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: 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: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers

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: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers

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

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

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

Texts Include: We'll use the high-quality, inexpensive Folger Library annotated paperback editions of the following plays, ed. Mowat and Werstine (these editions only; physical texts required):

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (978-1501146213);
• The Merchant of Venice (978-1439191163);
• Henry V (978-0743484879);
• As You Like It (978-0743484862);
• Hamlet, Updated edition (978-1451669411);
• The Tempest, Updated edition (978-1501130014);
• The Two Noble Kinsmen (978-1982170165);
• additional critical readings on Canvas.

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 study what the first Native American Renaissance was. 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: Lecture and Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance and participation, in-class midterm, mixed-media paper.

Texts Include: 

• Louise Erdrich, The Round House, 9780062065254
• Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians, 9781597146289

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

Teaching Method: Short lectures, discussion, collaboration.

Evaluation Method: Brief weekly writing assignments, in-class peer-reviews, mid-term paper, final project, active class participation.

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

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. As we read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, we will explore the ways in which Chaucer experiments with late medieval literary genres, from chivalric romances to bawdy fabliaux, from pious exempla to moral fables, frustrating and playing upon the expectations of his audience. We will also examine the changes Chaucer makes to his sources, by comparing several of his tales to the stories told by Gower and Boccaccio. 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, shapes our perceptions and expectations of the tales: How is a romance different when it is told by a knight, by a social climber, or by a renegade wife? What is the relationship between the teller and her tale? And conversely, when does the tale transcend its teller? We will be reading Chaucer’s poem in the original Middle English, becoming familiar with the vocabulary and the sound of the language by reading aloud. 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: Today we study and perform the plays of Shakespeare, but for playgoers of Shakespeare’s time, the play was not the only thing. The business of playing in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries—playwrights, actors, supernumeraries who collected pennies from playgoers and sold them food or beer—participated worked on scales both larger and smaller than the play: the location of the playhouses in London, the yearly repertories of competing companies, genres of plays and kinds of parts in them, but also the working words and gestures of the actors and the worn worlds of prop and costume. Looking at these other aspects of playing at reveal patterns invisible at the level of the individual play. We will approach Elizabethan playing as a self-organizing system made up not just of plays, but of many agents, interests, and objects. In this class we will study plays, of course—but also neighborhoods of London, floorplans of playhouses, lists of props and players’ wills, the plays different companies put on to take advantage of trends and slow periods. Looking at how plays were made and what they were made out of, we will develop different ways of looking at “Shakespeare’s theater.”

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Participation, papers, other projects, testing.

Texts Include: TBA

Course Description: South Asian writers seen to win a lot of literary 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.

Teaching Method: Discussion/seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance/participation/papers.

Texts Include: 

• Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable. ISBN-13: 978-0141393605
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children. ISBN-13: 978-0812976533
• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things. ISBN-13: 978-0812979657

Course Description: This course examines African drama as a major literary and cultural form. By centering drama, the course foregrounds performance, embodiment, ritual, language, folklore, and audience—elements foundational to African expressive cultures and social life. African drama is studied not only as text, but as event and practice, shaped by space, voice, movement, and historical circumstance. The course focuses on Anglophone African drama, with particular attention to protest theatre, drama for education, ritual and folkloric drama, women’s drama, and modern theatrical experimentation, including the African drama of the absurd. These forms are read as responses to colonialism, post‑independence disillusionment, apartheid, gendered authority, and political repression. Students will engage texts—and critical writings—by a wide range of dramatists and theorists, including Efua Sutherland (folklore, narration, and audience participation); Zulu Sofola (tragic form, custom, and women’s authority); Tess Onwueme (gender, political satire, and the African drama of the absurd); and Kole Omotoso (African adaptations of classical tragedy). Comparative theoretical perspectives will include brief excerpts from Aristotle, Brecht, and Beckett, used selectively to frame discussion rather than to maintain perceived hierarchies. African drama will also be situated in comparative perspective, particularly in dialogue with Greek and European theatrical traditions, to illuminate shared concerns with tragedy, ritual, and political power. Special emphasis is placed on women dramatists, whose work has been central to African theatre yet remains underrepresented in many curricula.

