This workshop will introduce students to the short story form as practiced by contemporary and canonical writers. Students will learn to read fiction actively, as writers developing their craft. We will focus on understanding the elements of fiction with an eye toward eventual mastery. Writing short stories will comprise the main work of this course, and students will work specifically on point of view, development of scenes, characterization, plot, and narration.

This course gives students practice in the basic elements of the poet's craft, emphasizing revision. It involves class criticism and conferences as well as collateral reading.

Since the 17th century, prose stylists have written essays to examine, analyze, argue, satirize, and to present social, scientific, and artistic theories. The course focuses on the evolution of the sentence, prose rhythms, grammatical patterns, paragraph coherence, and developmental structures. Students will master the form by writing their own essays. Readings: Francis Bacon, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, Adrienne Rich, Stephen Jay Gould, and others.

A narrative of English literary history from the Old English period to the Restoration of the monarchy (700-1660), paying attention to works, authors, and genres, and to changes of language and culture. Readings include Beowulf, selections from The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Shakespeare play, and selections from such authors as Julian of Norwich, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton.

A study of some of Shakespeare's plays emphasizing the poetic and dramatic aspects of his art, with attention to the historical context and close, careful reading of the language. Eight or nine plays.

This course will examine a variety of English works and genres written in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Our concentration will be principally on the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Langland, Margery Kempe, and Lydgate. Most of our readings are in Middle English.

This introduction to modern British poetry pays special attention to the emergence, consolidation, and dismantling of modernist poetry and poetics. It will link this literary history with, amongst other things, the loss of faith, the two world wars, and the relationship between monumental aesthetics, utopian poetics, and totalitarian politics. Writers will include Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, H.D., and Auden.

In The Quarry Wood, Martha's father teaches her, 'Scotland is bounded on the South by England...and on the West by Eternity.' This course explores that paradox, tracing the relationship of Scottish literature to European history and the making of Scottish identity, understanding language and form as political actions in the creation of Scotland's national, international, and mythologized identities.

A survey of American literature from the literature of exploration through the major authors of the mid-nineteenth century, with special attention to the formation of an American literary tradition, along with the political, social, and religious context that helped shape the imaginative response of American writers to their culture.

An examination of the gothic--a world of fear, haunting, claustrophobia, paranoia, and monstrosity--in American literature and culture, with an emphasis upon issues of race and gender. Topics include the gothic; gothic sexuality; Southern, Northern, and national gothic; freakishness and grotesquerie; and visual gothic. Focus on fiction, with some film and photography. Authors, filmmakers, and artists may include Alcott, Arbus, Browning, Crane, Dunbar, Dunn, Elmer, Faulkner, Gilman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, McCullers, Morrison, O'Connor, Oates, Parks, Poe, Romero, Turner, and Wood.