University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) 2024-25 Supplemental Essay Prompt Guide
Early Decision: Nov 1
Regular Decision Deadline: Jan 5
University of Pennsylvania 2024-25 Application Essay Question ExplanationsÂ
The Requirements: 3 essays of 150-200 words
Supplemental Essay Type(s): Community , Why
Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!) (150-200 words)
Gratitude is quickly becoming a practice we are encouraged to connect to and reflect on regularly, hence the popularity of gratitude journals and exercises. (Brainstorming method alert!) Itâs not a surprise, therefore, that the admissions department at UPenn wants to learn about what you value and how you express gratitude. Think about times when you have felt acknowledged, heard, and seen; moments when you have felt that swelling in your chest, as your heart grows three sizes. Who would you like to thank and why? What impact did they have on your life? How did their actions affect the way you think or approach new ventures? Remember that this essay or ânoteâ needs to reveal information about how you process, appreciate, and/or draw inspiration from the action of others. Ultimately, admissions wants to know more about how you relate to others in the world and how you repurpose good intentions. Bonus points if you share your âthank youâ note with the associated party after hitting submit!
How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective, and how your experiences and perspective will help shape Penn. (150-200 words)
Admissions wants to know how you will participate in the Penn campus community, so start by thinking about what youâd like to do when youâre not cramming for exams or soaking up your professorsâ sage wisdom (a little website research could come in handy here). If that hypothetical exercise is not producing quality ideas, think about the here and now. Where can you be found when your homework is done? How do you spend your weekends? Think of an activity or topic that gets you interacting and connecting with other like-minded peers. Once you have something in mind, explore Pennâs website to see if they have a similar group or community that youâd like to join. Admissions wants to know what your area of influence will look like at UPenn: an on-campus job, a unique hobby, or maybe an organization to which you contribute innovative ideas and exquisite cake decorating skills (bake sale, anyone?). Finally, remember to address how UPenn will shape your perspective and vice versa. Will the Black Wharton Undergraduate Association help you to explore your entrepreneurial interests? Will your plethora of non-profit internship and volunteering experiences make you a fantastic addition to and a natural leader in the Social Impact Consulting Group? Whatever you write about, make sure your response to this prompt shows that you have put some serious thought into what your life will look like at UPenn.Â
If Applying to Wharton:
Wharton prepares its students to make an impact by applying business methods and economic theory to real-world problems, including economic, political, and social issues. please reflect on a current issue of importance to you and share how you hope a wharton education would help you to explore it. (150-200 words)  , to help inform your response, applicants are encouraged to learn more about the foundations of a wharton education here. this information will help you better understand what you could learn by studying at wharton and what you could do afterward., if applying to arts and sciences:, the flexible structure of the college of arts and sciencesâ curriculum is designed to inspire exploration, foster connections, and help you create a path of study through general education courses and a major. what are you curious about and how would you take advantage of opportunities in the arts and sciences (150-200 words) , to help inform your response, applicants are encouraged to learn more about academic offerings within the college of arts and sciences at college.upenn.edu/prospective. this information will help you develop a stronger understanding of how the study of the liberal arts aligns with your own goals and aspirations., if applying to engineering: , penn engineering prepares its students to become leaders in technology by combining a strong foundation in the natural sciences and mathematics with depth of study in focused disciplinary majors. please share how you plan to pursue your engineering interests at penn. (150-200 words)., to help inform your response, applicants are encouraged to learn more about penn engineering and its mission to prepare students for global leadership in technology here . this information will help you develop a stronger understanding of academic pathways within penn engineering and how they align with your goals and interests., if applying to nursing:, penn nursing intends to meet the health needs of a global, multicultural world by preparing its students to impact healthcare through advancing science. how will you contribute to our mission of promoting equity in healthcare and how will penn nursing contribute to your future nursing goals (150-200 words), to help inform your response, applicants are encouraged to learn more about penn nursingâs mission and how we promote equity in healthcare here . this information will help you develop a stronger understanding of our values and how they align with your own goals and aspirations..
With each of these prompts, admissions is hoping to gain insight into your goals and ambitions. Whether youâre hoping to combat societal issues through business, explore your curiosity through The College of Arts and Sciencesâ curriculum, become a leader in tech, or promote equity in healthcare, your response should reveal new information about your passions, motivations, and vision for the future. Since you only have 150-200 words to work with here, you wonât be able to walk admissions through your journey to the college of your choice, but you can offer insight into the kind of work youâd like to do and the impact youâd like to have post-graduation. Just keep in mind that the best responses will cite specific resources at Penn in order to show that it is Penn, specifically, that will be instrumental to your future success.
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UPenn Supplemental Essays 2023-24
The UPenn supplemental essays are a key component of your UPenn application. As an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania has an extremely competitive application process. Moreover, with the UPenn acceptance rate at 6% ( per U.S. News ), every part of your application counts. So, itâs crucial that each UPenn supplemental essay highlights the best aspects of your application.
This guide will detail each of the UPenn essay prompts and provide tips for your UPenn supplemental essays. For each UPenn supplemental essay, weâll break down the best way to tackle the prompt and how to choose a topic.
Overall, the University of Pennsylvania essays are the best way to communicate directly with the UPenn admissions officers. So, itâs important that your essays speak to your individual strengths. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about the UPenn supplemental essays!
UPenn Supplemental Essays: Quick Facts
University of pennsylvania application quick facts.
- UPenn Acceptance Rate: 6% – U.S News ranks UPenn #7 in National Universities
- UPenn Application Requirements: In order to apply to UPenn , students must submit their UPenn application through either the Common App or Coalition App. Students must also provide an official high school transcript, school report, and letters of recommendation.
- Early Decision: November 1 st
- Regular Decision: January 5 th
- UPenn Supplemental Essay Requirements : UPenn requires three supplemental essays for every applicant. This also includes one school-specific essay that will depend on the program you are applying to. Additionally, students applying to the coordinated dual-degree and specialized programs will have an additional program-specific essay to complete.
- UPenn Supplemental Essay Tip: Your UPenn supplemental essays should highlight different themes/topics from your personal statement essay. The UPenn supplemental essay prompts are designed to paint a more holistic picture of your application. So, make sure your topics are unique and specific to your experience!
Does UPenn have any supplemental essays?
Yes, UPenn has several different supplemental essays. We will detail the UPenn supplemental essay prompts later in this guide. In addition to the 2 required UPenn supplemental essays, UPenn requires a third school-specific supplemental essay.
Be aware of the UPenn essay deadline, and give yourself enough time to write and edit your UPenn supplemental essays. The UPenn essay deadline is the same as the application deadline , so be sure to start your UPenn supplemental essays early!
How many essays does UPenn require?
Most students will be required to complete three UPenn supplemental essays. Each student will be required to complete the first two UPenn essay prompts, and then one school-specific essay prompt. Those applying to one of the coordinated dual degree and specialized programs will also need to complete an additional UPenn essay. Up next, weâll take a look at each UPenn supplemental essay prompt.
UPenn Essays: A Thank You Note
The first UPenn supplemental essay prompt is only required for first-year applicants.
Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on the experience!) (150-200 words)
The thank you note prompt is designed to help UPenn Admissions learn about who you are through your relationships. So, in your essay, they want to hear about the people who have helped you become who you are today. This UPenn supplemental essay is a great chance to share something deeply personal while showing your appreciation for someone important.
Think carefully about what story fits in the greater context of your application. You can pick a teacher, coach, mentor, community leader, friend, or family member â itâs up to you! Additionally, in this University of Pennsylvania essay, youâll need to draw your reader in with context and details. Writing about a specific anecdote can anchor your essay and also help your reader feel the impact of this particular relationship.
Thereâs a lot you might be thankful for. However, try to think of people who have helped you grow as a person or learn some kind of lesson. That way, you can capture something about who you are and what you admire in others. It may take several drafts to get your UPenn supplemental essays within the word count, so be mindful of the UPenn essay deadline!
UPenn Supplemental Essays: Community Essay
The second UPenn supplemental essay prompt is the closest to a why UPenn essay.
How will you explore community at Penn? Consider how Penn will help shape your perspective, and how your experiences and perspective will help shape Penn. (150-200 words)
This why UPenn essay prompt is framed specifically around community. So, think about the community youâve built in high school and how youâll create a new network in college. What clubs, sports, or organizations are you interested in joining? Moreover, how do you envision your community forming at UPenn? Additionally, try to be specific to the unique opportunities at UPenn â what are you most excited about experiencing on campus?
Your why UPenn essay should make it clear to admissions officers that youâve done your research. So, beyond listing specific details, you should have a clear perspective on how UPenn will help shape you over four years. Think about what youâre bringing to the UPenn community and what you hope to get out of it. Your why UPenn essay should be founded in reciprocity, so think about what you have to offer as well as what UPenn offers you.
Be sure to hit all points of the UPenn essay prompts as well. It can be easy to focus on how youâll build community. But, be sure to reflect on your experiences and how they will shape Penn as well. With a smaller word count, this can be a challenge. However, focusing on one aspect of the UPenn community can help. Your why UPenn essay should be unique to you and your passions. So, take the time to do your own research and find something that really excites you!
UPenn School Specific Short Answer Prompts
Applicants need to write one more UPenn supplemental essay, which will depend on the school or college theyâre applying to. These school specific UPenn supplemental essays help UPenn understand your academic goals. So, don’t neglect them.
Here are the school specific UPenn supplemental essay prompts:
School | UPenn Supplemental Essay Prompt |
---|---|
Penn Nursing intends to meet the health needs of society in a global and multicultural world by preparing its students to impact healthcare by advancing science and promoting equity. What do you think this means for the future of nursing, and how do you see yourself contributing to our mission of promoting equity in healthcare? (150-200 words) | |
The flexible structure of The College of Arts and Sciencesâ curriculum is designed to inspire exploration, foster connections, and help you create a path of study through general education courses and a major. What are you curious about and how would you take advantage of opportunities in the arts and sciences? (150-200 words) | |
Wharton prepares its students to make an impact by applying business methods and economic theory to real-world problems, including economic, political, and social issues. Please reflect on a current issue of importance to you and share how you hope a Wharton education would help you to explore it. (150-200 words) | |
Penn Engineering prepares its students to become leaders in technology, by combining a strong foundation in the natural sciences and mathematics, exploration in the liberal arts, and depth of study in focused disciplinary majors. Please share how you hope to explore your engineering interests at Penn. (150-200 words) |
Doing Research
Compared to a why UPenn essay, these UPenn supplemental essays specifically discuss your intended major. These UPenn supplemental essays resemble other why major essays you may encounter for other schools. So, if you want some inspiration, you can build off the foundation highlighted in these why major essay examples . However, itâs important that your UPenn supplemental essay highlights specific information for the UPenn program youâre applying to.
Comprehensive research is key to these UPenn supplemental essays. So, look into the major or program youâre applying to and try to find specific details to include in your essay. Try to find individual classes , professors , or research projects you can highlight. Connect your interest in your chosen major to the specifics of your program. Then, be sure to explain how UPenn will help you achieve your academic and even future career goals.
Choosing a Major
These UPenn supplemental essays aim to capture your passion as well as your experience within your chosen major. So, think carefully about why youâve chosen a particular school or college. If youâre still unsure about what major to select, check out our webinar on Deciding Your College Major . Your excitement about your major will help you feel confident tackling this University of Pennsylvania essay!
UPenn Supplemental Essay: Dual Degree/Specialized Programs
Students applying to one of UPennâs dual degree or specialized programs also have specific UPenn application requirements. To apply, students must complete an additional University of Pennsylvania essay.
