Department website: http://writingseminars.jhu.edu/
The Writing Seminars exists to help students combine imaginative writing with scholarship in the general context of the humanities.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
An introduction to basic strategies in the writing of poetry and fiction, with readings by Joyce, Woolf, Baldwin, Munro, Garcia Marquez, Donne, Bishop, Yeats, Komunyakaa, Tretheway, and others. Students will learn the elements of the short story and try their hand at a variety of forms: realist, fantastical, experimental. They’ll also study the basic poetic forms and meters, from the ballad to the sonnet, iambic pentameter to free verse. Students will compose short stories and poems and workshop them in class. This course is a prerequisite for most upper level courses. This course is part one of the year-long Introduction to Fiction and Poetry, and must be taken before AS.220.106.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The second half of IFP, this course delves deeper into the finer points of fiction writing, including tone, description, and point of view; students will also enrich their knowledge of poetic forms and devices, such as figurative language, verse rhythm, and the poetic line. Readings include work by Paley, Mahfouz, Calvino, Lessing, Richard Wright, Plath, Rich, Auden, Li-Young Lee, and others. Students will write and workshop their own stories and poems, and complete a final portfolio. This course is a prerequisite for most upper level courses.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 or AS.220.108
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A course in realist fiction and nonfiction, with readings by Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James; George Orwell, Beryl Markham and Truman Capote. Students compose short stories and essays with attention to literary models. AS.220.108 can be substituted for AS.220.105.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Enjoy the opportunity to develop your creative writing skills. You will work in both fiction and poetry. Through a combination of robust discussion, writing exercises, and substantial feedback, you will learn about imagery, voice, narrative structure, and other aspects of the writer’s craft. The reading list will include a diverse range of contemporary authors. There will be a strong emphasis on collaborative workshopping, during which you will discuss one another’s works in progress.
Area: Humanities
A study of the fundamentals and strategies of poetry writing. This course combines analysis and discussion of traditional models of poetry with workshop critiques of student poems and student conferences with the instructor.
Prerequisite(s): (AS.220.105 OR AS.220.108) AND AS.220.106.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course is designed to teach students the skills of daily news reporting, with a focus on covering science news. Students will learn how turn scientific discoveries into lively and engaging prose for the general public, interview sources, and pitch stories to news organizations. The skills taught are applicable to all areas of journalism, not just science journalism.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
"We left what we felt at what we saw,” the poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, suggesting writing involves a direct response to our experiences of reality. In this class, we’ll look exclusively at writing which takes on what hasn’t been seen, and hasn’t been felt. Through reading works of science fiction, magical realism, gothic literature, and speculative fiction, students will investigate how the unreal can still speak to our experiences and perceptions of the real. Additionally, students will get the chance to craft their own fantastical worlds through regular writing assignments. Tales of time travelers, haunted houses, unreal languages, and reimagined cities will be covered. Readings will include selections from Paul Beatty, Octavia Butler, Italo Calvino, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoko Ogawa, and Mary Shelley.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will be a chronological exploration of English-language poetry, beginning in the medieval era and continuing to the present day. We will examine not only the literature of the past, but also the ways in which a diverse range of contemporary writers have extended, challenged, and reimagined literary tradition. Throughout the semester we will pay especially close attention to the question of how a writer’s management of the poetic line can shape a poem's structure, context, and meaning. Although this is a lecture-based class, not a workshop, participants will have many opportunities to respond artistically to the course readings.
Prerequisite(s): (AS.220.105 OR AS.220.108) AND AS.220.106
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A review of the origins and development of the realist short story from fable, fairy tale, saint’s life, Bible story, through versions created in the Renaissance and classic (19th and 20th century) periods, to modern narratives. Writing Seminars majors only.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 AND AS.220.106
Area: Humanities
An interdisciplinary course focusing on the film writings of poets, novelists, critics, and essayists such as Virginia Woolf, H.D., James Agee, James Baldwin, and Pauline Kael; and films showing the intertitle and screenplay work of writers such as Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Jean Cocteau. Participants will write weekly assignments on film from a critical perspective.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course offers an in-depth exploration of content, style, and crossover literary techniques among authors who write both fiction and nonfiction, including Jamaica Kincaid's memoir My Brother and "Girl." Students will evaluate why each genre was chosen to narrate, for example, such quandaries as ethics in surgery: Abraham Verghese's novel Cutting for Stone and Richard Selzer's essay, "The Knife," as well as the reportage and novels of Ernest Hemingway and others. Also explored: topics of social import and questions of identity in James Baldwin's essays ("Notes of a Native Son") and stories ("Sonny's Blues"), and other works; The course builds on literary writing and reading techniques established in Intro to Fiction & Nonfiction (IFN) and Intro to Fiction & Poetry (IFP). Either course is a prerequisite, with IFN preferred.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 OR AS.220.108
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
An introduction for students unfamiliar with the Korean language but interested in Korean culture / literature. Students will read a variety of translated texts, especially of works written in the 20th and early 21st centuries by authors including Kim Tong-in, Hwang Sun-won, Pak Wanso, Hwang Sok-yong and Han Kang; there will also be classes on traditional sijo poetry. Students will become familiar with Korean literary genres and formal features, and develop a broad understanding of the historical and sociocultural context of Korean literature.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course explores the exchange of ideas and techniques between modernist literature and cinema in response to the social and technological changes of the twentieth century. Prominent figures include Charlie Chaplin, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Strand, and Gertrude Stein. Participants will write weekly assignments on films and readings from a critical perspective.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course examines a range of contemporary Korean fiction produced since political liberalization of Korea in the 1990s. Students will see the many different ways in which individual selves relate to the world, question the value systems of a globalized society, and celebrate the instinct to survive and thrive. While exploring these things, students will develop their analytical skills and identify the central components of new Korean narratives.
