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

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This course traces a genealogy for Chicana and Chicano writing from early, recovered diary entries, 19th century poetry, and personal narratives to its present-day examples of a complex, post-modern American literary tradition. We read widely from literary texts produced through grassroots publishing efforts, in English and English translations of Spanish; Chicana/o cultural theory that address issues of race and indigenism, class, citizenship, plight of migrant workers, border crossings; gender and sexuality including transitional sexualities; as well as texts of drama and fiction that have received mainstream attention.

We ask how fiction(s)—of identity, geography, and history—serve Chicana/o activist writers in the creation of a poetics of insurrection. We examine genre as a “contact zone” and consider how Chicana/o authors theorize how genres (conventional, corss-genre, and experimental) interact, construct, and/or interrupt audience expectations. Reading backwards, comparatively, and against mainstream models, we examine how present-day activist writers draw on the earliest models of writing to resist confining taxonomies of the Chicana/o subject-self. Authors include: Anaya, Anzaldúa, Arteaga, Bacca, Castañeda, Cisneros, Lopez, Muñoz, Rivera, Rosaldo, Salinas, and Viramontes.

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This course provides an introduction to major authors and significant periods in African American literature. It will also provide an introduction to methods of literary study and analysis. We will read closely and appreciatively texts representing a wide range of genres and writers, including poetry, slave narratives, essays, short stories, novels, and plays by authors such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Essex Hemphill, and Suzan-Lori Parks. We will also study cultural and political movements such as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Requirements will include weekly written reading responses, three papers, an in-class presentation, and participation in discussion. (4 credits)

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This course is an introduction to poetry as it lives and works in the modern world. We will read broadly in the English verse of a period in which our own modern realities were first taking shape: the era of revolutionary change extending from the seventeenth century to the turn of the nineteenth, from Shakespeare through Pope to Wordsworth, from the late Renaissance through the Enlightenment to early romanticism. Our goal will be to understand the ways in which poets arranged the English language to reckon with the shocking novelty of their world--both to orient ourselves in the literary history of poetic modernity and, not less importantly, to figure out how poetry can still help us give form to our own lived experience. Accordingly, we will practice crafts of reading and response that let us experience the poetry of the past as new. We'll learn to analyze both sound and sense; we'll search out the material and intellectual contexts in which poetry was written and received; and we'll learn to operate in various interpretive modes, from paraphrase to deconstruction, that help us answer the questions that modern poems make us ask.

You'll earn your grade for the course by good-faith participation in class discussion, by submitting brief responses to our readings, and by completing five small works of different kinds. You will be able, within bounds, to choose the kinds of works that best suit your interests and abilities: you might choose, for example, to write critical essays; to find out and report on historical documents, interpretive strategies, or poets and poems from beyond our syllabus; or to interpret the poetry we encounter in other forms of your own devising. This course fulfills the gateway requirement for English majors, but non-majors are more than welcome.

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This course will provide students with a introduction to the study of poetry in the English language, including poems in translation. We will examine the historical evolution of the poem as a flexible literary form and read a generous selection of influential poets. We will also explore the cultural politics of poetry in our world today. Where do we find and consume poems in our day-to-day lives? What is the place of poetry in the books we read, the music we listen to and the ceremonies we attend? For example, why does the government commission poets (rather than other types of writers) to solemnify national occasions such as presidential inaugurations? By working together to address these types of questions, we will gain a better understanding of poetry as both a literary development and a living cultural artifact.

Classroom time will include a mix a lecture, discussions and possible film or poetry reading screenings. Grades will be determined by course participation, short writing assignments and quizzes on key terms and literary/historical developments. There are no prerequisites for ENGL 135. Non-majors are welcome. This course fulfills the gateway requirement for English majors and the College's Writing requirement.

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In this course we will explore the emergence and development of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and investigate the transformations of the genre in the twentieth century. Our inquiries will also focus on the ways in which literary and artistic developments such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism mark the historical trajectory of the novel. Students will read literary theory and criticism in addition to novels. They will write three formal papers and three informal response papers. The reading list includes novels by authors from the U.K., the Caribbean, the U.S., and South Africa, all writing in English in the original.

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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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What does it means to write like a storyteller? To read like a writer?

Intro to Creative Writing will be as much about active reading as it will be about actual writing. To become a better writer, you must learn how to objectively analyze and critique a wide range of texts in your genre. How did the author make that text work? What do EM Forster, Jane Austen, Nabokov, Zadie Smith, Elmore Leaonard and Stephen King have to say about it?

