'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.'

'This course examines contemporary Asian American film and visual culture through the lens of cultural recovery, self-invention, and experimentation. Focusing primarily on film and photography, we will explore issues of race and visuality, Hollywood orientalism, memory and postmemory, and racial impersonation and parody. Students will engage with a variety of theoretical and critical approaches. Artists may include Nikki S. Lee, Margaret Cho, Tseng Kwong Chi, Jin-me Yoon, Justin Lin, Binh Dahn, Richard Fung, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, and Alice Wu.'

'In this seminar, we will examine Romantic poetry's unique contemplation of the problems of perception, cognition, and epistemology. We will investigate how male and female writers explored various theories of knowledge through their play with the figures of the idiot or savage, drug culture, and new technologies surrounding the Gothic genre and the virtual imagination. Authors including Wordsworth, Robinson, Coleridge, DeQuincey, and Keats will be read alongside philosophers such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, scientists John Galt and J. G.

'Explaining why we can't judge others' marriages, one Victorian narrator turns to science: 'Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse.' The microscope becomes a standard of seeing and simultaneously just one more mode of knowing.

'All the world's a stage.' This course surveys the era of literary history that invented this powerful idea. The drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a drama obsessively self-conscious, bursting with disguises, confidence tricks, cross-dressers, rituals, masques, and plays-within-plays. Reading Shakespeare as well as his rivals and peers (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and others), we will consider how theater, and the idea of theater, illuminates such concepts as desire, evil, gender, and ideology.

'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.

Can a story be accurate but false? Should reporters value protecting national security over telling the truth? Is it ethical to tell a lie if it allows access to important information? Journalists face difficult ethical dilemmas every day. But how do they know what to do? Are there rules? In this class we will study ethics in journalism from the time of the muckrakers to the rise of the blog.

'This course examines the work of a variety of twentieth-century women writers located in the United States, focusing on the genre of prose fiction and the themes of gender, race, and sexuality. Particular attention will be paid to developments in African American women's writing, to Southern writers, and lesbian literary representation. Writers may include Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Gertrude Stein, Alice Walker, Edith Wharton, and Hisaye Yamamoto.'

'Surveys the growing body of literature termed 'transnational,' with special focus on the theme of memory. How is culture defined by how we remember? What separates private and public histories? What role does temporality play in narratives extending across geographic regions? Reading novels, memoirs, short stories, and poems from the last half-century, we will consider themes of nostalgia, trauma, cognition, repression, archaeology, and myth in the contexts of colonialism, cosmopolitanism, migration, and diaspora.