Area: Humanities
This course explores the art and craft of the personal essay from Seneca to Soyinka, Montaigne to Adichie. Deriving from the French essai, to attempt, students bring a sense of investigation, as natural philosophers proposed, to the characteristics, presence, or quality of an idea. Through personal narrative exploration, essayists write on universal themes -- family, loss, social justice -- through various nonfiction essay forms, such as the braided essay, lyric essay, science essay, or humor essay. Students will employ research, convey personal experience, and develop their own voice and style. Course builds on material covered in Introduction to Fiction & Poetry courses and/or Introduction to Fiction & Nonfiction, and will prepare students for Advanced study. This readings-based course is also writing-intensive, including exercises, essay drafts, and revisions. Course features additional diverse authors such as Sei Shonagon, Sara Suleri, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriguez, Brian Doyle, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 OR AS.220.108
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This intermediate workshop will focus on rendering point of view. In addition to exploring questions of psychic distance and reliability, we will examine how point of view comes to bear on voice, character, the management of sympathy, and narrative structure. Students will write and workshop stories and discuss published fiction. Diverse and contemporary readings to include work by Yiyun Li, Carmen Maria Machado, Lorrie Moore, and Alice Munro.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
An intermediate workshop focusing on the question of how to make fictional worlds feel real. We'll read 19th, 20th, and 21st century short fiction by authors such as Anton Chekhov, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, and Alice Munro, focusing particularly on how authors make the lives on the page feel three-dimensional. Students will write stories and exercises, including exercises that involve exploring Baltimore in order to observe and write about the city in which we live. Recommend Course Background: Students need to have completed a 200-level Writing Seminars course.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 AND AS.220.106
Area: Humanities
This course is designed to teach students the skills of long-form narrative journalism, with a focus on covering science news. Skills taught will include how to compose scenes, create three-dimensional characters, create narrative tension, and conduct on-site reporting. Class speakers will include award-winning science journalists from New York to DC, who will share the secrets of their craft. The primary writing assignment will be a 3,000-word feature piece that is pitched, reported, and workshopped throughout the course of the class. "Writing About Science I" is recommended as a prerequisite for this course. If you have not taken this, please contact instructor (dgrimm5@jhu.edu) to enroll.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
When we recall our favorite works of fiction, it is often their voice that first comes to mind. This course will explore how narrators enchant us with their voice, focusing on such matters as perspective, syntax, word choice and how even deceptively impartial omniscience takes on a unique and memorable voice. Fiction readings to include: Paul Bowles, Toni Cade Bambara and Ismail Kadare. Craft readings to include: Christopher Castellani and John Gardner. Writing assignments will be both expository and creative.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Typically, stories are easy to start and difficult to conclude. This course will look at various ways in which stories end rewardingly. Close attention will be paid to final paragraphs. We will ask questions like: Do satisfying endings fall into categories? Can we generalize about how stories ought to end? Do some writers have a gift for endings? Readings to include: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Muriel Spark, Alice Munro. Assignments will include both expository and creative writing.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
How do fiction writers create believable people? A study of Characters. Readings to include E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and A Room with a View, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and various short stories.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A workshop in the formative genres of fiction: romance, confession, anatomy, and novel. Readings include Flaubert, Stevenson, Camus, and Stephen Dixon. Frequent sketches and two stories.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200[C]
Area: Humanities
We will look at writers in English who excelled at both fiction and poetry. We will ask: How does a talent in one genre show itself in another? Novels will include: Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, John Updike’s, Rabbit, Run. Other writers who may be included: Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Richard Wright, Muriel Spark.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200 AND AS.220.201
Area: Humanities
This class is primarily a workshop. Students will write two 10-20 page short stories to present for discussion and critique. The craft focus of the class is plot and narrative structure. Through the assigned reading and a few short writing exercises, we will think about storytelling and the elements (character, conflict, desire, causality, consequence) that make a question a plot or narrative question, and how stories are shaped and structured by these questions. The course reading will begin with a variety of short stories. Later in the semester, we will discuss braided narratives and read novels by Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Makkai and Valeria Luiselli.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
In this course, students will write and workshop two original stories. Additional generative writing exercises will explore the ways a writer can develop subtext in their work. How can character details work in parallel with elements of setting? How can a setting be instrumental in advancing a plot? How can finely tuned, sentence-level details, parallel images, foreshadowing, and figurative language give a story a cohesive sensibility and rich subtext? We'll read stories by writers including Stephanie Vaughn, Laura van den Berg, Rickey Fayne, Haruki Murakami, and craft essays by Matthew Salesses, Charles Baxter, and more.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A poem exists in time—both in the historical moment in which it is written, and in its movement from line to line. In this seminar, students will build their knowledge of the history of the poetic line in English, up to the present day. Assignments will include both short critical essays and creative exercises.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this workshop, students will study a variety of creative nonfiction essays and articles by a diverse group of writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maggie Nelson, Roxane Gay, Alice Wong, D. Watkins, and Esmé Weijun Wang. Using the expository methods and research practices of journalists and the narrative strategies of memoirists, students will write and workshop their own creative nonfiction as we attempt to understand how the subject of an essay can be meaningfully augmented by acknowledging and even centering the author's identity and experience.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Where does a story best begin? How does it successfully launch itself? We will look closely at a great many opening paragraphs and pages, analyzing the various strategies by which writers grab and hold a reader's interest. Most of the reading will be short fiction, drawn from various countries and languages.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Only fairly recently has adolescence been recognized as a developmental period distinct from childhood or adulthood. In this course, we'll read a range of classic and contemporary literature that takes on the challenge of writing about this complicated and fraught stage of life. Readings may include work by Shakespeare, Louisa May Alcott, Colson Whitehead, Louise Erdrich, and others. Students will write and workshop their own stories or novel chapters.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, we’ll focus on the writing and workshopping of student fiction, with special attention to style and voice. What distinguishes a good sentence from a bad one? How does one develop a style that feels both natural and distinctive at the same time? What do we even mean by “voice,” and how on earth is a writer supposed to find one? In addition to each other’s work, we’ll read stories by authors with particularly unique voices, focusing on what makes their sentences sing.