This course is dedicated to the memory of Biodun Jeyifo (1946–2026), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025), and Micere Githae Mugo (1942–2023), whose scholarship, artistry, and commitment to performance, language, and resistance continue to shape how African drama is read, taught, and understood.

Teaching Methods: Interactive lectures, staged readings, debates, performance analysis, archival visits, guest lectures, and small-group discussion.

Evaluation Method: Two analytical essays, short responses, performance or scene analysis, participation, and ungraded in-class writing, regular self-assessment No final exam.

Texts Include (may change):

• Ama Ata Aidoo –Anowa (Ghana). Heinemann/Longman. ISBN-13: 978-0582641971.
• Efua Sutherland – The Marriage of Anansewa (Ghana). Longman. ISBN-13: 978-0582642466.
• Zulu Sofola – Wedlock of the Gods (Nigeria). Heinemann/Evans Brothers. ISBN-13: 978-0435901983.
• John Ruganda – The Burdens (Uganda). Oxford University Press, African Writers Series. ISBN-13: 978-0435901150.
• Robert Serumaga – Majangwa (Uganda). Heinemann/Gollancz African Theatre. ISBN-13: 978-0435900689.
• Wole Soyinka – Death and the King’s Horseman (Nigeria). W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN-13: 978-0393927607.
• Athol Fugard – Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (South Africa). Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0195710508. 
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o & Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ – I Will Marry When I Want (Kenya). Heinemann. ISBN-13: 978-0435909606.

Course Description: U.S. Latinx and Latin American feminist literatures are often discussed as separate categories with distinct sociopolitical contexts. This course makes the case that it is not only logical but also necessary to embark on comparative readings of feminist cultural production from across the hemisphere. It weaves together feminist language surrounding the Ni Una Menos and Me Too movements to frame these conversations within a transnational and transhistorical scope. This course considers female and queer writers from the twentieth and twenty first centuries who have sought to reframe women’s roles in Latinx and Latin American cultural production. We will read stories about traitors, witches, and madwomen; stories that center language as our main instrument to fabricate and rupture gender roles. Our discussions will pay particular attention to the literary traditions that authors take up to narrate the unsettling reality of gender-based violence: surrealism, horror, realist fiction, and hybrid forms. We will explore how feminist reformulations of horror, surrealism, and realism respond to the male-dominated traditions of magical realism and nationalist movements. We will also study the non-textual mediums through which feminists have historically made themselves heard, namely protest movements, performance work, and visual art.

Teaching Method: Lecture and Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance and Participation, in-class midterm, creative assignment.

Texts Include: TBA

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.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Questions, Papers.

Texts Include:

• Bible excerpts (can use online)
• The Last Days of Socrates. (Penguin). ISBN-10 0140449280
• Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. (Arden Edition). ISBN-10 1474280145
• Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw. (Penguin Edition). ISBN-10 0140437916
• Billy Budd by Herman Melville. (TOR). ISBN-10 1500412910
• 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-10 0374532508

Course Description: This selective-enrollment, yearlong "Sequence" is designed to make students 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: Discussion.

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

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

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

Course Description: This seminar is designed to guide you through the many steps required to complete a research project in English. Your own research and that of your classmates will be the focus of the seminar. You will be expected to complete weekly written assignments, each of which will contribute in some way to the research and writing required for your Senior Thesis. You will craft a proposal/abstract for the project, construct an annotated bibliography of sources essential for the thesis, produce a “State of the Field” analysis, attempt close readings relevant to your arguments, and finally, write a draft introduction and chapter for the thesis. Even if none of these pieces make it into the final thesis, regular writing is an essential part of exploring and developing your ideas. ----- Since the seminar is focused on the independent research of you and your classmates, its success depends on the work you put into researching and revising, and the care and attention with which you engage the work of others in the seminar.

