Instruction and practice for writing in college. This course does not satisfy the requirements for the English major or minor.

This writing workshop explores the artistic modes of expression in poetry, fiction and non-fiction, using environmental issues as themes and topics. We will look into the core of environmental issues—the interaction between culture and nature, and how humans have been affected by the natural environment in the past and also how we have affected that environment and with what results. We'll examine the Twin Cities and surrounding areas on issues such as nature and industry, land, water and forests, human population growth, agriculture, urban/suburb expansion, tour industry, biodiversity, energy use, climate change, and environmental health. We'll learn how writers and poets across cultures create their imagery, figurative language, sound, rhythmic structures, voice, plot, character, point of view, etc., and how they use these techniques as carriers to reach their artistic goals.

Many of the writing assignments (poetry, stories, and essays) will be somewhat related to and/or based on the environmental topics you have chosen and researched. And all the assignments will be read and workshopped in class as part of the writing/editing process. Such practice is crucial to train your ear for the sound, rhythm and the flow of a poem and prose. It also trains both the reader and listeners the art of criticism and editing.

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see above

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The best way to learn about creative writing is to read and to write. A lot. In this course we will examine poetry, the short story, and creative nonfiction from the writer's perspective in order to figure out what makes these genres tick. We will discuss and critique published works by notable writers in order to enhance our understanding of what exactly separates poetry from prose, how to tell a story, how to use language artfully and purposefully, and how to convey emotional and intellectual meaning. This course is run as a workshop; discussion is the primary method by which we will improve our reading and writing skills. There will be the occasional lecture, but mostly we will be here to respond thoughtfully, imaginatively and constructively to published and student work in order to develop our own creative writing skills.

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This course is an introduction to writing fiction and poetry. We will use a variety of exercises, assignments, and readings to help students become comfortable as poets and writers of short fiction and creative nonfiction. We will read and discuss works by established authors to uncover some of the techniques they have used to make their writing effective, and we will workshop each other's writing in a supportive, constructively critical manner.

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In this course, we will dive head first into the creative writing process by reading and writing poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, and nonfiction. We will examine each genre from a writer's standpoint, discussing and critiquing accomplished works to enhance our own writing. We'll study how the works of published authors are built, how their language is crafted, how they convey sensation and emotion, and how they artfully tell a story. The course will be run as a workshop. I will lecture occasionally, but for the most part enriched writing and critical skills will come from discussion. They will come from the careful exploration of your work and the work of others (both Pulitzer-Prize-winning and that of the student next to you).

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This course offers students introductory practice in three genres of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Students will be required to submit at least three pieces of writing for each genre, and then revise some of this work for a final portfolio. Throughout the semester we'll also write spontaneously in class, in directed exercises that complement the formal, out-of-class assignments. We'll examine the published work of contemporary writers, and you'll be required to write brief analyses of these readings. No tests, but plenty of writing and reading each week. Attendance and participation required.

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What makes a voice "American"? What are the relationships between different kinds of writing and different "American voices"? How do different literary forms enable writers to find their "voice," to tell stories about themselves and the "America" in which they live? In this course we will seek answers to these and other questions by reading a range of poems, novels, short stories, and plays that tell varying—and often contradictory—stories about the lives and experiences of people in the United States. Readings include work by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Américo Paredes, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Philip Roth, Piri Thomas, Suzan Lori-Parks, Chang-Rae Lee, among others.

Assignments will include two short papers (2-3 pp.) and two longer papers (5 pp.) on topics to be distributed.

Satisfies the U.S. Multiculturalism requirement; serves as a gateway course to the English major.

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How do poems give form to experience, feeling, and thought? This course aims to make its participants into resourceful and creative readers of poetry, taking pleasure in works of many forms, periods, and languages, and mastering the skills that will allow us intimacy with a living, changing art. We will also listen closely for the ways that poetry can sharpen the mysteriousness of silences, of spiritual experience, of temporal experience, of haunted pasts and visionary futures. One of our threads is the poet's craft; another is major developments in the history of poetry in English; a third is on major documents in poetics. The main text will be The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Poetry.