Area: Humanities
Poetic Forms I fulfills one of the Intermediate requirements for The Writing Seminars Major. It deals with rhyme, meter, traditional forms, and ad hoc forms of students' own making. Whether you are a poet, novelist, song writer, science writer, or dramatist, this course will help you master lines and sentences even better.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In Contemporary Poetic Forms, we will look at exciting, mostly younger poets writing in a wide array of metrical forms. From Anthony Hecht to Erica Dawson, you will read a book a week and write eleven poems, and the assignments will be keyed but not beholden to those challenging authors.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201[C]
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This hands-on performance workshop, combining literary and theatrical practice, will look closely at what makes a performance or reading compelling, clear, and resonant. Through textual analysis, vocal technique, and group discussion, students will create a pliant and powerful reading style to best serve their work. The course includes regular writing assignments in poetry and fiction and weekly performance and group discussion.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course is primarily a workshop; students will each write and workshop two short stories. Additional shorter writing assignments will focus on writing about places, both real and imagined. We will think about the work of description at the sentence level, but also about the relationship between place, character and memory. We’ll read work by writers who are known for their ability to evoke or capture in detail a particular setting, potentially including work by Edward P. Jones, Zadie Smith, Eudora Welty, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, Victor Lavalle, Viet Than Nguyen, and Joan Didion.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
How can a subplot inform a reader's understanding of a story's protagonist? How can a story with multiple protagonists and plotlines reveal theme? This intermediate fiction writing class will focus on student writing and on published stories that are interestingly or intricately plotted. Parallel texts by Andrea Barrett, Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro, Amy Hempel, Barret Swanson, Dantiel W. Moniz, and others will give students the opportunity to examine concrete examples of intricately plotted stories while also putting some plotting techniques to the test in their own short fiction.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, we'll focus on writing and workshopping student fiction while reading contemporary parallel texts representing a variety of styles, subgenres, and forms. We'll look at exceptionally short works, stories of intermediate lengths, and longer, novella-length works in an effort to understand what kinds of stories lend themselves to particular lengths and styles. How do you know whether your story should be a work of flash fiction or a novel? What kinds of stories can you tell in each form? We'll read work by Lydia Davis, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Jenny Zhang, Bret Anthony Johnston, Paul Yoon, Lauren Groff, Bryan Washington, and more.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
In this course we’ll explore poetic responses to myth and legend, looking at how poets from different cultures and eras have responded imaginatively to established stories about gods, heroes, and the supernatural, whether for the sake of aligning themselves with tradition, or for the sake of challenging it. Our discussions will take place in the context of a rigorous poetry workshop, where students will experiment with figurative language, management of the line, narrative organization, and the control of rhythm in both form and free verse. At the end of the semester students will turn in a final portfolio of revised poems, accompanied by a reflective letter that demonstrates a mature understanding of verse technique.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Why and how do playwrights make their characters speak in verse? What can we learn about writing—and speaking—“naturally” but with artifice? Blank verse is the most important model we have in English dramatic poetry, but not the only one. Readings in this course will range from Shakespeare’s King Lear to modern verse plays by Caryll Churchill, Derek Walcott, and David Hirson. Students will write their own one-act verse play.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
We’ll read these three masterly fiction writers who found new ways to write about hard times.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The course will follow a chronological line from Homer through to American and British poets of the current war in Afghanistan. This means we will be looking at (among other things) Beowulf, poems of the English Civil War, poems of the American Civil War, poems of the First and Second World Wars, and poems about the conflicts in Iraq and Syria as well as Afghanistan. Each class will be divided into two sections of equal length. In the first half we will study poems written by our predecessors - poems by women as well as men, poems written in the front line as well as behind the lines in hospitals and 'at home', and poems written in a variety of forms - ranging from pure lyric to prose-poetry; in the second half we will discuss poems written by members of the class in response to conflict, and/or in response to the poems we are discussing in any given week.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201
Area: Humanities
In this Community-Based Learning course, students will read and write memoir and discuss issues of social concern with high-school age writers from Baltimore public schools in partnership with the organization Writers in Baltimore Schools Please note that this class is not a traditional workshop focusing on critique, but will instead explore how writing can build connection and foster conversation. Participation in some events outside of class time may be required.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, students will work alongside writing teachers from the non-profit organization Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS) to lead creative writing workshops in local public elementary and middle schools. Students and WBS teachers will also meet as a group once a week to plan classes, discuss pedagogy, and share ideas. Students will write weekly responses to reading assignments, write reflections on the volunteer experience, and help to assemble a final project at their worksite. Upon completion of the class, students will have the opportunity to apply to become instructors with Writers in Baltimore Schools. Please note that the weekly writing group you will co-lead will occur outside of class. Groups meet either during the school day or after school. We will work with you to find a group that fits your schedule.