How do stories move? What are the uses and limitations of the term “plot” in describing movement or development in narrative? What culturally-specific assumptions and expectations about storytelling are bound up with conventional notions of plot, and how can we, as writers and readers, unravel them? In this advanced fiction writing course, students will explore these questions and more through writing, reading, sharing, and thoughtfully critiquing fiction that challenges, resists, or forgoes linear or sequential narrative.

(Offered as EUST 303, ENGL 320 and RUSS 310) Acts of translation underwrite many kinds of cultural production, often invisibly. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, engaged with black internationalism through bilingualism and translation, as Brent Edwards has reminded us. In this course we will study literary translation as a creative practice involved in the making of subjects and cultures. We will read key statements about translation by theorists and translators, such as Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, Lawrence Venuti, Peter Cole and Gayatri Spivak.

An upper-level workshop for students interested in exploring larger projects in poetry or in hybrid forms. We will study chapbooks, long poems, sequences, docupoetics and other work that expands our understanding of the genre. Students will design a chapbook-length (20-25 page) project to write and revise over the course of the semester.  Readings may include Terrance Hayes, C.D. Wright, Banu Kapil, Theresa Cha, Alice Notely, M.

(Offered as ENGL 298 and STAT 201) This interdisciplinary Intensive Writing course investigates the role of writing in public discourse about STEM research, focusing on the way that the general public understands–or misunderstands–science and data. It teaches students to communicate technical information to a variety of audiences beyond academia. As such, this course will involve a community-engaged learning project related to science and communication. Assigned texts will include a range of sources (books, articles, podcasts, videos) from writing studies and a STEM discipline.

(Offered as ENGL 280 and FAMS 210) An introduction to cinema studies through consideration of key critical terms, together with a selection of films from different cultural contexts for illustration and discussion. Special emphasis placed on prominent genres, movements, and tendencies within contemporary film culture, and the concepts that animate critical debates on contemporary cinema. The keywords for discussion may include, among others: montage, realism, ideology, the gaze, streaming, digitization, truth, and access.

This course provides an introduction to literary modernism in two parts, each part in dialogue with the other. First, in their words: we will look at how early twentieth-century writers described their own formal experiments and aesthetic agendas. This section will pair modernist manifestos and critical essays with fiction and poetry written by those same authors. Second, in their worlds: we will examine the historical, geographical, and cultural dimensions of these famous literary experiments.

The influential German philosopher and social theorist Theodor Adorno famously said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is “barbaric.” In response, the Holocaust refugee Tuvia Ruebner once said, “it’s barbaric in the way that it’s barbaric that after a forest fire new trees grow.” Adorno was right, said Ruebner, but “poetry is so fundamental it bursts forth.” This course will explore twentieth and twenty-first century poetry that responds to or otherwise grapples with catastrophe, from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust; from the Nakba to the Vietnam War; from the Great Purge to the Rw

The most basic definition of poetry may be that it is memorable speech. What makes a poem, as distinct from prose, memorable? The accepted answer is that poetry in English is written in lines, lines of particular lengths, that become memorable by virtue of their rhythm and sounds as well as the poet’s choice of words and the thoughts, feelings, and images those words evoke.

[Before 1800] Readings in the comedies, histories, and tragedies, with attention to their poetic language, dramatic structure, and power in performance. Texts and topics will vary by instructor.

Limited to 50 students. Spring semester. Professor Bosman.

How to handle overenrollment: Priority will be given to majors, interested upperclassmen, and to students who are considering a major in English.

In this workshop-based course, students will continue to learn and hone the basic elements of writing for the stage: voice, craft, and process.  Playwriting work will be augmented by a focus on studying full-length plays and perspectives from global playwrights to expose students to a variety of forms, genres, structures, and narratives. A central goal of this course will be understanding the wide possibilities of creating a theatrical work from outside of a Western Naturalism perspective.