Here are the prompts for the dual degree/specialized programs UPenn supplemental essays:
Dual Degree /Specialized Program | UPenn Supplemental Essay Prompt |
---|---|
Why are you interested in the Digital Media Design ( ) program at the University of Pennsylvania? (400-650 words / 3575 characters**) | |
The Huntsman Program supports the development of globally minded scholars who become engaged citizens, creative innovators, and ethical leaders in the public, private, and non-profit sectors in the United States and internationally. What draws you to a dual-degree program in business and international studies, and how would you use what you learn to contribute to a global issue where business and international affairs intersect? (400-650 words) | |
The LSM program aims to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the life sciences and their management with an eye to identifying, advancing, and implementing innovations. What issues would you want to address using the understanding gained from such a program? Note that this essay should be distinct from your single degree essay. (400-650 words) | |
Explain how you will use the M&T program to explore your interest in business, engineering, and the intersection of the two. (400-650 words)Describe a problem that you solved that showed leadership and creativity. (250 words) | |
Describe your interests in modern networked information systems and technologies, such as the internet, and their impact on society, whether in terms of economics, communication, or the creation of beneficial content for society. Feel free to draw on examples from your own experiences as a user, developer, or student of technology. (400-650 words / 3575 characters**) | |
Discuss your interest in nursing and health care management. How might Penn’s coordinated dual-degree program in nursing and business help you meet your goals? (400-650 words) | |
Please list any predental or premedical experience. This experience can include but is not limited to observation in a private practice, dental clinic, or hospital setting; dental assisting; dental laboratory work; dental or medical research; etc. Please include time allotted to each activity, dates of attendance, location, and a description of your experience. If you do not have any predental or premedical experience, please indicate what you have done or plan to do in order to explore dentistry as a career. Do you have relatives who are dentists or are in dental school? If so, indicate the name of each relative, his/her relationship to you, the school attended, and the dates attended. Describe any activities which demonstrate your ability to work with your hands. What activities have you performed that demonstrate your ability to work effectively with people? Please explain your reasons for selecting dentistry. Please include what interests you the most about dentistry as well as what interests you least. | |
How do you envision your participation in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER) furthering your interests in energy science and technology? Please include any past experiences (ex. academic, research, or extracurricular) that have led to your interest in the program. Additionally, please indicate why you are interested in pursuing dual degrees in science and engineering and which VIPER majors are most interesting to you at this time. (400-650 words) |
Understanding the University of Pennsylvania essay prompts
Overall, each of these University of Pennsylvania essay prompts is extremely specific. So, just like with the why UPenn essay and the program-specific UPenn supplemental essays, research is key.
With the competitive UPenn acceptance rate and its highly-ranked programs , admission is selective to these dual-degree programs. These UPenn supplemental essays help the UPenn admissions team understand your interest in these programs. Dual degree/specialized programs can be extremely demanding. So, youâll want your University of Pennsylvania essay to communicate your passion and dedication to that specific program and field.
Identifying which UPenn Supplemental Essays to answer
The UPenn supplemental essays you complete will depend on which school youâre applying to. Your UPenn supplemental essay requirements will populate based on your school/college selection via the Common App or Coalition App. So, you will easily see which University of Pennsylvania essay prompts are required.
The first two UPenn supplemental essay prompts, including the why UPenn essay, are required for all applicants. The third prompt will depend on which school you are applying to, but all applicants will complete a school-specific essay. Students who are applying to a dual degree or specialized program will also write a fourth UPenn supplemental essay.
To find out which UPenn supplemental essays you will need to complete, explore UPenn’s majors . Then, you can check to see which school or college your intended major is housed in.
Does UPenn care about essays?
Yes, UPenn cares about essays â they are a key element of the school’s comprehensive review process . The UPenn supplemental essays are the best way for UPenn to get to know you better. The UPenn essay prompts are designed to help your readers understand your interest in UPenn as well as your academic goals. This is your chance to tell your story, so itâs important to spend adequate time and energy on each UPenn essay. Since all of the UPenn essays are required, itâs fair to say that your UPenn supplemental essays matter!
The UPenn supplemental essays are also a great chance to explain certain aspects of your application in greater detail. So, be sure to highlight what you find most compelling about your experiences within each UPenn supplemental essay.
The University of Pennsylvania essay is a crucial part of meeting the UPenn application requirements and crafting a strong application. So, be sure to take writing your essays seriously!
Five tips on how to write your UPenn Supplemental Essays
If youâre still feeling stuck starting or drafting your essays, donât worry. Here are five tips to keep in mind while writing your UPenn supplemental essays:
1. Be original
Your UPenn supplemental essays should reflect your academic goals and specific interest in UPenn. So, think carefully about what interests you about UPenn and make sure your why UPenn essay highlights this. The UPenn essay prompts aim to showcase your unique talents and experiences, so take advantage!
2. Read UPenn supplemental essay examples
It can be hard to jump into writing your UPenn supplemental essays without knowing what a successful essay looks like. Before you get started, read our UPenn supplemental essay examples here . Even if the UPenn supplemental essay prompts differ, you can get inspiration from the writing style and content.
3. Do your research
Your UPenn supplemental essays should also reflect the research youâve done and communicate what about UPenn specially interests you. So, researching UPennâs academics, student experience, and campus can help your UPenn supplemental essays highlight why youâre excited to attend UPenn.
4. Edit thoroughly
With such a selective admissions process, itâs important that your UPenn supplemental essays are polished. So, they must be free of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, or any other distractions. It can also help to share each UPenn supplemental essay with a teacher or mentor to help in the editing process. Additionally, youâll likely end up writing multiple drafts for each UPenn supplemental essay prompt â and thatâs a good thing! Editing, revising, and trying new approaches can help you write your best University of Pennsylvania essay.
5. Have fun!
Overall, the UPenn supplemental essays are a great chance to be creative in the admissions process. Try to write a UPenn supplemental essay in a different writing style, or experiment with your topics. The UPenn supplemental essay prompts help the school gain insight into who you are, so take advantage of the opportunity!
How to make your UPenn essays stand out
Your University of Pennsylvania essay is a crucial part of your overall application. The UPenn supplemental essays help admissions officers understand your goals and ambitions. The best UPenn supplemental essays work together to paint a holistic picture of an applicant. So, to help your UPenn supplemental essay stand out, take a step back and think about your larger narrative .
Each UPenn supplemental essay should also reinforce central themes present in your application. If you hope to become a doctor, your UPenn supplemental essays should illustrate your path towards medicine. For example, your why UPenn essay might explain how UPennâs pre-med program will help prepare you for medical school. Then, your school-specific essay might explain why you want to be a doctor.
Ask yourself, what different stories can you tell? Additionally, which stories fit better for different prompts? The most effective UPenn supplemental essay will help your reader view you as a complete individual. That means highlighting the values and passions of the person behind the grades and test scores .
More UPenn Resources from CollegeAdvisor and Beyond
CollegeAdvisor has a number of resources to help you through the entire college application process. You can read our guides on How to Get Into UPenn , and Ivy League Essay Examples . If youâre still feeling stuck on the University of Pennsylvania essay, try reading our essay guides. Youâll find more helpful tips regarding College Essay Topics and How to Write Better Essays .
For more information on the University of Pennsylvania, be sure to check our Forbes and the College Board . We also recommend visiting UPennâs website to find the most up-to-date details about the application process , and academic programs . You can also read the Daily Pennsylvanian , UPennâs student newspaper, to get a better sense of student life.
UPenn Supplemental Essays â 5 Takeaways
Each UPenn supplemental essay is a major component to your overall application. Here are 5 takeaways on how to write each of your UPenn supplemental essays.
Start early
The University of Pennsylvania essay can take many different drafts, edits, and attempts to complete. So, itâs crucial to start your UPenn supplemental essay early to give yourself enough time to write the best version possible. Essay prompts are typically released in late summer, so be sure to monitor UPennâs website for any updates.
Do your research
The UPenn supplemental essay is meant to demonstrate your interest in attending UPenn vs other universities. You should be able to pinpoint why UPenn is the best fit for you as well as how UPenn will help you achieve your goals. Spend time researching academic programs, student activities, and special programs for your UPenn supplemental essay.
Be specific
Your University of Pennsylvania essay will be one of hundreds submitted for consideration. So, itâs important that your essay captures your specific and unique narrative. The more details you can include, the better. Itâs important that your voice comes through â but it may take multiple drafts for this to happen!
Write multiple drafts
The first draft of your University of Pennsylvania essay should look very different from your final draft. The only way to ensure that you submit the best versions of your UPenn supplemental essays is to undergo multiple drafts and edits. Even if you donât think you need to, take some time away from your drafts and read them with fresh eyes. Additionally, you might be surprised what new ideas come to mind or spelling mistakes you didnât notice on a first read!
Consult with others
Even if you write multiple drafts, it can be hard to imagine how your ideas land on an outside reader. So, try to get your University of Pennsylvania essay read by another person before submission. Reach out to your teachers, mentors, or family members to provide feedback on your essays. Then you can choose what feedback to incorporate into your final draft.
This essay guide was written by S enior Advisor Jess Klein . Looking for more admissions support? Click here to schedule a free meeting with one of our Admissions Specialists. During your meeting, our team will discuss your profile and help you find targeted ways to increase your admissions odds at top schools. Weâll also answer any questions and discuss how CollegeAdvisor.com can support you in the college application process.
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English (ENGL)
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 0011
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 0012
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 0021 , COMLÂ 0021
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0022
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 0023
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 0024
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 0038
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1025 , MELCÂ 1960 , NELC 1960, SASTÂ 1124 , THARÂ 1025
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 0041 , COMLÂ 0041
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 0052
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 Shakespeareâs 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 0002
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0030 , ENGL 2303, GSWSÂ 0003
ENGLÂ 0200 Slow-Reading Shakespeare with Paul Robeson High School
In this ABCS (Academically Based Community Service) course, we will read a single Shakespeare play slowly and carefully, through multiple methodologies and approaches, over the course of the semester. Students will also work on the same play with 10th graders at Robeson High School under the direction of their award-winning teacher, Ms Tiaw. âSlow readingâ means an intensely detailed, iterative reading of the play through linguistic, cultural-historical, bibliographic, and performative lenses. We will gain a detailed knowledge of this play, but in doing so, we will also learn about Shakespeareâs style, dramaturgy, and theatrical context. Penn students will thereby become well-prepared to work with Robeson students as they work through a scene, or a piece of dialogue, or character motivations. The course will be a success if, through this work in tandem and in parallel, everyone in the Penn classroom and the Robeson classroomâboth students and teachersâgains a deeper understanding of the play and of the benefits of the slow, patient, detailed exploration of a text. No previous experience with Shakespeare or with teaching is required. What is required is a serious commitment to the work of the class, including showing up to all sessions both at Penn and at Robeson. (Sessions at Robeson will meet during the same Penn time block so everyone will be free. There may be one or two events arranged outside this time.) If for some emergency reason you will be unable to do the work on a given day, you must commit to notifying Ms Tiaw and me with as much advance notice as possible.
ENGLÂ 0201 Voting Writes: An ABCS Course
In this ABCS (Academically Based Community Service) course, Penn students will work with twelfth graders to write and discuss literature about the history and present tense of voting in our country. During the first of our twice-weekly class sessions, weâll meet on campus to plan the next lesson. In the following session, weâll bring this lesson to a high school classroom in West Philly. Sessions at the high school will meet during the same Penn time block so everyone will be free. Each week weâll use a different poem or short essay (like Reginald Dwayne Bettsâs poem about voting for Obama in a Nat Turner T-Shirt, Chanda Feldmanâs poem about voter suppression among sharecroppers, and John Lewisâs graphic novel MARCH) as the model for our own creative writing about what voting means to us and what it has meant to our families before us. Weâll also talk about voting policies and structures of government in order to reflect on them in poems and prose. Penn students will gain teaching experience, creative writing techniques, and close reading skills. No previous teaching nor writing experience is required.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 0301 First Year Seminar--Emotions
The field known as âHistory of the Emotionsâ 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 âemotions studiesâ: psychology, sociology, political theory, philosophy, and neuroscience. In this seminar we will explore some key methodologies and subject matters for history of the emotions. Weâll look at some philosophical reflections on emotion (including Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, as well as more recent moral philosophers); weâll also look at political theorists, including Thomas Hobbes; weâll 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: CLSTÂ 0015
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 0303
ENGLÂ 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 burningâbe 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.
