Writing Seminars

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

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.220.105 can be substituted for AS.220.108.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course will examine both light verse and how humor can enrich serious subjects in poetry. We will explore many subjects, from bad love to aesthetic experiences. Principal readings will range from classic exemplars such as Shakespeare, Dryden, and Eliot to selections from American poets since 1950, as represented in the anthology "Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else." Students will be required to write several seriously funny poems of their own. Fun is mandatory.

Area: Humanities

This course examines the role of lyric poetry in a media culture that has become obsessed with photographs. In a world where everyone with a cell phone is a photographer – and every literate person a writer – how do we create valuable work? We will pair genres of photography and lyric poetry in discussion – landscape photos and poems of place, for example – and view each through the other. Students will read a body of poetry and criticism (prose by Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Penelope Pelizzon, Roland Barthes, et al.). In addition to bringing worthwhile comments on the readings to each class, students will submit one original poem and one original photo each week for credit. * Prerequisites: Each student is required to have a device capable of taking digital photos. Cell phones are fine.

Area: Humanities

In this summer mini-course, students will use canonical works of children's literature to inspire their own stories and verses, which they will read aloud and discuss in a workshop setting. We will focus on the uses and reuses of fairy and folk tales -- from early works compiled by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault to fantasies from the Victorian era by Mary de Morgan and Oscar Wilde. We will end with contemporary reimaginings by Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter and Lauren Child. Class will include discussion of illustration, recent trends in children's literature, and the publishing process. Course instructor Sarah Smith is the former Children's Book editor at the New York Times Book Review.

Area: Humanities

While fiction is by definition not “real,” some modes of fiction present deliberate departures from the world as we know it. This class will examine fantastical and non-realist writing, including surrealist and magic realist stories, as well as works with fairy-tale and folklore influences, and stories with elements of the uncanny or supernatural. Students will read and discuss representative fiction, complete weekly creative assignments, and participate in workshop of a final, full-length piece.

Area: Humanities

“[I]n literature, only trouble is interesting,” Janet Burroway says in Writing Fiction. Conflict is often referred to as the heart or the engine of a story: in this workshop-centered course, we’ll investigate conflict within short fiction, giving attention to all its related components, such as narrative structure, pacing, character development, and dialogue. Both in workshop and in our weekly discussions of assigned readings, we’ll always return to the question of how a story provokes readers’ sense of anticipation and keeps readers engaged. This course builds upon the material covered in the Introduction to Fiction and Poetry course sequence and will prepare students for further study at the Intermediate and Advanced levels. Course readings include diverse and contemporary authors such as Han Kang, Z.Z. Packer, Carmen Maria Machado, Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, and Curtis Sittenfeld.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 AND AS.220.106

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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 AND AS.220.106

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Screenwriting workshop. This course will look at the screenplay as both a literary text and blue-print for production. Several classic screenplays will be analyzed. Students will then embark on their own scripts. We will intensively focus on character development, creating "believable" cinematic dialogue, plot development, conflict, pacing, dramatic foreshadowing, the element of surprise, text and subtext, and visual story-telling. Several classic films will be analyzed and discussed (PSYCHO, CHINATOWN, BLADE RUNNER). Students will learn professional screenplay format and write an 8-12 page screenplay that will be read in class and critiqued.

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

Learn reporting through analysis of famous and infamous work by contemporary journalists such as Janet Malcolm, Michael Finkel, Sarah Corbett and Seymour Hersch. Students will use readings to understand concepts central to news and feature writing, including libel, fair use, balanced reporting, and appropriate sourcing. They will then head out to find and write their own stories about local issues using best practices learned in class. Sarah Harrison Smith is a former managing editor of the New York Times Magazine and the author of "The Fact Checker's Bible."

Area: Humanities

In this lecture-based course, students will build their knowledge of the history of poetry writing in English through a chronological exploration of the poetic line. This course will serve as a foundation for future studies in the writing and reading of poetry.?

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 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

In this course, we will workshop student short stories, complete short writing exercises, and discuss published writing with an emphasis on the possibilities of point of view. We will explore the opportunities and challenges of writing in first, second, and third person, think about how narrative distance and tense complicate these choices, and connect narrative voice to story shape and structure.

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

Learn the practice of arts journalism, from reviewing to conducting interviews and writing profiles. In class, students will study the work of some of the best writers in this field, pitch story ideas, report and write, and then discuss their pieces in a workshop setting. Instruction will include journalistic ethics, plagiarism, libel law, and use of social media. Students can expect class visits from established journalists. Writing Seminars Majors only

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

This workshop will focus intensely on student writing, and on reading stories with a strong narrative voice, the kinds of stories in which the reader can hear the narrator speaking, where the voice gets stuck in the reader's mind, where the story feels like an invasion of the narrator's private thoughts, or is a retelling of the tale for some invisible public, or is the quiet, clear prose of a diarist, journaling into the void.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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

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.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

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

We will look at a variety of ways in which dialogue furthers artistic ends. We will ask questions like: When is dialogue best expressed directly? When is it best summarized? How does dialogue-heavy short fiction differ from a play? When can dialogue stand on its own, and when does it require an author's explanation or interpretation? Students will write both creative and expository papers. Recommend Course Background: Students need to have completed a 200-level Writing Seminars class.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 AND AS.220.106

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

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

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

Topics in Advanced Fiction

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

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

A collaboration of The Writing Seminars and The Center for Visual ArtsStudents will study JHU’s Homewood House, residence of the Carroll family, choosing a room as the site of a story or a series of prose poems. To illustrate their work and produce an artist book, students will learn camera handling and Photoshop.

