This is an archive. See the current website at www.ssp.harvard.edu.

English and American Literature and Language

Not all courses are available to SSP students. For example, some courses are offered only for graduate credit. Note especially any listed prerequisites.

Related Courses

ENGL S-10a English Literature: The First 900 Years (32118)
(Website) (Print version)
W. James Simpson
(4 credits: UN, NC) M-Th 9:30 am-noon, Sever Hall, Room 214. Short session I. Tuition $2,275.

This course offers the chance to read profound works from four of the richest periods of English writing: Anglo-Saxon literature (unrivaled in the Europe of its time for power and sophistication); late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman literature (again unparalleled in Europe for sophistication and daring); the late fourteenth century (where Chaucer's is not the only exceptionally rewarding oeuvre); and, in an exceptionally rich period of English writing, from Spenser to Shakespeare.

ENGL S-36z Summer Seminar—Utopia and Anti-Utopia (31795)
(Syllabus) (Print version)
Francis Abiola Irele
(4 credits: UN) M,W 3:30-6 pm, Barker Center for the Humanities, Room 230. Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275. Limited enrollment.
Summer Seminars are open to Secondary School Program students who are juniors or seniors in high school as well as to college undergraduates.

This seminar explores the utopian ideal as embodied in literary, intellectual, and ideological texts that either project an image or offer reasoned conceptions of the perfect society. The ambiguous character of the utopian ideal, which holds out the promise of human fulfillment but has also been the source of great collective misery and human tragedy, is highlighted. The utopian ideal is thus considered in light of the contemporary mood of disillusionment with the idea of progress as well as in light of the preoccupation with what has been called the "dilemma of modernity" in current philosophical debates—especially as these relate to the intellectual temper of the developed world and to the conditions of existence in the underdeveloped world. Members of the seminar focus on a selection of key texts that have influenced the development of modern consciousness. Readings include Plato's The Republic, Hesiod's "Works and Days," Thomas More's Utopia, Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, Voltaire's Candide, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Frantz Kafka's The Trial, Eugene Zamiatin's We, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

ENGL S-37u Summer Seminar—Bob Dylan: The Lyrics in Their Literary, Cultural, and Musical Contexts (31806)
(Print version)
Richard F. Thomas
(4 credits: UN) T,Th 3:30-6 pm, Boylston Hall, Room 203. Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275. Limited enrollment.
Summer Seminars are open to Secondary School Program students who are juniors or seniors in high school as well as to college undergraduates.

The seminar explores the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan from their earliest manifestations in the 1960s through their current evolutions. Topics include Dylan's creation of personae (folk, protest, country, Christian, gospel); his being "far behind his rightful time," and the creative dynamism involved in innovation versus audience expectation (acoustic to electric, protest to lyrical, counter-cultural icon to Christian); the "classical" punctuations of his fertile career (Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, "Tangled Up in Blue," Oh Mercy, "Love and Theft"); and the lead-ins and sequences to such classicism (Bringing It All Back Home, Desire, Time Out of Mind); performance and performative repetition and renovation; intertextuality and the creation of narrative patterns and storylines; bootlegs/outtakes as commentary on Dylan's continuing mythology; Chronicles Vol. 1 and its artistic status; Dylan in film, with special attention to Masked and Anonymous.

ENGL S-88 Study Abroad in Venice: Interracial Literature (32137)
(Print version)
Werner Sollors
Limited enrollment.
June 21-August 3. Study abroad programs are restricted to students 18 years of age or older.

See Study Abroad for more information.

ENGL S-90h The Harlem Renaissance (32009)
(Syllabus) (Print version)
Francis Abiola Irele
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

*** ENGL S-90h has been CANCELED.***

ENGL S-128a Shakespeare After All: The Early Plays (32164)
(Website) (Print version)
Marjorie Garber
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) M-Th 9-11:30 am, Barker Center for the Humanities, Room 133. Short session I. Tuition $2,275.

