Easter 2025 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.   

While the title might make it sound like a greatest hits album (That’s What I Call Narrative!), this course examines the production of literary tradition and the varieties of literary form. We will read Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, looking at how writers can repeat and reinvent past ways of writing, and how cultural forms, from hospitality to race to religion provide new ways of looking at the goals and effects of poetry. This is a Foundational Writing Intensive course, and teaches you about literary tropes (simile, metaphor, anaphora, litotes, etc.). 

This course examines poetry through the ballad, a narrative poetic form which was (and is still) often associated with music. The course will range across a wide historical selection of ballads. 

Slavery and its legacy, systemic racism, have been subjects for American writers and artists for more than two centuries. Revealing a yawning gap between American ideals and practices, they continue to tell us something vital about our country. This course examines representations of slavery and racism, including slave narratives and neo-slave narratives, across various media.

A course centered upon one of the most ambitious and challenging novels ever composed in English, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) by Herman Melville. But readings range well beyond that text, attempting to place it in several of its contexts: that of Melville’s prior and subsequent career (possible titles include Typee, Clarel, and Billy Budd), his intellectual milieu (works by contemporaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne), and the nautical and scientific literature available to Melville as he wrote. Much more than a fish story, Moby-Dick makes claims about literary history, politics, philosophy, religion, and—to use a term available to us though not to Melville—ecology. This course tries to engage as many of those claims as possible.

Perhaps we've heard of "Anglo-Saxon" England: the land of monsters, dragons, heroes, Vikings, bards, and halls with an endless supply of mead. While we will explore all of these (with the exception of the mead), we will find a complex literary and artistic culture, which can sensitively express intimacy and violence, friendship and enmity, and yes, heroism. This course will be taught in translation: no prior knowledge of medieval literature, history, or language is required. And yes, we will read Beowulf.  

A study of drama from the fifteenth century to the English Civil War, excluding works by Shakespeare but typically including tragedies by Thomas Kyd, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster, as well as comedies by Ben Jonson, Mary Wroth, and Francis Beaumont.

This class will consider the plays written by Shakespeare after 1600 through a variety of lenses:  as cultural artifacts of Elizabethan England; as scripts that have truly only lived, and continue to live, in performance; as an ongoing source of inspiration for us as we continue to make culture anew; and as brilliant works of dramatic poetry.  The instruction method is guided discussion, sometimes student-led, with occasional brief lectures. While the foundation of our work will always be careful close-reading, we will also think about reception, considering the implications of performance for our understanding of what Shakespeare might have meant to his contemporaries, and what he continues to mean (and what we make him mean) to us. The through-thread of performance analysis includes discussing and analyzing filmic interpretations, culminating in students creatively collaborating scenes.  

In English 362, we examine the varied works of John Milton (1608-1674), poet, polemicist, and revolutionary. Beginning with Milton’s youthful experiments across different modes and genres of lyric verse, we turn to the radical political tracts of his middle years as a context for Paradise Lost, an epic that brings together poetry, philosophy, theology, and science to undertake a task no less ambitious than “to justify the ways of God to men.” The course comes to a close with extended attention to Milton’s late masterpieces, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, which represent the culmination of his lifelong concerns yet also a profound questioning of his own settled views.

In this course we will explore themes of song-making, nature, memory, imagination, and seduction through the work of some major Romantic writers (Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, John Clare, John Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron). Whether we know it or not, many of our current assumptions about poets and poetry originate in this period. We’ll trace the history of those assumptions in the context of the French Revolution and the origins of the women’s and labor movements in Britain.

Whether in lively vignettes of gossiping neighbors, gripping tales of social ambition, or Gothic visions of lovers prowling the moors, Victorian novels immerse us in worlds and lives that feel as real as our own. Crucially, though, they are not—not ours, and not real. It is in the space between these dimensions—the familiar and the strange, the actual and the imagined, the singular and the universal—that the Victorian novel unfolds. We will trace the narrative structures, techniques of representation, genre tropes, thematic preoccupations, and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century British fiction through the work of several major authors: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde. Marrying an intense focus on the inner life with wide-ranging social scope, their books ask enduring ethical and existential questions: What do we owe other people? How do we measure social progress? Is the present forever haunted by the past? Are human beings creatures of self-determination or fate? As we explore these imagined worlds, we will pay special attention to the fellow-feeling that binds individuals together in Victorian fiction—as well as the hostile impulses that drive them apart. Doing so will show us what Victorian novelists knew well: that literary narrative theorizes the world by representing it, and thereby offers a unique mode of social, psychological, and moral insight.

