Faculty of Arts & Sciences

This workshop is a continued exploration of writing for the stage. Students will be encouraged to excavate their own voice in playwriting. They will examine and attempt multiple narrative strategies and dialogue techniques. They will bolster their craft of playwriting through generating short scripts and a completed one act. Readings will include significant contributors to the theatrical form such as Ibsen and Beckett as well as contemporary dramatists such as Annie Baker, Caryl Churchill and Sam Shepard.

Initially, students can expect to read, discuss, and imitate the strategies of a wide range of poets writing in English; to investigate and reproduce prescribed forms and poetic structures; and to engage in writing exercises meant to expand the conception of what a poem is and can be. As the course progresses, reading assignments will be tailored on an individual basis, and an increasing amount of time will be spent in discussion of student work.

By guided reading, classroom discussion, one on one conference, and formal and structural experimentation, members of the Advanced Poetry Workshop will look to hone, deepen, and challenge the development of their poetic inquiry and aesthetic. Students will be required to write and submit one new poem each week and to perform in-depth, weekly critiques of their colleagues' work.

This workshop is an introduction to writing for the stage through intensive reading and in-depth written exercises. Each student will explore the fundamentals and possibilities of playwriting by generating short scripts and completing a one act play with an eye towards both experimental and traditional narrative styles. Readings will examine various ways of creating dramatic art and include work from contemporary playwrights such as Kenneth Lonergan, Martin McDonagh, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Sarah Ruhl as well established work from Anton Chekhov, Sarah Kane, and Harold Pinter.

Whether in essay, memoir or reportage, creative nonfiction employs many of the same literary techniques as fiction: narrative structure, character development, scene-setting, extended dialogue, emphasis on voice and point of view. In addition to workshopping student writing, we discuss examples of the genre by writers such as Virginia Woolf, William Maxwell, Joan Didion, and John McPhee. Assignments include two 10-15 page narratives, an extensive revision, and typed critiques of classmates' work.

Open by application to both undergraduates and graduates. Class includes the discussion of literary texts as well as work written by students.

Writers will become familiar with more sophisticated aspects (technical and conceptual) of writing fiction, beginning with short exercises and moving toward the completion and revision of original work. Readings include Munro, Welty, Diaz, Lahiri, and others, and we will explore how practicing writers negotiate character, narrative structure, setting, voice, etc. Individual reading assignments are also devised on a per project basis. As the term continues, increasing amounts of time are devoted to the discussion of student work. Students in this course will be expected to revise work often and to a very high standard.

Writing fiction requires risk-taking and rigor: the ability to dream while staying awake to subtleties of dialogue, description, character, structure, point of view, and voice. The only way to learn to balance all these elements is to immerse yourself in reading and writing - it's a lifelong pursuit, and we can continue it here. The class will include discussion of an eclectic range of published stories; much writing and revision; and close reading of and written response to one another's work.

An introduction to major works in English literature from Beowulf through the seventeenth century, the course will explore various ways that new literatures are created in response to cultural forces that shape poets, genres, and group identity. We will hone close reading skills, introduce rhetorical tropes, and develop techniques of critical writing.

A study of major works of English literature from 700-1700, with particular attention to the relationship between literary forms and the cultural changes brought by war, commerce, and religion. Key texts include Beowulf, selections from the Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Doctor Faustus, and The Pilgrim's Progress. We will learn to read Middle English aloud, analyze poetic language, and construct cogent essays.

An introduction to the fundamentals of Lyric poetry.

This course will examine the uncanny, the abject, and the ghostly as they appear in American literature, and consider their formal implications as well as their relationship to the major cultural and social issues of the time. Authors may include Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Washington Irving, Henry James, Maxine Hong Kingston, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Flannery O'Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe.

This course surveys American literature from the colonial period to the Civil War. We will read accounts of early contact, narratives of captivity and slavery, sermons, autobiographies, poems, and novels. Authors will include Winthrop, Rowlandson, Franklin, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson.

