will comprise participation, facilitation, short responses, and a final project that can take the form of a research paper, presentation, or performance.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2810, THAR 2810
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2888 American Theatre and Performance
This course examines the development of the modern American theatre from the turn of the century to the present day. Progressing decade by decade the course investigates the work of playwrights such as Eugene O'Neil, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, David Mamet, August Wilson and Tony Kushner, theatre companies such as the Provincetown Players and the Group Theatre, directors, actors, and designers. Some focus will also be given to major theatrical movements such as the Federal Theatre Project, Off-Broadway, regional theatre, experimental theatre of the Sixties, and feminist theatre.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: THAR 2720
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2890 Icons in Performance: Actors and Others Who Have Shaped the Arts
Many talented performers bring works to life on a stage or in film. But a select few artists are so distinctive they become icons, defining for audiences-often for many years beyond their careers-the art they serve. Marlon Brando defined a new kind of American acting. Sidney Poitier broke the color barrier for leading man movie stars. Maria Callas showed that opera was equal parts theatre and music. Greta Garbo helped us understand the visual power of a film image. This seminar course will focus on iconic performers, directors and others, and the roles they play in defining their art forms. It is part analysis (interpreting in detail what it is these artists do) and part cultural study (why it matters, and also seeking to understand the larger circumstances at play in forging an icon). In addition to the performers mentioned above, we'll also study Mae West, Fred Astaire, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and more. We will also look at a handful of iconic directors-including Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, and others-whose style makes a definitive mark on American film and theater. And we will also look at how critics (in addition to popular audiences) assess performers through comparisons, and by understanding the evolution and tradition of the art. To support our work, we will use film, audio recordings, scripts, criticism and analytical essays, biography, and more.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2840, THAR 2840
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2899 Dramaturgy
This course will examine the functions and methods of the dramaturg--the person in the theatrical process who advises the artistic collaborators on (among other things) new play development, the structure of the script, the playwright's biography and other writings, the play's first production and its subsequent production history, and the historical and regional details of the period depicted in the plays action. We will study the history of the dramaturg in the American theatre and discuss contemporary issues relating to the dramaturg's contribution to the theatrical production (including the legal debates about the dramaturg's contribution to the creation of RENT). And, in creative teams, the class will create dramaturgical portfolios for a season of imaginary (and, potentially, a few actual) theatrical productions.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: THAR 2740
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2900 Global Film Theory
This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2950, CIMS 2950, COML 2950, GSWS 2950
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6950
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2901 Film Festivals
This course is an exploration of multiple forces that explain the growth, global spread and institutionalization of international film festivals. The global boom in film industry has resulted in an incredible proliferation of film festivals taking place all around the world, and festivals have become one of the biggest growth industries. A dizzying convergence site of cinephilia, media spectacle, business agendas and geopolitical purposes, film festivals offer a fruitful ground on which to investigate the contemporary global cinema network. Film festivals will be approached as a site where numerous lines of the world cinema map come together, from culture and commerce, experimentation and entertainment, political interests and global business patterns. To analyze the network of film festivals, we will address a wide range of issues, including historical and geopolitical forces that shape the development of festivals, festivals as an alternative marketplace, festivals as a media event, programming and agenda setting, prizes, cinephilia, and city marketing. Individual case studies of international film festivals—Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Sundance among others—will enable us to address all these diverse issues but also to establish a theoretical framework with which to approach the study of film festival. For students planning to attend the Penn-in-Cannes program, this course provides an excellent foundation that will prepare you for the on-site experience of the King of all festivals.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3910, CIMS 2010
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2910 Contemporary American Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3914, CIMS 2014
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2911 American Independents
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3911, CIMS 2011
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2920 Contemporary European Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3915, CIMS 2015, COML 2920
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2930 Transnational Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3912, CIMS 2012, COML 2012
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2931 World Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film Practice intensively. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3902, CIMS 2022, COML 2931
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2932 Bollywood and Beyond
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3916, CIMS 2016, COML 2932
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2933 Japanese Cinema
This course is a survey of Japanese cinema from the silent period to the present. Students will learn about different Japanese film genres and histories, including (but not limited to) the benshi tradition, jidaigeki (period films), yakuza films, Pink Film, experimental/arthouse, J-horror, and anime. Although the course will introduce several key Japanese auteurs (Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa, Oshima, Suzuki, etc), it will emphasize lesser known directors and movements in the history of Japanese film, especially in the experimental, arthouse, and documentary productions of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, in addition to providing background knowledge in the history of Japanese cinema, one of the central goals of the course will be to interrogate the concept of "national" cinema, and to place Japanese film history within a international context.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 3040
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2934 Cinema and Socialism
Films from socialist countries are often labeled and dismissed as "propaganda" in Western democratic societies. This course complicates this simplistic view, arguing for the value in understanding the ties between socialist governments, the cinematic arts, and everything in between. We will examine films from past and present socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as films made with socialist aspirations. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3100, CIMS 3100, EALC 2314, REES 3770
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2935 Culture on Trial: Race, Media & Intellectual Property
This course explores the US intellectual property regime’s impact on the production, distribution and consumption of media and art. By the end of the class, students will come away with historical, theoretical, and practical understandings of how media technology changes the law and how the law has subsequently responded to changes in media technology. This course is affiliated with CWIC (Communication Within the Curriculum). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2935, SOCI 2973
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2940 Documentary Cinema
This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3913, CIMS 2013
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2941 Historical Films
This topic course explores aspects of Film Practice intensively. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3900, CIMS 2020
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2942 Romantic Comedy
This topic course explores aspects of Film Practice intensively. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 3901, CIMS 2021
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2950 Digital and New Media Seminar
This course explores a particular topic in the study of digital and new media in an intensive and in-depth manner. See the English Department's website at: www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2920, CIMS 2951, COML 2960
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2951 Virtual Reality Lab
In this collaboration between Penn and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), students will work with with curators to create virtual reality projects connected to the museum's collections. This course mixes virtual reality theory, history, and practice. We will read a wide range of scholarship, manifestoes, and memoirs that examine virtual reality and other immersive technologies, stretching from the 18th century to today. We will explore virtual reality projects, including narrative and documentary films, commercial applications, and games. We will work with many different virtual reality systems. And we will learn the basics of creating virtual reality, making fully immersive 3-D, 360-degree films with geospatial soundscapes. Finally, we will take what we have learned out of the classroom, working with the Philadelphia Museum of Art curators to create virtual realty experiences based around the museum's objects and exhibits. Students will gain an understanding of the unique approaches needed to appeal to museum visitors in a public setting, so we can make viable experiences for them. No previous knowledge of VR or experience is necessary.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2000
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2952 Mobile Phone Cultures
Over the years, the cellphone or the mobile phone ceased to be just an extension of the landline telephone as a range of locative, social and networked media converged into it. Even as they have global impact, mobile media technologies influence and are influenced by socio-cultural factors in specific places, and so mobile phone cultures are both global and local at the same time. In this course, we will be studying the revolutions in youth culture, desire, gender norms, and political propaganda that are emerging as new hardware, apps, and internet services are being added to mobile media. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2952
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2953 Digital Infrastructures & Platforms
Platforms ranging from ride-hailing and food delivery apps (Uber and Swiggy) to subscription based audiovisual content providers (Netflix and SonyLIV) mediate multisided transactions (markets) and operate based on algorithmic collection, circulation, and monetization of user data. In this course, we will engage with a variety of readings about multi-situated study of apps, paying attention to both app interfaces as well as their connection to backend systems and infrastructures like content delivery networks and software development kits. In what ways do processes of data storage/distribution, content encryption/decryption and encoding/decoding make “seamless” streaming on Hulu/Prime Video and instantaneous digital payments on Venmo and PayTM possible? We will begin with how infrastructures have been studied in the past, and then in particular focus on media infrastructures such as satellite systems, optical fiber cables, cell antennas, and data centers. The course readings will consider the varied definitions of platforms and examine the socio-political effects of the proliferation of platforms in different regions of the world. In studying superapps and platforms like WeChat (China), LINE (Japan), and Jio (India), we will try to comprehend in what ways have discourses of platformization been shaped by governmental regulation, cultural practices, and socio-politics of regions. We will explore questions like: in what ways are infrastructures and apps related? How do content creators and SVoD audiences navigate algorithmic opacity? Why do BigTech companies float competing discourses about platforms? What are the connections between infrastructural investments and platform capitalism? What does it mean to have digital lives in a platform society? In what ways do digital infrastructures and platforms create the foundations for smart cities and Internet of Things? Course assignments include a final research paper (2000 words) as well as project-based case studies of platform companies and socio-material assessments of infrastructures.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2953
1 Course Unit
ENGL 2970 Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present
What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? How would such an approach to filmmaking challenge our understanding of terms like “authorship,” “amateur,” “exhibition,” “distribution,” “venue,” “completion,” “criticism,” “documentary,” “performance,” “narrative,” “community,” and “success”? How might we understand these U.S.-based works within a more expansive set of transnational conversations about the transformational capacities of collective media practices? This course will address these and other questions through a deep engagement with the films that make up the national traveling exhibition curated by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmerman, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, which foregrounds six major themes: Body Publics (public health and sexualities); Collaborative Knowledges (intergenerational dialogue); Environments of Race and Place (immigration, migration, and racial identities unique to specific environments); States of Violence (war and the American criminal justice system); Turf (gentrification, homelessness, housing, and urban space); and Wages of Work (job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment). As part of that engagement, we will study the history of a series of Community Media Centers from around the U.S., including Philadelphia’s own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this course’s co-instructor. This is an undergraduate seminar, but it also available to graduate students in the form of group-guided independent studies. The course requirements include: weekly screenings, readings, and seminar discussions with class members and visiting practitioners, and completing both short assignments and a longer research paper.
