Advent 2024 English and Creative Writing Classes

English 101 will set you to work planning, writing, and revising essays of various lengths, practicing a handful of essential skills that make for clear and persuasive writing.  Though every English 101 features a play by Shakespeare, the content of each courses differs widely, from medieval poetry to contemporary drama, from African-American memoir to speculative fiction.   

This iteration of Representative Masterpieces will include close study of Homer’s Iliad, Vergil’s
Aeneid, Beowulf, and The Inferno of Dante. The course thus follows the development of the epic
form from its origins in oral poetry through its refinement as literary art, and more importantly
from its emergence from the heroic ethics of the ancient world and transformations at the hands
of Christian writers.

This course focuses on several early works from different literary genres (but excluding the epic) manifestly part of “the cultural imaginary” of writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shelley, Toni Morrison, and Wendell Berry. First-hand knowledge of such works both enhances one’s ability to identify and understand literary subtexts, and also trains students to be attentive to the productive ways that later writers responded to and repurposed these premodern literary touchstones. Using English translations, we will be reading and thinking critically about Plato’s “Parable of the Cave” from the Republic and “Ladder of Love” from the Symposium; Euripides’s Alcestis, Medea, and Bacchae; Cicero’s On Duties, On Friendship, and Scipio's Dream; Virgil’s Georgics [Poem of the Land]; Apuleius’s The Golden Ass; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the courtly romances of Marie de France. This course involves student-centered constructivist and collaborative classroom exercises (“capers”), as well as individual presentations and formal “write-ups.” A good time will be had by all.

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” (Marcus Garvey)

The idea that citizens should have a right to free speech was widely contested, sometimes violently, in Britain and America—not only in courts and legislature, but also in the world of culture: in novels, pamphlets, plays, and bold poetic experiments.  This class explores a selection of classic literary texts from the long eighteenth century (roughly 1660-1800) as a way of asking where the First Amendment came from.  Reading rebels and jokesters alongside advocates of restraint, we will ask how British and North American writers gradually subverted the longstanding assumption that the ideal citizen was “obedient” in favor of the paradoxical idea that a system of government that permitted free speech was safer and more lasting than a government that did not.  We will examine not only revolutionary articulations of the benefits of a free press—John Milton’s Areopagitica, for instance—but also fiction and poetry from the period that tested the limits of law and good taste.  How did satirists such as Alexander Pope exploit loopholes in libel law to ridicule their contemporaries mercilessly in published verse?  When did women, Indigenous people, and enslaved people gain the right to petition the government with grievances?  What should we make of the raciness of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill?  To what extent did the authors of the Bill of Rights intend to protect the right to disseminate sexy and obscene materials?  Authors examined in the course include Locke, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Chudleigh, Montesquieu, Wilkes, Wheatley, Paine, J. Madison.  We will also be working with Sewanee’s exciting seventeenth- and eighteenth-century databases, EEBO and ECCO.  Requirements include weekly responses, a midterm paper, and a final research paper.

Wait a minute: English languages? What does that mean?

From a basic perspective, we share one English: we can effectively transmit meaning from one to another. Yet variations in our own use of English reveal that what we might conceive of as one language is not so easily limited. In this course, we’ll study the English language(s) from a variety of perspectives: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. In doing so, we’ll come to understand how our English(es) have been used as a means not simply for communication but for expressing both power and empowerment.

ChatGPT, in its Gen-Z voice, offers this recommendation: “Yo, I'm totally vibing with this class! It's gonna be lit and give me some serious brain workout, you know? Can't wait to dive in and see what's up. Gonna be mad interesting, for real.”

This course explores our place in the world through three complementary activities: reading, writing, and meditation. We will read together a wide selection of poems offering diverse views of “nature” and our relationship to the earth, taking into account African-American and Indigenous views as well as the European perspective that has long been dominant. We will also undertake a range of contemplative practices, including walking and sitting meditation, outdoors when possible.  Through journal-keeping and poetic experiments as well as formal essays and presentations, students will articulate their discoveries and hone their skills as readers and observers, both of poetry and of the natural world.

There is no responsible way to approach the study of Chaucer’s works without attending to the intersection between language, bodies, gender, and desire within them. As “the father of English poetry,” Chaucer plants his poetic feet in the relationships between the genders, in how we view bodily pleasures (or their absence), in the way language circulates in the social space between bodies, and in how we approach questions of bodily subjectivity from the pagan past to his Christian present. This is true when Chaucer writes about romantic or sexual love, but it is also true when he writes about religion, politics, history, animal fables, and dream visions. In this class, we will consider how the study of (often deeply troubling pieces of) Chaucer’s work should energize our contemporary assumptions and questions about gender and sexuality even as we become familiar with Chaucer’s historical contexts, his language, and his engagement with the literary innovations of his day. Because this is an upper-level class, all of our reading will be in the original Middle English, and so we will begin with a series of lessons on the language. No previous experience with Middle English is expected or required. By the end of the class, however, we will all be comfortable with reading (and reading aloud) the language of Chaucer’s 14th century London.  

