This course studies Elizabethan and Jacobean drama by Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries. Although most people identify Shakespeare as the representative Renaissance playwright, he was only one member of a distinguished generation. Students will encounter a variety of popular dramatic genres in which Shakespeare either did not work or that he heavily adapted to his own ends: Turk plays, city comedy, unperformed "Closet drama," revenge tragedy, pastoral.

This course examines the development of the novel as a literary and cultural form at the moment of its greatest impact during the Victorian era (1837-1901). It focuses on the emergence of the realist novel and other modes that intersected and competed with it (e.g. the gothic, the supernatural, sensation fiction, the New Woman novel), to explore the complex ways that represented different realities.

This course focuses on selected literary movements and their relationships to American culture up through 1900. Authors studied may include Susanna Rowson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James. Topics may include American imperialism, slavery and abolition, the rise of the historical novel, Sentimentalism, Romanticism, and the emergence of psychological realism. Open to students from any major. Provides ENG Major Elective credit and ENG minor credit.

This course analyzes the literary and visual representation of black women from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It explores how selected writers, working across different genres, render black female characters in ways that perpetuate, contest, or subvert stereotypical images of black women.

A course examining literature as a product of multiple regional, national, and international contexts. How do texts, ideas, goods, and people move across borders? How are identities and concepts produced through transnational dialogue and exchange? Possible areas of study include transatlantic political or literary movements, border studies, multinational literatures, or literatures of migration and diaspora. Open to students from any major. Provides ENG Major Elective credit and ENG minor credit.

Since the 1940's "literary theory" has emerged as a vibrant and vital aspect of literary studies. The term covers a wide range of formal, historical, and critical approaches to literature and culture that have changed the ways we read. This course investigates selected trends and schools of modern literary theory in diverse texts and contexts.

Provides a set of skills fo the critical analysis of different types of textual, audio, and visual media in the French-speaking world. Students will consider the relationships between information media and aesthetic media and explore the extent to which both "mediate" between what is called the real world and their reading, viewing, listening public.

An introduction to the basic phonological, syntactic and semantic categories and processes of contemporary French as studied in the light of current linguistic theory and practice.

"Alcohol and Drugs in Western Civilization" is an overview of the history of drugs and alcohol, and the individual and social problems that surround their use. The course begins when new or newly wide-spread stimulants like coffee, tea, tobacco, chocolate, sugar, and distilled spirits joined beer and wine as European consumer goods. The course then goes on to the more modern problems of increasingly potent drugs like heroin, cocaine, and cigarettes, and responses to them such as regulation, taxation, Prohibition, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the "War on Drugs."

An historical description and analysis of the development of political, economic, social, religious, intellectual and cultural institutions of Europe from Petrarch to Erasmus.