Also Offered As: AFRC 3932, ARTH 3931, CIMS 3931, COML 3931, GSWS 3931
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6931
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3001 First-Year Seminar: Creative Writing
First-Year Seminars will afford entering students who are considering literary and creative writing study as their focus the opportunity to explore a particular and limited subject with a professor whose current work lies in that area. Topics may range from first-person storytelling to poetry and fiction to writing about art and other themes. Small class size will insure all students the opportunity to participate in lively discussions. Students may expect frequent and extensive writing assignments, but these seminars are not writing courses; rather, they are intensive introductions to the serious study of literature and creative writing.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3010 Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry and Fiction
An introduction to writing fiction and poetry. We will focus on the main tools of fiction, such as characterization, dialogue, and description, as well as the forms of poetry, such as sound, image, and enjambment. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3011 Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry and Memoir
An introduction to writing poetry and memoir. We will focus on the main tools of poetry, such as sound, image, and enjambment, as well as the forms of memoir, including personal narrative, dialogue, description, and character development. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3012 Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry and Creative Nonfiction
An introduction to writing poetry and creative nonfiction. We will focus on the main tools of poetry, such as sound, image, and enjambment, as well as the forms of creative nonfiction, including reportage, interviews, personal essays, and memoir. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3013 Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry and Essay
An introduction to writing poetry and essay. We will focus on the main tools of poetry, such as sound, image, and enjambment, as well as the forms of essay, including reportage, interviews, personal narrative, and commentary. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3014 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction and Essay
An introduction to writing fiction and essay. We will focus on the main tools of fiction, such as characterization, dialogue, and description, as well as the forms of essay, including reportage, interviews, personal narrative, and commentary. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3015 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction and Journalism
An introduction to writing fiction and journalistic writing. We will focus on the main tools of fiction, such as characterization, dialogue, and description, as well as the forms of journalistic writing, including reporting, interviewing, editing, and commentary. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3016 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction and Memoir
An introduction to writing fiction and memoir. We will focus on the main tools of fiction, such as characterization, dialogue, and description, as well as the forms of memoir, including personal narrative, dialogue, description, and character development. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3017 Introduction to Creative Writing: Memoir and Literary Journalism
A workshop focused on the way a writer constructs characters in memoirs, personal essays, and journalistic profiles. Students will examine - through their own work and others’ - how nonfiction writers must shape information to render people on the page in a way that is honest and engaging. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3018 Introduction to Creative Writing: Memoir and Creative Nonfiction
An introduction to writing memoir and creative nonfiction. Students will read in a wide variety of subgenres, forms, and traditions (including memoir, criticism, lyrical and hermit-crab essays, travel writing, and food writing) and respond creatively with their own work, mining their experiences and memories to generate brand-new material. Suitable for beginners or more experienced writers who want to return to fundamentals. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3019 Introduction to Creative Writing: Sports Narratives
An introduction to writing personal essay, short fiction, and journalism through the lens of sports. Students will study and discuss a range of writing and other media (films, podcasts, etc.) that center around athletes, fans, and sports culture and will write creative pieces in each of the modes studied. This course is suitable for beginners as well as more experienced writers with an interest in sports. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3020 Introduction to Creative Writing: Extreme Noticing
Whether working on fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or any other genre, the writer has to pay attention to the very small, to zoom in on the specific detail or insight that can make even the most mundane moment feel entirely new. Noticing in this way is a skill that, like most skills, is developed with practice. In this class, we’ll practice paying attention to the small. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3021 Introduction to Creative Writing: Animal Tales
This workshop-style course provides an introduction to creative writing in multiple genres, focusing on the real and imagined lives of animals from ancient fables through twenty-first-century stories, poems, essays, and hybrid-genre works. Students will craft their own original pieces, read and comment on assigned readings, and use in-class exercises to push the boundaries of our own writing. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3022 Introduction to Creative Writing: Writing and Performance
This creative writing workshop includes the study of writing as a multimedia entity and as exciting ground for experimentation. Through writing, discussion, sound work, movement, and the exploration of hybrid, multimedia texts by writer-performers and installation artists, you will write and make your own experiments across writing and performance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3024 Introduction to Creative Writing: Imitations and Writing in Form
How can the imitation of literary forms be a way into improving your writing? This course works around the idea of imitation as a way of constructing generative practices of writing. We’ll begin by looking at examples of literary forms and their imitations before we work on our own imitation and how to use them - or how break them into any style. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3025 Introduction to Creative Writing: Writing Asian American Lives
What does it mean to be Asian American? How do religion, ethnicity, gender, class, nationality, and immigration status define this group? This course will explore these questions through an introductory fiction, nonfiction, and poetry creative writing workshop. In addition to critiquing each other’s short stories, essays, and poems, we will read works by a number of authors as springboards to examine representations of identity, inclusion, and exclusion. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall
Also Offered As: ASAM 1200
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3026 Introduction to Creative Writing: Writing Real Science
Most if not all fiction and nonfiction requires some kind of research. Our readings will explore how writers incorporate scientific knowledge into their prose without compromising craft. This course will explore ways to bring real science into our pieces and make them fun, exciting and fresh. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Also Offered As: ASAM 1226
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3027 Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry and Life Writing
An introduction to the craft of poetry and life writing. We will focus on the main tools of poetry, such as sound, image, and enjambment, as well as the forms of life writing, including narrative, description, and personal commentary. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3028 Introduction to Creative Writing: Breath and Movement
Amid an intensifying climate crisis and widespread air pollution, an ongoing airborne pandemic, and the terrible refrain of “I can’t breathe” that has echoed for a decade, the politicization of breath speaks to the precarity of our time. In this creative writing workshop, we will engage with poetry, prose, and performance to study how artists and writers are thinking about breath and movement today. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3029 Introduction to Creative Writing: Through the 1619 Project
This introductory creative writing workshop offers an opportunity to hone creative writing skills through the revelatory framework of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project. Through a study of this country’s foundations and present tense, students will write, workshop, and revise poems and short prose throughout the semester. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3100 Poetry Workshop
In this workshop, students will work across a range of poetic forms that may include list, lyric, documentary, collage, erasure, epistolary, sound-based, prose, performative, and other shapes and experiments, and will explore how contemporary poetry and poetics make us think differently about language and meaning. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3101 Poetry Workshop
Students will develop techniques for generating poems along with the critical tools necessary to revise and complete them. Through in-class exercises, weekly writing assignments, readings of established and emerging poets, and class critique, students will acquire an assortment of resources that will help them develop a more concrete sense of voice, rhythm, prosody, metaphor, and images as well as a deeper understanding of how these things come together to make a successful poem. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3101
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3102 Attention Poetics
This is a poetry workshop about paying close attention: to the ordinary and the ephemeral, as well as to the extraordinary and the large, often inexorable systems around us. Experienced poets and students new to poetry are all welcome. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3102
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3104 Poetry Lab
A creative writing workshop in which students will learn to experiment and deepen their writing practice using the tools of poetry. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3104
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3105 Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in poetry who are interested in pushing their practice and learning new poetic forms, such as long poems, serial poems, cross-genre work, multimedia poetry, or poetry informed by research. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3106 Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in poetry who are interested in pushing their practice and learning new poetic forms, such as long poems, serial poems, cross-genre work, multimedia poetry, or poetry informed by research. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3106
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3111 Experimental Writing
A creative writing workshop committed to experimentation. The workshop will be structured around writing experiments, collaborations, intensive readings, and new and innovative approaches to composition and form, which may also include work in digital, sound, and performance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3112 Experimental Writing
A creative writing workshop committed to experimentation. The workshop will be structured around writing experiments, collaborations, intensive readings, and new and innovative approaches to composition and form, which may also include work in digital, sound, and performance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3112
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3120 The Translation of Poetry/The Poetry of Translation
Through poems, essays, and our own ongoing writing experiments, this course will celebrate the ways in which great poetry written different languages underscores the fact that language itself is a translation. Alternating between creative writing workshops and critical discussion, the course will be tailored to the backgrounds of students who enroll, and all are welcome. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 3120
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3180 Writing Center Theory & Practice
This course is intended for capable writers who possess the maturity and temperament to work successfully as peer tutors at Penn.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: WRIT 1380
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3200 Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
This workshop-based course focuses on the study and practice of the techniques of short fiction, including such elements as character, form, description, dialogue, setting, genre, and plot. Students will discuss assigned readings and workshop each other's original works of fiction. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3201 Fiction Workshop: Flash Fiction
We live in an age of condensed information. Where does the art of fiction fit into our soundbite-driven lives? Short-form fiction - also called flash fiction, sudden fiction, or microfiction - is more than just “really short stories.” Every word in a piece of microfiction is the proverbial ant, carrying fifty times its own weight. Students will read short-short works of fiction and will write and workshop their own. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3202 Speculative Fiction
Some of the most powerful and popular storytelling across history has examined the nuances of the human condition in our own future, in alternate realities, and on other worlds, using ghosts, gods, magic, talking animals, animate machines, or the walking dead. In this workshop course, we will learn techniques to weave our own speculative tales. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3203 Horror, Mystery, Suspense
Students should come prepared to read a wide range of speculative fiction in horror, mystery, and suspense, and to craft their own canny, uncanny, and original contributions to the genres of slow-ratcheted, nigh-unbearable tension and white-knuckle, heart-pounding terror. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3204 The Art of Haunting
In this reading-intensive speculative fiction workshop course, we will explore the literature and art of haunted spaces and write our own tales of haunting. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3205 Science Fiction
A speculative creative writing workshop devoted to science fiction. Students can expect to read texts by a variety of practitioners of science fiction, complete regular writing assignments, and workshop writing by their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3206 Fantasy
A speculative writing workshop devoted to the genres of fantasy. Students can expect to read texts by a variety of practitioners of fantasy, complete regular writing assignments, and workshop writing by their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3207 I Was a Teenage Monster: Coming of Age in Speculative Writing
This writing workshop explores representations growing up strange. How can fantastic exaggeration accurately represent coming-of-age experiences and the trials of teenhood? We’ll examine monstering in TV, film, comics, novels, and poems, and write our own stories, poems, or essays of the strange and the monstrous. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3208 Advanced Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in fiction who are interested in pushing their practice further. Students will write and workshop their own original stories as well as discuss works of fiction. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3209 The Novella
A creative writing workshop devoted to the art and practice of the novella, the genre of fiction that in its length and breadth dwells between the short story and the full-length novel. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3210 The Novel
In this course, students will make progress on, or in some cases complete, a full-length novel. Ideal for students who have already put thought into and begun work on their novel. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3211 Fiction Workshop: Friends and Frenemies
How many kinds of love exist among friends? What is the difference between friendship and romance? In what ways do the ideals of femme, masc, trans, and cis complicate friendship? What are sisterhoods and what are bromances? What is a frenemy? What do race and class have to do with ardor and amity? This fiction workshop will explore not only how we experience friendship, but also how we write it. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3212 Autofiction
What we write can feel close to home, our characters and events firmly rooted in the real. But what is the overlap between writer and character? Writer and story? In this writing workshop, students will study the modern tradition of autofiction, or fictionalized autobiography, and write autofiction of their own. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3213 Fiction Workshop: Divergent Words
This fiction writing workshop invites students to be apprenticed by visceral, divergent literature, and through collaborative discussion, weekly writing, and drafting and workshop of our own original pieces, illuminate our own divergent writing practice. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3214 Points of View: Writing Polyvocal Fiction
Do multiple characters in a work of fiction experience the same event from different points of view, or do they examine different events in kaleidoscopic perspectives? This polyvocal fiction workshop will interrogate how we write one story from the point of view of two or more characters. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3215 The Art of Fiction
In this generative, interactive workshop we’ll investigate literary fiction technique through a series of directed prompts designed to unfetter your imagination and bring your fiction writing to the next level. This class is appropriate for fiction writers of every level. Come prepared to take creative risks as you deepen your art and advance your craft. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3250 Writing for Children
A creative writing workshop devoted to the art and practice of writing for children. Students can expect to read texts by a variety of practitioners of the genre, complete regular writing assignments, and workshop writing by their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3251 Writing for Children
A creative writing workshop devoted to the art and practice of writing for children. Students can expect to read texts by a variety of practitioners of the genre, complete regular writing assignments, and workshop writing by their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3251
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3252 Writing for Young Adults
This writing workshop will explore the craft of young adult literature. Students will focus on concerns crucial to writing about and for teens, such as voice, point of view, immediacy, and pacing, and will draw on the many possibilities available in YA literary fiction: blurred genres, unreliable narrators, surrealism, retellings, and issues of identity and self-discovery. We will look beyond straightforward prose into forms such as epistolary and verse novels and other experimental mashups. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3253 Writing for Young Adults
This writing workshop will explore the craft of young adult literature. Students will focus on concerns crucial to writing about and for teens, such as voice, point of view, immediacy, and pacing, and will draw on the many possibilities available in YA literary fiction: blurred genres, unreliable narrators, surrealism, retellings, and issues of identity and self-discovery. We will look beyond straightforward prose into forms such as epistolary and verse novels and other experimental mashups. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3253
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3254 Advanced Writing for Children
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in writing for children, including early chapter books and teen fiction. Exercises may include studies in voice, point of view, plot development, humor, description, developing a fantasy world, writing historical fiction, or memoir. Students will read and discuss a wide variety of published work for children and workshop the writing of their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3255 Advanced Writing for Children
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in writing for children, including early chapter books and teen fiction. Exercises may include studies in voice, point of view, plot development, humor, description, developing a fantasy world, writing historical fiction, or memoir. Students will read and discuss a wide variety of published work for children and workshop the writing of their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3255
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3256 Advanced Writing for Young Adults
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in writing for young adults and want to spend the semester making significant progress toward the completion of a YA novel. All YA genres are welcome and celebrated, from realism to speculative fiction, and those writing YA crossover (sometimes called new adult) are also welcome. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3257 Advanced Writing for Young Adults
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in writing for young adults and want to spend the semester making significant progress toward a major work for young adults. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3257
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3300 Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Exploring the Genre
A workshop course in the writing of creative nonfiction. Topics may include memoir, family history, travel writing, documentary, and other genres in which literary structures are brought to bear on the writing of nonfiction prose. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3301 Essays, Fragments, Collage: The Art of the Moment
In this creative nonfiction writing workshop we’ll explore the moments of our lives through prompts that range from the tactile to the auditory, the documented to the whispered. We’ll write and workshop works in essay, fragment, collage, and memoir. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3302 Experimental Nonfiction
A creative nonfiction workshop with an emphasis on writing that doesn’t quite fit into any particular genre. While narrative nonfiction often fears straying too far from stale and safe “journalistic” techniques, we will cook up our own new theories for what it means to compose radical contemporary nonfiction. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3303 Creative Nonfiction Workshop: The Art of Experience
Experience can be an elusive thing to capture: a strange hybrid of the highly subjective and the more tangible zone of perceptible fact. How do we strike a balance in narrative nonfiction? Each week we will review classics in the genre, do in-class writing exercises, go on periodic “experiential” assignments, and explore how the art of playing around with the raw material of everyday life (i.e., “reality”) can make for great and unexpected stories. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3304 Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Travel Writing
This creative nonfiction workshop focuses on travel as a deliberate act or an act of improvisation, as never-ending process or a fixed journey. Students will observe themselves as travelers and record what they see and what happens around them. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3305 Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Youth Voices Amplified
Youth Voices Amplified is an improvisational workshop in creative nonfiction that connects you to current reporting opportunities; gives you structured choice in assignments; and teaches you how to write about hard subjects for and about young people. Big questions about the social, emotional, relational and physical structures that affect young people require clear, engaging prose that avoids self-importance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3305
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3306 Writing and Politics
This is a course for students who are looking for ways to use their writing to participate in electoral politics. Student writers will use many forms, including essay, social media posts, videos, scripts, and podcasts, to explore our desire to live responsibly in the world and to have a say in the systems that govern and structure us. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Also Offered As: AFRC 3306
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3307 Creative Nonfiction Writing
A workshop course focused on the art and craft of the essay. In addition to discussing essay form, students will collaboratively workshop their own original writing. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3308 Cooking with Words
This writing workshop will be devoted to the topic of food, although it is not, strictly speaking, a course on food writing. Instead, we will read a manageable and engaging syllabus of writers who have used food in their work and then craft our own original writing using food as the catalyst for the larger story. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3350 Advanced Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Narrative Nonfiction
This is a course for students who love the written word and desire to advance their ability to write and craft narrative nonfiction. It is a course in applying devices of fiction to nonfiction writing without compromise of facts. Writing will be emphasized, and so will avenues of storytelling through such components as creating a narrative spine, building a dramatic plot, character development, scene-setting and use of quotes, and significant reportage. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3351 Writing About Mental Health and Addiction
There are many reasons mental illness and addiction are so pervasive, and so difficult to treat and discuss. But there is one baseline problem we can immediately address: learning how to do more effective writing about behavioral health. In this advanced writing course, one of the first of its kind for undergraduates in the country, students explore nonfiction writing on behavioral health and then create, workshop, and rewrite their own work in memoir, narrative longform, investigative reporting, medical science writing, or some combination of these. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3352 Creative Nonfiction: Look In; Look Out
Creative nonfiction is an art form that calls on both the literary techniques of fiction and the reporting strategies of journalism. This advanced workshop uses essay and memoir genres to explore connections between the personal and the universal. Students will experiment with narrative stance and form such as lyric, hermit crab, braided, and epistolary. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3353 Advanced Creative Nonfiction: Xfic
In this advanced creative nonfiction workshop, students write and publish work in Xfic, Penn’s innovative nonfiction literary journal. In Xfic, test the boundaries of longform creative nonfiction through innovative and experimental techniques. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3354 Writing Humor and Comedy
A writing workshop devoted to helping students develop their skills in humor and comedy writing. Topics may include writing for the page as well as comedy sketches and short plays for performance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3355 Memoir Workshop
A creative writing workshop devoted to the craft of memoir. Students will work with some of the forms of memoir, including personal narrative, dialogue, description, and character development, and will explore how memoir can expand our understanding of truth, imagination, memory, and why a story matters. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3356 Asian American Nonfiction Workshop
Contemporary literature has seen a recent rise of Asian American nonfiction writing, particularly in the form of essays and memoirs. Asian American writers are reshaping the form of the immigration story and the personal narrative, and are adding their voices to the pressing topics of political activism, STEM, and mental health. This course will include readings by authors such as Hsu, Hong, Nunez, Chang, Fan, Wang, Jacob, and Kalanithi, amongs others. For memoir and personal pieces, we will discuss how these writers transform their own material through craft, structure, and perspective. For essays, we will discuss how writers use research (and, yes, craft!) to present difficult and/or technical information in an engaging way. Students will write and workshop their own pieces of nonfiction (8-12 pages), with a choice of memoir or essay. No prior experience is necessary except for an eagerness to engage with the material and an open-mindedness during workshop discussions.
