DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively.

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio.

Texts include: A course reader.

Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively.

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio.

Texts include: A course reader.

Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively.

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio.

Texts include: A course reader.

[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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

[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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

[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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

[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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

[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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

[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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

[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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

[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.

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.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. No P/N registration. Attendance of first class is mandatory. Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Course Description: You can write a beautiful sentence, bust out of the gate with an enticing premise, and clairvoyantly reveal your character’s rich interior life to say something profound about the human condition---but at some point your story loses momentum and fizzles out. Answering the simple question of “What happens next?” is a powerful impulse that drives us as readers, and it should likewise, drive us as writers. Learn to grow your brilliant ideas into tense, invigorating stories. Put your beautiful sentences to work in the service of plot and character. And dive deep into a character during moments of conflict.

Students will explore structure, plot, and suspense through a variety of interdisciplinary, playful writing exercises that employ visual media and also other texts, encouraging spontaneity while adhering to constraints of form. Be prepared to write at least one full-length story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Textbooks Will Include: Thrill Me by Benjamin Piercy. PDFs of short stories and excerpts from longer texts available on Canvas.

Course Description: Paul Fussel, author of Abroad: British Literary Travel between the Wars, wrote, “A travel book is like a poem in giving universal significance to a local texture.”  Of all the forms of literature identified by its subject matter rather than its forms, travel writing is the most flexible in its ability to use any of the methods of mode—the ironic, the discursive, the narrative, the comic, the pastoral, the didactic.  Using examples historic and contemporary, foreign and domestic, and across the genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, we will look at the long tradition of travel writing and its practitioners. 

Not designed for students merely wishing to workshop their “Study Ablog”, this course will offer a balanced approach to the growth and change in literature devoted to the subject of travel, touching briefly on ancient and medieval foundations and moving quickly to the explosion of what may be a genre of literature unto its own.  We will also consider science and philosophy, art and religion, history and politics, all in the way they are encountered by the writer of travel.  Students will read and discuss work in all of these genres, give short presentations, and discuss both the aesthetic and intellectual thrust of the required readings. 

Readings may include Marianne Moore, Michael Chabon, Mungo Park, Malcolm X, John Beckman, Goldie Goldbloom, Louisa Adams, Paul Fussell, Marta Maretich, and Grace Dane Mazur.

**This course is offered through the School of Professional Studies and may count toward the Creative Writing Minor with DUS permission.  To enroll, search CAESAR for the class with SPS set as the School.**

Course Description: So you’ve finished a messy first draft of a new story: now what? This class will focus on getting you from first draft through a substantial revision. Using prompts and other strategies, students will draft a new story, getting feedback from the class and professor along the way. You’ll then use expansion and layering techniques to deepen and further develop the story, taking it through a full, considered revision.

Teaching Method: In-person. Workshop and discussion.

Assignments: Students will draft and revise one new story and provide feedback to classmates on their stories. Reading and discussion of published stories and brief craft lessons will supplement our focus on student work.

Pre-requisite: enrollment in a fiction writing class, such as 207. If CAESAR won’t let you enroll, email professor for a permission number. This course can count toward the undergraduate cross-genre minor with the director’s approval as well as the SPS writing certificate.

Note that all story drafts should be either literary realism or magical realism; no fantasy, sci-fi, or other genre fiction.

Course Description: In this course we will practice a cutting-edge form of nonfiction at the intersection of documentary, literature, experimental film and video art. We will apply literary techniques to the composition of short multimedia essays and explore the many ways in which writing with image and sound differs from writing for the page. Like its print counterpart, the video essay is an attempt to see what one thinks about something. The video essay may engage with fact, but tends to be less self-assured than documentary. Rather, the video essay, writes Phillip Lopate, “wears confusion proudly as it gropes toward truth.” Agnes Varda, the poetic French filmmaker who coined the term cinécriture, or film writing, best described the promise of the form when noting that, for her, writing meant more than simply wording a script. Choosing images, designing sound—these, too, were part of that process. At its best, the video essay leverages the visceral power of sound and image, builds a sympathetic resonance with language, and enlivens the senses. The goal of this course is to better understand how the act of writing is shaped and, in best cases, furthered, by visual and sonic elements. We will author our own short video essays and will, in the process, learn to record and edit video, produce layered soundscapes, and use our voices as tools of performance.

Teaching Method: Students produce four multimedia sketches for this course (a soundscape, a still-image essay, a video portrait, and an object diary), write an audio/visual script, then produce a roughcut video essay or short documentary based on that script, to be followed by a complete, polished film. Readings, screenings and auditions of peer work comprise a substantial share of class sessions.

Texts include: Films by Laurie Anderson, John Akomfrah, William Burroughs, Raoul Peck, Slavjov Zizek, Ross McElwee and many more, all available via NU.

Course Description: At times, we write because we have witnessed an event or emotion that we want to capture in words. At other times, we write because we need to imagine a world that we have not yet witnessed. And then, at times, we find ourselves witnessing more than we could have ever anticipated. The author Michael Cunningham observed, "If you survive a war or epidemic, your sense of life and the world is changed…And you work with that.”Given the large-scale events that we are witnessing, from the pandemic and police brutality to the climate crisis, how do we negotiate with this material as writers? How, in our creative works, does language and narrative change in light of such circumstances? 

In this course, we will read fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry engaged with these questions of the writer as witness, including works by Edwidge Danticat, Alejandro Zambra, and Claudia Rankine among others. We will discuss experiments with point of view and structure, as well as the ways that writers use techniques like anaphora across genres. You will write three short works and a longer work in the genre of your choice. Writing exercises will support you in generating new works, and small group workshops, in addition to the traditional workshop, will provide you with feedback on your writing in a variety of ways.

Course Description: Students will be invited to write and produce multiple prose and poetic works, layering the spoken word with evocative sonic textures, tones, music, and sometimes - shocker - even silence. This course will place equal emphasis on literary quality, vocal performance and production value. We will spend ample time on computers, learning and perfecting various audio production methods, taking cues from the best of contemporary radio practice by listening in on the rich and varied soundscapes of podcasts such as "Uncivil" and "Twenty Thousand Hertz", as well as broadcast mainstays like "This American Life" and "Radiolab". We will sample the beautifully layered soundscapes of Miranda July, Laurie Anderson, Joe Frank, Delia Derbyshire and many other sonic greats. Open to writers of all genres and all skill levels.

Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing.

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

Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing.

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

Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 64 Return to Calendar increasingly informed readers and self-sustaining apprentices of poetry. The Fall portion of the course begins with summer reading and intensive study in which poets learn to identify operative modes in poetry -- including description, rhetoric, story and song -- and begin connecting contemporary participants with root systems in the tradition. We support our studies with reading exercises and "imitation" assignments, in which students convert close reading into fodder for original writing. Students will write at least four papers and will write, workshop and revise four poems during the Fall term. They also will lead presentations on one chosen poet and one classmate during workshop. In the Winter term, students will continue to read and complete close reading assignments and will stretch their skills as they complete a week of "Daily Poems," thereby drawing on original energy and stamina to bring their work to the next level of accomplishment. Finally, in the Spring term, students will focus entirely on their own work, drafting, revising, workshopping and completing one long poem of at least 120 lines that combines autobiographical material with writing from research. Throughout the year, our close reading assignments hone skills in sensitive and critical thinking; our imitation poems challenge existing habits as they introduce new strategies; our Daily Poems exercise agility and confidence; and our workshops cultivate the openness and humility necessary to serious writing and lifelong learning. Through this intensive and nurturing Sequence, students become careful readers of each others -- work and complete a polished portfolio of original writing.

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

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.

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.

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.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation.

Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies.

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

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation.

Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies.

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

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Based on creative and critical work; class presentations and participation.

Texts Include: Varies each quarter. Texts will be available at Norris Center Bookstore and Quartet Copies.

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

Course Description: This course is an introduction to the early English literary canon, extending from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century. We will spend significant time thinking critically about who is and who is not included in this "canon," and what values are enshrined in it--including the particular ideologies of race, gender, and empire these texts record and perpetuate. When and how does the canon include the voices of women, persons of color, and colonized subjects? What are the differences between such voices as written by white men and the writings penned by these subjects themselves? Authors will include Geoffrey Chaucer, Marie de France, Margery Kempe, Thomas More, Thomas Hariot, Leo Africanus, John Donne, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Eliza Haywood, Oludah Equiano, and Samuel Johnson.  

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Assignments include a midterm and final exam and a midterm and final paper. Robust participation is required.

Course Materials (Required): Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volumes A, B, C) ISBN-13: 978-0393603125.

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

Course Description: This lecture-and-discussion course surveys landmark works of anglophone literature by major authors across two dynamic centuries, from the Romantic poets through the Modernist' radical innovations to Postcolonial writers. Authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Derek Walcott, and Salman Rushdie. We'll study selected poems, fiction, plays, essays, letters, and journals of this turbulent and transformative period, in themselves and in light of historical developments: the industrial revolution, urbanization, scientific breakthroughs; the French revolution, democratization, rising literacy, transportation and media technologies; human, workers',­­­­ and women's rights; imperialism, racialized slavery, colonialism, postcolonial conditions; and the global adventures of the English language.

Teaching Method: lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation in discussion section (20%); weekly quizzes (potential extra credit); weekly posts (these count as midterm and final) (25%) ; a short analytic study (20%); a final paper and self-evaluation (35%). Steady work, heart, and improvement all count.

Course Description: The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways:  as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown.  Theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience.  In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us.  In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process.

Teaching Method:  Lectures and required weekly discussion sections.

Evaluation Method:  Weekly (w)reading exercises;  one 5-7 page paper;  final project;  final exam.

Required Texts: Course packet available at Quartet Copies and on Canvas.

Note: This course is combined with Comp Lit 211-0.

Course Description: This course introduces students to the study of fiction. Students will learn and discuss critical elements and concepts relevant to literary analysis including form, style, character, narrative voice, tone, plot, and genre. Texts will come from various historical periods and cultural contexts, including more and less canonical works, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the short fiction of John Keene.

Teaching Method: lecture and discussion section.

Evaluation Method: Short essays, quizzes and final exam.

Course Description: This course harbors two primary objectives: 1) to acquaint students with vocabularies and frameworks of argument required to analyze film in terms specific to that medium; and 2) to familiarize students with a broad range of written texts crucial to the study of cinema, enabling them to render persuasive interpretations of those texts, as well. The first half of the course will emphasize recent case studies of literature adapted into popular movies, tracking how not just the plots and characters but the perspectives, voices, structures, prose styles, and associated politics of written work get preserved but also transformed on screen, in blatant and subtle ways. In the second half, we will reverse course to examine plays, essays, and other literary works inspired by the movies. Cultivating techniques of close analysis—whether breaking down a film sequence, parsing a scholar’s arguments, or negotiating between two versions of the “same” story—will be the paramount skill developed in the course, hopefully leading to deeper appreciations of several kinds of texts.

Lectures, discussion sections, and assignments will presume no prior coursework in film studies, but they will require quick, studious absorption of terms and concepts that might be new. Moreover, the course requires a willingness to put movies and other assigned materials under close observation and interpretive pressure, while hopefully retaining the joy of watching, reading, and evaluating them.

Teaching Method: Twice-weekly lectures as well as weekly discussion sessions.

Evaluation Method: Graded writing assignments; lecture quizzes; section participation.

Assignments: Writing assignments will include one conventional, argument-driven essay of 4 5pp. (around mid-quarter), a similar essay of 6-7pp. (as a final), plus two shorter, skill-building exercises of 1-2pp. (around Weeks 2 and 7). At least one quiz will be administered to confirm absorption of key concepts and film-specific vocabularies.

Readings: Most assigned readings and all assigned films will be available free on Canvas, with the exceptions of Nella Larsen’s Passing (ISBN: 0593437845), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (ISBN: 1973762196), Annie Baker’s The Flick (ISBN: 1559364580), Ron Stallworth’s Black Klansman (ISBN: 1250299055), and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (ISBN: 0307948471). The combined costs for these texts on Amazon total around $50.

Films: Movies screened in whole or in part are likely to include Arrival (2016), Birdman (2014), Passing (2021), BlacKkKlansman (2018), Pulp Fiction (1994), The Salesman (2016), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).

Course Description: This course is intended to familiarize students of literature with the most influential text in Western culture. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres and strategies in the Bible; the historical situation of its writers; the representation of God as a literary character; recurrent images and themes; the Bible as a Hebrew national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the “Old Testament” (or Hebrew Bible); and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since time will not permit a complete reading, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, Amos, Jonah, Second Isaiah, and Daniel; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms, and the Song of Songs, along with the saga of King David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John and the book of Revelation.