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Contemporary literary depictions of apocalypse often offer up a world that’s been transformed (rather than annihilated) by climate change, disease, and war. In this course, students will explore comparatively optimistic literary dystopias with an eye toward understanding how writers observe and extrapolate real dangers to inform their novels and stories. We’ll read one classic dystopian work alongside newer stories and novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Lauren Groff, Colson Whitehead, Rumaan Alam, Emily St. John Mandel, Ted Chiang, Ling Ma, Laura van den Berg, and more. Students will write short creative and critical responses to our readings as well as a final comparative paper.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will explore the context and craft of racial passing texts in the U.S, asking students to think critically about literal passing narratives and their persistence over time, and more broadly about how we write about cultural passing, codeswitching, and identity as conscious performance. We’ll start with texts that ground us in the genre—Chopin, Larsen, Fauset, Ellison, and Morrison—and read our way into contemporary texts, potentially including work by Danzy Senna, Mat Johnson, Brit Bennett, Min Jin Lee, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Students will write a critical paper, a craft paper, and a short story or novella.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Class reads the writings of scientists to explore what their words would have meant to them and their readers. Discussion will focus on the shifting scientific/cultural context throughout history. Authors include Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Crick and Watson.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A study of the novella as a literary form. Authors may include Melville, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kafka, James, Wharton, Baldwin, Porter, Rulfo, Smiley, and others.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Students will build on previous work in the major by completing a project of sustained length, depth, and cohesion (15 - 25 pages) in their final semester. Application only; Advanced Poetry prerequisite.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A study of three of Shakespeare’s plays, and of some of the most important creative responses to these plays by modern writers, such as Auden and Stoppard. Students will familiarize themselves with Shakespeare’s continuing place in contemporary culture, and write short critical responses; they will also write a longer creative work that in some way transforms one of Shakespeare's plays.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201[C]
Area: Humanities
International voices will combine the workshopping of poems by students with a study of contemporary poems written by black British writers and British writers in dialect, African-American writers, Caribbean writers, and Indian and South African poets who are writing in English. The study of broad themes and subjects will be combined with a particular appreciation of linguistic and acoustic matters - which means among other things that time will be spent listening to and evaluating recordings of the poets concerned.Writing Seminars Majors Only
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
An excursion through the 3,000 page, seven-volume masterpiece, *In Search of Lost Time.* We will closely read *Swann’s Way* and *Within a Budding Grove*; we will cover, in a less intensive way, *Guermantes Way*, and *Time Regained*.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
A survey of contemporary Canadian poetry and fiction. Course readings will include work by Margaret Atwood, Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Anne Michaels, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Madeleine Thien, and others. Students will have the opportunity to respond artistically as well as analytically to the course readings.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 AND AS.220.106 AND AS.220.201
Area: Humanities
In this Community-Based Learning course, students will explore poetry of social and political concern in partnership with high-school age writers from Baltimore public schools. Students will put learning into practice by engaging in community conversation and collaboration. Participation in some events outside of class time will be required.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, we'll take a look at the increasingly obsolete notion of “genre fiction” and the way that many contemporary writers are borrowing the conventions of once-frowned-upon genres, from sci-fi to horror to crime, and imbuing them with the concerns of the “literary novel” (character, language, social critique, etc.). The course will pair classics of genre fiction with more contemporary works that take the genre in surprising directions. We'll also do a fair bit of writing ourselves, experimenting with various genres. Authors might include Mary Shelley, Colson Whitehead, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Edgar Allen Poe, Carmen Machado, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Zane Grey, and Charles Portis.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A course in the composition of a novella or short-story collection. Students will write and revise a thesis of 50 to 60 pages of fiction.Open to seniors by invitation.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
With the 21st century 22 years old, it seems like a good time to ask ourselves what’s going on with the American short story. What can it tell us about our various identities, individual and collective? Is it reflecting our current reality, transforming it, or both? Is it undergoing formal changes to better engage with our transformative times, and if not, should it be? Is contemporary fiction as diverse as our nation itself, and if not, what might account for such shortfalls in representation, and what might be the effects? Our reading list is likely to include such authors as Carmen Maria Machado, Yoon Choi, Bennett Sims, Charles Yu, Jamel Brinkley, ZZ Packer, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyeh, Dantiel W. Moniz, Claire Vaye Watkins, Kimberly King Parsons, Kirsten Valdez Quade, Ted Chiang, Danielle Evans, Karen Russell, George Saunders, and Bryan Washington. Students will write short critical and creative responses throughout the term, as well as a final longer creative piece.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The course will workshop the original work of participants, while also looking at the major figures of immediately post-war British Poetry (Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes) and the diversification of writing that has appeared in more recent years. Among the writers to be discussed are : Simon Armitage, Mary Jean Chan, Imtiaz Dharker, Carol Ann Duffy, Sarah Howe, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Grace Nichols, Alice Oswald, Hannah Sullivan and Roger Robinson.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will explore the intersection of poetry and drama, from Euripides, Shakespeare, and Moliere to modern verse plays by Derek Walcott and Caryl Churchill. We’ll also look at some modern plays about poets and poetry—such as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and The Invention of Love and Sarah Ruhl’s Euridice. Finally, we’ll examine the poetry of prose speech in such playwrights as David Mamet and August Wilson. Students will write their own scenes in poetic drama.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this Community-Based Learning course, students will read and write memoir and discuss issues of social concern with high-school age writers from Baltimore public schools in partnership with the organization Writers in Baltimore Schools Please note that this class is not a traditional workshop focusing on critique, but will instead explore how writing can build connection, foster conversation, and bring together writers from diverse communities.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Ordinarily no more than one independent study course may be counted among the eight Writing Seminars courses presented for graduation.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