Also Offered As: ASAM 3356
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3400 Journalistic Writing: Exploring the Genre
Journalism has been called the first rough draft of history, because it attempts to answer a basic everyday question: What's happening? This workshop-based course explores the techniques that make a good journalism story, including fact gathering, ledes, structure, kickers, interviewing, quotes, description, and journalistic ethics, and the basic skills needed to produce journalism across print and digital mediums. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3401 Entrepreneurial Journalism
This class is designed to help students develop their own digital journalism models. Working alone or in small groups, students will conceive of a unique site or app and then spend the semester fine-tuning the concept and developing a basic business plan before presenting them before a panel of outside judges and competing for seed funding. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3402 Guinea-Pig Journalism
Guinea-pig journalism is nonfiction writing in which the author seeks out new experiences and writes about them in the first person. The genre can include travel writing, undercover investigative reporting, comic narratives of unusual self-experiments, and more. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3403 Food Journalism
A creative writing workshop devoted to the craft of food journalism. Writing exercises and assignments may include restaurant reviews, food memoirs, interviews, profiles, and reportage. Students will be encouraged to think through the links between food and culture, identity, politics, and history. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3404 Environmental Journalism
A creative writing workshop devoted to journalistic writing about the environment. Taking inspiration from the long history of naturalist writing as well as the current state of reporting on the climate, students will craft their own reportage, opinion pieces, and criticism. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3406 Magazine Journalism
A creative writing workshop devoted to writing for print and digital magazines. We will delve into what it takes to report for a range of mainstream and independent magazine outlets; explore how time works in longform reporting and the specific demands magazines place on storytelling; design and practice pitching stories to magazine editors; and produce our own original work. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3407 Writing about Health and Medicine
In this creative writing workshop, we’ll focus on the fundamentals of good science journalism, with an emphasis on how to evaluate the strength of published research and integrate it into our own writing for a broad audience. This course is designed both for students who have little background in science and for science and pre-med students who want to become stronger writers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3408 Long-Form Journalism
The so-called “New Journalists” have thrived ever since the iconoclastic 1960s, their chief impact on the field of journalism being to write fact-based journalism that reads like fiction. We will study and practice the novelistic techniques of this sort of journalism, including narrative storytelling, dramatic arcs, structural cliffhangers, shifting points of view, author’s voice, and dialogue as action. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3409 Documentary Writing
A creative writing workshop devoted to the art of documentary writing. Assignments may include working with found materials; observation and reportage; fact-based reporting; documentary work in literary genres; and learning from documentary film. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3410 Writing from Photographs
A creative writing course built entirely around crafting our own writing out of photographs. We will consider the image as documentary source, as thematic constraint, or as narrative inspiration as we write and workshop our own original pieces in this collaborative course. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3411 Writing about the Arts and Popular Culture
This workshop-oriented course concentrates on all aspects of writing about artistic endeavor, including criticism, reviews, profiles, interviews and essays. For the purposes of this class, the arts will be interpreted broadly, and students will be write about both the fine arts and popular culture, including fashion, sports, and entertainment. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3412 Advanced Writing Projects in the Arts and Popular Culture
This advanced course in writing about the arts and popular culture (interpreted broadly) is limited in enrollment and focuses on a semester-long project that each student defines in consultation with the instructor: most typically, a lengthy feature (6,000+ words) of the sort that regularly appears in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine or Rolling Stone, but other approaches to the project will be considered. Ideally, students will have already taken Writing about the Arts and Popular Culture, but that is not a firm prerequisite and other students should absolutely feel free to consider this course. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3413 Journalistic Storytelling
Journalistic Storytelling is about mastering the mechanics of effective nonfiction narrative storytelling. What are the best ways to put the reader into your story? What are the elements that make a piece work? What are the elements of a good opening? When is it better to “show” as opposed to “tell”? When is it best to use first, second or third person? We’ll work in different genres, including observational pieces, profiles, personal pieces, and long-form third-person pieces. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3414 Journalistic Writing in Science, Technology, Society
This workshop is intended for students interested in using popular science writing to broaden public understanding of science, technology, and society. Good science writing helps the public understand how to judge scientific claims; students will hone journalistic skills such as how to research a topic; how to identify interviewees and conduct interviews; and how to redraft and edit. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: STSC 2202
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3415 Global Journalism
Students in this course will have an opportunity to write in a variety of modes, including factual reportage, op-ed, review, and analysis about people and places that take them beyond their own immediate experience. The intent is to use reporting to enlarge the area of personal experience, thus enabling students to become more conscious of, and to move beyond, cultural assumptions, presuppositions, and prejudices. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3416 The Art of the Profile
Students in this class will explore and practice the key elements of profile-writing: gaining access to the profile subject; conducting an effective interview and extracting quotes that reveal the person; observing the profile subject in action; extracting details that reveal the person; and making the profile subject compelling and relatable for the reader. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3417 Political Journalism
The prime goal of this course is to help students develop political writing skills: a respect for factual reporting, context and perspective, and informed opinion. This course will explore the daunting challenges that political journalists face when writing about polarizing topics for polarized audiences while grappling with the thorny issues of “objectivity” and “balance.” This course is designed to be timely, so we’ll closely monitor breaking stories as they arise. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3418 Political Commentary Writing
This course focuses entirely on the daunting art of political commentary writing. Students will track the news as it unfolds, and, most importantly, write commentary pieces in a shared publication space for this course. At a time when Americans are more awash in opinions than ever before, the aim is to master the craft of writing clear, responsible, incisive, substantive, and entertaining point-of-view journalism backed up with factual research. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3419 Political Journalism: The Congressional Midterms
This course focuses entirely on the daunting art of writing political journalism about the congressional midterms. Students who are passionate about writing and politics will track current congressional midterm campaigns and write for collaborative workshop. At a time when Americans are more awash in opinions than ever before, the aim is to master the craft of writing clear, responsible, incisive, substantive, and entertaining journalism backed up with factual research. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3420 Political Journalism: The Presidential Primaries
This course focuses entirely on the daunting art of writing political journalism about the presidential primaries. Students who are passionate about writing and politics will track the current presidential primary campaigns and write for collaborative workshop. At a time when Americans are more awash in opinions than ever before, the aim is to master the craft of writing clear, responsible, incisive, substantive, and entertaining journalism backed up with factual research. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3421 Political Journalism: The Presidential Election
This in-depth course on political journalism will feature the clash between candidates who seek office in the White House. Students will write weekly, chronicling and analyzing the twists and turns of campaign rhetoric, campaign ads, and media coverage; presidential debates will be grist for much of our writing. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3422 Advanced Long-Form Nonfiction
An advanced course in long-form nonfiction journalistic writing for a select group of experienced and self-starting student writers. Ideally, each accepted member will have already taken one or two nonfiction workshops. This is a kind of master course, limited in enrollment and devoted to your pursuit of a reporting and writing project you may have long wished to take up but never had the opportunity. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3423 Planet on the Brink: Climate and Environment Journalism
A course for students who want to try their hand at formulating publication-quality fact and opinion pieces on urgent topics that regularly command today's headlines, such as global warming; the sixth extinction; and how to prevent the next pandemic. A course for STEM students who are writing-curious; journalism students interested in sci-tech writing; and prose writers who care about using facts to tell urgently important stories. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3424 Let It Rock: The Rolling Stones, Writing and Creativity
A creative writing workshop devoted to criticism, reviews, profiles, interviews and essays about the Rolling Stones. This course will focus on the band’s songs, films, solo projects and lifestyles as a source of creative inspiration. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3425 Station to Station: The Art and Life of David Bowie
A creative writing workshop devoted to criticism, reviews, profiles, interviews and essays about David Bowie. This course will focus on Bowie's music, films, and other projects as sources of creative inspiration. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3426 The Art of Editing
A course for student writers of all kinds who are seeking hands-on experience in editing, whether copyediting and proofreading, line editing, developmental editing, or content editing. Topics covered may include the technical aspects of editing, the publishing profession, and the politics of language standards. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3428 Deep Dive Arts and Culture Writing
This course focuses on a semester-long project that takes a deep dive into some aspect of arts and culture. Students will be invited to chart their own course into a topic they are passionate about, whether it be an aspect of the fine arts or a crucial element in pop culture, fashion, sports, comedy, or some other field. Ideally, students will have already taken Writing about the Arts and Popular Culture, but that is not a firm prerequisite and other students should absolutely feel free to consider this course. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3501 Writing and Witnessing
This course will explore one of the fundamental questions we face as humans: how do we bear witness to ourselves and to the world? How do we live and write with a sense of response-ability to one another? How does our writing grapple with traumatic histories that continue to shape our world and who we are in it? The very word “witnessing” contains a conundrum within it: it means both to give testimony, such as in a court of law, and to bear witness to something beyond understanding. In this class, we will explore both senses of the term “witness” as we study work by writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Paul Celan, M. NourbeSe Philip, Bhanu Kapil, Layli Long Soldier, Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and others that wrestles with how to be a witness to oneself and others during a time of ongoing war, colonialism, racism, climate change, and other disasters. Students are welcome in this class no matter what stage you are at with writing, and whether you write poetry or prose or plays or make other kinds of art. Regardless of your experience, in this class you’ll be considered an “author,” which in its definition also means a “witness.” We will examine and question what authorship can do in the world, and we will analyze and explore the fine lines among being a witness, a bystander, a participant, a spectator, and an ally. In this class you will critically analyze and write responses to class readings; you’ll do writing exercises related to the work we read; and you’ll complete (and be workshopped on) a portfolio of creative writing (and/or art) that bears witness to events that matter to you.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 3501, GSWS 3501
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3502 Writing and Borders
Many writings are influenced by crossings, borders, and war. But many of these writings also exceed the limits of form: the drive to put down experience in poems spills out into prose, and vice versa; the borders of poetic form seem to be incapable of holding or transferring experience into language. Students will explore their own experimentations across borders. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3504 Across Forms: Art and Writing
What if a poem spoke from inside a photograph? What if a sculpture unfurled a political manifesto? What if a story wasn't just like a dance, but was a dance-or a key component of a video, drawing, performance, or painting? In this course, artists and writers will develop new works that integrate the forms, materials, and concerns of both art and writing. Many artists employ writing in their practices, but may not look at the texts they create as writing. And many writers have practices that go beyond the page and deserve attention as art. This course will employ critique and workshop, pedagogic methodologies from art and writing respectively, to support and interrogate cross- pollination between writing and art practices. Additionally, the course will will examine a field of artists and writers who are working with intersections between art and writing to create dynamic new ways of seeing, reading, and experiencing.