Like Abraham Lincoln’s announcement of “a new birth of freedom” in the Gettysburg Address, the American literature covered in English 378 struggles to articulate, then problematize, American freedom in the era surrounding the Civil War and emancipation. What is freedom? To whom does it extend? What are its blessings and its costs? Nobody has ever thought more profoundly about these issues than the American writers who emerged before, during, and after the war America fought with itself: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others.

By turns terrifying, melancholy, and bizarre, Gothic literature channels real anxieties in monstrous forms. Drawing from the British and American traditions, this course features narratives of the mysterious, uncanny, supernatural, and grotesque. We will trace the Romantic origins of the genre in 18th-century tales of crumbling castles and deranged monks, then turn to the vampires and doppelgangers that menaced Victorian fantasies of domesticity and progress, and finally grapple with phantoms of slavery in 20th-century American fiction. In the process, we will examine how the familiar conventions of Gothic fiction—ghosts, doubles, old houses, family curses—take on new meaning in light of their literary and cultural contexts. As we put these gripping texts in dialogue with one another, we will see how the unsettling, explosive narratives of Gothic fiction give voice to individual and collective fears, unleashing monsters that refuse to be forgotten. Texts: The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole); The Monk (Matthew Lewis); Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë); Dracula (Bram Stoker); The Turn of the Screw (Henry James); short stories by Edgar Allan Poe; Beloved (Toni Morrison)

The most important, influential, and fearlessly innovative American novelist of the twentieth century is also, preeminently, the writer we need to make sense of our moment of the twenty-first.  It was William Faulkner, profound analyst of the South’s tragic history, who said “The past is never dead.  It isn't even past.”  But why isn’t it?  Why can’t we, as so many Americans impatiently ask, “just move on”?  This is, over and over, the anguished question Faulkner’s characters ask, yearning for the freedom of the fresh start but taught by tragic experience that such redemptions are usually illusory.  As the nation, and our campus, try once more to face the darkest parts of history and acknowledge the ways they still affect us, William Faulkner’s is the indispensable literary voice, and his difficult, brilliant, funny and heartbreaking novels are the ones we need to wrestle with. 
 
The Faulkner class will focus on the great novels Faulkner wrote, in frenziedly quick succession, between 1929 and 1942, what he called his “matchless time.” Be prepared for books that will resist you every step of the way, then reward you richly. 

This course explores selected fiction by Toni Morrison and some of the literary criticism that surrounds her work. It examines Morrison's treatment of race, class, gender, and sexuality in her fiction, and also considers some of her nonfiction, interviews, and speeches to gain a clearer understanding of her contributions to the American literary canon and the African American literary tradition.

This course counts fully as an ENGL course, for both the English and the Creative Writing Major. It also counts towards African and African-American Studies, American Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies. 

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

How do certain writers create a complete, engrossing experience for their audiences? In this introductory class, we will be exploring the art and practice of the literary short story. This course will provide an introduction to the contemporary short story and familiarize you with crucial elements of craft. Students will study a diverse selection of short stories published in or translated into the English language and analyze how elements of each piece build a successful literary experience for the reader.

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. 

Discussions will center on students’ narrative nonfiction. Selected readings are assigned to focus on technical problems of craftsmanship and style.

This semester we will take on the challenge of writing toward home – place in contemporary poetry. The best poems are often those that express an awareness of the time and place of their making. In this class we will study how place and context inform a poem's making. Which poets seek to write from the experience of living in or being from a particular place? How do we, as readers, experience other places through poetry? How has the digital landscape changed how we experience poetry? Authors studied may include Eduardo C. Corral, Nate Marshall, Natasha Trethewey, Bruce Snider, Layli Long Soldier and Eavan Boland, with special attention paid to poets from the South and Appalachia. Students will use these poets as guides for the writing of their own poems. . Prerequisite: WRIT 205 or WRIT 206 or WRIT 207 or WRIT 208.

In the intermediate workshop, students expand their skills writing, reading, and critiquing poems, as well as share their writing with peers in a workshop setting. The course builds upon the basics of craft learned in the Beginning Poetry Workshop and explores more complex ways of utilizing that craft. Students read a diverse range of published poems, but the primary focus is the creation and critique of their own work and the work of their peers.

In the intermediate workshop, students expand their skills writing, reading, and critiquing short stories, as well as share their writing with peers in a workshop setting. The course builds upon the basics of craft learned in the Beginning Fiction Workshop and explores more complex ways of utilizing that craft. Students read a diverse range of published short stories, but the primary focus is the creation and critique of their own work and the work of their peers. Prerequisite: WRIT 206.

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).