Advent 2024 our focus for “Shakespeare 1” will be six plays written and performed between 1594 and 1599, the years just after Shakespeare had published his two long narrative poems (when London’s theatres were closed due to the bubonic plague) and before his company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men (in which Shakespeare was an actor, playwright, and shareholder), moved to the newly constructed Globe Theatre. Although these six plays continue to have perennial appeal in their own right, we will also investigate the historical contexts associated with their composition and staging—especially Shakespeare’s aesthetic tendency toward lyricism, a term and theme we will need to explore and define before we can examine how it informs and animates his plays written between 1594-99. Although his great tragedies¬–other than Romeo and Juliet (1595) which we will read this term–come after his prolific lyrical period, he continued to experiment with several different dramatic forms including the insertion of high tragic elements within madcap comedies such as The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant Of Venice. Finally, we will study the historical tragedy Richard II, one of Shakespeare’s only plays written entirely in verse, which is deeply concerned with issues of royal succession at a time when childless Queen Elizabeth I was approaching the end of her life and a long, glorious reign.

This course involves student-centered constructivist and collaborative classroom exercises (“capers”) including team performances of select episodes and scenes, as well as individual presentations and formal “write-ups.” The one-night-a-week class structure is ideal for allowing us to dive deeply into each of these plays in a serious and sustained way, including playing out various possible stagings of the same episode or scene to discern what exactly the text is asking actors to emphasize and to highlight in their performance. No prior acting experience is required or assumed, for as the closing couplet of The Comedy of Errors puts it so well:

“We came into the world like brother and brother,
And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another.”

In English 359, we read the poetry of sixteenth-century England. Amidst dramatic shifts in religion and politics, a variety of notable poetic styles flourished in this era: the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey, imitated from Italian models; the amatory sequences of Sidney, Shakespeare, and Spenser, telling the story of love through delicious languor and rapt immobility; and the mythological epyllia (brief epics) of Shakespeare and Marlowe. The course culminates in a complete reading of Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a chivalric romance that evokes an idealized vision of the middle ages even as it breaks new ground in the representation of contemporary history.

The eighteenth-century British novel was at heart experimental, riffing on but also departing from previous literary forms. This survey invites us to explore the early British novel in all its multifarious inventiveness as we read and discuss works by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen. Particular attention will be paid to the way the early novel interrogates concepts of gender and sexuality. 

Spanning the 18th, 19th, and 20th century, this course explores the relationship between the British empire and literatures written in English. Through colonial and postcolonial novels, poems, imperial romances, travel narratives, and essays, the course analyzes how Britain's territorial and ideological expansion abroad shaped the form and content of English literary expression. Balancing historical context and close analysis of novels, films, and critical texts, the course will consider how empire has affected literature and literary study and how these fictions of empire continue to shape the contemporary world. Readings will include works from Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, E. M. Forster, H. Rider Haggard, Jean Rhys, Olive Schreiner, and Rabindranath Tagore. 

Coming of age during the American and French revolutions, William Blake was an original multimedia artist who saw the imagination as the key to liberation, both for the individual and for society.  In this seminar, we will dive deeply into his poetry and visual art, while at the same time looking at their political and cultural context. Engagement with literary criticism and theory will enable students to take their own place in the scholarly conversion surrounding this unique and challenging author. 

“Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.”--Blake

Victorian literature is famously preoccupied with the past: memory and personal experience, national history, nostalgia, and repressed trauma. At the same time, Victorian culture encouraged a robust faith in various visions of progress: the possibility of self-determination, advances in science and technology, and the growth of England as a nation. In this survey of Victorian poetry and non-fiction prose, we will read works of literary and intellectual significance by writers whose preoccupations ranged widely—from romantic desire to evolutionary science, from religious belief to the rise of capitalism. Yet they all grappled with the relationship between art, individuals, and the ever-changing society they inhabited. As we put these fascinating works in dialogue with one another, we will pay special attention to their representations of individual and collective pasts, presents, and futures.

This course, the first half of the two-semester survey of American literature before the twentieth
century, begins with the earliest writings in English by European explorers and colonizers and
follows the slow emergence of distinctive political, moral and literary traditions that were
recognizably American. It thus features, along with poetry and fiction, a good deal of nonfiction
writing in the form of essays, memoirs, and sermons. The course culminates with the period
usually called “the American Renaissance,” a thirty-year span just before the Civil War in which
internationally important works were created by such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar
Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.

This course will be a stone’s skip across British poetry, fiction, and drama from around 1900 to the present moment. Using and breaking a variety of familiar forms, tropes, and conventions, the writers of this period work to understand and represent the practice of modern warfare, the disintegration of the British Empire, the rise of the English welfare state, and the slippery concept of "Britishness" itself. The survey explores these historical and cultural contexts, observes the different kinds of critical attention these genres demand, and emphasizes the practice of close reading. Students will have some choice about the forms of work they undertake. 

In this course, we’ll explore literary and cultural representations of the US South from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. We’ll focus especially on the ways in which the South has long been conceived as “queer”—that is, deviant from national normativity and home to perversity of all kinds. Our syllabus will include works by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Randall Kenan (among many others). We’ll discuss intersections among categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality and consider the relationship between literary canon formation and the mythology of the South. 