Teaching method: three interactive lectures and one discussion section per week.

Evaluation methods: class participation, two lecture outlines, four in-class quizzes, eight online posts, one five-page paper. No midterm or final exam.

Texts: Bible (must be either New Revised Standard Version or New International Version); course packet at Quartet Copies. Available at Norris or online.

Course Description: This course will introduce students to a range of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and romances.  During the quarter, we will be considering these plays in their Early Modern context—cultural, political, literary and theatrical.  We will focus centrally on matters of performance and of text.  How is our interpretation of a play shaped by Shakespeare’s various “texts”— his stories and their histories, the works of his contemporaries, the latest literary fashions, and the various versions of his plays that circulated among his audience?   Similarly, how do the details of a given performance, or the presence of a particular audience, alter the experience of the play? To answer these questions, we will consider not only the theaters of Early Modern England, but also recent cinematic versions of the plays, and we will read only our modern edition of Shakespeare but also examining some pages from the plays as they originally circulated. Our readings may include Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, and the Tempest.

Teaching Method(s): Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section.

Evaluation Method(s): Section attendance and participation, discussion board posts, a midterm, a scene performance and short papers

Texts will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore. The required textbook is The Norton Shakespeare, 3^rd ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. ISBN 978-0393934991 (approximate cost $95 new; $48 used; copies of the 1^st and 2^nd editions may also be used). 

Course Description: This is part one of a two-quarter survey that covers writings produced in North America between the time Native peoples encountered Europeans for the first time and the turn of the twentieth century.

In the first quarter we’ll explore the history of North American literature from its indigenous beginnings—including the migration by Europeans to what they imagined as a “new world”—through the crisis of slavery in the mid-1850’s.  We will be centrally engaged with a set of related questions: What is American literature?  Who counts as an American?  Who shall be allowed to tell their stories, and on whose behalf?  We embark on this literary journey at a moment of questioning the relations between the present and our “literary traditions”: various organizations are debating how to commemorate the four hundredth anniversaries of the years 1619 (the year the first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia) and 1620 (the year of the Plymouth settlers’ landing in what is now Massachusetts); at the same time, people are calling for the removal of monuments to Christopher Columbus and to the Confederacy.  We will be reading authors that canonical literary histories have usually included—Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—alongside Native American authors who told stories of European encounter and African American accounts that radically contest the meanings of some of the key terms of U.S. literature, history, and culture: discovery, citizenship, representation, nation, freedom.

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

Evaluation Method:  Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all sections is required.

Some of the authors whose works we will read include: Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Christopher Columbus, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Powhatan.

Course Description: This course is the second part of a survey of American literature covering the decade preceding the Civil War to 1900. In lectures and discussion sections, we shall explore the divergent textual voices--white and black, male and female, poor and rich, enslaved and free--that constitute important strands of the literary tradition of the United States in the nineteenth century. Central to our study will be the following questions: What does it mean to be an American in 1850, 1860, 1865, and beyond? Who speaks for the nation? How do the tragedy and the triumph of the Civil War inflect American poetry and narrative? And how do post-bellum writers represent the complexities of democracy, particularly the gains and losses of Reconstruction, the advent of and resistance to the "New Woman," and the class struggle in the newly reunited nation?

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

Evaluation Method: Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all sections is required.

Texts may include: Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street"; Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills"; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Emily Dickinson, selected poems; Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” and other selected poems; Charles Chestnut, selected tales; Kate Chopin, The Awakening.

Note: English 270-2 is an English Literature major and minor requirement; it is also designed for non-majors and counts as an Area VI WCAS distribution requirement.

Course Description: This course explores the linked histories of poetry and performance across the Americas (from Harlem to Havana, and from Chicago to Mexico City and Buenos Aires). We’ll focus especially on modern and avant-garde poetry and dance from their origins to the present. Along the way, we’ll consider how experimental writers and artists of color navigated racial discrimination, how poets and performers understood their relationship to national and international politics, and how their extraordinary formal experiments in language and embodiment sought to imagine new social possibilities. Students will learn to describe how the expressive capacities of poetry and dance have shaped major episodes in 20^th and 21^st century cultural history. 

Poets may include: José Martí, Rubén Darío, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Pedro Pietri, and Claudia Rankine. Performers may include Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, José Limón, Merce Cunningham, Eleo Pomare, Bill T. Jones, and Will Rawls.

Course Description: TBA

Note: This course is colisted with ASIAN AM ST 275.

Course Description: TBA

Note: This course is combined with LATINA/O ST 277 and SPANISH 277.

Course Description:Scams have taken a central place in recent culture, providing Netflix and Hulu with seemingly endless material for documentaries and docuseries, from Fyre Island to Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes, and the so-called Tinder Swindler, to name just a few. Some have even suggested that scams—and our obsession with them—are a particularly Millennial phenomenon. But scamming, and literature about scammers, has a long and rich history, from Herman Melville’s Confidence Man, to the Wizard in L Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, or the protagonist of the recent Oscar-nominated remake of Nightmare Alley. This course surveys a selection of literature, film, TV, and podcasts about scams and scammers, explores historic and contemporary discourse about scams, and interrogates and critiques the current cultural obsession with them.

 Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based seminar.

 Evaluation Method(s): Mid-term presentation and final essay.

 Texts include: Herman Melville, The Confidence Man. Frank L. Baum, The Wizard of Oz. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

 Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

Course Description:

What is folk horror, and why have witches, deals with the devil, and pagan cults gained such a hold on audiences today? Embracing the weird and the eerie, unsettling and uncanny, folk horror is at once a relatively new genre and as timeless as folklore itself, with origins in the superstitions and tales circulated long before the printed word. Working with plays, short stories, films, folk songs, and historical documents, this class will attempt to better define folk horror as a genre with storied, complex roots, and also account for its unmistakable modern renaissance. Our search for answers will take us back to the 17th century and its tempestuous transition into so-called modernity: how do plays about the perils of selling one’s soul like Doctor Faustus and The Late Lancashire Witches testify to distinct historical anxieties, as well as dramatize growing tensions between urban and rural, reason and superstition? And how do these texts anticipate viewers' tastes centuries later for films like The Wicker Man and, more recently, Midsommar--movies which draw upon our modern fears and desires for rituals older than the capitalist clock, and a more communal, pastoral past? In addition to considering how folk horror has addressed anxieties around class, race, and gender over time, we will particularly attend to the relationship these texts and films explore between humans and the natural world--an environment in turn timeless and imperiled, comforting and terrifyingly unknowable. 

Teaching Method: Discussion-based.

Evaluation Method: Participation, short writing assignments and final essay/project.

Texts may include: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1592); William Rowley & Thomas Dekker, The Witch of Edmonton (1621); Thomas Haywood, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634); short stories by Eleanor Scott, Algernon Blackwood, and M.R. James; Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962); Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians (2020)

Films may include: The Wicker Man (1973); The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971); Penda's Fen (1974); Candyman (1992); The Blair Witch Project (1999); A Field in England (2013); Midsommar (2019)

Texts will be available at: Norris

Course Description: Maybe everyone has heard of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, whether they know Shakespeare’s play or not.  But their story did not start or end with Shakespeare.  Almost three hundred years earlier, Dante mentions them in passing in the Divine Comedy.  More than three hundred years later, they turn up in West Side Story as teenagers from different backgrounds in gentrifying Manhattan, and they appear in dozens of other versions in between.  They owe much to traditions of both courtly love and bawdy country stories, and they in turn have given us many of our ways of understanding love.  Idealized or criticized, Romeo and Juliet seem to slip free of the work in which they appear to lead many other lives.  In this class we will explore some of the ways Shakespeare’s play and Romeo and Juliet’s story have appeared and reappeared, changed and persisted.  We will use this body of writing to explore different ways of reading and interpreting literature. We will also learn how we use this story to think about values, about love, about violence, and about stories themselves. 

Teaching Method: Mostly discussion-based, with several hands-on projects.

Evaluation Method: Several short writing assignments; final paper.

Texts include: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Weis (Arden/ Bloomsbury) ISBN 978-1903436912.

Texts will be available at: Norris, or I will supply information for ordering books by mail.

Films include: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Shulman/ Bernstein/ Sondheim/ Robbins, West Side Story (1961 film); Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet (1996 film); Madden, Shakespeare in Love (1998 film); other precursors and adaptations.  Films and other texts will be available online or from the Library.

Course Description: Recent bestsellers such as The Girl on the Train and My Sister, the Serial Killer are part of a long legacy of wildly popular murder mysteries. In the early nineteenth century, murder, madness, and illicit sexuality were often confined to remote Gothic castles or the wilds of the English moors. With the rise of detective stories in the United States and sensation fiction in Britain, however, these middle-class nightmares invaded the supposedly blissful domestic scene. Writers also started to use murder as an occasion to pose radical questions about which deaths are considered "grievable." Beginning with bestselling authors Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins, this seminar follows the transatlantic tradition forward through Pauline Hopkins (author of the first Black murder mystery), mid-twentieth-century thrillers by Patricia Highsmith, and cutting-edge work by Percival Everett. Paying particular attention to how gender and race shape the narration of these tales, the course will conclude with a survey of twenty-first-century chart-toppers by Paula Hawkins, Oyinkan Braithwaite, and others. Readings will be supplemented with films, including the 2016 adaptation of The Girl on the Train.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Texts include: Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer; Hawkins, The Girl on the Train.

Texts will be available at: Norris.

Course Description: We live in a moment on the brink of change. From political uncertainty and looming climate catastrophe to long overdue calls for racial justice and an understanding of gender beyond the binary, our future is taking shape in ways we couldn't have imagined. Or, could we? How do the monsters, ghosts, mermaids, and rebels who fill the pages of young adult speculative fiction help us reflect on our world today? How does YA speculative fiction, with its interest in utopian and dystopian societies, think through the moral dilemmas and new possibilities that await us? Focusing particularly on speculative fiction by Queer and BIPOC authors, this class will ask how these texts respond to questions of fascism and governmental control, climate change, technology, gender and sexuality, disability, and race. We will investigate speculative YA fiction through the lenses of childhood studies, queer theory, Afrofuturism, environmentalism, and disability studies, to name only a few. In so doing, we will ask: how does speculative fiction help us imagine new possible futures? And why are young adult characters–and readers–the prime site for exploring these concerns?

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, in-class presentation, papers.

Texts include: Legendborn by Tracy Deonn, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger, Legend by Marie Lu, A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow, and The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin, plus theoretical readings.

Texts will be available at: Bookends and Beginnings (1712 Sherman Avenue); individual readings available through Canvas.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: This course introduces critical and practical approaches to decolonization strategies for performance. Students will closely investigate recent performance case studies from different cultures and nations then apply learning to develop concept statements for classic works from dramatic, operatic, or dance repertoires. 

Teaching Method: Seminar/discussion.

Evaluation Method: writing and in-class presentation.

Texts will include: TBD (a combination of on-line and a printed course pack, max. $40).

Course Description: This class will investigate the roots of the modern science fiction novel as it emerged in the post-war period of the 20^th century through the lens of three major, prolific writers of the period: Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler. These three writers have only recently begun to be recognized for making vital contributions not only to science fiction—historically disparaged as a popular, pulpy genre—but literature more broadly. Science fiction is conventionally viewed as an overwhelmingly white, male-dominated genre, but Le Guin, Butler, and Delaney prove the contrary: variously female, Black, and queer, each of these writers proved formative to the genre’s development in their fearless explorations of race, gender, sexuality, and ability during the 1960’s and 70’s. We will read major works across each writer’s oeuvre to analyze their particular contributions to how we define science fiction as a narrative category. What does it mean to consider genre fiction as less artistically sophisticated, less serious than literary fiction, when sci-fi has always been invested in reimagining the stories we tell about ourselves? Butler, Le Guin, and Delaney each interrogate traditional ideas of narrative conflict and form, in addition to the ways we might imagine our collective future by unflinchingly facing our present moment. What space did science fiction afford these writers to reimagine erotics, environmental thought, utopian politics, and social care? We will approach these questions by considering the depiction of science in these novels, and how these posited technologies intersect with experiments in race, gender, and sexuality, keeping in mind the genre’s coexistence with civil rights and feminist movements across the country.

Possible Texts: Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster (1976), Mind of my Mind (1977), Dawn (1987); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed (1974), Samuel R. Delaney, Babel-17 (1966), Nova (1968), Trouble on Triton (1976), in addition to short stories and essays by all three writers.

