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.

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: 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: TBA

Course Description:

“Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense.  What would happen next?  The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him.” 

—E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Where does writing come from? By looking at examples of literature that were initially meant to be spoken aloud, we will explore how they were placed, elegantly and not, onto the page.  How does this happen?  The bardic boom, the pulpit pitch, the mad futurist with a megaphone—so many of the great works of literature were first delivered orally, then spelled out and called literature.  Speeches, psalms, slams, rants, anecdotes, manifestos, declarations, sermons, lectures, yarns, ballads, brags, jeremiads, prayers, incendiary instructions for the coming revolution—we’ll investigate as many as we can of these in the readings, considering, as writers, how we can get performative narratives of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from the stage to the page.  We will discuss, too, the instructive aspect of art and literature, the difference between voice and style, and how oral culture differs from written culture, with a serious take on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy.  We will consider formal prosody, rhetoric, and poetic forms, and original and amusing methods inventive writers come up with to interpret the sound of speech.   Readings may include sermons by John Donne, Toni Morrison, and Herman Melville; prayers and suras from Adam Zagejewski and the Koran, Brags from Beowulf, Beastie Boys, Sharon Olds, and Shmuel HaNagid, anecdotes from Ivan Turgenev, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Olga Tokarczuk, murder ballads from Cole Porter and Dolly Parton, speeches and declarations from Susan B Anthony and Frederick Douglass, and jeremiads by Jamaica Kincaid, Valerie Solanis, and Joy Williams.

While writing your own fictions (not necessarily from the oral tradition), we will discuss the instructive aspect of art and literature, the difference between style and voice, how delivery by great orators can change the meaning of the material, and how the speech on the page has its own specific power that makes it, in its way, a second, separate work of literature.

Teaching Method      Reading, lecture, discussion, workshop.

Evaluation:

• 4 short creative writing projects in fiction, prompts as given
• 1 long creative writing project in fiction
• 1 optional revision of one of the 4 projects for revised grade
• 2 short papers (2-3 pages), called annotations

Course Requirements:

1. Creative work (50%)
2. Short Papers (30%)
3. Class participation (20%)

Course Description: Students write and produce multiple prose and poetic works, layering spoken word with evocative sonic textures, tones, instrumentation and silence. This course places equal emphasis on literary quality, vocal performance and production value. We act as writers, performers, producers as we listen deeply into contemporary radio practice. We also encourage one another to experiment, to try weird ideas, to take risks. We will investigate what it means to write for the ear (as opposed to the page or screen), and we will learn to connect with the listener. In the process of producing multiple audio works, we will acquire numerous audio production skills. We will write frequently, speak frequently and in varied styles. We will use field mics and studio mics as we harness our unique voices and the voices of others. We will also compute a fair bit as we learn to use audio editing software to produce polished, multilayered soundscapes. By winter’s end, we will be more practiced writers, more accomplished multimedia performers and producers, possess a greater number of technological skills and a greater range of artistic expression.

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: In the era of Snapchat and TikTok, epic has entered the urban dictionary.  As the genre of what Milton called “heroic song,” though, epic predates even the invention of writing, and is perhaps the oldest form of poetic production.  What has allowed such epic success?  The persistence of epic through cultural and linguistic change is one of the form’s central themes: how can words heroically uttered and deeds heroically dared be passed on from one lifetime to those that follow?  How are they transformed?  What does it mean to take up as one’s own something that has been passed down from a culture no longer present?  Such questions become even more pressing in moments when one culture encounters another and in its new context must confront what to retain, what to adopt, and what to invent.  In this course we will consider how epic narrative projects, recalls, and reworks its history as tradition.  Benefitting from several recent translations of epic poems by women, we will consider the role of gender in epic.  Finally, we will look at contemporary epics that push back against the histories that have often been associated with the genre and find new themes in the form.

Texts:  Homer, Iliad (transl. Wilson); Vergil, Aeneid (transl. Bartsch); Beowulf (transl. Headley); Milton, Paradise Lost; Atwood, The Penelopiad; Wolcott, Omeros; as well as selections from other epic poems

Objectives: Students will become acquainted with the principal formal features of the genre of epic through the study of a number of representative works in the genre.  In addition they will be introduced to some theories of epic, both current and historical.  They will learn something of the genre’s history of self-reflection, cultural contexts within which epic appears, and some of the cultural uses to which epic has been set.  They will consider how epic differs from two other long narrative forms, novel and romance.  Using these materials, they will sharpen critical argumentation skills orally and in writing.

Course Description: Following Beyoncé’s iconic call to action, this course takes a look at a number of “single ladies” - and a few who managed to “put a ring on it” - in literature, film and TV from the last two hundred years. Together, we will investigate archetypal figures of femininity, from the spinster to the madwoman to today’s “girlboss.”  How do our literary and popular media construct and deconstruct these categories at different moments in history? Pairing feminist theory with primary texts, we’ll ask: how does marriage function to resolve class tensions? How does it construct and enforce constructions of race and gender? And how, according to these texts, can women find social, emotional and financial independence? Texts may include selections from Jane Eyre, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, A Room of One’s Own, Conversations with Friends, Sex and the City, and The Bachelor.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion, short lectures

Evaluation Method: Participation, analytical essays and a final project

Texts including ISBNs: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (ISBN 9780141441146), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole (ISBN 0140439021),  A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf ( ISBN 0156787334), Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (ISBN 0156787334), Bridget Jones's Diary dir. Sharon Maguire (2001), selections from Sex and the City created by Darren Star (1998-2004) and The Bachelor created by Mike Fleiss (2002-2024)

Texts will be available at: Required novels at Norris Bookstore. Other excerpts provided via Canvas.

Course Description: In 2016, Taylor Swift’s highly publicized feud with Kanye West and the Kardashians peaked with the release of Kanye’s song, “Famous,” which features a derogatory reference to the pop artist. In response to Taylor’s outrage, Kim Kardashian released a recorded phone call between Taylor and Kanye in which she seemed to approve the controversial lyric, and called Taylor a “snake.” This suggestion of Taylor’s deceit spread quickly through public opinion, and #TaylorSwiftisaSnake went viral across social media platforms. What does it mean to call a woman a snake? What does such a comparison seek to express about someone’s intentions, or even their ethics? And what happens when women accused of sn(e)akiness lean into rather than away from the comparison? We will consider these questions in a winding investigation of snakey women through the ages and across a variety of narrative forms. From the bond between Eve and a serpent in the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace to the bond between dragon-rider Rhaenyra Targaryen and her dragon (HBO series, “House of the Dragon”), from Melusine, a medieval folkloric figure cursed with the body of a serpent from the waist down, to Medusa, the monstrous snake-haired woman of Greek mythology, this class will examine how premodern and modern representations of serpentine femininity treat issues of gender and power. 

Texts may include: Excerpts from the Old Testament; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Melusine; the HBO series “Game of Thrones”; and “House of the Dragon”; as well as selections from medieval illuminated manuscripts and social media.

Course Description: Is the American dream only a white dream, even a fantasy? Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning 2017 horror film Get Out, in which a white liberal family systematically transplants the brains of their aging family members into the bodies of Black people, satirizes the postracial fantasy of colorblindness. White wealth and flourishing (and eternal youth) are based on a horrifying techno-fix: the exploitation and extraction of Black life, the production of a living nightmare. Peele’s film raises unsettling questions about the American conception of race—questions with deep histories—which this class aims to explore: How has race been mobilized as a structure of white supremacist social control? What has racialization meant for those being racialized? Centralizing the work of Black and Indigenous thinkers, our goal will be to interrogate what race has meant in American culture over time. We will read a selection of excerpts and short texts from the 18^th and 19^th centuries to learn about the development of “race science” as a logic underpinning violently imposed social hierarchies. In tandem with this material, we will analyze Peele’s film and two contemporary novels with historical roots: Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), the story of a young Black man in a “reform school” in 1960s Florida, and Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars (2024), which traces the experience of two Indigenous boys at the Carlisle Indian School, an institution designed to destroy Native culture. In doing so, we will aim to investigate the question: What are our contemporary inheritances of these histories?

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, Agbagi, Donne, Hughes, Sidney, Keats, McKay, Rosetti, Yeats, and Eliot.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): class attendance and participation required; two papers, short assignments, and discussion board posts.

Texts include: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 6^th edition, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (ISBN: 978-0393679021, approximate cost: $80 new, 45-50 used, $25 rental); students may also use The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5^th edition, (ISBN: 978-0393979206), approximate cost: ~$10 used.  

Text will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore.

Course Description: This course explores the way literary writers have imagined “energy” in all its manifestations from the life force that moves human and animal bodies and the motive power derived from fossil fuels to human attributes like efficiency and productivity. We will consider how classical thinkers like Aristotle and Epicurus, early Modern ones like Cavendish and Shakespeare, and modern ones ranging from Charles Dickens to productivity vloggers on Youtube use “energy” as a metaphor to name a variety of dynamics, including those of race, gender, class, empire, nature, and god. Reading literary texts alongside a social history of science, we’ll ask: how does the science of energy make its way through literature into our imaginations about work? Through what literary maneuvers and historical conditions have we come to imagine work and productivity as ultimately good? What political horizons emerge when we argue that writing about energy negotiates the complex acts of doing work, forcing work, shirking work, and refusing to work?