The Professional Internship is a one-credit independent course created to document internships in journalism, publishing, the arts, or other writing-related fields. Internships require a minimum of 120 work hours and a short final paper. Permission required. Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory only.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
The Professional Internship is a one-credit independent course created to document internships in journalism, publishing, the arts, or other writing-related fields. Internships require a minimum of 120 work hours and a short final paper. Permission required. Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory only.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Permission Required.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
The Professional Internship is a one-credit independent course created to document internships in journalism, publishing, the arts, or other writing-related fields. Internships require a minimum of 120 work hours and a short final paper. Permission required. Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory only.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
The course explores the notion of one's own personal anthology--the books that mean the most to one over the decades, the books one keeps returning to. In addition to the assigned reading, each student will be asked to come up with a list of books (not read in this class) of great personal significance and to analyze in class the things one's personal touchstones have in common. Assigned readings will be drawn from two genres: the epic (Derek Walcott's Omeros, Halldor Laxness's Independent People) and the comic or light novel (Jane Austen's Persuasion, E. M. Forster's Room with a View, Laxness's The Fish Can Sing, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kingsley Amis's Ending Up, Mark O'Donnell's Getting Over Homer).
Area: Humanities
Study of classic/modernist novels written by the “I”: Christopher Isherwood, Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus, Ford Madox Ford, and other practitioners. Mostly close study of texts, but some writing practice, too.
Area: Humanities
This course will use the sonnet form as a through line to consider both aesthetic shifts and the enduring lyric impulse across centuries of poetry in English, with a particular focus on how contemporary poets are working with the form through individual poems, sequences, and book-length works. Coursework will include reading, critical writing and presentation, discussion, and completion of an original lyric sequence.
Area: Humanities
An examination of some half-dozen English-language novelists who were also significant poets. Readings will include both novels and poems. The course seeks to bridge the gap between the two genres.
Area: Humanities
How is our experience of a novel's story affected by its form? We'll discuss some traditional structures, including mystery plots and the three-act structure, before moving on to works whose forms bend or break various storytelling conventions. Authors may include Vladimir Nabokov, Susan Choi, Zadie Smith, Tommy Orange, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, Carol Shields and others.
Area: Humanities
This course will be an artistic exploration of the long poem. Throughout the semester we’ll read a diverse range of work by both contemporary and non-contemporary writers, paying particular attention to the question of how a poem’s dramatic intensity or lyric charge can be maintained when a poet is writing at length. Instead of submitting individual poems to a weekly workshop, students in this class will submit successive drafts of a long poem, which they will continue developing over the course of the entire semester.
Area: Humanities
We will read and write a variety of traditional and less traditional poetic forms with a keen ear toward meter, rhyme, and other prosodic curiosities.
Discussion and critique of fiction manuscripts by students enrolled in the M.F.A. program.
Discussion and critique of fiction manuscripts by students enrolled in the MFA program. Some assignments possible.
Discussion and critique of poetry manuscripts by students enrolled in the M.F.A. program. Some assignments possible.
Discussion and critique of poetry manuscripts by students enrolled in the MFA program. Some assignments possible.
A study of three major poets--Caribbean, Irish, and Russian--who self-identified with at least two cultures. We’ll examine these poets' literary friendship and their shared engagement with subjects such as tyranny, empire, home, exile, and the English language. Exploration of these poets' shared debt to a predecessor, Robert Frost, and the debt owed to them by younger poets, will lead to students' own original projects in poetry and prose.
Area: Humanities
A graduate course designed to develop both close reading and genre study, and to support the teaching of Introduction to Fiction and Poetry (IFP) I and II. Readings in selected works of American, English, and European poetry and short fiction. Course required by all graduate students in fiction and poetry.
Area: Humanities
Which books do writers often foist on other writers, telling them "You have to read this"? In this course, we'll look at books that have yet to find much popular appeal, but which writers often speak about in reverential tones. Authors may include James Salter, Paula Fox, Dezso Kosztolanyi, J.L. Carr, Juan Rulfo, Tom Drury, Christina Stead, Evan S. Connell, Leonard Gardner, Joy Williams, and Penelope Fitzgerald.
Area: Humanities
Readings from modern novels and collections of short fiction which, however well received at time of publication, fell into subsequent eclipse before undergoing something of a revival. Many of the titles will be drawn from the series of New York Review of Books Classics.
Area: Humanities
A study of the interplay of the line and the sentence in poetry, with an emphasis on syntax. Some prose works will also be used for context. Poets employing syntax with great verve and precision, whether they obey or disrupt the rules, will be read in order to inform students’ own stylistic choices.
Area: Humanities
Class will read nine short novels and begin to write one.
Area: Humanities
This hands-on performance workshop, combining literary and theatrical practice, looks closely at what makes poetry performance compelling, clear, and resonant. Through textual analysis, vocal technique, and group discussion and critique, students will create a pliant and powerful reading style, as an integral part of their work.
