In this creative writing workshop, we will engross ourselves in contemporary literary works that respond to, speculate about, and/or collaborate with ancestors and ancestral languages. We will explore the ways these works conceptualize time, truth, kinship, lineage, and narrative itself, and examine different formal approaches to writing into silences, gaps, and contradictions. In addition to reading and analyzing literature, we will also engage in writing exercises and research processes that borrow or reenact the methodologies of the authors we study.

(Offered as ENGL 280 and FAMS 210) An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of key critical terms, together with a selection of films from different cultural contexts for illustration and discussion. Special emphasis placed on prominent genres, movements, and tendencies within contemporary film culture, and the concepts that animate critical debates on contemporary cinema. The keywords for discussion may include, among others: montage, realism, ideology, the gaze, streaming, digitization, truth, and access.

In this course you will read letters and write letters. We will explore the letter as a complex instrument of self-expression and communication with others, as literary artefact, as carrier of affect, intention and ideas, and as a record of individual and communal growth.  Letter writing will be experienced as a performance that deploys persona, tone, voice, purpose, persuasion, and will focus on the tension between transparency and decorum. Your discoveries and the development of your thoughts will be circulated as letters written among a small circle of correspondence.  

A first course in writing fiction. Emphasis will be on experimentation as well as on developing skill and craft. Workshop (discussion) format.

Limited to 15 students. Fall semester section 01: Lecturer Sweeney. Fall semester section 02: Visiting Lecturer Stinson. Spring semester: Professor Myint.

How to handle overenrollment: The instructor will seek to achieve representative equity (majors, class years, gender, background, etc.).

This creative writing course explores hybrid and cross-genre literature as an alternative to the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. What happens when we write creatively in a form that falls between genres? How do we categorize our writing, and how does our writing exceed categorization? Through reading and workshops that will encourage exploration, experimentation, and vulnerability, we will develop our own personal approaches to hybridity.

[Offered as ENGL 185 and FAMS 185] This course, an introduction to media studies, examines the relationship between contemporary media forms and the environment with an emphasis on media’s role in the ongoing global environmental crisis. We will analyze the environmental aspects of a range of media objects including science-fiction films, documentary photographs, reality TV shows, video games, and others. But we will also explore the environmental impact of broader media technologies like video streaming platforms and fiber-optic cable networks.

(Offered as ENGL 183 and FAMS 122) Television has become so vast, so amorphous that it may seem impossible to define today. But in this ineffability also lies possibility. This course will explore the possibilities that television offers us when we look at it closely: possibilities of comfort, of speculation, of desire, even of kindness. And we will consider other formal possibilities in television’s various incarnations from its original broadcast commercial format in the US to contemporary streaming applications.

(Offered as ENGL 175 and LLAS 175) This course approaches Latinx poetics from two angles: we will read poems written by U.S. Latinx writers and cultural theory on the shared and divergent experiences of people of Latin American origin or descent in the U.S. Is there a poetics of being Latinx?

The short story as a genre has been called many things, including a distinctly American form, a genre-bending form, betwixt and between poetry and the novel. Edgar Allen Poe remarked that "the unity of effect" distinguished the short story from other genres, while Flannery O’Connor viewed it as the ideal vehicle for distilling the "mystery of existence." In this course, we will explore the development of the short story, its histories and its possible futures in mapping the American national and literary imaginary.