What is poetry’s role in bearing witness to an age of seemingly unremitting emergency? How can poets represent and respond to ongoing crises such as collapsing public health infrastructure, racialized police brutality and environmental devastation? Conversely, what is poetry’s relationship to highly mediatized “crisis events” like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina? Through literary and cultural analysis, this course explores and historicizes the concept of “emergency” in the United States. What is a state of emergency, and who gets to declare it?

In this class students closely read the novels of Jane Austen, focusing on her innovations in narrative form and style, while putting the novels in the context of early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. The discussions consider how Austen delineates the nuances of feeling, embodiment and attachment, her complex use of the marriage plot and her incisive and often ironic social commentary. At the forefront are issues of gender, power, politics, history, marriage, love and class, and a close and careful attention to narrative form, technique and style. Enrollment limited to 30.

This course helps more advanced fiction writers improve their skills in a supportive workshop context, which encourages experimentation and attention to craft. The course focuses on technique, close reading, and the production of new work. Students submit manuscripts for discussion, receive feedback from peers, and revise their work. They keep a process journal and practice mindfulness to cultivate powers of focus and observation. Students read Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and short fiction by authors in different genres.

The body of literature written by Asian American women over the past 100 years or so has been recognized as forming a coherent tradition even as it grows and expands to include newcomers and divergent voices under its umbrella. What conditions enabled its emergence? How have the qualities and concerns of this tradition been defined? What makes a text--fiction, poetry, memoir, mixed-genre--central or marginal to the tradition and how do emergent writers take this tradition in new directions?

A study of England's first cosmopolitan poet whose Canterbury Tales offer a chorus of medieval literary voices, while creating a new kind of poetry anticipating modern attitudes and anxieties through colorful, complex characters like the Wife of Bath. The class reads these tales closely in Chaucer's Middle English, an expressive idiom, ranging from the funny, sly and ribald to the thoughtful and profound. John Dryden called Chaucer the "father of English poesy," but if so, he was a good one.

Visionary London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner “sees research as a spiritual and artistic endeavor,” writes Museum of Modern Art curator Michelle Kuo. This course of interdisciplinary reading and writing explores “how Black people have thought through, imagined, and articulated freedom through artistic and cultural production,” an idea central to Wales Bonner’s Artist’s Choice exhibition, Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection. How is spirituality defined and activated through contemporary art and poetry?

Offered as AFR 170 and ENG 235. An introduction to the themes, issues and questions that shaped the literature of African Americans during its period of origin. Texts include poetry, prose and works of fiction. Writers include Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass and Phillis Wheatley.

Offered as JUD 230 and ENG 230. Explores the significant contributions and challenges of Jewish writers and critics to American literature, broadly defined. Discussions include the American dream and its discontents; immigrant fiction; Yiddish in America; ethnic satire and humor; crises of the left involving 60s radicalism and Black-Jewish relations; after-effects of the Holocaust; and the novel as alternate history. Must Jewish writing remain on the margins, too ethnic for the mainstream yet insufficient for contemporary gatekeepers of diversity? No prerequisites.