Area: Humanities
The course will begin by looking at theories of translation, and thereafter spend half of each class looking at examples of poems in translation before moving on in the second half to look at poems by members of the group - translated poems where people have been able to write them, otherwise at original pieces. I’ll be providing texts for study each week.
Area: Humanities
Some of the most interesting moments in fiction are those when characters experience the same event or situation in profoundly different ways. In this course we will look at writing that explores those moments of intersection and collision and think about how point of view can work to achieve both strong characterization and an illuminating sense of larger context. We'll consider what makes a story where the narrative lens or voice can shift feel cohesive and intentional. The reading list will include work by Colson Whitehead, Theodore Dreiser, Virginia Woolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, E.L Doctorow, Mieko Kawakami, Caitlin Horrocks, Dawnie Walton, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Makkai.
Area: Humanities
Who are the poets who made us who we are? Over years of practice, poets become increasingly aware of their special debts to predecessors whose music compels them and whose themes seem both urgent and enduring. Readings will include some of the instructor's own touchstones, including Herbert, Milton, Dickinson, Auden, Larkin, Bishop, Walcott. Students will write poems inspired by certain models, and also present orally and in a final written project a personal anthology of poets who mean the most to them.
Area: Humanities
Cross Listed Courses
Comparative Thought and Literature
This course offers a conceptual and historical introduction to Intellectual History. What makes the “history of ideas” different from the history of other objects? What, if anything, distinguishes the history of ideas from the history of philosophy? What is it exactly that we call “ideas”? In what sense do they have a history? These are examples of the kind of questions addressed in the course.
Area: Humanities
William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair together plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied: by Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale; by Ibsen, St. John’s Night, Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken.
Area: Humanities
Vladimir Putin’s charismatic authority has a deep history in Russian culture. We’ll investigate that history through cinema, which Lenin called “the most important of the arts.” While Soviet cinema often served as immersive propaganda, directors also found ways to question authority and power. Films to be screened range from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944) to the 2013 documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer. This course will combine study of Russian and Soviet culture from the end of World War II to the present with study of film history, style, and technique.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In weekly lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov, Brecht, Pirandello, and Beckett.
Area: Humanities
This course offers an introduction to the history, theory, and praxis of comparative literature. We will read texts from some of the founding figures of the discipline and look at the most recent debates in the field, including translation studies, literary theory, and world literature, among others. Particular attention will be given to the methodologies and problems of studying literatures in different linguistic traditions and the relation between literature and other areas of thought and culture, such as philosophy, art history, and psychoanalysis. Case studies in comparative approaches to literature will provide concrete examples to our discussions.
Area: Humanities
Film and Media Studies
This primer to screenwriting will emphasize the power of the image to deliver character, situation, and theme, and to advance even complex plots. Students will analyze narrative films, compose their own still and moving images with cellphone cameras, and write several short dramatic pieces to be read and workshopped by the group. They'll learn the basics of scene design and of screenplay format. For FMS majors in the screenwriting track, this course fulfills the Media and Narrative requirement . $50 lab fee.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Through the analysis of narrative films, short fiction, myths, fairy tales, and ghost stories, and through the workshopping of their own creative writing, students will explore the art and science of "a good story well told." The course will offer an introduction to dramatic and visual storytelling, and is an essential primer for upper-level screenwriting. Lab fee $50.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course we will explore the basic principles of visual storytelling in narrative film as they apply to the design, creation, and revision of the screenplay. Specifically, we will focus on learning the craft of screenwriting — strategies, processes, and philosophies that writers can develop, practice, and rely upon as they progress through a series of screenwriting exercises and write a 12-page screenplay, which will be critiqued in-class during weekly table reads and with the Instructor (one-on-one) during office hours. Select professional screenplays will be read and analyzed — and clips from select films viewed — to further explore what works well on the page, and how it translates to working well onscreen. (Scripts and clips often selected from American films spanning the 60s through the 2000s.) Final Draft screenwriting software is required; a FREE 18-week trial will be made available for all students who don’t already have Final Draft.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course explores the exchange of ideas and techniques between literary modernism and modernist cinema: how Virginia Woolf’s writings on the cinema connect with her use of shifting points-of-view as literary devices, how James Joyce influenced the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and how Eisenstein in turn influenced the American novelist John Dos Passos, how Franz Kafka's frequent trips to the movies reflect in his fiction, and how artists ventured broadly to develop experimental languages for expressing the new speeds and scales of modern life. Additional texts will be drawn from novels, essays, poems, and films from Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Anita Loos, Andrei Bely, Dziga Vertov, Gertrude Stein, Louis Aragon, and René Clair. The course fulfills the writing intensive requirement and involves a series of essays on literature and cinema from a critical perspective.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course explores film adaptation by considering how words, images, and sounds offer different affordances and constraints for creative expression. A central goal is to conceive of adaptation outside of typical discussions of fidelity to a source work and instead consider how different artistic media open up unique opportunities for storytelling. To this end, we will draw on a number of different intermedial translations, which may include from novel to film (The Night of the Hunter, from Davis Grubb’s book to James Agee’s screenplay to Charles Laughton’s film), from short story to film (The Turin Horse), from graphic novel to film (Ghost World) or television series (HBO’s Watchmen), from personal essay to documentary film (James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work and I Am Not Your Negro), from poetry to film (O Brother, Where Art Thou), from play to film (A Raisin in the Sun and My Own Private Idaho), from radio drama to film (Sorry, Wrong Number), and film-to-film homage (Far From Heaven and All That Heaven Allows). We will also delve into the vagaries of film-to-book novelizations and the curious case of concurrently writing film and book, as in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark’s collaboration on the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (both adapted from a short story).
