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.

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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so.
• 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:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so.
• No P/N registration.
• Attendance of first class is mandatory.
• Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.

Course Description: A combination of seminar and workshop. In this advanced poetry workshop, we will read deeply and write frequently, focusing on the fundamental elements of poetic craft, including imagery, metaphor and simile, line, stanza, music, rhythm, diction, and tone. The course reading will consist primarily of work by contemporary poets exploring the intersections of cultural identity, nationhood, race, gender, and sexuality. As we study how their poems are built, we will also consider the ways in which, and the reasons why, these poets are indebted and/or resistant to the poetry of the past, paying special attention to the ways in which poets are in dialogue, through their work, over time and space, shaping their poems in response to those of others.

Our meetings will consist alternately of performing close readings of selected poems and of workshopping student writing. In the process, we will read as writers, clarifying our sense of what a poem is and where ours might come from; deepening our comprehension of poetic craft and tradition; and further developing the critical language with which to discuss your poems and the poems of others, in service of writing your strongest, most fully realized poems.

Teaching Methods: A mixture of workshop and discussion of assigned reading.

Texts include: PDFs of poems prepared by the instructor, critical guides/handouts, craft essays, and the creative work of other students, all distributed via Canvas. Students will be responsible for presenting one full-length collection by a contemporary poet that they obtain on their own.

Evaluation Methods:

• Process Essay drafts/weekly poem assignments – 20%
• Ability to Critique/Class Participation – 20%
• Presentation/Leading Discussion – 20%
• Final Portfolio: journal, 6-8 poems, final essay –  40%
• (Reading Journal –  20%)
• (Poems and final craft/process essay – 20%)

Course Description: In 207, you have learned to apply the basic building blocks of fiction—character, plot, point of view, scene and summary—to write your own stories.  We learn the great bromide "Show, don't tell!"  In this advanced course we will buck the bromide, and learn how to tell.   We will brush up some of that previous knowledge, and build on that material and experience while continuing and deepening the apprenticeship to great writers, both contemporary and classic.  Students will read some examples of great taless both classic and contemporary, and will write several exercises and two stories during the quarter.   

In addition, good writers learn their craft through extensive critical reading.  Through close study, critique, and imitation of many different kinds of writers, you can push the boundaries of your own abilities and discover new ways to create fiction. Each week, I will assign two or three stories that focus on some advanced topics in writing, including “What Makes a Tale Satisfying?”, “Using Objects in Fiction”, “Staying on the Surface”, “Villains”, “Using Jokes as a Way to Tell a Story”, and “Reading for Writers”.   

Teaching method: Lecture, discussion, workshop

Evaluation methods: 

1. Creative Work (50%) 
2. Short Papers (30%) 
3. Class participation and attendance, including workshop (20%) 

Readings may include work by Jennifer Egan, Isak Dinesen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, the Gilgamesh poet, Chaucer, Rebecca Curtis, Charles and Mary Lamb, Julia Elliott, and Toni Morrison, Yiyun Li, Rabindranath Tagore, and all will be made available as pdf files.

Course Description: Our ancestors are an endless source of stories. They connect us to human experiences and historical contexts that hold opportunities for self-reflection, increased agency, and multi-generational awareness. To begin to understand our ancestors’ contexts, resilience, and survival is to be “delivered from our myths and given our history,” as James Baldwin wisely wrote. Writing stories from our families and ancestries can help us to vivify and add specificity to our writing as we transcend the subject matter of our individualism. This course will help you to write some of the stories, poems and essays that only you can write. Each week, we will read work about family and ancestors by authors, including Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Harjo, Rita Dove, Tarfia Faizullah, and Brandon Shimoda. We will connect our reading to pragmatic exercises that guide you to engage in research, listening, imagination, drafting, and revision. You will write across genres and can choose to focus on Poetry, Fiction, or CNF. You can expect to enliven your creative process, and to revise at least three finished works of writing.

Course Description: Students write and produce multiple prose and poetic works, layering the spoken word with evocative sonic textures, instrumentation and environmental sounds as we investigate what it means to write primarily for the ear. We will wear multiple hats: writing, performing, producing. We will use field mics and studio mics as we harness our unique voices and the voices of others. And we will be on computers, learning to use audio editing software to craft polished, multilayered soundscapes. Our goal is to become more practiced writers and performers, more accomplished multimedia producers, and to possess a greater range of artistic expression. Open to writers of all genres and skill levels.

Texts include:

Audio works by Steve Reich, Sandra Tsing Loh, Janine Jackson, Joe Frank, Axel Kacoutié, Gil Scott-Heron, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Ken Nordine, Delia Derbyshire and Miranda July.

Course Description: The situation of writing requires that we create literature, as well as the contexts in which literature is shared, appreciated and understood. We are the inheritors, perpetuators and innovators of literary culture, and in this class, we will position our inquiries on the present and future, even as we acknowledge the enduring humanistic values of creative writing. We will begin with a discussion of ideas about shaping the literary traditions of the United States starting with Melville, and moving quickly to those who have led or lead in shaping that tradition by shaping it or walking away from it—Roxane Gay, Adrienne Rich, Richard Baldwin, and others. Then we will build on these ideas practically with a service learning assignment and a creative work that reaches a new public, coordinates new media or engenders community. Our class will be enhanced by the annual Return Engagement series, featuring visits and readings from alumni of Northwestern’s Writing Program. My intention is to have a conversation that will unfold in real-time between us all, and will evolve into a learning experience that is both pragmatically useful and philosophically illuminating. My hope is that this class will help us to become more conscious of our motives and processes as writers; that it will allow us to more lucidly defend creative writing as an art form and a vital contribution to society; and that it will acquaint us with the productions of literary culture, including their changing technological platforms and their relationship to social structures. This course is part of the Hewlett Diversity Initiative, and as part of this program, we will investigate literature and culture through the lens of social inequalities and diversities.

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: Beginning with the sonnet craze in the late sixteenth century and ending with twenty-first-century reinventions and deconstructions of the sonnet, this course will explore questions of literary history by taking up the relationship between poetry and popular culture, investigating the ways in which poets draw on the latest trends in popular and literary culture and in turn the ways in which that culture incorporates and transforms poetry—on the stage, in music, and on the screen.  Thinking of literary history as a set of conversations in verse across the centuries, we will consider how poets borrow from and respond to one another, experimenting with traditional forms and familiar themes to make the old new.  In order to recognize and interpret this experimentation, we will first study those traditional forms, learning to read and interpret poetry. While we will be reading a range of poems in modern editions, we will be situating them in their social, historical, literary and material contexts, analyzing the ways in which these contexts shape our interpretation.  Readings may include poetry by Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Keats, Shelley, Williams, Stevens, and Eliot.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: class attendance and participation required; two papers, short assignments, and an oral presentation.

Texts include: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (ISBN: 978-0393679021, approximate cost: $80 new, 45-50 used, $25 rental).

Text will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore.

Course Description: How does longing for home–– a place of belonging–– shape our sense of identity and community? How do writers as different as Homer and Octavia Bulter meditate on the experience of displacement as well as possibilities for new kinds of citizenship? Our goal in this class will be to see how literature can offer different theories of what home and humanity can mean. Beginning with the classical epic hero Odysseus who desperately battles monsters, seductive women, and vengeful gods to get home from the Trojan war, we turn to more modern stories where travelers are not traditional heroes but figures who feel vulnerable or alienated even within their home spaces. Even as their journeys share themes of violence and renewal—and fantasy and realism—these different works steer us to contemplate strikingly different problems such as immigration, racial inequities, and climate change. Texts will likely include Margaret Atwood’s feminist recentering of The Odyssey in the domestic space (The Penelopiad); Shakespeare’s tragic story of lovers’ journeying to war on a Mediterranean island where danger resides where they least expect it (Othello); Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic cli-fi story about a young Black woman’s attempt to refound a world utterly destroyed (The Parable of the Sower); Maurice Sendak’s children’s book about punishment, nourishment, and fantasy (Where the Wild Things Are); creative nonfictional narratives of detainees in the UK (Refugee Tales); Mohsin Hamid’s poignant tale of Middle Eastern exiled lovers who find a magic portal to lands where outcasts band together for survival (Exit West); and Yuri Herrera’s stunning rewriting of Odysseus as a young Mexican woman undertaking a hazardous borderland crossing to the US to reconnect her family (Signs Preceding the End of the World). This course will introduce students skills—how to interpret literature, situate fictional writing in historical contexts, and craft strong arguments in writing.

Required texts:

• Homer, The Odyssey, ed. Emily Wilson  ISBN: 978-0393356250
• Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Barbara Mowat (Folger edition) ISBN  978-0743477550
• Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad ISBN: 978-1786892485
• Octavia Bulter, The Parable of the Sower   ISBN  ‎ 978-1538732182
• Mohsin Hamid, Exit West;  ISBN ‎ 978-0735212206
• Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, trans. Dillman  ISBN ‏  978-1908276421
• Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are ISBN ‎ 978-1782955030

Course Description: This class surveys major texts in the development of English literature from the epic Beowulf (c. 750 – 950) to Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1788).  A central goal of the class is to develop tools for approaching literary texts as creative expressions as well as challenging reflections on society, power, knowledge, and difference.  The millennium-long sweep of English 210 will help us approach literature not as escapism but as challenging social thought articulated by means of new representational forms.  We will pay special attention to the role of transoceanic travel, exploitation, and mercantile capitalist trade in the development of English literary forms.

Required Texts (at Norris Bookstore): 

• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave.  Ed. Joanna Lipking.  Norton Critical Edition. ISBN:  978-0393970142
• Beowulf, A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney.  Ed. Daniel Donoghue.  Second Norton Critical Edition (2019).  ISBN:  978-0393938371
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales.  Ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson.  Third Norton Critical Edition (2018).  ISBN:  978-1324000563
• John Milton, Paradise Lost.  Ed. Gordon Teskey.  Norton Critical Edition (2005).  ISBN: 978-0393924282
• Thomas More, Utopia.  Ed. George M. Logan.  Third Norton Critical Edition (2011).  ISBN: 978-0393932461
• William Shakespeare, The Tempest.  Ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman.  Second Norton Critical Edition (2019).  ISBN:  978-0393265422
• optional:  Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African.  Ed. Werner Sollars.  Norton Critical Edition (2000). ISBN:  978-0-393-97494-2
• optional:  Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.  Ed. Albert J. Rivero.  Norton Critical Edition. ISBN: 978-0-393-95724-2

Note:  Readings from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative will be available on Canvas. 

Note:  For more affordable digital versions of these editions, please purchase from: 

https://wwnorton.com/norton-critical-edition-ebooks

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: A monster, a basement, a storm, a prayer.  What scenes haunt a child's mental landscape? Coming of age is a process of wrestling with scenes of the past, and coming-of-age novels present us with identities that are paradoxically both formed and in the process of being formed. Such novels probe our sense of origins and identity, and moreover they reveal a complex relationship between language and the body. The four groundbreaking novels we'll read span 200 years and multiple continents, and explore a striving for belonging that is complicated by issues of ethnic, racial and sexual identity.

Note: Representations and opinions of gender and race in Frankenstein will not align fully with our own notions, and the casual and unreflective nature of its prejudices may be dismaying.  We will certainly discuss these issues.  Two of the contemporary texts on our course contain frank depictions of juvenile sexuality.

Teaching Method: Two lectures per week; one required discussion-section per week.

Evaluation Methods: Midterm paper (25%); final paper (35%); final exam (20%); quizzes and class participation (20%).

Texts include:

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Broadview 3^rd Edition, 2012), ISBN 9781554811038.
• Justin Torres, We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), ISBN 9780547844190.
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury), ISBN 978-1-60819-626-5.
• Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom (Vintage), ISBN 978-1-9848-9976-7

Course Description: In this course, we will apply techniques of close-reading and evidence-driven argumentation to a range of films produced over the last five years, including work from France, Senegal, South Korea, and the U.S. In so doing, we will blend “literary” interests in plot, theme, and character with artistic techniques specific to film, especially cinematography, editing, and sound. In movies written directly for the screen, such as Parasite, Atlantics, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Tár, we will highlight how such cinematic artistry adds crucial dimension to these films’ stories and concepts, without which any interpretation is inadequate. In adaptations from page to screen, such as If Beale Street Could Talk, Burning, and Nomadland, we will compare and contrast aspects of perspective and structure in the written and the filmed versions, taking stock of how meanings and stakes shift as a result. We will also read scholarship and public-facing reviews of these texts so as to understand, extend, and/or dispute the arguments advanced in these critiques.

By the end, students should amass new levels of confidence, insight, clarity, and curiosity about cinema made around the world in our own historical moment, including films that go out of their way to challenge us with provocative premises, ambiguous stories, and enigmatic styles.

Course Description: We will read excerpts from the Bible--both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament-- that include many genres: poetry, narrative, epic, prophecy, letters, and even law. Our emphasis is on the literary artistry of the texts we read, the characterizations of God, humans, and political organizations, the major themes and conflicts, and the variety of styles. You will be asked to write two short papers and to take a final exam. Participation in class is expected and will be counted toward your grade. You will also be asked to write questions about your reading assignments for the kinds of questions you ask of a text influence how you understand it.

Course Description: We'll read a range of Shakespeare's plays: comedies, histories, tragedies, and tragicomedies, from early in his career to his final works. The course will introduce the plays by introducing them back into the context of the theatre, literary world, and culture in which Shakespeare originally wrote them.  We will think about Shakespeare's contexts and how they matter: a theatre on the outskirts of ever-expanding Renaissance London; a financially successful acting company in which he played the simultaneous and often overlapping roles of writer, actor, and co-owner; a world of reading and writing in which words, plots, and texts were constantly being re-circulated into new plays; the rich possibilities of the English language around 1600.  We will centrally consider the ways in which these theatrical, literary, and cultural questions register within the plays themselves.  What do words, plays, stories do—how do they work—in Shakespeare's plays?  Who or what is an audience or an actor in these plays?  How do Shakespeare's plays stage issues such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, social class, entertainment and the media -- and how does his approach to these issues continue to speak to our own era?