There are no prerequisites for this course. Non-majors are welcome. This course does fulfill the gateway requirement for English majors, and it fulfills the College's Writing requirement.

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This course will examine pivotal works in the tradition of the American novel. We will discuss death, the meaning of life, beauty, time, cruelty, freaks, ritual, the family, ecological catastrophe, racism, and literature and philosophy. The class will engage in intensive readings of individual texts, but will also seek to examine the larger backgrounds of American literary and cultural history. To more fully understand the novel as a form, we will have a few brief cross-genre interludes, including film and poetry. Readings will include: E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime; William Faulkner, Light in August; Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away; Saul Bellow, Herzog; Katherine Dunn, Geek Love; Don DeLillo, White Noise; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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William Shakespeare has become a fixture of popular culture as well as literary studies. For many people, he is the primary representative of the English Renaissance and his works the epitome of highbrow literature. This introductory course aims to familiarize readers with the language, culture, and historical background of Shakespeare's works as well as a number of the works themselves. We will explore all four dramatic genres and nondramatic poetry, addressing issues of performance, gender and sexuality, identity and the self, the individual in society, leadership, and agency and fate. Works may include As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Venus and Adonis, and selected sonnets. There will also likely be an opportunity to see The Two Gentlemen of Verona in performance at the Guthrie Theater.

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In this course we will examine texts by, about, and for workers for social justice. Our method will be interdisciplinary. With an eye toward aesthetics, we will examine novels and plays that have at their center protagonists who have been called to realize a vision of the just society or, more desperately, to stand alone against seemingly inevitable assaults upon human dignity. We will at the same time examine philosophical and sociological accounts of political action, including works that evaluate the effectiveness of different individual and organizational strategies for social change. Issues of particular importance will include human rights, economic justice, eco-activism, globalization, and the question of personal vocation—that is, how do we bring together our ethical commitments and our working lives? We will seek to better understand the contemporary norms and practices of human rights by examining its deep historical contexts, and by considering the philosophical and religious debates that continue to shape human rights theory and practice. We will also examine theories of trauma and torture, personal accounts of human rights and humanitarian fieldwork, representational ethics, and studies of human rights in film and media. We will scrutinize relevant literary texts as works of art, as case studies in human rights, and as models for understanding how words can change the world, whether in the form of human rights reports and newspaper accounts or of poems and novels. In other words, we will seek to better understand how spectators of suffering develop (or fail to develop) empathy for distant persons or for persons considered alien by also examining how they can so palpably feel for the dreams, desires, and dignity of fictional persons. In The Defense of Poesy Sir Philip Sidney describes the tyrant, Alexander Pheraeus, "from whose eyes a tragedy well-made and represented drew abundance of tears; who without all pity had murdered infinite numbers, and some of his own blood, so as he that was not ashamed to make matters for tragedies, yet could not resist the sweet violence of a tragedy." What is the line that separates those who are merely moved from those who are moved to act? When does the story become real enough to change you? Our list of authors will span the range of intellectual and ethical endeavor, including Sophocles, Aristotle, Henrik Ibsen, Herman Melville, Dave Eggers, Franz Kafka, Ursula Le Guin, Hannah Arendt, Marx and Engels, Immanuel Kant, J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Rawls, Michel Foucault, Naomi Klein, Greil Marcus, Elaine Scarry, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Lynn Hunt, Alan Dershowitz, and Kenneth Cain.

