DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Freshmen are NOT permitted to enroll until winter quarter. Seniors require department permission. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor. Literature Majors are also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Note: This course may also be counted toward the English Literature major.

Instructor Bio: Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal and Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda. He is currently editing of a volume of essays by contemporary Latinx poets on poetry, Latino Poetics (University of New Mexico Press).

With over a decade of practical experience and training, Quesada serves as faculty at Northwestern University, The School of the Art Institute, Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches Latinx literatures, literary translation, editing, and poetry writing.

Quesada is the founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus, which meets annually at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and serves to connect and advocate Latinx and Latin American poets and writers from around the world.

Revelations, a chapbook of poetry and translations, is forthcoming in November from Sibling Rivalry Press.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique.

Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome. Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts. Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision.

Prerequisites: English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors. Literature Majors also welcome.

Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.

Course Description: This course offers an introduction to the early English literary canon, extending from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century. In addition to gaining a general familiarity with some of the most influential texts of English literature, we will be especially interested in discovering how literary texts construct, engage in, and transform political discourse. What kinds of political interventions are literary texts capable of making? What are the political implications of particular rhetorical strategies and generic choices? How do literary texts encode or allegorize particular political questions? How, at a particular historical moment, does it become possible to ignore or overlook the political projects embedded in these texts? In readings of Chaucer, More, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Behn, and Swift, among others, we will consider how important it is to understand these texts from a political perspective, and wonder why this perspective is so often ignored in favor of psychologizing and subjectivizing readings.

Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section.

Evaluation Method: Regular reading quizzes (15%); class participation (25%); midterm exam (20%); final exam (20%); final paper (20%).

Texts include: Beowulf; Mystery Plays; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; More, Utopia; Sidney, Defense of Poesy; Shakespeare, Tempest and selected sonnets; Milton, Paradise Lost; Behn, Oroonoko; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.

Note: English 210-1 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for nonmajors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.

Course Description: Until fairly recently, it was uncontroversial to assert that Native Americans lacked a literary history—because oral literatures did not “count” as literature.  These assumptions—guiding canonical texts like James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans—ignored centuries of Native literary traditions, which appear in multiple genres and media.  This course challenges such assertions of literary absence by offering an introduction to Native American literatures, surveying key texts from pre-colonial epics to award winning novels published in the twentieth century.   We’ll ask how Native writers created and preserved pre-colonial media and how they transformed colonial educational programs like boarding schools to advocate on behalf of their people.  How have Native writers used their literary traditions to criticize colonialism and imagine futures for their people?  How does our view of American literature, broadly speaking, change when we account for the long histories and multiple media of Native literatures?

Teaching Method: Lecture.

Texts will include: Key autobiographies, nonfiction, short stories, novels, and multimedia texts such as video games and pictographs.  Selected reading list: The Popul Vuh; William Apess, Son of the Forest (1829); Zitkála-Šá (Gertrude Bonnin), “The School Days of An Indian Girl” (1900); Simon Ortiz, from Sand Creek (1981); Louise Erdrich, The Round House (2012); and Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (2017).

Course Description: This quarter, we will examine contemporary Ethnic American literature whose formal experimentation challenges conventional understandings of racial, ethnic, and cultural representation. Rather than situating questions of aesthetics “beyond” race, these texts insist that racial politics and aesthetic evaluation are inextricable from one another, especially in a contemporary United States marked by the gap between promises extended by acts of legal enfranchisement in the Civil Rights era and enduring structures of racial difference and inequality. We will think about these tensions through “postrace aesthetics,” a set of stylistic innovations that literary critic Ramón Saldívar has characterized as deploying: 1) a critical dialogue with postmodernism; 2) genre-mixing; 3) speculative realism; and 4) twenty-first-century American racial thematics. We will build on Saldívar’s list and develop our own interpretive tools for identifying how particular genres, forms, and aesthetic strategies can revise how racial issues are represented and understood in contemporary American literature. In addition, we will explore keywords such as—“identity,” “authenticity,” “representation,” “transnationalism,” “genre,” “form,” “aesthetics,” and “racial formation”—that have been important in the field of Ethnic Studies.

Teaching method: Seminar

Evaluation method: Regular short writing assignments, final paper, class presentation, active participation.

Texts Include:

• Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
• Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange

Notes: English 300 is an English Literature major and minor requirement. First class mandatory. No P/N registration. This course does NOT fulfill the WCAS Area VI distribution requirement. This course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.