ENGLÂ 0310 Reading the City (First-Year Seminar)
This first-year seminar will consider how nineteenth-century literature helped transform the city into the symbolic nerve center of modern social life, and it will follow the changing shapes of urbanism across contexts and into the present. To make sense of these conflicting meanings, we will examine what versions of the city take shape in fiction, poetry, social theory, photography, film, and contemporary writing and media. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0310
ENGLÂ 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: AFRCÂ 0320 , GSWSÂ 0320
ENGLÂ 0322 Freshman Seminar on Asian American Lit
An introduction to writing about Literature, with emphasis on Asian American literature and culture.
Also Offered As: ASAMÂ 0010
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 0333
ENGLÂ 0340 First Year Seminar: Scenes of Teaching
This course will consider the theory and practice of pedagogy in a range of texts and films. Topics will include critical pedagogy, language and power, school reform, class and upward mobility, education and the professions, social control, pedagogical eros, race and racism, and the social space of the classroom. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 0501
ENGLÂ 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 storytellingâs cultural function. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 0372 First Year Seminar: Juvenilia
This course explores the childhood and adolescent writings of some of English literatureâs most notable figures. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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, weâll 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. Weâll start with some quick case studies on Wordsworth, Whitman, and Dickinson. For the remainder of the semester, weâll work intensively on Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Bob Dylan, and Claudia Rankine.
ENGLÂ 0376 First Year Seminar: The Short Story Cycle
This First Year Seminar examines some of the greatest short-stories from the 19th and 20th centuries, with special attention to writing of the modern period, vivid with new experiences and alive with stylistic experimentation. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 0380 First Year Seminar: Modern American Poetry
This First Year Seminar examines innovations in modern American poetry, exploring a range of poetic voices from the 20th and 21st centuries. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 0391 First Year Seminar: Dark Academia
This First-Year seminar explores the phenomenon of the âdark academiaâ online aesthetic. What are the origins of this way of romanticizing the act of studying and the experience of university? What do its signifiers mean, and why are they used? What cultural and political currents run underneath the surface of that #darkacademia post? This course invites you to interrogate the myth of the academy itself to see what it can tell us about class, race, sexuality, and power in the hallowed halls of higher education. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 0401 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 and an intensive introduction to the serious study of literature and creative writing.
ENGLÂ 0402 First-Year Seminar: Kelly Writers House
This first-year seminar is held at Pennâs vibrant literary arts hub, the Kelly Writers House. Students can expect an in-depth introduction to the serious study of literature and creative writingâas well as collaborative, intensive work with an array of visiting poets, novelists, journalists, and other writers and artists giving readings, workshops, and colloquia at KWH throughout the semester. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 2086 , LALSÂ 2860 , THARÂ 2860
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CLSTÂ 3703
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 0502 , ITALÂ 3335
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0507
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 3330 , ITALÂ 3330
ENGLÂ 0510 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: National Epics (Med/Ren)
In this course we will consider texts that become ânational epics,â texts that in some sense come to ârepresentâ 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 â especially if I am French Muslim? What about El Cid in Spain? How do some texts â such as the Mahabharata in India, or Journey to the West in China â 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 ânational epicsâ). English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0510
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 0513
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 âglobalization.â See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 0518 , COMLÂ 0518
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: SASTÂ 0519
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0520 , LALSÂ 0520
ENGLÂ 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: AFRCÂ 0521
ENGLÂ 0525 Black Style: Fashions, Fictions, and Films of the 1920s
This course will explore literature, art, film, and politics of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 0531
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CLSTÂ 3508 , COMLÂ 0540
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 3097 , GSWSÂ 3890
ENGLÂ 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 DĂ?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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3510 , GRMNÂ 1302 , ITALÂ 3610
ENGLÂ 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
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2500 , ENGL 2799, FRENÂ 2500 , HISTÂ 0722
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 0578
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTH 3890, CIMSÂ 0590 , COMLÂ 0590
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3871 , CIMSÂ 3201 , FNAR 3182
ENGLÂ 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 Companyâs 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 Disneyâs 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+.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3873 , CIMSÂ 3203 , FNAR 3184
ENGLÂ 0594 History of Children's TV
This course will survey the history of childrenâs 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. Weâll 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 childrenâs cable channels in the 90s, as well as other landmark moments. Weâll also assess the impact of streaming platforms on television and the future of childrenâs media.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3874 , CIMSÂ 3204 , FNAR 3185
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 3781
ENGLÂ 0596 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: Charles Chaplinâs Films and the Politics of Silence
This BFS seminar focuses on the variety pantomime inherited by twentieth-century film from the Commedia dellâArte and European Music Hall stages. Emphasis will be placed on how pantomime was used by filmmaker Charles Chaplin between the years 1914â1940. 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: CIMSÂ 0596
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3930 , ARTHÂ 3930 , CIMSÂ 3930 , GSWSÂ 3930
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 0701 Medieval Road Trip: Reading and Writing with Chaucer
This Critical-Creative Seminar reads Chaucerâs pathbreaking The Canterbury Tales to consider whether stories that entertain us can also make us better humans, how we should react when stories offend us; what power short stories have to challenge hierarchies and inequalities, and finally, how translating, adapting, and critiquing old stories can fashion communities of readers and writers across time. Students will have a chance to experiment with Chaucerâs language and meter and ultimately contribute either a critical or a creative piece. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0701 , RELSÂ 0701
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: ANTHÂ 1755
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 0765 Podcasting--a Critical-Creative Seminar (SNF Paideia Program Course)
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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 0771 Joyce's Ulysses: Making Readings
James Joyceâs Ulysses was a major literary event well before its publication. Seven years in the writing, the novel was recognized for its beauty and originality when it began appearing in serial form in a U.S. literary magazine, only to be confiscated when a court found it unprintably obscene. But because Joyce was stubborn and his patrons generous, Ulysses found its way into print in Paris in 1922, the wonder year of international modernism. Since then, it has inspired dozens of adaptations, prompted many hundreds of scholarly studies, and launched thousands of literary pilgrimages to Dublin, where readers retrace the steps of Joyceâs characters in their latter-day reenactment of Homerâs Odyssey. âJoyceâs Ulysses: Making Readingsâ is a Critical-Creative Approaches course. Weâll devote the first ten weeks of the semester to reading Joyceâs novel alongside selected criticism and adaptations in a variety of media. Discussion, mini-lectures, and student glosses will form the basis of this part of the course. Weâll spend the final month of the course collaboratively making readings of Ulyssesâconceiving and producing hybrid creative-critical projects that engage with the novel in some way other than conventional analysis. You might co-write an apocryphal episode, complete with schema and annotations. You might produce a film or stage adaptation of an episode that benefits from your readings in Joyce criticism. Or you might devise some other approach entirely. Our co-instructor and primary consultant on the final projects will be Rob Berry, the artist behind Ulysses âSeen,â the internationally acclaimed digital comics adaptation of Joyceâs novel.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 0776
ENGLÂ 0777 Frightful: Adolescence and the Gothic (Critical-Creative Seminar)
In this course, we will study classic and contemporary Gothic texts and films, along with supplemental commentary, to determine what exactly Gothic means. Where adolescence fits into the equation. And why, as a fuzzily-boundaried genre, it has been unflaggingly best-selling, lauded and derided in equal measure, for nearly three hundred years. 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.
ENGLÂ 0783 Writing About Music (Critical-Creative Seminar)
This critical-creative seminar takes a dynamic and interdisciplinary look at the art of writing about music. When one writes about music what does one write about? Sound? Culture? Feeling (is feeling historical)? Technologies? Art? The course explores how one can approach the power of any of the above through writing, writing about record labels, cities, bands, musicians, and more. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0783
ENGLÂ 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: THARÂ 0785
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 0984 Transfer Credit & Credit Away
Reserved for Transfer Credit and Credit Away electives (to be used in XCAT).
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 0987 Study Abroad with Medieval/Renaissance
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Sector 3 Medieval/Renaissance of the English major
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 0999 Independent Study in Language and Literature
Supervised reading and research.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CLSTÂ 1700
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1013
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 1014
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1015
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 1043
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1021
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 1041
ENGLÂ 1041 Gothic Bodies
Surveying works of the Romantic and Victorian periods, this course will explore the problem of the body within gothic and horror writing. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 1055
ENGLÂ 1056 Sherlock in the Multiverse
This course will consider the transmedia phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes. We will begin with his detective antecedents, weâll then dive into Conan Doyleâs Victorian-era Sherlock, and finally explore Sherlockâs 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: CIMSÂ 1056
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1070
ENGLÂ 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 todayâs 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: ARTHÂ 2889 , COMLÂ 1072 , FRENÂ 1071 , GRMNÂ 1065
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1081
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 1092 , CIMSÂ 1092
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: LALSÂ 1202
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 1131 , GSWSÂ 1131
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 1141 American Horror Traditions
This course will serve as an introduction to American horror traditions from the 19th and 20th centuries. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CLSTÂ 1602 , COMLÂ 1191
ENGLÂ 1180 The Art of Revolution
This course offers an international and multidisciplinary tour of revolutionary art from the 20th and 21st centuries, including cinema, literature, visual art, theater, and performance art. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1280 , COMLÂ 1180 , GSWSÂ 1180 , LALSÂ 1180 , THARÂ 1180
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1190 , COMLÂ 1190
ENGLÂ 1191 Community, Freedom, Violence: Writing the South Asian City
The South Asian cityâas space, symbol, and memoryâis 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1121 , SASTÂ 1120 , URBSÂ 1120
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 1200 , GSWSÂ 1201
ENGLÂ 1201 The African American Short Story in the 21st Century
This survey of African American follows the trajectory of the form as it moves from a reliance on African and African American folk sources to modern and postmodern practices. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 1210
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 0082 , COMLÂ 0082
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 2679 , COMLÂ 1260 , GSWSÂ 1260 , LALSÂ 1260
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ASAMÂ 0103
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1271 , THARÂ 1271
Mutually Exclusive: THAR 0271
ENGLÂ 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: ASAMÂ 1210
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 1273 , THARÂ 1273
ENGLÂ 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.).
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 1279 , THARÂ 1279
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1090 , GRMNÂ 1090 , JWSTÂ 1090
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ITALÂ 1920
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2084 , ITALÂ 2510
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 0090 , GSWSÂ 0090 , ITALÂ 0090
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 1300
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1310 , GSWSÂ 1310
ENGLÂ 1330 Writing Women, Part 1
This is a sophomore-level course designed for students who are curious about the literary and social history of womenâs writing between 1660 and 1700. Weâll survey the work of influential writers of the time period who identified as female, and add a few texts by men writing about women. Weâll consider how women's writing participated in the many worlds from which women were excluded â 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 âGreat Britainâ (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, ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 1330
ENGLÂ 1331 Writing Women, Part 2: Sexuality and Power, 1700-1799
"Sexuality and Powerâ 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: GSWSÂ 1331
ENGLÂ 1391 Introduction to Chick Lit
This course will introduce students to the genre known as "Chick Lit," a label that emerged in the 1990s to encompass pleasurable fiction written primarily for women, by women, and about women. Although Chick Lit has been criticized for elevating the so-called âsuperficial,â âtrivial,â and âfluffyâ elements of womenâs lives, it has nonetheless remained an enormously popular and influential segment of contemporary fiction. This course journeys through Chick Lit's predecessors, greatest hits, and new boundary-pushing work, in both novels and film. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 1391
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 2400
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1400 , GRMNÂ 1303
ENGLÂ 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
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1000
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3560 , CLSTÂ 3509 , COMLÂ 2052 , GRMNÂ 1015
ENGLÂ 1427 Wild Things: Childrenâs Literature and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child
This course, framed as a psychoanalytic study of the child, focuses on English-language childrenâs 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: COMLÂ 1427 , GSWSÂ 1427
ENGLÂ 1430 From the Uncanny to Horror: Film and Psychoanalysis
This course introduces students to the links between psychoanalysis and film by focusing on two themes, the Uncanny and Horror. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1430
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0095 , HISTÂ 0822 , REESÂ 1177
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1050 , REES 1179
ENGLÂ 1460 World Socialist Literature and Film
In 1989-1991, a whole world, perhaps many worlds, vanished: worlds of socialism. In this course we will investigate key works of literature and film spanning the socialist world(s), focused around the USSR, which was for many the (not uncontested) center of the socialist cosmos for much of the twentieth century. 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 largeâglobal in scaleâand therefore âcoverageâ will of necessity be incomplete. Readings and viewings may include works by: Tengiz Abuladze, Bertolt Brecht, Slavenka DrakuliÄ, Sergei Eisenstein, Howard Fast, Ritwik Ghatak, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pablo Neruda, NgĆ©gÄ© wa Thiong'o, SembĂšne Ousmane, Jean-Marie Straub and DaniĂšle Huillet, Rabindranath Tagore, Christa Wolf, Zhang Meng, and others.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0149 , REESÂ 0149
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: STSCÂ 1101
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 0050
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1160 , ENVSÂ 1050 , GRMNÂ 1160 , STSCÂ 1160
ENGLÂ 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?