But the course is ultimately about your own writing. Intro to Creative Writing will be for many an introduction to the writer inside you, a person that you may be meeting for the first time. It's about the joys and challenges of expression and learning about your abilities and yourself. It's an introduction to the art of fiction, and non-fiction in all their shapes and forms, and the craft of critiquing your work and the work of your peers. The course will be run in both lecture and workshop format; lectures for the basic elements of fiction and non-fiction, and workshops where your own work will be explored and discussed.

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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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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. Students will write poetry, a short-short story, a short story, and a piece of creative nonfiction. 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 will welcome students to decelerate, closely examine their surroundings, and transmit their discoveries through the writing of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Topics that may result from the arc of in-class (and outdoor) writing exercises are likely to center around students' sense of place and history, and their relationship to the natural world. This course will encourage participants to synthesize their unique worldviews on the basis of available evidence-that which can be seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted, and felt. Because conscious self-editing is a skill common to great writers, students will be required to offer verbal and written feedback on each piece submitted to the workshop. They will also be assigned a variety of readings by authors whose work illuminates the technical underpinnings of successful writing, and the ethereal intangibles that enable it to breath on its own.

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This course, which is intended for anyone interested in locating and developing his/her own voice as a writer, will serve as an introduction to three genres of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Though the course will be run mostly as a workshop-that is, we'll be taking a look at your writing, providing feedback individually and as a group-we will also spend a good amount of time reading and responding to contemporary, published work. As always, the questions will be: what makes this particular piece successful? What makes it interesting? Unique? What keeps you engaged? We'll look closely at the way language is mobilized, how characters are created, how voice is deployed. The point here is to not only get you writing (which-oh boy-you will be writing), but to help you become a better, more thoughtful reader of your own work. I will lecture occasionally, but for the most part this class will be discussion based. Also? It'll be fun. A portfolio of your written work in all three genres will be due, with revisions, at the end of the semester.

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The Minnesota, Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers converge nearby and provide the context for our class. We begin with a consideration of Native American perspectives on the three rivers. In September we plan to take a weekend canoe trip on the Minnesota River under the direction of the Healthy Nations Program of the American Indian Center. Our consideration of Native American perspectives will raise questions of ownership and property rights and lead to consideration of environmental justice as well as the environment as a human rights issue. The written work for the course will include creative writing such as poems, short stories and reflections as well as philosophical writing such as conceptual analysis and arguments for ethical and political positions related to environmental justice and human rights.

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This new course offered by the English Department comes in response to students' and teachers' appeals for more systematic literary history offerings, including those foundational to all formulations of later writings, genres, and critical thinking in the English language. We will read excerpts from three big works of three major poets: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. We will study their gifts to later literatures in the development of literary craft; we will also focus on their wide-ranging formulations of gender, liberty and the opposition to tyranny, the relationship between science and religion, and the power of narrative to open up political thinking about individual autonomy. Although we won't be studying Shakespeare, his works will frequently engage us as we study relationships among these writers and their subsequent pathways into our present time.

We'll use Norton Critical editions to study each of the three writers; also Peter Conrad, Cassell's History of English Literature. There will be 2 formal essays, half a dozen brief response pieces, and a final exam. This course fulfills the College's W (writing-intensive) requirement.

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How do we read and make sense of literature? How do we "read" and make sense of the world around us? These basic questions are at the root of both cultural and literary theory, and they will serve as guiding questions for our work semester. We will read select scholarly essays, works of literature and film texts, and examine important debates about the origins of "culture" and the relationship between art/literature and politics.

Our texts will include works of literary and cultural analysis by influential writers, such as Matthew Arnold, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Roland Barthes, Gayle Rubin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams and others.

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How a manuscript moves through many hands to become a published book is fraught with assumptions, politics, and, to the outside world, mystery. Who are the arbiters of literary taste, and how do they decide what works are bound for publication and what works are bound for the slush pile? This course will approach publishing by tracing the literary work from the hands of the author, through the processes of acquisition, editing, production, marketing, and distribution, and into the hands of the reader. Additional topics will include recent trends in technology, magazine and book editing, fine arts bookmaking, and the roles of the literary agent, the independent publisher, the university press, the corporate publishing house, and the book reviewer. We will take advantage of the extraordinary publishing resources in the Twin Cities through guest speakers and field trips. Assignments will include writing brief book reviews, presenting publisher profiles, editing projects, and writing a final paper on publishing issues. This course is designed for readers who want to know how the magazine or book they're holding got into their hands, for writers who want to know what happens when they send their works to publishers, and for those interested in publishing as a future career.