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Many of us are able to read a poem and pronounce it a resounding success or a staggering failure. But fewer of us are able to pronounce exactly why that poem succeeds or fails. This course on the art and craft of poetry is designed to enable us to uncover what makes a poem work and what effects that poem produces for the reader—and, as poets ourselves, how we might employ specific craft techniques for our own artistic goals. To that end, this course will be conducted in large part as a study of prosody—the art and history of versification, meter, verse forms, rhyme, and other sonic techniques—and also in part as a workshop of your own poems. We will read and discuss a wide range of poetries, from traditional works to contemporary innovations, and use these readings as models and inspirations to examine our own development as poets: how might you trace the connections from Chaucer to Ashbery, from Milton to Walcott, from Blake to Ginsberg, from Dickinson to Glück, from Hughes to Baraka, from Eliot to Graham-or any of these poets to your own poetry? Assignments will include reading broadly across poetries and essays on poetic craft, writing poems both in strict and free forms, critiquing each other's poems in workshop, and completing a final portfolio of your creative and critical works. The goal of these assignments, and of this course, is to make strategies of poetic craft explicit in your approach to poetry and, ultimately, intuitive in your writing of it.

Please note that ENG 120: Introduction to Creative Writing is a pre-requisite for this course and first day attendance is required.

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In this course, we will study fiction writing through the process of reading and writing flash fiction, short stories, and novel excerpts. We will study a variety of published work, discussing elements of craft like: voice, perspective, dialogue, interiority, and lyricism. Everyone will write a variety of short stories to put up for workshop. The goal is to become better readers of our own stuff—better self-editors. Being in a workshop is essentially about hearing responses to your work and learning what mistakes you are making and which things you are doing right. By recognizing and commenting on the mistakes and successes of others, and studying the work of great writers, you will learn to look at your own stories in a more critically evolved way.

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In Crafts of Writing Non-Fiction we will combine intensive workshops with seminars and critical study. For the workshop you will produce original works of biography, new journalism, memoir, or narrative non-fiction-submitting them to classmates and instructor for a close critical analysis.

Workshop critiques (which include a detailed written report, as well as thorough line-edits from your professor) will assess the mechanics and merits of the piece of writing, while individual conferences with the instructor refines the various critiques into a plan to improve the work. A student writer develops by practicing the craft under the diligent critical attention of his or her peers and instructor. This dynamic is meant to continually assist the student writer toward new levels of creative endeavor.

Students in the creative writing seminars read several books (or excerpts) and engage in round-table discussions about the artistic attributes of the texts, in order to better understand how literature might be made; a crucial difference between this and a literature course. By engaging in a deep analysis of outstanding and diverse works of literature, the creative writer can build the resources necessary to produce his or her own accomplished creative work.

Likely Texts: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; Mary Karr, The Liar's Club; David Sedaris, Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim; Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff; Alison Bedchel, Fun Home; Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls; Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

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Shadows and fog. Streets by night. Psychopaths. Detectives. Femme fatales. In this course we'll examine the international crime genre through the particular lens of film noir – its signature visual style and contemporary revisions. Starting with its roots in 1920s/30s German Expressionism and American crime fiction as translated into Hollywood films of the 1940s and 50s, we'll then consider the international neo-noir phenomenon in British, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Asian, and Latin American cinemas. Through close analysis of 12-14 films, we'll build a technical vocabulary for how to discuss film as a narrative and audiovisual art form (mise-en-scène, framing, editing, lighting, soundtrack). We'll analyze the visual style of film noir, as initially theorized by the French cineastes (Bazin, Rivette, Godard, Truffaut) and embodied in particular films from Fritz Lang through Pedro Almodóvar. We'll ask: How do the urban landscapes of New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Paris, Madrid, Mexico City, Rio, Tokyo, and Hong Kong animate/embody the visual style of film noir? What's the relation between technologies of film and our pleasure in viewing the noir landscape? How are we complicit in on-screen crime and acts of violence in these films, becoming more than spectators? How do crime films of the 1970s-1990s reflect apocalyptic anxieties of the end of the city and the (post)human condition? How does film noir move out of the material site of the city and into psychological and symbolic terrain and suburban states of mind?  Required texts will include film/critical theory and source novels for several films.

Likely films include: M (Fritz Lang, 1931); Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932); Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941); Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950); Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950); Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958); Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960); Breathless (Jean Luc Godard, 1960); Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965); Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966); Branded to Kill (Seijun Sukuki, 1967); A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971); Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1973); Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976); Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982); Veronika Voss (Fassbinder, 1982); Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986); Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992); The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992); Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993); Fargo (Coen Brothers, 1996); LA Confidential (Curtis Hansen, 1997); In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000); City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002); Bad Education (Pedro Almodóvar, 2004).