Also Offered As: ANTHÂ 1440 , COMLÂ 1140 , ENVSÂ 1440 , GRMNÂ 1140 , HISTÂ 0872
ENGLÂ 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: ENVSÂ 1410
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ENVSÂ 2430 , RELSÂ 2460
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: HISTÂ 2203
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1650 , HISTÂ 0870
ENGLÂ 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.
Mutually Exclusive: PHYSÂ 1100
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1740
ENGLÂ 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, odd numbered years only
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 0015 , GSWSÂ 0051
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 1810 , COMLÂ 1810
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1840
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 1859 , THARÂ 0103
ENGLÂ 1860 Early Drama
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. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 1861 Othello
In this class, we will examine Shakespeare's Othello from a variety of critical perspectives through close-analysis of the play-text and adaptations on film and stage, beginning with the playâs earliest performance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 1861
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: THARÂ 0102
ENGLÂ 1880 African American Drama: Origins to present
This course will introduce students to African American drama from its origins to the present. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 1880 , THARÂ 1880
ENGLÂ 1890 On the Stage and in the Streets: An Introduction to Performance Studies
What do Hamilton, RuPaulâs Drag Race, political protest, TikTok Ratatouille, and Queen Elizabethâs funeral have in common? They all compose repertoires of performance. From artistic performances in theatres, galleries, and concert halls to an individualâs 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 isnât 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 performanceâs 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: ANTHÂ 1104 , COMLÂ 0104 , THARÂ 0104
ENGLÂ 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 beforeâwhile 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 itâs headed. In addition to the works already mentioned, weâll look at Caroline or Change, The Color Purple, In the Heights, Fun Home, and more. This course will also consider some recent ârevisals,â like director Daniel Fishâs Oklahoma!, and Marianne Elliottâs gender-reassigned Company: reinterpretations of classic American musicals that imagine them in more contemporary light.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1275 , THARÂ 1272
ENGLÂ 1892 Movie Musicals: From Oz to La La Land
The very first major sound filmâThe Jazz Singer, in 1927âfeatured not only speaking, but also singing. Audiences around the country hungrily consumed this new cinematic genreâone that was also strongly influenced by the stage musicals that were taking New York by storm. The synergy between Hollywood and Broadway was electric. Virtually every major composer and lyricist, including Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, worked both coasts. At the same time, the movies created new film celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Judy Garland, The Nicholas Brothers, and more. In the Depression 42nd Street, The Wizard of Oz, and Stormy Weather provided entertaining escapismâand sometimes a critical lens into reality. As time moved on movie musicals moved with them⊠and continue to do so. Jailhouse Rock, A Hard Dayâs Night, Sparkle, The Whoâs Tommy, Robert Altmanâs Nashville, and Damien Chazelleâs La La Land are just a few of the films that reinvent and even subvert the genres, while showcasing stars from Elvis Presley to Tina Turner to Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Movie Musicals will explore the development of this form and the artists who made it, including Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bob Fosse, Baz Luhrmann⊠and of course, Walt Disney. The class will also present an international perspective: Bollywood, Nollywood, and the Scandinavian sensibility of Bjork and Lars von Trierâs Dancer in the Dark.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1276 , THARÂ 1276
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 2830 , THARÂ 2830
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 1051 , URBSÂ 1051
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CLSTÂ 3708 , COMLÂ 2000 , GSWSÂ 2000
ENGLÂ 2010 Old English Seminar
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 2014 , RELSÂ 2014
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 ENGLÂ 2310 : https://catalog.upenn.edu/courses/engl/
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 2021
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: ASAMÂ 2310 , COMLÂ 2031 , EALCÂ 1321
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 2060 Sex, Scandal, and Sensation in the Victorian Novel
This seminar explores themes of sex, sensation, and sensationalism in the Victorian novel. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 2061 Victorian Action Heroes
This course is designed to investigate several key texts in the blockbuster genres that emerged in the Victorian era â detective novel, spy thriller, ghost story, treasure hunt, imperial romance, invasion scenario, monster tale, science fiction, true crime narrative â as well as their contemporary adaptations in order to figure out why Victorian Action Heroes still exert so much cultural force. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3850 , COMLÂ 2071 , GRMNÂ 1304
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 2072
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 2073 , COMLÂ 2073
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 2080 , JWSTÂ 2080
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2082
ENGLÂ 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 theyâre 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 âpassâ as a different race? When we speak in a different accent? How do we reconcile the conflicting demands of âbe yourselfâ and âfake it till you make itâ? What is the relation between our presentation of ourselves and our selves? Novels and shorts stories for discussion might include classics like Nella Larsenâs Passing, Vladimir Nabokovâs Despair and Patricia Highsmithâs 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 â keenly aware of their own artifice â 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 2083 , COMLÂ 2083
ENGLÂ 2085 Nuclear Fictions
The novel and the nuclear, the book and the Bomb: in this course weâll 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.
ENGLÂ 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 websiteâs at: www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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 writersâand 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 2092
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: FNARÂ 3100
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 2120
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 2131 Early Philly: Literature and Culture of Philadelphia in the 18th and 19th Centuries
This course will consider the literatures and cultures of Philadelphia in the 18th and 19th centuries. By reading novels, poetry, and historical documents, we will consider how the city in which we live and work developed during its first two centuries. We will focus in particular on themes of race, labor, colonialism, slavery, migration, and popular culture. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 2135 Trash: The Dime Novel
This seminar explores the rise of the âdime novelâ 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: LALSÂ 2135
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 2145 Failure to Communicate (SNF Paideia Program Course)
This seminar examines âfailure to communicateâ 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
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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, Aáž„mad ibn QÄsim Ibn al-កajarÄ«, 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 â political, religious, cultural, and literary â 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.
Also Offered As: HISTÂ 3602
Mutually Exclusive: HISTÂ 2602
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2180
ENGLÂ 2190 Postcolonial Literature Seminar
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2190
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 2191
ENGLÂ 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: ASAMÂ 1211 , COMLÂ 2192
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 2200
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 2211
ENGLÂ 2222 August Wilson and Beyond
"The people need to know the story. See how they fit into it. See what part they play.â - 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 Wilsonâs plays are receiving fresh attention with recent acclaimed film versions: Fences with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis; Ma Raineyâs 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 2325 , THARÂ 2325
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 2251
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: LALSÂ 2260
ENGLÂ 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
Also Offered As: LALSÂ 2261
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ASAMÂ 2200
ENGLÂ 2272 In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique
This interdisciplinary seminar examines how popular cultural representations frame Asian Americans as either invisible or hypervisibleâour 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: ARTHÂ 3749 , ASAMÂ 2272 , GSWSÂ 2272
ENGLÂ 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: ASAMÂ 3130 , FNARÂ 3060
ENGLÂ 2276 The Chinese Body and Spatial Consumption in Chinatown (SNF Paideia Course)
ENGLÂ 2299 Italian American Studies
Topics vary. Please check the department's website for a course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 3400 , ITALÂ 3400
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 2310 , COMLÂ 2310 , GSWSÂ 2310
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 2315
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 2321
ENGLÂ 2355 Happily Ever After?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are no more famous opening words than âOnce upon a timeâ. They are familiar to the point of ubiquity, beloved, demanded, simply accepted as a promise that something extraordinary is about to unfold. And, in fairy tales, something always does. In this course, we will focus not on that promise (after all, itâs an immutable truth), but on the less immutable âHappily ever afterâ that we expect to have follow. Because not every tale ends happily for anyone, let alone everyone. Just ask most fictional stepmothers. And even for the winner, the path is seldom smooth. We will examine fairy tales and folklore across continents and centuries, considering both form and function in how they stand as both rulebook and cautionary tale, specifically as they speak to gender. What determines success in these tales? Who deserves to win? The ambitious young man with few resources but plenty of ambition and cunning? The beautiful girl with few expectations but boundless patience? What, really, are the messages in these age-old tales? In their contemporary adaptations? When we sing along loudly with Queen Elsa of Disneyâs Frozen, exhorting each other to âLet It Goâ, what is it? Materials will include the traditional fantastical (Grimmâs tales, One Thousand and One Nights, Ghanaian folklore, The Odyssey, Pride and Prejudice), to the modern (Disney Disney Disney, Hayao Miyazaki, Angela Carter, Barbie) to the scholarly (Bettelheim, Lieberman, Kristeva, Warner).
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 2455
ENGLÂ 2385 Terrifying: Adolescence, Real and Imagined
This course explores the concept of âchoiceâ in adolescence, and where adolescence and society cross, clash, and mesh, primarily focused around the subjects of gender and sexuality. We will explore media of the long adolescence through two-and-a-half centuries: prose narrative to graphic novel to television and TikTok and more, from Austen to Vuong, Kant to Kaling to Kobabe, J. Swift to T. Swift (well, probably not Jonathan Swift, but it felt clever).
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 2385
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 2390 , GSWSÂ 2390 , LALSÂ 2390 , PRTGÂ 0090
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2410 , GSWSÂ 2960
ENGLÂ 2401 Literature and Theory Seminar: Theories of World Literature
This course is an introduction to effortsâbeginning in the nineteenth century, but with special attention to the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuriesâto 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: COMLÂ 2401
ENGLÂ 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 capitalismâs 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 todayâs world. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2402 , GSWSÂ 2410
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 2403
ENGLÂ 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 workâfiction, 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 ChĂșngara, 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: GSWSÂ 2405
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 2930 , CIMSÂ 2420 , COMLÂ 2420
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 2460
ENGLÂ 2501 The Science-Fictions of Octavia E. Butler
This course covers key novels, short stories, and essays by the great African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, with a focus on her experiments with genre and gender-bending shape-shifters. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 2501 , GSWSÂ 2501
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 2522 The Death of the Sun: Energy, Evolution & Ecology in Victorian Fiction
This course explores the ways Victorian literature wrestled with and helped shape the way we understand ourselves and the natural world, forming the basis of modern ecology. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 2541 Caravaggio
This lecture course explores the artistic culture of Baroque Rome, with focus on the life and career of Caravaggio.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 2541 , ITALÂ 2541
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 2542 , ARTHÂ 2542 , LALSÂ 2542
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ANTHÂ 3390 , COMLÂ 2595
ENGLÂ 2596 Ecocritical Seminar: Remediating the Environment
In this course, we will interrogate the term âremediationâ 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 materialsâfrom bestselling books to billboards, documentaries, and websitesâhave 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: CIMSÂ 2506
ENGLÂ 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 âliterature.â 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: COMLÂ 3603 , HISTÂ 3603
ENGLÂ 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: HISTÂ 2104
ENGLÂ 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 transformationsâpolitical, economic, religious, cultural, and literaryâin the early modern Mediterranean world. Students will also be introduced to and learn to analyze original materials from the Libraryâs 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: HISTÂ 2602
Mutually Exclusive: HISTÂ 3602
ENGLÂ 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 âIndiansâ by the Spanish and portrayed the packing of Africans on a slave ship. Goyaâs 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: ARTHÂ 3621
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 2940 , GSWSÂ 2940 , VLSTÂ 2360
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3970
ENGLÂ 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 toolâs ability to detect it.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 2665
ENGLÂ 2666 Algorithmic Ethics
Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence have become ubiquitous in the 21st century. From the movies recommended by Netflix to the advertisements presented on social media and the routes suggested by Google Maps, AI and algorithms can make our lives more convenient. But what about AI that that can earn a B+ on an MBA exam without studying, phones that unlock with facial recognition that doesnât work smoothly on all skin colors, or autonomous weaponized drones that mistake civilians for targets? As algorithms play an increasing role in various aspects of modern society, addressing their ethical considerations becomes increasingly crucial to ensure their responsible and beneficial use. This course explores the ethical dimensions and implications inherent in algorithms and their associated technologies in a wide variety of contexts. Topics will range from the intricacies of privacy invasion and the mitigation of bias to the establishment of accountability in the use of algorithms in fields such as education, healthcare, finance, criminal justice, employment, environmental issues, urban planning, and weapons of war. We will critically analyze academic research, policy debates, and case studies to develop a nuanced understanding of the ethical considerations surrounding algorithms. Students will engage with cutting-edge scholarship and contribute to ongoing discussions on algorithmic ethics. As part of the course, students will interact with AI and report on their findings.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 2666
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 2720
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 storytellingâs cultural function. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 2800 Poetry and Poetics Seminar
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2800
ENGLÂ 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 conceptsâespecially those concepts related to the question of âthe person in the poemâ: âauthor,â âvoice,â âpersona,â âaddress,â âpersonification,â ârepresentation,â and âreferentiality.â See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2810
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 2840
ENGLÂ 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, weâll explore a major poetic genreâthe elegyâin relation to its two, intertwined themes: death and sex. All of the elegies weâll 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: GSWSÂ 2841
ENGLÂ 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 Genetâs The Blacks and Imamu Amiri Barakaâs Black Arts Repertory Theater and School, to Ntozake Shangeâs 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: AFRCÂ 2852 , THARÂ 2850
ENGLÂ 2860 Drama to 1660 Seminar
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 2860
ENGLÂ 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 âSundayâ 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 itâs been nearly 15 years since Sondheimâs final new musical, he is very much part of our theatrical presentâthrough 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 âlegitimateâ playwrights. In this seminar, we will examine in detail Stephen Sondheimâs writing over six decades. Weâll begin with Sondheimâs 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 â now both composer and lyricist â 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 Sondheimâs work, which often are reconceived from their original form, often with Sondheimâs 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: CIMSÂ 1274 , THARÂ 1274
ENGLÂ 2879 Acting Shakespeare
All the worldâs a stage and Shakespeareâs plays were written to be performed on it. In this open-level acting course weâll explore the performance of three of Shakespeareâs greatest dramatic works (Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet). Weâll dive deep into the language, verse, rhetoric, and dramaturgy of Shakespeareâs 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 Shakespeareâs dramatic works to their most impactful life. Students will leave the course not only with techniques to perform and appreciate Shakespeareâs work, but with expressive tools that will serve them in all kinds of performance or public speaking.