Area: Humanities

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

We will trace the ancestry of some modern genres, pairing a modern book with a nineteenth-century counterpart. We will look at suspense fiction (Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities), romantic comedy (Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist and a Jane Austen novel), science fiction (Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis for Blade Runner—and Wells’s The Time Machine) and tales of the fantastic (stories by John Cheever and Steven Milhauser paired with Poe and ?Hawthorne). A few films may be shown, but not during class.

Area: Humanities

This course will focus on musicality in prose, with close attention to the effects that fiction writers can achieve through assonance, refrain, and the careful management of rhythm. Readings will include work by Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Ondaatje, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marilynne Robinson, and Virginia Woolf.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201

Area: Humanities

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 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.

Area: Humanities

Registration Restrictions: Permission required. Twentieth-century novellas, with a new author and book each week. The course asks: What can and has been accomplished by American fiction writers in fewer than 150 pages?

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

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 short story cycle as a literary form. Authors may include Joyce, Schulz, Anderson, Welty, Calvino, Munro, Erdrich, Diaz and others.

Area: Humanities

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.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.400

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

In this Community-Based Learning course, students will explore poetry of social and political engagement in partnership with high-school age writers from Writers in Baltimore Schools. Participants will put learning into practice by organizing community conversation, reflection, and collaboration. Participation in some events outside of class time will be required.

Area: Humanities

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

We will read the major novels with the aim of detecting the chief patterns and devices the author uses to make the familiar and ubiquitous marriage plot suspenseful and gripping.Writing Seminars Majors only

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.220.105 AND AS.220.106 AND AS.220.201

Area: Humanities

Given the significant differences between their aims and styles as novelists - James the great investigator of the interior life, and Stevenson the equally great exponent of the adventure story - it's somewhat surprising to find the two men were good friends who admired one another's work. This course will use their friendship as a starting point to explore their novels in general, while paying particular attention to their narrative techniques; the novels under discussion will include Daisy Miller, Turn of the Screw, Portrait of a Lady, Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped. Students will also be asked to create original work that both responds to and takes off from their reading of these books.

Area: Humanities

In this Community-Based Learning course, students will explore theatre and areas of social concern in partnership with high-school age writers from Writers in Baltimore Schools. Participants will put learning into practice by organizing community conversation, reflection, and collaboration. Participation in some events outside of class time will be required.

Area: Humanities

Students in this course will write poems based on an exploration of Baltimore itself: weekly assignments will require the students to get off campus, visit specific sites around town, and craft their observations into original poems. Course readings will include work by Baltimore authors past and present; other readings, drawn from further afield, will take up the question of what it means to explore a city. Writing Seminars majors only.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 AND AS.220.106

Area: Humanities

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.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201

Area: Humanities

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.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Area: Humanities

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

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.

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.

Permission Required.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Department 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.

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.

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.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

A study of Modernism focusing on long poems and poem sequences by Stein, Pound, Eliot, Rukeyser, Tolson, and others. Coursework will include completion of a long poem or poem sequence.

This course will look at the ways in which poetry finds words to express moments of vision and self-forgetting. Ranging from the Elizabethans to the present day, it will begin by looking at poetic manifestos by Sidney and Shelley (among others), and explore the ways in which they require poetry to engage with what cannot easily be put into words, then go on to consider: poems about religious transcendence; poems about rapturous communication with nature; visionary poems; dream poems; poems about ghosts and haunting; and poems which explore the possibility of saying the unsayable. Donne and other Metaphysical poets, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Whitman, Hardy, Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and Seamus Heaney will be among those poets discussed. Workshop time will be divided equally between critical discussion, and the presentation of original work by students.

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

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. Some assignments possible.

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

We will read all--or most--of Chekhov's short stories, his "notebook," as well as the letters that have been translated into English.

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

This course focuses on three poets whose individual relationships with form, inspiration, and innovation continue to shed light on the poetic process.

Area: Humanities

We will examine five American writers who were emerging or thriving in the middle of the 20th century: John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Stafford, John Updike. We will read short stories by all five, as well as the following novels: Malamud's The Assistant, Nabokov's Lolita and Pale Fire. Restricted to graduate students in the MFA program.

Area: Humanities

This course will look at the way poets have responded to the environment, from the early Romantic period to the present day. In the process, it will study and show how the role of the natural world in poetry has changed from being a cause for celebration and a mirror for self-scrutiny, into a way of continuing these things while also expressing anxiety about the effects of global warming any other dangers to the health of the planet. Poets included in the discussion will include Wordsworth, Clare, Hopkins, Frost, Auden, Hughes and Heaney.

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

A study of major figures, including Dickinson, Moore, Bishop, Clampitt, Brooks, and others. The theme of place and displacement will be a focus.

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