'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.'

'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.'

'The first half of this seminar examines the major works of Richard Wright, including Uncle Tom's Children, 12 Million Black Voices, Native Son, Black Boy, and Black Power. The second half explores Wright's literary influence along with his political legacy to a range of modern and contemporary authors, including Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison.'

'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.