Course Description: Fabulous Fictions focuses on writing that departs from realism. Often the subject matter of such writing explores states of mind that are referred to as non-ordinary reality. A wide variety of genres and subgenres fall under this heading: fabulism, myth, fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, horror, the grotesque, the supernatural, surrealism, etc. Obviously, in a mere quarter we could not hope to study each of these categories in the kind of detail that might be found in a literature class. The aim in 307 is to discern and employ writing techniques that overarch these various genres, to study the subject through doing—by writing your own fabulist stories. We will read examples of fabulism as writers read: to understand how these fictions are made—studying them from the inside out, so to speak. Many of these genres overlap. For instance, they are all rooted in the tale, a kind of story that goes back to primitive sources. They all speculate: they ask the question, What If? They all are stories that demand invention, which, along with the word transformation, will be a key term in the course. The invention might be a monster, a method of time travel, an alien world, etc., but with rare exceptions the story will demand an invention and that invention will often also be the central image of the story. So, in discussing how these stories work we will also be learning some of the most basic, primitive moves in storytelling. To get you going I will be bringing in exercises that employ fabulist techniques and hopefully will promote stories. These time-tested techniques will be your entrances—your rabbit holes and magic doorways—into the figurative. You will be asked to keep a dream journal, which will serve as basis for one of the exercises. Besides the exercises, two full-length stories will be required, as well as written critiques of one another’s work. Because we all serve to make up an audience for the writer, attendance is mandatory.

Prerequisites: Prerequisite English 206. No P/N registration. Attendance at first class is mandatory.

Course Description: In post-1945 British theatre, successive generations of playwrights have written "state of the nation" plays to register national preoccupations and political realities. Essentially litmus tests of social feeling, these plays reflect on the slow dismantling of empire, demographic shifts, strained or nascent institutions, and political regime change in brilliant exposés of national character. More recently, this genre has also been used to register the project of cultural pluralism (and its discontents) and Britain's place in the world. Because the plays are staged, they provide outstanding ways to examine narrative and metaphor's reception in a constantly changing political landscape.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Analytical close readings, in-class presentation, final research paper.

Texts include: TBA

Course Description: This course looks at crime fiction in colonial and postcolonial contexts, beginning with reading Conan Doyle's stories in their colonial contexts, and then working through several case studies including Anglophone stories set in British India, Francophone novels that portray the Algerian War of Independence and Civil War, and contemporary Egyptian novels and graphic novels that explore the “Arab Spring." In doing so, we will explore the genre’s narrative conventions as keys to understanding the relationships between coloniality, literary interpretation, and political authority. We will also track the social histories of the crime fiction genre as it registers the affective reactions to metropolitan heterogeneity, political oppression and violence, and revolution.

Course Description: When your high-school English teacher praised “rounded” literary characters at the expense of “flat” ones, he or she was prising the novelistic over the allegorical, representing the latter as at best a sign of authorial laziness and at worst a vehicle for the heavy-handed transmission of doctrine. This course will approach allegory differently, considering it as a tool for thought. After an introductory unit that examines a number of competing definitions of allegory, we will read (and view) a variety of speculative fictions, pairing the medieval with the modern in order to highlight commonalities as well as differences. In order to explore the conventions of allegorical battle, we will thus read Prudentius’ fifth-century Psychomachia, which recounts a series of gruesome battles between personified Virtues and Vices, in conjunction with selected episodes from Joss Whedon’s teen-focused television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Within the category of allegorical journey, we will consider early episodes of Star Trek alongside the fourteenth-century “best-seller” Piers Plowman, and the medieval morality play Everyman alongside the classic 1957 western The 3:10 to Yuma. In engaging with these works, we will ask ourselves how their personifications are “good to think with.” What kinds of work do they do that mimetic characters do not? In what ways are they more or less “real” than the fictive persons and authorial personae with whom they interact? Finally, is personification itself a relatively homogenous category, or can we distinguish important subtypes? What different reading practices might these subtypes allow or encourage?

Teaching methods: Mostly discussion, some lecture.

Evaluation methods: Papers and short written assignments, oral presentation, regular and substantive contributions to class discussion.