Also Offered As: THARÂ 2236
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 2820 , LALSÂ 2820 , THARÂ 2820
ENGLÂ 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 Shakespeareâs The Tempest and Ibsenâs Enemy of the People. Weâll compare how non-western performances offer different relationships with the environment. And weâll analyze how performance has responded to climate anxiety; through visions of dystopia and an end of the world, as in Caryl Churchillâs The Skriker and Anne Washburnâs 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: THARÂ 2825
ENGLÂ 2882 Method Acting: From Self to Stage and Screen
What, exactly, is âmethod actingâ? Jeremy Strong became notorious on televisionâs Succession for âstaying in characterâ while filming, to the great irritation of his castmates. Jared Leto âtransformedâ himself by gaining sixty pounds for a role in Chapter 27, then losing another thirty for a role in Dallas Buyerâs Club. Are such approaches really âmethodâ acting? Are they healthy and sustainable? And do they produce truly compelling performances? This course aims to demystify âthe methodâ through a combination of historical inquiry and hands-on acting work. We will explore the cultural phenomenon of âthe methodâ 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 Yorkâs Actors Studio in the 1950s, and its culmination in iconic stage and film performances. (One prime example is Marlon Brandoâs famed portrayal of Stanley in Tennessee Williamsâs 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: CIMSÂ 2810 , THARÂ 2810
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: THARÂ 2720
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 2840 , THARÂ 2840
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: THARÂ 2740
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 2950 , CIMSÂ 2950 , COMLÂ 2950 , GSWSÂ 2950
Mutually Exclusive: ARTHÂ 6950
ENGLÂ 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 festivalsâCannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Sundance among othersâwill 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3910 , CIMSÂ 2010
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3914 , CIMSÂ 2014
ENGLÂ 2911 American Independents
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3911 , CIMSÂ 2011
ENGLÂ 2920 Contemporary European Cinema
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3915 , CIMSÂ 2015 , COMLÂ 2920
ENGLÂ 2930 Transnational Cinema
This is a course in contemporary transnational film cultures and world cinema. The course will examine the idea of world cinema and set up a model of how it can be explored by studying contemporary film in various countries. We will explore ways in which cinemas from around the globe have attempted to come to terms with Hollywood, and look at forces that lead many filmmakers to define themselves in opposition to Hollywood norms. But we will also look at the phenomenon of world cinema in independent terms, as âwavesâ that peak in different places and times, and coordinate various forces. Finally, through the close case study of significant films and cinemas that have dominated the international festival circuit (Chinese, Korean, Iranian, Indian, etc.) we will engage with the questions of which films/cinemas get labeled as âworld cinema,â what determines entry into the sphere of world cinema, and examine the importance of film festivals in creating world cinema.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3912 , CIMSÂ 2012 , COMLÂ 2012
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3902 , CIMSÂ 2022 , COMLÂ 2931
ENGLÂ 2932 Bollywood and Beyond
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3916 , CIMSÂ 2016 , COMLÂ 2932
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 3040 , EALCÂ 1352
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3100 , CIMSÂ 3100 , EALCÂ 2314 , REESÂ 3770
ENGLÂ 2935 Culture on Trial: Race, Media & Intellectual Property
This course explores the US intellectual property regimeâs 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: CIMSÂ 2935 , SOCIÂ 2973
ENGLÂ 2940 Documentary Cinema
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3913 , CIMSÂ 2013
ENGLÂ 2941 Historical Films
This course is a broad and eclectic introduction into the relationship between cinema and history. It explores a diverse range of films which claim to show that film can narrate and also shape history, and pays special attention to the manner in which films write and rewrite history by articulating and shaping popular memory. The course will be based on a premise that cinema, as a truly popular and global phenomenon, produces both the normative or institutional versions of history, as well as popular resistances to such official history. Because these issues are most prevalent in a genre called âhistorical films,â we will view and analyze several examples of this genre to try to answer the following questions: What is a historical film? What is its relationship to history and historical narratives? What is its role in producing or reshaping our memory of historical events? By extensive analysis of diverse films, both fiction and documentaries, we will thus raise significant questions about the construction of memory, history, and identity.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3900 , CIMSÂ 2020
ENGLÂ 2942 Romantic Comedy
We may know what it is like to fall in love, but how do movies tell us what it is like? Through an exciting tour of American and World cinema, we will analyze the moods and swings, successes and failures of love in romantic comedy, one of the most popular but generally overlooked and taken for granted genres. We will turn a spotlight on it by examining what elements and iconography constitute the âromcomâ genre, what specific qualities inform its sub-groupings such as screwball, sex comedy or radical romantic comedy, how they are related to their historical, cultural and ideological contexts, and what we can learn about their audiences. Watching classic as well contemporary examples of the genre, from City Lights (1931), It Happened One Night (1934) and Roman Holiday (1953), to Harold and Maude (1971), Annie Hall (1977), How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days (2003) and Her (2013), we will problematize this overly-familiar cinema to make it new and strange again, and open it up to creative analysis.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3901 , CIMSÂ 2021
ENGLÂ 2943 The Politics of Truth in the Global Documentary
This course is a study of documentary film practices internationally, beginning from the invention of cinema and ending in the contemporary landscape. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3959 , CIMSÂ 2943 , COMLÂ 2943
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 2920 , CIMSÂ 2951 , COMLÂ 2960
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 2000
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 2952
ENGLÂ 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 âseamlessâ 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?
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 2953 , STSCÂ 2692
ENGLÂ 2954 Collecting Media
There are tens of billions of videos on YouTube; a similar number of photos on Instagram; seven million items in the Penn Libraries; remains from more than 12,000 people stored in the Physical Anthropology Section of the Penn Museum; roughly 250 surveillance cameras capturing footage across our campus; over one million seed varieties stored in the Svalbard Seed Vault; tens of thousands of meters of frozen samples in the U.S. Geological Surveyâs Ice Core Facility â and, most likely, one huge, messy folder into which you dump all of your email. For thousands of years, cultural critics have lamented the onslaught of âinformation overload,â and for just as long, people have derived systems for collecting, organizing, storing, and facilitating access (or not) to media â whether Spotify playlists or cuneiform tablets or massive image files from NASAâs space telescopes. In this course weâll consider the past, present, and future â as well as the pragmatics, politics, and aesthetics â of organizing media and information in archives, libraries, and other media assemblages. Through readings, listening and screening exercises, occasional field trips and guest lectures, a few low-stakes student presentations and group collaborations, fun design exercises, art explorations, and potential collaborations with external cultural heritage organizations, weâll study why and how we collect media; why it matters for myriad scholarly fields, industries, creative practitioners, and communities; and how we might do it better. Because this new course is still in development, the assignments havenât yet been finalized â but students can tentatively expect to write one or two short papers; share one low-pressure in-class presentation; participate in a few small (and ideally enjoyable) design workshops and group exercises; and, in lieu of a final exam, complete a written or creative final project.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 2954 , CIMSÂ 2954
Mutually Exclusive: CIMSÂ 6954
ENGLÂ 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 âauthorship,â âamateur,â âexhibition,â âdistribution,â âvenue,â âcompletion,â âcriticism,â âdocumentary,â âperformance,â ânarrative,â âcommunity,â and âsuccessâ? 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 Philadelphiaâs own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this courseâs 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: AFRCÂ 3932 , ARTHÂ 3931 , CIMSÂ 3931 , COMLÂ 3931 , GSWSÂ 3931
Mutually Exclusive: ARTHÂ 6931
ENGLÂ 2982 Local Media
We may be tethered to global networks, streaming content from around the planet, joining in conversation (or conspiracy) with folks from all corners of the earth, but we also live in places with local characters and concerns, among people with local needs and contributions. What happens when we lose the local media â the newspapers and broadcast outlets â that bind and inform our localized communities? In this course weâll consider the important roles served by our place-based media, as well as whatâs lost when our local modes of communication collapse. But weâll also consider what might be gained if we think more generously about what constitutes local media â and if we imagine how they might be redesigned to better serve our communities, our broader society, and our planet. Through readings, listening and screening exercises, occasional in-class field trips and guest speakers, and low-barrier-to-entry in-class labs, weâll study local news; local book cultures, including libraries and bookshops and independent printers; local music scenes, including performance venues and record shops and music reviewers; local infrastructures of connection and distribution, including post offices and community digital networks; local data creators and collectors; local signage and interactive public media; local emergency communication resources; local whisper networks and town gossip; and a selection of other case studies that reflect studentsâ interests. Because this new course is still in development, the assignments havenât yet been finalized â but students can tentatively expect to write one or two short papers; share one low-pressure in-class presentation; participate in a few small (and ideally enjoyable) design workshops and group exercises; and, in lieu of a final exam, contribute a written or creative piece to a collective class publication, perhaps a local media field guide that weâll design and publish in collaboration with local makers.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 3782 , CIMSÂ 3782 , URBSÂ 3782
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 othersâ - 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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, weâll practice paying attention to the small. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3023 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fantasy and Magical Realism
An introduction to writing fantasy and magical realism. Suitable for beginners or 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.
ENGLÂ 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. Weâll 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.
ENGLÂ 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 otherâs 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.
Also Offered As: ASAMÂ 1200
ENGLÂ 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: ASAMÂ 1226
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 âI canât breatheâ 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.
ENGLÂ 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-Jonesâs 1619 Project. Through a study of this countryâs 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3101
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 3102
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 3104
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3106 Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3106
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3112 Experimental Writing
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3112
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 3120
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: WRITÂ 1380
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 âreally short stories.â 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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? Weâll 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3215 The Art of Fiction
In this generative, interactive workshop weâll 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.