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This course is an introduction to the British literature of the long eighteenth century. Between the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century and the revolutionary turn of the nineteenth, Britons enjoyed a period of relative political stability, rapid technological innovation, unprecedented social mobility, and increasing material comfort. Yet the period's literary works are anything but lacquered artifacts of a serene Age of Reason: they record readers' and writers' attempts to register the consequences of global capitalism, to adjust to the constant novelty of scientific discovery, to mourn the loss of the premodern world, to invent from scratch new forms of social and spiritual identity. From the radical loneliness of Defoe to Swift's "savage indignation," from the complicated sentimentality of Sterne to Austen's "rational happiness," we will explore the relationships between the historical forms of British literature and the forms of modern feeling to which they respond. Our goals will be to learn about an epoch in the history of Anglophone literary culture and, no less significantly, to trace some of our own culture's modern sensibilities to their literary origins.

Our texts may include works by Milton, Cavendish, Rochester, Locke, Dryden, Defoe, Finch, Addison, Haywood, Watts, Hutcheson, Pope, Swift, Gay, Johnson, Sterne, Hume, Smith (both Adam and Charlotte), Thomson, Gray, Walpole, Hannah More, Mackenzie, Sheridan, Erasmus Darwin, Bentham, Burke, Wordsworth, and Austen. We'll spend most of our time in the long eighteenth century, but we will sometimes examine more recent texts that will help us think about the literary history of modern feeling: we might consult intellectual history by Ernst Cassirer or Michel Foucault, for example, or literary scholarship by Stanley Fish or D. A. Miller. You'll earn your grade for the course by good-faith participation in class discussion, by submitting brief responses to our readings, by writing three essays (two of five pages, one of ten pages), and by taking a final exam. This course fulfills the pre-1900 requirement for the English major, as well as the general education requirement in Writing.

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From fin-de-siècle visions through postmodern apocalyptic fictions, in this course we'll explore the origins, transformations, and legacies of British and Irish modernism - in fiction, poetry, drama, visual culture, film. Beginning with the notorious prose experiments of Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf, we'll tune our ears to modernist literary strategies (impressionism, stream of consciousness, metanarrative, intertextuality) and read modernism as an aesthetic of innovation and alienation with transatlantic and transnational sources. We'll ask: What distinguishes modernism from nineteenth-century romanticism, naturalism, and realism? Why are so many practitioners of "British" modernism American expatriates (Eliot, Pound, Stein), Irish authors and exiles (Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Bowen) and immigrants (Conrad)? How do these texts respond to the historical-apocalyptic forces of the World Wars, colonial occupations and independence movements, British imperial decline and the rise of the Cold War? In the second half of the semester, we'll encounter post-WWII literary and cultural movements: Angry Young Man drama, British New Wave film, narratives of the post-1968 Irish "Troubles," postcolonial and postmodern fiction, and the brutalities of "In-Yer-Face" theatre. Through the particular lens of 20th-Century Apocalypticism, we'll explore how these texts document generational shifts in working-class culture, respond to transformations and/or crises in masculinity, pose feminist interventions, represent diasporic communities, manipulate readerly desire, and ultimately explode our expectations for how a novel/poem/play/film can look and sound.

Potential Texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier; Wyndham Lewis, BLAST!; James Joyce, "The Dead" and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Samuel Beckett, Murphy, Endgame; Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman; George Orwell, 1984; John Osborne, Look Back in Anger; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange; Martin Amis, London Fields; Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses or Fury; Sarah Kane, Blasted. Selected poetry by T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, W.B. Yeats, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Linton Kwesi Johnson. Selected short fiction and essays by George Orwell, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Alan Sillitoe, J.G. Ballard, Zadie Smith.

Potential Films: Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962); Jubilee (Derek Jarman, 1977); Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979); A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985); The Dead (John Huston, 1987); Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993); Beckett on Film (2001); 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002); Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaròn, 2006). Music: Django Bates, Music for the Third Policeman.