Teaching Method: Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section.

Evaluation Method: Papers, midterm, final, discussion participation.

Texts include: We'll use the high-quality, inexpensive Folger Library annotated paperback editions of the following plays, ed. Mowat and Werstine (these editions only): A Midsummer Night's Dream (978-1501146213); The Merchant of Venice (978-1439191163); Henry V (978-0743484879); As You Like It (978-0743484862); Hamlet, Updated edition (978-1451669411); The Tempest, Updated edition (978-1501130014); The Two Noble Kinsmen (978-1982170165); additional critical readings on Canvas.

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

Course Description: This lecture course attends to the ways that African-American writers have, by virtue of trying to inhabit the creative space of the speculative, not only used literature as a counter valence to the socio-political world but have aesthetically extended the very idea of what was formerly identified as “literature” proper. Thus, the focus of our discussion will examine the conventions and experimentations with literary production through writings that grapple with U.S. racial formation as well as the novel forms of invention, play, and performance latent within imagination. While the course will gloss the major literary histories, the early 20th century to the present will be accentuated. Writers will include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Teju Cole, Roxane Gay, Kendrick Lamar, Claudia Rankine, Jean Toomer, and Colson Whitehead.

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: Native American & Indigenous literatures are currently in the midst of what some scholars call a “second Native American Renaissance.” By this, they refer to the novels like Tommy Orange’s (Cheyenne and Arapaho) There There and Louise Erdrich’s (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) The Round House, and the books of poetry, like Natalie Diaz’s (Mojave/Gila River) Postcolonial Love Poem, which have won national awards, as well as to TV shows like Reservation Dogs that are widely popular among Indigenous viewers and receiving much critical acclaim. 

But where did this “second Native American Renaissance” come from? What was the “first” Native American Renaissance?  This course will offer an introduction to Native American & Indigenous literatures, with an eye both to the current flourishing of literatures and to their long histories. We will look at the variety of media and genres in which Native American & Indigenous literatures appear, including birchbark pages, pamphlets, pictographic texts and digital platforms, as well as autobiography, political petitions, novels, and short stories. And we will develop a vocabulary for reading, analyzing, and discussing these literatures using key terms and concepts from Native American and Indigenous Studies, including sovereignty, kinship, resurgence, decolonization, and land. 

Teaching Method(s): Lecture + discussion sections.

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

Texts include:

• Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter ISBN 9781771121767
• Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem, 978-1-64445-014-7
• Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves, ISBN 978-1770864863
• All additional texts will be available on Canvas.

Texts will be available at: The University bookstore. If you’d like to purchase the book from a Native-owned or independent bookstore, see Louise Erdrich’s store Birchbark Books, which will ship books (be sure to order well in advance): https://birchbarkbooks.com/ or for Evanston/Chicago independent bookstores, check out Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston); Women and Children First (Andersonville); and Unabridged (Lakeview).

Course Description: Asian American, Asian-American, Asian/American: from Chinese Americans to Hmong Americans to mixed race Asian Americans, from fourth-generation Californians to cosmopolitan college students, from desert internment camps to New York City office buildings, what do the many subjects and locations of Asian American literature tell us about the capaciousness of the category itself? This class has two goals—first, providing an overview of literature written by Asian Americans in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and placing these texts in conversation with key concepts from Asian American culture and history. Second, interrogating the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of Asian American identity, a category that came into use only in the 1960s as a coalitional entity defined by shared histories of labor, discrimination, and national and cultural unbelonging.

Teaching Method(s): Lecture, Discussion

Evaluation Method(s): Regular reading responses; two short essays; one long essay; active class participation

Texts (subject to change; please confirm final text list on Canvas before purchasing):

• Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (ISBN 978-157322531)
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (ISBN 978-0679721888)

Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at the Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available on Canvas and in a reader at Quartet Copies.

Course Description: In the United States, we often talk about Latinx people using blurry labels. We discuss the Latino vote, the Hispanic population, and the Latinx community. This course explores the nuances of these labels through the stories that Latinx authors have been narrating for the past six decades. As we follow characters through conflicts and inhabit their quotidian lives, we will navigate between the specificity of a story and the complexity of a Latinx identity. Class discussions will study emotional ties to places and languages, feminist thought, and the racial and ethnic diversity within the Latinx community. We will read well-established and emerging authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, and Kali Fajardo Anstine. A one-quarter course cannot do justice to the rich genealogy of Latinx writing. This course follows an illustrative sample of authors from the 1970s onward and focuses on short stories, poetry, and essays. It aims to provide students with a historical, political, and literary foundation for further exploration of Latinx literature.

Evaluation Methods: Participation and attendance, essays, and a creative assignment.

Textbooks Include:

• The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, by Michael Zapata. ISBN: 9781335147356

Course Description: Introducing some of the major texts, concepts, terms, and debates in the study of texts about colonialism and its aftermath, this course explores the interface of postcolonialism and other liberatory initiatives (e.g., feminism, climate activism, animal studies etc.). How can we reconceive English studies to be more inclusive of non-western cultures and their depiction of problems that face the planet as a whole? How do we compare postcolonial texts with Western canons without reinforcing the current hierarchies that privilege Western culture as the standard against which the other cultures are judged? Indeed, in what ways are Western and East Asian literatures postcolonial? What are the differences, if any, among such terms as “anti-colonialism”, “postcolonialism”, and “decolonial” studies in relation to climate activism? As we read and write about these questions, we will examine how at the root of perennial postcolonial debates (e.g., the language debate) is the question of holistic liberation of the planet. Paying attention to the formal properties of postcolonial texts, our discussions will include the structural and thematic agency the writers give to other-than-human elements of the cosmos as a gesture of absolute inclusiveness, while depicting postcolonial societies’ struggle against colonial domination and the over-exploitation of the environment at the hands of global capitalism. We will read theorists and activists such as Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Fatema Mernissi, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Cajetan Iheka, Frantz Fanon, and Wangari Maathai.

Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, library visits, guest lectures debates, role play, one-on-one meetings, and small group discussions.

Evaluation Method: Two 7-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, take-home exam, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded).

Readings (may change)

1.  Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Publisher: Random House; ISBN-10: 0812979656; ISBN-13: 978-0812979657
2. Farah, Nuruddin. Secrets. Publisher: Penguin Books; Reissue edition (December 1, 1999). ISBN-10: ISBN-13: 978-0140280456
3. Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider: Publisher: Graphia; 1-Simul edition (May 1, 2003) ISBN-10: 0152050167; ISBN-13: 978-0152050160
4. Mda, Zakes. The Whale Caller. Paperback: 230 pagesPublisher: Picador; Reprint edition (October 17, 2006 ISBN-10: 0312425872ISBN-13: 978-0312425876

Films

1. Jean-Pierre Gallepe’s Po di Sangui (Tree of Blood)
2. Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi
3. Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt
4. Tunde Kelani’s Saworoide

Course Description: How is it that the natural world has seemed to writers across time as both comforting and terrifying, a pastoral refuge or a dark threat? How have literary myths of a “green world” spurred us to think about what precisely separates “the human” from other worlds around us? Are humans a part of nature or an exception to it? How do our ideas about nature impose distinct worlds, with distinct rules and rights, on humans, nonhumans, and the places we cross paths, sometimes without knowing it? Tracking these questions through literary forms ranging from Edenic stories and origin myths to Shakespearean drama, Romantic poetry, the modernist novel, and science fiction, students in this course will unearth the unexamined grounds of “green” thought as it appears in literary environments (as well as film, mass media, and the popular imagination). The course will give students an introduction to the “environmental humanities” and a deep dive into the storied concept of “nature,” while offering an unusual and broad background on classic literary themes of belonging, justice/ethics, freedom, wilderness, and the everyday.

Teaching Method: Lecture and seminar style participation.

Evaluation Method: Class participation, short response papers, and an in class exam.

Learning Objectives: In this introductory course, students will

• Gain familiarity with key terms and concepts in the emerging interdisciplinary area of the environmental humanities.
• Seek to discover the blindspots and purposes of a given text’s version of what is “natural.”
• Learn to balance the study of rhetoric in literary texts with the study of natural environments in a variety of contexts.
• Work individually and in groups to develop college-level close readings of literary texts, with attention to the ways language, literature, and aesthetic production shape ideas about nature.
• Develop college-level literary arguments supported by textual evidence. Write college-level analytical papers, unfolding claims in clear, well-structured prose.

• William Shakespeare, As You Like It(1599; The Pelican Shakespeare Series, ed. Frances Dolan; ISBN-10: ‎ 0143130234 / ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0143130239)
• William Shakespeare, King Lear (The Pelican Shakespeare Series, ed. Stanley Wells; ISBN-10: ‎0143128558/ISBN-13: ‎9780143128557)
• Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal (1798-1803; Oxford Classics, ISBN ‎0199536872)
• John Clare, selected poems (material to be supplied)
• Virginia Woolf, Flush (1933; Oxford Classics, ISBN 9780199539291)
• Ursula Le Guin, “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow”(1971; material to be supplied)
• Harryette Mullen, Urban Tumbleweed (2013; Graywolf Press, ISBN 1555976565)
• Grizzly Man (2005, dir. Werner Herzog)
• • WALL-E (2008, dir. Andrew Stanton)

Course Description: In this course we will study one of the most famous and influential novels of the 19^th century, Jane Eyre, a novel of brilliant idealism and forbidden love whose sinister undertones have weighed increasingly on subsequent generations of readers.  How do we read this novel now, and how have adaptations of it over the years addressed its problematic feminism and its subtly racialized romance?  We will look at two novelistic adaptations of the novel, Jean Rhys’s post-colonial classic Wide Sargasso Sea and Patricia Park’s contemporary trans-Pacific novel Re Jane.  We will also look at two film adaptations of the novel:  the voodoo-inspired I Walked With a Zombie and Carey Fukunaga’s brooding Jane Eyre.  Finally, we will look at some influential scholarly articles on the novel.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Methods:  One short paper (15%), one midterm paper (25%), one final paper (40%), class participation (20%).

Texts include:

• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) (Penguin, 2006), ISBN 9780141441146
• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)   (Norton), ISBN 9780393352566
• Jane Park, Re Jane (2016) Penguin, ISBN 9780143107941
• I Walked With a Zombie (1943, dir. Tourneur)
• Jane Eyre (2011, dir. Fukunaga)
• Gilbert and Gubar, selections from The Madwoman in the Attic (online)
• Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (online)

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 psychoanalysis and embodiment. Ranging over a wide variety of texts—from Thomas Hobbes to Calvin & Hobbes, scathing satire of British imperialism to memes of the lost pandemic years, 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, fiction by Zadie Smith, 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 Beef. Please note that this class is not open to students who took an earlier version of this course.

Teaching method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Texts include: Smith, White Teeth (978-0375703867); Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For (978-0358424178); Swift, A Modest Proposal; Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes; short fiction by Lorrie Moore, Langston Hughes, and David Sedaris.

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore

Course Description: What is realism?  Do we even need to ask?  Realism guarantees that the fictional worlds of novels, stories, films, and TV resemble our worlds.  Realism obeys the laws of gravity; like us, realist characters grapple with social forces they cannot magically transcend.  Most important of all, we know that realist texts are lifelike but not literally true—and yet, when we read Pride and Prejudice, we don’t think Jane Austen is lying to us.  How have we come to occupy this distinctive cognitive posture?  How has fiction come to epitomize the limits and possibilities of the real?

In English 300, we’ll trace some key twists and turns in the emergence of British prose fiction that claimed to be lifelike.  As it turns out, realism is a relatively recent literary invention with a turbulent history.  We’ll focus on texts and topics that shape the emergence of realism:  the travel narrative, which tries to depict flora, fauna, and people that are inconceivable to an English audience; criminal biography, which exposes the duplicity of notorious characters to an eager reading public; and domestic fiction, which explores the tensions structuring family life.  We’ll read one novel that epitomizes nineteenth-century realism as social critique (by either Balzac or Dickens) before turning to two contemporary novels (Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad; Miriam Toews, Women Talking) that flout realist conventions while still affirming the urgency of their reference to the real.  Along the way, we’ll read shorter critical texts to explore realism and its limits with methods including narratology, ideological critique, and critical fabulation.

List of texts:  William Dampier, A New Voyage Around the World (exerpted); Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders; Jane Austen, Emma; Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot (in translation) or Charles Dickens, Bleak House; Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad; Miriam Toews, Women Talking.  (We may also watch the film adaptation of Women Talking.)

The class is discussion-based.  Method of evaluation:  three short essays; optional group presentation.

Trigger warning:  The Underground Railroad and Women Talking depict or refer to sexual violence.

Course Description: Since H.G. Wells’s unnamed time-traveler first rocketed forward to the distant future, time travel has been a favorite thought exercise for writers, day-dreamers, and artists. In this course, we’ll the genre from its origins in the nineteenth-century. We’ll combine readings of literary classics like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), with selections from children’s literature like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), theory like Mark Fisher’s work on lost futures, and modern, mixed-media additions to the canon, including episodes of the anime Tatami Galaxy (2006) and the movies Interstellar (2014) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). How do traditional coming of age narratives change in non-linear time? Can and should history be preserved? Students will confront questions about cultural difference and blur the boundaries between “past,” “present,” and “future.”

Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises

Evaluation Methods: Participation, discussion posts, short analytical paper, final project

Texts Include: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895); Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843); Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928); Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962); Mamoru Hosada, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006); Christopher Nolan, Interstellar (2014); the Daniels, Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Texts will be available at: Orlando (ISBN 9780241371961) and A Wrinkle in Time (ISBN 9780312367541) at Norris, all others on Canvas.

Course Description: Detective novels have often been classed dismissively as mere “genre fiction” unsuitable for academic study. But the “close reading” that we prize so highly as literary scholars might be understood as a linguistic form of detection: the ability to notice and interpret small linguistic clues that can help to unlock a “solution”—that is to say, a full and nuanced understanding—of a narrative. This course will survey influential works of detective fiction as literary artifacts in their own right, but also as potential handbooks for what Eve Sedgwick calls the “paranoid reading” that so often propels literary analysis. In other words, we will consider detective fiction as meta-literary commentary on the challenges of reading and interpretation. Reading assignments will include weekly novels, literary criticism and theory of detective fiction, and meta-theory about the theory and practice of literary analysis as a field and as a set of interpretive habits and skills.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion, brief introductory lectures (often as Canvas videos to be viewed before class), group discussion and peer review.