Fall
Also Offered As: FNAR 3080
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 5056
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3508 Queer Forms
Queer and trans writers have always queered form, constantly inventing new ways to express new forms of becoming. And yet, much of the attention paid to LGBTQ+ writing has focused on identity and content rather than looking at the many innovations in form that queer and trans writers are always producing. This multi-genre creative/critical workshop will examine some of the methods contemporary LGBTQ+ writers have used to queer genre and form in their writing, whether they are working through fiction, poetry, essay, play/performance, or some combination thereof. Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s notions of disidentification and queer futurity will help guide our thinking in this course. Students will read and write creative/critical responses each week to a wide range of writing that queers form. The class will include weekly workshopping and students will work towards a final project that incorporates all they have learned over the term, generating ever new queer forms of making.
Also Offered As: COML 3508, GSWS 3508
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3510 Making Comics
Open to both beginners and enthusiasts alike, this creative writing workshop will expose students to the unique language of comics and allow students to create their own stories in the medium. Through essential critical readings, practical homework, and lab assignments, students will develop an understanding of how text and sequential images combine, and will take on a variety of roles in the making of comics (writing, illustrating, page layout, inking, character creation, and more). To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3511 Writing through Culture and Art
This is a year-long creative writing class, given as a collaboration between the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Students will be encouraged to develop correspondent methods of responding to the PMA's exhibitions. The class will involve regular trips to attend concerts, museums and lectures. Students will have access to the most cutting-edge artists today via class visits and studio visits, and the course will culminate in a publication of student work. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3512 Duchamp Is My Lawyer
This course examines the impact of copyright law on artists and creative industries. Looking at publishing, music, film, and software, we will ask how the law drives the adoption of new media, and we will consider how regulation influences artistic decisions. A mix of the theoretical with the practical, we will be using UbuWeb (the largest and oldest site dedicated to the free distribution of the avant-garde) as our main case study. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 3512
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3513 Cities and Stories
So much of what we know about cities comes from the stories we tell about them. This course takes the-city-in-stories as both our subject and our muse. We will work across genres and disciplines, reading a mix of fiction and nonfiction in which cities figure prominently, from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities to Sarah Broom's Yellow House. We'll go from Mumbai, in Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, to Oakland, in Tommy Orange's There There. With each text, we'll examine how the city is represented, including what and who we see and don't see, and the role it plays in the narrative. We'll also explore the author's craft and write our own creative nonfiction about city streets and neighborhoods. The class will be part discussion-based seminar and part peer-review writing workshop. It is open to both creative writing and urban studies students excited to explore the intersections between our stories, our cities, and ourselves.
Spring
Also Offered As: URBS 3500
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3514 Writing Towards Transformation
Writing Towards Transformation is a critical and creative writing workshop focused on developing works across genres that express and elaborate upon current and historical conditions of crisis and injustice. Using guided meditation, critical feedback and healthy, ethical discussion, the students of the class will develop manuscripts of poems, short stories, essays, plays and/or screenplays that in some way articulate their analysis of the present and the past towards a transformative future. We will read essays, manifestos, theater and fiction as well as view films that will hopefully inspire each student to develop texts and scripts of hope. Writers used as models of inspiration will include Gary Indiana, Valerie Solanas, June Jordan, Bertolt Brecht, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Feinberg and Toni Cade Bambara, among many others. This is a graduate level course open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3514, LALS 3514
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3515 Translating Laughter
While this course will deal with the history and theory of translation at large, the practical aspect of the course or the workshop component of it will focus on translating humor from various texts and mediums. We will begin by examining the history and theory of translation, read theory on translation and parody, and examine specific passages and how they manifest themselves in literary and visual translations. Finally, we will set workshops to present, share, and examine the effects of our translations together. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3516 Writing as Translation
This workshop course is devoted to creative writing as inherently a form of translation. Some or all students will try their hands at writing their own translations, although please note that knowledge of a language other than English is not required. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3517 Plague Lab: Writing through Infection and Affliction
How do we write through a plague? In this creative writing class we will begin with the question of how plagues make and disrupt meaning. In addition to canonical examples, we’ll explore off-center, anti-colonial, and non-Western literary and popular culture works. Students will then produce across a number of genres including poetry, fiction, memoir, zines, double-blind studies, sculpture, installation, performance, or found object scavenging. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: FNAR 3517, THAR 1117
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3600 Screenwriting Workshop
This is a workshop-style course for those who have thought they had a terrific idea for a movie but didn't know where to begin. The class will focus on learning the basic tenets of classical dramatic structure and how this (ideally) will serve as the backbone for the screenplay of the aforementioned terrific idea. Each student should, by the end of the semester, have at least thirty pages of a screenplay completed. Classic and not-so-classic screenplays will be required reading for every class, and students will also become acquainted with how the business of selling and producing one's screenplay actually happens.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 1160
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3601 Advanced Screenwriting
This is a workshop style course for students who have completed a screenwriting class, or have a draft of a screenplay they wish to improve or want to learn everything in one shot and are ready to do a lot of writing, and even more rewriting.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 1300
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3603 Writing for Television
This is a workshop-style course for those who have an interest in writing for television. The course will consist of two parts: First, students will develop premise lines, beat sheets and outlines for an episode of an existing television show. Second, students will develop their own idea for a television series which will culminate in the writing of the first 30 pages of an original television pilot.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 1170
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3604 Playwriting Workshop
This course is designed as a hands-on workshop in the art and craft of dramatic writing. It involves the study of new plays, the systematic exploration of such elements as storymaking, plot, structure, theme, character, dialogue, setting, etc.; and most importantly, the development of students' own short plays through a series of written assignments and in-class exercises. Since a great deal of this work takes place in class - through lectures, discussions, spontaneous writing exercises, and the reading of student work - weekly attendance and active participation is crucial. At the end of the semester, students' plays are read in a staged reading environment by professional actors.
Spring
Also Offered As: THAR 0114
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3605 Advanced Playwriting
This course is intended to reinforce and build upon the areas covered in Level 1 Playwriting (THAR 0114) so that students can refine the skills they've acquired and take them to the next level. Topics covered will include techniques for approaching the first draft, in-depth characterization, dramatic structure, conflict, shaping the action, language/dialogue (incl.subtext, rhythm, imagery, exposition etc), how to analyse your own work as a playwright, dealing with feedback, the drafting process, techniques for rewriting, collaboration (with directors, actors etc) and the 'business of the art' - working with theatres, agents, dramaturgs etc. Students will undertake to write their own one-act plays over the course. The classes will be a mixture of lecture, discussion, study of dramatic texts, writing exercises and in-class analysis of students' work.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: THAR 1114
Prerequisite: THAR 0114
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3606 Experimental Playwriting
A course on writing for theater and performance. Students will take cues from myriad experimental playwrights and performance artists who have challenged conventional ideas of what a script should look and sound like, how narrative is constructed, how characters are built, and what a setting can be. This class will push beyond the formal structures of the well-made play script and address how writers explore and reinvent form and language as a means for radical change. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: THAR 3606
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3607 Adaptation
This course is designed to explore the techniques and practices of adaptation in order to transform stories not originally written for the stage into plays. We will reimagine material from other media, considering how the original author’s intent intersects with a student’s own artistic voice. Through reading and writing exercises, we will focus on themes, characters, setting, as well as theatricality, and better understand the value of transferring ideas from the page to the stage. Students will investigate what makes a story stage worthy as they work to create a short play from source material of their choosing.
Also Offered As: THAR 1115
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3608 The Planets in my Pen: Experiments in Writing, Visual Art & Performance
The Planets in my Pen is a multi-genre creative arts workshop constellated around experimentation. We will be looking at innovative writing, visual art and film as models for the making of poetry, fiction, memoir, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, plays and performance. The genres, techniques and movements of science fiction, surrealism, performance art and the political essay will be key with an emphasis on feminist, queer, left and anticolonial models of art and world making. The works of William S. Burroughs, John Rechy, Nelly Santiago, Jean Genet, Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler, Adrienne Kennedy, Lucrecia Martel, Aimé Cesaire, Jamaica Kincaid, Regina Jose Galindo, Raul Ruiz, Josefina Baez, Zadie Smith and Cherríe Moraga will be among those read, viewed and studied. As their final project students will submit a final manuscript, performance and/or art object as well as participate in a public reading/viewing/screening.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3600, LALS 3600, THAR 3600
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3609 The Short Film: Writing, Producing and Directing
In this class students will write and prepare a short film for production with the INTENT to direct it. The first half of class is devoted to coming up with an idea and writing a short film with a total run time of around 8-12 minutes. This is the ideal length for a short. The second half of the class is devoted to preparing to shoot the film which will include scheduling, budgeting, casting, crewing up, location scouting and creating a directorial look book for the film. At the end of class each student will have a short film script and all the necessary materials to start production of that film. The below documents are required to pass the class and presented as one all inclusive PDF document at the end of the semester.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 1180
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3630 Here I/We Stand: Writing/Performing Self and Community
This writing for performance workshop will focus on the creation of plays, solo performance, collectively devised work, screenplays and videos. Students can work in both the autobiographical mode common to one person shows, traditional theater and screenplay form as well as avant-garde and experimental techniques. We will write and use theater exercises to develop character and narratives that either directly or obliquely speak to the conditions of subjects who struggle to make art and sense out of self and community, history and society, memory and fantasy. We will read the work of playwrights and solo performers as well as view film and video with an emphasis on the work of leftist, feminist, queer/trans, BIPOC and social justice artists such as Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Cherríe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, Holly Hughes, Kate Bornstein, Ana Mendieta, Valerie Solanas, Wallace Shawn, Tomata du Plenty, Teatro Campesino and ACT UP.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3630
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3650 Self-Scripting: Writing through Body and Space
Students in Self-Scripting will write through a variety of exercises and activities that put text into play with the body and space. Over the course of the semester, students will actively engage space and composition as they develop and explore scriptwriting for performance. This course aims to expand on techniques for writing plays, poetry, and experimental biography. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: THAR 0115
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3651 Passion Projects: Radical Experiments in Writing Plays, Screenplays, and Pilots
This creative writing workshop will focus on writing for screen, stage and internet and is open to undergraduate and graduate students at every level of writing experience. The course will be writing intensive and also include the reading and analysis of feminist, trans, queer, working class and racially liberatory plays, films, television and performance as models of inspiration. Meditation, drawing, theater games, improv exercises, screenings and outings to see work on and off campus will round out this holistic and experimental approach to making work that illuminates and entertains audiences from across the US and global audience spectrum.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3651, LALS 3651
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3652 Is This Really Happening? Performance and Contemporary Political Horizons
This class addresses the meeting points inside of and between a range of resistant performance practices with a focus on artists using performance to address political and social encounters in the contemporary moment. Performance, a chaotic and unruly category that slides across music, dance, theater and visual art, has long been a container for resistant actions/activities that bring aesthetics and politics into dynamic dialogue. Embracing works, gestures, movements, sounds and embodiments that push against and beyond the conventions of a given genre, performance can't help but rub uncomfortably against the status quo. Scholars working across Performance Studies and Black Studies importantly expanded critical discourse around performance to address the entanglement of the medium with physical, psychic, spatial and temporal inhabitations of violence and power. Generating copious genealogies of embodied resistance, this scholarship instigates a complex, interdisciplinary and multidimensional perspective on intersections between art and life, performance and politics. The class hosts a series of public lectures, presentations and performances by visual artists, choreographers, theater artists, composers/musicians, performers, curators and activists engaged with the social and political moment. Presentations will be open to the public with students in the course developing in-depth research into the work of each visiting artist/performer/presenter to engage the larger context of each visitor's scholarship and/or practice through readings, discussion and in-class presentations. This course is open to all interested students. No prior requisties or experience with performance or the performing arts is necessary.