Course Description: Desire is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk. And yet romantic and erotic desire are the very motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. In great novels, we as readers hang as much on the outcome of romantic entanglements as we do on the solution of crimes. How do our desires and the characters' desires entwine in the phenomenon we call "narrative desire?" And what are the dangers of identifying with the characters and outcomes of a supremely "plotted" world? We will look at four classic novels in which the dangers of desire are figured, variously, as class snobbery, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and vampirism!

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Early 3-pp. paper (15%); midterm project or presentation; final 5-7 pp. paper (40%); seminar presentations, brief assignments, and contribution to seminar discussion (20%).

Texts include: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin, 9780141439518), Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford, 9780199577033), Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin, 9780141439594), Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford, 9780199564095). Books will be available at Norris Bookstore, though students are encouraged to acquire their texts independently and beforehand.  Please note that it is ESSENTIAL to acquire the specific editions listed or to have a digital version of the novels, so we can all "be on the same page."

Course Description: As we follow along the road to Canterbury, we not only hear a compendium of stories-both pious and irreverent-but we also meet a collection of characters whose diversity spans the spectrum of medieval society:  a noble knight and a manly monk, a drunken miller and a virtuous priest, a dainty nun and a domineering wife, who compete with one other, trading insults as well as tales.  Over the course of the quarter, we will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres, from chivalric romances to bawdy fabliaux, frustrating and playing upon the expectations of his audience.   Against and alongside this literary context, we will consider the dramatic context of the pilgrimage itself, asking questions about how the character of an individual pilgrim, or the interaction between pilgrims, further shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales:  How is a romance different, for example, when it is told by a knight, by a social climber, or by a renegade wife?   We will be reading Chaucer's poem in the original Middle English.  At the end of the quarter, we will give an in-class performance of one of the tales.

Teaching Method: Discussion and some lectures.

Evaluation Method:  class attendance and participation required; an oral presentation; several short papers; quizzes and a midterm exam.

Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann  ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $23) (The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson are also acceptable editions).

Textbooks available at:  Norris Center Bookstore.

Course Description: People in the middle ages were fascinated by the strange, the morbid, and the otherworldly. The supernatural and the macabre were pervasive in their art and literature, from stories about werewolves, ghosts, and the walking dead; to tales of deceptive demons and paranormal creatures; to visions of the afterlife and meditations on death. Medieval people used these themes to express and explore anxieties about the unknown, the frightening, and the ‘other.’ They imagined monsters at the boundaries of their social worlds, employed demons to explain their dangerous desires, and painted dancing skeletons and graphic images of hell in public spaces. At the same time, they also used the bizarre to construct and reflect on their own identities. This class will be broken into four units that explore magic, monsters, and the macabre in the middle ages: 1. Animality, Monstrosity, and Transformation; 2. Demons, Golems, and Jinn; 3. Magic and Necromancy; and 4. Death and Crossing Over. Each unit will feature selections of medieval literature and art, as well works of media that interpret the middle ages (Monty Python and the Holy Grail; The Seventh Seal) or illuminate the endurance of these themes in the modern world (Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video, episodes of Stranger Things, scenes from The Matrix). Drawing on secondary readings and short lectures, we will explore this material from a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, including queer theory, disability theory, and race theory. Students will each produce a creative final project that draws on medieval sources and modern media to explore how the strange, the supernatural, and the macabre can be used to circumscribe and demonize particular groups; or how they can be used radically and subversively by marginalized communities as they work to thrive in strange, hostile worlds.

Course Description: Whether it causes fear or fascination, blood holds a mysterious sway on the modern imagination. From those who faint at the sight of it, to those who love vampire movies and gory thrillers, to those who study and analyze it in labs, this strange substance serves as a constant source of conflict, anxiety, and ideology. Representations of blood in medieval literature were just as fraught. Medieval people saw the substance as alternately miraculous and polluting, life-giving and death-bringing, a marker of difference and a symbol of unity. Blood had the capacity to reveal whether a person was sick or healthy, whether they were sexually active, what god they worshipped, and even whether they were guilty of murder. If it was shed on a battlefield it was considered valiant; if it was shed from the bodies of virgins or martyrs it was considered holy; if it was shed during childbirth or menstruation it was considered polluting; and if it was shed in pursuit of love it was considered romantic. In this class, we will explore these complex and often contradictory representations of blood and bloodshed in medieval literature. By approaching this topic from a range of genres and sources (chivalric romance, crusade chronicles, medical compendia, and vampire movies) and theoretical perspectives (queer theory, disability theory, race theory), we will use blood as a starting point for exploring broader questions about gender, religion, culture, and individuality. Moreover, we will consider how medieval assessments of blood value, purity, and pollution continue to shape constructions of identity today.

Course Description: For most of the twentieth century, scholars thought there were virtually no medieval women writers.  “Everyone knew” that women couldn’t read and the Church didn’t allow them to write.  But the feminist revolution changed all that, as dozens of women writers were rediscovered, edited, and translated.  Yet even today, some of the most widely read medieval women still pose challenges.  In this class we will read four women writers in depth, giving us time to delve into the critical literature and discuss the issues that vex their place in the canon.  In the twelfth century, the popular romance poet Marie de France (who wrote in French but lived in England) proudly signed her work—because she feared, with good reason, that “some cleric” or learned man would claim credit for it.  Late medieval England’s most important women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (who knew each other), were long consigned to a religious ghetto.  Kempe in addition was pathologized as a hysterical female.  Finally, the prolific French writer Christine de Pizan became the first professional author in Europe—that is, the first of either sex to support herself and her family solely by writing. She was translated into English in the early modern period.  Despite her explicit feminism, however, her signed works were often ascribed not to her, but to their male translators.  This course will have a triple focus on the texts themselves, the difficulties faced by medieval women writers in their time, and their post-medieval reception.

Teaching method: mostly discussion, a few lectures.

Requirements: regular attendance and participation; three 5-7 page papers, at least one of which will be a creative option.

Books: Available at Norris or online, but you must buy only these editions and translations. There may also be a course packet at Quartet.

• The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Claire Waters (Broadview, 2018) – ISBN 9781554810826
• Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (Penguin, 1998) – ISBN 9780140446739
• The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. and trans. Lynn Staley (Norton Critical Edition, 2001) – ISBN 9780393976397
• Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee (Norton Critical Edition, 1997) – ISBN 9780393970104
• Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E. J. Richards (Persea, 1998) – ISBN 9780892552306

Course Description: The love poetry of the English Renaissance invites the reader into worlds of fantasy, confusion, seduction, despair, and faith. In this seminar we will ask: how did poets explore the emotional chaos caused by love by delving into other issues–– how to express feeling in writing, how to get ahead in the world, how to believe in intangibles, and how to “possess” others imaginatively? How were the seemingly private issues of love deeply intertwined with power brokering, religious struggles, sexual politics, race, nationalism, and gender identity? When did love cement social bonds and when was it an unruly force that seemed to unravel the very fabric of the self or the nation? And how did poets investigate and express love by creating a mash-up of inherited conventions, philosophies, and beliefs? We’ll tackle these questions by reading poetry in the context of early modern religious controversies, court politics, colonialism, same-sex desire, feminism, medical theory, and science.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: In-class presentations, papers, projects.

Texts include:

• The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems ISBN: 9780199535798

All other texts will be available at: Amazon and on the Canvas class site.

Course Description: Though he doesn't boast the name recognition of William Shakespeare or John Milton, Edmund Spenser holds the perhaps-dubious honor of having written the longest extant poem in English. His poem The Faerie Queene, published in two installments in1590 and 1596, clocks in at 34,928 lines—and remains only half-finished at that length. At once a Christian allegory, an Arthurian legend, a chivalric epic-romance, and a nationalistic paean to Queen Elizabeth, The Faerie Queene is a storehouse of material for a range of popular literature, including Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, and (perhaps less directly) George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones. Like the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, or the Brothers Grimm, Spenser's poem includes not only knights and ladies and fire-breathing dragons (though it does have those), but also the darkest elements of human psychology and behavior, on scales both personal and national, from suicide to genocide. In reading roughly half of The Faerie Queene, alongside selected supplemental materials, this course will use Spenser as a case study in how to approach literary and cultural materials that have the capacity both to delight and horrify us as twenty-first-century readers. What is it about Spenser's poem that has made four hundred years of readers value him as part of the Western canon? What are some of the political and ethical problems that are raised by his work? How do we weigh our responsibility to know and confront our cultural history against our loathing of some of the ideologies and behaviors that authors such as Spenser have transmitted to us?

Teaching methods: Brief informational or introductory lectures, but mostly discussion.

Evaluation methods: 

• Regular class preparation and participation
• Class presentations
• Papers (argumentative essays based on close reading and literary analysis, rewrites allowed and encouraged) 
• Creative project / "un-essay" 
• Peer evaluation
• Self-evaluation

Texts include:

• Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, second edition, ed. A.C. Hamilton et. al, Longman Annotated English Poets ISBN-13: 978-1405832816, ISBN-10: 1405832819.
• Additional readings will be available for download from Canvas.

Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore

Course Description: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion, and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: based on class participation, an oral report, a short paper, and a longer paper.

Course Description: Books and sex go hand in hand. We use books and other writing technologies to express desire, enjoy our sexuality, and explore and define our gender identities. Likewise, cultural anxieties about sex and gender often center on books, as recent calls to ban texts with queer themes from schools and libraries around the U.S. demonstrate. To make sense of the fascinating, often fraught relationship between sex, gender, and written media, this course focuses on a key period in Anglophone literary and sexual history: the so-called Renaissance, when book production exploded thanks to the printing press and England was rocked by rapid cultural, racial, and religious upheaval. Examining representations of sex and gender in books, manuscripts, maps, printed images, and other textual media from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, we will ask: how did different communities share ideas about sex? What could be published in print and what had to stay private? What texts survive today, and why? What distinguishes art from obscenity? In the process of exploring these questions, students will have the opportunity to work hands-on with premodern books.

Teaching Method: Discussion, occasional short lectures, group work.

Evaluation Method: Presentation, participation, writing portfolio.

Texts include: Selected poetry, prose, visual texts/images, and secondary readings (available online).

Texts will be available at: Canvas and elsewhere online.

Course Description:  While many of them are set among courts and kings, Shakespeare’s plays explore experiences and perspectives of those outside prevailing circles of power and social acceptance of his time: the poor, women, the young and the old, members of racial and religious communities different from the dominant ones in England.  Shakespeare himself fell into some of these categories of “otherness”; as actors without fixed social status, so did his colleagues; as a woman ruler, so for that matter did his Queen.  Readers and interpreters of Shakespeare have found in his representations of other identities much to praise and much to question, but they have found common material to think with.  Given Shakespeare’s unique status within anglophone and world literatures, Shakespeare’s writings are rich ground for posing questions of otherness, identity, and empathy, of commonality, belonging, and difference.  In this class we will take up some of the cues from Shakespeare’s plays, their insights and oversights, and investigate how Shakespeare, and others, responded to people imagined to be somehow different.

Teaching Method(s): Largely discussion; occasional lecture.

Evaluation Method(s): Papers; other research-based projects; imaginative work; group work.

Texts include:

• Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Drakakis (Arden/ Bloomsbury) ISBN 978-1903436813

• Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Neill (Oxford) ISBN 978-0199535873

• Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Vaughan and Vaughan (Arden/ Bloomsbury) ISBN 978-1408133477

OR

• Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Hodgdon (Arden/ Bloomsbury) ISBN 978-1903436936

Texts will be available at: Norris, or I will supply information for ordering books by mail

Course Description: Jane Austen’s beloved classic novels are often characterized as sweeping romances—but are they? Sense and Sensibility notoriously pairs its fanciful young heroine with a solemn middle-aged man she admires, but perhaps does not love; Mansfield Park ends with a peaceable marriage between two cousins who received more exciting proposals elsewhere; and even the heroine of Pride and Prejudice—that seeming romance par excellence—only begins to consider the hero as a romantic possibility after seeing his extensive estate. Readers of Jane Austen, know that love—be it affection, admiration, or desire—is never not a complicated emotion. In this class, we will read Austen’s works with an eye to investigating how she uses narrative to capture the richness of what were known in the 18^th century as “the passions.” How do we recognize what we are feeling, and how are these feelings shared—between individuals, or in prose? We will particularly consider Austen’s gift for portraying what the critic Sianne Ngai deems “ugly feelings,” messy, negative affects like envy, irritation, disgust, and numbness that prove critical to Austen’s sharp social commentary. While this class will particularly focus on reading Austen’s six novels, as well as some of her juvenilia and her unfinished novel, Sanditon, we will also turn to selections by her contemporaries—including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Collier, Phillis Wheatley, and Joanna Baillie—as well as recent film adaptations of her works to further contextualize Austen’s view of the passions in light of the period’s revolutionary discourse around gender, race, and class. 

