This course explores the unique challenges of experiencing performance through the page.  While this course is not intended as a survey of dramatic literature or theater history, students will be introduced to a variety of drama from across the English-language tradition.  The organizing theme of the course may change slightly from year to year, but the goal will always be to explore a wide array of theoretical and methodological approaches to drama.  Of particular interest will be the relationship of play-reading to other reading practices.  What does a play demand of t

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

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:  Visiting Lecturer Stinson.  Spring semester:  Professor Frank.

(Offered as THDA 270 and ENGL 222) A workshop in writing for the stage. The semester will begin with exercises that lead to the making of short plays and, by the end of the term, longer plays--ten minutes and up in length. Writing will be done in and out of class; students’ work will be discussed in the workshop and in private conferences. At the end of the term, the student will submit a portfolio of revisions of all the exercises, including the revisions of all plays.

A first workshop in the writing of poetry. Class members will read and discuss each others’ work and will study the elements of prosody: the line, stanza forms, meter, free verse, and more. Open to anyone interested in writing poetry and learning about the rudiments of craft. Writing exercises weekly.

With a focus on the skills of close reading and analytical writing, we will look at the ways in which writers imagine illness, how they try to make meaning out of illness, and how they use illness to explore other aspects of experience.  This is not a course on the history of illness or the social construction of disease.  We will discuss not only what writers say about illness but also how they say it: with what language and in what form they speak the experience of bodily and mental suffering.  Readings may include drama by Sophocles, Molière and Margaret Edson; poet

This seminar explores the particular pleasures and interpretive problems of reading and writing about three very long works of fiction–novels so large that any sure grasp of the relation between individual part and mammoth whole may threaten to elude author and reader alike.  How do we gauge, and thereby engage with, narratives of disproportionate scale and encyclopedic ambition?  How do we lose, or find, our place in colossal fictional worlds?  As befits its interest in the losing and finding of place, the course introduces students to college-level literary study.&nbs

(Offered as ENGL 112 and SWAG 106)  This course will examine the phenomenon of “realism” in a variety of artistic media.

Why study literature?  In many contexts, including the contexts of most other academic disciplines, one reads in order to extract the gist of a text. By studying literature, we enable ourselves to do much more than that. Studying literature makes it possible to recover a relationship to language that we all once had, in which words and their interrelationships were new, strange, and rich with possibility.

The senior departmental honors seminar is a workshop that supports the first half of senior thesis work in economics.  Students learn research methods and engage with economic research via close reading, structured writing, empirical analysis, theoretical reasoning, and active participation in discussion.   Students develop and refine their own research proposals, so that by the end of the semester each student’s proposal clearly states a research question, places that question into context, and outlines a feasible approach.  By the end of the semester, students wi

Independent Reading Course. Full course.

Admission with consent of the instructor.  Fall and spring semesters.