Teaching Method: Discussion.

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 escapist leisure but as social thought expressed in new representational modes.  We will pay special attention to the role of transoceanic travel, exploitation, and mercantile capitalist trade in the development of English literary forms.  At a time of unprecedented encounters with other peoples and places, how did English literary forms represent—and contest—these new realities?  

Required Texts 

• 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
• 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

Course Description: A human “monster,” stitched together out of disparate body parts. An urban community of Indigenous peoples, all with different experiences and stories. A borderland, bisected by checkpoints and border crossings. This course examines works of fiction that engage with—and embody--questions of pieces, fragments, and wholes in order to question what makes a human, a family, and a community. Along the way, we’ll encounter contested frontiers, stories that are at once simple and tangled, and characters who feel monstrous and yet somehow whole.

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

Evaluation Method:  2 papers, 1 exam, postings and class participation.

Texts include:

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin Classics, 2004), ISBN 9780141439471.
• Justin Torres, We The Animals (2012), ISBN 9780547844190.
• Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009), ISBN 9781908276421.
• Tommy Orange, There There (Vintage), ISBN 9780525436140.
• Selections from:  Coco (Pixar); Popol Vuh (The Sacred Book of the Maya K’iche’); Peter Pan.

Course Description: Film noir! the musical! melodrama or the "woman's film"! the western! the screwball comedy! This course surveys the most powerful genres of Hollywood cinema's "classical" era, the period of studio production from the 1910s to about 1960. Focusing on the sound era this course introduces students to the study of Hollywood cinema as a mode of industrial cultural production at the dynamic intersection of art and mass culture. Our approach will be to study one film per week with an emphasis on formal analysis supplemented by readings from film theory and history. Films will likely include The Wizard of Oz (1939), Sullivan's Travels (1941), Now, Voyager (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Singin' in the Rain (1952), among others. Readings may include writings by Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, Altman, Cavell, L. Williams, and others. Assignments will include short papers, a video editing exercise (no expertise required), and a final project.

Teaching Methods: Lecture & discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Short writing assignments.

Course Description: TV shows like The Mandalorian, House of the Dragon, and The Boys have sought to portray great empires: the Galactic Empire, Targaryen House, and Vought International. All-powerful, authoritarian kingdoms and state and/or corporate powers abound in the many genres of speculative fiction—from fantasy to space western, from superhero to dystopian. This class is an exploration of how empires are conceived and constructed and what role race plays in their creation.  Working with both contemporary popular media and the literary works of writers of color, we’ll ask: How are empires built? How do they construct (and deconstruct) the meanings of race and gender? And how do they, to follow Luthen Rael from the Star War’s series Andor, breed rebellion? Texts and media may include selections from Helena María Viramontes’ The Moths, Vanessa Angélica Villareal’s Magical/ Realism, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Fernando A. Flores’ Tears of the Trufflepig, The Mandalorian, Andor, House of the Dragon, and The Boys.

Course Description: This course is meant to familiarize you with the most influential text in Western culture from a literary perspective. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres in the Bible—primeval myth, epic, lyric poetry, prophecy, proto-novel; the representation of God as a literary character; and dominant images and themes.  We will focus on those books that have had greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, Amos, Hosea, Jonah, selections from Jeremiah and Second Isaiah; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms and the Song of Solomon, along with the stories of Kings Saul and David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read selections from the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John and the book of Revelation. (We’re skipping Paul because he’s more a theologian than a literary writer.)

Recommended Reading:

• Bernhard Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament              
• Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative 
• Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism
• Bart Ehrman, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction

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

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

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

Texts will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore. The required textbook is The Norton Shakespeare, 3^rd edition, (two-volume set) ed. Stephen Greenblatt (ISBN 978-0-393-26402-9, approximate cost $90 new; $ 40 used, $39 digital; copies of the 1^st and 2^nd editions, as well as the one-volume 3^rd edition may also be used).

Course Description: In this survey of African American literature, students will read across four centuries of literary and cultural production to understand the relationship between Black culture and freedom struggle. Students will engage topics in Black study—including questions of freedom, fugitivity, nationalism, and racial justice—as well as literary and cultural history to analyze and explain the development of Black letters in the U.S. Our course will move quickly through four periods in black literature and cultural production: enslavement, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and segregation, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, and multiculturalism and the 21^st century. Throughout, will read a range of sources including poetry and prose, and long- and short-form works to understand the ideas and imaginaries that inhere in Black literature. We will also listen to Black music, including, the Blues, jazz, and Hip Hop and view television and films that have been important entries in the cultural history of Black life.

Readings will include:

• Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun 978-0679755333
• Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuff 978-0684843261
• Whitehead, The Nickel Boys 978-0345804341

Course Description: This is part one of a two-quarter survey that explores writings produced in North America between the time Native peoples encountered Europeans for the first time and the turn of the twentieth century.  (Students are welcome to take one or both parts of English 270.)

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: 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, discussion section, writing assignments

Evaluation Methods: Attendance, class participation, writing assignments, quizzes, readings, papers

• David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (ISBN 978-0452272590)
• Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (ISBN 978-157322531)
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (ISBN 978-0679721888)
• Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (ISBN 978-1566894869)

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 stories narrated by Latinx authors. 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 language, feminist thought, Latinx Indigeneities, and queer storytelling. Our readings will alternate between short stories, poetry, non-fiction writing, and one novel. As we move between forms and genres, we will pay particular attention to what Latinx authors achieve by choosing to tell their story in a poem, a short story, an essay, or a novel, as well as what each of these forms asks of us as readers.

A nine-week course cannot do justice to the rich genealogy of Latinx writing. This course follows an illustrative sample of Latinx authors from the 1980s to the present. It aims to provide students with a historical, political, and literary foundation for further exploration of Latinx literature.

Teaching Method(s): Lecture and discussion-based course.

Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final papers, personal essay, attendance and participation.

Texts include: We the Animals by Justin Torres (9780547844190). Short stories, poetry and excerpts from Carmen Maria Machado, Sandra Cisneros, Manuel Muñoz, Javier Zamora, Helena Maria Viramontes, and others.

Texts will be available at:

• We the Animals by Justin Torres will be available at the Northwestern bookstore
• All other materials will be available on Canvas

Nature is one of humanity’s most elastic concepts. Sometimes it seems to offer a healing refuge, but sometimes it seems to threaten -- or even contradict -- human survival. Are we part of nature, or do we encounter it? Is human society as natural as the pack or pod, or a defense against “the laws of nature”? Both human and literary history have been defined by the stories we tell about the environment; our common future will be shaped the same way. What new forms of attention might address the destabilized ecologies on which we now know we depend?

Tracking environmental writing from the ancient Greeks to the Anthropocene, this course offers a deep dive into the storied concept of “nature” and the rise of ecological thought and environmental literature. Philosophical reflection began by wondering whether something dystopian separates humanity from the rest of the cosmos. Longstanding ideas of a utopian “green world” have offered an escape from the greyness of everyday life and a corrective to the corruptions of the (so-called) “real world.” Meanwhile, industrial and technoscientific attempts to “master” the earth have scorched it instead, extinguishing countless species and toxifying land, water, air, and our bodies too – proving once and for all that we are a continuous part of the world. Classic literary concerns like close observation, perception, point-of-view, justice, ethics, belonging, and the wild or unknown frontier invariably draw on environmental content. And the way we represent the natural world, in turn, can be as consequential as scientific advances in the great project of preserving our planet.

Teaching Method: Lecture and discussion, plus required section meetings.

Evaluation: Lecture attendance and discussion; attendance and contributions to section; two quizzes, one short paper, and an in-class final exam.

Readings: Along with popular images and scholarly essays on nature and the Anthropocene, we’ll read a broad range of literary-environmental texts, including: short passages from origin myths, classical natural history, and pastoral verse; Shakespeare’s As You Like It and King Lear; Romantic poetry; journal selections from the 19th-century naturalists, Dorothy Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau; a novel from a nonhuman perspective (Virginia Woolf’s Flush); 20th-century conservationist and “environmental literature” (Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s landmark text in both literary and environmental history, Silent Spring); excerpts from science fiction; contemporary sound studies; the NOVA documentary, Sea Change: The Gulf of Maine; and the film, WALL-E.

Course Description: This course is about learning how to read closely, that is, how to “do” a deeply informed comparative close reading. Tailored to the time constraints of the quarter, it introduces students to a series of episodes in the recent history of the study of literature and culture: the influential heroes of these episodes are engaged intellectuals who have together helped to inform how we read today. Pairing a handful of shorter primary texts with field-defining theorists and readers of the past and present, students will not only build fluency in the vocabulary of “literary theory,” they will emerge as more worldly, technically savvy, and theoretically sophisticated readers themselves. In this course, we are not interested in theory for its own sake, but in the ways the thing we call “theory” — like literature — is not only shaped by, but helps to shape the world around us.