Teaching Method: Discussion-based.

Evaluation Method: Participation, short writing assignments and final essay/project.

Texts include: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and selected juvenilia.

Films will include: Persuasion, dir. Carrie Cracknell (2022); Love and Friendship, dir. Whit Stillman (2016); Emma, dir. Autumn de Wilde (2020).

Texts will be available at: Norris.

Course Description: This class will trace the surprising plots that led to marriage—or not—in prose fiction before the modern novel.  Jane Austen’s chaste courtship plots were preceded by renditions of desire, frustration, rebellion, and amorous failure.  Due to women’s exclusion from most forms of paid labor, girls were expected to become wives.  This expectation was interrogated and subverted in British prose fiction across the “long” eighteenth century (1660 – 1820).  We’ll encounter extra-marital sex, sapphic desire, incest, sex work, delusion, discipline, remarriage, and many other plot twists which show that the road to the courtship plot was rocky, contested, and definitely not predictable.  Texts not purchased in hard copy will be available in a course pack (these are Penelope Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Du Pont, An English Lady; Henry Fielding, The Female Husband).

Texts Include:

• Anonymous, The London Jilt.  Broadview Editions (ISBN-10: 1-55111-737-1)
• Anonymous, The Woman of Colour. Broadview Editions (ISBN-10: 1-55111-176-4)
• Daniel Defoe, Roxana. Broadview Editions (ISBN-10:  1-55111-807-6)
• Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote. Penguin Random House (ISBN-13:  9780140439878)
• Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall. Broadview Editions (ISBN-10:  1-55111-015-6)

Course Description: The recent surge in popularity of the 18^th-century period drama evinced by series like Bridgerton and The Great, and films like The Favourite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, speak to our modern moment’s fascination with the era when, arguably, modernity was born. This course will approach a number of key 18^th-century writings and their contemporary adaptations to reflect on the timeless appeal of the historical costume drama. In what ways does the eighteenth-century novel—a category only just beginning to define itself during the period—particularly lend itself to modern adaptation? And what do contemporary films and television series reveal about our relationship with the cultural sensibilities and complex politics of the past? Reading Enlightenment-era and Regency fictions like Aphra Behn’s rakish romp, The Rover, Jane Austen’s satirical novella Lady Susan, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s novel of the French Revolution, Dangerous Liaisons alongside films like Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and Amma Asante’s Belle, we will investigate the ways in which visual and written mediums attempt to offer us a glimpse into the past, as well as how we use might use them to historicize and critique questions of class, race, gender, and sexuality—then and now.

Texts may include: Aphra Behn, The Rover; Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey; Jane Austen, Lady Susan; Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman; Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liasons dangereuses (in translation); Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Films may include: Marie Antoinette, The Favourite, Belle, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Course Description: In nineteenth-century Britain, a transportation revolution forever altered how people move through the world. Although spurred in large part by technological innovations such as the advent of railway travel, this revolution also unfolded in the pages of newspapers, novels, and other literary texts. This course will explore how literature shaped meanings and experiences of travel across the nineteenth century. How did Romantic poetry help transform the mundane act of walking into a respected leisure activity (aka “hiking”)? How did Victorian novels help process the shock of railway travel? How did Black transatlantic writers give voice to diasporic experience within a predominantly white British literary marketplace? These questions will take us through the English countryside, along dark Victorian streets, and across the Atlantic, guided by authors including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Mary Prince, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mary Seacole, and Bram Stoker. While exploring how nineteenth-century authors used representations of travel to grapple with pressing issues of their day, we will also consider the ongoing legacies of these issues in contemporary culture and lived experience. To that end, the course will include several short excursions in the Chicago/Evanston area.

Teaching Method: Mini-lectures, class discussion, group work, field trips.

Evaluation Method: Students will be graded based on class participation, short papers, a presentation, and a final project.

Texts include: The only required text for purchase will be Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Penguin, 2005, ISBN: 978-0140439021).

All other materials will be provided as PDFs or are available free online. These include short works by William and Dorothy Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Charles Dickens, and Virginia Woolf and excerpts from longer works, including Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince, the anonymously authored The Woman of Colour, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Course materials may also include selected films, short videos, and visual works.

Course Description: The climax of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre hinges on a shocking revelation that other writers have been rereading and even rewriting ever since. Brontë’s iconic Gothic tale of “madness,” and that concept’s inflection by gender, race, and nationality, has become central to our ideas about difference and power. Tracing the afterlives of Brontë’s confined madwoman through twentieth-century reimaginations of the trope, including Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and recent films such as Hereditary, this course will examine how “insanity” has been seen as a category useful for regaining (and sometimes blocking) political and literary agency. Putting these texts and films in dialogue with critical responses by Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, and others, we will explore the knotty question of how madness shapes our culture’s narratives about gender and authority.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Texts include: Brontë, Jane Eyre; Larsen, Quicksand; Jackson, Haunting of Hill House; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea.

Texts will be available at: Norris.

Course Description: The word “Victorian” exudes a certain stuffiness, a corseted and stiff-lipped repression characteristic of, and confined to, a distinct historical moment. Comparing modern sexual mores to those of the past, however, Michel Foucault notoriously deems us “other Victorians” in our erotic predilections and preoccupations, suggesting far less has changed since the nineteenth century than we might like to believe. By examining a number of nineteenth-century novels that particularly grapple with issues of desire, eroticism, and consent alongside queer and feminist scholarship, this course will investigate questions of sexual identity, desire, gender conformity, and fluidity, that remain provocative today.

Melodramatic, sensational, sensual, and challenging, texts like Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Vernon Lee’s A Phantom Lover give us the opportunity to reconsider what the Victorians often referred to as “the Woman Question”: a growing social conservatism in response to changing gender conventions in no way confined to a single sex. How do these narratives negotiate questions of consent and kinship in response to growing calls during the period for gender equality? And what does the Victorian novel have to tell us—“we other Victorians”—about ways of thinking about sexual difference, deviance, and desire?

Texts Include: Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands; George Eliot, The Lifted Veil; Vernon Lee, A Phantom Lover; Rokeya Hossain, Sultana’s Dream; Marghanita Lasky, The Victorian Chaise-Longue.

Course Description: Deadly betrayal, concealed murders, illicit love, double agents and ghost children: postcolonial fiction is filled with dark secrets and disturbing silences. Why are secrets so endemic in postcolonial culture in both the political and the personal realm, and how do they work? Colonial cultures have depended on secrets and lies to maintain order. But what are the implications for a society that remains silent about some of its darkest crimes and traumas? In this seminar, we will read three postcolonial novels set in three very distinct postcolonial cultures—Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (Northern Ireland), Arundati Roy’s The God of Small Things (India), and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (Vietnam and Los Angeles)—in order to think about these questions. We will consider how a legacy of violence—physical, psychic, and sexual—manifests itself when it cannot be spoken out loud. We will discuss how secrets and lies are both specific to place and context, and fit into a pattern of control and silencing that is recognizable across cultures. How can a code of silence create the conditions for traitors, informants, and double agents? How can fiction help to reveal some of these hidden codes and give voice to the silenced? Why might the horror genre be well suited to raising some of these questions? In addition to a close reading of these three novels, we will look at a variety of recent memoirs, graphic novels, films and television episodes to enrich our reading, including: excerpts from Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, Thi Bui’s illustrated memoir The Best We Could Do, selected episodes from the Netflix series The Crown (”Hyde Park Corner,” “Tywysog Cymru,” and “Hereditary Principles”), Apocalypse Now, the documentary Meet the Patels, and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out.

Teaching Method: Class discussion, small-group discussion, peer response

Evaluation Method: Class participation, weekly short writings, one longer paper (5-7 pages)

Readings:

• Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark
• Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (nonfiction)
• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
• Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (graphic novel)
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

Films/Video Include:

• Peter Morgan (dir), The Crown (selected episodes)
• Geeta Vasant Patel and Ravi Patel (dir), Meet the Patels (documentary)
• Francis Ford Coppola (dir), Apocalypse Now (film)
• Jordan Peele (dir), Get Out (film)

Course pack:

• Seamus Heaney, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” and “Singing School” (poems) *
• Anna Burns, Milkman (short excerpt, novel)  pp.21-33 (ISBN: 978-1644450000) 
• Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “The Language of African Literature,” from Decolonising the Mind pp. 4-16 (book chapter) (ISBN: 978-0852555019) 
• Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies” from Interpreter of Maladies pp. 43-69 (short story) (ISBN: 9780358213260) 
• Edward Said, “Chapter One: Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories” from Culture and Imperialism pp. 3-19 (book chapter) (ISBN: 978-0679750543) 
• Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, pp. 183-201 (essay)  (ISBN: 978-0395901502) 
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Just Memory,” from Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War  pp 4-19 (book chapter) (ISBN: 978-0674979840) (CP)

* The Heaney poems are easy to find online, but "Whatever You Say" is from Field Work  (978-0374531393) and "Singing School" is from North (978-0571108138)

Instructor Bio: Laura MacKay Hansen (BA, University of Michigan; PhD, New York University) specializes in twentieth-century literature with an interest in postcolonial fiction, border spaces, and translation. She has written and taught on the modern and postmodern novel, as well as producing study guides for the Great Books Foundation and Penguin Books on a wide range of writers. She has held teaching positions and fellowships at NYU, Brooklyn College, Beloit College (WI) and the Newberry Library, and has worked in academic publishing at the University of Chicago Press.

Course Description:Novels often describe real and complete worlds that is proximate to our own, with entirely imaginary people going about their daily lives as if in a continuous hut parallel universe.  This process is called worldling and is now an established concept. But what happens when the contract with the “real world” is broken and instead writing reanimates myths, folktales, legends, and more within the real? What kinds of new worlds does this open up and how might it interfere with the conception of literature?Around 1950, Latin American writers began to break away from “realist” writing to explore a realm between the real and the magical, giving rise to what is now the established style of “magical realism.” 

To understand this overall movement from realism to magical realism, this course will begin with a consideration of realist writing and its reliance on the simulation of reality, aka verisimilitude, in the first few weeks. After understanding some basic tenets of realism, we will turn to Latin American, South Asian, and American sites of magical realism that stage a revolt against the dictates of the real.  We will consider how paying close attention to the deployment of this style can yield significant political interventions, particularly around anti-imperial and anti-racist discourses. Fiction will include texts like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon. The course will also foray into theoretical work that helps to situate the importance of magical realism and its variations. Assignments will be modest, with two short close-reading papers, a presentation, and a final comparative paper.

Course Description: This course introduces students to a variety of works by Black writers of the long nineteenth century. In this class, we will concentrate on the poetry and fiction of this period and explore the central themes, styles, commonalities, and differences within these works. For instance, we will consider how dialect and geography change our understanding of the subject matter. We will confront our preconceived expectations of what "Black literature" means in the nineteenth century and consider the implications of this process throughout the semester.

The course depends on reading and writing, and every week will require preparation of a primary text and supplementary reading through which we will explore central issues in the assigned reading, including issues of class and citizenship, identity formation, and gender.

Evaluation Method: This class depends on discussion and participation of every member of the class. Come to class prepared to enthusiastically tackle, through discussion and our own literary criticism, issues of gender, class, sexuality, and race as they figure in our readings and other materials.

Assignments will include regular online discussions, leading an in-class discussion, and a final annotated bibliography project. Students will be evaluated on their performance in these assignments as well as class attendance and participation.

Texts will include: works by Henry Box Brown, Mary Prince, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and others, in addition to companion critical and theoretical articles.

Course Description: This class will examine lesbian representation in film and television over the last four decades. “Representation” is a tricky word in politics and media: queer communities, communities of color, and disabled communities (and those categories overlap in important ways) have pushed for more representation in film, television, the music industry, and publishing. Lesbian women have long complained of the community’s invisibility. At the same time, minoritized communities must grapple with the fact that simple representation can be a mixed bag. If the primary goal is visibility, is all representation good representation? Are lesbian villains, or lesbians who are narratively punished, still politically useful?  Does the inclusion of a lesbian character (or lesbian characters) “count” if no one involved in the production of the object was themselves a lesbian? This course will explore these questions and more, discussing theoretical readings from cultural studies alongside our primary films, television, music, and print media. We will consider the difficult and derogatory tropes that are part and parcel of lesbian representation in the media, but we will engage most intensively with narratives that have attempted to expand the narrative potential of queer female life and to affirm lesbian identities—with complex results.

Teaching Methods: Discussion, collaborative course building, in-class viewing of cultural objects.

