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: 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: TBA

Course Description: TBA

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: 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 technofix: 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 18th and 19th centuries to learn about the development of “race science” as a logic underpinning violently imposed social hierarchies. We will then 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: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: How does longing for home–– a place of belonging–– shape our sense of identity and community? In this course, we will discuss ways that writers for centuries have used fantasy to contemplate home and exile. Beginning with the classical epic veteran Odysseus who battles monsters, sirens, and vengeful gods to return from the Trojan war, we turn to modern stories where travelers are not traditional heroes but figures who feel profoundly vulnerable in their home spaces. Even as the journeys in these texts share themes of violence and renewal, they steer us to contemplate strikingly different issues, including generational conflict, immigration, race, gender, childhood, love, and climate change. Our classroom journey will involve learning how to analyze literature, contextualize fiction in historical frameworks, and craft strong arguments in writing. Texts will likely include Homer’s Odyssey; Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (a feminist recentering of The Odyssey); Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic cli-fi novel, Parable of the Sower; Yuri Herrera’s rewriting of The Odyssey in the borderlands, Signs Preceding the End of the World; Mohsin Hamid’s refugee fantasy fiction tale, Exit West; Maurice Sendak’s children’s tale, Where the Wild Things Are; and the fantasy-drama film set in Louisiana’s eroding coastline, Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.  

Required texts:

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

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

Teaching Method:  Lectures and required weekly discussion sections.

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

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

Course Description:  A monster, a basement, a storm, a prayer—what images shape a child’s inner world? Coming-of-age novels return us to these charged moments, showing how identity is formed through memory, language, and the body. In this course, we’ll read four powerful novels that portray growing up not as a straight line, but as a series of looping encounters with the past. These works explore the physical and emotional experience of embodiment:  what it means to live in a body that can feel monstrous or comforting, alien or intimate. At the same time, they ask what it might mean to transcend the body.

But this course is also about how we read. We’ll ask how literary language works—how it differs from everyday speech, how structure shapes meaning, and how novels speak through what they leave unsaid. We’ll develop our own interpretations, learning how to read closely, write persuasively, and argue with precision and care.

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

Teaching Method:  2 lectures, 1 required discussion-section per week.

Method of Evaluation:  midterm paper (25%); final paper (35%); final exam (20%); quizzes and class participation (20%).

Texts (available at Norris bookstore):

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin Classics), ISBN 9780141439471.
• Justin Torres, We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), ISBN 9780547844190.
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury), ISBN 978-1-60819-626-5.
• Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom (Vintage), ISBN 978-1-9848-9976-7.

Course Description: This course harbors two primary objectives: 1) to acquaint students with vocabularies and frameworks of argument required to analyze film in terms specific to that medium; and 2) to familiarize students with a broad range of written texts crucial to the study of cinema, enabling them to render persuasive interpretations of those texts, as well. d politics of written work get preserved but also transformed on screen, in blatant and subtle ways. Cultivating techniques of close analysis—whether breaking down a film sequence, parsing a scholar’s arguments, or negotiating between two versions of the “same” story—will be the paramount skill developed in the course, hopefully leading to deeper appreciations of several kinds of texts.

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

Teaching Method: Lectures and discussion sections.

Evaluation Method: Exams; short in-class writing.

Required Texts: None.

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 and strategies in the Bible; the historical situation of its writers; the representation of God as a literary character; recurrent images and themes; the Bible as a Hebrew national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the “Old Testament” (Hebrew Bible); and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Because time is short, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, the Lamentations, Jonah, Daniel, and Second Isaiah; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms, Job, and the Song of Solomon, along with the saga of King David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John and the book of Revelation. (We’re skipping Paul because he’s more a theologian than a literary writer.) We’ll look more briefly at issues of translation, traditional strategies of interpretation, and the historical processes involved in constructing the Biblical canon.

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

Evaluation method: Grades will be based on regular attendance at section and active, informed discussion (25%); four 15-minute quizzes given in section (25% total); and eight weekly Canvas posts, or short critical and creative essays, written in response to prompts (50% total). Any finding of AI use on these assignments will result in failure for the course.

