Though course registration at Rutgers is over and done with, I want to put on record that I do know what courses I am teaching next term, even as I am still grading this semester’s finals.
English 359:201 Principles of Literary Study
This course fulfills the AHp and WCd Core requirements and your need for pleasurable intellectual challenges. It fulfills my need to teach metrics for one week every year.
Spring 2026, Mondays and Thursdays, 10:20–11:40 in Hardenbergh A5
Course page
This course is an introduction to the discipline of English literary studies, focusing on ways to answer the fundamental questions academic readers ask about poems, short stories, and novels: How is it put together? What meanings does it convey? What effects does it achieve? How does it relate to the cultures and societies in which it is read? Learning to answer these questions about a variety of poems, short stories, and novels, students sharpen their skills as readers, writers, and thinkers.
The breadth of literature in English is represented by highly selective introductions to two broad genres, poetry and prose fiction, spanning works from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Students develop a strong foundation in formal analysis, learning to identify and analyze the components of verse and narrative—rhyme, meter, stanza; plot, character, point of view—as well as significant aspects of literary language in general. But formal analysis matters only in connection with arguments about what texts mean; in discussion and in written assignments, students practice presenting literary interpretations systematically and convincingly.
English 350:654 Literary Modernity in the US (graduate)
Pace the Rutgers online Schedule of Courses, where this course appears with the title “Science Fiction and Cultural Capital,” this is absolutely pinky-swear-and-hope-to-die not a stealth science fiction course except for the Martian vampires near the end. As for “and cultural capital,” frankly you could attach that to the title of any my courses. Or anyone else’s. But I’m more self-reflexive about it.
Spring 2026, Wednesdays, 12:10–3:00 p.m., in Murray 207
Course page
This course is a US-focused case study in modernism in the context of the broader transformation of print and literacy in the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time an American-dominated modernism was thought to cover nearly everything of interest in (early) twentieth-century literature, but scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the limitations of this approach, which ignores or devalues a wide range of literary production that does not resemble classic modernism. In order to grasp the effects of the structural transformations that affected reading and writing broadly in the period, this course proposes that modernism and its many non-modernist others are best studied as joint products of an expanding, fragmenting, and polarizing literary field. To give our inquiry some heuristic limits, we accept a US national frame, bearing in mind as we read individual writers that really, universally, literary relations stop nowhere. The course is divided into two parts. The first half of the course gives a selective overview of American modernism up to 1940. The second half of the course is a series of rapid introductions to a few key US literary tendencies contemporary with but distinct from modernism: the Harlem Renaissance, proletarian literature, and several genres of commercial fiction. Needless to say we cannot cover the field in its totality, but our goal is to articulate some of the themes, transformations, and interpretive problems that an expansive literary history of the twentieth century encounters.
Readings include both primary texts and scholarship throughout the semester. The primary texts are to be studied with particular attention to the era’s distinctive print media (little magazines, pulps and slicks, experimental anthologies, and so on). The selection of secondary readings gives rather short shrift to classic modernist scholarship in order to emphasize more recent approaches to the broader field.
Edited, January 14, 2026. Added the links to the course pages now that those are up.