This course offers an introduction to the field of English studies, with focus on problems of method revolving around the field’s burning question, What is literature? We read a range of recent scholarship, exploring approaches, methods, and issues of interest, including formalism vs. historicism, literary and cultural theory, poetics, book history, and periodization. Primary works assigned are drawn from different centuries and all major genres, mainly from Britain. Students write either a research paper on a primary text or a substantial position paper on an issue or a method. [Taught as the PhD seminar fall 2025]

units

I. Close
What is literature?
Formal specificity, genre distinctions, and historical granularity

II. Oscillating
Structure and concept: reading theories
Discipline and verse: poetics

III. Far
The new boredom: history of the book
The shape of time: periodization

  1. W. H. Auden, Another Time
  2. Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
  3. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
  4. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
  5. William Shakespeare, Macbeth

course website

[pictured: Denzel Washington plays Macbeth in The Tragedy of Macbeth, dir. Joel Coen (2021)]