Course materials: You can use either the New Oxford Annotated Bible (New Revised Standard Version) or the New International Version. Other versions are not allowed because they differ too radically. You should bring a printed Bible to every lecture and section meeting.

Course Description: In this survey of African American literature, students will read across three centuries of literary and cultural production to examine and assess 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 literature and culture in the U.S. Our course will survey the following periods in Black literature and cultural production to analyze the evolution of Black cultural expression and its relationship to the historical transformations enveloping black people in each specific period: enslavement, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and segregation, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, and multiculturalism and the “post-blackness.” Throughout, will read a range of sources including poetry and prose, and long- and short-form works to characterize 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.

Texts include: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (ebook).

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: The term “literatures” at the end of this course title will serve as a guiding question throughout the quarter — how and why do we establish boundaries between literature and non-textual forms of storytelling by Native American and Indigenous peoples? Following the impulse of this question, the course will pay particular attention to the presence of oral and visual mediums in Native American and Indigenous literature. We will also study the wide variety of forms that make up Native American and Indigenous literatures, including codices, short stories, memoirs, and novels. We will begin by considering the notion that we are currently undergoing a second Native American Renaissance, or a flourishing of publications by Native American authors, and retrace publishing history back to the first Native American Renaissance, thus labeled in the 1980s. Our discussions will interrogate the notion of a renaissance as a revival of something that was previously dormant and consider the centuries-long history of storytelling by Native American and Indigenous authors. Although the course is centered on the United States, it explores the hemispheric ties of Native American authors with Indigenous writers from throughout Abiayala (the Americas).

Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based course.

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

Texts include: Bad Indians by Deborah Miranda, Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, Carapace Dancer, by Natalia Toledo, and excerpts from Popol Vuh.

Texts will be available at: Canvas and NU bookstore.

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: Lecture, discussion, discussion section, writing assignments.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, class participation, writing assignments, quizzes, readings, papers.

Texts include:

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

Texts will be available at: Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: In the United States, we often talk about Latinx people using blurry labels. We discuss the Latino vote and the Hispanic population, we move from Latino/a to Latinx to Latine and finally reject the very possibility of a category that can encompass a continuously expanding number of national identities, ethnicities, and languages. Our course readings and discussions will interrogate terms like Latinx, Chicano, and Nuyorican by tracing their emergence in the 1960s and following their evolution since then.

This class will provide an overview of literature written by Latinx authors in the last six decades. Our readings will alternate between short stories, poetry, essays, and one novel.

A nine-week course cannot do justice to the rich genealogy of Latinx writing. This course 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, with discussion sections

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.

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: In modern usage, we use the term “witch hunt” to describe politically motivated persecution. As in McCarthyism, when the term spiked in popularity, a “witch hunt” targets a rival or enemy by cynically manufacturing wild accusations, appealing to irrational fears of the credulous mob. In medieval and Renaissance Europe and in colonial America, on the contrary, we think of witch hunts as tragic symptoms of ignorance: a desperate attempt to assign blame for unexplained misfortune. In both cases, the term conveys more about the persecutors than about the targets. In this course, we will explore anglophone literature of witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, inquiring into what “witches” reveal about those who fear them. Who are the witch hunters? Who are the witches? What can these narratives reveal about gender, power, and community? We will consider drama, from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible; modern fiction from Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba to Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate; and films from Robert Eggers (The Witch, 2005) and Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria, 2018) to achieve a broad view of the beliefs, ideologies, and politics of witchcraft accusations. As we consider arguments and evidence invoked to scapegoat witches, we will also build our understanding of how arguments and evidence work in literary studies—distinguishing fact from opinion, interrogating assumptions, and improving writerly clarity and precision.

