(Offered as ENGL 283 and FAMS 234.) What stories does television tell? And how does it tell them? This course will approach television’s narratives through a focus on both form and content. We will take into account issues of production, distribution, and exhibition, with attention both to historical developments and contemporary transformations to the medium. In this way, we will explore how shifts in programming, platforms, and viewing habits alter both televisual narration and consumption.

(Offered as ENGL 283 and FAMS 234.) What stories does television tell? And how does it tell them? This course will approach television’s narratives through a focus on both form and content. We will take into account issues of production, distribution, and exhibition, with attention both to historical developments and contemporary transformations to the medium. In this way, we will explore how shifts in programming, platforms, and viewing habits alter both televisual narration and consumption.

Children’s books are a site of first encounter, a doorway to literacy and literature. This course will offer both a history of book production for child readers in England and the United States and an exploration of what these first books can teach us about the attractions, expectations, and responsibilities of reading.

A first course in the critical reading of selected English-language poets, which gives students exposure to significant poets, poetic styles, and literary and cultural contexts for poetry from across the tradition. Attention will be given to prosody and poetic forms, and to different ways of reading poems.

 The majority of this course will revolve around synchronous Zoom meetings, though there will be opportunities for visits to museums and archives in smaller groups. Students will receive feedback on their writing in individual meetings.

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

Spring semester, online only, Visiting Writer Myint: This course is a discussion-based writing workshop that will require your weekly synchronous attendance, as well as your participation in asynchronous discussion forums and writing exercises. Also, though this is an online course, I am open to the possibility of creating in-person opportunities for students on campus, especially as the semester progresses.

This course explores the questions at the heart of creative nonfiction: What does it mean to tell a “true” story? And what does it mean to tell a true story “creatively”? A deep dive into essay, memoir, and genres of nonfiction that have yet to be named will allow us to form our own definitions of creative nonfiction. Through workshops that will encourage exploration, experimentation, and vulnerability, we will develop our own personal practices for writing from life.

[Before 1800] What is “English Literature,” and how does one construct its history? What counts as “England” (especially in relation to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and to ancient Greece and Rome)? What is the relationship between histories of literature and political, social, religious and intellectual histories? What is the role of gender in the making of literature, and the making of its histories?

Survey courses have in our time increasingly disappeared, except in most high schools. Attempts to make them sufficiently inclusive have seemed impossible. The chosen approach in this course is to concentrate on the remarkable literatures created by African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, bi-national writers, and working-class writers. We will also read “classic” writers like Willa Cather and Fitzgerald along with some of the working-class writers from the Thirties.

Spring semester. Professor Emeritus O’Connell.

From Emily Dickinson to Robert Frost to Sonia Sánchez, Amherst is world-famous because of its poets. More than twenty well-known poets have written, lived and taught in the area where we find ourselves living. This introductory course is designed to welcome students who have not previously taken a college-level English course into the literary environment of Amherst, as well as into the literary community of poetry readers across the globe, by closely studying just a few of them.

In this course we will weather famous storms featured in literary, artistic, and cinematic works from the nineteenth century through the present day. Together, we will make our way through snow, sleet, hurricanes, cyclones, tropical storms, superstorms, and everyday rain showers. This topic will provide a unifying thematic thread for a class focused on the fundamentals of close reading, viewing, writing, and revision. We will examine how various genres, narrative styles, and authorial voices engage this common topic in strikingly different ways.