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A workshop devoted to creating complex characters in challenging moral landscapes. Students will view and discuss a wide range of films; and creative assignments may include profiles, short fiction, monologues, and dramatic scenes for the screen. Short critical and creative written exercises, and a longer, creative final project.
Prerequisite(s): AS.061.148 OR AS.061.205 OR AS.061.315 OR AS.061.316 OR Instructor Permission
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A workshop devoted to creating compelling short scripts based on personal experience. Analysis of screened films and collaborative development of student work will emphasize how unique worlds and world views can reflect a larger shared humanity. Short critical and creative written exercises, and a longer, creative final project.
Prerequisite(s): AS.061.148 OR AS.061.205 OR AS.061.315 OR AS.061.316 or Instructor permission.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A workshop devoted to creating complex characters for the screen. Students will examine memorable film characters from the silent era to the present, with attention to how these characters are revealed through both the drama and the mise en scene. Weekly screenings. Short critical and creative written exercises and a longer, creative final project.Recommended Course Background: AS.061.148 OR AS.061.205 OR AS.061.265
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will explore strategy and process for developing a short screenplay from pre-existing literary or journalistic source material (short story, news/feature article, etc.). By exploring several “case studies” — feature films and the source material that inspired them — students will identify the practical strategies employed by professional screenwriters with the goal of employing such strategies with their own screenplay adaptations. Bulk of class will focus on designing, writing, and rewriting a 20-30 page screenplay, and sharing multiple drafts with the class (and with the professor one-on-one) for critique over the course of the semester. Each student should have 2-3 pieces of material under consideration for possible adaptation by the start of class. Discussions from time to time will also touch on the business of screenwriting. (Scripts and clips often selected from American films spanning the 60s through the 2000s.) Students will be required to purchase a license for Final Draft screenwriting software for $99. Students are expected to have previously completed AS.061.205 or another lower level screenwriting class.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Intensive workshop course where students will write a first draft of a feature-length screenplay. Classes will focus on the specific challenges of the students’ works-in-progress, with an emphasis on developing a story idea that is suitable for a feature, and the craft to see it through to completion. Particular emphasis will be placed on the feature screenwriter’s central challenge: creating enough of a structure in the early writing stages to keep the screenplay on track, while remaining open to new ideas for scenes and sequences that inevitably arise as the characters come to life. Select professional screenplays will be read and analyzed — and clips from select films viewed—to explore what works well on the page, and how it translates to working well onscreen. Students will aim to have a solid and workable first draft at the end of the semester, at which point avenues for further revision may be discussed. Throughout the course, Instructor will also devote a portion of class time to discuss the business of screenwriting. Students will be required to purchase a license for Final Draft screenwriting software for $99.
Writing Intensive
First Year Seminars
In this First-Year Seminar we will examine the poetic artistry of American song, from Tin-Pan Alley and Broadway tunes to Folk songs, Billboard’s Top 40, and Hip Hop. Our focus will be on the linguistic art of song – the meaning(s), rhythm, timbre, and pitch found in words alone. Taught in a workshop format, the course will encourage students to read lyrics as poetry and then write their own.
Area: Humanities
Interdepartmental
Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2020 include Homer, Plato, Dante, John Donne, George Herbert, Christina Rosetti, Mary Shelley, Friederick Nietzsche, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frederick Douglass.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
This course taught by Writing Seminars professor Wayne Biddle and Media Studies professor Bernadette Wegenstein covers the 20th-century history of propaganda with special focus on its visual techniques, on censorship, and how media serve as sites of both control and resistance to power. We will pay particular attention to the influence of misinformation abetted by the new media revolution, and both the rise of the political rhetoric of “fake news” and the massive dissemination of actual fake news since the 2016 election. Students will write papers pegged to current issues and events using the critical framework developed in class. Cap 30 students. Reader: Jason Stanley: How Propaganda Works, Princeton University Press, 2015.
Writing Intensive
“Everything which we loved is lost! We are in a desert” – this emotional assertion was the reaction to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting The Black Square, as the artist himself recalled it. This sentiment of fearing, warning and even witnessing the end of the world as we know it, will stand at the center of the course. We will study the literary and cinematic representations of this apocalyptic notion and investigate its theoretical, theological, physiological and aesthetic aspects. We will seek to trace the narrative dynamics as well as literary and cinematic means of apocalyptic representations in works from various periods, languages, cultures and religions. Among the issues to be discussed: what is the apocalypse, biblical apocalypse, dystopia and nostalgia, trauma and post trauma, war and the apocalypse, the Holocaust as the end of civilization, the atomic bomb, realism and anti-realism, political changes and the apocalypse in popular culture.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Dante's Divine Comedy presents a complete picture of the medieval world-view in all its aspects: physical (the structure of the cosmos), historical (the major actors from Adam to Dante himself) and moral (a complete system of right and wrong). Dante shows how the Christian religion portrayed itself, other religions, the nature of God, humans, angels and devils, and human society. We will explore these topics both from the viewpoint of Dante's own time, and in terms of its relevance to our own societal and cultural concerns.