Books:

• William Shakespeare, Macbeth 1904271413
• Thomas Dekker et al., The Witch of Edmonton 1554814162
• Arthur Miller, The Crucible 0142437339
• Maryse Condé, I, Tituba 0813927676
• Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate 0802122833
• Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch 1250849314

Course Description: We will read a range of texts that are themselves focused on acts of reading, in order to think about the methods of reading and interpretation central to studying literature and language. Our texts include classic pieces of literature about literature: Henry James’s novella about a narrator obsessed with an author’s hidden papers; Oscar Wilde’s tale of a man similarly driven to prove the identity of the tantalizing figure behind Shakespeare’s Sonnets (which we will also read); Virginia Woolf’s genre-bending story/memoir/polemical essay about her search for earlier women’s writing; among other texts. Throughout, we will zero in on what’s involved in the crucial act of interpreting language and literature. Where are the boundaries between reading a text, drawing meaning “out of” a text, and “reading into” a text? Where does meaning come from or reside? What is the relation of authors to meaning? What is “close reading” and what are the alternatives? What work can reading and interpretation do for us? Our literary and critical texts in the course will also help us ask other related questions: what’s a feminist or a queer reading? What aspects of culture can be read besides (or beside) literature? Through active seminar discussion, the course will prepare students for the conceptual and theoretical questions that are central to studying literature — and reading and writing in the larger world.

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Methods: essays.

Texts include: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, ISBN: 9780141439907; William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth, ISBN: 9780300085068; Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H., (Hesperus Press edition), ISBN: 9781843910312; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, ISBN: 9780156030410; others TBA.

Books available at: Norris Bookstore.

Notes: English 300 fulfills a foundational requirement in the English Literature major and minor. The course may not be repeated for major or minor credit.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: This version of English 300 will examine the following works of fiction: Charlotte Temple; The Coquette; Our N--; The Scarlet Letter; and Broken Blossoms, Way Down East; and Madame X;  narratives of seduction and abandonment span the era of the nation’s founding through the turn of the 20^th century, as the virtuous woman ruined by the worldly libertine has served as political allegory.

Course Description: This version of English 300 will examine the following works of fiction: Charlotte Temple; The Coquette; Our N--; The Scarlet Letter; and Broken Blossoms, Way Down East; and Madame X;  narratives of seduction and abandonment span the era of the nation’s founding through the turn of the 20^th century, as the virtuous woman ruined by the worldly libertine has served as political allegory.

Course Description: South Asian writers win prizes. Ever since Salman Rushdie catapulted to international fame with the Booker Prize in 1981, writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have become the mainstay of not only literary prize cultures and the festival circuit but also U.S. university campuses. What has made South Asian literature so popular, especially when it deals with somber questions of anticolonial resistance, postcolonial nation-building, violence, and loss? This course will introduce students to twentieth and twenty-first century South Asian Literatures in English characterized by exciting stylistic innovations in magical realism, modernist language games, lyrical prose, and biting satire. By examining novels, short stories, poems, political writing, and films, we will ask, how has literature shaped both the promise and failure of the postcolonial nation-state? What might South Asian writing teach us about the global project of democratic world-making? Topics of discussion will include gender, caste, empire, globalization, migrancy, and environmentalism.

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

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

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

Books:

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

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

Course Description: Desire is the field in which we put our very identity, autonomy and independence at risk.  At the same time, romantic and erotic desire are the motors not only of social relations but of narratives and fiction. In novels, we as readers hang as much on the outcome of romantic entanglements as we do on the solution of crimes. This course explores how our own desires and those of fictional characters become entangled in what we might call "narrative desire."

The refraction of desire through language presses us to ask:  What are the lines that distinguish desire from pleasure, pain, instinct, identification and dis-identification?  What are the principal metaphors by which desire is represented, and what ambiguities do such metaphors involve?  Is desire defined more by its object or its form?  And what are the dangers of identifying with the characters and outcomes of a supremely "plotted" world? We will look at three classic novels in which the dangers of desire are figured, variously, as perversity, faith, sexual violence, betrayal, blood, and addiction.