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This course studies poems, tales, myths, and non-fiction of the British and Scandinavian archipelagos in medieval times, focusing on accounts of magic, marvels, enchantment and disenchantment, nature spirits, dragons, demons, shape-shifters, fairies, and uncanny animals. These narratives and character types, surprisingly, constitute medieval literature's most complex explorations of environment, home and homelessness, invasion and settlement, the fates of indigenous religions and its spirits as Christianity spread, and people's encounters with seas, forests, lands, weathers, and other humans of those northern worlds.

Works will be drawn from the Scandinavian Volsung Saga and The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki; the Irish legends Sweeney Astray and The Life of Saint Gall; the Welsh Mabinogion; the English Beowulf, The Wedding of Sir Gawain & Dame Ragnelle, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and Franklin's Tale, excerpts from Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, and Hayao Miyazaki's film Spirited Away. We will make connections among scholarship in literary history, religious studies, anthropology, philosophy, and historical geography.

This course fulfills the College's Writing requirement; for majors it fulfills the pre-1700 requirement.

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Four centuries after his time, Shakespeare's stage comedies and romances prove irresistible to modern audiences and artists, inviting adaptations ranging from musicals (Kiss Me Kate) to teen flicks (Ten Things I Hate About You). This course will explore these two genres (including how they intersect and blend) in Shakespeare's original texts and will examine issues of gender and sexuality in human relationships and society, identity and the self, and transformation and discovery. Plays may include As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. There will also likely be an opportunity to see The Two Gentlemen of Verona in performance at the Guthrie Theater.

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This course considers representations of affect in British Romantic literature. Romanticism was a trans-Atlantic artistic movement, whose influence was felt in every artistic discipline, including music, painting, drama, poetry. Taking three manifestoes as our starting point, we will examine the intersections between the Romantics' endorsement of heightened emotional states and the critical authority of the individual imagination, as well as the movement's rejection of Enlightenment empiricism and the scientific rationalization of nature. How did Romanticism distinguish between terror, joy and tranquility - among other affective states - in their privileging of the sublime? What is the relationship between the powers of the imagination and emotion? A series of affective states will structure our course. Our readings of Romantic texts will also attend to the historical conditions that gave rise to these aesthetic, philosophical and subjective concerns.

Required Texts: Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (Penguin) Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (Oxford) Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Blackwell)

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This course undertakes a detailed critical reading of some representative literary texts from the Victorian age in Britain. Our aim in this course is to explore and define the sort of society out of which these texts arose, and to come to an understanding of why the decisions and techniques of these writers, such as Charlotte Brontë or Charles Dickens, continue to influence our ideas of what modern society is and how it can be represented. Our own middle-class, economic, mobile, complex and interwoven world, increasingly urbanized and organized, was first described and mapped in this period—thus, perhaps, the continuing power and allure of these aesthetic objects. We will be considering the following factors:

— The novel form itself, which reached the apex of its influence in this period: why was this age the age of the classic novel? What is a novel and why did it dominate literature in the nineteenth century?

— Economic and social contexts, such as the modern city, industrialism, the newly powerful factors of advertising, the newspaper, transportation, social mobility, empire: how did they shape, and how were they transformed by, Victorian literature?

— The Victorian self: what was the mind like to Victorians? Memory, will, sensation, perception, imagination: what did they mean in this period?

— Intellectual contexts of the Victorian age: the thought of Malthus, Darwin, and others; the influence of science and philosophical pessimism upon British literature in the nineteenth century

— What constituted an increasingly middle-class literature: ideas of domesticity, intimacy, normality, and gender, and how these texts work toward or against these newly powerful concepts

The complex inauguration of modern consciousness: that will be our theme, tracked through various texts (e.g., Alice in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray,  Bleak House) various genres, and various sites (London, the suburbs, the country).

