Novels and short fiction, mainly comic, by such writers as Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Taylor, Kingsley Amis, John Updike, Philip Roth, Nicholson Baker, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franzen, Barbara Pym. The effort will be to refine and complicate one’s performance as a critic of these writers and their books.

Spring semester. Professor Emeritus Pritchard.

(Offered as ENGL 350 and AMST 350) [before 1800] American Origins is a course in Early American literature and history. It explores when and how this country began. We readily forget that it only became the “United States” in 1789.  Before that and from early in the European conquests, it was “the (Spanish, or French, or English, or Dutch) colonies,” or “America” and thus but a part of European settlements in both the Southern and the Northern hemispheres.

(Offered as LJST 317 and ENGL 337)  [Research Seminar] It is well known that Shakespeare’s texts put into play an intricate set of juridical terms and forms. The premise of this course is that we can retrieve from this “putting into play” a unique way of thinking about modern juridical order at the moment of its inception.

(Offered as ENGL 330 and EUST 330) By many accounts, a concept of “race” does not emerge in the West until the colonizing of the New World in the Renaissance. Yet medieval people had many ways of identifying, exoticizing, excluding, and discriminating against “others.” This was often framed in terms of religion (Christianity vs. Islam), but it also manifests in terms of physiognomic description and ideas of monstrosity in romance and quest narratives.

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will research and write two to three linked short stories set in the same historical period.  For the purpose of this course, historical fiction is defined as work written at least twenty-five years after the events described, or which has been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events, and so approaches them only by research.  Students will develop and complete a research plan that includes archival work, nonfiction sources, and sensory research to address the problem of effectively evoking the material, emotional

“Who can give / an account of occasions // ... undo the work of a million years” – Simone White.  For those of us touched by language, there is, perhaps, no greater form of satisfaction than finding the right word at the right time to elevate our state of consciousness.  We have witnessed poetry take a front seat in conversations surrounding our current social landscape:  Warsan Shire’s on Beyonce’s Lemonade, Instagram poets like nayirrah waheed and Rupi Kaur.

(Offered as THDA 370 and ENGL 322) A workshop/seminar for writers who want to complete a full-length play or series of plays. Emphasis will be on bringing a script to a level where it is ready for the stage. Although there will be some exercises in class to continue the honing of playwriting skills and the study of plays by established writers as a means of exploring a wide range of dramatic vocabularies, most of the class time will be spent reading and commenting on the plays of the workshop members as these plays progress from the first draft to a finished draft.

This course examines the way writers commit their own lives to the page and the many interesting hybrids that, falling somewhere in between fiction and non-fiction, writers have been experimenting with of late. Why have these hybrid forms become so dominant in the literary world? How do the assumptions and expectations we bring to fiction differ from those we bring to non-fiction? Why are forms that play with the relation between these forms so popular right now?  What do they offer us, emotionally and intellectually?

It’s possible to imagine people who have not yet suffered, who have not yet had a peculiarly intense and sustained experience of physical or psychic pain. Those imaginary people are, however, vulnerable to future suffering. Even more importantly, they live in a world in which many others suffer, so many that a refusal to attend to suffering amounts to a refusal of a meaningfully relational existence.

Books have been around, arguably, since there were things to write down. While they have not always looked the same, or meant the same things, or been used for the same purposes, reading them has been bound up with their material form: how they look, and smell, and feel. So what happens to books in the digital age? What do books feel like when they are on the Internet?