Note:  19^th-century England was an intensely hierarchical society.  Representations of, and attitudes toward, gender and race in the 19^th century will not conform to our own notions, and we may find the casual and unreflective way in which their prejudices are expressed to be highly dismaying.  We may legitimately want to assess how this literature continues to find relevance for our own culture.  One of the novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, alludes to an episode of sexual assault.  I don’t take this lightly or without awareness of the fact that this may be a traumatic or triggering topic for you.  The novel is nonetheless important for our historical and conceptual understanding of the relationship between sexual violence and aesthetics.  We will consider the relationship between sexual violence then and now, and I will provide information about the support resources available here on campus.  Accommodations will certainly be made for students who need to work around particular classes or assignments. 

Teaching Method:  this is a unique course in that it is organized something more like a graduate seminar.  There will be a substantial final paper, but the bulk of your work in this course will consist in your regular contribution to the seminar discussions, and in the two formal seminar presentations that you will make to the class.  If you are not willing to prepare in a concentrated way for class meetings, this is not the course for you.  You can check the CTECs to see if students find this a rewarding way to learn!

Method of Evaluation:  2 seminar papers (20% each), seminar contribution (20%), final paper (40%).

Texts (available at Norris bookstore):

• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin, 9780141441146)
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Broadview Press 2^nd ed, 9781551117515)
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford, 9780199564095).

Please note that it is IMPORTANT to acquire the specific editions listed OR to have an edited digital version of the novels, so we can all "be on the same page."  The ideal solution would be to have both a hard copy of the recommended edition, and to consult a free digital edition for search purposes. 

Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a special case.  It was published in several conflicting editions during Hardy's lifetime.  If you don't acquire the edition ordered for the class, there will be some important passages and episodes missing from your edition.

Rudimentary digital versions of all three novels are available at gutenberg.org and on the university library’s “Nineteenth Century Fiction” database.  Since these are not highly edited version (they do not have explanatory notes, etc), they are best for word searches rather than for your primary reading.  Here is the URL for the library site:

http://philologic.northwestern.edu.turing.library.northwestern.edu/philologic/ncf.whizbang.form.html

Course Description: While in the popular imagination the Thousand and One Nights is often reduced to a few well-known characters, this course will take a wider approach to the collection. Over the quarter, we will read the earliest of these stories, as well as follow the collection's history as an archetypical example of world literature—from its evolution in Arabic oral and manuscript traditions, its eighteenth-century "discovery" and translation into European languages, to its modern afterlives in the novels, film, and visual arts it has inspired. We will consider how the Nights has been used in these works as a vehicle for deeply-considered investigations into narrative form as well as for clichéd and colonially-imbued images of the Middle East. Reading and watching these works next to and against the Arabic originals, we will encounter the vast variety of ways that the Nights has been a source of narrative techniques, literary themes, political allegories, and feminist debates across literary traditions.

Teaching Method: Discussion-based Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Mid-term examination and final paper as well as robust participation.

Texts Include:

• Daniel Heller-Roazen and Muhsin Mahdi, eds., The Arabian Nights: Norton Critical Edition (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2009). 978-0393928082.
• Yasmine Seale, trans., Aladdin: A New Translation (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2021) 978-1324091110.

Texts will be available at: TBA.

Course Description: TBA

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

Teaching Method: Discussion and some lectures.

Evaluation Method:  class attendance and participation required; discussion board posts; language quizzes; an oral presentation; and three short papers. 

Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $25) (The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson are also acceptable editions).

Textbooks available at:  Norris Center Bookstore.

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

Teaching Method: Discussion and some lecture.

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

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

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

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

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

Text available at: Norris Bookstore.

Course Description: 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth (December 16th, 1775), and at 250, she seems more alive than ever. Lurking just beneath the seemingly placid surface of Austen’s writing is a messy range of bad feelings, scathing wit, vicious cruelty, suppressed rage, and unsparing critique. How are these feelings oriented, where can they find expression, and at what point do they burst through the delicate veneer of social etiquette? What are the political stakes embedded in such moments? In this course, we will examine the persistence of Austen’s radical edge across her juvenilia, major novels, and final, unfinished work. We will also consider the ways in which Austen’s writing engages with eighteenth-century concerns and discourses around sensibility, race and empire, gender and marriage, and class and social mobility. How does Austen play with form and genre, from the first-person epistolary correspondence of her early work to her tyrannical third-person narrator? What are the limits of parody and satire as modes of critique? And how do film adaptations frame Austen’s subversiveness 250 years later? Possible texts may include Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion as well as selected juvenilia and shorter works. Austen’s novels may be paired with excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Prince. Possible films and shows include Mansfield Park (1999), Persuasion (2022), and selected episodes of Sanditon (2019) or Bridgerton (2020).  This course may also include archive visits and a virtual tour of Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, England.