Evaluation Methods: Pop culture journal, presentation, final project.

Texts Include: Films: Personal Best (1982); Desert Hearts (1985); The Watermelon Woman (1996); But I’m a Cheerleader (1999); Monster (2003); Pariah (2011). TV: episodes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), The L Word (2004-2009), Orange is the New Black (2013- ).

Texts Will Be Available At: All material will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: Graphic novels have recently achieved a place in literature far from their origins in serials and superhero stories. From retellings of classic novels, to fantasy epics, to published compendiums of webcomics, the graphic novel is one of the fastest growing genres. In particular, graphic novels have become an important site through which to retell individual and collective histories, from coming-out memoirs to indigenous retellings of historical events usually occluded from Western history books. This class will focus on the graphic novel as a form of life-writing that documents both personal and social histories. How does the graphic novel’s form make it particularly suited for this kind of work? What kinds of political visions of the past are graphic novels contesting and rewriting? And how does the graphic novel’s popularity influence our understanding of the digital age and its dissemination of information? Reading texts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, both texts recently at the center of controversial school bans, we will investigate how these books aim to retell history and how their visual form influences the debate about their place in schools. What political possibilities do such texts offer us as they write their graphic lives?

Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Participation, in-class presentation, papers/final project.

Texts include: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer.

Texts will be available at: Norris; individual readings available through Canvas.

Course Description: This seminar introduces students to several canonical theories of wit, starting with founding accounts of laughter as based on superiority, often called “punching down,” through recent work on embodiment and new media. Ranging over a wide variety of texts—from Thomas Hobbes to Calvin & Hobbes, scathing satire of British imperialism to memes of Bernie in mittens, comic poems to comic strips—we will develop tools to analyze the aesthetic and political import of jokes and laughter. Drawing a long arc from the seventeenth century through the present day will allow us to appreciate, in rich historical context, the forms and social effects (not to mention the wit itself) of the texts we examine. Readings include Hobbes’s Leviathan, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, poems by Dorothy Parker, performances by Reggie Watts, and Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. We will also analyze excerpts and episodes of contemporary comic media, including Atlanta and What We Do in the Shadows.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Texts include: Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer

Texts will be available at: Norris.

Course Description: During the first two years of the pandemic, many of us binged sitcoms from before we were born. Netflix released new family comedy series with old-style vibes and camera angles. Crowds lined Michigan Avenue to visit “The Office” Experience–a large-scale installation designed to put visitors inside their favorite sitcom workplace (even while they might be working from home). For at least five years prior, reboots and revivals of ‘80s and ‘90s sitcoms were popping up faster than you could say “Friends Reunion.” What is it about the sitcom–that half-hour-ish mainstay of US televisual life–that keeps us coming back? How might studying sitcoms help us understand narrative, nostalgia, or even how we read? What social formations can the sitcom represent or imagine? In this class we will study the sitcom by looking at traditional examples, recent revivals, and boundary-pushing experiments alongside short fiction, essays, and theory that will help us interrogate the form. Course texts may include episodes of Abbott Elementary, Friends, BoJack Horseman, PEN15, and more (students will have some choice), and writing by Haruki Murakami, Kelly Link, Don DeLillo, Jason Mittell, and others.

Course Description: What can literature tell us about the political language of revolution and insurgency? We might think that the state’s vocabulary of insurgency occupies a distinctly different domain from novels and poetry, but a great deal of ink has been spilt for centuries on dissidence, revolutionary movements, and the state’s attempts to quell rebellion. The events of 9/11 have returned us in the last twenty years to the intersections between literature and terror. This course explores how contemporary authors from the US, South Asia, Middle East, and North Africa offer varied accounts of insurgency in fiction. How might these texts either continue or critically challenge existing narrative tropes used to represent terrorism and literature? Moving from New York to Lahore, from Ground Zero to Baghdad, we will read American novels like Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel In the shadow of no towers alongside Pakistani novels like Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim’s short stories, Assignments will include two short close-reading papers, a presentation, and a final annotated bibliography.

Course Description: An encyclopedic epic that tracks three Dubliners’ criss-crossing adventures on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's landmark Ulysses (1922) 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 Homer’s Odyssey and other sources, notes, and commentaries. In thinking about the fictional Dubliners who populate Ulysses, we’ll consider Joyce’s transmutation of Homer’s Odyssey 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; resonances of home, exile, and homecoming; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and “the psychopathology of everyday life” (Freud); scapegoat dynamics in theory and everyday practice; bodies, sensation, 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, satire, 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 voices: narrative voice, 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 and soundscapes from the cat’s “mrkgnao” to a screeching tram and characters’ inner, speaking, and singing voices; the worldly diction of Joyce’s beyond-English; and more. Together we’ll approach this challenging, maddening, amazing, exhilarating, funny, moving, deeply rewarding book in ways playful and critical, jocoserious and analytic, and we’ll seek revelation by engaging it with serious purpose and imaginative freedom.

Teaching Method: Impromptu lectures, presentations, discussion.

Evaluation: Prompt attendance, preparation, participation (20%); weekly posts (25%; these count as midterm and final); class presentation with 1-2-page handout (15%); course papers and projects: option of two shorter or one longer paper/project) (40%).

Books: Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library, 1961 text), Don Gifford with Robert J Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald's or another translation. Other recommended and supplementary readings, recordings, and films via Canvas Course Reserves and Library Media.

Course Description: Students in this course will take a global tour of canonical and recent short fiction. Ranging over masters of the short story from Gogol to Kafka, Gordimer to Ngũgĩ, and Melville to Baldwin, we will conclude by turning to contemporary American authors Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Dantiel Moniz. The class will analyze the widely varying techniques by which stories from different cultures and perspectives achieve “unity of effect.” We will pay particular attention to how these stories reflect, and construct, a national imaginary. Tales of alienation in the Russian caste system, intricate thought experiments from Argentina, and distillations of early American experience beguile us with their elegance even as they rewrite the narratives and myths of nationhood. Through theoretical accounts of national identity and close readings of the dialogues, details, and symbols that give a story its resonance, students will gain broad familiarity with the global history and current state of short fiction. Readings will be supplemented with seminal film adaptations such as All About Eve and Brokeback Mountain.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Texts include: Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others; Poe, Philosophy of Composition; Anderson, Imagined Communities.

Texts will be available at: Norris.

Course Description: Africa is usually seen in terms of rural settlements as depicted in such canonical works as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Okot p’Bitek’s Song Lawino, and Ngugi’s The River Between. Reading the work of such writers as Marjorie O. Macgoye, Buchi Emecheta, Meja Mwangi, Phaswane Mpe, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Teju Cole, the course will discuss urban settlements and planning in Africa. Topics will include indigenous languages and urbanization; African popular culture; African modernities; precolonial African cities; disillusionment; and sexualities of the city. We’ll also read theoretical and historical work by Ngugi, Kenda Mutongi, Fanon, and Achille Mbembe.

Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, debates, role-play, and small group discussions.

Evaluation Methods: Two 7-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded). No final exam.

Course Description: How do we gauge, and thereby engage with, a narrative of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition? How do we lose--or find--our place in a colossal fictional world?

One can find only a few examples in world literature of bigger, more capacious, more ambitious books than Moby-Dick.  In the first place, of course, the book is long, and part of our work will be to consider the specific pleasures and challenges of reading a big book.  But Moby-Dick is also big in another sense: it has proven to be a hugely influential and profoundly consequential novel.  Indeed, one cannot really understand U.S. literary, cultural, and political history if one has not come to terms with its story and the issues it engages.  Our work will be, like Captain Ahab, to take on Melville’s Leviathan better to understand the worlds the novel has helped to shape—including, by no means incidentally, our own.

Teaching Method: Mostly Discussion.  Possible student oral presentations. 

Evaluation method:  It is essential to keep up with the reading and there may be occasional quizzes to gauge compliance.  Possible short writing assignments.  Two longer papers (8-10 pages each).

Texts:  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (first published in 1851), and a range of reviews and critical essays, including film adaptations.  Everyone MUST purchase and read ONLY THIS Norton Critical third edition of the novel, edited by Hershel Parker; ISBN: 978-0-393-28500-0.

Course Description: In the summer of 2021, the Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson mounted a huge public art exhibit along the Chicago River that read: “Bodéwadmikik ėthë yéyék/You are on Potawatomi Land.” The banners rebuked a nearby monument depicting “brave…pioneers” who were “defending” Chicago from Indigenous peoples.  The banners might also have generated questions for tourists on river boat tours that purport to tell the city’s history but make no mention of Indigenous peoples.  This course takes as its point of departure this tension between the city’s long and vibrant history of Indigenous literature and art and its pervasive erasure of Indigenous peoples. We’ll examine the city as a site for Indigenous literary creation and collaboration, as well as a place where public art, world’s fairs, and everyday things like street names encourage people to actively forget about Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and about settler colonialism.  We’ll read Indigenous-authored short stories, pamphlets, poems, and plays from and about Chicago alongside Native American and Indigenous Studies scholarship that will help us to examine how Native writers “remap” Chicago and the very idea of the city within Indigenous literary, artistic, and political histories.  Readings/artworks include works by Simon Pokagon, Susan Power, Mark Turcotte, Leanne Howe, Carlos Montezuma, Natalie Diaz, Tommy Orange, X, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Andrea Carlson, and others.

Teaching Method(s): discussion; short lectures; archive workshops; visits to place-based artwork

Evaluation Method(s): papers; preparation for and participation in discussion

Texts include: Please purchase the following texts. Additional readings will be available on Canvas.

• Susan Power, Roofwalker (2002), 9781571310415
• Mark Turcotte, Exploding Chippewas (2002), 9780810151239
• Black Hawk, Autobiography (first published 1833), 9780143105398
• LeAnne Howe, Savage Conversations (2019), 978-1566895316

Texts will be available at: Norris. Bookshop.org supports local bookstores and is a good alternative to Amazon, if you prefer to order online. Native-owned and independent bookstores also carry these books. See Louise Erdrich’s store Birchbark Books, which will ship books from Minneapolis (be sure to order well in advance): https://birchbarkbooks.com/ or for independent Evanston/Chicago bookstores, check out Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston); Women and Children First (Andersonville); or Unabridged (Lakeview).

Course Description:  Asian American literary and cinematic arts invite us to understand their achievements in terms of an ongoing interrogation of the nature and nativity of speech: From "model minority" to "enemy aliens," from fortune-cookie clichés to talk-stories, and from "FOB" to "crazy rich," the representation and self-representations of Asian Americans weave an ambivalent -- sometimes affirmative, sometimes monstrous -- and ever-changing story. In this class, we will explore works of fiction, film, and other media by which Asian American realities are created, disturbed, and otherwise transformed, with a concentration on the themes of speaking, silence, place, displacement, protest, deviance, and exile.

Teaching Method:  Discussion, collaboration, and peer-reviews.

Evaluation Method:  Weekly responses (posted to Canvas), in-class peer-reviews, mid-term paper, final project, active class participation.

Required Texts:  Texts may include novels, short stories, and graphic novels by Chang-Rae Lee, John Okada, Aimee Phan, Brian Ascalon Roley, and Mariko Tamaki. Films and television episodes may include Fresh Off the Boat, The Half of It, I’m the One That I Want, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and Crazy Rich Asians.

Note: Students who completed the First Year Seminar on Identity and Representation in Asian America with this same instructor may not enroll in this section of 375.

Course Description: How is it that a minimally-educated Brooklyn carpenter and journeyman printer became an indispensable figure in US literary history and poetics?  This question is the point of departure for a sweeping seminar on Walt Whitman’s writings, early, middle and late.  Extending from virtually one end of the nineteenth century to the other, Whitman’s career also provides an opportunity to engage with crucial events in US history, not least slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath, especially as he treated these events in poetry (Drum-Taps), and in prose (Specimen Days).  Starting with Whitman’s journalism, novels, and short stories, we’ll then turn to his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, and the focus of his career for the next forty years.  Wherever possible, we’ll read Whitman’s writings in facsimile--that is, as reprints of the forms in which they first circulated, which is an especially appropriate way to study the writings of this poet who was also a printer, and who took a hands-on approach to the publication of his works.  Finally, at course’s end we’ll survey the voluminous number of poets, artists, writers, and free thinkers of all stripes for whom Whitman has figured as spiritual inspiration. 

Teaching Method: Mostly discussion.

Evaluation Method: Two essays, 8 pages each.  Possible in-class quizzes; probably no exams.

Texts Include: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose.

Textbooks available at: Norris Book Center.

