Literary Arts

Theory Courses

In addition to taking at least four creative writing workshops covering at least two genres, students are also required to take at least six reading-intensive courses, including a course in literary theory or the history of literary criticism and a breadth of literary periods.

Below, please find below a list of courses that meet the theory requirement (a subsection of these classes may be given in any given semester). New courses will be added to the list as they come to our attention:

  • LITR 1230E | Form and Theory of Fiction
  • LITR 1230J | Writing: Material Differences
  • LITR 1231E | Rereading Writing
  • AMCV 1903P | Please Please Me
  • COLT 0810T | Oedipus in Theory and Literature
  • COLT 1210 | Introduction to the Theory of Literature
  • COLT 1421C | Subaltern Studies
  • COLT 1422P | Time for the Novel
  • COLT 1610B | Irony
  • COLT 1610S | Theory of the Novel
  • COLT 1610Y | Of Friends and Enemies
  • COLT 1810G | Fiction and History
  • COLT 1810N | Freud: Writer and Reader
  • COLT 1810P | Literature and Medicine
  • COLT 1811E | Sentimentalism: Fiction/Film/Theory
  • COLT 1811X | Marx and his Critics
  • COLT 1812J | Poetry and Ethics
  • COLT 1814T | Maghrebi Fiction and Psychoanalysis
  • COLT 1814U | Politics of Reading
  • COLT 1814W | Repetition: Kierkegaard, Nietzche and Freud
  • COLT 1815F | Memory, Commemoration, Testimony
  • COLT 2520F | Theories of the Lyric
  • COLT 2650M | Literary Theory
  • COLT 2650R | The New Foucault: Between Antiquity and Neoliberalism
  • COLT 2650T | Foundations of Literary Theory
  • ENGL 0150W | Literature and the Visual Arts
  • ENGL 0410J | Literature of Identity
  • ENGL 0600 | The Work of Mourning
  • ENGL 0700E | Postcolonial Literature
  • ENGL 0700P | Reading Practices: An Introduction to Literary Theory
  • ENGL 0710L | Ishiguro, Amongst Others
  • ENGL 0710R | Poetry and Science
  • ENGL 0710W | Readings in Black and Queer
  • ENGL 0800D | The Dead and the Living
  • ENGL 0800I | Global South Asia
  • ENGL 0800S | Blackness in Critical Thought
  • ENGL 1140A | Intellectual Pleasures
  • ENGL 1140B | The Literary Scholar
  • ENGL 1190A | The Arrangement of Words
  • ENGL 1190J | Narrative Poetics
  • ENGL 1190S | Poetics of Narrative
  • ENGL 1190Z | The Art of Craft
  • ENGL 1210 | History of the English Language
  • ENGL 1310H | Origins of American Literature
  • ENGL 1511I | Culture and Anarchy
  • ENGL 1311K | Hamlet in Theory
  • ENGL 1361N | Evil Plays: Shakespeare and Contemporaries
  • ENGL 1511A | American Literature of the Civil War
  • ENGL 1511L | On Being Bored
  • ENGL 1511Y | Emily Dickinson and the Theory of Lyric Form
  • ENGL 1560Q | The Poetry of Politics
  • ENGL 1560R | From Frankenstein to Einstein
  • ENGL 1560W | Getting Emotional: Passionate Theories
  • ENGL 1560Y | The Ethics of Romanticism
  • ENGL 1561D | Writing and the Ruins of Empire
  • ENGL 1561H | The Brain and the Book
  • ENGL 1561W | On Being Bored
  • ENGL 1710U | What Was Postmodern Literature
  • ENGL 1710M | Nationalizing Narratives
  • ENGL 1711J | Act for an Undivided Earth
  • ENGL 1711K | The Politics of Perspective: Post-War British Fiction
  • ENGL 1711P | We have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze: Contemporary Writing Not by Men
  • ENGL 1711R | Kazuo Ishiguro
  • ENGL 1760C, Body and Event in Contemporary Fiction
  • ENGL 1760I | Terrible Beauty: Literature and the Terrorist Imaginary
  • ENGL 1760M | The Miracle of Cinema
  • ENGL 1760T | Literary Africa
  • ENGL 1760V | Lying Cheating Stealing