Course Description: While attending to the major debates and keywords in postcolonial studies, this course will read speculative fiction from formerly colonized regions of the world. How can we account for the explosion of speculative fiction from the Global South in the 21^st century? How do these texts compare with their Western counterparts? In what ways have foundational mimetic texts from the Global South incorporated aspects of speculative fiction? As we answer these questions, we will also respond to the debates about literature in the Global South, especially its intimacies with folklore. Primary texts will include works by Nnedi Okorafor, Kojo Laing, Lauren Beukes, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Indrapramit Das, etc. We will put these texts in conversation with much more conventional postcolonial genres and speculative fictions from other parts of the world. Topics will include how writers use speculative fiction to present a wide range of topics (e.g., the universal human condition; technology and culture; environmental crisis; expressions of gender/sexual identities; racial politics; political power; people with disabilities; and human/non-human relations). Experimenting with different ways of reading a text (e.g., close reading, distant reading, surface reading, etc.), we will attempt to critically write about materials read in class using ideas by such literary and narrative theorists as Aristotle, Judith Merril, Pierre Bourdieu, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Diana Waggoner, Kathryn Hume, Tzvetan Todorov, Fredric Jameson, and Robert Scholes. At the end of the class, the student should be able to appreciate the nature and function of artistic production in the Global South.

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

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

Texts include:

• Nnedi Okorafor, Tordotcom (2015). ISBN-10: 0765385252; ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-0765385253
• Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber. Grand Central Publishing; (2000) ISBN-10‏: ‎ 0446675601 ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-0446675604
• Wu Ming-Yi, The Man with the Compound Eyes. ‎Pantheon (2014). ISBN-10‏: ‎ 9780307907967; ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-0307907967
• Chen Qiufan, Waste Tide. Tor Books. (2019 English translation) ISBN-10‏: ‎ 0765389312 ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-0765389312

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.

Course Description: What might the world like if it were made in the image of black feminist visionaries? How and why should we invite those imagined futures into our political and social realities? In this course, students will survey a range of writing in Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, paying special attention to the world-making potential of radical thinking. Students will read foundational texts including those by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, alongside more recent contributions from scholars including Jennifer C. Nash, Kevin Quashie, and Nicole Fleetwood to understand the shape and contour of contemporary black feminist world-making. Additionally, students will examine the veil between literature and theory and consider the ways in which these two genres of writing bleed into and reinforce one another. This course is reading intensive with weekly writing assignments and a large summative writing assignment.

Texts include:

• Ntozake Shange, for colored girls 978-0684843261
• Toni Morrison, Sula 978-1400033430
  

Course Description: The hemisphere we sometimes call the Americas has Indigenous names that supersede this title, namely Abiayala and Turtle Island. This course learns from literature by Indigenous authors who remap the lands we inhabit, whether by tracing hemispheric Indigenous connections, interrogating borders, or blurring boundaries between human and non-human worlds. We will consider José Martí’s late nineteenth-century articulation of “Our America” alongside the circulation of the Guna word “Abiayala” among Indigenous activists 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 and Indigenous authors across Abiayala/Turtle Island. This course will provide an illustrative and non-exhaustive sample of writings by Indigenous authors from what today we call Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, and Chile. Following calls by Indigenous authors to understand colonialism’s five-hundred-year history, will move between sixteenth-century manuscripts and contemporary literature.

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

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

Texts include: Excerpts from Popol Vuh and Florentine Codex as well as writing by Ailton Krenak, Natalie Diaz, and Yásnaya Aguilar Gil.