Also Offered As: FNAR 3160, GSWS 0860
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3653 Collaborative Practices: Staging Projects Together
Collaborative Practices is an ABCS course in which Penn students will build and hone their stage practices in collaboration with young artists and performers in Philadelphia. Collaborative Practices offers models for staging original works in collaboration from start to finish and interrogates assumptions about collaboration inside a hands-on mentorship relationship. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Also Offered As: THAR 2520
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3899 Independent Study: Bassini Writing Apprenticeship
The Bassini Writing Apprenticeship is a supervised independent study in creative writing. For more information, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3998 Creative Writing Honors Thesis
The Creative Writing Honors Thesis is a supervised independent study in creative writing to be submitted for the consideration of Honors in English. For more information, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 3999 Independent Study in Creative Writing
A supervised independent study in creative writing. For more information, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4097 Honors Thesis Seminar
This seminar is a workshop for seniors in the Honors Program. Admitted students will compose a critical essay of substantial length under the supervision of a faculty advisor.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4098 Senior Thesis Independent Study
Supervised reading and research toward the Senior Honors Thesis.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4500 One Series: Medieval/Renaissance
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the Medieval and/or Renaissance period. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4501 One Series--Medieval/Renaissance with Theory and Poetics
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the Medieval and/or Renaissance period with a focus on Theory & Poetics. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4502 One Series--Medieval/Renaissance with Difference and Diaspora
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the Medieval and/or Renaissance period with a focus on Difference and Diaspora. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4503 One Series--Medieval/Renaissance with Theory & Poetics and Difference and Diaspora
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the Medieval and/or Renaissance period with a focus on both Theory & Poetics and Difference & Diaspora. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4504 One Series--Literature of the Long 18th Century
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the Long 18th Century. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4505 One Series--Literature of the Long 18C with Theory and Poetics
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the Long 18th Century with a focus on Theory and Poetics. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4506 One Series--Literature of the Long 18C with Difference and Diaspora
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the Long 18th Century with a focus on Difference and Diaspora. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4507 One Series--Literature of the Long 18C with Theory & Poetics and Difference and Diaspora
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the Long 18th Century with a focus on Theory & Poetics and Difference & Diaspora. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4508 One Series--19th Century Literature
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the 19th Century. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4509 One Series--19th Century Lit with Theory and Poetics
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the 19th Century with a focus on Theory and Poetics. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4510 One Series--19th Century Lit with Difference and Diaspora
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the 19th Century with a focus on Difference and Diaspora. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4511 One Series--19th Century Lit with Theory & Poetics and Difference & Diaspora
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the 19th Century with a focus on Theory & Poetics and Difference & Diaspora. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4512 One Series--20th/21st Century
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the 20th/21st Century. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4513 One Series--20th/21st Century with Theory and Poetics
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the 20th/21st Century with a focus on Theory and Poetics. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4514 One Series--20th/21st Century with Difference and Diaspora
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the 20th/21st Century with a focus on Difference and Diaspora. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4515 One Series--20th/21st Century with Theory & Poetics and Difference & Diaspora
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major literary text from the 20th/21st Century with a focus on Theory & Poetics and Difference & Diaspora. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4516 One Series--Major Film
This seminar offers students the opportunity to undertake a semester-long in-depth study of a major film regardless of origin. Discussions will address emergent research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates surrounding canonization. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMS 4516
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4517 One Series--Love and Rockets: The Great American Comic Book
This One Series course explores Love and Rockets, an anthology comic book series created by the collective known as Los Bros Hernandez and published continuously since 1978. We will approach the series through the lenses of Comics Studies and Latinx Studies. Is it true, as one scholar says, that, “Love and Rockets is the closest thing we have to ‘The Great American Comic Book?’” How does the series continue or challenge the legacy of the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s? We will consider how Love and Rockets incorporates elements of the anarchist LA punk scene, challenges notions of Latinidad, and expands the visual vernacular of gender & sexuality in American comics. Alongside two representative volumes from Love and Rockets, we will read criticism, watch documentaries, incorporate our own comics research, and write comics of our own. Assignments will include brief research exercises and short writing in various forms. For the final projects, students will have the choice of a critical essay or creative project. Students will come away from the class with increased visual literacy as well as a basic theoretical framework for ethnic studies writ large.
Also Offered As: LALS 4517
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4599 Study Abroad--Advanced Seminar
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Advanced Seminar for English
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4955 JRS Med/Ren & 20C-21C Lit
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, as well as debates in both Medieval/Renaissance and 20th and/or 21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4956 JRS Med/Ren & 20C-21C Lit with Theory and Poetics
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates in both Medieval/Renaissance and 20th and/or 21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4957 JRS Med/Ren & 20C-21C Lit with Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Difference and Diaspora, as well as debates in both Medieval/Renaissance and 20th and/or 21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4958 JRS Med/Ren & 20C-21C Lit with Theory and Poetics & Difference and Diaspora
his course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, Difference and Diaspora, as well as debates in both Medieval/Renaissance and 20th and/or 21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4976 JRS 19C Lit & 20C-21C Lit
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, as well as debates in both 19th Century literature and 20th and/or 21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4977 JRS 19C Lit & 20C-21C Lit with Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Difference and Diaspora, as well as debates in both 19th Century literature and 20th and/or 21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4978 JRS 19C Lit & 20C-21C Lit with Theory and Poetics
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates in both 19th Century literature and 20th and/or 21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4979 JRS 19C Lit & 20C-21C Lit with Theory and Poetics and Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, Difference and Diaspora, as well as debates in both 19th Century literature and 20th and/or 21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4980 JRS 20C-21C Lit with Theory & Poetics and Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates in 20th and/or 21st Century Literature, with an added focus on difference and diaspora. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4984 JRS Med/Ren
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates within the Medieval and/or Renaissance period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4985 JRS Med/Ren with Theory & Poetics
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates within the Medieval and/or Renaissance period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4986 JRS Med/Ren with Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates within the Medieval and/or Renaissance period, with a focus on difference and diaspora. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4987 JRS Med/Ren with Theory & Poetics and Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates within the Medieval and/or Renaissance period, with an added focus on difference and diaspora. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4988 JRS Long 18C Lit
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates within the Literature of the Long 18th Century period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4989 JRS Long 18C Lit with Theory and Poetics
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates within the Literature of the Long 18th Century period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4990 JRS Long 18C Lit with Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates within the Literature of the Long 18th Century period, with a focus on difference and diaspora. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4991 JRS Long 18C Lit with Theory & Poetics and Difference and Diaspora
This course offers English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates in the Literature of the Long 18th Century period, with an added focus on difference and diaspora. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4992 JRS 19C Literature
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates within 19th Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4993 JRS 19C Literature with Theory & Poetics
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates within 19th Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4994 JRS 19C Literature with Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates within 19th Century Literature, with a focus on difference and diaspora. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4995 JRS 19C Literature with Theory & Poetics and Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates in 19th Century Literature, with an added focus on difference and diaspora. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4996 JRS 20C-21C Literature
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates within 20th Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4997 JRS 20C-21C Literature with Theory & Poetics
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, Theory and Poetics, as well as debates within 20th-21st Century Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 4998 JRS 20C-21C Literature with Difference and Diaspora
This course offers junior English majors the opportunity to design and undertake a semester-long research and writing project in an advanced seminar setting. Discussions will address research methods, advanced writing and critical thinking issues, and debates within 20th Century Literature, with a focus on difference and diaspora. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5001 Cinema and Globalization
In this course, we will study a number of films (mainly feature films, but also a few documentaries) that deal with a complicated nexus of issues that have come to be discussed under the rubric of "globalization." Among these are the increasingly extensive networks of money and power, the transnational flow of commodities and cultural forms, and the accelerated global movement of people, whether as tourists or migrants. At stake, throughout, will be the ways in which our present geographical, economic, social, and political order can be understood and represented. What new narrative forms have arisen to make sense of contemporary conditions? Films will include: The Year of Living Dangerously, Perfumed Nightmare, Dirty Pretty Things, Monsoon Wedding, Babel, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Maria Full of Grace, In This Word,Darwin's Nightmare, Black Gold, Life and Debt, The Constant Gardener, Syriana, and Children of Men. In addition to studying the assigned films carefully, students will also be expected to read a selection of theoretical works on globalization (including Zygmunt Baumann's Globalization: The Human Consequences) and, where appropriate, the novels on which the assigned films are based. Advance viewing of the films is required. (I find it is best to place films on reserve for students' use, or to ask that students get their own DVDs from Amazon or Netflix, but screenings can certainly be arranged.) Writing requirements: either a mid-term and final paper, or an in-class power point presentation and final paper.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5001
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5002 Hollywood Film Industry
This is a course on the history of Hollywood. It seeks to unravel Hollywood's complex workings and explains how the business and politics of the film industry translate into the art of film. We will trace the American film industry from Edison to the internet, asking questions such as: What is the relationship between Hollywood and independent film? How has the global spread of Hollywood since the 1920s changed the film industry? How has Hollywood responded to crises in American politics (e.g., world wars, the cold war, terrorism)? And how have new technologies such as synchronized sound, color cinematography, television, home video, computer graphics, and other digital technologies changed film and Hollywood? We will look closely at representative studios(Paramount, Disney, and others), representative filmmakers (MaryPickford, Frank Capra, and George Lucas, among many others), and we will examine the impact of industrial changes on the screen.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5002
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5003 Copyright and Culture
In this course, we will look at the history of copyright law and explore the ways that copyright has both responded to new media and driven art and entertainment. How, for example, is a new medium (photography, film, the Internet, etc.) defined in relation to existing media? What constitutes originality in collage painting, hip hop music, or computer software? What are the limits of fair use? And how have artists, engineers and creative industries responded to various changes in copyright law? A major focus of the course will be the lessons of history for the current copyright debates over such issues as file sharing, online video, and remix culture. In this course, we will look at the history of copyright law and explore the ways that copyright has both responded to new media and driven art and entertainment. How, for example, is a new medium (photography, film, the Internet, etc.) defined in relation to existing media? What constitutes originality in collage painting, hip hop music, or computer software? What are the limits of fair use? And how have artists, engineers and creative industries responded to various changes in copyright law? A major focus of the course will be the lessons of history for the current copyright debates over such issues as file sharing, online video, and remix culture.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5003
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5004 Horror Cinema
The course will explore European Horror Cinema from the 1970s to the present time, focusing on a number of cult films that have helped rejuvenate and redefine the genre in a radically modern sense by pushing the envelope in terms of subversive representation of gore, violence and sex. We will look at various national cinemas (primarily Western Europe – Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands – with the occasional foray into Eastern Europe and Scandinavia) and at a range of subgenres (giallo, mondo, slasher, survival, snuff, …) or iconic figures (ghosts, vampires, cannibals, serial killers, …). Issues of ethics, ideology, gender, sexuality, violence, spectatorship will be discussed through a variety of critical lenses (psychoanalysis, socio-historical and cultural context, aesthetics, politics…). The class will be conducted entirely in English. Be prepared for provocative, graphic, transgressive film viewing experiences. Not for the faint of heart!