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London. Post-imperial city shaped by Caribbean, African, and Asian diasporas, rebuilt from the Blitz, now home to over seven million Londoners. In the wake of postwar “Windrush” labor migrations, colonial independence movements, and recent arrivals of political and economic refugees – and despite severe waves of anti-immigration legislation – the cultural cartography of London has been forever transformed.

From the East End to Hounslow, Brixton to Notting Hill, Thames-side metropolis to sprawling suburbs, in this course we'll consume London's diasporic fiction, film, art, and music.  We'll encounter iconoclastic novels about and by Londoners (Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, among others), exploring how these texts map London's complex social, cultural, psychological, and architectural landscapes, challenging our conceptions of how a novel can look and sound. In addition to works of fiction, we'll read theory by Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer, Pratibha Parmar, Errol Lawrence, Hazel Carby; view films by Gurinder Chadha, Stephen Frears, Isaac Julien, Mike Leigh, and Danny Boyle; consider popular music as cultural movement (reggae, ska, two-tone, desi and bhangra music, hip-hop, fusion); and view works of contemporary visual and performance art.

A series of related questions will animate our discussion: What makes a Londoner? How do migratory histories (diasporic, imperial, refugee) and scenes of racial/ethnic/class conflict inflect the language and voices of contemporary British culture? What is the relationship between the postmodern and postcolonial as literary genres, theoretical movements, and historical frameworks? How does cosmopolitanism relate to histories of diaspora? How do representations of gender, sexuality, and youth cultures populate these texts? How have the horror, gothic, gangster, comic, and war genres shaped late-twentieth century British fiction and visual culture? How have authors, filmmakers, and artists recorded the individual and communal history of diaspora through the lens of social realism, satire, even documentary?

Likely Texts: Monica Ali, Brick Lane ; David Dabydeen, The Intended ; Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack; Hanif Kureishi, Buddha of Suburbia; Gautam Malkani, Londonstani; Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle; Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses ; Sam Selvon, Lonely Londoners; Zadie Smith, White Teeth;  Meera Syal, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee; Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Likely Films: Gurinder Chadha, Bhaji on the Beach (1993); Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Dirty Pretty Things (2002); Isaac Julien, Young Soul Rebels (1991); Mike Leigh, Secrets and Lies (1996); Ken Loach, It's a Free World (2007); Danny Boyle, Trainspotting (1996), 28 Days Later (2002).

Requirements: Biweekly journals (25%); Papers (50%); Participation (25%)
                                   
*Course fulfills College “Internationalism” requirement*
*Course fulfills English major requirement in diasporic literature*
*Course approved as part of the Urban Studies Concentration*

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Nineteenth-century poetry is the undiscovered country of American literature, a time when poetry mattered in ways now difficult to believe. Poems were part of nineteenth-century public culture: they commented on all aspects of the times, and participated intimately in the lives of ordinary readers. Our course will study the “serious” poetry that became part of American Literature, and the forgotten, timely verse that sold cheaply and circulated widely as part of daily life in nineteenth-century America

This course will survey the history of American poetry from the post-Revolutionary era to the turn of the twentieth century. We will read the poetry of major authors like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and others; we will also read the poetry of major events and movements, like the poetry of antislavery and the poetry of the Civil War. Finally, we will survey the “popular” poetry of the era, looking at the poems and songs of the minstrel theater, execution elegies, popular ballads, slave spirituals, political songs and satires, and sentimental verse.

We will work with anthologies of nineteenth-century poetry, and digital archives available from the Library of Congress, the American Antiquarian Society, and elsewhere.

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This course will trace the development of an African American literary and cultural tradition from the turn of the century to the present. We will explore the ways that African American writers of the 20th century have expressed a history that includes trauma, migration, and survival; we will also consider how the invention or revision of art forms may be related to that history. We will explore a wide range of genres and literary modes, from jazz poetry to speculative fiction. We will cover many topics, among them: the "New Negro," the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the Blues, Black Power and the Black Arts Movement, Black Feminism, and Afro-Futurism. Requirements include three 5-7 page papers, an in-class presentation, and a final examination. This course fulfills the English major requirement in literature by U.S. writers of color. It also fulfills the college's Domestic Diversity/U.S. Multiculturalism requirement.