Evaluation Method(s): Participation (online and in class); frequent short writing assignments; final essay; peer evaluation and self evaluation.

Texts include:

• John Hodgman, ed., Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essay ISBN: 0312089457
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep ISBN: 0804168881
• Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins ISBN: 0393925358
• Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night ISBN: 0062196537
• Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express ISBN: 0062073494
• Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train ISBN: 0393351939
• Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress ISBN: 1982150343
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 ISBN: 006091307X
• Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers ISBN:1400031575
• Additional readings will be available on Canvas. Students are welcome to use alternate editions.

Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore.

Course Description: Well over a century after the West was won—or rather, seized—and narratives of the wild, wild West continue to pervade mass media in the U.S. and beyond. Musical artists such as Lil Nas X, Megan Thee Stallion, Orville Peck, and Kasey Musgraves have been credited with ushering in a “yeehaw agenda” return to cowboy aesthetics and Yellowstone, a cable drama with modern-day cowboying and gunslinging is the one of the most watched shows on television. This course is an introduction to the genre of the western as it has appeared throughout literature and visual media from James Fenimore Cooper to Cowboy Bebop. We will begin in the 19th century, when narratives of the West manifested notions of expansion in advance of its reality and helped repair its deepest ideological fissure, slavery, after a war that tore it apart. In the 20th century, we will consider the role of cinema in ushering in visions of the West and invention of the Spaghetti Western (and why we called them that). Lastly, we will turn to contemporary mutations of the western to think about how westerns persist and remain lively to issues of race, sexuality, and the nation.

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, werewolves, 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(s): Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Presentation, participation, short papers.

Texts include: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (ISBN: 9780439023528), Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (ISBN: 1534441611), Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger (ISBN: 1646142764), Lobizona by Romina Garber (ISBN: 1250239133), Pet by Akwaeke Emezi (ISBN: 0593175441).

 Texts will be available at: Bookends and Beginnings.

Course Description: What do Jonathan Swift’s pamphlet A Modest Proposal and Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out have in common?  This class examines the genre that Swift and Peele exploit to devastating effect:  satire.  We’ll devote special attention to satire’s key paradox: for those who get it (or think they do), satire signifies by not signifying what it literally says.  We’ll explore satire with a focus on the “long” eighteenth century (1660 to c. 1825) to ponder its ethical concerns with social and political life; sexuality, sex work, and marriage; social class, corruption, and criminality; and empire and race.  The class ends with one contemporary American satire (TBD) as well as contemporary film and TV, including Get Out and Black Mirror.

Required Books

• Anonymous, The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1801). Broadview Literary Text.  ISBN:  9781551111766
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818). Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551114798
• Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild (1743). Oxford’s World Classics. ISBN: 9780199549757
• John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Dover Thrift Editions. ISBN: 9780486408880
• Abu Talib, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Broadview
• Literary Texts (1810). ISBN: 9781551116723
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Oxford’s World Classics. ISBN: 9780199536849

Course Description: How did the poetry and visual art of William Blake (1757-1827) come to inspire later artistic misfits and countercultures? Where and how can we trace Blake’s visions in the formal experiments and political orientations of modern art and literature? How does his example prepare us to read poetry differently, today? This course explores the unique poetry of Blake alongside its experimental, politically committed, sometimes hallucinogenic afterlives. Blake — a deeply eccentric poet and engraver who was always an odd fit with his British Romantic contemporaries — might be seen as the prototype of the artistic genius outside their time: obscure while he lived, nearly two hundred years after his death he is ever more widely celebrated as a visionary iconoclast and outsider original. The course gives students a strong grounding in some of Blake’s own most famous “illuminated” works, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and America: A Prophecy, reading these alongside 20^th & 21^st-century works across and between genres. Emphasis will be placed on the poetic inventiveness of Blake’s mixed-media forms, and his reinvention of the book, as we compare his illuminated poetry and innovative printing techniques with successors in poetry as well as across artistic media (including abstract expressionism, beat poetry, punk rock, and film media). Teaching Method: Brief lectures & seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: short writing assignments, final project.

Learning Objectives

• To practice close reading, interpretation, and analysis of poetic texts;
• To introduce students to the poetry and art of one of English literature’s most notorious figures;
• To link the field of literary studies, through poetry, with other artistic forms and media; and to study forms of cultural influence, by treating ideas as historical “objects” that persist and change over time;
• To develop advanced oral presentation skills, including participating in and leading seminar-style discussions and making presentations supported by audio and/or visual media;
• To write advanced analytical papers, unfolding persuasive claims in lucid, well-structured prose; and to improve writing and speaking as cultural critics, using Blake and his afterlives to recognize how philosophical and political ideas are materialized in aesthetic form.

• Saree Makdisi, Reading William Blake (ISBN: 0521128412)
• William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (ISBN: 0192810898)
• William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ISBN: 0192811673)
• blank notebook, standard size, for journal entries and short writing assignments
• For most classes, you will be consulting the website, blakearchive.org. Additional or secondary texts will be made available as PDFs through our Canvas site as needed.

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.

This class may not be taken by students who have previously enrolled in ENG/CLS  211

Teaching Method:  Brief lectures, discussions, and co-labs

Evaluation Method:  Weekly (w)reading exercises; mid-term paper;  final paper.

Required Texts: All texts available on Canvas and by request at Quartet Copies

Course Description: This course surveys experimental movement-based performance from the 1950s to the present in the U.S., Europe, Japan, India, and West Africa. Starting with the Happenings at Black Mountain College, the course looks at Butoh, Tanztheater, Judson Dance Theatre, conceptual dance, black postmodernism, and contemporary dance in Asia and Africa. After situating each movement within the time and place of its initial formation, we’ll follow its ideas and practices across national borders. Along the way, we’ll discover surprising alliances—Katherine Dunham’s impact on Tatsumi Hijikata, the interrelations between Judson and conceptual dance, and the mutual influences of Pina Bausch and Chandralekha. At issue is how to account for the power differentials between the Global North and Global South while also acknowledging the multidimensionality of global circulation. Intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

Course Description: Our focus will be the homosexuality in drama, and the drama of homosexuality, in Anglo-American theatre and culture, from Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare through Angels in America. This course surveys that drama, but it also thinks theoretically about homosexuality's "drama"--that is, the connections the culture has made (at least at certain moments, at least in certain contexts) between male homosexuality and the category of "the dramatic." The course examines the emergence of "homosexual" and "gay" as historical categories and analyzes the connection between these categories and theatrically related terms such as: "flamboyance," "the closet," "outing," “gender trouble," "drag," "playing," "camp," "acts," "identities," "identification," and "performativity." We will also be interested in the identificatory connections between gay men and particular theatrical genres and figures such as opera, the musical, and the diva. 

Teaching Methods: mini-lectures; guided analysis and discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Based on preparation and participation in discussion, papers, final paper/project.

Books:

• Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Arden Early Modern Drama series, published by Arden Shakespeare/AC Black, 2009. ISBN-10: 1904271731; ISBN-13: 978-1904271734.
• Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band: A Play in Two Acts; Paperback (June 1968), Samuel French Inc; ISBN: 0573640041.
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, Vintage Books, ISBN 0679724699.  
• Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Parts 1 & 2), Revised and Complete edition, ISBN-13: ‎978-1559363846
• Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, New Mermaids Series, ed. Martin Wiggins and Stephen Guy-Bray, ISBN-13: 9781472520524.
• John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine.  Folger Shakespeare Library (Simon & Schuster),  ISBN-10: 1982170166; ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1982170165
• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays,  Richard Allen Cave, Penguin Classics, new edition (February 27, 2001), ISBN 0140436065. 
• Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, New American Library; ISBN 0451167783.
• Critical, theoretical, and historical readings; films.

Books available at: Norris Bookstore.

Course Description: This course surveys methods and theories for dance research, drawing case studies from theatrical and social dance in varied times and places. Students will gain broad and deep familiarity with foundational methods for critical dance studies, including analysis of movement style and choreography, ethnographic “thick description,” historical approaches to embodiment and spectatorship, and theories of corporeality. Intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

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 perversity, identity theft, sexual violence, betrayal, and drug addiction!

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): early 4-pp. paper (15%); rewrite of first paper (15%); final 6-7 pp. paper (35%); two seminar presentations (10% each), and quality of contribution to seminar discussion (15%).

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 (Broadview, 9781551117515), Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Broadview, 9781551116556). Books will be available at Norris Bookstore, though you are encouraged to acquire the 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."   Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a special case.  It was published in several conflicting editions during Hardy's lifetime.  If you don't acquire the edition ordered for the class, there will be some important passages and episodes missing from your edition.

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

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, Tananarive Due, and Dantiel Moniz. The class will analyze the richest responses from across different cultures to emerging problems of desire, subjectivity, national identity, and narrative form. Tales of alienation in the Russian caste system, intricate thought experiments from Argentina, investigations of perspective in a modernized Japan, and distillations of early American experience beguile us with their elegance and insight. Through theoretical accounts of economics, ethics, and national identity, as well as close readings of the techniques 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. Please note that this class is not open to students who took an earlier version of this course.

Teaching method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Texts include: Stories by Poe, Gogol, Melville, Baldwin, Kafka, Ngũgĩ, Munro, Link and Chiang.

Texts will be available at: No required texts.

Course Description: Poised in different ways on the peripheries of American cultural influence, Taiwan, Jamaica and Mexico provide uncanny and critical mirrors of the United States.  In this course we will look at three brilliant novels which begin outside the United States but follow the tracks of characters compelled for various reasons to pursue dangerous journeys to it.  As borders unravel and underworlds emerge, these novels raise profound questions about the relationship between experience, language and place, and examine in depth the permeable nature of both national and personal identity. 

Teaching Method:  Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Two brief seminar reports (10% each); weekly posts (27% total); contribution to seminar discussion (20%); final paper (33%). 

Texts include:

• Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island (Vintage), ISBN 978-1101872369.
• Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, trans. Lisa Dillman (And Other Stories Press), ISBN 9781908276421.
• Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead/Penguin), ISBN 978-1594633942.

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

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(s): Discussion and some lectures.

Evaluation Method(s):  class attendance and participation required; language quizzes; an oral presentation; and three short papers. 

Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $25) (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: What are the Seven Deadly Sins, how did they come into being, and how do can we make sense of the role they continue to play the 21^st century popular imagination?  What is the nature of moral and ethical transgression:  is sin a disposition, a thought, an action, or an external force? And how does one make amends for such transgression? Over the course of the quarter, we will attempt to answer these questions by exploring the shifting representations of sin, secrets and confession that pervade late medieval literature. Analyzing the texts of preachers and poets alike, we will investigate the ways in which medieval writers adapted their depictions of sin to address the major social and political issues of their day, highlighting certain sins while hiding others as the moment required.  Along with sin, we will examine the practice of confession in its historical and literary contexts, discovering how priests, poets, and playwrights exploited and transformed this pastoral tool for narrative and social ends.  While giving students with a background in confessional practice and the discourse of Seven Deadly Sins, this course will also provide an introduction to some of the major works of the late Middle Ages: Dante’s Purgatory, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Everyman. We will also explore how David Fincher’s 1995 film, Se7en reworks these medieval concepts for a contemporary audience.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion and some lecture.

Evaluation Method(s):  class attendance and participation are required; two papers, short assignments and an oral presentation.

Textbooks will be available at: Norris Center Book Store. [Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vol. II:  Purgatory.  ISBN 978-0140444421 (approximate cost: $16); other readings will be available on Canvas].

Course Description: The term “Middle Ages”—the period “in the middle” between classical antiquity and the Renaissance—derives from European history, and it’s problematic even there. But the global turn in medieval studies enables us to go beyond the field’s traditional focus on Europe alone to explore its ties with the rest of the known world. In this course we’ll do that in three ways. Our first unit will consider court ladies as authors from two island nations, England and Japan, as we read the fashionable Lais of Marie de France (12^th century) alongside excerpts from “the world’s first novel”—The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (11^th century). Our second unit will focus on travel literature. We’ll read the Mission of Friar William of Rubruck (1255), one of the first Europeans to visit the court of the Great Khan in the Mongol Empire, beside the best-selling Book of John Mandeville (1360s), an armchair traveler whose open-minded curiosity and scholarship make him a model of premodern ethnography. Finally, we will explore the versatile genre of the framed story collection, which came to Europe from India via Persia and Arabia, as we read selections from The Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

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: 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: We will read and analyze some of the extraordinary plays written by Shakespeare's prolific contemporaries between the beginnings of the professional London theatres around 1580 to their forced closing in 1642.  We will approach these plays from literary, theatrical, cultural, and book-history perspectives; please be prepared to think across categories.  We'll read: a revenge tragedy more popular in its time than Hamlet; a history play about a king and his lower-class, immigrant boyfriend; a shockingly incestuous rewrite of Romeo and Juliet); two very different tragedies with women at their center (one the first original play by an English woman); a marriage anti-comedy with multiple trans resonances; and a prematurely postmodern play where the audience seizes control of the script.  These plays will help us think about theatrical genres, about how plays were written, performed and printed, about modes of social organization (marriage, family, sexuality, reproduction, social class, race and ethnicity, monarchy, dynasty, nation, to name a few), about periodization ("Renaissance" or "early modern"?), and about canonicity (for example, the distinction between Shakespeare and "his contemporaries" implied by our curriculum and this course description).

Teaching Methods: Mini-lectures; guided analysis and discussion of the plays.

Evaluation Method(s):  Based on participation in discussion, weekly in-class writing, papers, and a final exam.

Plays include The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd), Edward II (Christopher Marlowe), Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (Ben Jonson), The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry (Elizabeth Cary), The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont et al.), together with some historical and critical essays. 

