This course will examine a variety of ethical dilemmas writers face, and face with particular intensity in our current moment. We will consider identity/representation, appropriation, representing violence and self-harm, standards of “truth” in memoir, cancellation, and the ethics and politics of the creative writing workshop.
There are “moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action,” the novelist George Eliot writes, “like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.” This is a class about moments like these and the endless struggle to find language for them.
When the editors and contributors to This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color published this landmark text in 1981, the women of color writers wrote with urgency, connecting their struggles within the United States to the anti-imperialist and decolonization movements rippling throughout the Third World. This seminar begins with This Bridge, while asking what their radical politics and writings offer—and how we can expand on the lessons they share—to address the critical personal and political issues of our present times.
In a flurry between 1846 and 1856, a series of genre-redefining novels were published in Great Britain, the U.S., and France. They appeared in cultures that were inhospitable to their strangeness and wildness, that either dismissed them or ignored what was most troubled and troubling in them. They inspired later novelists not to imitate them, but to write with all of the energies of their own idiosyncracies on display and to trust in their own senses of form.
(Offered as ENGL 251 and FAMS 251) From the ubiquity of selfies to the drama of true crime, the practice of documenting reality is endlessly fascinating and influential. This course explores the tradition of documentary filmmaking—an art form that has sparked debates, shaped industries, and transformed worldviews since the dawn of cinema. Famously described by filmmaker John Grierson as “the creative treatment of actuality,” documentaries challenge us to ask: What does it mean to capture reality? Can film not only reflect the world but also change it?
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.).
An introductory course in the writing of poetry. The most basic elements of a poem are voice and breath. How can these simple elements surprise, move, illuminate, delight and shake us, as a poem must? In this course, we will take up this question by exploring a wide range of contemporary poetic voices. Using the techniques we discover, we will work toward developing our own powerful, persuasive voices on the page.
An introductory course in the writing of poetry. The most basic elements of a poem are voice and breath. How can these simple elements surprise, move, illuminate, delight and shake us, as a poem must? In this course, we will take up this question by exploring a wide range of contemporary poetic voices. Using the techniques we discover, we will work toward developing our own powerful, persuasive voices on the page.
(Offered as ENGL 210 and AAPI 210) This survey course introduces students to foundational and recent literatures by Asian American authors. Through examination of canonical anthologies such as Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of Asian American Writers, reading lists of Asian American writers, and polemic responses to genre-bending works such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, this course will engage with the major texts and debates in Asian American literary studies. Throughout the semester, we will ask: What is the canon of Asian American literature?
In this creative writing course, we will write across genres while engaging with a wide range of creative contexts in which such writing occurs. We will study, interact with, and actively respond to real-world communities including (but not limited to) publishers and literary magazines, communities of writers with shared identities, literary organizations, and local writing circles. With the help of class visitors and our own in-class discussions, we will identify the conversations in which our writing participates and write as part of those conversations.