Texts will be available at: Materials will be available on Canvas.

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

Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussion.

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

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

• Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (978-0295993546)
• Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth (978-0812981322)
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (978-0520390485)
• Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (978-0375724374)

Course Description: On May 11, 2023, the World Health Organization officially declared the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this milestone, the effects of COVID linger as we mourn people and opportunities we lost and reassess the strategies of public health advocacy and communication. Now that the epidemiological emergency has subsided, humanistic scholarship allows us to consider not so much what, exactly, happened, but why and how it has affected our attitudes, ideologies, and values. How has COVID-19 affected our civic and political participation, our social relations, and our intellectual culture? How does the cultural aftermath of COVID-19 compare to responses of plague and pandemic from earlier periods? What prejudices and biases emerge during pandemics, and with what consequences? How does literature help us to assign meaning to collective experiences of disease? Course readings are organized into three units: the bubonic plague in medieval and early modern Europe, the AIDS epidemic in the US in the late-twentieth century, and the emerging literature of COVID-19 by contemporary Anglophone writers. Assignments include collaborative annotations on Canvas, a podcast episode to be completed in small groups, short weekly writing assignments, and a final essay or creative project.

Texts include:

• Eula Biss. (2015). On Immunity: An Inoculation. ISBN 978–1555977207.
• Ling Ma. (2018). Severance. ISBN 978–1250214997.
• Sapphire. (2021). Push. (Original pub. 1996). ISBN 978–0593314609.
• Michael Cunningham. (2024). Day. ISBN 978–0399591365.
• Mark Doty. (1995). Atlantis. ISBN 978–0060951061.
• Pamela Sneed. (2020). Funeral Diva. ISBN 978–0872868113.

Course Description: How does literature work through the structural and social struggle of disability to create discrete, sustainable worlds? How night the language of disability mobilize not just an identity category but a robust aesthetic apparatus of thought and feeling? This course works through Anglophone writing from India, South Africa, Britain, and the US to ask how disability remaps collectivity  care, and personhood by querying vocabularies of cripness, capacity, debility, and illness. We will examine how disability challenge assumed categories of exceptionality and capitalist productivity, while also asking significant questions about civil rights and human rights. In addition, the course also tracks how disability studies has evolved beyond a narrow Anglo-American focus to understand complex Global South realities. Reading disability theorists like Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Eve Sedgwick, Jasbir Puar, and Eli Clare, we will think about the frictional registers of belonging and alienation represented in novels, autobiographies, short stories, and art.

Evaluation Method: Assignments will comprise presentations, weekly discussion posts, and a final group video project.

Texts include: Ved Mehtq’s Face to Face, Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, IM Coetzee’s Slow Man, and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.

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: Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmworkers Union, both campaigned against toxic exposures in the mid-20^th-century United States and yet are rarely considered in tandem. This course puts the writings and activism of these two women in conversation, ranging through feminist, queer, and Latinx environmental writing to build connections between environmentalism and labor rights. Our study focuses on the craft of environmental nonfiction writing, examining contemporary practitioners working in the vein of Carson and Huerta. Students will also compose environmental nonfiction, employing the literary techniques analyzed in this course to craft a narrative addressing exposure, toxins, or the state of public health.

Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions.

Texts may include:

• Rachel Carson. Silent Spring. 1962.
• Sandra Steingraber. Living Downstream. 1997.
• Helena María Viramontes. Under the Feet of Jesus. 1995.
• Cherríe Moraga. Heroes and Saints and Other Plays. 1994.
• Karen Zacarías. Native Gardens. 2019.
  

Course Description: TBA

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 the classic novels like Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and George Orwell’s Burmese Days to shorter texts such as Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Sexy.” We will contextualize our readings with postcolonial 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); George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934); Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (1973); Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993); Jhumpa Lahiri, “Sexy” (1998); Pocahontas (1995); Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave (2022).