This seminar looks at poets from two turbulent eras: England in the Age of Revolution (1789-1824) and America in the 1950's and '60s. During those times poetry was seen as a vital medium for change-but how? And why? Our case studies will be William Blake and Allen Ginsberg, though we'll also read widely in the work of their contemporaries: Romantics, particularly Keats and Shelley; and Americans, such as O'Hara, Bishop, Lowell, and Plath. We'll also look at a few important texts in between, like Rimbaud's Season in Hell.

This course will examine aspects of the literary traditions of the indigenous peoples of North America. Students will read translations of traditional stories and songs as well as poems, novels, and stories by contemporary Native American and Canadian writers. The course will emphasize the diversity of the literature of North America from pre-Columbian times to the present, and will pay particular attention to the ways in which English has been employed and resisted as a literary language. Authors may include N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Thomas King, Sherman Alexie, Tomson Highway, and Eden Robinson.

This is a survey course of Shakespeare plays.

This course will examine the aesthetics and politics of the first Modern African American cultural movement, known today as the Harlem Renaissance. In our readings of key literary texts by authors such as Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer, we will discuss both the national and global contexts of so-called "New Negro Writing" and focus on debates surrounding representation, "respectability" and racial authenticity.

A look at the complex ways in which writers represent their characters' thought in texts by Austen, Flaubert, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Giovanni Verga, and Woolf. More broadly, traces the development of stream-of-consciousness, from Austen's incipient mastery of free indirect style, through Flaubert's more sophisticated use of it, to Woolf's full-blown inner monologues, seeing this development as not merely a fact of English and American literature, but as a phenomenon of world literature and an element of our modernity.

Studies systematically the arc of Samuel Beckett's literary career, with particular emphasis on Beckett's stage and video plays. The course proposes the idea of a "stable habitation for the Self" as one way of understanding both Beckett's thematic matiere and his astonishing aesthetic innovations in three media: stage, page, and video screen. Video resources supplement reading and discussion of texts, and local productions of the plays are studied when available.

This seminar explores the relationship between literary and scientific experiment during the Restoration and the eighteenth century. Our readings, by authors such as Milton, Fontenelle, Pope, Hume, Diderot, and Mary Shelley, will be paired with hands-on activities: while reading Swift's Gulliver's Travels, for example, students will have the opportunity to use microscopes and telescopes from the period. Throughout, we will seek to understand how writers of various sorts - scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, and essayists - were inspired by new accounts of nature, from the simplest experimental observations to the grandest visions of the cosmos.

Supervised small group tutorial in the study of literature in English.

An introduction to the deeply religious, yet turbulent culture of Anglo-Saxon England, where the tension between new Christian belief and deeply engrained warrior culture produced works of provocative prose and astonishing poetry. We will first learn the fundamentals of Old English, which requires study as a foreign language. As we gain facility with the language, we will translate biblical narratives, sermons, and religious poems: some of them cautiously literal in their treatment of scripture, others fascinatingly hybrid. Ultimately, we will gain a sense of the development of English prose, and read some of the greatest poems in the English language.

This course studies epic literature through six significant works in the genre: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, Milton's Paradise Lost, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and George Lucas' Star Wars. We will examine these works in terms of their formal conventions, thematic interests, and historical contexts, as well as attending to the interactions between texts in the epic tradition, the shift from narrative poetry to novel and film, and the manifestations of epic in the modern world.

The rise of the novel, seen through eighteenth-century fiction by Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Jane Austen. Through fiction, we can live out our highest aspirations and blackest fantasies; we can imaginatively enter the minds of others and inhabit strange, sometimes terrifying alternate realities. The early novel was preoccupied with such possibilities for dislocation and change: what happens when a character ventures far from home, and how can someone rise or fall in the world? Alongside these issues, we will explore the paradoxes of "realism," the problems of gender and class, and the sheer pleasure of reading fiction

In this class we'll read at least five of Jane Austen's novels and study the contribution they made to the early-nineteenth-century remaking of the novel as a form. Our chief concern will be Austen's intervention into her own era's discussions of what fiction could and should do, but we'll also acknowledge the ardent feelings her books continue to arouse today. As part of that acknowledgment, we'll conclude the course by investigating the wild world of contemporary Austen fandom and the Austenian tourism, shopping, adaptations, and sequels that nurture it.