Course Description: In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. “ During the cultural crisis of Modernism, when a variety of intellectual revolutions and the unprecedented carnage of the Great War suggested that Western civilization was either a sham or doomed, writers and other artists created new literary forms. Their aesthetic innovation often depicted art and love (or sex) as parallel (or contradictory) ways to create meaning the wasteland of Modernity.  In this class, we will read and discuss canonical, lesser-known, and popular texts of ‘20s in order to explore how these revolutionary writers saw love and art in their own time and, maybe, in the future.

Teaching Method: Lecture & Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation in class discussion; short one-page responses to each text; plus a variety of options for critical papers, ranging from several short argumentative essays to one long research paper.

Texts include: Eliot’s The Waste Land, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, Boyle’s Plagued by the Nightingale and The First Lover and Other Stories, Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Dos Passo’s Manhattan Transfer, as well as Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse.

Course Description: What does it mean to be an American Girl? The phrase itself has spawned a lucrative line of dolls and other merchandise, but long before the rise of American Girl dolls, authors used the figure of the ‘girl’ to make claims about the imagined future of the nation. What kinds of ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and class underpin these fantasies about who the American girl is? How does literature about the ‘American girl’ further white, colonial ideas of nation building or protest against these norms? In this class, we will study key texts about American girlhood from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to examine how the figure of the girl is deployed as a figure making and remaking claims about the nation. Beginning with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, we will move to contesting visions of girlhood from Black and Indigenous authors, including Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories. We will pair these texts alongside critical readings from scholars in childhood studies.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Participation, in-class presentation, papers.

Texts include: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1935), Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories (1921), Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accent (1991).

Texts will be available at: Bookends and Beginnings (1712 Sherman Avenue); individual readings available through Canvas.

Course Description: This course examines the relation between race and feeling. In what way do certain emotions stick to some bodies and not others, and how can this help us account for structures of privilege and power in the U.S.? How have writers and artists thought of race on emotional terms—how does it, indeed, feel to be a problem?

Teaching Method: Lecture-discussion.

Evaluation Method: Reading responses, midterm, final paper.

Course Description: Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city.

Teaching Method: Discussion and brief lectures.

Evaluation Method: Class participation; brief written responses to each text; several options for papers of various lengths.

Texts Include: Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make and The Neon Wilderness; Richard Wright's Native Son; Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago; journalism by Mike Royko; short fiction by Sandra Cisneros, James T. Farrell and others; poetry by Carl Sandburg, Eve Ewing, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Fitzpatrick and others; the films The Untouchables, The Blues Brothers, and Barbershop; the graphic novel 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call.

Note: Texts will be available at Norris.

Course Description: This course challenges students to engage in the intense close reading of fictional and cinematic texts created or brought to expressive life by American women artists (writers and actresses) working between the nineteenth-century fin de siècle and the beginning of World War II.  Our Canvas archive features eight films starring Bette Davis, arguably the greatest film actress of Hollywood's classic period.

We will talk during the quarter about terminology for the analysis of cinema, particularly the four so-called central principles through which to read and interpret filmic texts: cinematography; mise en scene; sound; and editing. We will read films through the methods of psychoanalysis, historicism, feminism, critical analysis of sexuality, gender, and race and in consideration of the studio system, star culture, and modes of spectatorship. This syllabus marks an early experiment toward thinking about Davis's films as literary works.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Participation, Close Reading Exams, Final paper.

Texts include: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs, (1896); Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1900); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905); Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940); Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929).

Course Description: The field of disability studies grew out of the rights-based activism that led, in the United States, to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet, as disability theorists have observed, “western” literature has long been obsessed with disability as metaphor, character trait, and plot device. This course will serve as an introduction to the application of disability studies in literature. We will explore a range of questions: how do we approach the representation of disability in texts by non-disabled authors? How do we differentiate (or should we?) between disability and chronic illness, or between physical and mental disabilities? Can literary representation operate as activism? How do we parse the gap between disability as metaphor and lived experience? What does literature offer disability studies, and why should disability studies be a core method for studying literature?  Readings will be divided between theoretical texts and primary sources. Students will learn to grapple with complex sociocultural and literary analysis, as well as to make space for their own primary source readings.

Teaching Methods: Discussion, collaborative reading.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, short assignments that apply course methodology.

Texts Include: excerpts from Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1760) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771); essays by Audre Lorde, Eula Biss, and Esmé Weijun Wang; popular television, including Black Mirror and Doctor Who; theory from Tom Shakespeare, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Therí Alyce Pickens, Susan Wendell, Alyson Patsavas, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Stuart Murray, Alison Kafer, and Jasbir Puar. 

Texts Will Be Available At: All texts will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: We often think of the humanities and sciences as opposite pursuits. While the humanities seem to focus on subjectivity and feeling, we see the sciences as objective and fact-based. Yet attending to the history of medicine demands a troubled acknowledgement that medical inquiry both shapes and is itself shaped by cultural assumptions about race and gender. Indeed, critics have pointed time and again to how the seeming impartiality of medical fact reveals biases about which kinds of bodies feel pain and who is prone to certain diseases, distinctions that have been assigned moral and social meaning. In this class, we will read literature about medical encounters in order to investigate how ideas about race and gender shape medical experiences. How do these individual accounts reflect larger structural injustices? What kinds of barriers and assumptions do women and people of color face when they receive treatment? What about people seeking gender affirming care? Beginning with the nineteenth century and moving towards the present day, we will examine the surprising history of how medical knowledge often depended on the exploitation of racialized bodies, grapple with the tangled enmeshment of femininity and illness, and explore how claims about medicalized bodies became a metric for citizenship.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion

 Evaluation Method: Participation, in-class presentation, papers/final project

Texts include: “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath, The Cancer Journals (1980) by Audre Lorde, Some Assembly Required: The Not-So-Secret Life of a Transgender Teen (2014) by Arin Andrews, and Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflection on Race and Medicine (2015) by Damon Tweedy.

Texts will be available at: Norris; individual readings available through Canvas

Course Description: The field of disability studies grew out of the rights-based activism that led, in the United States, to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet, as disability theorists have observed, "western" literature has long been obsessed with disability as metaphor, character trait, and plot device. This course will serve as an introduction to the application of disability studies in literature. We will explore a range of questions: how do we approach the representation of disability in texts by non-disabled authors? How do we differentiate (or should we?) between disability and chronic illness, or between physical and mental disabilities? Can literary representation operate as activism? How do we parse the gap between disability as metaphor and lived experience? What does literature offer disability studies, and why should disability studies be a core method for studying literature? Readings will be divided between theoretical texts and primary sources. Students will learn to grapple with complex sociocultural and literary analysis, as well as to make space for their own primary source readings. 

Required Texts: All texts will be uploaded to Canvas as screen-reader-compatible PDFs.

Course Description: This course begins not from the premise, necessarily, of an intellectual and political genealogy of black women. Rather, this course is one that thinks black feminist theory and theorizing; this course chronicles the ways that the political, intellectual, ethical, and social resound radically and progressively and names that resonance—and all its vibrations and textures—black feminist theory. Thus, we will, of course, be reading a variety of black women along the jagged gendered spectrum between and beyond “cis” and “trans,” but more specifically we will, in this course, be tracing the ways radical politics and ethics arise in such a way as to interrogate the established parameters of race and gender normativity. To do this, we will be reading the work of people like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, Jennifer Nash and Hortense Spillers, and more.

Course Description: This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. The focus will be the classical tradition, the biblical tradition, and Shakespeare who inherited both and reworked them in the early modern period. The trial of Socrates, the trial of Jesus, biblical prophecy, tragedy in Aeschylus and Shakespeare, and a modern work by Melville will be included. Our exploration will be done in the context of theories of justice, and we will read those theories alongside the literature. But we will also heed how literature itself offers elaborations of theories of justice, following their consequences both within legal frameworks and beyond, as they shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived.

Teaching Methods: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Discussion and papers.

Texts include: Excerpts from Plato and Aristotle; Aeschylus, The Eumenides; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; excerpts from Rawls; Kymlicka, Political Philosophy.

Notes: If you have completed Professor Schwartz's First Year Seminar, titled Ideas of Justice, you may not take this course and count it toward major or minor requirements.

This course will be taught fully remotely in Fall 2022.  There is no in-person component to this course.  Subsequent offerings' instructional modalities will be in-person.

Course Description: This course maps the literary and cinematic DNA of the contemporary “rom com,” from William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and the screwball comedies of 1930s Classical Hollywood to the 1990s blockbusters and the Netflix revolution. Along the way we may ask: What do the comedic conventions of Western classical drama, the medieval genre of “romance,” or the political aesthetics of Romanticism have to do with the romantic comedy as it exists today? The anarchic space of comedy is usually understood to grant the genre a subversive potential using absurdism or satire to reimagine power dynamics or to question social norms governing gender, sexuality, race, and family. One question we will ask throughout is: Does the romantic comedy threaten to tame that subversive potential? Or does it promise to release its chaotic energies in ever renewed ways? Students will regularly be asked to watch two movies in a single week. Apart from writing several papers for the course, students will also present on an episode, scene, or clip from a recent TV show that helps us understood the genre and its history. 

Required Texts (available at Bookends & Beginnings): 

• William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew or Much Ado About Nothing;
• Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro;
• Jane Austen, Emma.

Films for this course drawn from this list (available on Canvas): His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve, Parting Glances, Poetic Justice, The Wedding Banquet, When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman, Clueless, Out of Sight, Saving Face, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Ten Things I Hate About You, Deliver Us From Eva, Obvious Child, Appropriate Behavior

Course Description: This course is about how we talk about art and why that matters. What does it mean to call something "cute"? How about "interesting," "zany," "#oddlysatisfying," or -- reaching back into the past -- "beautiful" or even "sublime"? This course explores questions of aesthetic judgment through a sustained and in-depth reading of literary theorist Sianne Ngai's 2012 book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Along the way we will read selections from authors writing in earlier periods (Kant, Lyotard) and major influences on Ngai (Marx, Cavell). We will also consider more recent and primarily internet-based categories of aesthetic judgment as well as possible alternatives to "judgment" (such as when art serves as a prop for self care; or when the term "aesthetic" signals a lifestyle, e.g. "cottage core," "dark academia," etc). This course is designed to appeal to students interested in reading and writing at the intersections of literature, art, philosophy, and mass culture in 20^th- and 21^st-century western cultures. It is also designed as one possible introduction to the broad field of writings often called "literary theory." To ground our discussion we will analyze a variety of works across genres and media, including videogames, literature, and experimental film and video.

Required Text:

Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 978-0674088122

Course Description: From the Civil Rights Movement to the AIDS crisis to the legalization of gay marriage, LGBT art and activism have been deeply intertwined.  Queer writers in the U.S. have negotiated ever-shifting priorities and stigmas to represent queer life in literature and media. Yet stories have always been a way to have a voice, to account for oneself and one’s community, and to connect to others who share one’s experience. LGBTQ literature might be outward facing—representing queerness to a straight audience—or it might face inwards, speaking to a queer community of readers. This class will consider the relationship between sociopolitical movements and the art and literature that were produced from or around them. Focusing on flashpoints in the history of LGBTQ rights and culture in the United States, students will leave this course with a concrete sense of recent history, artistic diversity, and intersectional queer studies. In addition to a core set of literary and historical texts, students will give queer culture presentations on each of the primary periods this class covers. These presentations will provide the opportunity to bring in objects from outside of the class, which will supplement our understanding of queer art and activism.

Teaching Methods: Discussion of assigned texts, as well as supplementary material presented in class.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, short presentation, reflections, final paper or creative project.

Texts Include: Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952); James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956); Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973); Tony Kushner, Angels in America (1991); Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006). In addition, we will read a series of activist documents, short stories, and essays, and watch the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012).

Texts Will Be Available At: Novels will be at Beck’s Bookstore; all other essays and films will be on Canvas.

Course Description: When Mary Shelley released the revised edition of Frankenstein in 1831, she referred to her groundbreaking and popular novel as her “hideous progeny” which she hoped would nonetheless “prosper” in the world. She could not have imagined the extent to which Frankenstein would persist in popular culture. This class will consider the retellings, adaptations, appropriations, and parodies of Frankenstein. We will consider what aspects of Shelley’s novel have survived in the popular imagination, and what we have changed. Why did the creature turn from a well-spoken, self-educated subject into a green, non-speaking monster? What lessons have we drawn from Dr. Frankenstein’s ill-fated experiment? When and how have marginalized writers (re)claimed the creature as a figure of the oppressed? Why has Shelley’s sentimental and atmospheric gothic novel inspired so much levity and humor? From the 1931 film adaptation to Susan Stryker’s expression of trans rage in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” (1994); from the beloved parody Young Frankenstein (1974) to Victor LaVelle’s graphic novella series Destroyer (2017-), there seems to be no bottom to the relevance of Shelley’s classic novel. This class will consider questions of authorship, originality, and novelty. In addition to reading Frankenstein and its progeny, students will learn how to analyze media on the basis of historical context and genre norms.