Course Description: This course will examine the dynamics of Shakespearean tragedy in four plays: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. What specific ideas and questions impelled Shakespeare’s exploration of evil in Othello, King Lear and Macbeth?  How does Coriolanus differ from these earlier plays?  What specific physical, psychological, and intellectual challenges do Shakespeare’s tragic characters confront as they negotiate cultures and a cosmos that often militate against the idea of individuality?  Finally, why do Shakespeare’s plays continue to resonate so powerfully with modern audiences, and how do modern adaptations of Shakespearean tragedy reflect the relationship between literature and culture?

Teaching Method: Seminar with discussion and some lectures.

Evaluation Method: Grades will be based on several critical response papers (10%), one midterm essay (25%), one research assignment (30%), and participation (25%).

Texts include: McEachern, Claire (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Shakespeare, William, Four Great Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.  Ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet, 1998), and Coriolanus, eds. Sylvan Barnet & Reuben Brower.  (New York: Signet, 1998).

Course Description: What happens when we learn to see the world in deep time? What has changed, in our ideas about human life, when we acquire a sense of our “finitude” in contrast with the vastness of geological timespans? What new forms of worldly attention are demanded by a “poetics of stone”? Today, in a moment of intense ecological concern, these questions have special force. But in hindsight, we can see clearly that such questions have long preoccupied poets, scientists, and philosophers of the past. Behind literature’s greener shades, the overlooked figure of inanimate stone looms surprisingly large. In the Romantic era, around the same time that key texts by architects of the modern study of geology James Hutton and Charles Lyell were being published (1780s-1830s), the Revolutionary Age at the close of the 18^th century put the cosmic notion of “revolution” to new use — and great poets were busy giving new resonance to the strange processes of slow inhuman transformation, like petrification, erosion, fossilization, and sedimentation. This course examines the fertile ground where philosophy, science, and poetry met, at the turn of the 18^th century and onward; towards the end of the class, we compare the Romantic era’s use of geological forms with 20^th- and 21^st-century poets who have adapted and updated this poetic tradition.

Teaching Method: Brief introductory lectures, seminar-style discussion, group exercises, possible field trip.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & Participation; Short Assignments/Presentation; Midterm Paper & Final Paper/Project.

Texts include:

• Blake, The Book of Urizen, ISBN: 0486298019;
• Novalis, The Novices of Sais, ISBN 0974968056;
• Tennyson, In Memoriam, ISBN 0393979261

Course Description: This course explores recurring motifs in Edwardian (1901-10) fiction and beyond, providing a clear introduction to British modernism and to the “setting” of the First World War (1914-18). We’ll study the cultural and literary shift from naturalism to post-impressionism, as well as other formal changes in British fiction that writers tied to the immediate aftermath of the war and its catastrophic effects. We’ll also trace comparable arguments and shifts in painting and aesthetics, and examine related social and cultural preoccupations, among them: changing conceptions of privacy, psychology, and gender; and widespread concerns about rural change, urban decay, national cohesion, military conflict, and the ends of imperialism.

Teaching Methods: seminar-style discussion, focusing intensively on passages and background arguments.

Evaluation Methods: Weekly canvas posts, one short analytical paper, final essay, and in-class participation.

Texts may include (available at Norris Center Bookstore and in order of use): Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (ISBN 0141441585); E. M. Forster, Howards End (ISBN 0486424545); James Joyce, Dubliners (ISBN 978-0143107453); Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (ISBN 0393925331); D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (ISBN 0486424588); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (ISBN 0156628708); and selected poetry in George Walter (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (ISBN 9780141181905). Please follow the editions assigned; comparable pagination will greatly advance our discussions.

Course Description: An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners' crisscrossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses captures a day in the life of a semicolonial city in a wealth of analytic--in his word, vivisective--detail. Proposing that Ulysses has much to teach us about how to read our own everyday worlds, we'll study the book's eighteen episodes alongside sources, annotations, and commentaries. In thinking about Ulysses' fictional Dublin, we'll consider such matters as Joyce's transmutation of Homer's Odyssey and his own actual Dublin into a modern epic quest; Ireland's long colonial history and its struggle to throw off British rule; characters' conflicting dreams of a subject or sovereign Ireland; home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and "the psychopathology of everyday life" (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, food, peristalsis, hunger, sex; desire, the gaze, gender, gesture, dress and social power; performance--studied and unconscious--and theatricality; the pain and mourning of loss; the power of love; the scalpel of wit; the social life and political bite of jokes, comedy, humor; the socio-economic sex/gender system, including marriage and prostitution, as key to political authority in light of Joyce's reported remark that women's emancipation is "the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is"; intersubjective dynamics, human and animal, dead and alive; history, time, memory, monuments; the powers and pleasures of language; the play of inner and spoken voices amid the chameleonesque narrative styles--interior monologue, dialogue, colloquy, reported speech, telling silences, omniscient authority, poetry, news, advertising, jokes, parody, obfuscation, song, music, play script, letters, catechism, allusion, citation, noises, soundscapes from the cat's mrkgnao to a screeching tram; Joyce's worldly, inventive English; and so on. We'll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, deeply rewarding book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, and engage it with serious purpose and imaginative freedom in search of treasure and revelation.