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: This course introduces students to the study of the modern American horror film. The course will focus on one major feature-length film per week proceeding roughly chronologically while studying powerful and often influential examples of various subgenres of horror from the slasher film to the supernatural and more. We will analyze films textually; and we will also focus on acquiring critical vocabularies for discussing horror cinema. Our prevailing concern will be with bodies -- bodies onscreen and the body of spectators. Horror cinema may arguably be defined by its ability to impact and affect the body of the film spectator through various conventions of portraying the body. With this in mind we'll be asking what the relation is exactly between the images onscreen and the experience of horror cinema in the theater/living room couch/etc. A focus on bodies naturally lends itself to a range of approaches scholarship across disciplines to studying the body, e.g. as racialized, gendered, sexualized, but also, specifically in horror, bodies as gasping, violated, screaming, tense, mutilated, incapacitated, nauseated or otherwise rendered abject, or existing perilously on the edge of humanity. To catalyze discussion we will read a variety of secondary sources from academic film studies and popular journalism and other sources. There will be a few lectures but we will mainly proceed via short lecture and guided group discussion.

Teaching Method: Discussion; short lecture; writing assignments.

Required Texts:  None.

Course Description: What is fantasy and how do queer people of color mobilize fantasy to imagine freedom. In this advanced seminar, students will read across a range of Queer of Color scholarship to analyze key texts from artists including James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Samuel Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Joel Kim Booster, and others. Students will also read standards from the Queer of Color critical canon, including works by José E. Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, Robert Reid Pharr, and E. Patrick Johnson.

Some guiding questions will include 1). What is fantasy and how does make and unmake a queer world? 2) How do scholars imagine in the presence of racist and cisheteropatriarchal structures?

• Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name 978-0895941220
• N.K. Jemisin, Far Sector 978-1779512055
• Juliet Takes a Breath, Gabby Rivera 978-0593108192

Course Description: Appropriation, Adaptation, Reinvention: 20^th- and 21^st-century artists ––working in different media across the globe––engage in these acts when they use Shakespeare’s plays as a vital cultural resource. From Renaissance London to contemporary India, from apartheid-era South Africa to modern U.S. teen culture, Shakespeare’s work has boldly been positioned to engage with timely issues: colonialism, war, same-sex desire, racial and ethnic tensions, gender instability, school violence, and legal injustice. In this seminar, we’ll examine the global transformations of Shakespearean drama across cultures and media (print, theater, and film). We’ll focus on The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet, alongside creative reworkings such as Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice (a play about Hindu, Muslim, and Latina/o cultures in modern Los Angeles), James Lujan’s Kino and Teresa (a play about star-crossed love in colonial New Mexico), the teen flick O, and Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti (The Māori Merchant of Venice). All assignments will be geared toward building the skills needed to undertake research in the humanities, with attention to designing a viable research project, identifying and treating valid sources responsibly, and developing a sustained argument. For their final projects, students may choose to investigate any afterlife of any Shakespearean play (afterlives might take the form of a play, YA book, graphic novel, translation, ballet, puppet performance, film, or literary adaptation).

Required texts:

• Toni Morrison, Desdemona, ISBN: 135027027X
• Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Halio, Oxford World Classics 1st ed, ISBN: 019953585X
• Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Thompson, Honigmann, The Arden 3rd series, 2nd ed, ISBN: 1472571762
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Gordon McMullan. ISBN-13:‎ 978-0393926262

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

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

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

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

Course Description:

This course will offer students an introduction to current theories and methods in literary studies. Students will grapple with key questions and debates that guide research and teaching in the humanities in the twenty-first century. The course begins with an inquiry into the history of the institution, the field(s) of literary studies, broadly conceived, and the questions of center and periphery that remain central to our work. We will then shift to an investigation of contemporary keywords guiding literary studies in the present.

Foregrounding the disorienting effects of the literary, the course begins by examining the history of the discipline and its institutions, including shifting definitions of our objects of study; the histories of exclusion and inclusion that accompany these shifts; and, issues of canonicity, especially as they relate to empire building both within and outside the academy. Then, we will explore the methods of literary critique, thinking about what is at stake in the objects we study and the ways we choose to read them. Finally, we will engage with challenges to the traditional organizing principles of our field, including its archives, geographies, periodization.