Teaching Method: Brief lectures and engaged discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation; short writing assignments; one presentation; and a final project.

Authors may include: Germaine de Staël, William Hazlitt, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavio Paz, Franz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Paolo Freire, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Rey Chow, Barbara Johnson, and Lauren Berlant.

All texts for the course will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: What is the right thing to do? This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. Biblical ideas of justice, utilitarianism, rights theory, and more justice theories will be explored. We will read literature alongside these theories, following how such ideas of justice 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. Class participation is required.

Texts:

• Bible (can use online)
• Paradise Lost excerpts (online)
• Romeo and Juliet  by Shakespeare (Arden Edition)  ISBN 1903436915
• Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw (Penguin Edition) ISBN 0140437916
• The Case for Reparations by 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) ISBN 0374532508

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. What does it mean to fantasize about the future and to reimagine the past? How does time travel undercut or complicate commonplace linear narratives, progress narratives, or coming of age stories? In this course, we’ll investigate the genre as a way into thinking about the fundamentals of literary analysis and methodology. We’ll combine readings of literary classics like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Marghanita Laski’s forgotten The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) with selections by modern sci-fi writers like M. John Harrison and N. K. Jemisin. We’ll also consider mixed-media additions to the canon, including the anime The Girl who Leapt Through Time (2006) and the movies Interstellar (2014) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Together, we 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; Marghanita Laski, The Victorian Chaise-Longue; Virginia Woolf, Orlando (ISBN 0156031515); N.K. Jemisin, “Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows”; the Daniels, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Course Description: As a critical methods seminar for English majors and minors, English 300 will enhance your interpretive, analytic, and argumentative skills.  To that end, this class explores new ways to read Jane Austen in both her historical context and our contemporary moment.  Whether you’re a stranger to Austen or a devoted Janeite, this class will give you surprising insights into her connections to the social, domestic, and aesthetic movements of her time.  We will pair three Austen texts with three earlier novels:  Pride and Prejudice and Mary Hays’s radical feminist novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799); Emma and Daniel Defoe’s criminal autobiography Moll Flanders (1722); Northanger Abbey and the mass-popular Gothic novel A Sicilian Romance (1790) by Ann Radcliffe.  We’ll accompany each pairing with critical texts in contemporary feminism and queer studies; narratology; and genre studies (on the Gothic).  The class will conclude by looking at some contemporary TV or film renderings of Austen (e.g., Bridgerton, Clueless, or Pride and Prejudice).    

Attendance at first class meeting is mandatory.

Required texts:

• Jane Austen, Emma.  Broadview Literary Texts.  ISBN: 9781551113210
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Broadview Literary Texts. ISBN: 9781551114798
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Broadview Literary Texts.  ISBN: 9781554814893
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders. Broadview Literary Texts.  ISBN: 9781551114514
• Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice.  Broadview Literary Texts.  ISBN: 9781551112176
• Anne Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance. Oxford University Press.  ISBN: 9780199537396

Course Description: It is difficult to imagine an Asian figure in American culture without first recalling a stereotype of it: the yellow peril, the model minority, the inscrutable Orient, and, more recently, the crazy rich. This course will think about how we read literature and film by focusing on these figures and how they’re represented. How do we understand the historical transformation of the representation of Asians in American culture past and present? How can focusing on “types” and “stereotypes” assist us in thinking about how we read and interpret literature and film more generally?  How do we explain and grapple with the seeming inevitability of types and stereotypes in cultural representations? The main literary texts we will be reading are Maxine Hong Kinston’s classic novel Woman Warrior, Peter Hessler’s nonfiction River Town, and Yiyun Li’s short stories collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. We will also analyze the 2018 romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, directed by Jon M. Chu.

Course Description: Though we often think of fan fiction as an advent of our contemporary moment, fan fiction extends at least as far back as the eighteenth century. Fans and fictions have increasingly shaped the way we encounter literature, animating works from the past with different agendas, desires, and needs that speak to the contemporary moment. This course explores texts and the adaptations they inspire. We will think about how adaptations not only comment on and critique earlier texts, but also how they might inspire us to encounter the original text in new ways. How might we regard adaptations as standalone works, with lives and afterlives of their own? From modern reworkings of Shakespeare to critical retellings of Austen, adaptations ask us to consider how familiar stories might be leveraged to address different audiences. We will also explore some related concerns around fan fiction including fandoms and fan culture, the death of the author, and approaching work created by problematic authors.

Texts May Include: William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1594) and Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) and J. M. Coetzee, Foe (1986), Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jo Baker, Longbourn (2013), and Fire Island (2022), Jane Austen, Emma (1815) and Clueless (1995), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) and Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (1992), Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Howard’s End and Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005), Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl (2013).

Course Description: How do we “capture” nonhuman phenomena within literary forms and genres that are designed (mainly) by humans? As an introduction to critical methods in textual studies, our seminar will think about how representation works across species and how it can grasp the relationship between animate creatures and their elemental surroundings. These habitats will range from literal fields, forests, skies, and oceans to the wily conceptual terrain of “Nature” itself. By focusing on human representations of animals and the nonhuman more broadly, this seminar delves into the question of how literary re-presentations of the natural world work – this is both a practical and a philosophical question. To address it, we’ll analyze the raw materials and core resources of the written word: close observation and description; perspective, point-of-view, and matters of voice; anthropomorphizing and/or animalizing imagery; and the mind-bendingly disparate frameworks of narrative, human, evolutionary, and planetary time. In return, our readings will also trouble assumptions about how exclusively “human” we humans ever really are when we write.

Our syllabus will include classics of nature writing and environmental literature, even as we push the boundaries of what is “literary” in the first place. With various contextualizing materials (from Aesop’s fables to poetry to legal verdicts) provided by the instructor, our main texts will be selected from the following major works: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Michel de Montaigne’s Essays; sections of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man; Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” and “Wild Apples”; Octavia Hill’s “Open Spaces”; Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography; Rachel Carson’s “The Road of the Hawks” and Under the Sea-Wind; J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip; Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto and Staying with the Trouble; Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature; Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus; and Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk.

Course Description: If you’ve watched Saltburn or the Netflix series Bridgerton, you know that the English estate has undergone some cultural revision. No longer the opulent backdrop of period drama, the country house is the site of reckonings with the history of England’s overseas empire, traffic in captive people, and flagrantly unequal distribution of wealth and power. In this class, we will trace the ongoing force of English literary refigurations of landed property initially tied to the largesse and power of the lord of the manor. We’ll first explore the early modern country house poem, where the landed estate serves as a locus of pastoral abundance and naturalized social, architectural, and ecological order. But as we will discover, cracks appear in this vision. Moving forward, we encounter the idealized country house contested from the vantage of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels whose narrators and protagonists include servants, colonial subjects, and witnesses to family decadence financed by slavery. We’ll turn to twentieth-century texts that claim the decaying country house as source of ghostly national nostalgia. Our final unit will engage public revision (in print, monuments, and activism) of the estate as “English Heritage.” We will watch at least one episode of Bridgerton (Season 1, 2020) and the film Saltburn (2023) to assess recent popular re-representations of the landed estate.

Evaluation Method: Grades will be based on three short essays and one group presentation. Old major requirements: ICSP, pre-1830. New major requirements: GSE, pre-1830.

Texts May Include:

Country house poems may include: Aemelia Lanyer, “A Description of Cookham” (1611); Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst” (1616); Thomas Carew, “To Saxham” (1640); Robert Herrick, “A Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton” (1648); Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House” (1651); Abraham Cowley, “On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House” (1668); John Dryden, “To My Honoured Kinsman, John Driden, of Chesterton in the County of Huntingdon, Esquire” (1699); Anne Finch, “Upon My Lord Winchilsea’s Converting the Mount in His Garden to a Terrace” (c. 1703); Mary Leapor, “Crumble-Hall” (1751); John Agard, “Upon Revisiting Mansfield Park” (2006).

Novels and short stories may include: Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall (1762); Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847); Arthur Canon Doyle, “The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips” (1891); Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938); Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Isabel Colgate, The Shooting Party (1980); Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day (1989).

Course Description: “Make It New”: Ezra Pound borrows this slogan from an ancient Chinese emperor’s bath tub: “As the sun makes it new / Day by day make it new.” But what is "it"? In our seminar we'll explore poetry as an art of words, voice, song, speech, story; of describing, expressing, transforming, translating, and revealing worlds visible and invisible; of hiddenness and discovery, paradox and mystery, epiphany and surprise, the everyday, the extraordinary, and the otherworldly. Reading selected poems and related prose texts on poetics by Baudelaire, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, H. D., Williams, Bishop, Hughes, Brooks, and other poets both earlier and later, we'll see how particular poems emerge in creative dialogue with other poems across historical moments, locales, languages, cultural surrounds, and sensibilities. We'll practice close reading, analytic, and comparative skills to discuss, appreciate, and write about the formal and linguistic virtuosity by which poets create poems-as-worlds that enrich the resources of English poetry: verse lines and forms, sound patterns (meter, rhythm, music, tone), diction, rhetorical tropes, figurative language, personae, voices. We’ll visit our Special Collections Library to learn about print culture and to see first editions of some of the works we'll be studying. We’ll conclude with a Poetry Fest for which everyone will choose and read, recite, or perform a poem for the class.