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, preparation, participation (20%); Canvas discussions (25%); class presentation (15%); option of course papers and projects or a final exam (40%).

Texts include: 1) Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text). Please use this edition even if you already own another. 2) Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (California, 1989). 3) Homer, The Odyssey, Fitzgerald translation or another.

Recommended: 4) Joyce, Dubliners. 5) R. Ellmann, James Joyce (rev. ed., 1982). 6) Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. K. Barry (Oxford, 1991). 7) Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study (NY: Vintage, 1952).

Course Description: This course description will be available at a later date.

Course Description: How do writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost in the passage of history? How is this question doubly fraught for Asian American authors who contend with obstacles stemming from diaspora, linguistic difference, and minoritization? In this class, we will explore how comics, novels, and poetry function as receptacles of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting narratives, and as the imagining of alternative histories and futures.

Teaching Method: Seminar

Evaluation Method: Regular reading responses, two short essays; one longer essay; class presentation; active class participation.

Texts may include:

• Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660
• GB Tran, Vietnamerica
• Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
• Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth

Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at the Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available online and in a course packet.

Note: This course is co-listed with Asian American Studies 376-0-20.

Course Description: In 1830 Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and infuriated women revolted. Diplomat Nancy Ward (Cherokee) made at least two moving speeches, activist Catharine Beecher organized the first national women’s petition campaign, and writers such as Lydia Maria Child penned novels and short stories advocating for the protection of Native peoples. This course examines the vast genre of protest literature written and spoken by women during the tumultuous nineteenth century. Exploring activist works by notable women writers such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Beecher Stowe, we will ask: How are histories of protest, literature, and women’s political voices interconnected in the nineteenth century? How have women’s protest strategies changed between the nineteenth century and today? What is the current role of literature in political and social activism? How can we view contemporary movements such as #noDAPL, the opioid epidemic, prison abolition, and #metoo as descendants of nineteenth-century protest movements?

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Close-reading postings; participation and attendance. We will not only be examining the genre and characteristics of women’s protest literature, but learning to write it ourselves. This course will require 3 short writing assignments (3-5 pages) ranging from more traditional close-readings of literary texts, to an archival research and writing component, to an op-ed on a current issue of your choice.

Texts include: Authors for this course will include writings by women activists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Lydia Maria Child, Susan B. Anthony, and others.

Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore.

Instructor Bio: Meaghan Fritz’s research and teaching interests concern nineteenth-century American literature and print culture, women’s and gender studies, and legal studies. Professor Fritz has taught courses in the Northwestern English Department and the Northwestern University Writing Program, where she received a teaching award. Her pedagogy is distinctly interdisciplinary, placing historical, cultural, and political artifacts alongside literature to encourage students to think of reading and writing as part of an ongoing and historical conversation. She is also a self-proclaimed foodie, and enjoys teaching courses focusing on food, gender, and national identity.

Course Description: In 2007 Stephen King opined “I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy…I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their f------ Congressmen are.” This course will ask students to take up King’s call, discussing seriously the origins of celebrity culture in America and its recent proliferation in a variety of media in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. To this end, we will read novels and watch films about the pursuit of fame and watch films that address the often dire consequences of intense media scrutiny and expectations for celebrity lives, exploring how American ideals of self-reliance, self-making, financial success, and physical beauty drive and direct our complex desires for particular celebrities and celebrity culture in general. Recognizing that the divisions between celebrity culture, politics, and other media forms have long been blurred, this course will also prompt students to delve into the dark sides of American culture, asking questions about our obsessions with crime, corruption, and Hollywood glamour.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, short writing assignments, weekly reality TV journal, presentation and final paper.