  • ENGL 1760X | The Men’s Film, c. 2011
  • ENGL 1761D | Hollywood and American Modernism from FDR to JFK
  • ENGL 1761N | Natural and Supernatural
  • ENGL 1761Q | WG Sebald and Some Interlocutors
  • ENGL 1761Y | Issues in World Literature
  • ENGL 1762A | Perverse Cinema
  • ENGL 1762D | Kubrick
  • ENGL 1762E | Invisibility and Impersonality in Modern American Fiction
  • ENGL 1900A | Literature and the Ideology of the Aesthetic
  • ENGL 1900D | Literature and Politics
  • ENGL 1900E | Aesthetics and Politics
  • ENGL 1900F | Interpretation
  • ENGL 1900G | Literature and Structure of English
  • ENGL 1900I | Critical Methodologies
  • ENGL 1900J | Fanon and Spillers
  • ENGL 1900K | Reading Sex
  • ENGL 1900J | Zooepoetics
  • ENGL 1900P | History of Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism
  • ENGL 1900R | Queer Relations: Aesthetics and Sexuality
  • ENGL 1900S | Realism and the Realistic
  • ENGL 1900T | The Postcolonial and the Postmodern
  • ENGL 1900Y | Medieval Manuscript Studies
  • ENGL 1900Z | Neuroaesthetics and Reading
  • ENGL 1901B | Politics and the Novel
  • ENGL 1901E | Literature and Digital Humanities
  • ENGL 1901F | Art of Criticism
  • ENGL 1901G | Tiny Politics
  • ENGL 1901J | Cronenberg
  • ENGL 1901M | Reading Literature in an Information Age
  • ENGL 1901N | The Sublime
  • ENGL 1901P | Waves and Edges: Poetry and the Sea
  • ENGL 1950E | Reading Narrative Theory
  • ENGL 1950F | Law and Literature
  • ENGL 1950H | The Recent Novel and its Cultural Rivals
  • ENGL 1950J | Reading Literature in a Digital World
  • ENGL 1950L | Inoperative Selves
  • ENGL 2560K | Postcolonial Theory and Africanist Discourse
  • LITR 2560O | Victorian Poetry and Visual Arts
  • ENGL 2560Z | Global Early American Literature
  • ENGL 2561S | Corporate Aesthetics
  • ENGL 2561T | Rhetoric and Narrative Discourse, from Austen to James
  • ENGL 2561V | The Pursuit of Happiness
  • ENGL 2760M | Postcoloniality and Globalism
  • ENGL 2760X | After Postmodernism: New Fictional Modes
  • ENGL 2760Y | American Orientalism and Asian American Literary Criticism
  • ENGL 2761C | Black Internationalism and its Discontents
  • ENGL 2761N | Theories of Affect: Poetics of Expression
  • ENGL 2716R | Metaphor/Matter/Time
  • ENGL 2761U | Comedy and Justice
  • ENGL 2761W | The Sublime
  • ENGL 2900E | Deleuze: Literature and Aesthetics
  • ENGL 2900F | Form and Content
  • ENGL 2900G | History and Form
  • ENGL 2900H | Queer Passivity
  • ENGL 2900K | Nietzsche Foucault Latour
  • ENGL 2900N | Ethical Turns in Psychoanalysis and Literature
  • ENGL 2900O | Narrative Theory
  • ENGL 2900X | Postcolonial Theory
  • ENGL 2901G | Ultimate Dialogicality: Thinking with Bakhtin
  • ENGL 2901H | Genres of Critique
  • ENGL 2901J | Classical and Post-Classical Narratology
  • ENGL 2901K | Theory, Technics, Religion
  • ENGL 2901L | Studying Humanities in an Information Age
  •  ENGL 2901M/HUMAn 2401A | Bakhtin and the Political Present
  • ENGL 2901N/RELS 2110C | Suspicion and its Others
  • ENGL 2901R | Technologies of Memory
  • ETHN 1890E | Johnny Are You Queer?
  • GNSS 0120 | Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • GNSS 1960D | Feminist Theory/Feminist Activism
  • GNSS 2020H | Research Seminar in Feminist Theory
  • GRMN 1200D | Repetition: Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Freud
  • GRMN 1320I | What is an Image?
  • GRMN 1340M | Kafka's Writing
  • GRMN 1661C | Troubled Origins: Accounting for Oneself
  • GRMN 2661O | Heidegger and the Arts