Course Description: This course examines men dancing in diverse genres onstage and onscreen—blackface and Black minstrelsy, ballet and tap, modern and postmodern dance. The inquiry will focus on the intersection between gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality in theatrical performances from the early 19^th through the early 21^st century. Readings will be complemented by visual documentation and by visits from guest artists.

Course Description: This class examines U.S. playwriting as not only an august and expansive tradition but also, for the last 100 years, a crucial medium by which production teams, public audiences, and private readers have co-participated in critical self-reflection on what “America” means to them/us. After a three-week unit devoted to plays and writers that hugely influenced the trajectory of U.S. drama (O’Neill, Bonner, Odets, Miller, Hansberry, Baraka, Kennedy), the bulk of the course privileges artists and texts that sustained but also stretched that legacy from the 1980s onward. These writers (Wilson, Kushner, Parks, Hwang, Baker, et al.) often take America as their explicit subject, in emblematic microcosm or as grand-scale macrocosm, in ways this course will unpack with curiosity and nuance. At the same time, we will sharpen our attention to the structures, semantics, styles, and stagecraft that make these plays such compelling objects of literary analysis as well as cultural-historical contemplation.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar-based discussion.

Evaluation Method(s): Writing exercises (papers, practice exercises, annotations, etc.), possible group activities or presentations.

Texts include:

• The America Play and Other Works, Suzan-Lori Parks (9781559360920);
• Angels in America (Pt. 1 & Pt. 2), Tony Kushner (9781559363846);
• The Crucible, Arthur Miller (9780142437339);
• Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3, Suzan-Lori Parks (9781559365000);
• Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire (9781559363938);
• John, Annie Baker (9781559365291);
• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, August Wilson (9780452261136);
• A Raisin in the Sun & The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Lorraine Hansberry (9780679755319);
• The Red Letter Plays, Suzan-Lori Parks (9781559361958);
• Waiting for Lefty, Clifford Odets (9780802132208);
• What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck (9781559369640);
• Yellow Face, David Henry Hwang (9781559363402)

Course Description: Fierce rivalries. Raging jealousies. Misplaced desires. Unequal affections. Love triangles have long been one of the most popular tropes in fiction. In this course, we will explore how triangulated love affairs mediate channels of desire. While love triangles may seem immediately legible as a conventional structure of the heterosexual marriage plot, things are not necessarily what they seem. From cases of mistaken identity to specters of missed opportunities, what happens when desire gets oriented, misdirected, or redirected in different ways? If love triangles seem to position the third person as antagonist, then what happens when the third person instead becomes a vector through which the other two characters may express their mutual desire? We will consider the queer undertones (or, in some cases, overtones) of triangulated relations and the ways in which love triangles often open up alternative narrative trajectories that make us consider what might have been or what could be. By attending to love triangles (and the occasional rectangle or pentagon), we will consider the dynamics of gender, sexuality, and race. Possible texts include Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1602), Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Bronte Wuthering Heights (1847), Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), du Maurier, Rebecca (1938). Possible films and shows include She’s the Man (2006), Past Lives (2023), and selected episodes of Bridgerton (2020).

Course Description: Medieval culture was overwhelmingly Christian, but it was heir to several pre-Christian religions. Germanic paganism brought monsters, defiant heroism, and expectation of a coming “twilight of the gods,” while Celtic paganism supplied magical objects and mysterious Otherworld visitors. Contrary to popular belief, the Church did not suppress the use of pagan sources, but medieval writers transformed the materials they inherited, producing sophisticated texts that present a Christian point of view layered above tantalizing and elusive pagan subtexts. In this class we’ll look at (1) the Old English world of Beowulf with an apocalyptic novel based on it, Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife; (2) three tales about magical shape-shifting characters: Marie de France’s Yonec, The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and (3) the romance of the Holy Grail—a Celtic magical cauldron that evolved into a prized Christian relic. The class may also include film adaptations such as the comedy classic, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and David Lowery’s imaginative retelling of The Green Knight (2021).

Texts:

• Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (Norton Critical Edition, 2002) - ISBN 978-0-393-97580-2
• Beowulf, trans. Maria Dahvana Headley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) - ISBN 978-0-374-11003-1
• Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife (Picador paperback) - ISBN 978-1-250-21494-2
• Marie de France, Yonec, trans. Claire Waters (on Canvas)
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale (on Canvas)
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Marie Borroff, ed. Laura Howes (Second Norton Critical Edition, 2021)- ISBN 978-0-393-53246-3
• Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, trans. Ruth Harwood Cline (U. of Georgia Press, 1985) - ISBN 978-0-8203-0812-9
• Robert de Boron, Merlin and the Grail, trans. Nigel Bryant (D. S. Brewer, 2001) - ISBN 978-0-85991-779-7

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; discussion board posts; 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: Medieval romance famously celebrated “courtly love”—the ennobling passion of an aristocratic man for an upper-class woman. But just as deeply ingrained is the ideal of same-sex love between men. And despite—or perhaps because of—the Church’s misogynist bias, the culture shows a surprising openness to transgender identities. This class will explore two kinds of texts: those in which women identify as men, and those in which heterosexual love disrupts or is disrupted by male affection. In Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthe, two girls (one passing as male) fall in love and marry, while in the life of the transgender saint Marina, a woman who becomes a monk is accused of fathering a child. In Silence, a 13^th-century French romance, the “silenced” hero/ine is born female but raised male; as a knight, he is charged with homosexuality after rejecting the queen’s advances. After our study of ambiguous gender identities, we’ll turn to ambiguous desires, reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Amis and Amiloun, and selections from The Romance of the Rose. We’ll end with Chaucer’s “other masterpiece,” the magnificent Troilus and Criseyde. Set in ancient Troy, this romance features the ambiguous, bisexual Pandarus, who seems to be in love with both the hero and the heroine. Amis and Amiloun and Troilus and Criseyde will be read in Middle English, the other texts in translation. 

Texts May Include:

• Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Love (excerpts) – on Canvas
• Ovid, Tale of Iphis and Ianthe (Metamorphoses IX) - on Canvas
• Transgender Saints' Lives (SS. Marina, Pelagia, Margaret, and Theodora) - on Canvas
• "The Debate between Ganymede and Helen" (trans. John Boswell) - on Canvas
• Heldris of Cornwall, Silence (ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi) - ISBN 0-937191-32-9
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (trans. Marie Borroff) - ISBN 978-0-393-53246-3
• Amis and Amiloun (ed. Edward Foster) - ISBN 1-879288-88-5
• Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (trans. Frances Horgan) - ISBN - 9780199540679
• Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (ed. Barry Windeatt) - ISBN 978-0-140424-21-8

Course Description: More than once between 1500 and 1700, people in early modern England learned of a new world—the Americas after the voyages of Columbus in 1492 and of Ralegh in 1585, the moons of Earth and of Jupiter observed through the telescopes of Harriot and Galileo by telescope in 1609, the intimate worlds of microscopy explored by Hooke in 1665.  As their worlds widened, deepened, and multiplied, English writers and thinkers invented new worlds of their own: fairy realms, enchanted islands, kingdoms of darkness, lunar landscapes, perfect polities and nightmare ones, imagined worlds that could critique of their own or propose and explore things that seemed impossible in it.  Despite being avowed as fictions, usually, these speculative worlds claimed value, seriousness, and even kinds of truth through the extravagance of their fantasies, while also asserting their pleasurableness and recreativity.  In this class we will explore some of these worlds of imagination and how and why early modern writers crafted them, including Thomas More’s Utopia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, as well as related works on exploration and science by Columbus, Cortes, Galileo, and others.

Course Description: How can we think about the transhistorical nature of queerness in English culture? Moving from the Renaissance to the present, the course follows the literary careers of two influential tragedies --  Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s adaptation and rewriting of it in Richard II -- to think about the representation of queer kingship over time. Together we’ll analyze theatrical revolutionary Bertolt Brecht’s landmark early twentieth-century adaptation of Marlowe’s play and its “alienation effect,” twentieth-century productions and films of Marlowe tied to the early gay-liberation movement (Ian McKellen) and the early AIDS crisis (Derek Jarman’s), and twenty-first century rewritings, including a companion play that incorporates figures in/against queer culture from Gertrude Stein, Harvey Milk, and Julie Andrews to Margaret Thatcher (Tom Stuart’s play After Edward). We’ll conclude with the recent gay rom-com “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” Critical readings will delve into the history of sexuality, queer readership and book history, and theories of dramatic adaptation and performance.

Teaching method: Discussion and mini-lecture.