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5004
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5005 Sex/Love/Desire In Art Cinema
This topic course explores multiple and different aspects of Cinema Studies. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/courses for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5005
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5010 Introduction to Old English Language and Literature
This is an accelerated study of the basic language of Anglo-Saxon England, together with a critical reading of a variety of texts, both prose and poetry. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5030 Transnational TV
How are television and nation historically related, and how has television been part of new kinds of nationalization and globalization projects? Television content like telenovelas or BBC news have often transnationally moved and television infrastructures like satellites and optical fiber cables have had a global footprint. We will discuss both the local situatedness of televisual production and reception cultures as well as their ability to impact global issues and discourses. The course is interested in how television schedules historically have been part of everyday lives of people and how more recently, on-demand TV content shapes and is shaped by quotidian rhythms of people’s lives in different countries with specific socio-cultural contexts. The course particularly focuses on how global television cultures have been transformed due to shifts from broadcasting technologies to (Internet) streaming services: In what ways has the television landscape changed and remained the same with the emergence of global subscription TV platforms like Netflix and Prime Video as they commission and develop content in collaboration with local and national artists and practitioners? How are regional streamers competing with and resisting the expansion of Netflix? What explains the growing transnational exports of Turkish dizi and Korean TV dramas? We will attend to both emerging genres of content and trace the new distribution circuits of transnational television.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 5030
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5050 Digital Humanities Studies
This course is designed to introduce advanced undergraduate and graduate students to the range of new opportunities for literary research afforded by Digital Humanities and recent technological innovation. Digital Humanities: you've heard of it. Maybe you're excited about it, maybe you're skeptical. Regardless of your primary area of study, this course will give you the critical vocabularies and hands-on experience necessary to understand the changing landscape of the humanities today. Topics will include quantitative analysis, digital editing and bibliography, network visualization, public humanities, and the future of scholarly publishing. Although we will spend a good portion of our time together working directly with new tools and methods, our goal will not be technological proficiency so much as critical competence and facility with digital theories and concepts. We will engage deeply with media archaeology, feminist technology studies, critical algorithm studies, and the history of material texts; and we will attend carefully to the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in the field. Students will have the opportunity to pursue their own scalable digital project. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 5051, COML 5050
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5180 King Arthur: Medieval to Modern
From the Middle Ages to the present, stories about King Arthur, the brave deeds of the nights of the Round Table, and Merlin's mysterious prophecies have mesmerized readers and audiences. In this course, we will study nearly 1000 years of literature about King Arthur, beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and ending with Mark Twain, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the fantasy fiction classic, T. H. White's Once and Future King. We will also be reading authors who repurposed Arthurian literature to think about gender relations (for example, Elizabeth Phelps' critique of domesticity), colonialism and nationalism (Wales and India), and religious cultures (for example, the medieval Hebrew version of King Arthur). Throughout the course, we will think about what Arthurian legends mean to the way we write history and the ways in which we view our collective pasts (and futures). Assignments will include response papers, an oral presentation, and a final paper.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5240 Topics in Medieval Studies
This course covers topics in Medieval literature. Its emphasis varies with instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5240, GSWS 5240
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5245 Topics in Medieval Studies: Premodern Animals (c.500-c.1500)
From St. Cuthbert, whose freezing feet were warmed by otters, to St. Guinefort, a miracle-performing greyhound in 13th-century France, to Melusine, the half-fish, half-woman ancestress of the house of Luxembourg (now the Starbucks logo), medieval narratives are deeply inventive in their portrayal of human-animal interactions. This course introduces students to critical animals studies via medieval literature and culture. We will read a range of genres, from philosophical commentaries on Aristotle and theological commentaries on Noah’s ark to werewolf poems, beast fables, political satires, saints’ lives, chivalric romances, bestiaries, natural encyclopaedias, dietary treatises and travel narratives. Among the many topics we will explore are the following: animals in premodern law; comfort and companion animals; vegetarianism across religious cultures; animal symbolism and human virtue; taxonomies of species in relation to race, gender, and class; literary animals and political subversion; menageries and collecting across medieval Europe, the Near East, and Asia; medieval notions of hybridity, compositeness, trans-species identity, and interspecies relationships; art and the global traffic in animals (e.g., ivory, parchment); European encounters with New World animals; and the legacy of medieval animals in contemporary philosophy and media. No prior knowledge of medieval literature is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.
Also Offered As: CLST 7710, COML 5245, RELS 6101
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5250 Chaucer
An advanced introduction to Chaucer's poetry and Chaucer criticism. Reading and discussion of the dream visions, Troilus and Criseyde, and selections from Canterbury Tales, from the viewpoint of Chaucer's development as a narrative artist. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5380 Major Renaissance Writers
This is a monographic course, which may be on Spenser, Milton, or other major figures of the period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5400 Topics in 18th Century British Literature
This course covers topics in 18th Century British literature. Its emphasis varies with instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5410 Topics in Cultural History
Topic for Fall 2021: Making and Marking Time.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 5870, COML 5410, GRMN 5410
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5430 Environmental Humanities: Theory, Method, Practice
Environmental Humanities: Theory, Methods, Practice is a seminar-style course designed to introduce students to the trans- and interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. Weekly readings and discussions will be complemented by guest speakers from a range of disciplines including ecology, atmospheric science, computing, history of science, medicine, anthropology, literature, and the visual arts. Participants will develop their own research questions and a final project, with special consideration given to building the multi-disciplinary collaborative teams research in the environmental humanities often requires.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5430, ENVS 5410, GRMN 5430, SPAN 5430
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5440 18th-century Visual Cultures of Race & Empire
This course approaches the Western history of race and racial classification (1600-1800) with a focus on visual and material culture, natural history, and science that connected Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Across the long eighteenth century, new knowledges about human diversity and species distinctions emerged alongside intensifications of global trade with Asia. The course will include case studies of chinoiserie textiles, portraits of consuming individuals, natural history prints and maps, Chinese export porcelain and furnishings, and "blackamoor" sculpture. Objects of visual and material culture will be studied alongside readings on regional and world histories that asserted universal freedoms as well as hierarchies of human, animal, and plant-kind. Keeping in mind that the idea of race continues to be a distributed phenomenon - across color, gender, class, religion, speech, culture - we will explore changing vocabularies of difference, particularly concerning skin color, across a range of texts and images. Knowledge often does not take written or literary form, and for this reason, we will study examples of visual and material culture as well as forms of technology that were critical to defining human varieties, to use the eighteenth-century term. Although we will be reading texts in English, some in translation, we will also account for European and non-European knowledge traditions - vernacular, indigenous - that informed scientific and imaginative writings about the globe. Topics may include cultural and species distinction, global circulations of commodities between the East and West Indies, the transatlantic slave trade, the casta system of racial classification in the Americas, religious and scientific explanations of blackness and whiteness, and visual representations of non-European people.
Spring
Also Offered As: ARTH 5680, COML 5041
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5450 Eighteenth-Century Novel
A survey of the major novelists of the period, often beginning with Defoe and a few of the writers of amatory fiction in the early decades of the century and then moving on to representative examples of the celebrated novels by Richardson, Fielding, and others of the mid-century and after. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5480 English Literature and Culture, 1650-1725
English 5480 studies the literature of this period in the context of the artistic and cultural milieu of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Texts usually include works by Dryden, Rochester, Swift, Pope, and Defoe. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5500 Topics in Romanticism
This class explores the cultural context in which the so-called Romantic Movement prospered, paying special attention to the relationship between the most notorious popular genres of the period (gothic fiction and drama) and the poetic production of both canonical and emerging poets. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5530 British Women Writers
A study of British women writers, often focusing on the women authors who came into prominence between 1775 and 1825. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5560 Topics in 19th-Century British Literature
This course covers topics in ninteenth-century British Literature, its specific emphasis varying with the instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5600 The Novel
This course will provide an intensive introduction to the study of the novel, approaching the genre from a range of theoretical, critical, and historical perspectives. It may examine conflicting versions of the novel's history (including debates about its relationship to the making of the individual, the nation-state, empire, capital, racial and class formations, secularism, the history of sexuality, democracy, print and other media, etc.), or it may focus on theories of the novel, narratology, or a particular problem in novel criticism. It may attend to a specific form or subgenre of fiction, or it may comprise a survey of genres and texts. See the English Department's website at: www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5640 British Modernism
An introduction to British Literary Modernism. Specific emphasis will depend on instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5690 Topics in 20th-Century American Literature
This course covers topics in 20th-century literature, its emphasis varying with instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5700 Topics in Afro-Diasporic Literature and Culture
This course treats some important aspect of African American and Afro-Diasporic literature and culture. Some recent versions of the course have focused on the emergence of African-American women writers, on the relation between African-American literature and cultural studies, and on the Harlem Renaissance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 5701, COML 5700
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5720 Topics in African Literature
This course is based on a selection of representative texts written in English, as well as a few texts in English translation. It involves, a study of themes relating to social change and the persistence of cultural traditions, followed by an attempt at sketching the emergence of literary tradition by identifying some of the formal conventions of established writers in their use of old forms and experiments with new. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5730 Topics in Criticism & Theory: Object Theory
Topics vary annually
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 5730, CIMS 5730, COML 5730, GRMN 5730, REES 6683
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5735 Topics in Criticism: What is Poetics?
What is poetics? How does it differ from other forms of criticism in terms of both attitude or posture and method? In terms of practices of art and politics, What is its relationship to poieis and ethics -- what is poethics? -- as articulated by such varied thinkers as Joan Retallack, Denise Farreira Da Silva and R.A. Judy? What’s to be observed about the current turn of black studies toward poetics? For the seminar, let’s think about the above as matters of a) critical inquiry b) art practice and c) professional discipline. It may be possible to triangulate by way of “critique” and “aesthetics.” Proposing the inseparability of critical inquiry and writing practice, the final assignment will be deemed experimental since the monograph-ish essay won’t be presumed. Consequently, we will discuss the institutional state/status of what participants will have made. Possible readings incoude Michel Foucault, What is Critique?; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, What is Philosophy?; Hortense Spillers, Black, White & in Color (selections); Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager; Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Unpayable Debt; Boris Groys, Going Public ; Rachel Zolf, No One’s Witness; Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense/Longing from Taking Place.
Also Offered As: COML 5735
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5740 Introduction to Bibliography
This course offers an introduction to the principles of descriptive and analytic bibliography and textual editing. The history of authorship, manuscript production, printing, publishing, and reading will be addressed as they inform an understanding of how a particular text came to be the way it is. Diverse theories of editing will be studied and put into practice with short passages. The course is generally suitable for students working in any historical period, but particular emphases specified in the current offerings on the English website. www.english.upenn.edu
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5745 Material Texts
This course offers an introduction to the relationship of texts to their production, circulation, and physical forms, including the history of textual production and reproduction. Students will gain technical expertise and experience through a series of hands-on exercises in bibliographical analysis, but will mainly practice a "way of seeing" material texts that can be brought to bear on literary criticism, cultural or media studies, and historiography, beyond the technical work of bibliography. Different instructors will emphasize different aspects of this topic. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5790 Provocative Performance
What is feminist theatre? How do artists use live performance to provoke not only thought and feeling, but also social, personal, and political change? This course will examine a wide array of plays and performances by and about women; these pieces are, in turn, serious, hilarious, outrageous, poignant--and always provocative. Our focus will be on English-language works from the late 20th century to the present (#metoo) moment. We will read these performance texts and/or view them on stage/screen; we will also read essays that provide contextual background on feminist theatre theory and history. Throughout the semester, we will engage diverse perspectives on women and race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender identity; the issues we encounter will also include marriage and motherhood, career and community, feminism and friendship, and patriarchy and power. The class will take full advantage of any related events occurring on campus or in the city, and will feature visits with guest speakers. Students will have the opportunity to pursue research on their own areas of interest (some recent examples are "women in comedy," trans performance, drag kings, feminist directing, etc.).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 5790, THAR 5790
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5820 American Literature to 1810
In this course we shall examine the ways various voices--Puritan, Indian, Black, Female, Enlightened, Democratic--intersect with each other and with the landscape of America to produce the early literature(s) of America. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5840 Environmental Imaginaries
Drawing on theories of worldmaking and ethnographic works on culture and environment, this seminar will examine the production of Cartesian-based environmental imaginaries and their alternatives across a range of genres and practices. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5890 Twentieth-Century American Poetry
See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5900 Recent issues in Critical Theory
This course is a critical exploration of recent literary and cultural theory, usually focusing on one particular movement or school, such as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, or deconstruction. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5901
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5910 Russian and Soviet Cultural Institutions
In this seminar, we will study Russian and Soviet culture through the history of its institutions, in the broader social-institutional context of land-based European empire and state socialism. The course will include material from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, but attention will be focused disproportionately on the twentieth century. Each unit will focus on a specific social institution of culture, yet will also require the reading/viewing of canonical texts and films. Topics will include: reading publics and education; authorship and professionalization; cultural management of social, ethnic, gender and national diversity (including via institutions of translation); journals and publishing houses; genres; the Union of Soviet Writers; censorship and unofficial dissemination; the film industry; cultural history and memory (jubilee celebrations); the culture industry.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 6530, REES 6150
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5920 20th-Century Literature and Theory
This course treats some aspect of literary and cultural politics in the 20th-Century with emphasis varying by instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5930 Classical Film Theory
At a moment when contemporary film and media theory has become increasingly interested in how earlier film theories can help us understand our moment of transition, this course will give students the opportunity to read closely some of those key early texts that are preoccupied with questions and problems that include: the ontology of film, the psychology of perception, the transition to sound, the politics of mass culture, realism, and ethnography. Course requirements: ; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; 20-25 page paper.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 5930, CIMS 5930, COML 5930, GSWS 5930
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5931 Contemporary Film Theory
In this course, we will dig in to a variety of contemporary film theory debates in the context of earlier texts with which they engage or against which they define themselves. We will also watch films weekly and consider the relationship between theory and practice.Course requirements: ; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; 20-25 page paper.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 5931, CIMS 5931, GSWS 5931
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5932 The Place of Film and Media Theory
Taking its title from a recent special issue in the journal Framework, this seminar will engage the where of film and media theory. At a moment when this discourse, often presumed to have roots in Anglo and Western European traditions, is purportedly undergoing a global turn, we will consider how some of film and media theory's key terms and preoccupations including realism, documentary, genre, identity, sound, spectatorship, nation, auteur, and screens are being inflected by expanded geographic, linguistic, aesthetic and cultural frames. We will grapple with some of the logistical challenges, motivations, resistances, and questions that scholars encounter as they attempt to shift film and media theory's borders; compare contemporary efforts to broaden the discourse's geographic horizon with earlier efforts to do the same; and consider what happens to the viewer's sense of space and place in different media environments. Course requirements: full participation in readings, screenings, discussion, and class presentations; 20-25 page research paper + annotated bibliography.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 5932, CIMS 5932, GSWS 5932
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5933 Cinema and Media Studies Methods
This proseminar will introduce a range of methodological approaches (and some debates about them) informing the somewhat sprawling interdisciplinary field of Cinema and Media Studies. It aims to equip students with a diverse—though not comprehensive—toolbox with which to begin conducting research in this field; an historical framework for understanding current methods in context; and a space for reflecting on both how to develop rigorous methodologies for emerging questions and how methods interact with disciplines, ideologies, and theories. Students in this class will also engage scholars participating in the Cinema and Media Studies colloquium series in practical discussions about their methodological choices. The course’s assignments will provide students with opportunities to explore a particular methodology in some depth through a variety of lenses that might include pedagogy, the conference presentation, grant applications, the written essay, or an essay in an alternative format, such as the graphic or video essay. Throughout, we will be trying to develop practical skills for the academic profession. Although our readings engage a variety of cinema and media objects, this course will be textually based. No prior experience needed. The course is open to upper-level undergraduates with relevant coursework in the field by permission of instructor only. Course Requirements: Complete assigned readings and actively participate in class discussion: 20%; Reading responses: 10%; Annotated bibliography or course syllabus on a particular methodology: 20%; SCMS methodology-focused conference paper proposal according to SCMS format: 10%; Research paper, grant proposal, or essay in an alternative format using the methodology explored in the syllabus or bibliography: 40%.
