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: This course introduces students to the early English literary canon from the late medieval period through the eighteenth century. We will think critically about whose voices and perspectives are represented in, and omitted from, this canon. What values does it enshrine? Whose authority and perspectives does it prioritize? What context does this canon provide for later writers, including writers from traditionally marginalized demographics? Readings will include work by Geoffrey Chaucer, Marie de France, Margery Kempe, Thomas More, Leo Africanus, John Donne, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Eliza Haywood, Oludah Equiano, and Samuel Johnson.

Teaching Method: Seminar.

Evaluation Method: Attendance & participation, reading quizzes, poetry recitation, in-class midterm and final essay.

Texts Include: Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volumes A, B, C) ISBN 978-0393603125

Course Description: In this quarter we’ll explore 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-1850s. We will be centrally engaged with a set of related questions: What is American literature? Who counts as an American? Who shall speak and for whom? We embark on this journey at a moment of intense questioning about historical memory and literary traditions: for example, various organizations are still 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, we have all seen the removal--and sometimes the return--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 tell contrasting 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. This course introduces American literature from its beginnings, at the time Native peoples first encountered Europeans, through the Civil War. (A related course, English 271, takes up the later part of American literature's story. Students are welcome to take both courses.)

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 lectures and section meetings is required and will be taken.

Texts Include: There are two required texts for the course: volumes A and B of the TENTH edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. ISBN: 978-0393884425.

Course Description: TBA

Course Description: The goal of this course is to familiarize students with practices of “close reading” fundamental to the broader study of literature and culture. With this general goal in mind the course will proceed in two sections. In the first section of the quarter students will read selections from Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century along with short fiction by contemporary authors, possibly including George Saunders, Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and others. The second half of the course will build on the first by considering the topic of aesthetic judgment. Put otherwise, the second half of the course will think about how and why we talk about art in the ways we do (and why that matters). Why, for example, does it make sense to call something ‘interesting’ and something else ‘cute’ or something else ‘slop’? The idea here is that getting to know this mode of thinking will improve our sense of how close reading matters. For this portion of the course we will think in depth with literary theorist Sianne Ngai. This progression will prepare students to develop a final analytical paper on an aesthetic judgment.

Teaching Method: Discussion, short lecture.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Papers, participation.

Texts Include: 

• Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 978-0674088122
• Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century 978-0691265704
• Printed course reader

Course Description: Students write and produce multiple prose and poetic works, layering spoken word with evocative sonic textures, tones, instrumentation and silence. This course places equal emphasis on literary quality, vocal performance and production value. We act as writers, performers, producers as we listen deeply into contemporary radio practice. We also encourage one another to experiment, to try weird ideas, to take risks. We will learn to connect with the listener, and we will investigate what it means to write for the ear, distinct from the page and screen. In the process of producing multiple audio works, we will acquire numerous audio production skills. We will write frequently, speak frequently and in varied styles. We will use field mics and studio mics as we harness our unique voices and the voices of others. We will also compute a fair bit as we learn to use audio editing software to produce polished, multilayered soundscapes. By the end of the spring term, we will be more practiced writers, more accomplished multimedia performers and producers, possess a greater number of technological skills and a greater range of artistic expression. No production or technological training is needed prior to this course.

Teaching Method: Hands-on instruction, workshop.

Evaluation Method: Short-form multimedia essays, stories, poems.

Course Description: Just about everyone has heard of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, whether they know Shakespeare’s play or not. But Romeo and Juliet’s story does not start or end with Shakespeare. Almost three hundred years earlier, Dante mentions it in passing in the Divine Comedy. More than three hundred years later, Romeo and Juliet turn up in West Side Story as teenagers from different backgrounds in gentrifying Manhattan, and they appear in dozens of other versions in between. Romeo and Juliet owe much to traditions of both courtly love and bawdy country stories, and they in turn have given us many of our ways of understanding love and the intensities that surround it. Idealized or criticized, Romeo and Juliet seem to slip free of the work in which they appear to lead many other lives. In this class we will explore some of the ways Shakespeare’s play and Romeo and Juliet’s story have appeared and reappeared, changed and persisted. We will use this body of writing to explore some different ways of reading, understanding, and using literature. We will also learn how we use this story to think about values, about love, about violence, and about stories themselves.