Course Description: This course responds to shifts in paradigms of gender and sexuality in writing from the global south. 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 are sex relations used as an allegory of the national condition? How does sexuality intersect with other postcolonial concerns (e.g., environmental crises). What are the attitudes toward inter-species sex among postcolonial writers? How best do we integrate activist positions in postcolonial concerns?  Authors to be discussed include Jessica Hagedorn, Witi Ihimaera, H. Nigel Thomas, Nawal el Saadawi, Chris Abani, K. Sello Duiker, Suniti Namjoshi, and Lawrence Scott. We will consider postcolonial theoretical statements by a wide range of thinkers (e.g., Keguro Macharia, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Gopinath, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe etc.).

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

Evaluation Method: A 6-page paper, Canvas postings, regular self-evaluation, peer critiques, class participation, pop quizzes (ungraded), and 1-minute papers (ungraded).

Texts May 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: Over the last decade, posters announcing “Refugees Welcome Here” have appeared across the American landscape. The post-9/11 era has seen the displacement of 38 million people over the Middle East and North Africa due to the ever-escalating effects of US militarism, not to mention the thousands of civilians who have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and surrounding regions. Against the backdrop of what Afghan anthropologist Anila Daulatzai calls “serial war,” what does the figure of the refugee tell us about the status of human rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In other words, what are human rights and why do we care about them? Who gets to be a human and who doesn’t? Beginning with fiction from the mid-to-late twentieth century, this course examines the dialectical logic of dispensation and denial of human rights through literary texts across nations and genres. We will employ the lens of political theory around race, citizenship, territory, and the category of the human across global sites like Kashmir, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Mexico as well as detention sites like Guantánamo, and Manus Island. The course problematizes an investment in the rhetoric sympathy and sentiment to unlearn what Didder Fassin calls “humanitarian imperialism,” instead asking what it means for human rights subjects to make demands, rather than petitions, for  protection from torture, genocide, and extralegal violence. We will read fictional as well as nonfictional accounts by global authors to consider key figures such as the refugee, the undocumented migrant, the detainee, and the animal as instantiations of what Giorgio Agamben calls “homo sacer,” i.e. the human who remains outside of a polity as a sacrificial surrogate against the safe haven of the settler/citizen within. Students will be introduced to scholars working in the intersections of political theory, human rights, and literary studies such as Judith Butler, Joseph Slaughter, Achille Mbembe, Sonali Thakkar, and others.

Reading List:

• Bessie Head, Maru
• Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, or The Pessoptimist
• Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
• Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator
• Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stroeis
• Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the Mountain
• Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends
  
• Jerome Tubiano, Guantánamo Kid
• Malik Sajad, Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir
• Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Haji Hotak and Other Stories
  

Course Description: Throughout the twentieth century, the terms “urban” and “black America” became so intimately connected that they are often used as synonyms. By tracing different representations of urban life, this course examines the signification of the metropolis in African American cultural production.  Although our focus will primarily center on cultural texts, we will address a number of the “push and pull” factors that prompted the Great Migration and the social forces that have subsequently kept many African Americans in the city. In focusing on a set of cultural texts, we will consider the ways in which African Americans have imagined both the allure and dangers of life in the city. Literature may include work by Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones; artists may include the photographers Wayne Miller and Camilo José Vergara as well as the painter Jacob Lawrence; film media may include Coolie High and Good Times; music may include hip hop artists from Public Enemy to Common. Critics may include W.E.B. DuBois, St. Clare Drake, Raymond Williams, Mike Davis, and Mary Pattillo.

Teaching Methods: Lecture.

Evaluation Methods: 2 essays; in-class Final Examination.

Texts include:

• James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
• Teju Cole, Open City
• Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
• James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• Nella Larsen, Passing
• Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones

Texts will be available at: TBA

Course Description: In this class, students will analyze Black literature and popular culture to understand the cultural work of joy, especially in the face of antiblackness. Reading across a range of texts, including poetry, short and long fiction, film, music, and food, students will analyze how joy emerges alongside a other social feelings—despair, rage, and hope to name a few. In addition, we will take up questions that have formed the core of Black study in the 20^th century including 1) How do Black people “theorize” in their everyday life and cultural production (Christian 1987); 2) What cultural forms emerge to respond to and undermine antiblackness  (Carpio 2008; Scott 2022); 3) What role does literature play in the relation of Black feeling and the creation of Black life worlds (Hurston 1928; Lorde 1978; Quashie 2022; Nash 2024). Throughout, we will be especially attentive to how gender and sexuality work in tandem with race to contribute to the emotional lifeworlds of Black people.  

Evaluation Method: Two short papers and one final project.

Texts May Include: Tee Franklin, Bingo Love; Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor.

Course Description: The United States is set to become a majority minority country by 2045. What are the many promises—and what are the many pitfalls—of interracial encounters, and what do they reveal about the country writ large? How do minority writers understand and narrate each other? This class brings contemporary African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American literature into relation with a focus on interracial dynamics. By examining complex topics from Black/Asian conflict during the 1992 LA Riots to the shared border migrations of indigenous and Latinx subjects, we will develop an analytical framework attuned to how American racial identity has been differentially and unevenly constructed through history, culture, and politics. A central goal of the course is decentering whiteness as the primary locus of literary analysis, to allow for more nuanced interpretations of topics such as U.S. imperialism, mixed race identity, activism, labor history, and immigration. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with the richness and diversity of multiethnic American literature by considering a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, and film.

Teaching Method(s): Seminar-based discussions.

Evaluation Method(s): Graded participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay.

Texts include:

• Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight Los Angeles, 1992
• Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
• Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

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, and Mexican writer Yuri Herrera. 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.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based.

Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final paper, creative mapping project, attendance and participation.

Texts include: Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (9781908276421). Short stories, poetry and excerpts from Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ofelia Zepeda, Cristina Henríquez, Tommy Orange, and others. 

Texts will be available at: Signs Preceding the End of the World will be at the Northwestern bookstore and all other materials will be uploaded to Canvas.

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

Teaching Method: Lecture & Discussion.

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

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

Course Description: Race is socially constructed—but how is it medically constructed? This seminar surveys Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous American literary and cultural production to question how “healthy” bodies in the United States are constituted, and in turn, what these racialized processes reveal about the essential role of race in producing a body politic. Concomitantly, we will also read scholarship from ethnic studies that charts racialized comorbidities, pre-existing conditions, and environmental racism, as well as work that expands our understanding of race’s imbrications with medical paradigms such as eugenics, genetics, informed consent, reproductive rights, disability, mental illness, and, of course, pandemics.

In addition to excavating the long histories and present problems surrounding medical racism, another goal of this course is tracking the medicalization of race itself. As such, we will challenge commonly held perceptions of bodies, pain, ability, and the constitution of equitable futures. We will also supplement our reading with guest lectures from medical professionals working at the intersection of race and medicine. Students will take away from the class a deeper grasp of the discourse surrounding race and medicine, as well as how to deploy this knowledge in their critical interpretations of cultural production. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do texts by writers of color challenge normative assessments of what constitutes health and wellness? How do we ethically consider race and medicine without resorting to postracial idealism? And to what extent can creative experiments generated in art and literature re-envision the medicalized terms under which race is understood?

Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions.

Evaluation Methods: Graded participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay.

Texts include: Please verify before purchasing. Assigned primary texts will likely include pieces such as Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming, Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, Oscar Cásares’s Brownsville, Rafael Campo’s What the Body Told, Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, I Am Legend, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, Reservoir Dogs, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

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.

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) ISBN 0-14-044582-X
• Ursula La Guin, The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
• Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare (Arden Edition) ISBN 1903436915
• Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw (Penguin Edition) ISBN 0140437916
• Billy Budd (TOR) ISBN 0143107607
• The Case for Reparations by 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) ISBN 0374532508

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. 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 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.

Course Description: This course focuses on climate change literature, the most active and popular arena of contemporary environmental writing. Examining a variety of 20th and 21st century works—including science fiction, spoken word poetry, narrative fiction, and film—we will analyze how literature shapes and responds to planetary crisis. Which imaginative currents—apocalyptic, technocratic, communalist, militaristic—are molding readers’ visions of the climatic future? Is it possible to narrate climate change as a multi-century catastrophe rooted in colonialism and the acquisition of capital? What can we learn about climate change from literature that we can’t grasp through other fields of study? Since the works in this class cover a broad geographic range and include both award-winning texts and relatively unknown books, we will also theorize how—and why—particular writers’ voices become central or peripheral within climate discourse.

Course Description: Pocahontas and John Smith are making goofy, animated eyes at each other as British colonials push further into the New England interior. Outlander’s Claire and Jamie steal passionate moments during the fight for Scottish independence. And when he died, David Ochterlony—British Resident to the Mughal Court in the early 1800s—left behind thirteen Indian wives. This course asks: how and why are the tropes of possessive romance so often refigured in the colonial context? What can tracing these affects, fetishes, and motifs allow us to uncover about the emotional resonances of imperialist discourse and resistance? After grounding ourselves in classic tales of romantic obsession, we will map these romantic forms onto larger concepts of empire. Edward Said described the Orientalist impulse as “fatally tend[ing] toward the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories.” To trace these fatal, obsessive drives to possess, we will move from classic novels like Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and George Orwell’s Burmese Days to shorter texts such as Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star and V.S. Naipaul’s “In a Free State.” Films include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. This course will also include readings in postcolonial and affect theory.