ENGLÂ 3216 Revising Speculative Fiction
A creative writing workshop devoted to revising students' original work in speculative fiction (including but not limited to fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, and experimental prose).
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3251 Writing for Children
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3251
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3253 Writing for Young Adults
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3253
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3255 Advanced Writing for Children
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3255
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3257
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3301 Essays, Fragments, Collage: The Art of the Moment
In this creative nonfiction writing workshop weâll explore the moments of our lives through prompts that range from the tactile to the auditory, the documented to the whispered. Weâll 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.
ENGLÂ 3302 Experimental Nonfiction
A creative nonfiction workshop with an emphasis on writing that doesnât quite fit into any particular genre. While narrative nonfiction often fears straying too far from stale and safe âjournalisticâ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 âexperientialâ assignments, and explore how the art of playing around with the raw material of everyday life (i.e., ârealityâ) can make for great and unexpected stories. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3305
ENGLÂ 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: AFRCÂ 3306
ENGLÂ 3307 Creative Nonfiction: The Essay
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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3350 Long-Form Reported Nonfiction
Students in this workshop will learn how to use the tools of good storytelling to create compelling works of long-form reported nonfiction. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3353 Advanced Creative Nonfiction: Xfic
In this advanced creative nonfiction workshop, students write and publish work in Xfic, Pennâs 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3355 Memoir Workshop
A creative writing workshop devoted to the craft of memoir. Students will work with some of the forms and tools of memoir, including personal, hermit crab, and lyric essays, as well as 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.
ENGLÂ 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: ASAMÂ 3356
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3402 Immersion Journalism
Students will study and practice the genre of immersion journalism, in which a writer seeks out new experiences for first-person narratives that can take the form of travel writing, undercover investigative reporting, or hilarious narratives of unusual self-experiments. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3407 Writing about Health and Medicine
In this creative writing workshop, weâll 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.
ENGLÂ 3408 Long-Form Journalism
The so-called âNew Journalistsâ 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, authorâs voice, and dialogue as action. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 âshowâ as opposed to âtellâ? When is it best to use first, second or third person? Weâll 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: STSCÂ 2202
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 âobjectivityâ and âbalance.â This course is designed to be timely, so weâll closely monitor breaking stories as they arise. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 bandâs 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 3427 Investigative Journalism Workshop
This creative writing workshop will focus on the fundamentals of investigative journalism: reporting that approaches its topics and subjects with rigor, in-depth research, and an emphasis on accountability. For more information, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 âwitnessingâ 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 âwitnessâ 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 youâll be considered an âauthor,â which in its definition also means a âwitness.â 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; youâll do writing exercises related to the work we read; and youâll complete (and be workshopped on) a portfolio of creative writing (and/or art) that bears witness to events that matter to you.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 3501 , GSWSÂ 3501
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: FNARÂ 3080
Mutually Exclusive: FNARÂ 5056
ENGLÂ 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 JosĂ© Esteban Muñozâs 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: COMLÂ 3508 , GSWSÂ 3508
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 3512
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: URBSÂ 3500
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 3514 , LALSÂ 3514
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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, weâll 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.
Also Offered As: FNAR 3517, THARÂ 1117
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1160
ENGLÂ 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. Classes will consist of discussing student's work, as well as discussing relevant themes of the movie business and examining classic films and why they work as well as they do. Classic and not-so-classic screenplays will be required reading for every class in addition to some potentially useful texts like /What Makes Sammy Run?/
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1300
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1170
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: THARÂ 0114
ENGLÂ 3605 Advanced Playwriting
This course is intended to reinforce and build upon the areas covered in Level 1 Playwriting ( THARÂ 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.
Also Offered As: THARÂ 1114
Prerequisite: THARÂ 0114
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: THARÂ 3606
ENGLÂ 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 authorâs intent intersects with a studentâs 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: THARÂ 1115
ENGLÂ 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, AimĂ© Cesaire, Jamaica Kincaid, Regina Jose Galindo, Raul Ruiz, Josefina Baez, Zadie Smith and CherrĂe 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: GSWSÂ 3600 , LALS 3600, THARÂ 3600
ENGLÂ 3609 The Short Film: Writing, Producing, 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 1180
ENGLÂ 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, CherrĂe Moraga, Luis Alfaro, Holly Hughes, Kate Bornstein, Ana Mendieta, Valerie Solanas, Wallace Shawn, Tomata du Plenty, Teatro Campesino and ACT UP.
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 3630
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: THARÂ 0115
ENGLÂ 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: GSWSÂ 3651 , LALSÂ 3651
ENGLÂ 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: FNARÂ 3160 , GSWSÂ 0860
ENGLÂ 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: THARÂ 2520
ENGLÂ 3655 Writing Class
Gayatri Spivak has stated, âOf race, class and gender, class is the least abstract.â While materially true, in literary, theatrical, perofmative and cinematic representational schemes, class is often occluded, made permeable in opposition to longstanding economic realities or simply wished away in order to focus on plot and pleasantry. Within this course, students will instead focus their writing on class, whether that be on the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, ruling class, or the worldâs majority: the working class. Work on class can take the form of satire or solidarity; expose conflict and antagonism between and within a given class; historicize individual relationships within the history of property relations; focus on finances, wealth, or poverty; portray class ascent or descent. Writing may be in any genre: poetry, fiction, memoir, political essay, film script, play or performance. We will read and view work by artists such as Tillie Olsen, Kae Tempest, Leslie Feinberg, Zadie Smith, Cherrie Moraga, Alma Luz Villanueva, Helena Maria Viramontes, Gary Indiana, Gloria Naylor, Paul Beatty, Robert Altman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the Dardenne Brothers, Ken Loach, Lucrecia Martel, Bertolt Brecht, Clifford Odets, Adrienne Kennedy, Studs Terkel, Jean Toomer, Valerie Solanas, and the Chicano, Black and Nuyorican Theater Movements. We will develop work in/on class via writing exercises, attend readings, plays and performances both on and off campus. Students will do a midterm presentation of their work in progress. Final projects can be a short story, essay, a suite of poems, a play or film script, a short video, a collection of vignettes or a mĂ©lange of these genres. Let the writing of class begin!
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 3655 , LALSÂ 3655 , THARÂ 3655
ENGLÂ 3660 Movement Song: The Poetics of Liberation
This creative and critical poetry writing workshop will focus on the study of poets associated with antiwar, feminist, leftist, queer/trans and racial justice liberatory movements. We will study the work of Pablo Neruda, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Sean Bonney, Ntozake Shange, Jake Skeets, Chrystos, Natalie Diaz, Adelaide IvĂĄnova, Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez in relationship to the communities and movements which their work engages. Students will also work on their own poetry and will formulate innovative ways to present their work to a wider audience in the forms of video poems, zines, broadsides, social media posts, podcasts and letter print posters.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 3660 , FNAR 3660, GSWSÂ 3660 , LALSÂ 3660
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 4098 Senior Thesis Independent Study
Supervised reading and research toward the Senior Honors Thesis.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: CIMSÂ 4516
ENGLÂ 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, âLove and Rockets is the closest thing we have to âThe Great American Comic Book?ââ 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: LALSÂ 4517
ENGLÂ 4599 Study Abroad--Advanced Seminar
Study Abroad number reserved for XCAT requests that fulfill Advanced Seminar for English
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5001
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5002
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5003
ENGLÂ 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 â Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands â with the occasional foray into Eastern Europe and Scandinavia) and at a range of subgenres (giallo, mondo, slasher, survival, snuff, âŠ) or iconic figures (ghosts, vampires, cannibals, serial killers, âŠ). Issues of ethics, ideology, gender, sexuality, violence, spectatorship will be discussed through a variety of critical lenses (psychoanalysis, socio-historical and cultural context, aesthetics, politicsâŠ). The class will be conducted entirely in English. Be prepared for provocative, graphic, transgressive film viewing experiences. Not for the faint of heart!
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5004
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5005
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 peopleâs 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5030
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5051 , COMLÂ 5050
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5240 , GSWSÂ 5240
ENGLÂ 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 Noahâs ark to werewolf poems, beast fables, political satires, saintsâ 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: CLSTÂ 7710 , COMLÂ 5245 , RELSÂ 6101
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 5320 After Danteâs Divine Comedy: Transmission and Material Form, Creative Adaptation and Performance
This 5000-level seminar, co-taught by Marco Aresu (Italian) and David Wallace (English, Comparative Literature), considers how Dante and the copyists of his works deployed the tools of scribal culture to shape, signal, or layer meanings beyond those conveyed in his written texts. Medieval texts, uniquely positioned to provide such perspective, are foundational to theoretical understanding of new forms and materials in our media-saturated, contemporary world. In this course, we also read later creative responses to Dante, especially in Irish and English, American and African American contexts, and in poetry and prose, video and film. We will work from a parallel text, paying attention to the Italian but with no prior experience of the language required.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5320 , ITALÂ 5320
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 5410 Topics in Cultural History
Topic for Fall 2021: Making and Marking Time.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 5870 , COMLÂ 5410 , GRMNÂ 5410
ENGLÂ 5415 Orientalisms
This course surveys the scholarly and real-world life of Edward Said's 1978 monograph, Orientalism. Topics may include Said's primary source material, theories of Orientalism applied to eighteenth-century literature, earlier and later forms of Orientalism, and the impact of Said's work on postcolonial studies.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5415
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5430 , ENVSÂ 5410 , GRMNÂ 5430 , SPANÂ 5430
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 5680 , COMLÂ 5041
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 5701 , COMLÂ 5700
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 5725 Songs of Dissent: African American Poetry in the 21st Century
This course explores how poetry and poetics figure into the effort to theorize the African American subject in the 21st Century. Different instructors may emphasize difference aspects of the topic. Please see English.upenn.edu for a full list of course offerings.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 5725 , COMLÂ 5725
ENGLÂ 5730 Topics in Criticism & Theory: Object Theory
Topics vary annually
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 5730 , CIMSÂ 5730 , COMLÂ 5730 , GRMNÂ 5730 , REESÂ 6683
ENGLÂ 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? Whatâs to be observed about the current turn of black studies toward poetics? For the seminar, letâs 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 âcritiqueâ and âaesthetics.â Proposing the inseparability of critical inquiry and writing practice, the final assignment will be deemed experimental since the monograph-ish essay wonât 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 Oneâs Witness; Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense/Longing from Taking Place.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5735
ENGLÂ 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
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 5790 Provocative Performance
Also Offered As: GSWSÂ 5790 , THARÂ 5790
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 5840 Environmental Imaginaries
This seminar considers the interplay of narrative and environment. Through primary and secondary readings weâll consider environment as, variously, object and subject of narration, event, condition, and actant in plot. Different instructors may emphasize different aspects of the fields. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5841
ENGLÂ 5850 Topics in Indigenous Studies
This course is a critical exploration of recent literature and theory related to Indigenous studies, potentially including topics related to land treaties, residential schools, adoption and foster care system, oral histories, indigenous community justice, and indigenous feminisms. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 5890 Twentieth-Century American Poetry
See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5901
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 6530 , REESÂ 6150
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5920 , COMLÂ 5921
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 5930 , CIMSÂ 5930 , COMLÂ 5930 , GSWSÂ 5930
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 5931 , CIMSÂ 5931 , GSWSÂ 5931
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 5932 , CIMSÂ 5932 , GSWSÂ 5932
ENGLÂ 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 diverseâthough not comprehensiveâtoolbox 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 courseâs 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%.
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 5933 , CIMSÂ 5933 , COMLÂ 5940 , GSWSÂ 5933
ENGLÂ 5935 Art/Work and the Question of Autonomy
This seminar aims to get a handle on the often suspect concept of autonomy, partly by examining the relationship between art and work. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5904 , ITALÂ 5940
ENGLÂ 5945 Nationalism, Globalism, and Literary Form
This course will survey national epics and related critical theory from a range of national traditions. Emphasis will on globalization, nationalism, and literary form. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5945
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 5960 Marxism
This course will focus on Marxist thought as it has developed around the world from the 19th century to the present. Different instructors may emphasize difference aspects of Marxism and its legacy. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5960
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 5980 , GSWSÂ 5980
ENGLÂ 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 ânewâ media, such as social media, cellphone apps, streaming platforms, video games, and drones increasingly dominate everyday life, âoldâ 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.).
