Courses

Through a careful reading of the most influential recent scholarship, students will explore a range of argumentative modes and evidentiary practices; through workshops of their own writing, they will experiment with rhetoric, voice, and style. Students will leave the course...

Even after the United States became an independent nation, American culture continued to be dominated by Britain. Most American writers struggled, until well into the nineteenth century, with a sense of cultural inferiority and belatedness. Then suddenly, in the 1850s, on...

An introduction to the most important genre of the novel. We will begin by reading the canonical examples of the Bildungsroman ( Wilhelm Meister, The Red and the Black, and Sentimental Education), as well as the canonical critical accounts (Hegel and Schiller, Lukacs and...

This course is a hybrid. Half of the weeks will proceed as an ordinary graduate seminar, in which we will read recent novels and discuss current critical questions, among them contemporary literary movements, the institutions of the contemporary novel, the transnational and...

Intensive study and discussion of important works in cultural history, from ancient times to the twentieth century. The course is designed for students interested in concentrating in a Humanities discipline, but all students are welcome.

This interdisciplinary course examines the American Civil War from Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 to the legendary history film, Birth of a Nation, in 1915, which coincided with the Jubilee of Appomattox. We reframe traditional understandings of the conflict by...

An introduction to the contemporary Anglophone novel, with particular attention to book reviews. As we read pairs of novels that represent the possibilities for the contemporary novel, we will also read the reviews that have set the terms by which these novels are read and...

The historical novel emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Its emergence reflected, as Lukacs famously argued, a new conviction that human experience is not static--and that persons are shaped by...

In addition to being the most successful novelists of their day, Eliot and Howells were also the most influential critics. This course focuses on the role each played in the nineteenth-century literary world: their championing of literary realism and their experiments in...

A study of the novel’s most important mode. We will read the novelists who defined realism for three national traditions: Balzac, for the French; Eliot, for the British; Howells, for the US. Alongside these novels, we will read an array of theoretical works on realism, which...

Established by Goethe at the end of the eighteenth century, the genre of the Bildungsroman (or novel of education) has since travelled around the world. This course will explore its appearance in Victorian Britain, in the mid-twentieth-century United States, and in post...

The rise of the nineteenth-century American novel from its origins (Irving, Cooper), through the American Renaissance (Hawthorne, Stowe, Melville), to realism (James, Howells, Twain) and naturalism (Dreiser, Wharton). This course will attend to the historical and cultural...