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, group exercises.

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

Texts include: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847); Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (1973); Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1977); Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993); Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

Course Description: As iconic anime such as “Cowboy Beebop” and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan’s classic album “Liquid Swords” demonstrate, the outcast samurai, the desperado, and the mobster have been adapted and (re)purposed across national boundaries and divisions of genre. Japanese artists are experimenting with Western gunslingers at the same time as American rappers are imagining themselves as the Ronin of Staten Island. What explains the persistent and global appeal of these rebellious figures? And how are they transformed as they move from one cultural context to another? Looking at a broad range of film, anime, manga, music, and literature from the 20th and 21st centuries, this course pays specific attention to the way outlaws associated with a particular culture or genre are adapted beyond their original formulations to express new social realities. From the samurai in Paris to the highwaymen of Neo-Tokyo, we will attempt to understand how and why these icons of outlaw culture have been able to captivate audiences all over the planet.

Teaching Method: Seminar style, discussion-based; small group exercises. 

Evaluation Method: Participation, two short analytical papers, final project. 

Texts to include: “Cowboy Beebop” (selected episodes); GZA’s “Liquid Swords”; “Sukiyaki Western Django” (Dir. Takashi Miike); “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” (dir. Jim Jarmusch); “A Fistful of Dollars” (dir. Sergio Leone); “Cruel Gun Story” (dir. Takumi Furukawa); “City of God” (dir. Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund); “Le Samouraï” (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville); “Yojimbo” (dir. Akira Kurosawa).

Texts will be made available through a combination of course reserves or Canvas. In the occasion a text is unavailable via the library, students may be required to purchase a temporary streaming subscription. 

Course Description: Does the popular genre of the romantic comedy continually renegotiate the social contract? Or do its “happy endings” continually impose the safety of closure on love’s wayward digressions? This course maps the literary and cinematic DNA of the contemporary “rom com,” from William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and the screwball comedies of 1930s Classical Hollywood to the 1990s blockbusters and the Netflix revolution. Along the way we may ask: What do the comedic conventions of Western classical drama, the medieval genre of “romance,” or the political aesthetics of Romanticism have to do with the romantic comedy as it exists today? The anarchic space of the “comedy” genre is often understood to house a subversive potential, using absurdism or satire to scramble power dynamics or to question social norms governing gender, sexuality, race, and family. One standout question for us will be: Does the romantic comedy threaten to tame the comedy genre’s subversive potential? Or does it promise to release its chaotic energies in ever renewed ways? Why do some literary forms and characters seem endlessly adaptable for different social subjects; and how does a screen actor’s “star text” or public image help direct the genre’s history? Students will regularly be asked to watch two movies in a single week. Evaluations are based on participation and preparation; writing several short papers, film analyses, & response posts; presentation on an episode, scene, or clip from a recent TV show that helps us understood the genre and its history; and a final exam.

Required Texts (available for purchase & buyback at Bookends & Beginnings):

• William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (Pelican Edition) (ISBN 978-0143130185)
• Jane Austen, Emma (Penguin Edition) (ISBN 978-0141439587)

 Note: All films and other readings will be available in “Reserves” on our Canvas site.

Course Objectives:

• To study what constitutes a “genre,” how it comes into being, and how it changes over time
• To analyze personal attachments to cultural objects in a critical light
• To practice and improve critical reading and writing about literature and film
• To practice and improve conversational analysis, public presentation, and critical dialogue

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

Teaching Method: Discussion-based seminar.

Evaluation Method: Mid-term presentation and final essay.

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

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore.

Course Description: Whether fathoms beneath the ocean's surface or in the shadowy spots under our beds, supernatural beasts lurk just outside the range of our perceptions—until they emerge from concealment in order to wreak havoc! What drives our morbid fascination with these creatures? Drawing on insights from literary scholars who have explored the role of monsters in our cultural imaginary, this course aims to explore how monstrous depictions reflect the fears, desires, prohibitions, and prescriptions of the societies that create them. From the elusive “Grendel” in Beowulf to the colossal creatures of kaiju films like Godzilla, we will examine a diverse range of texts and films that have sent shivers down the spines of audiences across cultures for generations. As we explore these haunting and mysterious works, we will delve into questions such as: How have historical fears and anxieties been represented? Whom do we classify as "monstrous" and why? How do these representations either mirror or challenge prevailing cultural norms? And since real monsters don’t exist, what are we actually afraid of?

Teaching Method: Seminar style, discussion based; small group exercises. 

Evaluation Method: Participation, two short analytical papers, final exam. 

Course Materials: Paperback editions of the novels (and one narrative poem) will be available for purchase at Norris or any other major book retailer. All other media will be made available through NU Library Course Reserves. The novels are as follows: Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (ISBN: 978-0393320978); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (ISBN: 978-0143131847); Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling (ISBN: 978-0446696166). 

Course Description: This course surveys the modern American horror film from Psycho in 1960 to the present. Likely films to be studied include Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Alien, Jennifer's Body, It Follows, Get Out, Midsommar, and others. The course will focus on one major feature-length film per week proceeding chronologically. We will analyze films textually; and we will also focus on acquiring critical vocabularies for discussing horror cinema. Major themes and questions will include not only the question of why it's fun (or not) to be scared but also what social and philosophical themes the genre of horror opens up in surprising and provocative ways (from gender, violence, and technology to childhood, evil, and race). To catalyze discussion we will read a variety of secondary sources by authors from a range of disciplines.

Teaching Methods: Discussion and short lecture.

Evaluation Method: Essays.

Required Texts: None.

Course Description: Women’s fiction and films of the classical Hollywood era, 1929-1950, feature heroines on the brink of madness, suicide, and death. Melodrama, a dramatic form that flourished in the nineteenth century and featured making virtue and evil visible, structures many of the works in our course. We will explore how and why female artistic production from the beginning of modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the heyday of the “woman’s picture,” 1933-1950 featured women on the brink, rejecting the 19^th-century “marriage plot,” for a different set of endings.  We will discuss the significance of “the New Woman,” the last throes of the “cult of domesticity” and the work of arguably classic Hollywood’s greatest actress, Bette Davis, whose films took up those historical issues.  Mode of evaluation will be two take-home close reading exams (2 pages total) and a final project on a Davis film not on the syllabus.  Works may include The Awakening, Ethan Fromme, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Plum Bun, Quicksand, and The Street. Films may include Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, Dark Victory, Now, Voyager, In This Our Life, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Course Description: How do Indigenous writers use archives as a site of experimentation with artistic forms and media, from personal narrative to collage to performance to installation art?  Indigenous writers have taken on the power and histories of archives—from national libraries like the Library of Congress to small, local historical societies to anthropological repositories—and made experimental literatures that challenge these institutions of power and memory.  Examples include Pequot William Apess’s 19^th century texts assembled out of extracts from newspapers and testimonies from other Pequots to the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s intervention in legal documents at the level of the page in Whereas to Deborah Miranda’s (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California) assemblage of personal and institutional histories in her memoir Bad Indians.  This seminar pairs Indigenous literatures with archival theory and practice. We will develop our own archival practices by learning how to work with materials in Northwestern’s Special Collections, how to identify and interpret archival materials, how to develop a research question in conversation with archival research and theoretical readings, and how to develop a sustained argument with strong evidence. 

Teaching Method: seminar discussions, hands-on workshops, classes in Special Collections

Required Texts:

• Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians (ISBN 9781597145862)
• LeAnne Howe, Miko Kings (9781879960787)
• Beth Piatote, The Beadworkers (9781640094277)
• Blaire Morseau/ Simon Pokagon, As Sacred to Us (9781611864625)

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: Plot is easy to define and difficult to execute. We know that narratives require some form of animating force, and we know that this force hinges on a series of causally-linked events, sometimes. Not always. In this seminar we’ll work through two disparate novel genres---autofiction and the campus novel---to tease out what makes for compelling story-telling energy: a political or cultural or personal crisis, a disconnect between public and private behavior, subgenres and their expectations (there’s a hilarious epistolary novel in our list, but there are also striking examples of science fiction, horror, the fantastical, and the crime novel), hunger, desire, hypocrisy, satire (academic and otherwise), setting, ticking clocks and timetables, and our direct lived experience. The latter is crucial: we find our most interesting plots in life. We’ll also be sure to connect these elements beyond the novel and into each of our genres: we’ll discover how these same narrative engines animate poetry and creative nonfiction.

Our reading list will include Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Lisa Tuttle's My Death, Amy Gentry’s Bad Habits, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale, and Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk.

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 in your primary genre---a short story or a poem or an essay---that you feel best exploits one of the topics discussed.

Every week, we will all (1) read a novel, (2) respond, (3), read the short piece chosen by one of our classmates. In addition, one of us will be responsible for a presentation on the chosen short piece.

Teaching Methods: Discussion, critical and creative responses, presentations.

Evaluation Methods: Discussion, critical and creative responses, presentations.

