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 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

Prerequisite(s): (AS.220.105 OR AS.220.108) 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 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

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

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