Prerequisite(s): AS.214.479
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
One of the greatest works of literature of all times, the Divine Comedy leads us down into the torture-pits of Hell, up the steep mountain terrain of Purgatory, through the “virtual” space of Paradise, and then back to where we began: our own earthly lives. We accompany Dante on his journey, building along the way knowledge of medieval Italian history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. The course also focuses on the arts of reading deeply, asking questions of a text, and interpreting literary and scholarly works through discussion and critical writing. Conducted in English.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will deal with close readings of Borges ficciones and critical essays in order to determine how his thinking on the problem of writing and thinking is fictionalized in his stories.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course examines the works of major Israeli poets such as Yehuda Amichai, Nathan Zach, Dalia Rabikovitch, Erez Biton, Roni Somek, Dan Pagis, Yona Wollach, Yair Horwitz, Maya Bejerano, and Yitzhak Laor. Against the background of the poetry of these famous poets we will study recent developments and trends in Israeli poetry, including less known figures such as Mois Benarroch, Shva Salhoov and Almog Behar. Through close reading of the poems, the course will trace the unique style and aesthetic of each poet, and will aim at presenting a wide picture of contemporary Hebrew poetry.
Area: Humanities
This course examines the role of the Holocaust in Israeli society and culture. We will study the emergence of the discourse on the Holocaust in Israel and its development throughout the years. Through focusing on scholarly, literary, artistic, and cinematic responses to the Holocaust, we will analyze the impact of its memory on the nation, its society, politics, and collective self. The course is divided to three general categories: Historical and Sociological Perspective, Literary Perspective, and Cinematic Perspective. However, we will study the crossroad between these three categories, and will explore them in relation to one another.
Area: Humanities
In this course we will study the various representations of what functions as one of Israel’s most unifying and yet dividing forces: war. By analyzing literary and cinematic works as well as visual art and popular culture we will attempt to understand the role of war in shaping Israeli society, culture and politics. Topics such as commemoration and mourning, heroism, dissent and protest, trauma and memory and the changing image of the soldier will stand at the center of the course.
Area: Humanities
Political Science
This course is focused on reading, analyzing, and, most importantly, producing writing about the American political experience and contemporary events in American politics. We will use scholarly, print, and new media sources from different sides of the political spectrum, drawing on political and literary theory to inform our discussions. We will then try to do better: Students will write and workshop a variety of pieces of different lengths and styles, spending in-class time on peer critique, presentations, and writing exercises, which they will compile into a writing portfolio. We will discuss and write op-eds, memoirs, long-form book reviews, commentary essays, and satire. Throughout, we will devote considerable class time to critique and discussion of students’ writing. Readings will include works by James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Claudia Rankine, Hunter S. Thompson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alexander Chee, Angela Nagle, and Omar el Akkad. We will draw on political commentary from sources ranging from The Washington Post to Jacobin to The Onion, through to Facebook and Twitter. Throughout, we will consider a wide range of topics pertinent to writing about politics, including questions of the make-up of the public sphere and diverse audiences, the use of voice and language, the deployment of facts and rhetoric, the place of fiction and humor in political critique, and the rise of fake news and trolling.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Program in Museums and Society
Students work with the Director of, the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture as it reinvents itself as a museum for the twenty-first century. Involves working with community story-tellers in residence. Extra time is to allow for field trip travel - most days class runs 1:30-3:50.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Why are some literary works from the past reprinted, anthologized, and considered worthy of study, but not others? Why are some works “lost” and some “rediscovered,” while others simply fall out of favor? Focusing on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary culture, we will use rare books and archival materials from JHU collections to examine Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston, along with a few authors you’ve never heard of, in terms of the relationship between authorship, stewardship, and status.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students examine select texts and archival materials related to Emily Dickinson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edith Wharton, Ida B. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sui Sin Far, Alice Duer Miller, and Zora Neale Hurston. Students interrogate how these writers navigated the constraints of gender, as informed by race and class, in the decades before and after the 19th Amendment and consider literary collecting in relation to gendered cultural politics.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
If Shakespeare had a sister who went to London to be a writer, what would she write? Virginia Woolf’s account of the thwarted career of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, Judith, in A Room of One’s Own frames our reading of plays and poetry by Shakespeare and contemporary women writers, including Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth. Working within a selected historical context, students will create fictional biographies of “Judith Shakespeare,” including her perspective on our identified authors and a sample or description of Judith’s own literary accomplishments. Secondary course readings will reflect contemporary economic, political, and religious contexts.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Theatre Arts & Studies
This is a writing intensive class exploring the current wealth of women playwrights, including Pulitzer Prize winners: Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, and Jackie Sibblies Drury (2019 Prize for FAIRVIEW). We will discuss Script Analysis and read (and see) plays by numerous writers including Claire Barron, Kia Corthron, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl, Danai Gurira, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, and Hansol Jung. This class will include a mid-term and a Final Paper.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
For aspiring playwrights, dramaturgs, and literary translators, this course is a workshop opportunity in learning to adapt both dramatic and non-dramatic works into fresh versions for the stage. Students with ability in foreign languages and literatures are encouraged to explore translation of drama as well as adaptation of foreign language fiction in English. Fiction, classical dramas, folk and fairy tales, independent interviews, or versions of plays from foreign languages are covered.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A seminar and workshop in playwriting with Dr. Joe Martin, playwright and dramaturge. Student writers, developing their plays, will learn how to open up to the creative process, “brainstorm,” refine their work, and shape it toward an act of artistic communication. Writer’s techniques, such as attending to plot or “story,” delineation of character, creating effective “dialog,” even overcoming “writer’s block,” will be addressed. This course is designed to be complementary to – not a replacement for – playwriting classes in the Writing Seminars.
Writing Intensive