Texts include: Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Lisa Tuttle's My Death, Amy Gentry’s Bad Habits, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale, and Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk.

Texts will be available at: campus bookstore & library reserves.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: This seminar explores the various approaches to literary analysis in the 21st-century academy, including the pitfalls to avoid when using certain theories and methods of reading. Examining the history of English as a discipline and the emergence of different methods of analysis, we will discuss both established and emergent critical approaches and assess their applicability in the reading of a particular set of texts and in engaging different audiences. Of particular interest to us is the future of humanistic knowledge, research and writing practices in the neo-liberal academy. How do creative writing, literary theory, and literary research inform one another? In what ways can we be innovative and “marketable” in the neo-liberal realities of our times while remaining true to the core values of humanistic education? In a world that is inundated with theoretical approaches, how do we choose a methodology that best suits our goals? How can we enfold activism in our research and maintain academic standards? The main aim of the course is to equip ourselves with skills to handle different types of texts—activist, theoretical, creative etc. —in the classroom, during research, and in public-facing engagements. At the end of the course, the student should be able to analyze a primary literary text (or a set of texts) using the most appropriate theory and methodology and in a way that the analysis would have resonance beyond the narrow confines of the academy.

Teaching Methods: Class discussions, library visits, guest lectures.

Evaluation Methods: Weekly self-evaluation, presentations, 13-page essay.

• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
• Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus and Other Essays
• Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline
• Bruce McComiskey, English Studies Reimagined
• James F. English, The Global Future of English Studies
• Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

Course Description: Frantz Fanon has famously written that the conditions of modernity have rendered blackness increasingly illegible, fraught with contradictions that push it outside the realm of facile comprehension and explicability. Taking Fanon’s polemic as a cue, this graduate seminar will look at a number of late twentieth-century textual and performance sites with radical instances of experimentation where articulations of blackness move into the interstitial space between meaning and non-meaning, coming into being precisely at the moment when the compositional logic of their anticipated forms are ruptured. The course will focus on three primary sites where black artists engage what might be called the poetics of dissolution to examine and critique the processes of racial formation: poetry (where the form of the line or stanza dissolves); music (where sonic interpolations puts additional, if not different, claims on the lyrical content), and visual culture (where the moves toward graphic mimesis are refused delineation). The material under consideration may include work by the poets Nathaniel Mackey, Douglas Kearney, and Harriet Mullen; sound alchemists King Tubby, Alice Coltrane, and MF Doom; and visual artists Glenn Ligon, Hank  Willis Thomas, and Bethany Collins. Theoretical texts may include work by Emily Apter Barthes, Baudrillard, Fred Moten, and Saussure, as well as ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists.

Teaching Methods: Seminar

Evaluation methods: Research essay.

Texts include:

• Darby English, How to Read a Work in Total Darkness
• Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton
• Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement.
• ————. Splay Anthem.
• Fred Moten. In the Break.
• Christina Sharpe. Ordinary Notes.

Texts will be available at: TBA

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 two ways. Our first unit will deal with romance, gender, and the aesthetics of eroticism. Court ladies feature as foundational romance authors in two island nations, England and Japan, at opposite ends of the Eurasian land mass. After reading the Lais of Marie de France (12^th century) and selections from the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (11^th century), we’ll complicate our study with two transgender romances: Heldris of Cornwall’s Silence and a Japanese tale translated by Rosette Willig as The Changelings. In our second unit, dealing with travel and ethnography, we’ll consider two Islamic and two European works: The Book of Ibn Fadlan (921-22), The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck (1253-55), The Travels of Ibn Battutah (1325-54), and The Book of John Mandeville (ca. 1356). Critical readings will include literary essays on the French and Japanese texts, as well as excerpts from Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages; Shayne Aaron Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel; and Shirin Khanmohamadi,  In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages.

Texts:

• The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Claire Waters (Broadview) - 978-1-55481-082-6
• Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (abridged), ed. and trans. Royall Tyler (Penguin) – 978-0-14-303949-0
• Heldris of Cornwall, Silence, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (Michigan State UP) – 0-937191-32-9
• Torikaebaya monogatari (The Changelings), trans. Rosette Willig – on Canvas
• Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, trans. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (Penguin) – 978-0-140-45507-6
• The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, trans. Peter Jackson (Hackett) – 978-0-87220-981-7
• The Travels of Ibn Battutah, ed. and trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (Picador) – 978-0-330-41879-9
•  The Book of John Mandeville, ed. and trans. Iain MacLeod Higgins (Hackett) – 978-0-87220-935-0

Course Description: This course will simultaneously engage a set of methods within/around literary/performance studies and interrogate the transhistoricity of queerness.  It follows the long representational career of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (c. 1592): from Holinshed’s Tudor-era chronicle history and other “pre-texts” through Shakespeare’s adaptation/revision/rewriting in Richard II, to the emergence of the theatrical-alienation effect in Bertolt Brecht’s early twentieth-century translation/adaptation Leben Eduards des Zweiten, twentieth-century productions and films tied to the early gay-liberation movement (Ian McKellen in repertory as both kings) and the early AIDS crisis (Derek Jarman and “New Queer Cinema”), to contemporary re-writings -- Tom Stuart’s play After Edward; a German opera that weaves together antisemitism and homophobia; the recent rom-com “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” Critical readings in the history of sexuality, queer theory, “source” study, history of the book, adaptation theory, theory of tragedy, critical race studies and casting, and performance studies.

Course Description: This seminar will bring together literary texts from the English Renaissance, ancient and Renaissance theories of spectatorship and catharsis, and academic criticism and theory on contemporary horror fiction and film. Juxtaposing theoretical texts ranging from Aristotle to Carol Clover, we will consider the ways in which early modern narratives and theatrical productions anticipate horror fiction and film of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Across three main units—on revenge tragedy, witches, and monsters—we will consider what psychological, cultural, and civic functions are served by the publication and performance of horror. Methodologically, we will consider the validity and value of a diachronic approach that juxtaposes Renaissance and contemporary texts without relying on direct and documentable examples of authorial influence.

The following books will be available for purchase at Norris; other assigned reading will be available for download on Canvas. You may substitute alternate editions of texts—including facsimiles available through EEBO or online editions available through NU Library—so long as you’re willing to contend with different sets of explanatory notes, page numbers, and so on.

• Aristotle, Poetics ISBN 978-0140446364
• Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, ISBN 978-0231053471
• William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ISBN 978-1350030916
• Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ISBN 978-1472520456
• John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ISBN 978-1904271512
• James I, Daemonologie ISBN 978-0738723457
• Henricus Institor, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) ISBN 978-0719064432
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ISBN 978-1904271413
• Ambroise Paré, excerpts from On Monsters and Marvels (English translation) ISBN 978-0226645636
• Marie de France, Bisclavret, ISBN 979-8863454115

Course Description: The utopian tradition plays a significant role in the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century. Novels often include embedded utopias within them, so much so that these might be considered a “chronotope” of the early novel. On the face of it, this is paradoxical. Utopias portray visions of idealized societies, while novels operate in the mode of a critical realism scrutinizing the present. In this class, we will try to understand the place of utopian thinking in eighteenth-century novels.  Are utopianism and realism at odds in the early novel? Does the critical potential of realism need the normative guidance of utopian thought to be effective? Why do embedded utopias become more scarce in later novels, and how is realism able to get along without them?

This class will read an array of early novels with embedded utopias. (Possibilities include: Cervantes, Don Quixote; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (book 4); Mandeville, Fable of the Bees; Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Rousseau, Julie; Goethe, Wilhelm Meister; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.) We will also read a selection of early utopias such as More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis. Alongside these texts, we will read contemporary critical writing about utopias (Bloch, Jameson), realism (Watt, Lukacs, Jameson) and the crisis of ends-oriented thinking in eighteenth century ethics and politics (Horkheimer, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Pfau). Our aim will be to arrive at an account of the function of the “embedded utopia” chronotope in early novels.

Course Description: This course gives students grounding in contemporary topics in translation studies by focusing on some of the problems embedded in its history and practice: translation’s employment in the contexts of war, displacement, and empire; its role in national canon formation and transnational literary circulation amid the hegemonic force of Anglicization; and the importance of translation problems—mistranslation, pseudo-translation, “bad translation,” and untranslatability—to current discussions of translation's politics and ethics. Alongside a corpus that includes important translation theorists, we will work through case studies of translation problems and problematic translations of literary texts between Arabic and (largely) English. The course serves, then, as both a history of Arabic-English literary transmission (from the 19^th to 21^st centuries) and an introduction to the historical, linguistic, and political problems embedded in that transmission.

