This seminar explores the varied publications produced by people of African descent, America, Canada and England, including early sermons and conversion narratives, criminal confessions, fugitive slave narratives and the black press. We consider these works in terms of publishing history, editorship (especially women editors), authorship, readership, circulation, advertising, influence, literacy, community building, politics and geography. We examine their engagements with such topics as religion, law economics, emigration, gender, race and temperance.

This capstone course offers an intensive research-based study of a single important work of literature in English, seen in its social, historical, and intellectual context on the one hand, and in terms of its reception history on the other. Course may be repeated once for credit with different topic and instructor. Permission of the instructor required. Enrollment limited to 12.: Prerequisites: two 200-level courses in either the reading of fiction or in 19th-century British literature, or a combination thereof.

A comparative study of 20th-century women writers in English from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and Australia. We read novels, short stories, poetry, plays and autobiography in their historical, cultural and political contexts as well as theoretical essays to address questions such as: How have women writers addressed the dual challenge of contesting sexism and patriarchy from within their indigenous cultures as well as the legacies of western imperialism from without? How have they combined feminism with anti-colonialism?

Irish writing in the 20th century (and beyond) has been indelibly formed by the experience of British colonialism on the island. We will examine a range of literary responses to this history, and to the experiences of civil war, independence, partition, and postcolonial status. Writers include Yeats, Joyce, O'Casey, Boland, O'Brien, Moxley, Heaney, and Friel. Prerequisite: a college-level course in literature.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, and Shakespeare's sonnets. Enrollment in each section limited to 25. Not open to first-year students.

The English language is dominated by visual metaphor: students, for example, must bring insight to their readings, inspecting these texts to look for—and illuminate—any blind spots. This course will examine Western culture’s privileging of vision that culture’s attitudes toward blindness, as well as the ways in which disability shapes and defines the way we read.

A reading of Anglo-Saxon England’s most powerful and significant poem, invoking the world of barbarian Europe after the fall of Rome.

This course offers a chance to read and think about works of science fiction and fantasy, considering the forms they take, the conventions they play with, and issues they address. We read novels and stories by H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Maureen McHugh, Ian McLeod, Ted Chiang, Andrea Hairston and others. Several films, including Pan's Labyrinth. Prerequisite: one college-level literature course or permission of the instructor. Recommended for nonmajors. {L}

The goal of this workshop is to help more advanced fiction-writing students become stronger writers in a supportive context that encourages experimentation, contemplation and attention to craft. The workshop will include all the traditional elements of a fiction writing workshop, focusing on writing skills and technique, close reading and the production of new work. In addition, the workshop will include instruction in mindfulness meditation to help students cultivate their powers of concentration, observation, imagination and creative expression on the page.

Taught by the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet in Residence, this advanced poetry workshop is for students who have developed a passionate relationship with poetry and who have substantial experience in writing poems. Texts are based on the poets who are reading at Smith during the semester, and students gain expertise in reading, writing and critiquing poems. Writing sample and permission of the instructor are required.