Also Offered As: ARTHÂ 5940 , CIMSÂ 5940
ENGLÂ 5995 Digital Humanities Praxis
This course puts digital and material archives into productive conversation by working collaboratively on existing and in-progress digital collections, maps, and exhibits. Through hands-on experience digitizing and researching these materials, students will learn how to formulate a digital (or public) humanities research question, devise a research plan, curate digital assets, present a digitally-based research project to a variety of audiences, and develop the infrastructures necessary to sustain a web-based digital collection or archive.
Also Offered As: CIMSÂ 5995
ENGLÂ 5999 Internship: Community Archiving in Theory and Praxis
This course covers theoretical and practical aspects of archiving materials from community organizations. It discussions of theoretical readings on the history, praxis, and ethics of community archiving with practical hands-on experience archiving materials owned community partners. Students also learn from and work with curators, librarians, and conservationists at the Kislak Center for Special Collections.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 6120 , GRMNÂ 6120 , JWSTÂ 6120 , PHILÂ 5439
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: CLSTÂ 7601 , COMLÂ 6160 , EALCÂ 8290 , REESÂ 6450 , ROMLÂ 6160
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 5400 , GRMNÂ 5400
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 6149 , REESÂ 6149
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 6770 , ANTHÂ 6770
ENGLÂ 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
Also Offered As: FRENÂ 6800
ENGLÂ 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
Also Offered As: FRENÂ 6840
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: COMLÂ 6860
ENGLÂ 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 GREKÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 6100 , GREKÂ 7203
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 7080 , COMLÂ 7080
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 7155 Boethius from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period
This seminar will explore the medieval and early modern reception of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, through literary imitations and translations, commentaries, and literary responses. To study the fortunes of the Consolation is to come to terms with one of the greatest informing influences on medieval and early modern European poetic thought. We will spend the first few weeks reading and digesting the Consolation itself, working between the Latin text and an English translation (probably using the Loeb edition). Knowledge of Latin is not required for the course, but the readings will provide ample opportunities for you to work on and with Latin as you wish. When we have read the Consolation we will explore its reception history. This will include medieval vernacular receptions (moving from early texts such as the Old English Boethius to its many appearances in Old French and Middle French, in Middle English especially in the form of Chaucer's Boece, and in any other language traditions that students want to cover); some of the remarkable commentaries on the text, and the later medieval literary apotheosis of the Consolation in Chaucer's Troilus and the "Boethian lyrics," in Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, in Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes, and in early modern texts, including--spectacularly--the translation of the Consolation by Queen Elizabeth 1. I encourage you to bring your own interests in the Consolation to the course and suggest some reception directions for the group to take.
Also Offered As: CLSTÂ 7714 , COMLÂ 7714
ENGLÂ 7177 The Quest for a Universal Language
This seminar is an exploration in European intellectual history. It traces 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 humanity. The tantalizing question of the possibility of such a language has been a vital and thought-provoking inquiry throughout human history. If recovered or invented, such a language has the potential to explain the origins, physical reality, and meaning of human experience, fostering universal understanding and world peace. Greek philosophers grappled with the capacity of names to correctly denote things. In Judaic and Christian traditions, the notion that the language spoken by Adam and Eve perfectly expressed the nature of the physical and metaphysical world captivated the minds of intellectuals for nearly two millennia. In defiance of the biblical myth of the confusion of languages and peoples at the Tower of Babel, they persistently endeavored to overcome divine punishment and rediscover the path to harmonious life. In the 19th century, Indo-Europeanist philologists perceived an avenue to explore the early stages of human development by reconstructing a proto-language. In the 20th century, romantic idealists like the inventor of Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhof, constructed languages to further understanding among estranged nations. For writers and poets of all times, from Cyrano de Bergerac to Velimir Khlebnikov, the concept of a universal and perfect language has served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Today, this idea reverberates in theories of universal and generative grammars, in the approach to English as a global language, and in various attempts to devise artificial languages, including those intended for cosmic communication. Each week, we examine a particular period and a set of theories to explore universal language projects. But above all, at the core of the course lies an examination of what language is and how it is used in human society.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 6177 , REESÂ 6177
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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: CLSTÂ 7701 , COMLÂ 7210
ENGLÂ 7220 Vernacular Epistemologies
This seminar considers the ways of knowing, the epistemologies, that were particular to vernacular cultures in medieval Europe, c.1100-1500. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current's offerings.
Also Offered As: CLSTÂ 7713 , COMLÂ 7220
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 7350 Premodern Trans Studies
This seminar revisits the question of gender before modernity in light of new expansions and developments within gender and sexuality studies, particularly trans studies. Different instructors may emphasize different aspects of the topic. Please see English.upenn.edu for a full list of course offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 7350 , GSWSÂ 7350
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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 novelâs 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 HonorĂ© 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 LukĂĄcs, Ian Watt, Roland Barthes, Catherine Gallagher, Fredric Jameson, Elaine Freedgood, Anna Kornbluh, Colleen Lye, the Warwick Research Collective, and others.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 7600
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 7640 Marx and Freud
This seminar will be a broad survey of Marx and Freud, with attention to each thinker as well as to how their theories supplement one another. Different instructors may emphasize different aspects of marxism and psychoanalysis, as well as the historical contexts of the two theorists. See English.upenn.edu for full course offerings.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 7640 , FIGSÂ 6640
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 7730 Modernism
An interdisciplinary and international examination of modernism, usually treating European as well as British and American modernists.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 7670
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 7760 Partition in South Asia
This course examines the ways in which imaginative literature and film have addressed the difficult sociopolitical issues leading up to, and following from, the independence and partition of British India. Looking to theoretical and political debates, novels, short stories, poetry, and some films, this course will acknowledge the continuing role played by the events of Partition in shaping the cultural, social, and political realities of contemporary South Asia.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 7760 , SASTÂ 7760
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 7900 Recent Issues in Critical Theory
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 7901 , GSWSÂ 7901
ENGLÂ 7903 Recent Critical Issues in Archival Theories
This seminar examines the literary, historical, and visual matter of the archive in order to generate new method of analysis in cultural studies. Different instructors may emphasize different aspects of the field. Please see the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 7903 , COMLÂ 7903
ENGLÂ 7904 New Directions in Black Thought and Literature
This course explores contemporary Black thought through a set of literary, visual, and theoretical texts. Our theoretical repertoire will include concepts like love, quiet, fabulation, and gaze to explore Black interiority in relation to political movements, aesthetic experimentation, gender and sexual identity, and African continental and diasporic practices. The course will draw on a range of genres (including films, photo portraits, personal essays, and criticism) and also take a comparative approach (including works from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 7904 , COMLÂ 7904 , GSWSÂ 7904
ENGLÂ 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).
Also Offered As: COMLÂ 6050 , ENGL 6050, FRENÂ 6050 , GRMNÂ 6050 , ITALÂ 6050 , REESÂ 6435
ENGLÂ 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: AFRCÂ 7920 , COMLÂ 7920
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 6971 , LALSÂ 6971 , SPANÂ 6971
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 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.
ENGLÂ 8510 Dissertation Proposal
A continuation of ENGLÂ 8500 .
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5000
ENGLÂ 9001 Fiction Workshop
A workshop course in the craft of fiction.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5001
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5002
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 9005 , GSWSÂ 9005 , MLAÂ 5005 , URBSÂ 9005
ENGLÂ 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: AFRCÂ 9006 , GSWSÂ 9006 , MLAÂ 5006 , URBSÂ 9006
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5007
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5008
ENGLÂ 9009 Creative Research: A Writer's Workshop
Many writers think of research as a âtaskâ that is somehow separate from writing. In truth, itâs 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.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5009
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5010
ENGLÂ 9011 Screenwriting
This creative writing workshop is devoted to writing scripts for film, video, and television.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5011
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5012
ENGLÂ 9013 Memoir Writing
This memoir workshop will shine light on the human experience as viewed through your personal lens. Weâll 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: GSWSÂ 9013 , MLAÂ 5013 , URBSÂ 9013
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: MLAÂ 5015
ENGLÂ 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.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 9016 , GSWSÂ 9016 , MLAÂ 5016 , URBSÂ 9016
ENGLÂ 9017 Considering Race, Class and Punishment in the American Prison System
This writing seminar will sharpen and expand our writing, while bringing to our hearts and minds a deeper understanding of the reality of imprisonment in the United States. This system never goes away. This year it is locking up more than 2,300,000 men, women and childrenâthe highest per-capita rate of imprisonment in the world. Even when we know the statistics and watch shows about crime and jail on TV, what do we really know about life behind bars? For a year? Ten years? Life? As a young journalist, I saw how the criminal justice system was used to suppress Black leadership. I felt drawn to teach creative writing at Holmesburg Prison, to eventually investigate the state prison system, interview prisoners, make friendships, write a newspaper series, magazine articles, and my first book on the subject. For nearly five decades, Iâve observed the human cost of a prison system that connects and damages all of our lives and keeps people from poverty in place. In this course, we will seek insights in books and stories written from prisonersâ personal experiences. Weâll also read scholarsâMichelle Alexander,âŻBryan Stevenson, Angela Davis and othersâwho shed light on the historical repetitions and political exploitations. Guest speakers will include public defenders, parolees, former prisoners, and those fighting for prisonersâ rights and re-entry. Students will gain a more intimate understanding of how the legacies of slavery, racism, the prejudices of class, caste, and misogyny intersect and determineâŻwho goes to prison and who does not. Students will free-write for ten minutes a day, every day, and write personal reflections on readings, films, and guest speakers. Responses will lead to essays or stories that students write and present for class discussion. These key pieces may draw from observation, facts and imagination, and may traverse literary nonfiction, memoir, fiction, or poetry. We will present the best of your work in a reading at the end of the semester.
Also Offered As: AFRCÂ 9017 , GSWSÂ 9017 , MLAÂ 5017 , URBSÂ 9017
ENGLÂ 9998 Independent Reading
Open only to candidates who have completed two semesters of graduate work.
1-4 Course Units
ENGLÂ 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
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How To Tackle The Weirdest Supplemental Essay Prompts For This Application Cycle
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Writing the college essay
How do you write a letter to a friend that shows youâre a good candidate for the University of Pennsylvania? What reading list will help the Columbia University admissions committee understand your interdisciplinary interests? How can you convey your desire to attend Yale by inventing a course description for a topic youâre interested in studying?
These are the challenges students must overcome when writing their supplemental essays . Supplemental essays are a critical component of college applicationsâlike the personal statement, they provide students with the opportunity to showcase their authentic voice and perspective beyond the quantitative elements of their applications. However, unlike the personal essay, supplemental essays allow colleges to read studentsâ responses to targeted prompts and evaluate their candidacy for their specific institution. For this reason, supplemental essay prompts are often abstract, requiring students to get creative, read between the lines, and ditch the traditional essay-writing format when crafting their responses.
While many schools simply want to know âwhy do you want to attend our school?â others break the mold, inviting students to think outside of the box and answer prompts that are original, head-scratching, or downright weird. This year, the following five colleges pushed students to get creativeâif youâre struggling to rise to the challenge, here are some tips for tackling their unique prompts:
University of Chicago
Prompt: Weâre all familiar with green-eyed envy or feeling blue, but what about being âcaught purple-handedâ? Or âtickled orangeâ? Give an old color-infused expression a new hue and tell us what it represents. â Inspired by Ramsey Bottorff, Class of 2026
What Makes it Unique: No discussion of unique supplemental essay prompts would be complete without mentioning the University of Chicago, a school notorious for its puzzling and original prompts (perhaps the most well-known of these has been the recurring prompt âFind xâ). This prompt challenges you to invent a new color-based expression, encouraging both linguistic creativity and a deep dive into the emotional or cultural connotations of color. Itâs a prompt that allows you to play with language, think abstractly, and show off your ability to forge connections between concepts that arenât typically linkedâall qualities that likewise demonstrate your preparedness for UChicagoâs unique academic environment.
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How to Answer it: While it may be easy to get distracted by the open-ended nature of the prompt, remember that both the substance and structure of your response should give some insight into your personality, perspective, and characteristics. With this in mind, begin by considering the emotions, experiences, or ideas that most resonate with you. Then, use your imagination to consider how a specific color could represent that feeling or concept. Remember that the prompt is ultimately an opportunity to showcase your creativity and original way of looking at the world, so your explanation does not need to be unnecessarily deep or complexâif you have a playful personality, convey your playfulness in your response; if you are known for your sarcasm, consider how you can weave in your biting wit; if you are an amateur poet, consider how you might take inspiration from poetry as you write, or offer a response in the form of a poem.
The goal is to take a familiar concept and turn it into something new and meaningful through a creative lens. Use this essay to showcase your ability to think inventively and to draw surprising connections between language and life.
Harvard University
Prompt: Top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you.
What Makes it Unique: This prompt is unique in both form and substanceâfirst, you only have 150 words to write about all 3 things. Consider using a form other than a traditional essay or short answer response, such as a bullet list or short letter. Additionally, note that the things your roommate might like to learn about you do not necessarily overlap with the things you would traditionally share with an admissions committee. The aim of the prompt is to get to know your quirks and foiblesâwho are you as a person and a friend? What distinguishes you outside of academics and accolades?
How to Answer it: First and foremost, feel free to get creative with your response to this prompt. While you are producing a supplemental essay and thus a professional piece of writing, the prompt invites you to share more personal qualities, and you should aim to demonstrate your unique characteristics in your own voice. Consider things such as: How would your friends describe you? What funny stories do your parents and siblings share that encapsulate your personality? Or, consider what someone might want to know about living with you: do you snore? Do you have a collection of vintage posters? Are you particularly fastidious? While these may seem like trivial things to mention, the true creativity is in how you connect these qualities to deeper truths about yourselfâperhaps your sleepwalking is consistent with your reputation for being the first to raise your hand in class or speak up about a cause youâre passionate about. Perhaps your living conditions are a metaphor for how your brain worksâthough it looks like a mess to everyone else, you have a place for everything and know exactly where to find it. Whatever qualities you choose, embrace the opportunity to think outside of the box and showcase something that admissions officers wonât learn about anywhere else on your application.
University of Pennsylvania
Prompt: Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge.
What Makes it Unique: Breaking from the traditional essay format, this supplement invites you to write directly to a third party in the form of a 150-200 word long letter. The challenge in answering this distinct prompt is to remember that your letter should say as much about you, your unique qualities and what you value as it does about the recipientâall while not seeming overly boastful or contrived.
How to Answer it: As you select a recipient, consider the relationships that have been most formative in your high school experienceâwriting to someone who has played a large part in your story will allow the admissions committee some insight into your development and the meaningful relationships that guided you on your journey. Once youâve identified the person, craft a thank-you note that is specific and heartfeltâunlike other essays, this prompt invites you to be sentimental and emotional, as long as doing so would authentically convey your feelings of gratitude. Describe the impact theyâve had on you, what youâve learned from them, and how their influence has shaped your path. For example, if youâre thanking a teacher, donât just say they helped you become a better studentâexplain how their encouragement gave you the confidence to pursue your passions. Keep the tone sincere and personal, avoid clichĂ©s and focus on the unique role this person has played in your life.
University of Notre Dame
Prompt: What compliment are you most proud of receiving, and why does it mean so much to you?
What Makes it Unique: This prompt is unique in that it invites students to share something about themselves by reflecting on someone elseâs words in 50-100 words.
How to Answer it: The key to answering this prompt is to avoid focusing too much on the complement itself and instead focus on your response to receiving it and why it was so important to you. Note that this prompt is not an opportunity to brag about your achievements, but instead to showcase what truly matters to you. Select a compliment that truly speaks to who you are and what you value. It could be related to your character, work ethic, kindness, creativity, or any other quality that you hold in high regard. The compliment doesnât have to be grand or come from someone with authorityâit could be something small but significant that left a lasting impression on you, or it could have particular meaning for you because it came from someone you didnât expect it to come from. Be brief in setting the stage and explaining the context of the complimentâwhat is most important is your reflection on its significance and how it shaped your understanding of yourself.
Stanford University
Prompt: List five things that are important to you.
What Makes it Unique: This promptâs simplicity is what makes it so challenging. Stanford asks for a list, not an essay, which means you have very limited space (50 words) to convey something meaningful about yourself. Additionally, the prompt does not specify what these âthingsâ must beâthey could be a physical item, an idea, a concept, or even a pastime. Whatever you choose, these five items should add depth to your identity, values, and priorities.
How to Answer it: Start by brainstorming what matters most to youâthese could be values, activities, people, places, or even abstract concepts. The key is to choose items or concepts that, when considered together, provide a comprehensive snapshot of who you are. For example, you might select something tangible and specific such as âan antique telescope gifted by my grandfatherâ alongside something conceptual such as âthe willingness to admit when youâre wrong.â The beauty of this prompt is that it doesnât require complex sentences or elaborate explanationsâjust a clear and honest reflection of what you hold dear. Be thoughtful in your selections, and use this prompt to showcase your creativity and core values.
While the supplemental essays should convey something meaningful about you, your values, and your unique qualifications for the university to which you are applying, the best essays are those that are playful, original, and unexpected. By starting early and taking the time to draft and revise their ideas, students can showcase their authentic personalities and distinguish themselves from other applicants through their supplemental essays.
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Russian and East European Studies: Finding Journals and Articles
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Access to Journal Articles
- ABSEES: American bibliography of Slavic & East European studies online North American scholarship on East-Central Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet Union. Contains bibliographic records for journal articles, books and book chapters, book reviews, dissertations, online resources, and selected government publications. Earlier print volumes for European publications are also available.
- Modern Language Association Interational Bibliography (MLA) Indexes critical materials on modern literatures, languages, linguistics, and folklore in journals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, etc from around the world.
- EastView "Stand Alone" Serials and
- EastView Russian Newspapers EastView is a major source for coverage of newspapers published with non-Roman scripts. Follow these links and see the "Online Journals and Newspapers" box for a selection of specific titles.
- Historical Abstracts Historical Abstracts Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present. It covers all aspects of history and provides indexing of more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955.
- HeinOnline A extensive database focused on all aspects of law and society. Includes World Constitutions, Law in Eastern Europe, Foreign and International Law Resources, World Treaty Library, and more. Browse the collections, search for specific topics, such as Russian elections or Czech political parties, events, geographies.
- JSTOR JSTOR specializes in making available the back issues of journals in a wide variety of humanities and social science disciplines. Issues are available both as images and as text, making searching possible both within each title and across the whole database. The most current issues are only available for a handful of titles.
- Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
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High school students entering their senior year who are considering applying to Penn through QuestBridge should begin the process with the National College Match Application. The application opens in the late Summer and is due at the end of September. We encourage you to visit the QuestBridge website to learn more about how the National College ...
Requirements will be updated in fall 2024. Submit along with official transcripts, School Report, and two recommendations. If these documents were submitted as part of your QuestBridge Application, you do not need to submit them again. Applicants must write original essays for the Penn Supplement.
2024-25 Short Answer and Essay Prompts. When answering these prompts, be precise when explaining both why you are applying to Penn and why you have chosen to apply to that specific undergraduate school. Some of our specialized programs will have additional essays to complete, but the Penn short answer prompts should address your single-degree ...
However, you must also submit the Penn Supplement which can be accessed through the Penn Applicant Portal after your application has been forwarded by QuestBridge. Essays for the Penn Supplement and can found here. Students may also apply to Penn using the Common Application with Penn Supplement, or the Coalition Application with Penn Supplement.
2024-25 Short Answer and Essay Prompts When answering these prompts, be precise when explaining both why you are applying to Penn and why you have chosen to apply to a specific undergraduate school. Some of our coordinated dual-degree or specialized programs will have additional essays to complete, but the Penn short answer prompts should ...
Yes. Penn will allow you to send in an application through Common App or the Coalition Application to supplement the information you provided in your QuestBridge Application. We will not remove your QuestBridge Application from your admissions file. Do not request to withdraw your QuestBridge Application to replace it with another application.
QuestBridge. If I applied through QuestBridge can I receive a fee waiver for Common App or the Coalition Application? If I am applying through the QuestBridge National College Match (NCM), should I indicate that I am applying Early Decision or Regular Decision on the CSS Profile? What if I apply to Penn using my QuestBridge Application and do ...
University of Pennsylvania 2024-25 Application Essay Question Explanations. The Requirements: 3 essays of 150-200 words. Supplemental Essay Type (s): Community, Why. Write a short thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge. (We encourage you to share this note with that person, if possible, and reflect on ...
Academics. 90 majors, along with an extensive array of minors. Student-to-faculty ratio 8:1. 75% of undergraduate classes have fewer than 39 students. Introduction to University of Pennsylvania. First things first: The University of Pennsylvania (aka Penn) is an Ivy League research university founded by Ben Franklin in the heart of Philadelphia.
UPenn Supplements. I'm ranking UPenn 2nd but i'm looking at their "Penn Specific Essays" for the supplements and it's making me so discouraged almost because it's like they're too vague to the point i dont even know what to write about. its about how i would fit in their community and how that would help my identityđ. 4 comments.
UPenn Supplemental Essays 2023-24. The UPenn supplemental essays are a key component of your UPenn application. As an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania has an extremely competitive application process. Moreover, with the UPenn acceptance rate at 6% (per U.S. News), every part of your application counts.So, it's crucial that each UPenn supplemental essay highlights the best ...
you can find a few of them directly linked from the qb website (for example, yale and upenn offer a link to their website w the prompts and stuff) otherwise you could also google "[college name] questbridge supplements" and it tends to get you the site w the prompts
Supplementary Materials. All the information that we feel is crucial in making an admission decision is included within our required documents. Most students who apply to Penn do not submit any supplemental materials. However, some applicants may feel that their application is missing key contextual information representing who they are and ...
Can I reuse an essay from my QuestBridge application for my Penn Supplement? Penn Admissions. 5 years ago. Updated. Follow. No, the Penn Supplement must include original essays and should not be answered with essays already used in the QuestBridge application. Submit a request.
For Upenn there was two supplements one of them was "Considering the specific undergraduate school you have selected, how will you explore your academic and intellectual interests at the University of Pennsylvania"(300-450 words) And the other one was: "At Penn, learning and growth happens outside of the classroom, too.
Essay Bootcamp #1. Explore the college essay brainstorming process, and learn practical writing tips to help your unique story stand out. Applying for College. Video. Writing Essays QuestTips. Learn about the Writing Section of the National College Match application. Applying for College. Video. Activities QuestTips.
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 ...
For those of you who are interested in starting your supplemental essays early, here are the prompts for some of the schools. Disclaimer: All of these prompts/info is for the 2023 admissions cycle (last year). Although unlikely, there is a possibility that they may tweak the word limit, and add, or delete prompts.
If you would like to use your QuestBridge application to apply, you will need to submit the Penn Supplement for QuestBridge Finalists, which will become available in your Penn Applicant Portal. You will receive your portal credentials once QuestBridge informs us you are no longer participating in the National College Match.
Supplemental essays are a critical component of college applicationsâlike the personal statement, they provide students with the opportunity to showcase their authentic voice and perspective ...
It was first published as a supplement for Rabochaia gazeta. Krokodil was given considerable license to lampoon political figures and events. ... and folklore in journals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, etc from around the world. EastView "Stand Alone" Serials and. EastView Russian Newspapers. ... University of Pennsylvania.
the process goes. do the essays : AUG 1 -> SEP 26. rank the colleges : SEP 27 -> OCT 12. get accepted as finalist : OCT 18. do the supplementals ( and other match requirements ) : OCT 18 -> NOV 1. get matched : DEC 1 đ. 9.
I have referred to Nalimov's worksin many essays over the years, most comprehensively in a tribute to him published in 1982.~ISI Press ~ has published translations of four of his books.nshl-Ccfr7~ ~ThIsWeek's Citation ClassicÂź CC/NUMBER21 MAY 21,1990 Nalimov V V. The application of mathematical statistics to chem.icai analysis. Oxford.
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