This course explores the range and variety of American literary expression from the 1920s through the early 1940s. Topics include the role of regionalism; the emergence of a 'modernist' aesthetic; ethnicity and modernism; debates within African American literary culture. Authors include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Henry Roth, and Pietro Di Donato.

What is race? Who decides? Are we a postracial society? This course examines the historical, social, and legal underpinnings of the social construction of race and how perspectives on race have influenced lives within school communities. Classes compare old vs. new racism, contrast the workings of white privilege with calls for white responsibility, explore perspectives on the achievement and opportunity gaps, and examine impact of antiracist pedagogies on inequities in education at the curricular, interpersonal, and institutional levels.

A seminar on three major early modern dramatists--Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton--focusing on the range of genres, characters, conflicts, and aspirations explored in their plays. These playwrights, along with their contemporary Shakespeare, shaped the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century theatre into a site for performing authority and conquest, national and individual identity, trickery and carnival, desire and sexuality, and complex unfoldings of revenge.

In this workshop students will generate new poems, working in both free verse and traditional forms. Emphasis will be given to honing elements of craft, to developing one's 'voice,' and to the all-important process of revision. Readings will include books by contemporary poets, with workshops devoted to critiquing student work and discussing the poems of established writers.

This workshop is for students seriously engaged in writing short stories. Students will refine their technical skills and work on the subtleties of style. Extensive readings are required.

Exceptional works of nonfiction will guide us as we weigh the challenges of building energetic narratives out of small mountains of facts. Story development, research, structure, 'voice,' and the translation of specialized language into accessible prose will be our focus throughout. Students will read widely, dipping into the best work now in print; yet the core endeavor will be to produce two original works of nonfiction at magazine length.

An introduction to African literature in English since 1960. Fiction, drama, autobiography, essays by such writers as Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Adichie, Chris Abani, Sindiwe Magona, and Zoe Wicomb. Particular attention to themes of exile and imprisonment, political struggle before and after independence, the convergence of oral cultures and European languages, and the emergence of postcolonial and feminist discourses in contemporary Africa.

This course will examine African American literature and culture in the postwar period as American identities are coalescing around the concept of the US as a world power. Specifically, our task during the semester will be to discuss the myriad ways black authors and artists attempt to interrogate the structure of racial hegemony by creating poetry and prose meant to expand notions of culture and form. We will also examine music, visual art, and advertisements from this era to have a greater sense of the black experience through various cultural representations.

A continuation of English 240, which explores the diversity of writers and literary forms that arose in U.S. society in the period from the Civil War to World War I. Authors may include Alcott, Chopin, Crane, Dreiser, Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson, DuBois, Sui-Sin Far, Gilman, Harper, James, Jewett, Stein, Twain, Wharton, and Whitman. Will address the development of realism, naturalism, and modernism; will explore literary redefinitions of race, gender, sexuality and class as shaped by social pressures during this era.

While influenced by Augustine's warning that worldly inquiry could endanger the pilgrimage of the soul, medieval literature contains many instances of curious looking. Exploring the medieval desire to know, this course considers how the period's tendencies toward spiritual and metaphysical thought are balanced against its fascinations with the observable world. We will study the ways allegories, travel narratives, romances, and dream visions intersect with natural philosophy, historiography, cartography, and architecture.