What do love, sex, erotic desire, gender and personality have to do with one another, with how you see yourself, with what and how you read, with how others see you? What is this thing called sexuality, where did it come from, and how did literary creators find ways to reflect it, or change it? We'll look for answers in novels, plays, film, poetry, comics and nonfiction from the Renaissance to the present, among them Austen, Baldwin, Bechdel, Binnie, Lawrence, Rochester, Sedgwick, Wilde, and Whitman.

A survey history of Western drama, from the Greeks to the present. Plays include Oedipus Rex, Tartuffe, The Cherry Orchard, Gypsy, and Fires in the Mirror.

This course examines how American and African American writers engaged with legal definitions of race, personhood, and citizenship in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the first half of the course we will read literary texts from the antebellum alongside legal documents such as the Fugitive Slave Act, and Dred Scott v. Sandford. In the second half, we will analyze the literature of the "Jim Crow" era in the context of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Authors we will read include: Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins and Charles Chesnutt.

This course is both a survey of Asian American literature and an introduction to ongoing debates about what constitutes Asian American literature. How do we determine that a literary work is "Asian American" when the term has been continuously revised and expanded since it came into common usage in the late 1960s? How important are considerations of a work's thematic concerns, its relationship to specific cultural forms and traditions, or its author's biography?

This course looks at the scene of contemporary American fiction via the work of someone whom many-perhaps controversially-have called the writer of his generation: David Foster Wallace. This year we will pay particular attention to influences on Wallace: Pynchon, Barth, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Ozick, Borges, Kafka.

Money and language as means of representation, exchange, and production. Principal literary texts include works by Shakespeare, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Ruskin, Joyce, and Martineau as well as attention to novels where a coin is the narrator and to coins inscribed with poetic epigrams. Special consideration of the economics of literature from Aristotle to Heidegger, the relationship between monetary and aesthetic form in visual arts and cinema, and various theories of money as social fiction.

A study of four poetic and/or visionary works written 1300-1400: Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, John of Morigny's Book of Flowers, Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love, and William Langland's Piers Plowman. We consider the inter-relationship between the poetic and the visionary in light of the categories of "orthodoxy" and "discretion of spirits" during a period when both were fiercely contested.

This seminar on eighteenth-century novels and their philosophical surrounds situates itself at a crossroads where the histories of epistemology, the senses, and belief (both in God and in fictions) intersect. The Enlightenment described itself as the moment when an educated populace, weaned from superstition, would begin to see the world in its true colors: knowledge was to replace credulity. Our task will be to investigate its writers' investment in replaying the benighted, "Gothic" delusions they were meant to have put behind them. Our readings will encompass novels by Defoe, Lennox, Walpole, Radcliffe, and others, which we'll read alongside eighteenth-century philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and twenty-first-century discussions of magic and secularism.

Reading-list to be determined in consultation with seminar members will include Austen, Bronte, Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Collins, Trollope, read against both contemporaneous and new criticism and theory. Exercises in book reviewing, abstract-writing and conference presentation/public speaking.

The seminar offers an in-depth study of Ulysses and of Beckett's dramatic oeuvre. It doubles as an introduction to scholarly methods, including biography, history of the book, genre, geography, theater history, media studies, and philosophy.

This course will examine key books in the fields of theater and performance studies published in the last five years. We will look closely at their methodology, theoretical contributions, and engagement with earlier texts that have helped define and shape the fields.

Philosophic and literary accounts of beauty from Greek through modern, including Plato, Aquinas, Dante, Kant, Keats, and Rilke. In addition, the major arguments against beauty; and its stability across four objects (God, gardens, persons, and poems).

The Conference focuses upon dissertations in progress and other research topics of mutual concern. Membership limited to faculty members teaching or conducting research in medieval English language and literature and to graduate students working in this field.

Focuses on dissertations, dissertations in progress, and research topics of mutual interest.

Focuses on research topics related to dramatic literature, theatre, and performance. Open to all faculty members and graduate students teaching or conducting research in the field.

The craft of teaching (discussion, lectures, tutorials, course descriptions, syllabi). This colloquium, designed for third-year graduate students, also considers issues related to the field exam, prospectus, and other aspects of advanced graduate study in English.