HMAN 1972X | Kubrick’s Work

  • MCM 0110 | Introduction to Theory and Analysis
  • MCM 0150 | Text/Media/Culture
  • MCM 0220 | Print Cultures: Textuality and the History of Books
  • MCM 0230 | Digital Media
  • MCM 0240 | Television Studies
  • MCM 0260 | Cinematic Coding and Narrativity
  • MCM 0730B | TV or Not TV
  • MCM 0750C | Subtle Machines
  • MCM 0800L | I Don’t Even Know Why They Call it Color TV
  • MCM 0900N | Body/Gesture/Cinema
  • MCM 0900T | Public Cinema
  • MCM 900U | Face-to-Face: The Filmed Interview
  • MCM 0900V | Interpretation as Detection
  • MCM 0900W | Media and/as Ethnographies
  • NCN 0901Q | Governing Sex
  • MCM 0901S | Mediating Representation
  • MCM 0901W | The Space Within
  • MCM 0902C | Digital Media in the Time of Ecological Crisis
  • MCM 0902G | Visual Cultures of Repair and Resistance
  • MCM 0902E | In Design: Layouts of Modern Media and Design
  • MCM 0902F | Post Cinema? Histories and Politics in the Digital Revolution
  • MCM 0902H | Cinema and Revolution
  • MCM 0902I | Never Work! History, theory and media of work and its refusal
  • MCM 0991O | Reinvention of Life
  • MCM 0991X | Digital Cinema and the Inhuman
  • MCM 0991Y | Puzzle Films
  • MCM 1110 | Theory of Sign
  • MCM 1200G | Cinema and Stardom
  • MCM 1203F | The Aesthetics of Political Cinema
  • MCM 1203J | Anime Studies
  • MCM 1204D | Politics of Chinese Cinemas
  • MCM 1205A | What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror
  • MCM 1205R | Film-Noir and the Post-War City
  • MCM 1230K | Sharing
  • MCM 1230L | Media and Everyday Life in Japan
  • MCM 1500D | Contemporary Film Theory
  • MCM 1500O | From Classical Film Theory to Cinema Semiotics
  • MCM 1501I | Reading Marx
  • MCM 1502H | Information, Discourse, Networks
  • MCM 1502U | Media and Memory
  • MCM 1503F | Aesthetic Theory/Cultural Studies
  • MCM 1504C | Greek Tragedy in Politics
  • MCM 1504D | Sex, Difference and Relation
  • MCM 1504Z | Civil Disobedience
  • MCM 1505A | Television Realities
  • MCM 1505B | Hitchcock: The Theory
  • MCM 1505P | Channeling Race: Television and Race in America
  • MCM 1505S | Cinema and Imperialism
  • MCM 1505Z | Kiarostami: Questions of Cinema + Reality
  • MCM 1510O | Television, Gender, Sexuality
  • MCM 1700B | Approaches to Narrative
  • MCM 1700F | Theory for Practice/Practice as Theory
  • MCM 1700Z | What is Happening in Narrative
  • MCM 1701E | Experimental Narrative
  • MCM 1701J | Data Visceralization and Climate Change
  • MCM 2100 |  Sex. What is it? Why does it matter?
  • MCM 2110Y | The Literary Fact and the Work of Critique
  • MCM 2120H | Object of (and in) Animation
  • MCM 2120L | Aesthetics, Politics and Medium(s) in Contemporary Film Theory
  • MCM 2310H | Television Realities
  • MCM 2310M | Politics and Literature
  • TAPS 1230 | Performance Theory: Ritual, Play and Drama
  • TAPS 1280Y | Issues in Performance Studies
  • TAPS 1380 | Mise en Scene
  • TAPS 1425 | Queer Performance
  • TAPS 1630 | Performativity and the Body
  • TAPS 2200 | Subjects and Objects