This course helps more advanced fiction writers improve their skills in a supportive workshop context, which encourages experimentation and attention to craft. The course focuses on technique, close reading, and the production of new work. Students submit manuscripts for discussion, receive feedback from peers, and revise their work. They keep a process journal and practice mindfulness to cultivate powers of focus and observation. Students read Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and short fiction by authors in different genres.

This course focuses primarily on writing scripts: pitching, outlining, drafting and editing. The course examines the ways in which politics, current events, race, gender and cultural equality have shaped iconic comics and many of the best works published today. Students study Marvel and industry standard scripts, but there are multiple ways of creating a script and subsequent comics. Those who write and draw (as opposed to only write or only draw) may have completely different methodologies. Students need not have skills as illustrators.

Romantic writers were obsessed with uncertainty, feeling, and the irrational, unthinking mind. Concerned with the unusual ideas that surface when one is sleeping or spaced out, absorbed or intoxicated, Romanticism embraced reason’s alternatives: forgetting, fragmentation, madness and hysteria, dreams and the unconscious, childhood, stupidity, and spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion.

A study of the major poems and selected prose of John Milton, radical and conservative, heretic and defender of the faith, apologist for regicide and advocate of human dignity, committed revolutionary and Renaissance humanist, and a poet of enormous creative power and influence, whose epic, Paradise Lost, changed subsequent English Literature. Restrictions: Not open to first-year students.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest and Shakespeare's sonnets. Restrictions: Not open to first-years.

A survey of major aesthetic shifts in American fiction in the twentieth century, moving from realism and naturalism into modernism and late modernism. How did American novelists—from a variety of economic and racial backgrounds—imagine the relationship between their “American subject” and aesthetic innovation in the context of rapid industrialization, global conflict, and racial segregation? Authors studied may include Henry James, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. (E)

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; the course concludes by reading several novels by Austen-including one she wrote when 13 years old.

Offered as AFR 170 and ENG 235. An introduction to the themes, issues and questions that shaped the literature of African Americans during its period of origin. Texts include poetry, prose and works of fiction. Writers include Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass and Phillis Wheatley.

In this course students read as writers and write as readers, analyzing the poetic devices and strategies employed in a diverse range of contemporary poetry, gaining practical use of these elements to create a portfolio of original work and developing the skills of critique and revision. In addition, students read and write on craft issues and attend Poetry Center readings and Q&A’s. May be repeated. Prerequisite: ENG 125 or ENG 205, or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 12.

The crisis of climate change, according to many scholars, is a crisis of imagination. So how can fiction writers—as inventors of imagined worlds—be active participants in the fight for a sustainable future? In this creative writing course, students explore potential answers by learning the ins and outs of writing “Climate Fiction.” Drawing inspiration from a diverse array of contemporary authors, students practice different techniques for navigating environmental issues on the page, with short exercises building toward a longer workshopped story.