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.

[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: 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: 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 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: 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: 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:  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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

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

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

Texts Include: TBA

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

Course Description: 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 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: 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: 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

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