Teaching Method: Seminar

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

Texts Include: TBA

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

Teaching Method: Mini-lectures and discussion.

Evaluation Method: Essays and projects; course engagement through participation and Hypothesis annotation.

Texts Include: 

• Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Arden Early Modern Drama (Bloomsbury), ISBN 9781408133453. Paperback.
• William Shakespeare, Richard II, Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, eds., updated edition, Folger Shakespeare series (Simon & Schuster), ISBN 9781501146282. Paperback.
• Bertolt Brecht, Edward the Second: A Chronicle Play, Eric Bentley, trans., Grove Press, ISBN 9780802151476, ISBN 10 0802151477
• Tom Stuart, After Edward, Oberon Modern Plays, ISBN 9781786827050
• "Red, White, and Royal Blue" on video may require renting/buying access via Amazon online.

Course Description: How is it that a minimally-educated, gay, and idiosyncratic Brooklyn carpenter and journeyman printer became the indispensable poet (along with Emily Dickinson) in U.S. literary history? This question is the point of departure for a sweeping seminar on Walt Whitman’s writing career. Extending from virtually one end of the nineteenth century to the other, Whitman’s writings also provide an opportunity to engage with crucial events and issues in U.S. history, including slavery and racial representation, gender and homosexuality, urbanism, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Starting with Whitman’s journalism and short stories, we’ll then turn to his magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, and the focus of his on-and-off revision for nearly forty years. We’ll read Whitman’s writings in facsimile--that is, as reprints of the way they looked when they first circulated, which is an especially appropriate way to study the writings of this writer who was also a printer, and who took a hands-on approach to the publication of his works. Finally, at course’s end we’ll consider the enormous number of poets, artists, writers, and free thinkers of all stripes for whom Whitman has been an inspiration, forbear, and chosen family.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Engaged Participation, Two essays, 8 pages each. Possible in-class quizzes; probably no exams.

Texts Include: Facsimile editions of the first three editions of Leaves of Grass, and a fourth of WW's Civil War poems, Drum-Taps. Other writings on Canvas.

Course Description: TBA

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: We will study John Milton’s poetry and prose in context, with sustained attention to the complexities of his art, the crisis of his times, the subtlety of his thought, and the extent of his influence. Milton’s defenses of political, personal, and religious liberty, his self-presentation, and his grappling with key ethical questions involving free will, gender definitions, crime, authority, rebellion and redemption will be among the many concerns that arise as we explore his work in the context of the raging political and theological controversies of his time. We will rad Milton scholarship and see the diverse approaches made to his work.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Oral Report, Papers.

Texts Include: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Milton, ed Kerrigan. ISBN-10: 0679642536.

Course Description: This is a course about how we talk about art and why it matters. What does it really mean to call something “cute”? How about “interesting,” “#oddlysatisfying,” “slop,” or – reaching back into the past – “beautiful” or even “sublime”? This course explores questions of aesthetic judgment through a sustained and in-depth reading of Sianne Ngai’s 2012 book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Along the way we will read selections from authors writing in earlier periods (Kant, Lyotard) and major influences on Ngai (Marx, Jameson, Cavell). We will also consider more recent and primarily internet-based categories of aesthetic judgment as well as possible alternatives to "judgment" (such as when art serves as a prop for self care; or when the term "aesthetic" signals a lifestyle, e.g. "cottage core," "dark academia," etc). Time permitting we will read more of Ngai’s work. To ground our discussion we will sample a range of aesthetic texts across media.

Teaching Method: Discussion.

Evaluation Method: Attendance, Participation, Papers.

Texts Include:

• Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 978-0674088122
• Printed course reader

Course Description: A graduate level poetry workshop for MFA+MA students. Open to other university graduate students by application.