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The great African American writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is widely remembered as the "poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance." Though richly true, this title masks Hughes' remarkably wide-ranging and internationalist career. He published in every imaginable genre – poetry, novel, short story, children's literature, humor, memoir, drama, song lyric, history, and more – and collaborated with writers from Latin America, Soviet Central Asia, Africa and the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean. He was also the first black writer of any nation to make his living exclusively from writing.

This course ranges chronologically and widely through Hughes's career, attending to multiple dynamics, politics, and cultural histories. Texts will include The Collected Poems, The Ways of White Folks, The Big Sea, essays from The Chicago Defender, 1942-62, The Return of Simple, I Wonder as I Wander, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, From Harlem to Johannesburg, and many essays. Written assignments may include research on little-known or archival texts, making use of materials not available to the general public.

Required preparation: students should come to the course with good background in one or more of a) literary (especially poetry) studies, b) American race studies, and c) inter-national or global studies. Few class members will have all three, but the class as a whole will embody all of these preparations.

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This course studies a wide array of poetry, along with selected creation myths, cosmologies, and essays, to consider poets' sense of habitation in environment. What environs us? How do we find principles of dwelling? How do poets evoke the vitality of sensory experience within elemental environments? What forms and genres lend themselves to literary investigation of how to inhabit a place? Are broad scientific virtues of exactitude of observation, and a contemplative spirit, also virtues in environment poetry? How can studying poetry fuel or refine thinking about environmental justice? We'll read from poets and cosmologists of ancient China, ancient Greece and Rome, Britain, and especially from 20th- and 21st-century poets of the United States: Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Gary Snyder. We'll also make connections among studies from literary history, anthropology, religious studies, architecture. We'll tour the Purcell-Cutts House in Minneapolis, and perhaps a straw-bale house.

This course fulfills the College's Writing requirement. For ES majors, it meets a Humanities course requirement; for English majors, it serves as an elective.

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This course is a study of the forms of selfhood reflected in and shaped by the forms of that most notable genre of Victorian self-understanding, the novel. The emergence of a newly normative “personality,” considered through several categories- memory, will, sensation, perception, etc.—explicitly thematized by nineteenth-century British fiction, and a study of that fiction's participation in various psychological practices and theories of the period. Our reading will lead to an inquiry into how the formal procedures of the Victorian novel (in its many genres: social novel, Bildungsroman, sensation novel, multi-plot novel) were particularly adept at constructing and popularizing unique psychic forms- what might be called “Victorian consciousnesses.”

Required Texts: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Penguin); Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Oxford); Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Penguin); Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford); Bram Stoker, Dracula (Norton). Secondary Readings: selected Victorian psychological writing from Taylor and Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves (Oxford).

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The terms Latina/o and Latinidad encompass the myriad cultural practices, language performance, and migrations by and about Hispano subjects. These terms also propose alternative geographic, temporal, and corporeal histories of “the West.” Further still, these terms allude to the desire, of multi-raced, multi-national, and/or multi-lingual subjects for self-identification and self-determination. In this course, we theorize Latina/o aesthetics' potential to engender oppositional space, through discursive practices of resistance. More specifically, we examine how poetry and prose forms, sometimes, enact, replicate, or inspire social justice activism. We read examples of poetry from the 19th century through the contemporary era. We read texts in original language and translation: Caló, French, English, Spanish. We employ Latino theorists Anzaldúa, Arteaga, Mesa-Baines, Monsiváis, and Ybarra-Frausto to help us navigate a program of conciencia. We consider the poetics of reclamation and liberation of Puertorriqueños, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Clemente Soto Vélez and Martín Espada. We walk through the fields with the character, Perfecto Flores, in the poetry and fiction of Chicanos Jimmy Santiago Baca and Helena María Viramontes. Poets who interpolate how “the border crossed us:” Lorna Dee Cervantes, Dolores Dorantes, and Tino Villanueva. We also consider the international and inter-ethnic gazes Latina/os cast on each other's bodies: Díaz, Zamora, and Aragón. As a course in poetics, we practice thinking through writing, as well as experimentation in writing. We write queries, book reviews, and a term critical paper. Poets, fiction writers, and playwrights may also research and produce creative work, to incorporate into their final projects.