A key goal of the seminar is to foster a collaborative scholarly community, in which you help each other hone your ideas, refine your writing and find new paths to explore. Research never happens in isolation. Although I will be guiding you through the steps of research, you should think of the seminar as a workshop space to explore and develop ideas, work through frustrations with your writing and solicit the advice of others. A central part of the seminar will be reading and commenting on the work of your peers, as well as receiving and incorporating constructive criticism from them. It is never easy to share work publicly, particular in its early stages when ideas seem unfinished and still in need of work. I hope we can create an environment in the seminar that is open, respectful, constructive and supportive. Being open to constructive criticism is the only way to improve your writing and advance your ideas.

The skills you develop through the regular practices of writing and workshopping – precise analytic writing, giving constructive feedback, incorporating editorial advice – will improve your senior thesis. But these skills will also serve you well in many contexts beyond academia where you will be asked to undertake independent research.

Teaching Method: Seminar, intensive workshopping

Evaluation Method(s): Weekly writing assignments

Texts include:

• Wayne C. Booth et el., The Craft of Research, 5th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) ---- ISBN: 9780226826677

Texts will be available at: Norris

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

Course Description: Shakespeare studies and early modern studies have long been a fertile ground of methodological exploration and ferment influencing literary studies more broadly (examples include textual bibliography and editing, psychoanalysis, new historicism). This seminar will function both as an introduction to Shakespeare’s dramatic writing at the graduate level, reading a selection of plays from across Shakespeare’s theatrical career, and as an entry point for a range of current critical approaches. We will read selections of very recent books and articles drawn from: queer and feminist studies; transnational approaches; early modern critical race studies; literacy, language-learning, and early modern pedagogy; trans approaches; approaches to time, anachronism, and authorial biography.  At the same time, we will engage with two foundational areas that continue to inform critical work: textual studies/history of the book and performance history. Plays include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, As You Like It, Hamlet, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen.  Because close textual work will be a part of our process, required critical editions are TBA.

Course Description: “Queer theory” and “New Queer Cinema” were two neologisms born of the same early-1990s moment in Anglophone academia and public film culture. Both saw themselves as extending but also complicating the intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological parameters of prior formations like “gay and lesbian studies,” "gay liberation," or “LGBT film.” These new and spreading discourses stoked each other's productive advances. Scholars developed and illustrated new axioms through the medium of the movies, while filmmakers rooted stories and images in changing notions of gender performativity, counter-historiography, and coalitional politics.

This class honors but also decenters this peak period in the reclaiming of “queer.” We will unpack relevant scholarly and filmic trends before, during, and after this much-revisited heyday of queer cinema. We will also track competing narratives and subsequent trajectories around “queer” in the way we perform readings, imagine bodies, absorb histories, spin narratives, form alliances, enter archives, and orient ourselves in space and time. Diversities of race, gender identity, nation, class, and political project will inflect our understandings of “queer” and even challenge the presumed primacy of sexuality as its key referent.

Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussion, including some components of formal presentation by the professor and the other participants.

Evaluation Method: Written assignments, class participation.

Texts Include: All materials will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: The goal of this class is to revise material currently in progress, but don’t freak out if what you have right now doesn’t feel substantial or ready: you’ll generate enough to keep yourself going as we go forward. If you’re working in your genre, I strongly encourage you to consider working material that could potentially be part of your thesis. If fiction is not your genre, that’s OK! I’m excited to see what you’ll create---and excited too to see how the elements of craft we’re exploring here are in dialogue with your poetry and your non-fiction. You’ll still be writing stories here, though. As we revise, I hope that we all discover what practices work best for our own writing, so that we’re not just revising but also developing a deeper understanding of the strictures and demands of this recursive process. That’s all a super long way of saying that we’re revising, sure, but we’re also here to figure out how to revise---it doesn’t look the same for everyone, and it honestly doesn’t even look the same for the same person. It shifts from project to project, like everything else.

Teaching Method: Lecture, discussion, seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, participation, papers, craft presentation.

Texts Include:

• Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts (1641293411)
• Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself (0393332179)