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.

[Before 1800] The sonnet is one of the most enduring poetic forms in English Literature. Broadly defined, it is a poem with fourteen lines, a strict rhyme scheme, and the expectation that there will be a volta, or a turn in the argument or logic of the poem at some point. Yet despite these strict constraints, it is a space that poets have willingly entered into for centuries. In this course, we attempt to understand the appeal of the sonnet form, from the 14th century to the present.

Home is where we live in every sense, but "home" is more than the physical structure we reside in: it is also the psychological, societal, emotional, and even the mythical. In this course, we will read a variety of fiction and non-fiction and explore the importance of space, be it physical or metaphysical, as well as the construction of home. We will consider how these terms (whether we accept them, shun them, or experience them via travel and immigration), dictate to us and others a sense of self and identity via our own writing.

With a focus on the skills of close reading and analytical writing, we will look at the ways in which writers imagine illness, how they try to make meaning out of illness, and how they use illness to explore other aspects of experience. This is not a course on the history of illness or the social construction of disease. We will discuss not only what writers say about illness but also how they say it: with what language and in what form they speak the experience of bodily and mental suffering.

(Offered as ENGL 120 and EDST 120) This Intensive Writing course functions primarily as an introduction to academic writing. It also considers from many perspectives what it means to read and write and learn and teach both for ourselves and for others. As part of the work of this course, in addition to the usual class hours, students will serve as weekly tutors and classroom assistants in adult basic education centers in nearby towns.