Text: English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (W.W. Norton). ISBN: 0-393-97655-6. [This anthology contains all the plays we will read and is available new, used, for rent and will be on reserve.]  All editions of Renaissance plays differ, often significantly; use this edition only.

Text available at: Norris Bookstore.

Course Description: This course will survey dramatic revenge tragedy: a genre of plays that surged in popularity during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England (and elsewhere in Europe). Drawing on conventions established by Senecan tragedy—itself an adaptation of Greek tragedies by Euripedes, Sophocles, and Aeschylus—the Renaissance genre chronicles the inevitable spiraling of individual vows of revenge into widespread and spectacular violence. Often featuring ghosts and other supernatural agents, onstage depictions of madness, and outlandishly gory scenes of assassination, revenge tragedy might be framed as an early precursor of slasher/gore subgenres of horror. The first two-thirds of the course will immerse us in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, while the final third will rush headlong toward the present, examining stories, novels, and films that adapt various elements of the early modern genre and examine the continuing fascination with the ethics and consequences of revenge. (N.B.: to count this course as a pre-1830 requirement for the English major, students must focus on an early modern text for the final project.)

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, brief introductory lectures (often as Canvas videos to be viewed before class), group discussion and peer review.

Evaluation Methods: Participation (online and in class); online annotation using Hypothes.is; frequent short writing assignments; final essay or project; peer evaluation and self evaluation.

Texts include:

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare ISBN: 9781472518385
• Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Arden Shakespeare ISBN: 9781350030916
• Katharine Eisaman Maus, ed., Four Revenge Tragedies ISBN: 0199540535
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 ISBN: 006091307X

Additional readings will be available on Canvas. Students are welcome to use alternate editions but should be aware that different editorial approaches can generate significant differences, especially in early modern dramatic texts—from different lineation to the deletion/addition of whole scenes.

Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore

Course Description: This seminar will work across Shakespeare’s genres (comedies, tragedies, and tragicomic hybrids), focusing on representative plays that also show a preoccupation with humanity’s cosmic place and environmental situation.

The course will explore Shakespeare’s persistently troubled sense that humankind, alone, does not quite “belong” to nature. We’ll assess how his understanding of “Nature” and our relation to it changes over his career and also how it varies in the distinct ecologies of tragedy and comedy. The critical concept of Shakespearean “green worlds” first arose to describe those retreats into nature (and away from civilized society) that typically occur in the comedies. There, a removal to the “green world” serves to counteract one or another social ill, which in turn enables a rebalanced, healthier socio-political life to be restored. But how does this traditional and sometimes pastoral sense of a natural equilibrium hold up against a closer reading of the plays, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human order of civil life defined and established, and from what threatening “laws of nature” is it supposed to defend us? How does our grasp of more contemporary human impacts on the environment illuminate Shakespeare’s premodern vision of human existence as a calamity of exposure -- to hard weather and our own worst instincts, too? This inquiry into Shakespeare’s environmental vision will, finally, tell us something about the history of what it has meant to be human.

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Sustained and substantive class participation and two papers.

Texts include: Readings will be chosen from among Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale; brief contextual readings in early modern natural history, theology, and political thought will be supplied by the instructor.

Course Description: Despite the seeming rationality of the Enlightenment, early American literature was haunted by tales of seduction, sensation, and captivity. Early American writers redeployed gothic imagery to reflect on the unique anxieties of Puritanism, the frontier, the social instability of popular democracy, and the cultural guilt of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide. How did early American writers’ tales of passion and captivity map onto questions of democracy, citizenship, and agency? In this class, we will study the sensational works of early American literature, from a tale of a fallen woman seduced by an unscrupulous British officer in Charlotte Temple to a novel about a man driven to murder after hearing supernatural voices in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Bringing to bear the critical lenses of ecocriticism, gender and sexuality, and race, to name only a few, we will examine how early American writers grappled with their relationships to the environment, meditated on the perils and failures of democracy, and tried to imagine new forms of political activism. We will also consider modern interpretations of early America, from the 2015 horror film The Witch to the Broadway smash hit Hamilton. 

Possible texts include: Charlotte Temple by Susannah Rowson, Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving, selected poetry by Phillis Wheatley and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and screenings of Hamilton and The Witch

Course Description: The course of true love never did run smooth and the novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817) are no exception.  Austen’s heroines typically are kept apart from her heroes by prudence, error, or “low connections,” during which time readers are treated to scandalous affairs involving dashing ne’er-do-wells, marriage proposals from petty fools, timely injuries to romantic rivals, and satirical portraits of various wannabes and oughtabes.  As the song goes, however, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.  Eventually, then, all of these obstacles are overcome and the heroine and hero marry, signifying a new social order that promises to be better than the old.  What are we to make, however, of heroines who are not especially romantic, or even that likeable?  Of all these stories taking place during the Napoleonic Wars, which are barely mentioned?  Of nearly all Austen’s heroines and heroes being members of the landed gentry at a time when their wealth was often derived from plantation slavery?  Of the aristocratic values Austen champions at a time when democracy was finding its foothold in Europe and America?  In short, our challenge will be to hold in our minds Austen’s delightful genius and exquisite prose alongside what seems, at first glance at least, to be her dubious politics as we explore the extent to which her novels remain a productive field of engagement for our contemporary concerns.  Novels will include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.  Films will include Master and Commander, Bride and Prejudice, Clueless, and Late Spring.

Course Description: It’s hard to imagine modern alternative culture—the queer aesthetics of the goth 1980s, the drugged-up industrial 1990s, or even Matty Healy of The 1975’s swaggering claim that his style is “black and expensive”—without its roots in the fashionable decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. In 1891, four years before his trial for sodomy and indecency, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray shocked the Victorian public with its seductive exploration of queer sensuality, decadence, indulgence, and drug use. What is it about Wilde’s rallying cry of “art for art’s sake” that was so transgressive? As a survey of nineteenth-century decadent and aesthetic literature, this course unpacks the seedier, darker side of the stiffly corseted Victorians and their cultural afterlives. We will explore key canonical works by authors including Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James, and recover important aesthetic fantasies by lesser-known writers. Over the course of this class, students will build a foundational understanding of aesthetic theory and learn to interrogate texts through queer and postcolonial frameworks. In addition to reading key Victorian texts, students will unpack Romantic precedents and the ways that these distinctly nineteenth-century preoccupations with decay, degeneracy, and transgression influenced and shaped counterculture through the present day.

Teaching Methods: seminar discussion, short lectures.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, presentation on a selection from the decadent magazine The Yellow Book, one analytical essay, final project.

Texts Include: Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Edgar Allen Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Suicide Club” (1878); Vernon Lee, “Oke of Okehurst” (1881); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013); selected episodes of What We Do in the Shadows (2019) and Interview with the Vampire (2022); selections from alternative music criticism, fashion magazines, and zines from the 1990s-present.

Texts will be available at: The Picture of Dorian Gray (ISBN 978-0393696875) at Norris, all others on Canvas.

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 madness 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 the twin states of “going mad” and “being mad” shape our culture’s narratives about gender and authority.

Teaching method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Texts include: Brontë, Jane Eyre (978-0141441146); Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (978-0143134770); Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (978-0393352566); Rankine, Citizen (978-1555976903).

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

Course Description: The Victorian period may be as famous for its long novels as for its long-living queen, but many of the liveliest works created in the mid to late nineteenth century took forms other than the novel. And many of these works displayed a feisty engagement with or challenge to the monarchical “brand” of Queen Victoria. Examples of works we will read in this course are: George Eliot’s 1856 essay on the Greek play Antigone, which dramatizes the tragic collision between individual and state; Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862), a wild anti-fairy tale about female desire and the dangers of yielding to it; the exuberantly profane appreciations of sacred art in Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873); The Phantom Lover (1886), a phantasmagoric novella about ancestral murder (maybe?) by Vernon Lee; News from Nowhere (1890), a socialist utopian fiction by William Morris; and a play with a satirical take on a Biblical story, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1896). We will read essays and study photographs and paintings that address the concerns of the day from prostitution to sanitation, and study writers and artists on the frontline of anti-imperialist and anti-slavery activism.

Course Description: The course responds to shifts in paradigms of gender and sexuality in writing from the global south and in western writing about formerly colonized subjects. Should we use western terms (e.g., “gay” and “lesbian”) to describe sexual practices in the global south? What are the main theoretical issues in postcolonial studies, and how would the positions change if we factored in gender and sexuality? How does sexuality intersect with other expressions of identity (e.g., nationalism)? Is there a connection between gender and other conditions in the global south (e.g., ecology and economics)? How are sex relations used as an allegory of the national condition? What are the attitudes toward inter-species sex among postcolonial writers? Authors to be discussed include H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Jessica Hagedorn, Witi Ihimaera, K. Sello Duiker, Suniti Namjoshi, and Lawrence Scott. We will consider postcolonial theoretical statements by a wide range of scholars (e.g., Madhavi Menon, Gayatri Spivak, Anne McClintock, Keguro Macharia, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Gopinath, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe etc.) and respond to them in the context of gendered power relations.

Teaching Method: Interactive lectures, debates, role play, one-on-one meetings, and small-group discussions.

Evaluation Method: Two 6-page papers, weekly Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, take-home exam, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded).

Texts include: 

• Cliff, Michelle, No Telephone to Heaven, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987. 
• Gurnah, Abdulrazak, Paradise. New Press, 1994.
• Ihimaera, Witi. Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Auckland: Seeker and Warburg, 1995. 
• Njau, Rebeka. Ripples in the Pool, Nairobi: TransAfrica, 1975. 
• Obejas, Achy. Memory Mambo, Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1996. 
• Powell, Patricia. The Pagoda, New York: Mariner Books, 1999. 

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, films and television episodes to enrich our reading, including: excerpts from Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (nonfiction), Thi Bui's illustrated memoir The Best We Could Do, selected episodes from the Netflix series The Crown, the documentary Meet the Patels, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Jordan Peele's Get Out.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises, peer response.

Evaluation Method: Class participation, weekly short writings and/or Canvas posts, 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
• 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) 
• Edward Said, “Chapter One: Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories” from Culture and Imperialism pp. 3-19 (book chapter) (ISBN: 978-0679750543) 
• 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: What might the world like if it were made in the image of black feminist visionaries? How and why should we invite those imagined futures into our political and social realities? In this course, students will survey a range of writing in Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, paying special attention to the world-making potential of radical thinking. Students will read foundational texts including those by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, alongside more recent contributions from scholars including Jennifer C. Nash, Kevin Quashie, and Nicole Fleetwood to understand the shape and contour of contemporary black feminist world-making. Additionally, students will examine the veil between literature and theory and consider the ways in which these two genres of writing bleed into and reinforce one another. This course is reading intensive with weekly writing assignments and a large summative writing assignment.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar style discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Weekly assignments, presentation, final project.

Texts include:

• Toni Morrison, Sula
• Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
• Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
• Course Reader

Course Description: This course introduces major authors and writers of the African American literary canon from the 1900s to the present. Among a diverse range of literary production—sci-fi stories to protest novels, sonnets, film criticism, and personal essay—we will think about what it has meant for black writers to work towards a literature to call their own and how the artistic and conceptual goals of African American literature have changed against the backdrop of evolving rights and attitudes across the 20th century and into our contemporary moment. Possible authors include: Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Percival Everett.

Course Description: In this course, students will consider the role the novel plays in the development of Black literature and life. Through our engagement with three key works—James Baldwin’s Another Country, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Colson Whitehead’s, The Intuitionist—student’s will exmaine how long-form narrative articulates ideas about Black freedom and struggle during and after the Civil Rights Movement. In addition to fiction, students will also read theories of narrative written by black and non-black authors to better understand how narrative works.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar style discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Weekly assignments, presentation, final project.

Texts include:

• James Baldwin, Another Country
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
• Course Reader

Course Description: In this course, students will engage the archive of contemporary black speculative fiction, including works by Samuel Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead, and N.K. Jemisin, to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the Black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction, and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to investigate what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about black life, worlds, and futures. The course argues that speculative works—both narrative fiction and theoretical writing—invite readers to think beyond the boundaries of known realities to see new modes of being in the world. Our study will concern texts written in the contemporary, but students will be invited to consider how contemporary manifestations of the speculative and radical necessarily speak across time and space into both past and future manifestations/imaginaries of black experiences, embodiments, and identities.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar style discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Weekly assignments, presentation, final project.

Texts include:

• Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories
• Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
• Morales and Baker, Truth: Red, White, and Black (comiXology recommended);
• N.K Jemisin, The Fifth Season
• Victor LaValle, Destroyer (comiXology recommended)

Texts will be available at: Campus Bookstore.

Course Description: Recent bestsellers such as The Girl on the Train are part of a long legacy of wildly popular murder fiction. In the early nineteenth century, murder and other forms of gothic violence were often confined to remote castles or the wilds of the English moors. With the explosion of detective stories and crime fiction, however, these middle-class nightmares invaded both the supposedly blissful domestic scene and the modern city. Writers started to use murder as an occasion to pose radical questions about which deaths are considered “grievable.” Increasingly, authors depicted amateur detectives who were skeptical of the social and legal order they were reestablishing through their work. Beginning with founders of the genre Edgar Allen Poe and Pauline Hopkins (author of the first Black murder mystery), this course follows the transatlantic tradition forward through Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled tales, Agatha Christie’s mysteries, mid-century psychological thrillers by Patricia Highsmith, and recent detective fiction by Walter Mosley. Paying particular attention to how gender and race shape the narration of these tales, we will conclude with a survey of twenty-first-century chart-toppers by Paula Hawkins and others. Readings will be supplemented with films, including excellent adaptations of The Girl on the Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Please note that this class is not open to students who took an earlier version of this course.

Teaching method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Texts include: Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (978-0062073563); Chandler, The Big Sleep (978-0394758282); Hawkins, The Girl on the Train (978-1594634024); Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (978-0393332148); Mosley, Little Scarlet (eBook: 978-0759511668).

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

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): papers, presentation.

