A writer's workshop designed to explore the complexities and delights of creative nonfiction. Constant reading, writing, and critiquing. Admission by permission of the instructor. English 290 will be a course for students with a serious interest in developing and refining their skills at formal essay writing. Because reading and writing are complementary cognitive activities, we will spend time reading essays by some of the best writers of the last 100 years or so: Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Richard Rodriguez, Alice Walker and Gore Vidal.

Consideration of a number of contemporary women writers, mostly British, some well-established, some not, who represent a variety of concerns and techniques. Emphasis on the pleasures of the text and significant ideas?political, spiritual, human, and esthetic. Efforts directed at appreciation of individuality and diversity as well as contributions to the development of fiction.

The sustained explosion of Faulkner's work in the dozen-odd years between The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses has no parallel in American literature. He explored the microtones of consciousness and conducted the most radical of experiments in narrative form. At the same time he relied more heavily on the spoken vernacular than anyone since Mark Twain, and he made his "little postage stamp of native soil" in northern Mississippi stand for the world itself.

What do these three pursuits, both the respectable and the disreputable, have in common? Jonathan Swift, the greatest prose satirist in English literature, the "madman" who proposed eating babies as the solution to Irish poverty, was joined in the "Scriblerus Club" by Alexander Pope, the greatest satiric poet in the English tradition. Pope celebrated the heroic cutting of --a lock of hair.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Tempest. Enrollment in each section limited to 25. Not open to first-year students.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Tempest. Enrollment in each section limited to 25. Not open to first-year students.

His art and his social and literary background. Emphasis on the Canterbury Tales. Students should have had at least two semester courses in literature. Not open to first-year students.

Visiting the pulpits, meeting houses, and gallows of British North America to the colonial West Indies and docks of Liverpool to the modern day Caribbean, U.S., Canada, U.K., and France, this course analyzes the literatures of the Black Atlantic and the development of Black literary and intellectual history from the 18th to the 21st century. Some key theoretical frameworks, which will help inform our study of literature emerging from the Black Atlantic, include diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

An exploration of the worlds of the Victorian novel, from the city to the country, from the vast reaches of empire to the minute intricacies of the drawing room. Attention to a variety of critical perspectives, with emphasis on issues of narrative form and the representation of consciousness. Novelists likely include Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope and Hardy.

A study of novels written in England from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen and Walter Scott (1688-1814). Emphasis on the novelists' narrative models and choices; we will conclude by reading several novels by Austen -- including one she wrote when thirteen years old.