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In this new section of Environmental Classics, a course created by ES to introduce students to crucial works from multiple disciplines in the written history of environmental issues, we will read works of literary complexity and craft, that evince imaginative critical and that open up an environmental ethic of inclusivity. We will reach back in time as far as the Romantic poets, forward to postcolonial environmental writers. Texts will include poetry from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; Thoreau's Walden; large excerpts from Darwin; Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (winner of a National Book Award); James McMichael's essay-length poem Itinerary and Alice Oswald's essay-length poem Dart; Amitav Ghosh's recent novel The Hungry Tide; individual essays and chapters from creative thinkers in many fields: Tim Ingold, William Cronon, Aldo Leopold, Patricia Crane, David Mazel, Angus Fletcher, Timothy Morton, Luce Irigaray, Donald Worster, Michael Pollan, Derek Walcott, Lynn Margulis, and Amitav Ghosh.

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In the middle of the 19th century, as the country tottered on the brink of a murderous civil war, a group of strange, passionate, and visionary artists set out to discover the soul of America. "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close." These words from Emerson's oration, "The American Scholar," constituted America's declaration of literary independence. From 1850 to 1855, in one of the most astonishing creative convergences in literary history, Emerson's promise would finally be realized. Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850; Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852; Henry David Thoreau published Walden in 1854; Herman Melville published Moby Dick in 1855; Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855; and Frederick Douglass published My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855. Dickinson would begin writing her greatest poetry in the next few years, and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl would be published in 1861. Together these artists produced a canon of literature that revealed both the demons and angels of our nature, inventing a uniquely American spiritual movement of unprecedented optimism at the same time that they damned it all to hell. The works of what would come to be known as the American Renaissance were spiritual and blasphemous, elegant and profane, beatific and pornographic, irreverently comic and heartwrenchingly sentimental. Everything that was written in America after this period would, in one way or another, have to come to terms with the brilliant and disturbing achievements of this small cluster of artists.

In this course we will read the landmark texts of this era from literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives.

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This course will examine several landmark novels in American literary modernism. We will examine these texts as aesthetic achievements with specific formal requirements, but we will also consider questions of cultural production and political consequence. What conceptions of beauty underlie different narrative styles? How do authors use the experience of beauty (a phrase that jars the reader into seeing the world anew, a paragraph that has the delicate structure of a stanza) to develop the larger themes of the work as a whole? At the same time we will consider how codes of race, class, and gender function in these texts, paying particular attention to the way social systems (employment structures, language, the family) detract from or contribute to the promotion of human dignity. How are power relations in society reproduced in relations between author and text, or text and reader? How is the reader changed by the act of reading? Is art beyond politics and moral judgement? Or is art a form of politics? 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. Authors of special attention may include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zora Neale Hurston.

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We start with the body, the body in pain and ecstasy, the body seeking harmony with the mind and spirit, the seven emotions of the heart, and then the mind and spirit seeking the reunion with the body, a full circle that has no beginning or end. We’ll look inward (the shadow world of dreams and unconsciousness) as well as outward (body, nature, society), and our poetry will weave them all into a tapestry. We’ll play with the forms and the voices, and we’ll explore different genres from the lyrical to prose poems and collage poems. We learn how to sing the world from a child’s eye, ear, mouth and heart.

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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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This class will use discussions of the readings and class exercises to generate and shape student writing. In the first half we will explore texts which break down traditional narrative and use techniques such as collage and crossing genres (writers such as Susan Sontag, Kimiko Hahn, Kathy Acker, Michelle Cliff, Leslie Marmon Silko, John Cage, Sei Shonagon). We will examine the mixing of various forms which can take place in a nonfiction text-memoir, cultural analysis, history, quotations, myth, stage dialogue, film script, e-mail, news stories, lists, poetry, etc. In the second half, we will read short stories (writers such as Junot Diaz, ZZ Packer, Denis Johnson, Jumpha Lahiri, Sherman Alexie). We will take aspects of the writing from the first half of the semester and then attempt to discover and shape a nonfiction narrative. We will address how a protagonist--in either memoir or fiction-is revealed, shaped and changed through narrative. We will work on the creation of scenes as a way of defining and depicting a self or character. We will study various structures of narrative, from myth to drama to fiction to film, and the literary and psychological need for stories.

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One of the past century's most profound transformations was decolonization: the end of direct European rule over vast areas of the earth. The worlds of cultural and political analysis have both contributed and responded to this transformation, producing a forceful body of writings we name colonial and postcolonial critique. This course examines key docu¬ments, questions, and themes in that vast body of writing.

The course is recommended for sophomores and above who have already begun serious work in any of a range of disciplines (political science, literature, history, anthropology, etc.) in which colonial, post-colonial, or first/third world encounters are assessed.