Texts include: The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (ISBN: 0679406417), March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell (ISBN: 1603093001), Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (ISBN: 037571457X), Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (ISBN: 0544709047), Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe (ISBN: 1549304003), Stitches: A Memoir by David Small (ISBN: 9780393338966), They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, and Steven Scott (ISBN: 1603094504), American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (ISBN: 1250811899).

Texts will be available at: Norris.

Course Description: Centered around London’s British Museum, the modernist artists and intellectuals known as “Bloomsbury” formed, E. M. Forster suggested, "the only genuine movement in English civilization." If prewar social movements inspired hope that Europe “might really be on the brink of becoming civilised” (L. Woolf), the Great War (1914-1918) shattered millions of lives, marked “the end of a civilization,” disrupted a racialized imperialist and patriarchal social order, and challenged Europeans to rebuild their social world “on firmer ground” (Freud. The ensuing global contest between liberal democracy and rising totalitarianisms in a century of rapid technological and social change led to – and far beyond – World War II. Bloomsbury’s influential network includes writers Virginia and Leonard Woolf, co-founders of the Hogarth Press (which made Virginia Woolf “the only woman in England free to write what I like”); economist John Maynard Keynes; founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (published by Hogarth); E. M. Forster (A Passage to India), Mulk Raj Anand (Untouchable), T. S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke, Katherine Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, David Garnett, and Vita Sackville-West (who inspired Orlando); painters and designers Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry; philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore; composer Ethel Smyth, and art critic Clive Bell. Working across disciplines, genres, and forms in this stimulating milieu, “Bloomsbury” friends, relations, and associates shared inventive private lives while creating enduring public works that cut a cross-section through the twentieth century and illuminate challenges that are still very much with us.

We’ll study major novels and essays by Virginia Woolf alongside works by Bloomsbury contemporaries and inheritors in light of such contexts as: the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition; the women’s movement and suffrage campaign; class, sexualities, the law; war, peace, pacifism, censorship, domestic and world conflict; race, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonial critique; the Spanish Civil War; Nazism, fascism, WWII; science, technology, the natural world, the cosmos known and imagined; literary genres, forms, theory, history influence; drama, theatre, fashion, travel, parties, diaries, letters, dogs, and more. As we read and think together, we’ll hone analytic and writing skills while engaging each other in vital, informed, questioning conversations that spark creative insight into the Bloomsbury era and our own.

Requirements and evaluation: Attendance and participation (20%); Canvas posts collected as midterm and final (20%); presentation with 1-2 page handout (15%); 4) option: two shorter or one longer critical and/or creative paper or project (40%); self-evaluation (5%).

Books at Norris, chosen from: Woolf, Monday or Tuesday (Dover 978-0486294537); Jacob's Room (Dover 978-0486401096 or: Oxford World Classic 978-0199536580); Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt; Mariner, ed. B. K. Scott 0156030357); To the Lighthouse (Harvest 978-0156907385 or Oxford World Classic B009OBTHCS); A Room of One's Own (Harvest 9780156787338), The Waves (Harvest 978-0156949606), Three Guineas (Harcourt; Mariner, ed. Marcus 0156031639), Between the Acts (Harvest, 9780156034739); Forster, A Passage to India (978-0156711425); shorter texts on Reserve and Canvas.

Course Description: We’ll study selected works by border-crossing, internationally famous twentieth- and twenty-first century women writers who address an array of issues in women’s lives in genres, forms, and media ranging across essays, fiction, poetry, drama, graphic narrative, cinema, and theory. Authors to be chosen from Virginia Woolf (England), Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand), Jean Rhys (Dominica/England), Toni Morrison (USA), Gloria Anzaldúa (USA), Marjane Satrapi (Iran), Annie Ernaux (France), Anna Burns (Northern Ireland), Elena Ferrante (Italy), Arundhati Roy (India), Kate Hamill (USA), and Lili Elbe (Denmark), with supplementary texts by authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, bell hooks, Audre Lorde.

Course Description: In this class, we will examine the related ideas of the Great American Novel and “the American Dream” to explore the ongoing construction of American identity, values, and literature. We will operate from two basic points: America can be understood as a text, constantly being rewritten, revised, and contested; and American identity is relational, situated in culture, history, and the body. The questions we will examine include: In a racially and ethnically diverse (even divided) nation, what constitutes American identity, the quality of "Americanness"? Who, if anyone, speaks for all Americans? What sort of literary voice best expresses American realities and ideals? How does the dynamic of culture and counter-culture, dominant and marginal, get worked out aesthetically and ideologically?

Teaching Method: Lecture, discussion.

Evaluation Method: Brief written responses to each novel and several options for papers.

Texts include: Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Chopin, The Awakening; Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm; Kerouac, On the Road; Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Morrison, Song of Solomon.

Course Description: In 1893, the Potawatomi writer Simon Pokagon circulated a birchbark book, The Red Man’s Rebuke (also titled The Red Man’s Greeting), which was printed to circulate at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Pokagon strongly criticized the Fair’s celebration of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas in the book’s text, but Pokagon’s words are not the only form this critique takes. The birchbark pages, the illustrations, the process by which the books were made and printed: these elements extend Pokagon’s critique to questions of environmental destruction, political sovereignty, and gendered experiences of colonialism.

This class asks: What is an Indigenous book? We will learn and practice methods for reading materiality (what is paper made of?) and process (who printed the books? Prepared the pages? Circulated them for sale?). In doing so, we will examine how Indigenous writers and artists experiment with the materials of bookmaking to make the book form part of its meaning.  We will examine how critically questioning the book form can decenter individual authors; raise questions about many people who participated in making, circulating, reading, and keeping books; and orient us to the trees and plants out of which books are made.

This is an experimental, hands-on course where we will not only learn methods for making books but practice them as well. We will learn how to look at Indigenous books that take various forms: these include codices that open like accordions or fans; printed or sewn designs on birchbark; contemporary artist books that combine graphic arts with ancient book forms or that embed material objects like bullets on a page, or books that look like the thing they are about.  We will understand processes of making and circulating books and how to connect those processes to the literary meanings on the page.  We will consult these very cool and very special books during class sessions at NU’s Special Collections and at other libraries, and the class will also include engagement with letterpress printing, as well as discussions with Potawatomi scholars and artists about birchbark books and other objects. 

Teaching Method(s): Discussion, hands on workshops, conversations with visiting artists.

Evaluation Method(s): Short reflections; annotated bibliography; preparation for and participation in discussion; final project designed by instructor and students.

Texts include:

• As Sacred To US: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories In Their Contexts (9781611864625)
• All additional texts will be available on Canvas.

Texts will be available at: The University bookstore. If you’d like to purchase the book from a Native-owned or independent bookstore, see Louise Erdrich’s store Birchbark Books, which will ship books (be sure to order well in advance): https://birchbarkbooks.com/ or for Evanston/Chicago independent bookstores, check out Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston); Women and Children First (Andersonville); and Unabridged (Lakeview).

Course Description: The Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko wrote in 1977 that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.”  40 years later, in 2017, Orion Magazine published a cluster of poems written by Native writers “for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock.”  How, this course asks, have stories and poems been part of Indigenous protest movements and decolonial resistance?  How have Indigenous writers used novels, newspapers, and films to document, critique, and refuse what Nick Estes calls settler colonial common sense? 

This course examines the interrelated stories of Native American literatures & resistance movements from the Red Power activism of the 1960s-1970s to the water protectors at Standing Rock.  We’ll examine how writers like Louise Erdrich have used fiction to intervene in legal protections and policies for Indigenous women.  We’ll examine how speculative fiction and visual art imagine beyond a world shaped by colonialism and climate change.  By pairing these literary texts with Indigenous Studies scholarship, we’ll examine the different approaches Indigenous writers have taken to questions of sovereignty, environmental justice, legal jurisdiction, and political recognition.

Teaching Method(s): discussion; short lectures; hands-on archive workshops.

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

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

• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done (978-1-5179-0387-9)
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (9780143104919)
• Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (9781597142014)
• Louise Erdrich, The Round House (9780062065254)
• Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (9781770864870)

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

Course Description: How can writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost to the passage of history? This class explores how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Given the difficulty of assembling a coherent Asian American identity, our examinations will be defined as much by the absences, gaps, and contradictions of Asian America’s collective memory as by what is found within it.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar-based discussion

Evaluation Method(s): Regular reading responses; two short essays; one long essay; active class participation

Texts (subject to change; please confirm final text list on Canvas before purchasing):

• Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (978-0295993546)
• Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth (978-0812981322)
• Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (978-0525562047)
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (978-0520390485)
• Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (978-0375724374)

Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at the Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available in a reader at Quartet Copies.

Course Description: The U.S.-Mexico border was first envisioned in writing when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) imagined the course that a new dividing line would run: from the Gulf of Mexico through the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande until the town called “Paso,” west toward the Gila River and onto the Pacific Ocean. This line would mark not only land and water but also racial and ethnic formations. Indigenous nations saw their territories split in half by a border that considered their homelands wilderness. Mexicans who found themselves north of the imagined line had to grapple with a new vocabulary to define themselves as they lost their lands to settlers. Those who ended up south of the border attempted to reconcile their recent independence from Spain with the loss of half of the country as they too tried to piece together a narrative for their new identity. This course will walk students through the text and maps of the 1848 treaty and the literary works that continue to process its aftershocks throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Some of the authors we will read include Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, Mexican writer Yuri Herrera and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. We will learn about the discourse of Manifest Destiny, the Chicano Movement, and contemporary literature from Latinx, Indigenous and Mexican writers who continue to tell the stories about their ancestral lands, their migration journeys, and their encounters with a line that became both border and borderlands.

Course Description: The products and pastimes young people have been accused of killing off are too numerous to name. Among them: bar soap, home ownership, casual dining, vacations, wine, napkins, diamonds, golf, football, and crude oil. In turn, baby boomers have left their own path of the destruction, causing affordable tuition, retirement, and the social safety net to pass right out of style. The eternal strife between millennials and their parents has quite overshadowed other sorts of inter-generational conflict: millennials and Zoomers have their own beef and boomers were once young people with their own gripes with The proverbial Man. And why has Gen X gotten to stay out of the fray? (Who is Gen X, anyway?)

This course explores idea of generations: what defines them, what binds them, why we so strongly identify with them. How do generational labels and traits become accepted truths? When is it useful politically, socially, culturally, and rhetorically? How does generational thinking stand-up to the nuances of social and economic differences of race, gender, and class? We will ask these and other questions by studying a range of cultural texts (novels, news articles, television, and film) alongside critical readings from scholars. Possible texts: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (dir. Leslie Harris), Reality Bytes (dir. Ben Stiller), Office Space (dir. by Mike Judge), Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris, and Severance by Ling Ma.

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 girl is deployed as a figure making and remaking claims about the nation. We will read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie–texts which fantasize about being universal texts of American girlhood while in reality putting forth a vision of whiteness–against contesting visions of girlhood found in texts such as Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, the first novel published by an African-American woman, 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): Presentation, midterm and final papers, participation.

Texts include: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (ISBN: 9780140390698), Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (ISBN: 9780064400022), Our Nig by Harriet Wilson (ISBN: 0143105760), American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Ša (ISBN: 0142437093), How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez (ISBN: 9781565129757), and Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera (ISBN: 0241433983).

Texts will be available at: Norris

Course Description: This course will begin and end with the two greatest sentimental novels written in American literary history: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Stowe’s work frames our conversation as we then explore the enslavement narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley, and the fictionalized autobiographical  novels of enslavement and Black child indentured servitude by Hannah Crafts and Harriet Wilson.  Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons completes our reading list.  Stoddard’s book is formally radical novel that pioneers a narrative voice close to the work of the modernists.  She is the Emily Dickinson to write fiction, it would sound like Stoddard’s work..  Questions we will ponder involve the intersection of racial trauma and literary form, the novel as polemic, and the way that an African American women’s canon emerged in vigorous response to and critique of Stowe’s transformative novel.

Mode of Evaluation:  two take-home close reading exams (2 pages each) and a final project or essay that may involve the analysis of a classic Hollywood  or contemporary film version of Little Women or a more recent depiction of enslavement and freedom such as 12 Years a Slave.

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: Well over a century after the West was won—or rather, seized—and narratives of the wild, wild West continue to pervade mass media in the U.S. and beyond. Musical artists such as Lil Nas X, Megan Thee Stallion, Orville Peck, and Kasey Musgraves have been credited with ushering in a “yeehaw agenda” return to cowboy aesthetics and Yellowstone, a cable drama with modern-day cowboying and gunslinging is the one of the most watched shows on television. This course is an introduction to the genre of the western as it has appeared throughout literature and visual media from James Fenimore Cooper to Cowboy Bebop. We will begin in the 19th century, when narratives of the West manifested notions of expansion in advance of its reality and helped repair its deepest ideological fissure, slavery, after a war that tore it apart. In the 20th century, we will consider the role of cinema in ushering in visions of the West and invention of the Spaghetti Western (and why we call them that). Lastly, we will turn to contemporary mutations of the western to think about how westerns persist and remain lively to issues of race, sexuality, and the nation.

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, brief lectures, guest speakers, and an optional urban tour.

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 Ben Hecht, Mike Royko and others; short fiction by Sandra Cisneros, James T. Farrell and others; poetry by Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Fitzpatrick and others; the films The Untouchables, The Blues Brothers, Call Northside 777, and Barbershop; the graphic novel 100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call.

Note: Texts will be available at Comix Revolution, 606 Davis Street.

Course Description: Some forays into fictional narratives are escapist; they allow us an imaginative respite from our daily reality. Other narrative adventures run in the opposite direction: through fiction, they allow us to engage with present difficulties with greater insight; acuity; context; and (perhaps most importantly) company, reminding us that we are not the first to face even seemingly unprecedented terrors. This course has been organized in the latter spirit, in hopes that engaging intellectually with literary and artistic responses to plagues and pandemics of the past will afford us new intellectual, historical, and effective resources for understanding our present and very recent past. We will look to literary narratives of plague and pandemic as a way to contextualize, historicize, and deepen our comprehension of the way the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our social, economic, cultural, and imaginative realities. Texts will span seven centuries of plague literature, including selections from Boccaccio's Decameron (1348–53) and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1380s); Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare (1603); Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" (1842); Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912); José Sarmago’s Blindness (1997); Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011); Ling Ma’s Severance (2017); and Carmen Maria Machado’s “Inventory” (2018).

