This course will examine the writing of Emily Dickinson, both her poetry and her letters. We will consider the cultural, historical, political, religious, and familial environment in which she lived. Special attention will be paid to Dickinson's place as a woman artist in the nineteenth century. The class will meet at the Dickinson Museum (280 Main Street in Amherst and accessible by Five College bus). Enrollment is limited to ten students.

Biography is both a literary genre and a mode of literary scholarship. This course will explore some varieties of the biographical impulse in both fiction and nonfiction. We will begin with eighteenth-century British models: Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets and James Boswell's Life of Johnson. Then we will turn to ideas of biography and literary portraiture in the work of Henry James and Gertrude Stein.

Nothing human can be alien to me.' Taking its cue from Terence's maxim, and focusing on works of contemporary transnational literature, this seminar explores the idea of 'cosmopolitanism.' Can there be such a thing as global citizenship, a set of values or commitments that transcend local particulars and instead emphasize universality? How does cosmopolitanism square with nationhood and global mobility? What in particular constitutes literary cosmopolitanism?

As London and the British novel enter the new millennium, both are sites of competing histories, traditions, and agendas. This course will map the city's progress from the center of an empire to a node in the global world's economy, and chart the twentieth-century novel's movement from realism to postmodernism and beyond. Beginning by contrasting the realist London of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes with Virginia Woolf's modernist version in Mrs. Dalloway, we will go on to trace the development of the post-1945 British novel.

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.

A study of the history of drama in Europe, America, and Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present. Readings include plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, O'Casey, Pirandello, O'Neill, Brecht, Williams, Miller, Beckett, Pinter, Hansberry, Soyinka, Aidoo, Shepard, Fugard, Norman, Wilson, and Parks.

This course will explore the project of realism in the Victorian novel, watching tensions between a desire for guidance and a desire for mimesis. One critic has said the Victorians brought a sense of social duty to Romantic world-awareness, creating a 'duty of awareness' that was almost overwhelming for the novelist and novel. We will explore this 'duty of awareness' as we investigate representations of gender, class, and feeling as structuring principles in the novel. Novelists may include Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, C. Bronte, and Hardy.

We will read plays by Shakespeare, watch films based on those plays, and study the plays, the films, and the plays-as-films. 'Shakespeare' comes first, of course, both historically and as the source/inspiration for the films. Yet each film has its own existence, to be understood not just as an 'adaptation,' but also as the product of linked artistic, technical, and economic choices.

Known as a storyteller par excellence, Chaucer was also a famous reader of classical epic, romance, and philosophy. This research seminar will give students the opportunity to read the Canterbury Tales in light of the work's cultural, historical, and literary contexts. Throughout the semester, students will engage with Chaucer's tales and his favorite sources to examine and discuss his representations of gender and class, his perspectives on religious authority, his use of the English vernacular, and his commitment to poetry.

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.