Teaching Methods: Short lectures; discussion

Evaluation Methods: Presentation, reflections, 2 short papers

Texts Include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (1994); Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014); Victor LaVelle, Destroyer #1 (2017); Films include Frankenstein (1931); Young Frankenstein (1974); The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975); we may also watch individual episodes of television, look at visual representations of Frankenstein’s monster in comics and illustrations, and keep a running list of Frankenstein encounters in our day-to-day lives

Texts Will Be Available At: Texts will be available at the campus bookstore; films and articles will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: Will you support our future robot overlords? Robots have long played a significant role in our cultural imagination, from the earliest science fiction to dozens of recent shows and movies. And with recent advancements in robotics and AI, they are playing an ever-greater role in our everyday life. This course will delve into the cultural history of the robot, from the coining of the term in the 1920 play R.U.R. to The Terminator to contemporary depictions such as Blade Runner 2049 and Westworld. We will compare these fictional robots to the growing number of real robots that increasingly shape our world, from mining and manufacturing to healthcare and food delivery. The course will explore cultural anxieties around AI and robotics, their increasing indistinguishability from humans, our ever-greater reliance on them, and the inevitability of robot world domination.

Teaching method: Discussion-based seminar.

Evaluation method: Student presentations and final essay.

Texts will include:

• Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (play, 1920)
• Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man (short stories, 1951)
• Isaac Asimov, The Complete Robot (short stories, 1982)
• Philip k. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (novel, 1968)
• WALL-E (film, 2008)
• Selections from Futurama (series, 1999 – 2006)
• Selections from Atomic Robo (comic, 2007-present)
• I, Robot (film, 2004)
• Blade Runner 2049 (film, 2021)
• Selections from Westworld (series, 2019-present)
• Selections from Lost in Space (series, 1965-1968)

Course Description: Political corruption, murderous conspiracies, adulterous affairs, and deceptions of all kinds plague the realms of detective fiction.  If only a knight in shining armor would arrive on the scene to untangle the web of lies, or rescue the damsel in distress, or solve the puzzle of “whodunit?”  And that’s exactly how fictional detectives are often characterized.  Indeed, the very first fictional detective, Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, had the title Le Chevalier, the French word for a knight.  This figure of the knight invites us to consider the detective’s investigation as a lonely, but noble and heroic, quest for the truth.  It also invites us to assume that the quest is undertaken by a gentleman for the sake of a lady’s honor, and that the grail-like truth is something that only he will be able to discover.  What happens, however, when the truth-seeker is no longer a man of honor, or a man at all?  Or, when the lady in question is no longer in distress, but the cause of the distress?  Or, when the social order on whose behalf the detective-knight supposedly works is no longer committed to seeking the truth but to covering it up?  That’s when things get interesting.  We’ll begin our class with Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which raises in pointed fashion the question of human culpability and bestial violence, and end with Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, which transforms the detective’s traditional powers of “deduction” based on empirical evidence into something like its opposite, pure “intuition.”  Along the way, we will examine who comes to occupy the position of the detective, and how the identity of the detective affects both the search for truth and its relationship to power.  And, just for fun, we’ll explore how reading a novel or viewing a film is like the work of detection.

Likely texts: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (ISBN 978-0394758282), Katherine Forrest’s Murder at the Nightwood Bar (ISBN 978-1935226673), and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (ISBN 978-0385493000).

Likely films: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Third Man (1958), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), and Knives Out (2019).

Instructor Bio: Doug O’Hara received his Ph.D. in Early Modern Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.  He has taught classes at Berkeley and Northwestern, while studying widely in history, philosophy, and some film.  Currently, he is most interested in genre fiction, because it offers more opportunities for better conversation.

Course Description: Monstrosity is ubiquitous in contemporary popular culture. The ghosts, zombies, vampires, poltergeists, and extra-terrestrials that populate this course’s syllabus register that modern fascination. From classic horror by H. P. Lovecraft, probing at the margins of civilization, through Angela Carter’s monstrous fables, to recent novels and movie adaptations such as Let the Right One In and Coraline, this course grapples with the taboo forms of subjectivity, filiation, and national identity that monsters embody. Analyzing fiction by Shirley Jackson and Neil Gaiman, blockbuster films such as The Shining and Alien, as well as parodies like What We Do in the Shadows, students will explore what representations of monstrosity reveal about our understandings of self, family, and nation. In addition to classic and contemporary examples of cinematic and literary horror, we will explore the genre through multiple scholarly frameworks, including psychoanalysis and disability studies.

Course Description: Breaking the rules is a fundamental aspect of growing up, but some transgressions have more serious consequences than others, particularly for those who do not have the option of second and third chances. How do we push against the life stories that have been chosen for us? In this seminar, we will look at a variety of coming-of-age texts dealing with the development of identity, the loss of innocence, and the subversion of narratives. We’ll consider the questions: How do friendships help to shape us, and how is betrayal a part of growing up? How do we navigate parental expectations that do not match with our own dreams or desires? How are the stakes different and higher for those who are not a part of the dominant culture? We will look at three novels that complicate the coming-of-age story in distinct ways: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tale My Brilliant Friend; Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian elegy Never Let Me Go; and Cameroonian writer Ferdinand Oyono’s epistolary anti-colonial work Houseboy. In addition to these texts, we will consider Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis and a variety of films: Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, and Jordan Peele’s Us. Standing on the brink of adulthood, with one foot still partially in childhood, it can feel as though small decisions can have outsized consequences, and the people who should be the most supportive can create the biggest obstacles. We will use these novels and films to interrogate the conventional coming-of-age narrative and to raise questions about the hard work of defining ourselves against strong and sometimes dangerous forces–and the loss that may happen along the way.

Course Description: Appropriation, Adaptation, Citation, Allusion, Reinvention: how do these terms describe ways that 20^th and 21^st century artists ––working in different media across the globe–– use Shakespeare’s drama as a resource for exploring issues such as colonialism, war, same-sex desire, race, non-binary gender, school violence, urban ethnic tension, legal injustices, and anti-Semitism? From Renaissance London to 21st -century India, from apartheid South Africa to US teen culture, readers have remade Shakespeare’s plays in powerful and strikingly different ways. In this research seminar, we will reflect on the transformations of Shakespearean drama in cultures of the world, through a range of media (print, theater, and film). We will focus on The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest as well as Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice (a play about Hindu, Muslim, and Latina/o cultures in modern Los Angeles), Aimé Cesaire’s A Tempest, the prison documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars, and the film O, and Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti, Te (the Māori Merchant of Venice). Together we will think through the steps needed to undertake research in the humanities, addressing ways to design a research project, identify and treat sources, and develop a sustained argument.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Research assignments, papers, projects; oral presentations

Texts include:

• Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (trans. Richard Miller) ISBN: 1559362103
• William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Halio, Oxford World Classics 1^st edition, ISBN: 019953585X
• William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Thompson, Honigmann, The Arden 3^rd series, 2^nd edition, ISBN: 1472571762
• William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Vaughan, The Arden 3^rd series, ISBN: 1408133474
• Toni Morrison, Desdemona, ISBN: 135027027X

Course Description: This course will examine a series of novels that look at the relationship between empires and islands.  We will approach islands through the lens of various theoretical paradigms, and we will ask questions about sovereignty, imperialism, slavery, piracy, race, origins, language and memory.  Students will develop their own independent research projects revolving around a single island. 

Evaluation Method: Students will be responsible for two short seminar presentations, one short paper and one long paper.

Literary readings will be drawn from:  Shakespeare, The Tempest (978-0393265422), Césaire, Une Tempête (on Canvas), Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island (978-1-101-87236-9), Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (978-1-55111-935-9), Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (978-0393352566), Charles Nordhoff and James Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty (978-0316611688), Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (978-1-59463-394-2) and Wu He, Remains of Life (978-0-231-16601-0).  Critical readings (provided on Canvas) will be drawn from:  Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Modern History; Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology; Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands”; Hegel, “Of Lordship and Bondage”; Samuel, Theaters of Memory (Vol, 2: Island Stories); texts from the Sahlins–Obeyesekere debate; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; James, The Black Jacobins; Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra; Santos-Perez, from unincorporated territory.

Course Description: This course takes as its primary focus on the most contemporary of contemporary American literature. If the election and administration of the 44th President of the United States was enabled by and facilitated hope and change of a kind, how then has this event been anticipated and archived by writers and artists? We will read poetry, essays, and novels of the past two decades along with relevant theory and criticism. In preparation for the final research project, students will submit reading responses and an annotated bibliography.

Teaching Method: Lecture-discussion.

Evaluation Method: Reading responses, annotated bibliography, final paper/project.

Course Description: Nothing marks the modern world so much as the devastating and disruptive effects of imperialism.  An understanding of this complex phenomenon is vital not only for an understanding of modern history and geography, but also for modern literature.  Lenin and Arendt draw diametrically opposed interpretations of Hobson’s original theory of imperialism:  while Lenin understands imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, Arendt believes it is the first stage of rule by the bourgeoisie.  At stake in this debate, at least for Arendt, is the ability of an interpretation of imperialism to explicate works of literature written under imperialist conditions.  With a focus on the “Age of Imperialism” (especially the “scramble for Africa” and “the Great Game”), we will begin the class with an examination of some of the central theories and interpretations of European imperialism (those of Marx, Hobson, Lenin, and Arendt); continue with an exploration of the historical conditions of certain imperialized regions (India, Congo Free State, and Nigeria); and make use of both inquiries as we confront some of the most lucid and powerful literary encounters with imperialism in this century, including works by Kipling, Conrad, Achebe, and Desai.

Teaching Method:  Brief lectures and discussion.

Evaluation Method:  Two in-class presentations (one collaborative, one independent); research dossier developed over the course of the quarter; final research paper.

Required Texts: Texts will likely include theoretical writings and novels by Hobson, Lenin, Arendt, Kipling, Conrad, Achebe, and Desai.

Course Description: Part of 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.

Course Description: Part of 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.

Course Description: This course for writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction focuses on the contexts and processes of creative writing.  Our multi-genre readings enact or exemplify or think or imply something about how what we write develops out of our social, intellectual and artistic formation, intellectual curiosity, psychic processes, emotional investments, sense of language, and artistic goals. Readings will broaden our sense of how writers discover and develop their materials, techniques, and reshape their artistic goals as they work—in the way that the work of writing itself can shift the writer’s sense of the work and of the writer’s purposes. We’ll examine how the complexity of writing from one body of experience and thought may lead not to a “style” but to a range of possible structures, stances, and processes of writing. We’ll draw examples, methods and artistic positions from our readings in order to expand our ability to think about (and perhaps begin) new possible projects and—just as important—new ways of working on existing projects. Writing assignments will be unlike those you may have previously completed.  This is not a creative writing workshop.

Readings (many of these are brief) will be late 20^th and early 21^st century writers, including some of the following: Julia Álvarez, James Baldwin, Christopher Bollas, Julia de Burgos, Helene Cixous, Lucille Clifton, Víctor Hernández Cruz, Mahmoud Darwish, Robert Duncan, William Goyen, Kimiko Hahn, Amy Hempel, Danilo Kiš, Clarice Lispector, Ed Roberson, Katherine Mansfield, Linda McCarriston, Leonard Michaels, Marga Minco, Toni Morrison, Lorine Neidecker, Grace Paley, Sterling Plumpp, Adrienne Rich, Yannis Ritsos, Angela Jackson, Richard Wright, Jenny Xie or others.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: Near the turn of the millennium, an astute reader labeled a mixed bag of books as “systems fictions” or “network narratives.”  These works—DeLillo’s Underworld, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, and others—assumed the multiple, shifting viewpoints of huge varieties of characters on dizzyingly ramifying plots; dashed across vast ranges of time and space; and experimented formally, structurally, and stylistically, not always successfully, addressing themselves to the interdependent complexities of the world by imitating as well as representing them.  A wider sweep places such works not as a peculiar style of the millennium, but as recurring features of literary history, from the premodern romance traditions of Spenser’s Faerie Queene to modernist collages like Joyce’s Ulysses to post-millennial works like Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Catton’s The Luminaries, or Yanagihara’s To Paradise.  These works have in common a reluctance to reduce the world to the scale of a single human consciousness, aiming instead at rendering its other patterns.  Collectively they ask, What does literature know that cannot be known in other ways?  What does it represent that cannot otherwise be represented?  In this seminar we will explore the premises and efforts of several such texts, following their signal in dislocating their form of writing to earlier historical moments.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Presentations; final paper with preliminary proposal and outline.