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, brief introductory lectures (usually on Canvas prior to class), group discussion and peer review.

Evaluation Methods: Participation (online and in class); online annotation using Hypothes.is; podcast assignment; final paper or project; peer evaluation and self evaluation.

Texts include:

• Eula Biss. (2015). On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. ISBN: 1555977200
• Susan Sontag. (2001). Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York, NY: Picador. ISBN: 0312420137
• Daniel Defoe. ed. Paula R. Backsheider.  (1992). A Journal of the Plague Year. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company.  ISBN: 0393961885
• Colson Whitehead. (2011).  Zone One. New York, NY : Anchor Books. ISBN: 0307455173
• Jose Saramago. (1997). Blindness, trans Giovanni Pontiero. Boston, MA and New York, NY: Mariner Books.  ISBN: 0156007754
• Ling Ma, (2018). Severance. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 1250214998
• Additional required readings and media will be posted on Canvas. Students are welcome to use alternate editions.

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 attempt to 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(s): Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Presentation, short papers, participation.

Texts include: “The Yellow Wall-paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (ISBN: 0061148512), The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (ISBN: 0143135201), Lakewood by Megan Giddings (ISBN: 0062913204), The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Dylan Scholinkski (ISBN: 9781573226967). Other readings and films available on Canvas.

Texts will be available at: Norris.

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 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.

Texts include:

• Bible excerpts (can use online)
• The Last Days of Socrates(Penguin)
• Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare (Arden Edition)
• Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw (Penguin Edition)
• Billy Budd (TOR)
• The Case for Reparationsby Ta-Nehisi Coates (I will send you the online link)
• Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do by Michael Sandel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Course Description: This course begins not from the premise, necessarily, of an intellectual and political genealogy of black women. Though also not to the exclusion of this. But rather, this course is one that thinks black feminist—not black “women’s”—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, of our social world. To do this, we will be reading the work of people like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara, Jennifer Nash and Hortense Spillers, and more.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Paper/essay.

Texts include:

• Sula, Toni Morrison. ISBN: 978-0-307-38813-1.
• All other texts are articles and available online.

Texts will be available at: On Canvas.

Course Description: This course will take as fundamental that black vernacular—the dialects and slang and folk language and indeed robust language found in black communities—is a form of theory and theorizing. This theory, though different from the capital-T Theory of notable philosophers, will be shown to also possess intellectual sophistication, simply in, as Barbara Christian has said, “the form of the hieroglyph.” If we assume, rightly, that black people have always theorized, only in different and alternative ways, how might we examine the nuances of that theory? What does it look like? Where, and in what forms, can it be found?

“Black Vernacular as Theory” will traverse myriad discursive genres—from essays to poems to music to social media to personal lives. It will put, say, the conversations between black women in the kitchen on par with the intellectual status of literary theorists, dismantling implicit hierarchies between “high” and “low” theory. Students will read the work of Barbara Christian, Geneva Smitherman, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, and others; listen to the albums of Canibus and Big L; and reflect on community conversations from family reunions and barbershops. Ultimately, we will begin to rethink what “counts” as theory, and how we might come to understand various marginalized communities within black cultural production as doing substantive work in terms of knowledge production.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Paper/essay.

Texts include:

• Martin Heidegger Saved My Life, Grant Farred. ISBN: 9780816699360
• The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett. ISBN: 9780143111863
• All other texts are articles and available online

Texts will be available at: On Canvas

Course Description: As cultural critic Ariana Grande once said, “I want it, I got it, I want it, I got it!” Some hundred years before, Karl Marx warned about consumerism and alienation: “Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.” Taking the iconic makeover scene as its guiding trope, this course considers the preoccupation with gender, sex, and the performance of femininity that lies at the heart of modern consumer culture. How are racial and gender boundaries constructed and enforced through consumerism? Can one truly purchase empowerment? Are there, in fact, some ways in which consumerism offers key avenues for self-fashioning, and the subversion of heteronormative gender performance? While this course begins in 1725 with Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and a brief survey of antecedents, the majority of texts are literature, film, and pop culture ephemera from the 1990s through today. Texts include Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Bong Joon-ho’s best picture winning Parasite, and Greta Gerwig’s latest satire Barbie. Students will engage with Marxism, feminism, gender theory, and sociological thought to construct a modern pop canon of consumption. According to interest, students will also be expected to track a vlogger/influencer of their choice in a pop culture journal.

Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, pop culture journals, final project.

Texts Include: Agnes Varda, Cleo from 5-7 (1961), Amy Heckerling, Clueless (1995), Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep (2005), Sakaya Murata, Convenience Store Woman (2016), Bong Joon-ho, Parasite (2019), Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers (2019), Channing Godfrey People, Miss Juneteenth (2020), and Greta Gerwig, Barbie (2023).

Texts will be available at: Prep (ISBN 9780812972351) and Convenience Store Woman (ISBN 9780802129628) at Norris, all others on Canvas.

Course Description: Everywhere you look, queer sexuality and queer lives are in the news, and not always in a good way.  On the one hand, people of all kinds are finding the courage and the power to come out and live their authentic lives.  On the other, book bans targeting LGBTQIA+ titles have gained momentum.  Back on the first hand, we’re living in a time of unparalleled visibility for many LGBTQIA+ people.  On the other, gender-affirming care for trans people has come under attack in states across the country.  Things are complicated. 

We can’t solve these problems in a single quarter.  But what we will do in “Writing Gay Men’s Lives” is gain a historical understanding about how “we” came to be where “we” are today.  (As we will see, it’s a complicated and changing “we.”) What is the long background to these anti-gay and anti-trans initiatives?  How can a look back at history help us to understand the progress we have made?

We’ll consider writings from the last 150 years on a range of topics, including the HIV pandemic (AIDS as “a gay disease” and as the disease of gayness); the 1950’s and 1960’s (periods often seen, respectively, as those of normative heterosexuality, and of the sexual revolution); early twentieth-century characterizations of gender “inversion”; and nineteenth-century versions of male-male amorous attachments, especially in the writings of gay poet Walt Whitman.  We’ll study the terms in which “gay men” have written about themselves in diaries, novels, letters, poetry, and journals, as well as how they have been written about in various discourses of power—legal, medical, sociological, and theological—in the 130+ years since the word “homosexual” first appeared in English.  We’ll look at movies and TV to see the ways in which popular media has depicted gay people.  We’ll finish the quarter with an understanding of what is old and what is new about where LGBTQIA+ people are today.  And in that way we’ll be better able to formulate ways to bring about the necessary change.

Course Description: This course explores the ways recent American fiction has imagined the internet -- primarily the print novel but also short stories, electronic literature, and film. The course will proceed by reading one novel per week discussing the ways literature expresses, worries about, adapts, or pointedly distorts dimensions of online experience. One of the course's broader concerns will be the question of how literature approaches the internet's broad capacity to trouble what feels real or what even counts as reality. A consideration of genre will also be central to our collective inquiries since we will read text across an eclectic range of generic traditions: from science fiction and the gothic novel to queer fiction, the web comic and graphic novel, and electronic literature. Likely authors will include Allie Brosh, Nick Drnaso, Jarret Kobek, Xta Maya Murray, Lauren Oyler, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Juan Martinez, Jane Schoenbrun, and Jia Tolentino. Assignments will include analytical essays.

Teaching Methods: Discussion; short lecture.

Required Print Texts:

• Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half
• Dennis Cooper, The Sluts
• Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• Nick Drnaso, Sabrina
• Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
• Xta Maya Murray, Art Is Everything

Course Description: How have film reviews and criticism evolved in the U.S. as cinema has evolved? What do film reviewers want, and what criteria do they imply not only for the movies they critique but for the prose, the logic, and the details they enlist to convey that analysis? Setting aside stars and thumbs and rotten tomatoes, we will engage with the literary, rhetorical, and stylistic aspects of film reviews as pieces of writing with their own history. This means considering how strong reviews require the same foundations as other expository essays (structure, argument, economy, evidence) but with specific and highly diverse relations to their readers, their venues, and their points of view. As an opportunity to bridge the “critical” and “creative” facets of literary study, participants in this course will study and write about film reviews by a host of crucial figures (including Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Andrew Sarris, Jonas Mekas, Pauline Kael, James Baldwin, Robin Wood, bell hooks, Roger Ebert, Wesley Morris, Justin Chang, and Angelica Jade Bastién) and will also write and revise their own reviews in response to a wide range of required as well as self-appointed viewings. Neither the films nor the reviews will be taken lightly, and the course expects students who are committed and ambitious—but wit, style, and esteem for the “popular” are warmly welcomed.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussions, mini-lectures, occasional guests speakers or local site visits

Evaluation Method(s): Written reviews and essays, course participation

Texts include: Films up for collective discussion are likely to include Hollywood classics (Double Indemnity, The Misfits), midcentury prompts to influential reviews (Bonnie and Clyde, 2001, Lady Sings the Blues), cultural watersheds in late 90s and early 00s cinema (Pulp Fiction, The Fast and the Furious, Brokeback Mountain), and a sampling of recent films that dazzled or split reviewers. Students may also have an opportunity to visit a local film festival and test their skills against work most of the world hasn’t yet seen.

Texts will be available at: All readings and screenings will be available on Canvas or on the internet. Aside from possible film festival tickets, there are no required purchases.

Course Description: Within the complex media landscape of 21^st-century life, we have seen the resurgence of a classic 20^th-century form: the sitcom. During the first two years of the pandemic, for instance, many of us binged sitcoms from before we were born. For at least 5 years prior, Netflix released new comedy series with old-style camera angles, and reboots of long-gone shows abounded. What is it about the sitcom–that formulaic mainstay of the small screen–that keeps us coming back? How have experimentations with the form variously met or fervently side-stepped the cultural and political issues of their times? How might studying the sitcom help us understand narrative forms as diverse as the 19^th-century novel and a popular YouTube channel? In this class we will think seriously about sitcoms, taking up questions of seriality, comedy, and more along the way. Course readings will help us consider literary forebears and counterpoints as well as media history and theory, by authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Mateo Askariopour, Anne Washburn, Jason Mittell, Sianne Ngai, and Quinlan Miller. We will listen to a few radio shows and watch a wide array of sitcoms—from I Love Lucy to very recent experiments with the form.

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, beginning with the coining of the term in the 1920 play R.U.R. and moving to contemporary depictions from Blade Runner to Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. How do robots serve as mirrors reflecting our own concerns about our humanity? How do cultural depictions of robots as Others—both monstrous and salvific—meditate on questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality? 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(s): Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Presentation, midterm and final papers, participation.

Texts include: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (ISBN-13: 9780345404473), Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (ISBN: 9780593311295), Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott), Star Trek: The Next Generation (selected episodes), Ghost in the Shell (dir. Mamoru Oshii), Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe, and selected fiction by Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury (available on Canvas)

Texts will be available at: Norris.

Course Description: This course tracks some of the best—and most heart-rending—writing by novelist-poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. Analyzing the operation of sentiment in such works, we start with Thomas Hardy’s shattering novel The Woodlanders, a harbinger of contemporary forms of tragedy, before turning to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Sylvia Plath’s stunning The Bell Jar. In conjunction with our interest in affect, students will consider the range of masculinities and femininities that emerge from these texts, reading a selection of each author’s poems alongside their novels to examine the bending of gender across genres. Readings will be supplemented with film and TV adaptations, including The Handmaid’s Tale. We conclude with On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the fictional debut of twenty-first-century poet Ocean Vuong. Across these varied works, we will analyze the mutual refraction of tragic affect and gender in some of the most brilliant fiction of the last century.

Teaching method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation method: Essays and class participation.

Readings will include Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale; Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Hardy, The Woodlanders; Plath, The Bell Jar.

Books will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

Course Description: What won’t girls do for each other? Slumber parties—revenge plots—kissing practice—makeovers—hiding bodies—shoplifting—exorcisms! This class reclaims modern “woman’s fiction,” a broad and dismissive publishing term, to unpack the strong, consuming, and sometimes combative relationships between best friends on the page and screen. In these texts, queer desire erodes the borders of “just friends,” and emotion and attachment dissolve the boundaries of personhood between besties. How do strong female attachments subvert hetero-patriarchal norms through history? How do mimicry, identification, and desire blend together? To explore these questions of identity and attachment, we will begin with twentieth-century short fiction and film, including Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding (1962), and Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Later texts include cult classics Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997) and Jennifer’s Body (2009), Sarah Ahmed’s blog feministkilljoys, Brit Bennett’s historical novel The Vanishing Half (2020), and selected episodes from Insecure (2016-2021) and Yellowjackets (2021). Students will approach these texts through a critical background in the history of emotion and affect theory.

Teaching Methods: seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, presentation, short analytical paper, final project.

Texts Include: Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy (1926); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929); Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding (1962); Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire (1993); David Mirkin, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997); Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half (2020); selected episodes from Insecure (2016-2021) and Yellowjackets (2021).

Texts will be available at: Passing (ISBN 9780593437841) and The Vanishing Half (ISBN 9780525536963) at Norris, all others on Canvas.

Course Description: This course explores the life and work of five classical Hollywood Divas: Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Hattie McDaniel and argues for their ongoing cultural significance to American thinking about race, gender, embodiment, and class.  Students will choose an actress to work on and view at least five of her major pictures. To introduce us to the methodology and vocabulary of film analysis, we will read David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson’s compendious Film Art: An Introduction; we will also examine works of feminist film theory, like Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” star studies work by  Richard Dyer, James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, and classic and recent essays on individual films.  Students will write a 15-page research paper on the star and film of their choice, arguing for the ongoing cultural significance of their chosen figure and her oeuvre.

Mode of evaluation: oral presentation, annotated bibliography, and fifteen-page final paper.