What precipitated Ralph Ellison penning The Invisible Man? How did we get to moving, daring women’s fiction like Sula by Toni Morrison? African American Literature is a rich tradition, as artistic as it is political, as inward facing as it is socially responsible. Forces of antiblackness have long considered the act of writing a threshold of humanity—even and especially when writing was illegal for African Americans; however, writers like poet Phyllis Wheatley have eloquently exceeded that benchmark. Black letters, then, are conscious extensions of not only cultural identities but the fullness of Black humanity, which writers from Frederick Douglass to Toni Cade Bambara commit to representing through a diversity of stories. In this course, we trace the beginning of the African American Literary Tradition, reading classic novels and landmark essays that all center the same question: what is the point and potential of Black writing?

An advanced research methods and composition course required for students pursuing honors in the department. The class will introduce students to the process of conducting independent research in the field of English and will provide experience with the most common research tools and methods used by scholars of literary analysis. We will discuss argumentative structures, disciplinary conventions, and work together in a collegial and cooperative environment that gives students experience with scholarly collaboration. Class sessions will be devoted to giving students in-class writing time, offering peer critiques, reflecting on the nature of scholarly writing, and working through exercises to develop and discover students’ individual voices and analytic priorities. In addition, students will work closely with their thesis advisor throughout the term as part of the course requirements, meeting with their advisor regularly outside of class for individual guidance and feedback about their project. By the end of the semester, students will have produced an initial rough draft of their thesis project that will then be revised in a more leisurely manner, under the supervision of their thesis advisor, during the following term. 

Admission to the class is granted by the department. To be selected, students must submit an abstract of their intended project over the summer and the department will approve the abstracts they believe will produce successful honors theses. 

Discussions will center on students' poems. Selected readings are assigned to focus on technical problems of craftsmanship and style.

If you’re dreaming up ways to tell new stories, the Beginning Fiction Workshop provides a welcoming space to explore techniques to hone your skills as a writer of fiction. You will read a diverse array of stories while we create a common language to aid us in discussion of the stories we study and create. You will write through generative exercises and build toward your own stories. Each writer will uncover their writing voice while becoming a part of the larger writing community. Together, we will become studied observers and generous participants in the writing and reading of fiction. 

If you’re dreaming up ways to tell new stories, the Beginning Fiction Workshop provides a welcoming space to explore techniques to hone your skills as a writer of fiction. You will read a diverse array of stories while we create a common language to aid us in discussion of the stories we study and create. You will write through generative exercises and build toward your own stories. Each writer will uncover their writing voice while becoming a part of the larger writing community. Together, we will become studied observers and generous participants in the writing and reading of fiction. 

Are you a fan of The Flight Attendant or House of Cards? Do you love Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto, or Turning Red? What do they all have in common? They were all written by playwrights.
Whether you are a fiction writer interested in improving your dialogue, a poet who wants to explore narrative, a theatre geek who wants to see their work come to life, or someone simply interested in trying something new, Beginning Playwriting Workshop is an excellent opportunity to explore dramatic writing in a safe and supportive environment. Emphasis is placed on promoting growth as a writer. A variety of foundational texts are read in order to develop an understanding of basic dramatic structure. Each play is chosen to address a corresponding skill, such as dramatic tension, subtext, dialogue, exposition, or character. Weekly writing exercises are assigned to work in concert with the plays we read. By reading plays and dissecting the form and content, students have an opportunity to develop their analytic skills, which can then be applied to their own work. In addition to short writing exercises, students will also complete either two 10-minute plays or a one-act play.

Craft-based instruction in specific formal issues in the tradition of poetry. Students will read poems through the lens of technique and craft, studying how writers utilize certain forms. The class will also focus on the generation of creative work, adhering to the forms discussed in class. Prerequisite: WRIT 205 or WRIT 206 or WRIT 207 or WRIT 208.

In this iteration of the forms course, we will focus on the novel. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of contemporary novels, looking at story structure, elements and expectations of genre conventions, character development, and explorations of conceits and themes. We will also focus on the generation of our own concept, working to create between 50 and 75 pages of the opening of the novel, while also building a comprehensive outline, character sheet, and researching our setting. We will also spend time on the professional aspects of pitching a novel to an agent. 

Building on the skills learned in Beginning Playwriting, students in Intermediate Playwriting will explore plays that utilize a non-linear story structure.  The semester will begin with readings from contemporary playwrights like Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Katori Hall, and Lauren Yee, as we continue to discuss craft. By reading plays and dissecting the form and content, student have an opportunity to develop their analytic skills which will serve them well as they begin examining their own work.  Students will apply the skills they have learned as they write their own original one-act play (30-60 pages).

In the advanced workshop, students focus on their capstone project, sharing that work with peers in a workshop setting. The course requires students to work with the professor to develop specific reading lists with the goal of shaping their own capstone project. The primary focus of the workshop is the creation and critique of their own work and the work of their peers. Prerequisite: WRIT 306.