Fall
Also Offered As: ARTH 5933, CIMS 5933, COML 5940, GSWS 5933
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5940 Theories of Nationalism
You cannot build a wall to stop the free flow of literary and creative ideas. But in constructing narratives of national identity, states have long adopted particular texts as "foundational." Very often these texts have been epics or romances designated "medieval," that is, associated with the period in which specific vernaculars or "mother tongues" first emerged. France and Germany, for example, have long fought over who "owns" the Strasbourg oaths, or the Chanson de Roland; new editions of this epic poem, written in French but telling of Frankish (Germanic) warriors, have been produced (on both sides) every time these two countries go to war. In this course we will thus study both a range of "medieval" texts and the ways in which they have been claimed, edited, and disseminated to serve particular nationalist agendas. Particular attention will be paid to the early nineteenth century, and to the 1930s. Delicate issues arise as nations determine what their national epic needs to be. Russia, for example, needs the text known as The Song of Igor to be genuine, since it is the only Russian epic to predate the Mongol invasion. The text was discovered in 1797 and then promptly lost in Moscow's great fire of 1812; suggestions that it might have been a fake have to be handled with care in Putin's Russia. Similarly, discussing putative Mughal (Islamic) elements in so-called "Hindu epics" can also be a delicate matter. Some "uses of the medieval" have been exercised for reactionary and revisionist causes in the USA, but such use is much more extravagant east of Prague. And what, exactly, is the national epic of the USA? What, for that matter, of England? Beowulf has long been celebrated as an English Ur-text, but is set in Denmark, is full of Danes (and has been claimed for Ulster by Seamus Heaney). Malory's Morte Darthur was chosen to provide scenes for the queen's new robing room (following the fire that largely destroyed the Palace of Westminster in 1834), but Queen Victoria found the designs unacceptable: too much popery and adultery. Foundations of literary history still in force today are rooted in nineteenth-century historiography: thus we have The Cambridge History of Italian Literature and The Cambridge History of German Literature, each covering a millennium, even though political entities by the name of Italy and Germany did not exist until the later nineteenth century. What alternative ways of narrating literary history might be found? Itinerary models, which do not observe national boundaries, might be explored, and also the cultural history of watercourses, such as the Rhine, Danube, or Nile. The exact choice of texts to be studied will depend in part on the interests of those who choose to enroll. Faculty with particular regional expertise will be invited to visit specific classes.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5904, ITAL 5940
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5950 Post-Colonial Literature
This course covers topics in Post-Colonial literature with emphasis determined by the instructor. The primary focus will be on novels that have been adapted to film. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5970 Modern Drama
This course will survey several basic approaches to analyzing dramatic literature and the theatre. The dramatic event will be broken into each of its Aristotelian components for separate attention and analysis: Action (plot), Character, Language, Thought, Music and Spectacle. Several approaches to analysing the dramatic text will be studied: phenomenological, social-psychological, semiotic, and others. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5980 Theories of Gender & Sexuality
This course addresses the history and theory of gender and sexuality. Different instructors will emphasize different aspects of the topic. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 5980, GSWS 5980
1 Course Unit
ENGL 5991 Media, Platform, Experience
This graduate seminar explores processes and sites of production, distribution, and consumption of audio-visual contents in the contemporary media environment with a focus on both platform logics and user interaction experiences. While “new” media, such as social media, cellphone apps, streaming platforms, video games, and drones increasingly dominate everyday life, “old” media including film, television, and books do not disappear but continue to be consumed and transformed in a new media ecology. Crossing the old/new divide, this course seeks to delineate a fuller picture of the choices, constraints, and experiences available for contemporary media users situated in both the Global North and South. We will attend to both the infrastructures and platforms shaping the circulatory dynamics of the current global media landscape as well as the phenomenological dimensions of media consumption by combining broad discussions of interface, algorithms, temporality, screen, and post-cinema, etc., with case studies that examine specific platforms (e.g. Netflix, Bilibili) and media forms (e.g. GIFs, reaction videos, etc.).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 5940, CIMS 5940
1 Course Unit
ENGL 6000 Proseminar
Literary studies continue to be reconfigured by a variety of theoretical and methodological developments. Various forms of Marxist and post-structuralist enquiry, as well as the often confrontational debates between theoretical and political positions as varied as Deconstruction, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Queer Studies, Minority Discourse Theory, Colonial and Post-colonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and Ecological Studies, have altered disciplinary agendas and intellectual priorities for students embarked on the professional study of literature. In this course we will study key texts, statements and debates that define these issues, and ask what it means to read in depth, on the surface, or somewhere in-between.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 6120 Hannah Arendt: Literature, Philosophy, Politics
The seminar will focus on Arendt's major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (and its three parts, Anti-Semitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism). We will also discuss the reception of this work and consider its relevance today.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 6120, GRMN 6120, JWST 6120, PHIL 5439
1 Course Unit
ENGL 6160 Approaches to Literary Texts
Most seminars focus on literary texts composed during a single historical period; this course is unusual in inviting students to consider the challenges of approaching texts from a range of different historical eras. Taught by a team of literary specialists representing diverse periods and linguistic traditions and conducted as a hands-on workshop, this seminar is designed to help students of literature and related disciplines gain expertise in analysis and interpretation of literary works across the boundaries of time, geography, and language, from classic to modern. Students will approach literature as a historical discipline and learn about key methodological issues and questions that specialists in each period and field ask about texts that their disciplines study. The diachronic and cross-cultural perspectives inform discussions of language and style, text types and genres, notions of alterity, fictionality, literariness, symbolism, intertextuality, materiality, and interfaces with other disciplines. This is a unique opportunity to learn in one course about diverse literary approaches from specialists in different fields.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CLST 7601, COML 6160, EALC 8290, REES 6450, ROML 6160
1 Course Unit
ENGL 6400 Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee
This seminar will listen attentively to the echoes of Franz Kafka in the novels of J.M. Coetzee. Building on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of a minor literature, elaborated on the example of Kafka's oeuvre, we will situate Kafka against the backdrop of the German-speaking Jewish community of Habsburg-era Prague and read Coetzee within the context of apartheid and his native South Africa. Beyond an investigation of empire and its aftermath, this course will consider the arguably posthuman ethics of these authors, examining them through the lens of animal studies and the environmental humanities in order to reveal how they anticipate and participate in current thinking on the Anthropocene. Reading Kafka's fables beside Coetzee's allegorical narratives, the seminar will follow the twisted course taken by literary justice from the Josef K. of Kafka's Trial to Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K. Alongside these two towering figures, the influence of and affinities with other German-language authors (Heinrich von Kleist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Walser) and Anglophone contemporaries (Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Cormac McCarthy) will also be considered. Other works to be read will include Kafka's Castle, In the Penal Colony, Metamorphosis and late animal stories as well as Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians and Elizabeth Costello. Advanced undergraduates may enroll with the permission of the instructor. Readings and discussions in English.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 5400, GRMN 5400
1 Course Unit
ENGL 6490 Socialist and Post-Socialist Worlds
In 1989-1991, a whole world, perhaps many worlds, vanished: the worlds of socialism. In this graduate seminar we will investigate key cultural works, theoretical constructs and contexts spanning the socialist world(s), focused around the USSR, which was for many the (not uncontested) center of the socialist cosmos. Further, we will study the cultural and political interrelationships between the socialist world(s) and anticolonial and left movements in the developing and the capitalist developed nations alike. Finally, we will investigate the aftermaths left behind as these world(s) crumbled or were transformed beyond recognition at the end of the twentieth century. Our work will be ramified by consideration of a number of critical and methodological tools for the study of these many histories and geographies. The purview of the course is dauntingly large - global in scale - and therefore "coverage" will of necessity be incomplete. In addition to the lead instructor, a number of guest instructors from Penn and from other institutions will join us to lead our investigations into specific geographies, moments and areas. Additionally, four weeks have been left without content, to be filled in via consensus decision by the members of the seminar.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 6149, REES 6149
1 Course Unit
ENGL 6770 Black Speculative Futures
Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar s exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 6770, ANTH 6770
1 Course Unit
ENGL 6800 Studies in the 20th Century
Topics will vary. Please see the French department's website for current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: FREN 6800
1 Course Unit
ENGL 6840 The French Novel of the 20th Century
Topics vary. Please check the French department's website for the course description. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: FREN 6840
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7050 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature
This course will explore one or more interdisciplinary approaches to literature. Literary relationships to science, art, or music may provide the focus. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7052 Form, Figure, Metaphor
This course will explore the tensions and overlaps between three concepts in literary studies: form, figure, and metaphor. Through readings of works in literary theory, literature, and literary criticism, we will ask what it means to pay attention to the form of a literary text, whether at the micro scale of its literary figures or the macro scale of its overarching structure. We will historicize the shifting relations between our three key terms by exploring their role in ancient rhetoric, Victorian aesthetic theory, Russian formalism, the New Criticism, and deconstruction, among other literary-critical schools. Special attention will be paid to the notion of metaphor as it operates across genres and disciplines. While our focus will be on modern European and American literary theory, students will come away with interpretive tools beneficial to the study of literature of any period or genre.