Course Description: This seminar introduces students in the arts-based humanities to the study of digital aesthetics across the arts, including literature, visual art, moving images, and music. It will examine a range of aesthetic forms responsive to the popular emergence of the computer and the internet, including computer-generated prints, video games, electronic music, hypertext, print fiction, and projects inflected by vernacular digital forms such as memes. Moving historically, roughly decade by decade from the 1960s to the present, the main task of the class will be to consider the difference digital computational technologies make in the creation of aesthetic forms and the experience of them. For instance, what new forms and modes of experience become possible with computers? What exactly makes something "digital"? And how can we tell (or not) -- and does it matter at all -- if something was made with the aid of automated processes? And finally, how do the answers to these questions change as we move from one computational era to another, e.g. from the mainframe and hobbyist eras to the domestic reception of popular electronics and computers in the 1980s to the emergence of the World Wide Web and social media and smartphones in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s up to and possibly beyond our historical present. The seminar will also emphasize the formal analysis of a range of both experimental and popular works across media, taking care to measure the aesthetic and historical meanings of the digital in the changing imagination of computers as central to society. Finally, students will encounter and write about forms native to their chosen discipline (literature, visual art, the moving image, music) but also about newer forms that do not fit easily into discipline-specific histories. Possible texts and objects of aesthetic analysis include computer-generated prints in the collection of Northwestern's Block Museum, the Detroit Techno and Chicago House electronic music scenes, fiction by William Gibson and Patricia Lockwood, net.art by Mendi + Keith Obadike and Ricardo Dominguez, films by Ridley Scott and the Wachowskis, glitch art by JoDi, Takeshi Murata, Jon Satrom, Rosa Menkman, and others, a group session devoted to video game play, meme aesthetics, and a class devoted to experimenting with artificial intelligence. Assignments will likely include a short presentation, a short formal analysis paper, and a final paper or project on digital aesthetics on an approved topic of the student's choosing.

Course Description: After asserting its “manifest destiny” in the nineteenth century, the United States became an unprecedented global power in the twentieth century, especially after World War II. In 1941, the publisher Henry Luce went so far as to coin the phrase “the American century” to describe the new role of the emerging superpower in world affairs. For some, the US became the “indispensable nation,” “world leader,” and an exceptional international figure. For many others, such as the people of the Philippines or Vietnam or Iraq, it became a cruel and coercive imperial force. This course studies how the historical fact of US empire influenced literature and expressive culture. We will examine how both domestic and international writers most impacted by imperial violence—ranging Filipino migrant laborers, Afghan diaspora in the US, Middle Eastern and North African civilians caught in the dragnet of detention—contest the language of empire that the U.S. uses to ceaselessly redefine itself.  This graduate course asks. how has the geography of United States empire shaped and informed the evolution of US empire studies and postcolonial studies in the contemporary moment?  In what ways might the intersection between postcolonial studies, ethnic American studies, Pacific studies, Middle Eastern and North African studies, and US empire yield new categories of analyses that have been broached by scholars like Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Eqbal Ahmad, and Amy Kaplan in the 1990s? What purchase do they have on contemporary academic as well as aesthetic developments in the post-9/11 era? Throughout the term, students will be introduced to and learn to grapple with theoretical and historical concepts like sovereignty, Cold War liberalism, counterinsurgency, extralegal internment, extraterritoriality, and neoliberal multiculturalism. We will read monographs almost every week by theorists starting with Said, Kaplan, Junaid Rana, Erica Edwards, Stuart Schrader, Anjuli Raza Kolb, and Darryl Li, We will also work through theorists like Eqbal Ahmad, Jasbir Puar, Judith Butler, Joseph Slaughter, Jodi Melamed, Nadia Abu Al-Hadj, and many others to think through complex vocabularies of law, literature, and human rights in understanding the undertheorized intersection between postcolonial studies and US empire.

Course Description: Women’s fiction and films of the classical Hollywood era, 1929-1950, feature heroines on the brink of madness, suicide, and death.  Melodrama, a dramatic form that flourished in the nineteenth century and featured making virtue and evil visible, structures many of the works in our course. We will explore how and why female artistic production from the beginning of modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the heyday of the “woman’s picture,” 1933-1950 featured women on the brink, rejecting the 19th -century “marriage plot,” for a different set of endings. We will discuss the significance of “the New Woman,” the last throes of the “cult of domesticity” and the work of arguably classic Hollywood’s greatest actress, Bette Davis, whose films took up those historical issues.

Mode of Evaluation: Two take-home close reading exams (2 pages total) and a final project on a Davis film not on the syllabus. Works may include The Awakening, Ethan Fromme, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Plum Bun, Quicksand, and The Street. Films may include Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, Dark Victory, Now, Voyager, In This Our Life, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? We will read selected theoretical works from object relations psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, star theory, genre theory, and Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint.

Course Description: The terms “sovereignties” and “Americas” in the title of this course stand at the crossroads of old and new dialogues about their meanings. This course considers Indigenous and Native American notions of sovereignty that imagine nationhood outside of the nation-state framework. It reads these theorizations of sovereignty and nationhood alongside Latin American and Latinx anti-imperial writing. We will consider José Martí’s late nineteenth-century articulation of “Our America” alongside the rise of the Guna word “Abiayala” and its use by Indigenous activists from Latin America, and “Turtle Island” as the name that Native American creation stories give to our continent. Our discussions will trace connections between the storytelling traditions of Native American, Indigenous, and Latinx authors across the hemisphere. We will study the narrative forms that authors take up as they construct or critique nationhood: essays, short stories, novels and poetry. We will also examine how authors break down these forms by taking up communal authorship, orality, visual media, and multilingualism as narrative strategies that provide aesthetic and ideological challenges to canonical articulation of nation-state sovereignties.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based seminar.

Evaluation Method(s): Conference abstract, paper, presentations, and participation in discussions.

Texts include: Assigned texts will likely include essays by Emil’ Keme, José Martí, Gerald Vizenor, Shari M. Huhndorf, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Walter Mignolo. Primary materials will include works by Leslie Marmon Silko, Luz Jiménez, Tommy Orange, Yuri Herrera, and Natalie Díaz, as well as excerpts from Popol Vuh and Florentine Codex

Texts will be available at: All materials will be uploaded to Canvas.

Course Description: In this course students will assess how the novel has figured in the development of Black literature and life over the long 20^th Century. Through our engagement with this form, student’s will examine how long-form narrative fiction has captured the historical and social realities of Black life since the turn of the 21^st century and how it has called for different worlds through innovative technique and style. We will read topically from the end of the 19^th century through to the 21^st century and will consider how the novel has evolved as a form that takes in multiple genres.  In addition to fiction, students will also read theories of narrative written by black and non-black authors to better understand how narrative works.

Some conceptual questions for consideration include:

What historical, stylistic, aesthetic qualities produce the novel? How do Black American novels innovate formally, stylistically, and narratively? How do such innovations (or, on the contrary, adherence to tradition) help us understand literature and culture’s work in the project of Black freedom?

Texts Include:

• Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man 978-1636003672
• Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 978-0060838676
• Ellison, Invisible Man  978-0679732761
• Brooks, Maud Martha 978-0883780619
• Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain 978-0375701870
• Butler, Kindred 978-0807083697
• Bambara, The Salt Eaters 978-0679740766
• Morrison, Beloved 978-1784876432
• Everett, Erasure 978-1555975999
• La Valle, The Changeling 978-0812985870

Course Description:This graduate seminar explores core concepts, questions, and methodologies within the environmental humanities. Rather than reading literature and literary scholarship in isolation, we will trace their entanglements in environmental history, anthropology, philosophy, geography, and other adjacent disciplines. What, we will ask, are the unique affordances of literary study when confronting environmental questions and challenges? What are the risks and rewards of conducting interdisciplinary environmental research?

The syllabus will be tailored to support the particular interests and pursuits of students in the course, but topics may include climate writing, environmental justice literature, environmental racism, global and local scales, militarized and nuclear environments, and queer ecologies. Collectively, the readings will ensure familiarity with classic texts in the environmental humanities and introduce students to the cutting edges of this wide-ranging field.

Teaching Method: Discussion-based seminar.

Evaluation Method: Conference abstract, paper, presentations, and participation in discussions.

Texts include: Assigned texts will likely include scholarship by Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, Rob Nixon, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Anna Tsing, and Kyle Powys Whyte. Primary materials will include works by Rachel Carson, Jamaica Kincaid, Imbolo Mbue, Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, and Karen Tei Yamashita.

Course Description: Mimesis names a relation of likeness: the way a work of art of literature is like something else—not the only way, but a uniquely central way in theories of representation in the traditions of Europe and the Mediterranean.  Since Plato and Aristotle, mimesis has often stood for a kind of natural relation of one thing to another.  It thus paradoxically is a relation that often goes without saying: you are supposed to recognize likeness when you see it.  This course will explore some of the things that literature is supposed to be like (action? the world? other literature?), but also what it means for one thing to be said to be like another thing at all.  We will balance theoretical discussions of mimesis with theatrical and other explorations of its role, as well as strategies for representation besides likeness, representing things that are like nothing, and hierarchies implied or subverted by the concept of mimesis.  Readings might include selections from Aristotle, Longinus, Shakespeare, Corneille, Calderon, Cavendish, Freud, Woolf, Warburg, Benjamin, Auerbach, Wittgenstein, Capote, Latour, Bhabha, Ranciere, Viveiros de Castro, or Hartman.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA