(Offered as ENGL 462, FAMS 462, and ARHA 462)  In recent years, curating has taken on an increasingly central role in the production of contemporary media cultures.  As the practice of selecting, organizing, and presenting cultural artifacts for public exhibition, curating often determines the sorts of media forms audiences have access to and the frameworks through which those media forms are interpreted.  Curating requires a facility with a wide variety of skills, from historical research to critical analysis, communication, administration, and creative thinking.  Yet i

(Offered as ENGL 458 and AMST 358)  [before 1800] 

(Offered as ENGL 455 and BLST 439 [US])  When we say “race relations,” we are using a phrase drawn from early twentieth-century American sociology, a phrase that conjures up a scenario in which already existing racial groups are separated by prejudice and misunderstanding.  As many sociologists and historians have argued, we need a new paradigm, one that implies neither that race is a primordial reality nor that racism is merely an informational problem.  In this class, we will begin by familiarizing ourselves with critical race theory and with theories emerging f

Why, Rita Felski asks, are people “willing to drive five hundred miles to hear a band playing a certain song, or spend years in graduate school puzzling over a single novel?”  Concepts like “cultural capital,” “the hegemonic media industry,” or “interpretive communities” do not fully explain “why it is this particular tune that plays over and over in our heads, why it is Virginia Woolf alone who becomes an object of obsession.”  Something else has to be involved, a “rogue something,” in the words of Toni Morri

[before 1800]  “Make It New”–Ezra Pound’s modernist call to reject late-Victorian poetic sentiment and harmonious measures–was not the first time a poet and those he championed had attempted, with notable success, to change the course of poetry in English.  William Wordsworth had stated in 1798 that poetry should be written in the language men speak, not, as he saw it, in elevated diction in the service of explicit moral instruction.  And roughly two hundred years before that John Donne brought unprecedented dramatic energy and new forms to poems

A poetry writing course, but with a strong emphasis on reading.  Students will closely examine the work of various poets and periods, then attempt to write plausible imitations of their own, all by way of learning about poetry from the inside, as it were.

Admission with consent of the instructor.  Limited to 15 students.  Please consult the Creative Writing Center website for information on admission to this course.  Fall semester.  Writer-in-Residence Hall.

We don’t just think, speak, or write our ideas; we perform them, too.

An advanced writing workshop devoted to the reading and writing of novellas, which will be the fall 2017 version of Fiction Writing II.  We will study such novellas as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Jane Smiley’s The Age of Grief, and Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, in order to get a sense of the parameters and scope of this in-between form.  Students will write up to ten pages per week with the aim of composing and revising a work of 70-80 pages by the end of the semester.

(Offered as ENGL 384 and FAMS 382)  As one of our most dominant, even omnipresent media forms, television is something most of us experience every day.  But Television Studies scholarship does not always take on the question of “experience” as a central part of its analysis.  This course will take experience as the central component of our study.  The first unit of the course will consider phenomenological approaches to television criticism, centering on those elements of televisual form that delineate an experience different from other media.  Our secon