Also Offered As: COML 6860
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7060 Ancient and Medieval Theories and Therapies of the Soul
This seminar focuses on premodern conceptions of the 'soul', the force felt to animate and energize a human body for as long as it was considered alive, and to activate virtually all aspects of its behavior through time. Premodern concepts of the soul attempted to account for a person's emotions and desires, perceptions, thoughts, memory, intellect, moral behavior, and sometimes physical condition. The course will trace the various ancient theories of the soul from the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Stoic thought in Greek and Latin, medical writers (Hippocratics, Hellenistic doctors, Galen), and Neoplatonists, to the medieval receptions and transformations of ancient thought, including Augustine and Boethius, Avicenna's interpretation of Aristotle and its medieval influence, and Aquinas and other later medieval ethicists. These premodern conceptions of the soul have a surprisingly long afterlife, reaching into the literary cultures and psychological movements of early modernity and beyond. Knowledge of Greek or Latin not required, but see the following: The seminar will meet for one two-hour session per week, and a separate one-hour 'breakout' session during which students who have registered for GREK 7203 will meet to study a selection texts in Greek, and students who have registered for COML/ENGL will meet to discuss medieval or early modern texts relevant to their fields of study.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 6100, GREK 7203
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7080 Cultural and Literary Theory of Africa and the African Diaspora
This course introduces students to the theoretical strategies underlying the construction of coherent communities and systems of representation and how those strategies influence the uses of expressive culture over time. Topics vary. See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana Studies.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 7080, COML 7080
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7150 Middle English Literature
This seminar will study a number of selected Middle English texts in depth. Attention will be paid to the textual transmission, sources, language, genre, and structure of the works. Larger issues, such as the influence of literary coventions (for example, "courtly love"), medieval rhetoric, or medieval allegory will be explored as the chosen texts may require. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7210 Medieval Poetics
This course may include some of the following fields: studies of medieval stylistic practices, formal innovations, and theories of form; medieval ideas of genre and form; medieval thought about the social, moral, and epistemological roles of poetry; interpretive theory and practice; technologies of interpretation; theories of fiction (fabula) and allegory; sacred and secular hermeneutics; theories of language and the histories of the language arts; vernaular(s) and Latinity; material texts. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current's offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7215 Medieval Poetics: Europe and India
This is a comparative course on medieval stylistic practices, formal innovations, and especially theories of form. Our common ground will be the theories that were generated in learned and pedagogical traditions of medieval literary cultures of Europe and pre-modern India (with their roots in ancient thought about poetic form). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CLST 7701, COML 7210
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7300 Topics in 16th-Century History and Culture
This is an advanced course treating topics in 16th Century history and culture particular emphasis varying with instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7310 Renaissance Poetry
An advanced seminar in English poetry of the early modern period. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7340 Renaissance Drama
This is an advanced course in Renaissance drama which will include plays by non-Shakespearean dramatists such as Marlowe, Jonson, and Middleton. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7360 Renaissance Studies
This is an advanced topics course treating some important issue in contemporary Renaissance studies. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7390 Milton
An examination of Milton's major poetry and prose with some emphasis on the social and political context of his work. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7450 Restoration and 18th-Century Fiction
This is an advanced course in the fiction of the Restoration and the 18th-Century, the period of "The rise of the novel". See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7480 Studies in the Eighteenth Century
This course varies in its emphases, but in recent years has explored the theory of narrative both from the point of view of eighteenth-century novelists and thinkers as well as from the perspective of contemporary theory. Specific attention is paid to issues of class, gender, and ideology. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7530 Victorian British Literature
An advanced seminar treating some topics in Victorian British Literature, usually focusing on non-fiction or on poetry. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7600 Realisms Seminar--19th Century to Contemporary
An advanced graduate seminar focused on Realism and spanning several centuries. This two-part course will consider the literary history of realism and will take on some fundamental epistemological questions entailed by the novel’s attempts to represent the real. We will read major theories of realism alongside canonical and marginal realist fiction. Emily Steinlight will address the variously formal, aesthetic, political, and epistemological status of realism in nineteenth-century novels and in theories old and new; some discussion will focus on the concept of totality and on the uneven histories and revitalized uses of realism across contexts. Heather Love will address the relation between classical realism, hyperrealism, and modernist/avant-garde departures in the 20th and 21st centuries, with special attention paid to the role of observation and description in literature and the social sciences. The range of readings may include novels by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, George Gissing, Mariano Azuela, Virginia Woolf, Patricia Highsmith, Nicholson Baker, Georges Perec, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Rachel Cusk, as well as critical and theoretical work by Viktor Schklovsky, Georg Lukács, Ian Watt, Roland Barthes, Catherine Gallagher, Fredric Jameson, Elaine Freedgood, Anna Kornbluh, Colleen Lye, the Warwick Research Collective, and others.
Also Offered As: COML 7600
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7610 British Modernism
This course treats one or more of the strains of British modernism in fiction, poetry, or the arts. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7680 Genres of Writing
Please check the department's website for the course description: https://www.english.upenn.edu. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7690 Feminist Theory
Specific topic varies. The seminar will bring together the study of early modern English literature and culture with histories and theories of gender, sexuality and race. Contact with 'the East' (Turkey, the Moluccas, North Africa and India) and the West (the Americas and the Caribbean) reshaped attitudes to identity and desire. How does this history allow us to understand, and often interrogate, modern theories of desire and difference? Conversely, how do postcolonial and other contemporary perspectives allow us to re-read this past? See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7700 Afro-American Literature
An advanced seminar in African-American literature and culture. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7710 Textual Production
This course is based on library work and is intended as a practical introduction to graduate research. It addresses questions of the history of the book, of print culture, and of such catagories as "work," "character," and "author," as well as of gender and sexuality, through a detailed study of the (re)production of Shakespearean texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7730 Modernism
An interdisciplinary and international examination of modernism, usually treating European as well as British and American modernists.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 7670
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7740 Postmodernism
An advanced seminar on postmodernist culture. Recently offered as a study of relationship between poetry and theory in contemporary culture, with readings in poststructuralist, feminist, marxist, and postcolonial theory and in poets of the Black Mountain and Language groups. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7750 African Literature
An advanced seminar in anglophone African literature, possibly including a few works in translation. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7780 20th-Century Aesthetics
This course explores notions that have conditioned 20th century attitudes toward beauty among them ornament, form, fetish, the artifact "women", the moves to 20th century fiction, art manifestos, theory, and such phenomena as beauty contests and art adjudications. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7785 Topics in Post-45 Literature, Cold War
This course considers the literature and culture of the Cold War period (1945-1991). Different instructors will emphasize different topics within these fields. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7830 Major American Author
A seminar treating any one of the major American Writers. Past versions have focused on Melville, Whitman, Twain, James, Pound, Eliot, and others. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7900 Recent Issues in Critical Theory
See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7901 Recent Issues in Critical Theory Related to Gender & Sexuality
This course will provide an overview of critical theory related to the study of gender and/or sexuality. Different instructors will emphasize different topics within these fields. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 7901, GSWS 7901
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7905 Modern Literary Theory and Criticism
This course will provide an overview of major European thinkers in critical theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will pay particular attention to critical currents that originated in Eastern European avant-garde and early socialist contexts and their legacies and successors. Topics covered will include: Russian Formalism and its successors in Structuralism and Deconstruction (Shklovsky, Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, Derrida); Bakhtin and his circle, dialogism and its later western reception; debates over aesthetics and politics of the 1930s (Lukacs, Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, Radek, Clement Greenberg); the October group; Marxism, new Left criticism, and later lefts (Althusser, Williams, Eagleton, Jameson, Zizek).
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 6050, ENGL 6050, FREN 6050, GRMN 6050, ITAL 6050, REES 6435
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7920 Study of a Genre: The Manifesto
If ubiquity confers significance, the manifesto is a major literary form, and yet it has been relatively marginalized in genre studies, where attention to the manifesto has been largely devoted to anthologies. In this seminar we will focus on the manifesto as a genre by exploring its histories, rhetorics, definitions and reception from a Black Studies framework. Associated with politics, art, literature, pedagogy, film, and new technologies, the manifesto involves the taking of an engaged position that is tied to the moment of its enunciation. The manifesto's individual or collective authors seek to provoke radical change through critique and the modeling of new ways of being though language and images. Included on the syllabus will be anticolonial, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ manifestos of the 18th through 21st centuries from throughout the Black world . In addition to leading class discussion, students will be responsible for a seminar paper or a final project to be developed in consultation with the instructor.
Also Offered As: AFRC 7920, COML 7920
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7940 Postcolonial Literature
An advanced seminar treating a specific topic or issue in Postcolonial Literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7950 Topics in Poetics
Topics in poetics will vary in its emphasis depending on the instructor. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7971 Afro-Latin America
In-depth analysis of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. The course opens with a general examination of the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas, through the study of fundamental historical, political and sociocultural processes. This panoramic view provides the basic tools for the scrutiny of a broad selection of literary, musical, visual, performance, and cinematic works, which leads to the comprehension of the different ethical-aesthetic strategies used to express the Afro-diasporic experience. Essential concepts such as negritude, creolite, and mestizaje, as well as the most relevant theories on identity and identification in Latin America and the Caribbean, will be thoroughly examined, in articulation with the interpretation of artistic works. Power, nationalism, citizenship, violence, religious beliefs, family and community structures, migration, motherhood and fatherhood, national and gender identities, eroticism, and sexuality are some of the main issues discussed un this seminar.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 6971, LALS 6971, SPAN 6971
1 Course Unit
ENGL 7990 Topics in American Literature
An advanced topics course in American literature, with the curriculum fixed by the instructor. Recently offered with a focus on American Literature of Social Action and Social Vision. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 8000 Teaching of Literature and Composition
A course combining literary study with training in teaching. These courses will normally be taken by students in their first semester of teaching.
Fall
1 Course Unit
ENGL 8500 Field List
Students work with an adviser to focus the area of their dissertation research. They take an examination on the field in the Spring and develop a dissertation proposal.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9000 The Short Story
A workshop course devoted to the craft of short fiction. Assignments will include informal exercises as well as formal crafted pieces.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9001 Fiction Workshop
A workshop course in the craft of fiction.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9002 Memoir Workshop
A creative writing workshop devoted to the craft of memoir. Students will work with some of the forms of memoir, including personal narrative, dialogue, description, and character development, and will explore how memoir can expand our understanding of truth, imagination, memory, and why a story matters.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9005 Finding Voice: Perspectives on Race, Class and Gender
This writing workshop explores the influence of identity, primarily race, class, gender, and sexuality, on the ways we convey our personal truths to the world.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 9005, GSWS 9005, URBS 9005
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9006 Learning from James Baldwin
This class will examine the intellectual legacy that James Baldwin left to present-day writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thulani Davis, Caryl Phillips, and others. We will spend time reading and discussing Baldwin's novels, short stories, plays and essays, and students will research subjects of their own choosing about Baldwin's life and art.
Also Offered As: AFRC 9006, GSWS 9006, URBS 9006
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9007 Writing through Music
This writing workshop will focus on the provocative interchanges between music and creative writing. We will consider music of all kinds, all genres (jazz, classical, hip-hop, ambient, folk, electronic, experimental, etc.), as a springboard for the imagination, as a counterpoint to forms of language, and as a tool for cultivating creative writing practices.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9008 Writing Experiments
A workshop course devoted to cultivating experimental approaches in your writing. Practitioners of prose, poetry, and mixed-genre writing--as well as students who are new to any of these genres--are all welcome. We will test the boundaries of form and language as we hone our skills, experiment with new tools, read a number of writings by authors who break the rules, and explore what taking risks can teach us about our craft.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9009 Creative Research: A Writer's Workshop
Many writers think of research as a “task” that is somehow separate from writing. In truth, it’s as much a part of the process as waiting for le mot juste. Research is much more than gathering material and filling in the blanks. It is the process of discovering your material at its deepest source. Students in this course will adopt a mindset of discovery and playfulness as we explore a variety of innovative research methods and hone the fine art of looking right under your nose.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9010 Writing for Young Readers
A creative writing workshop devoted to writing for young readers. Young adult, middle-grade, and other kinds of writing will be addressed.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9011 Screenwriting
This creative writing workshop is devoted to writing scripts for film, video, and television.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9012 Journalistic Writing
This course is devoted to the art of journalistic writing and will address genres such as straight news, narrative longform, interviews, profiles, criticism, features, and more, as well as writing for a range of platforms, including newspapers, magazines, and websites.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9013 Memoir Writing
This memoir workshop will shine light on the human experience as viewed through your personal lens. We’ll see how memoir can illuminate larger cultural themes - from the inhumanity of war, to racism, misogyny, and economic inequality - as viewed through lived experiences.
Also Offered As: GSWS 9013, URBS 9013
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9015 Writing and Place
In this creative writing workshop we will consider how writing about place - geography, architecture, landscape, cities, and so on - opens up both our imaginations and our ideas about literary form. Course offerings may include workshops devoted to poetry, fiction, travel writing, and cross-genre writing.
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9016 Being Human: A Personal Approach to Race, Class & Gender
In this workshop, we will address the ways race, class, and gender impact our lives, our work, and our culture. As a class, we will create connection and community by practicing deep listening, daily writing, deep reading, and the sharing of ideas and observations.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 9016, GSWS 9016, URBS 9016
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9017 Considering Race, Class and Punishment in the American Prison System
This graduate writing seminar will examine the origins, myths, and realities of the complex industry that currently imprisons more than 2,300,000 men, women and teens in America’s city, county, state and federal prisons - the largest prison population and highest per-capita rate of imprisonment in the world.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 9017, GSWS 9017, URBS 9017
1 Course Unit
ENGL 9998 Independent Reading
Open only to candidates who have completed two semesters of graduate work.
Fall or Spring
1-4 Course Units
ENGL 9999 Independent Study
Open to students who apply to the graduate chair with a written study proposal approved by the advisor. The minimum requirement is a long paper. Limited to 1 CU.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
1 Course Unit