Course Content
A more detailed look at ENGL 171LE course modules, readings, and assignments
Week 1: Introduction to “Emotion”
This week is devoted to building a foundational understanding of emotion through neuroscience, and thinking about how that knowledge might be applied to other fields.
Week 4: Romantic Poetry and Politics
This week explores the ways in which the Romantics thought about emotion in their poetry, including considerations on how emotion may be involved in social justice reform.
Week 2: Early Modern and Social Emotion
This week begins our historical journey through canonical representations of emotion, starting with early modern drama and theories of emotion as a social force.
Week 5: Bridge, Forms of Interiority
This week views how the rapidly evolving forms and new genres of literature in the 18th and 19th centuries change the ways we can communicate our interior lives.
Week 3: Bridge, Early Modern to Romantic
This week emphasizes how changing terminology at the end of the early modern period affects the way we might think about “emotion” in later literary movements.
Week 6: The Modern Novel
This week concludes our journey through history with examples of the modern novel and considers the new ways that novelists thought to explore emotional life through their work.
* Please consult the official course syllabus for a full breakdown of pages, due dates, and reading schedule. *
Week 1
Introduction to “Emotion”
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994)
Antonio Damasio
“Feelings: What Are They & How Does the Brain Make Them?” (2015)
Joseph LeDoux
The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (2013)
Giovanna Colombetti
Feeling and Form (1953)
Suzanne Langer
Due this week: Song Lyric Analysis assignment
Week 2
Early Modern and Social Emotion
Hamlet, ed. AR Braunmueller
William Shakespeare
Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (2004)
Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, Mary Floyd-Wilson
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974)
Thomas Nagel
The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004)
Sara Ahmed
Week 3
Bridge, Early Modern to Romantic
The Vehement Passions (2002)
Philip Fisher
Ugly Feelings (2005)
Sianne Ngai
A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (2017)
Rachel Hewitt
Due this week: Short Paper assignment
Week 4
Romantic Poetry and Politics
The Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)
William Blake
Lyrical Ballads (1800)
William Wordsworth
The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy B. Shelley
Week 5
Bridge, Forms of Interiority
Metaphors We Live By (1980)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us (2011)
James M. Pennebaker
The Turkish Embassy Letters
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Selected Letters
Charles Ignatius Sancho
Week 6
The Modern Novel
To the Lighthouse (1927)
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Inward (1970)
ch. 8, ch. 9, ch. 11
Harvena Richter
“Tactility and Distraction” (1992)
Michael Taussig
“Visual Orders” from Eye Level (2018)
Jenny Xie
Due this week: Final Paper assignment
Want more?
Access additional and optional readings for each weekly module using the link below.
try a video instead
try a video instead
With our busy schedules, sometimes walls of text can be overwhelming. If you need to catch up on quick ideas for the course, don’t have time to do some of the longer readings, or are constantly on the go, then you can also check out some of our video options!
Click the link below to be taken to the “Videos” page.
Assignments and Responses
Once you’ve gone through the available reading material, you might feel more comfortable tackling the writing assignments for this course! These major assignments are primarily how you will be assessed in ENGL 171LE.
On the one hand, you’ll get practice crafting formal research-based scholarly papers, drawing on findings from both science and the humanities. You can view these prompts below on the “Assignments” page.
On the other hand, we also encourage informal and candid discussion on the course blog page. Connect with others and ask questions about the material by visiting the link below!
Creative Work
Many ENGL 171LE students choose to expresses their big ideas about emotion as songs, poems, or visual artwork in addition to their formal academic writing. It makes sense that when researching emotions one would want to work in many different media!
You can sample some of their creative work on the Artist’s Spotlight page.