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This course will contextualize fascism as a historical phenomenon and as a particular modernist ideology in the context of contemporary political, economic, social, cultural theories. It will explore the relationship of fascism to concepts of masculinity and femininity, sexuality, race, class, and nation. We will investigate the roles and impact of writers/intellectuals creating bodies of thought within and around such theories and concepts. We will relate histories past to histories present through a discussion of (post)modernity. Some of the texts are Benito Mussolini's speeches, Antonion Gramsci's and Emma Goldman's theories, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Grazia Deledda's Cosima, Zora Neale Hurston's I Love Myself¿ , extracts from Gwendolyn Bennett's writings, Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas. Other media such as art and films will also be included.

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Oscar Wilde: Poet. Cultural Critic. Satirist. Playwright. Novelist. Prisoner. Celebrity. Iconoclast.
We'll explore the many literary, biographical, public and private faces of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde: Irish-born, Trinity and Oxford educated, London playboy, literary celebrity, prisoner and exile. Readings will include Wilde's early poetry (“Ravenna,” 1881 Poems), book reviews, aesthetic lectures (on theatre, fashion, interior design, celebrity/diva culture), short stories (“The Canterville Ghost”; Happy Prince and Other Stories), prose/essays (“House Beautiful”; “Truth of Masks”; “Decay of Lying”; “The Critic As Artist”; Portrait of Mr. W.H.; “Soul of Man Under Socialism”), plays (Vera; A Woman of No Importance; Lady Windermere's Fan; Importance of Being Earnest; An Ideal Husband; Salome), his sole novel (Picture of Dorian Gray), prison letters, and long poem Ballad of Reading Gaol, as well as biographical and cultural contexts. We'll encounter Wilde's writings as part of a larger discussion of fin-de-siecle aesthetics (Aestheticism, Dandyism, Baudelaire's figure of the flaneur), sexual politics, celebrity culture, Victorian prison system and penal reform.

Requirements: Journal/scrapbook; 15-20 page final project; active participation.

Required Texts: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins); Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford UP); Soul of Man and Prison Writings (Oxford UP); J.K. Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours); Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde. Selected critical/cultural theory: Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Bristow, Eve Sedgwick, Camille Paglia, Dan Novak, Karl Beckson, Chris Snodgrass.

*Course satisfies the English major capstone and/or senior seminar requirement*

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In this capstone course, we will closely read a wide range of innovative and possibly "postmodern" texts written by African American authors in the last twenty years. We will attend to literary form and to the politics of form, considering how our authors resist realism and the content of racial protest, even as they frequently engage questions of race, identity, and power. Authors will include Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman, among others. We will ask a number of questions as we read: How might the representation of trauma affect literary form? What do we make of the recent turn away from the southern, rural folk and toward postmodern urbanism? What happens when African American literature become "unnationed" and unmoored from time? How do our authors represent queer black identities? What do we make of the recent critical category of Afro-Futurism? These and many other questions will guide our semester's exploration, as will our reading of much relevant literary criticism and theory. Requirements for the course include: presenting extensively on one of our texts, writing two discussion questions about each primary reading, and writing draft and final versions of a term paper of about 20-25 pages. This course fulfills the capstone and the literature by U.S. writers of color requirements for English majors. It also fulfills the college's U.S. Multiculturalism/Domestic Diversity requirement.

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This advanced writing workshop is designed to help students to start their own writing projects (poetry, story, personal essays, or mixed genres). The four books chosen for the workshop will help us understand how a writer and/or poet started his or her project with a vision and determination, how they researched and collected materials, and how they processed the raw materials and transformed them into art, and finally, help us shape our ideas and materials into workable projects through constructive feedbacks and critiques.

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