Texts include:

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish 978-0241386019
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark 978-0679745426
• Chris Eng, Extravagant Camp 978-1479834662
• Faith Barter, Black Pro Se 978-1469685977
• Sarah Dimick, Unseasonable 978-0231209250
• Maia Gil’Adí, Doom Patterns 978-1478031208
• Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness 978-1512826074

Course Description: TBA

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

Texts include: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann ISBN 978-0140422344 (approximate cost: $25) (The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson or The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson are also acceptable editions).

Textbooks available at:  Norris Center Bookstore.

Course Description: Appropriation, Adaptation, Reinvention: scholars have deployed these terms to theorize ways that 20^th- and 21^st-century artists ––working in different media across the globe–– use Shakespeare’s plays as a vital cultural and creative resource. These artists’ acts of cultural translation offer sites for exploring complex social and political issues, including colonialism and postcolonialism, racial and ethnic tensions, gender fluidity, same-sex desire, structural violence, and legal inequities. In this course, we will focus on The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet to explore transformations of Shakespearean drama through a range of media (print, theater, and film). We’ll attend to creative reworkings such as Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice (a play about Hindu, Muslim, and Latina/o cultures in modern Los Angeles), James Lujan’s Kino and Teresa (a play about star-crossed love in colonial New Mexico), the teen flick O, and Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Weniti (The Māori Merchant of Venice). All course assignments are structured to support the development of foundational research competencies in the humanities, with emphasis on formulating viable research questions, engaging responsibly with sources, and constructing evidence-based arguments. The final project invites students to undertake an original research inquiry into any global adaptation or afterlife of any Shakespearean play.

Required texts:

• Toni Morrison, Desdemona, ISBN: 135027027X
• Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Halio, Oxford World Classics 1st ed, ISBN: 019953585X
• Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Thompson, Honigmann, The Arden 3rd series, 2nd ed, ISBN: 1472571762
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Gordon McMullan. ISBN-13:‎ 978-0393926262

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

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

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

Course Description: This graduate seminar serves as an introduction to the field of Asian American literature, with a twin focus on classic texts and core debates. In addition to highlighting the richness and complexity of this literary tradition, the class will pressure key critical terms and paradigms such as representation, authenticity, genre & form, voice & lyric, history & archive, and of course, race. Participants will be exposed to a range of methodologies for close reading for racial formation as a formal feature of textual composition, as well as gain proficiency with Asian American literature’s relationship to central and emergent debates within American literary studies.

Some questions for consideration include the following: What do the many subjects and locations of Asian American literature tell us about the capaciousness of the category itself? What tensions and resonances arise when critical race and ethnic studies meet theories of representation? How are conventional modes of understanding racial identity in literature transformed when put in relation with theories of migration, imperialism, economics, and the environment?

Teaching Method: Discussion-based seminar.

Evaluation Method: Conference paper, discussion posts, presentation, and participation in discussions.

Texts include: Assigned texts will likely include primary texts by Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Karen Tei Yamashita, Monique Truong, Frank Chin, Lesley Tenorio, lê thị diễm thúy, Ruth Ozeki, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Secondary texts will include work by Lisa Lowe, David Eng, Kandice Chuh, Colleen Lye, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Rachel Lee, among others. Please verify before purchasing texts.

Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at Norris bookstore, and all secondary materials will be uploaded to Canvas.

Course Description: After detailing Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier’s influential distinction between “full-stomach” and “empty-belly” environmentalism, this course focuses on literary engagements with the latter. We track class and environmentalism through literature set in electronic waste dumps, tent cities of the unhoused, and disaster zones. Via this reading, we catalogue the capacities and limitations of literary modes associated with poverty—including social realism, the documentary, and sentimentalism. This class delves into environmental knowledge and movements emerging from communities subjected to poverty, but it also attends to unsettling slippages between practices of environmental simplicity and experiences of economic deprivation. Primary texts will be drawn from 20^th- and 21^st-century literature of the United States and the global South.

Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussion.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: 

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: TBA