This course considers Shakespeare's early plays, from the early comedies and histories to Julius Caesar and Hamlet. We consider language, history, staging, character, and the development of the playwright's craft. This is an intensive course, covering 10 plays and their coinciding chapters from Garber's Shakespeare After All. Please see the course website for play lists.

ENGL S-128b Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays (32165)
(Website) (Print version)
Marjorie Garber
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) Short session I. Tuition $2,275.

*** ENGL S-128b has been CANCELED.***

ENGL S-141 The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self (31801)
(Website) (Print version)
Leo Damrosch
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) M,W 12:30-3 pm, Emerson Hall, Room 101. Eight-week session. Sections to be arranged. Tuition $2,275.

A study of major eighteenth-century autobiographical, fictional, and philosophical texts that explore the paradoxes of the modern self at a time when traditional religious and philosophical explanations were breaking down. Writers to be read include Mme. de Lafayette, Boswell, Voltaire, Gibbon, Diderot, Rousseau, Laclos, Franklin, and Blake.

ENGL S-163c English, Irish, and Postcolonial English Language Drama (32121)
(Print version)
Arthur Holmberg
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 3:30-6 pm, Sever Hall, Room 209. Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

This course is an exploration of the playwrights, political struggles, and artistic movements that shaped the evolution of British, Irish, and postcolonial drama in the twentieth century. Attention is paid to race, class, gender, and sexuality as well as to theater in performance. Playwrights include Wilde, Shaw, Coward, Eliot, Yeats, Osborne, Pinter, Orton, Churchill, Synge, O'Casey, Friel, Beckett, McDonaugh, Walcott, Soyinka, and Fugard.

ENGL S-164b Spies, Sleuths, and Seducers: British Popular Fiction (31971)
(Syllabus) (Print version)
Rebecca Wingfield
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

*** ENGL S-164b has been CANCELED.***

ENGL S-169 The Noir Antihero in American Fiction and Film (31720)
(Print version)
William Flesch
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) M,W 6-8:30 pm, Sever Hall, Room 306. Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

This is a course on classic film noir as well as some of its neonoir descendents, and on the literary sources of the genre. Authors include Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Dick, and Palahniuk, in relation to such films as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Blade Runner, and Fight Club.

ENGL S-176a Literature and Sexuality (32111)
(Print version)
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

*** ENGL S-176a has been CANCELED.***

ENGL S-180 Twentieth-Century American Poetry (31714)
(Syllabus) (Print version)
Nick Halpern
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 12:30-3 pm, Sever Hall, Room 107. Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

This course introduces the work of some of the most important American poets of the century just past. We engage in close readings and discussions of poems by T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, and James Wright. We end with close readings of poems by contemporary poets Louise Glück, Franz Wright, August Kleinzahler, and others.

ENGL S-185 Wit and Humor (31802)
(Website) (Print version)
Leo Damrosch
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 3:30-6 pm, Boylston Hall, Fong Auditorium. Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

Emphasizing wit and humor rather than "comedy" as classically understood, the course considers selected texts and films (for example, Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse, Dave Barry, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, Monty Python) in the light of theoretical studies by psychologists, sociologists, and critics who have tried to explain why people laugh, want to laugh, and pay to be made to laugh.

ENGL S-191 The Short Story (32158)
(Print version)
William Flesch
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) M,W 12:30-3 pm, Sever Hall, Room 104. Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

The most economical of narrative forms, short stories provide unique insight into how literature works, since they do not have time to set up rules, only to put an original spin on them. They make you see something new. We look at some of the greatest writers of short fiction, from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day.

ENGL S-197 Twentieth-Century Literature: Modernism and Postmodernism (31715)
(Syllabus) (Print version)
Nick Halpern
(4 credits: UN, GR, NC) T,Th 3:30-6 pm, Sever Hall, Room 107. Eight-week session. Tuition $2,275.

This course explores modernist and postmodernist texts. Authors include Proust, Woolf, Beckett, Bernhard, Nabokov, Pynchon, Calvino, Sebald, and Saramago. These works are put in a variety of cultural, political, and literary contexts.

 



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