Course Description: From video games and board games to game shows and sports, games saturate our culture and shape who we are. Some scholars have even argued that games are replacing novels and film as the dominant form of cultural expression. Others view games as a frivolous and unproductive activity, not worthy of serious study. In this seminar, we will explore some of the fundamental questions about the relationship between games and human culture. Why do people play games? What kinds of meanings, cultural values and political agendas do games encode? Do games function differently than other cultural objects, such as films, novels or works of art? What might it mean to think of all culture and works of art as arising from a “play impulse”? And if this is the case, why do we trivialize game-playing? Is the ubiquity of games in our lives a specifically modern phenomenon? Is the advent of the digital age producing a gamification of everyday life? To investigate these questions, we will read a wide range of critical writing about the importance of play and games in human culture, by philosophers, novelists, literary critics, social scientists, historians and game designers. The class will give you an opportunity to develop a 12-15 page research paper that studies one particular game or aspect of game culture in-depth. In the process, you will learn how to frame a significant research question; articulate a research proposal; navigate scholarly databases and archives; evaluate sources; and, produce an annotated bibliography.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar, discussion, workshop.

Evaluation Method(s):

• Topic Statement: 5%
• One paragraph proposal: 5%
• List of 15 sources developed in consultation with Charlotte Cubbage: 5%
• First five annotations: 5%
• Second five annotations: 5%
• State of the field analysis: 10%
• Paper abstract and outline: 10%
• 6 page draft and presentation: 15%
• Final research paper 12-15pp.: 30%
• Participation, peer review etc.: 10%

Texts include:

• Booth et al., Craft of Research (ISBN-10: 022623973X; ISBN-13: 978-0226239736)
  

Texts will be available at: Norris University Bookstore

Course Description: How do 20^th and 21^st century artists ––working in different media across the globe–– use Shakespeare’s drama as a resource for exploring 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 appropriated, adapted and reinvented Shakespeare’s plays to create new art forms. 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, musical concert, and film), with a focus on The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest and their afterlives: Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice (a play about Hindu, Muslim, and Latina/o cultures in modern LA), Aimé Cesaire’s A Tempest, the prison documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars, the film O, and the Māori Merchant of Venice). All assignments will be geared toward building the specific skills needed to undertake research in the humanities and to become a knowledge maker, with attention to designing a viable research project, identifying and treating historical and interpretative sources responsibly, and developing a sustained argument with strong evidence. Students may choose to investigate any afterlife of any Shakespearean play in their final research project; this afterlife might take the form of play, YA book, graphic novel, translation, ballet, puppet performance, film, or literary adaptation.

Required Texts:

• 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: 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: We can safely assume a familiarity with most aspects of craft. We know how point of view works, for example, or how revision can dramatically alter our sense of a short story or an essay--I mean, we know, sort of, and to a point, and beyond that point we all do our best. The purpose of this course is two-fold: to bolster our understanding of the building elements of prose, and to push those elements further by focusing on affect, on figuring out the various ways in which a kind of intentionality in navigating tone--when we draft and revise--can allow our creative work to flourish. While we’ll focus on “comic” and “horrific” approaches, the understanding is that most work is never fully working in just one mode, and we’ll figure out the advantages of each, and of modulating one into the other.

We’ll work through a considerable deal of material together, and we’ll help each other find ways to explore the possibilities of that material. But I’ll also ask each of you to bring in a short published piece that you love that we’ll all read; it should be a piece---a short story or a poem or an essay---that you feel best exploits a particular affect (something “funny” or “scary” or “sad”), and we’ll all read novels and story collections where this intent is front and center, including Mona Awad’s Bunny and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt.

Course Description:  Over the last eighty or so years, the proliferation of MFA programs and first-book contests has come to mean that more first books are being published now than ever. This development has generated both cultural and aesthetic questions—and a fair amount of skepticism—about the nature of first books and their inception. Surveying a sample of recent first books, in 2015, William Doreski, for example, argued that the first book (and indeed the poetry) of our era too often depends on “an autobiographical mode that has evolved from what was once called confessional poetry…[and] underscores a particular social allegiance,” wherein “identity is the issue,” rather than poetic experimentation and imaginative discovery.    

In this hybrid literature-creative writing course, we will study four first books by contemporary poets, exploring the ways in which these collections have announced themselves as “first books” and/or resisted the above cultural expectations of first books. Together we will consider these questions: What is the “concept” of the book (e.g., is it a “project” book or an arrangement of discrete poems?)? Which formal and aesthetic strategies are deployed in it, both at the poem-level and across the collection? To what end? And how might you bring those conceptual, aesthetic and formal strategies to your own first-book projects? Deep and engaged close reading will be at the center of our discussions. In all cases, the poets will have gone on to publish at least a second book. In alternate weeks, students will present an excerpt of the poet’s second (or later) book to the class, focusing on the ways in which that book serves as a departure from and/or an extension of the first. After each presentation, we will have a class visit from the poet. 

Weekly assignments will include critical responses to each of the books, including close-readings of individual poems, presentations, and the drafting of original poetry (or in another genre), using the tools provided by the collections we read. The final project will consist of original creative work, accompanied by a critical statement about your book project, informed by your study of the four first books we will read together.

Teaching Methods: A mixture of discussion of assigned reading and presentations. 

Evaluation Methods:

• Written critical responses to readings/poem assignments – 20%
• Ability to Critique/Class Participation – 20%
• Presentations – 20%
• Final Portfolio: Poems (15 pages), critical statement (5-7 pages) – 40%
• (Poems/creative work – 20%)
• (Critical essay to accompany creative work – 20%)

Texts may include: Catherine Barnett, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced; Chen Chen, When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities; Eduardo Corral, Slow Lightning; Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus; Richard Siken, Crush

Note: While this course is designed for poets, organized around first books of poetry, creative writers of other genres are welcome to attend. For those students, modified assignments will be discussed and determined at the beginning of and throughout the quarter.

Course Description: This course will prepare students for a successful career in graduate studies. Surveying both foundational and cutting-edge methods and theories in literary studies, this course asks students to grapple with the key questions and debates at play in the field(s) and discipline. The course begins with an inquiry into the history of the institution, the field(s) of literary studies, broadly conceived, and the questions of center and periphery that remain central to our work. We will then shift to an investigation of contemporary keywords guiding literary studies in the present.

Foregrounding the disorienting effects of the literary, the course begins by examining the history of the discipline and its institutions, including shifting definitions of our objects of study; the histories of exclusion and inclusion that accompany these shifts; and, issues of canonicity, especially as they relate to empire building both within and outside the academy. Then, we will explore the methods of literary critique, thinking about what is at stake in the objects we study and the ways we choose to read them. Finally, we will engage with challenges to the traditional organizing principles of our field, including its archives, geographies, periodization, theoretical interventions, and political stakes. In addition to our seminar session, we will have sessions that address the professional stakes of postgraduate life, including workshops in pedagogy, publishing, and navigating graduate studies.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method(s): Weekly assignments, presentation, papers.

Texts include:

• Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark,
• Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living
• Erica R. Edwards, “The Other Side of Terror”
• Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness
• Yogita Goyal, Runaway Genres
• Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms
• Steven Swarbrick, The Environmental Unconscious
• Course Reader

Course Description: From the fifteenth-century glossators to twenty-first century critics, readers of the Canterbury Tales have sought to interpret and contain Chaucer’s constantly shifting, experimental poem. The text poses numerous interpretative puzzles—the myriad objects of the poem’s irony, the cultural politics of its author, the “identities” of its characters, and the demographics and ideologies of its intended audiences, to name a few—puzzles that have been “solved” in strikingly different ways at different historical moments. This course takes as its subject the Canterbury Tales and its reception history, exploring of both the poem’s multiple interpretative contexts and the hermeneutic conundrums it poses to them. As we read the Tales, we will consider the narratives (and narrative conventions) that Chaucer translates and transforms and the contemporary voices with whom he is in dialogue—both in the fourteenth century and the twenty-first. We will investigate the ways in which the tales circulated both individually and as a collection (which tales were the most popular? how and by whom were they published? with which other texts did they travel?) and analyze the various paratexts that accompanied them (glosses, prologues, illustrations, and “spurious” links and tales). Alongside this early publication context, we will explore current conversations in Chaucer criticism and the scholarly history and contemporary publics debates to which it responds. Analyzing the Tales through a wide array of methodological lenses, we will use Chaucer’s experimental poem as methodological and interpretative testing ground, placing its multivalent narratives in dialogue with feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies, animal studies, and the Global Middle Ages, in addition to new and old materialities and historicisms. Seminar members are encouraged to treat the course as an interpretative lab, bringing their own methodological interests and questions to bear on the Tales in both seminar discussion and their final projects.

Course Description: A Tudor idiom frames the now commonplace phrase, “the body politic.” What mythographies, theologies, theories, and ideologies built this conception of socio-political organization? While social contract theory would soon reach new predominance (ie with Thomas Hobbes in the 17thC and rising 18thC claims about the foundational role of consent to government), what models preceded it? What claims and values justified the apparent organicism of a faith or reliance on the human body as an allegory for political authority? How do these approaches manage qualities like gender, age, or illness that might trouble the allegory?

This seminar will consider some key texts in early English political thought, beginning with the Tudor court case from which the phrase “the body politic” is mainly cited, and proceeding then to materials from the unsettling events of the English Reformation that address the question of obedience to the secular power (ie Thomas More’s Utopia, William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, Thomas Cranmer’s homilies from the first decade of the English church) and to anatomical and medical materials (like Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helthe and Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia). From this groundwork, we will move on consider early modern English debates about royal authority, including the ideological disarray triggered by the historical facts of a female monarch and of rebellion as treason (ie John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, selected speeches given by Elizabeth I, James I’s The Law of Free Monarchy, and John Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates). To explore these dynamics in the context of theater (then the largest assemblages of people into “bodies”), the seminar will delve into several Shakespeare plays (from among Henry IV 1&2, Richard II, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and most particularly Measure for Measure) to assess the proposition that Shakespeare — among his other forms of attention — was also a political theorist.

Course Description: This seminar will reexamine two commonplaces in the history of the British novel:  that early prose narrative was driven by the rise of empiricism and observational science; and that Restoration and eighteenth-century prose forms led straight to the representational mode known as realism.  We begin the seminar by querying accounts of the rise of the New Science based on its strict privileging of sensory data and refusal of imperceptible or “occult” causes.  Along with alternative accounts of embodied artisanal knowledge and micromatter, we will also ponder environmental determinism (which antedates the concept of biological race) and the structuring mandates of mercantile capitalism, extraction, and exploitation.  The seminar will confront the constitutive repression of the history of the slave trade in the long eighteenth-century archive, which will enable us critically to appraise dominant conceptions of the eighteenth-century “real” and attune us to speculative and/ or recuperative interventions in that reality’s textual consolidation through the present day.  We will read prose narratives to ponder the strategies through which they claim to represent the real, with special attention to empirical perception and its limits.  Are these texts’ representational, formal, and political claims based solely on phenomenal experience, plenitude of naturalistic detail, or verisimilitude?  Can we locate other, even anti-realist modes through which eighteenth-century prose forms transmit meaning?

Primary texts include (list subject to revision):  Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665); Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667); Nicole Aljoe, Early Caribbean Digital Archive; [anonymous,] The London Jilt (1683); [anonymous,] Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1684); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688); William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1721) and defense of the Royal African Company monopoly; Eliza Haywood, The Adventures of Eovaai (1736); [anonymous,] The Woman of Colour (1808); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814).

Scholars and theorists include (list subject to revision):  Nicole Aljoe; Srinivas Aravamudan; Franz Fanon; Simon Gikandi; Lynn Festa; Saidiya Hartman; Fredric Jameson; Bruno Latour; Georg Lukács; Michael McKeon; Edward Said; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer; Pamela H. Smith; Hortense Spillers; Ian Watt; Roxann Wheeler.

Course Description: This course serves as an introduction to the "greater romantic lyric," as well as an abbreviated survey of lyric theory. While tracking the sequence and dialogue of a handful of key critical paradigms from the last half century (and more), we will investigate how lyric poetry situates its reader in a universe of discourse through rhetorical address, affective cues, and social disposition. The "environments" in question do connote familiar romantic scholarship on "nature poetry," and the relations of language to nature; but we’ll be thinking about “nature” here bearing in mind that for the romantics and their newer interlocutors, natural “environments” implicate social space and psychic geographies as well. Relevant critical work will be drawn from romantic studies, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminist standpoint theory, affect studies, critical geography, and linguistic anthropology. Alongside the romantics, we’ll read a handful of works by living poets that distinctively (and sometimes self-consciously) reconfigure conventions for lyric space and scenes of address laid down in the romantic era. Teaching Method: Brief lectures, seminar discussion.

Poetry includes readings by Wheatley, Coleridge, Robinson, Wordsworth, Clare, Smith, Barbauld, Keats, Hemans, Shelley, Yearsley. Theory and criticism includes readings by G. W. F. Hegel, J. S. Mill, Frantz Fanon, Roman Jakobson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Williams, V. N. Voloshinov, Denise Riley, Lauren Berlant, Stanley Cavell, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Doreen Massey, Bakary Diaby, Susan Stewart, Nate Mackey, Camille Dungy, Geoffrey Hartman, Barbara Johnson, William Wimsatt, Rei Terada, Paul de Man, Virginia Jackson, M Ty.