Texts include: James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work; Willa Cather, Song of the Lark; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Jacqueline Susan, The Valley of the Dolls. We will also watch and analyze a range of films on celebrity culture, possibly including The Aviator, dir. Martin Scorsese; I’m Not There; dir. Todd Haynes; Sunset Boulevard, dir. Billy Wilder; and Drop Dead Gorgeous; dir. Michael Patrick Jann.

Texts will be available at: Beck's or through Canvas.

Instructor Bio: Todd Nordgren specializes in British and American modernist literature and culture, queer and feminist theories, life writing, and genre studies. At Northwestern, he has designed and taught courses on poetry and poetics, modernist fiction, and life writing in minority communities. His recent work includes a forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism on the intersections of autobiography and celebrity culture in the early 20th century.

His current book project, “Taking Form: Writing Queer Lives in the Early Twentieth Century,” examines how modernist literature inaugurated a new optimism about expectations of what a queer life could entail. “Taking Form" explores the period between Oscar Wilde’s trials for “gross indecency” in 1895 and the formation of large-scale gay and lesbian movements after World War II, highlighting how authors challenged, eluded, and exceeded the sexual constraints and codes of the school story, the marriage plot, the imperial romance, and autobiography to make writing about queer life possible in an era of increasing medical and legal categorization.

The present situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas gleaned from readings by Virginia Woolf, Martha Nussbaum, Lewis Hyde, Adrienne Rich, Ta Nehisi Coates and others. Then we will build on these ideas practically with an interview with another writer; a service learning assignment; and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media or engenders community. Many of our Thursdays will be enhanced by the "Return Engagements" series, featuring visits and readings from alumni of Northwestern's Writing Program who have gone on to forge careers in the literary arts. We will read their writing and open time for you to talk with them about continued education, publishing, agenting and editing. This course is designed especially for students who hope to forge careers as writers, and it will challenge all participants to think creatively about the space of literature in our changing society.

Note: ENGLISH 392 is a requirement for all senior creative writing majors. Other students may enroll with department consent.

This course will allow you to explore how fiction works. We’ll be looking at, discussing, writing about, commenting on, and researching the elements of fiction, but mostly what we’ll be doing is writing buckets (you will be turning in a completed piece every other week during the Fall quarter), so we’ll be reading mostly to steal: we’ll figure out what works and we’ll use it for our own material. We’ll be engaged in the reading of a concise, funny book on the craft of fiction, and we’ll also be reading a wide and varied array of short stories. Again, though, this work is geared to do one simple thing: to find out what means and modes of expression you best respond to, and to figure out ways to approach this question: Given all the other potentially more awesome forms of entertainment out there, what is the role of sitting around scribbling things and reading other people’s scribblings? Why do it? Just so you know, what we’re doing in class closely replicates what all successful fiction writers do on a daily basis: reading the work of their peers and those of established and emerging authors with care, attention, and greed, and writing copious amounts to see what sticks. The more you do both of these activities, the better and more confident you’ll get.

Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops.

Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback.

Texts Include: TBA

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only

Course Description: Virginia Woolf famously called George Eliot’s 1872 novel Middlemarch “the magnificent book which for all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.” In Middlemarch, as Woolf suggests, Eliot wishes to create complexity in order to develop readers’ sympathy and to quell their self-satisfaction. Both in scale and in depth, Middlemarch achieves this complexity: it is, in some sense, the biography of a town as a whole, investigating deeply into the psyches of its many and varied inhabitants and asking us to recognize ourselves and our towns. Unsurprisingly, this complexity rewards not only the reading but the examination, making it an ideal source text for literary research. In this course, we will not only explore Middlemarch through a quarter-long series of rich discussions, but also use Eliot’s wide-ranging novel as an entry point to various ways of researching the novel, specifically and as a genre, as well as literature more broadly. How do we pose questions about such an object, and how begin to investigate the answers? With Middlemarch as a lens, we will engage with and seek to activate a variety of scholarly approaches and literary-historical categories, including (but, never, limited to) Marxism, feminism, historicism, post-colonialism, ecocriticism, realism, liberalism, and narrative.

Teaching Method: Seminar-style discussion.

Evaluation Method: Class participation, class presentation, short response papers, final research paper.

Texts include: George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin 2003); Canvas course reader.

A two-quarter sequence for seniors pursuing honors in the English Literature major, consisting of a seminar in the fall quarter and an independent study with an honors adviser in the winter quarter.

Prerequisites: Seniors only. Permission of department required. Attendance at first class mandatory. No P/N registration.