Texts may include: Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, Catton, The Luminaries; and selections from Spenser, The Faerie Queene; Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Joyce, Ulysses; De Lillo, Underworld; Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Texts will be available at: Norris, or I will supply information for ordering books by mail.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: Spenserians have often identified their scholarship more closely with medieval studies than with early modern—understandably, given Spenser's deliberate archaism and his particular debts to Chaucer. The International Spenser Society, for instance, hosts its annual open-submission Spenser panels not at the Renaissance Society of America conference but the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Accordingly, it has been only in recent years—as medieval scholars have worked to counter right-wing appropriations of medieval symbols and demonstrably false claims about the past—that Spenserians have been forced to reckon with race in ways that go beyond Spenser's direct implication in Irish colonialism. In this course, we will read Spenserian texts--including approximately half of The Faerie Queene and A Viewe of the Present State of Ireland—paying particular attention to Spenser's religious extremism; his deployment of medieval racial tropes (such as the "Saracen"); and his advocacy of the brutal English colonial project in Ireland. We will also devote ourselves to a critical interrogation of Spenserian criticism—including the longstanding conversation about Spenser's anti-Irish ideology and politics, the 2021 special issue of Spenser Studies on "Spenser and Race," and the critics who have addressed the racialized portrayal of Jews, Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans in Spenser. We will consider these local critical conversations in the context of, and in comparison to, broader conversations in early modern studies about race and ethnicity (featuring such critics as Ania Loomba, Ayanna Thompson Mary Floyd Wilson, Kim F. Hall, Janet Adelman, and Dympna Callaghan). Dividing our attentions between primary texts and critical evaluation of the scholarship will make this course useful, I hope, both to early modernists seeking a deeper understanding of the field and to non-specialists interested in the literary history of racial and racist rhetoric. 

Teaching methods: Discussion.

Evaluation methods: 

• Regular class preparation and participation
• In-class presentations
• Final paper (broken into abstract/proposal, annotated bibliography/literature review, outline, first draft, peer review, final draft)
• MFA+MA students and interested Ph.D. students may propose alternative final projects that are more germane to their professional goals.

Texts include:

• Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, second edition, ed. A.C. Hamilton et. al, Longman Annotated English Poets  (ISBN-13: 978-1405832816; ISBN-10: 1405832819).
• Additional readings will be available on Canvas. 

Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore

Course Description: This seminar will offer an introduction and survey of two fields: the literary historical field of early Indigenous literatures and the interdisciplinary field of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS).  Reading texts created by Indigenous writers and printers between 1661 and around 1900, we will ground ourselves in the genres, modes of production, and politics of early Indigenous literatures, while also critically examining what terms like “early” and “literature” mean in this context and with attention to the reading, archival, and collaborative practices necessary to study this literary history. We will read this literary archive alongside NAIS scholarship, with a focus on keywords significant to the field, including but not limited to sovereignty, settler colonialism, land, recognition, refusal, and resurgence, transIndigenous, and decolonial.  Readings include works by Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, Hendrick Aupaumut, Katharine Garret, William Apess, Black Hawk, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, E. Pauline Johnson, Simon Pokagon, Gertrude Bonnin and others; scholarly work by Robert Warrior, Audra Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, David Chang, Mishuana Goeman, Jean Dennison, and Joanne Barker, among others. This course will meet both the 1680-1800 and the 1800-1900 period requirements.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Presentations; short response/reflection papers; final conference paper and presentation.

Texts include: Please purchase the following texts. Additional readings will be available on Canvas.

• Bross and Wyss, eds., Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, 9781558496484
• William Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (9780870237706)
• Black Hawk, Autobiography, 9780143105398
• Alice Callahan, Wynema: A Child of the Forest (9780803263789)
• Gertrude Bonnin, American Indian Stories (U Nebraska Press second edition), 9780803299177

Course Description: This course emphasizes the constructed and intersectional nature of 18C characters, the embeddedness of colonialism and imperialism in 18C plots, and the potential to “resurface” ideology through casting and interpretive choices. It will explore how critical insights can “take back” control of how performance affirms social memory and performers’ identities in the 21^st century.

Teaching Method: Seminar/discussion

Evaluation Method: As the course emphasizes interpreting 18^th-century works in the light of 21^st-century critical insights, there will be a variety of assignments stressing writing, imagining, and creative expression.

Texts include: TBD (a variety of authors, genres, and topics).  All text will be available in a printed course pack (max. $40).

Course Description: This course is conceptualized as a history of African American studies through, and against, the field of literary studies. Rather than take the literature as its central object, this course foregrounds the ways in some of the most important architects of African American Studies have engaged literature of the long nineteenth-century to re-animate critical theory. Works include Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent, Ken Warren’s Black and White Strangers, Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s La Isla que se Repite, C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins, and Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood.

Course Description: This course focuses on a recent profusion of criticism in the “blue humanities,” which we will define as the cultural study of marine and aqueous environments, especially as these spaces shape discourses of environmentalism and political geography. Although we may give some attention to urban hydroscapes, lakes, and rivers, we will mostly focus on the world’s oceans. In constructing our object of inquiry, the course takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on literary theory, art history, Black studies, postcolonial studies, environmental and labor history, legal studies, and media theory. Scholars may include Sekula, Rediker, Hofmeyr, Khalili, Sharpe, Blumenberg, Blum, Bolster, and a few novels and films such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Claude McKay’s Banjo, Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, or Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman (to be finalized with student input).

Course Description: From British mutiny novels to contemporary US fiction, terrorism has had a long literary history. Imperial sedition laws marking colonized subjects as insurgents continue to operate in South Asia well into the twenty-first century; the rhetoric of the US-led “Global War on Terror” has sparked a new method of postcolonial securitization. This course will embark on a comparative expedition that follows the affordances and differences between colonial/postcolonial South Asia and contemporary US empire through literature, history, and theory.  We will grapple with political concepts like mutiny, Naxalism, separatism, counterinsurgency and securitization by reading contemporary novels, poetry, prison memoirs, and graphic novels from South Asia, Middle East, and the US. “Terror in the Postcolony” will explore colonial, postcolonial and US imperial representations of anti-state violence that complicate the ideology of terrorism by turning to literary resistance. Works may include Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of the Towers, Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, and Aria Aber’s Hard Damage. Theoretical works will be drawn from Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed, Jasbir Puar, Simone Browne, Erica Edwards, Stuart Schrader, and Darryl Li.

Course Description: The goal of this course will be to read and examine the various means of thinking and modes of doing what we might provisionally call “black criticism.” How have black writers and thinkers adopted prose-forms such as the jeremiad, the editorial, the essay, and the monograph in the context of their political, social, and economic situations over the past three centuries? What styles have emerged to meet the unique demands of race writing? And what, ultimately, puts the ”black” in black criticism? And where does, and ought, the discipline reside with respect to institutions such as publishing and the press and academia?

Teaching Method: Lecture and seminar style discussion.

Evaluation Method: Weekly responses, annotated bibliography, and final project.

Course Description: American Women Auteurs centers around five novelists – Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Nella Larsen. That is, we move from the exquisite local color realism of Jewett’s spinster-filled Maine to Chopin’s “creole Bovary” set in fin de siècle New Orleans to Wharton’s anthropological vision of Old New York’s tribal mores for women, to Cather’s enabling Nebraska prairies and historical ante-bellum Virginia to Larsen’s Renaissance Harlem, Tuskegee, and rural black belt South. The seminar pairs both Jane Campion’s The Piano and an all-star set of Bette Davis’s greatest classical Hollywood films with these novels: The Country of the Pointed Firs and Deephaven with The Piano; Jezebel with The Awakening; Dark Victory and Now, Voyager with The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?  with Sapphira and the Slave Girl and My Antonia; and In This Our Life with Quicksand and Passing.  Augmenting this reading list will be theoretical essays on authorship by Foucault and Barthes; star theory; essays on spectatorship; and genre criticism on melodramatic, gothic, and sentimental forms.

Course Description: How do media impact our sense of such fundamental concepts as personhood, time and space, and social life? How do new technologies transform sensory experience at different moments in history? This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writings within the humanities addressing the nature of media and the role of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century western cultures. The course will be divided roughly into two halves: one portion devoted to foundational texts (Benjamin, McLuhan, Haraway) and to key terms (media, mediation, cyborg, digital, networks, etc.); and a second portion attentive to more contemporary work. Throughout our task will be to grasp these texts on their own terms, to put them into conversation with other texts and contexts, and to trace their relation to other texts in media theory and beyond. Requirements will include a short presentation, a shorter paper, and a longer one.

Textbooks may include: Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie Armond Towns, On Black Media Philosophy.

Note: This course is combined with COMM_ST 525 and ART HIST 4XX.

Course Description: TBA

Dear Writer,

Welcome to this fiction workshop.

There are many ways to approach a fiction workshop, but whatever the approach is, it is important to keep in the foreground the idea that we are making literature. What do I mean by this? We have to move beyond the limitation of making a small piece of art that is competent and sufficient to pass a class, and to impress our peers in a classroom (virtual or otherwise), to being able (aspirationally at least) to place the work we make within the larger context of tradition, genre and aesthetic considerations. Remember literature is a frame applied to story at a remove, concerned more with cultural and field/canon making, than with production itself.

In this workshop we should focus on all our reading of each other, and perhaps in the supplied readings, on 2 main approaches. Mastering of these two approaches opens up possibilities in writing in very unique ways and will move our craft forward exponentially. In this class we will look at the idea of story and narrative separately and then blend. All story, it seems, arises from, and carries a deeply emotional drive; whereas narrative is more about organizing or the organizational drives that bring clarity and focus to story.

You will submit a three-to-five-page aesthetic statement about your approach to fiction and story, editing and writing, and what you’re hoping to develop or achieve by the end of this class, while locating yourself  in a tradition (not vaguely but with concrete examples).

You will also submit a 15-to-20-page story or first novel chapter. Both of these are due on the first day of class, no exceptions. There will be supplemental and secondary readings and videos to help illustrate a pathway into deeper conversations. We will be flexible and adapt these additional resources as the quarter unfolds its own unique opportunities and challenges.

I look forward to seeing you soon.

Warmly,

Chris Abani

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: Students will start the first class with 10-20 page double spaced and paginated excerpt from a work-in-progress (# of copies TBA).  The class will take this as a starting point to develop your manuscript from within.  Focus will be on narrative drive, building tropes, activating scenes, nonfiction as the "story of an idea," durational issues in unfolding the reading experience, and place.

Text: Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.

Course Description: Our collective goal in this workshop is to help each member prepare a scholarly article for submission by the end of the quarter. Each member will work to develop and revise a promising seminar project or a dissertation chapter for publication in article form. We'll discuss how to think about and select a suitable journal, scholarly conversation, and audience; how to fit an article's frame, argument, and rhetoric to the journal and its audience; how to identify and address any weaknesses in research, argument, structure, and style; how to decide where and how to cut and compress the argument, where and how to develop or expand it; how best to organize the article; how to write a strong, attention-catching lead; how to follow a journal's style sheet; how to check references with meticulous care; how to submit the article for publication; and how to respond to readers’ reports. We'll also consider broader issues of scholarly publication, such as pros and cons of publishing in edited volumes, special journal issues, and online venues; whether and how to publish work that forms part of a future monograph; and how scholarly publication relates to publication for a wider, non-specialist audience. Workshop members will be analyzing and critiquing their own and each other’s submissions. Each will also receive feedback from the instructor and, where possible, from a specialist colleague in the field. Each will work closely with the instructor and workshop members on successive drafts.

"Writing for Publication" is offered P/N and open to all students in candidacy with their advisers' consent. Should demand be high, Ph D candidates in English who are nearing the job market will have enrollment priority.

Teaching method: Seminar discussion and workshop.

Course Description: In this course, we will engage with a wide range of possible approaches to the instruction of creative writing. To begin, we will look at the history of Creative Writing programs and the models of teaching that have traditionally guided MFA programs. We will then move on to discuss theories of learning as they apply to fine-arts courses. We will take into consideration intersectional challenges (race, gender, class, disability, etc). And we will think about the differences between teaching undergraduates and graduate students.

In the second half of the course we will move into the practical work of designing creative writing courses that have a beginning, middle, and end, and also a clear set of achievable learning objectives. You will do the practical work of drafting syllabi, generating exercises, and selecting reading material for introductory courses in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction.

Course Description: TBA