Required Texts (please note, this list is tentative for now):

• Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (Tin House 2017; ISBN 1941040632)
• Maureen McLane, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes (FSG 2016; ISBN 0374537054)
• Erica Hunt, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts (selva oscura 2019; ISBN 0990945332)
• Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts 2016; ISBN 0990945332)

Course Description: This course takes its point of departure from a careful reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s massive study of Nazi totalitarianism and its origins in anti-Semitism and European imperialism.  For the first three weeks of the class, we will read the three sections of the Origins along with a selection of Arendt’s contemporaneous writings on issues at the heart of her study: wide-scale statelessness and forced migration; racism and imperial expansion; totalitarian propaganda and the “holes of oblivion.”  Arendt recognized that the Origins posed a question that remained unanswered in that work: faced with the manufacture of living corpses, what preserves our humanity and redeems our actions?  Arendt’s next major work, The Human Condition, thus moves toward an analysis of the conditions and modes of human activity: from the biological life process, to the world-creating capacity of homo faber, to the urgency and fragility of human action.  As we read The Human Condition, which seeks to answer the question posed by the Origins by accounting for what European philosophy has generally failed to analyze with sufficient clarity—namely, the dimensions of the “active life”—we examine Arendt’s attempt in the same period to review and, in her own way, deconstruct the concepts of thinking around which the ideal of a “contemplative life” concretized.  This prepares us for a reading in the final weeks of the seminar of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where Arendt re-conceptualizes evil as a certain implementation of systematic thoughtlessness.   As we examine these three major works, each of which is a reflection on the relation between language and politics, we will continually attend to the varying ways in which Arendt sought to understand where poetry stands in relation to human “conditionality,” and we will use her often-neglected suggestions in this regard to develop an Arendtian poetics. 

Required texts:

• Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (any edition)
• Arendt, The Human Condition (any edition)
• Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (any edition)
• Additional texts available on Canvas

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: This seminar surveys literary experiments in contemporary Ethnic American poetry and narrative that expand notions of what constitutes “ethnic literature,” a category historically denigrated as insufficiently imaginative or aesthetically minded. In addition to highlighting the richness and complexity of these literary traditions, our goal in this course is to track evolving referents for racial formation in a “postracial” era defined by the gap between ostensible cultural tolerance and the persistence of structural inequality. Responding to the contradictions of racial representation, scholars of African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American literatures have redoubled critical engagement with form, genre, and aesthetics to expand our understanding of race’s imbrications with embodiment, aesthetic judgment, cultural belonging, and the constitution of histories and futures. With particular emphasis on familiarizing students with foundational texts of Ethnic American Literature, the class will pressure critical terms and paradigms such as representation, racial formation, genre & form, voice & lyric, and history. Participants will develop skills of close reading for racial formation as a formal feature of textual composition as well as gain proficiency with central and emergent debates within Ethnic American literary studies regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do experimental texts by writers of color destabilize conventional modes of understanding ethnic and racial representation? What tensions and resonances arise when critical race and ethnic studies meet theories of the avant-garde? And to what extent do these literary experiments suggest that race itself can be understood as a cultural form or generic object?

Required Texts

• Texts: Assigned primary texts will likely include texts such as Mat Johnson’s Pym, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, Ling Ma’s Severance, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, Theresa Hak Yung Cha’s Dictee, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Myung Mi Kim’s Commons, Craig Santos Perez’s Habitat Threshold, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, among others. Assigned scholarship will likely include work by Gloria Anzaldúa, Kandice Chuh, Ralph Rodriguez, Ramón Saldívar, Stephen Sohn, Min Hyoung Song, Dorothy Wang and others.
• Primary texts will be available at Norris Bookstore. All course readings besides the primary texts will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: This course examines the interface of ecology and literary form in literatures of the global south within the larger contexts of post-1945 global literary production. These literatures are rarely examined from either ecocritical or stylistic/narratological perspectives. Yet legacies of and globalization continue to alter local environments, and contemporary literary artists have used unique formal techniques to capture these changes and activate political consciousness toward ecological conservation. As we discuss what constitutes the “contemporary” in literature today from thematic and stylistic perspectives, we will particularly examine the legacies of modernism and post-modernism in literatures of the present that thematize ecologies of the global south and the impact of climate crisis on non-Western societies. The class will also discuss the perils and thrills of studying texts and themes that might be considered too contemporary and non-canonical. What are the best methodologies of studying and teaching these texts, most of which are comparatively not well known? We will study and comment on the various techniques individual contemporary texts (or sets of such texts) use to represent contemporary ethical and political concerns, including their allusion to older texts. We will also discuss the invocation of ecological metaphors in the various texts of postcolonial theory (e.g., the comparison of the preservation of indigenous languages and cultures with conservation of biodiversity). The course’s primary premise is that formalist analysis of texts (ala Robert Langhaum) is where all good criticism begins, not where it ends. While avoiding the shortfalls of purely functionalist/instrumentalist approaches to literature that drive much of criticism of non-Western literatures about the environment by attending to the literary techniques that artists use, we will discuss the interventionist imperatives in contemporary writing and criticism about the environment and climate crisis.

Co-taught by Kelly Wisecup (English/CNAIR) and Rose Miron (Director, D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Newberry Library and CNAIR)

Course Description: This interdisciplinary, co-taught course introduces students to the texts, theories, and methods of Indigenous archives, while considering and practicing what it means to do interdisciplinary, publicly- and community-engaged humanities scholarship.  We begin with these questions: how do writers, communities, scholars, and others use Indigenous archival materials?  What are the genres, practices, and ethics necessary to work in and create scholarship from archives that contain Indigenous materials?  

We are especially excited to model collaboration in the classroom and the archives and to introduce students to collaborative public humanities research. We welcome students working in a range of disciplines and with broad interests in archival theory and practice and in the public humanities (prior knowledge of Indigenous studies is helpful but not required; we will provide that training).  Students will obtain hands-on experience with archival methods and have the opportunity to design their own archival final projects, and we welcome students interested in integrating archival research and practice into performance, fiction/nonfiction/poetry, historical research, and more.

 The course readings and conversations foreground Native American & Indigenous Studies methods for archival research in literary studies, American studies, and history (among other fields). We will pair readings of NAIS scholarship with Indigenous texts, material culture objects, and archives created across several centuries, in order to understand the history of Indigenous archival creation, their critiques, uses, and representations in a range of media.  We will also investigate the various public humanities pathways and projects possible for scholars trained in archival methods, with opportunities for students to gain skills in archivally-based projects. These may include digital projects, museums, film, walking tours, workshops, podcasts, and community programming.

 The course will include regular hands-on work in archives and with archival materials located in Chicago, designed to help students develop their own archival practice. By the end of the course, students should be able to apply NAIS methods and perspectives to a primary text and its contexts; should be able to utilize public humanities best practices and critical perspectives in a range of contexts; and should be able to identify and implement core elements of community engaged research. 

Teaching Method(s): Discussion; collaborative project; public humanities scholarship with local archives.

Evaluation Method(s): Discussion; collaborative project; public humanities scholarship with local archives.

Readings in NAIS methods; Indigenous archival theory; and public humanities to include:

• Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, ed. Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien (New York: Routledge, 2017)
• Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History”
• Jennifer O’Neal, “The Right to Know: Decolonizing Native American Archives”
• Tiya Miles, House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story
• Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians

Texts will be available at: The University bookstore. If you’d like to purchase the book from a Native-owned or independent bookstore, see Louise Erdrich’s store Birchbark Books, which will ship books (be sure to order well in advance): https://birchbarkbooks.com/ or for Evanston/Chicago independent bookstores, check out Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston); Women and Children First (Andersonville); and Unabridged (Lakeview).

Course Description: This seminar examines the late twentieth- and twenty-first century emergence and saturation of contemporary culture by personalized electronic and computational technologies, primarily in the Anglophone West. The increasing cultural prominence of portable devices such as the Sony Walkman and the newly domestic character of "personal" computing -- from the Apple Macintosh to laptops to smartphones and networked applications -- through Michel Foucault's late career idea of "techniques of the self." For Foucault, such practices "permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." While Foucault had a much longer historical perspective in mind, we will consider the novel prominence of technologies of the self and selfhood within the context of neoliberalism where the task of entrepreneurial self-management comes to define the ideology of personhood. Central to our inquiry, then, will be not only the literal technologies of the historical present but also the ways in which media technologies as well as aesthetics newly conjugate subject and environment in terms of a felt pressure to manage that relation. Notions of ambience and the ambient will be central to our investigations as well as the role of technological aesthetics in providing not only beauty or entertainment but rather moment-to-moment tactics of mood management. Topics may include ambient music, ASMR, self-care, and habit. Aesthetic texts may include works by Brian Eno, Tan Lin, Claudia Rankine, and Tsai Ming-Ling. Scholarly texts may include work by Nikolas Rose, Ian Hacking, Alan Liu, John Cheney-Lippold, Lauren Berlant, Paul Preciado, Hannah Zeavin, Scott Richmond, Paul Roquet, Melissa Gregg, Mack Hagood, and others. Students will also be required to attend the symposium on Lauren Berlant to be held in late October.

Required Print Texts: 

• Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People 
• Heike Geissler, Seasonal Associate 
• Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt 
• Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely 
• Course Reader

Course Description: “Queer theory” and “New Queer Cinema” were two neologisms born of the same early-1990s moment in Anglophone academia and public film culture. Both saw themselves as extending but also complicating the intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological parameters of prior formations like “gay and lesbian studies” or “LGBT film.” These new and spreading discourses stoked each other's productive advances, as scholars developed new axioms by reference to the movies, and filmmakers rooted styles and images in changing notions of gender performativity and counter-historiography. Still, queer theory and queer cinema faced similar skepticisms: did their ornate language and conceptual novelty endow dissident sexualities with newfound political and cultural stature, or did they retreat too far from popular accessibility and ongoing public emergencies? Was the lack of fixed definitions, communal appeals, uniting goals, or shared aesthetic practices a boon or a harm in sustaining a long-term movement of art, action, or thought? And how many thinkers, writers, artists, scholars, and activists were erased or marginalized by a “queer turn” that purported to elevate them?

This class honors but also decenters this peak period in the reclaiming of “queer.” We will recover scholarly and cinematic trends that laid fertile grounds for that work and will also track subsequent trajectories and debates around “queer” in the way we perform readings, perceive bodies, record histories, spin narratives, form alliances, enter archives, and orient ourselves in space and time. Diversities of race, gender identity, nation, class, and political project will inflect our understandings of “queer” and even challenge the presumed primacy of sexuality as its key referent. Meanwhile, participants will develop skills of close-reading films and engage nimbly with the overarching claims but also the nuances, anomalies, and paradoxes in the scholarship we read.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar discussion

Evaluation Method(s): Practice exercises in short academic genres (the conference proposal, the abstract, the peer review of a journal article) as well as a final paper or project

Texts include: Readings are likely to include work by Scott Bravmann, Cathy Cohen, Teresa de Lauretis, Lee Edelman, David Eng, Elizabeth Freeman, Richard Fung, Rosalind Galt, Lindsey Green-Simms, Jack Halberstam, Michael Hames-García, Cáel Keegan, Kara Keeling, Keguro Macharia, José Esteban Muñoz, Jasbir Puar, B. Ruby Rich, Gayle Rubin, Vito Russo, Gayle Salomon, Karl Schoonover, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and C. Riley Snorton

Texts will be available at: All readings and screenings will be available on Canvas, with the possible exception of films that can be streamed on major public sites

Course Description: This course aims to further the development of a student’s craft in the writing of poetry with a focus on poems that seek to engage and document public histories, allowing us to place the explorations of our own experiences within a larger historical context. Through reading several collections of poetry and essays on poetry and historical memory, we will explore the intersections and rifts between larger histories (the stuff of cultural or public memory) and smaller, often subjugated or lost histories, and personal histories—as well as the gaps in these histories, the willed forgetting and cultural amnesia often surrounding them. We will discuss and analyze the ways in which some poets have used history in their work as well as the particular formal strategies of their poems, conduct research for writing new poems, define strategies for using information gathered from our research, and produce portfolios of poems that engage public history and/or the intersections between public and personal history. Selected essays on poetry and history—as well as a few collections of poems—will serve as texts for the course.

Course Description: The goal of this workshop is twofold: (1) to help ourselves and our peers with work we're currently engaged in and (2) to refresh our practice. It’s easy to fall into a rut, to think we’re only capable of working in certain modes, and it’s not true. We can do a lot more. We’ll work through a series of exercises to generate material drawn from two seemingly disparate sources: the fantastical and our own lives. We will, of course, also discuss and help each other work through the material we're submitting; be prepared to read and annotate closely. But we’ll also come out with fresh stories as well as new approaches to our creative output, and we’ll find constructive and supportive ways to sustain ourselves and our literary community. Writing can be hard, it can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to be---not all the time, at least---and there is real joy involved. Let’s get back to that joy.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: The focus of my nonfiction workshop is Manuscript Development. We will be looking at each colleague's current manuscript, whether it is all In pieces or a completed first draft. We will read together - carefully - to consider issues of the book as a whole alongside line readings. 

Topics include Structural Questions:How does the work unfold? Are tropes dynamic? Is the structure consequential + Content Questions: What is the piece saying? What are the revelations of the work? What is this book grappling with?

Class discussion will be organized to ensure that everyone has time and space to share cohered and succinct ideas.

Course Description: Research constitutes the corazón, or heart, of almost every book of creative nonfiction. This is true even with memoirs for which writers often trek into the archives of family photographs, forgotten emails, and Google Maps. How then do we create a research plan for a creative project? How do we begin research when we don’t know yet precisely what we are writing? How do we manage the linear process often required for research and the much more circular journey of writing? Once we have started on our research, how and when do we know it’s time to bring it to a close?

We will consider these questions as we discuss your creative work during workshop and also as we read contemporary nonfiction texts. Very short writing assignments called “Sketches” will help you to generate the start of new works of nonfiction, and the final assignment for this course will give you flexibility with your creative work.

Course Description: The aim of this course is to offer PhD students an open and supportive community for discussing professionalization issues of all kinds. It is not required, and it does not satisfy any graduation requirements. It is also intentionally designed to be low stress. Grading will be P/NP, there will be little-to-no homework, and students will need to attend only 50% of class sessions to pass the course. Some class meetings will focus on pre-selected topics such as “Putting Together a Qualifying Exam/Prospectus/Dissertation Committee,” “Strategizing Conference Presentations and Publications,” “Navigating Difficult Relationships,” and “Planning Ahead for Post-Graduation Employment.” Others will be on topics of students’ choosing, or open Q&As (with questions submitted anonymously if that makes students more comfortable). I promise to be as straightforward and transparent as possible.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: Guides advanced students toward the development of a book-length, publication-ready manuscript of poetry, prose, or creative nonfiction.