The course begins with classic statements by Fanon, Césaire, Ngugi and Walcott, on psychology, mimicry, and resistance. The mid-point is Edward Said's Orientalism. From there we cover anthropology, ecofeminism, the US, the former Soviet sphere, the growing institutionalization of post-colonial studies, and more. Two novels, by Ferdinand Oyono and V. S. Naipaul, will provide important thematizations of course subjects.

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In this course, we will ask a wide variety of literary, aesthetic, political, and historical questions about an equally wide variety of cultural productions from the Harlem Renaissance, roughly 1910-1938. We will study figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, Bessie Smith, Oscar Micheaux, and James Van der Zee, among others. Our texts will include: ragtime, the blues, film, photography, poetry, novels, short stories, plays, autobiographies, fictional autobiographies and autobiographical fictions, and literary and cultural criticism. As we closely read, view, and listen, we will investigate: the movement's chronological, geographic, and cultural boundaries; the imagination and representation of a "New Negro"; class, gender, and color conflict within the movement; tensions regarding "highbrow" versus "lowbrow" cultural production; the power and presence of gays and lesbians in what one scholar of the movement has termed "the gayest Renaissance in history"; debates regarding white patronage and audience; and the various "criteria of Negro art" being advanced by Harlem Renaissance figures. We will, finally, explore the current status of the Harlem Renaissance as a field of study and interest. Requirements for the course include: weekly 1-page responses to the reading, one paper of about 5 pages, one longer paper of about 15 pages, and one 20-minute presentation. This course will fulfill the college's U.S. Multiculturalism requirement and the English major requirement of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color.

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Through an encounter with film, documentary photography, memoirs, plays, and poems, we’ll examine cultural histories, ideological/social/military contexts, prevailing mythologies, protest movements, and critical reassessments of American involvement in Vietnam and the ensuing conflict (1959-1975). What distinguished the Vietnam War from other 20th-century American military actions? How did the media transmit visions of the war and the anti-war movement to an international audience (in newspapers, photographs, on television), contemporaneous with images of domestic violence of the 1960s and 70s (urban riots, student protests, assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK)? How have artists, authors, filmmakers responded to the war – its origins, traumas, aftermath – and in what genres/voices?  How might we see the ideological and military dramas of Vietnam revisited in Afghanistan and Iraq? We’ll begin with historical/aesthetic contexts for representing the Vietnam conflict (Graham Greene, The Quiet American; The Manchurian Candidate), then view a series of now-canonical films about the war (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket) in conversation with selected novels and memoirs (Michael Herr, Dispatches; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried; Norman Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam?; Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers; Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke), poetry (Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau), David Rabe’s Vietnam trilogy of plays (Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, Streamers), and the rock musical Hair. We’ll also look at representations of Vietnam-era masculinity and the trauma of veterans returning from combat (Deliverance, Coming Home, Born on the Fourth of July), documentary reassessments (Hearts and Minds, Unfinished Symphony, The Fog of War), and conclude with echoes of Vietnam in Afghanistan and Iraq (Jarhead; Small Wars, An-My Le’s photographs of war re-enactments and marine training camps). Essays by Philip Caputo, Susan Faludi, Howard Zinn, Andrew Huebner, David Cortright, Vivian Sobchack, Jean Baudrillard, among others.

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Dickens was a prolific bestseller, public performer, and transatlantic celebrity in the nineteenth century. His popularity continues today, as numerous recent theatrical adaptations, new print editions, and Hollywood productions such as Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist (2005) suggest. In this seminar, reading novels, sketches, short stories, and essays by Dickens, we will ask ourselves the question of what made Dickens so popular, with the understanding that intertwining formal, thematic, and ideological aspects of his work account for his appeal to Victorian as well as millennial audiences. How did Dickens address and assuage anxieties about industrial growth? Why did he prefer to publish in serial installments? What was at stake in representing social and political problems through the grotesque and the sentimental? How did he reaffirm and challenge gender codes simultaneously?

Child-wives, clumsy servants, industrial merchants, charitable prisoners, proud prostitutes, harsh disciplinarians, corrupt aristocrats: we will encounter such characters as we make our way through the novels. The themes we attend to will be as diverse as the characters Dickens offers us. Middle-class housekeeping, professional authorship, imperial administration, women's labor, and childhood memories are some of them. The majority of the seminar will be devoted to two long novels, Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Please note that this is tentative.

This course is open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. For seniors, it will satisfy the capstone experience requirement. Students will write one twenty-page research paper, informally present their weekly research as well as producing shorter formal papers and informal responses. They will also prepare formal presentations on topics of their choice, which might range from Dickens's London to Dickens as merchant.

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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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