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
In this introductory course, students will ultimately create their own short podcasts around stories that are meaningful to them and their intended audiences. Students will enact principles of listener-centered design, they’ll work to find stories worth telling, and they’ll learn to tell those stories powerfully. This course will build competency in recording and editing techniques, interviewing skills, creating story structure, and understanding the potential social impact of documentary work. Students will also study current monetization strategies in the booming podcast market and learn how to find, keep, and grow an audience.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course introduces the foundational strategies for writing literary fiction and nonfiction. Drawing on a diverse selection of literary models, students will engage in “creative experiments,” eventually submitting a short story or literary essay for class discussion and feedback. AS.220.105 can be substituted for AS.220.108.
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
Study in the reading and writing of short narrative with focus on basic technique: subject, narrative voice, character, sense of an ending, etc. Students will write weekly sketches, present story analyses in class, and workshop one finished story. Selected parallel readings from such models of the form as Henry James, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, John Cheever, Alice Munro, and others.
Prerequisite(s): 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.220.106
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. 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.220.106
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 creative writing workshop offers both new and experienced writers a chance to spend five weeks in Rome, making an artistic exploration of the Eternal City that inspired Keats, Shelley, Goethe, and, more recently, Jhumpa Lahiri. Students are welcome to work in prose, poetry, or both. Though the emphasis of the program will be the creation of new work, students will participate in a mult-genre workshop where they will receive feedback from classmates and the instructor.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will look at the way poets are responding to the climate crisis; it will concentrate on contemporary work, but set this in context by comparing it to ‘nature poetry’ written since the Romantic period. There will also be a chance for students to write and discuss their own poems on this subject.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Why write in a non-realist mode? What is involved in building a convincing altered reality? This course will examine fantastical writing's formal inventiveness, its capacious metaphorical qualities, and its explorations of complicated, unsettling truths. Students will write short critical and creative responses throughout the semester, as well as a final longer creative piece. Authors may include Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Toni Morrison, Jenny Offill, George Saunders, and Coleson Whitehead.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This intermediate workshop will explore questions of form in fiction. Students will read classically structured stories, as well as stories that are written as inventories, how-to manuals, and excruciatingly personal resumés. Readings from writers including Kathleen Collins, Annie Ernaux, Gwen Kirby, Deesha Philyaw, and Weike Wang will inform our discussions of form and inspire writing exercises in and out of class. Students will write, workshop, and revise stories of their own. This course builds upon the ideas and themes covered in Introduction to Fiction and Poetry I, IFP II, and Craft of Fiction, and will prepare students for advanced fiction courses.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This intermediate fiction workshop will explore the use of point of view in the short story, considering the narrative reasons we might choose a particular perspective (and consciousness) when writing. We'll take a close look at published short fiction, examining the ways specific points of view impact our experience as readers, and we'll analyze the various strategies we can learn from these works. Students will share their work throughout the semester, both in small groups and in a larger workshop. Readings will include stories by writers such as Lesley Nneka Arimah, Tobias Wolff, Casey Plett, and Mia Alvar.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
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 character development and characterization. We will consider how writers create characters capable of surprise and contradiction, how we balance writing a person’s interior life with writing their external presentation, how characters’ competing desires can fuel plot or narrative tension, and how we might think about characterization as a way of exploring power dynamics between the people in a story. We’ll also read and discuss published work that succeeds in creating layered and memorable characters, including writing by Dawnie Walton, Jennifer Egan, James Baldwin, James Joyce, Nam Le, Ling Ma, Lauren Groff, Asali Solomon, and Alice Munro.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
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
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
This course explores the presence of Shakespeare as a source in modern poetry and as a potential resource for student writing. We will discuss the connections between King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest and poems by W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Hyam Plutzik, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, and others.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201
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
Epic journeys, domestic dramas, quiet meditations on the human condition—whatever the story is, our investment in a given narrative often depends on our attachment to its characters, those compelling and complex enough that we want to follow them, from first page to the last. But what makes a character compelling and complex? And how do we create these characters in our stories? In this intermediate fiction course, we’ll take a deep dive into the art of characterization, and study the various strategies and techniques used in developing fictional characters. We’ll read published fiction by contemporary writers such as Edward P. Jones, Annie Proulx, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and examine the ways they bring their characters to three-dimensional life, and in the process create stories that linger beyond the final page.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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
In this writing workshop, we will study a variety of creative nonfiction essays by a diverse group of writers including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Richard Rodriguez, Zadie Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and more. Drawing on the narrative strategies of memoirists as well as the research practices and expository methods of journalists, students will explore new ways to enrich and deepen their own creative work.
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
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
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). This capstone course is open by application.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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
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, short-story collection, or section of a novel. Students will build on previous work in the major by writing and revising a project of 50 to 60 pages of fiction. This capstone course is open by application.
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
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.
Individual, guided study under the direction of a faculty member in the department. Undergraduates 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.
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.
Individual, guided study under the direction of a faculty member in the department. Undergraduates only.
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
What even is a novella? Ian McEwan offers this starting point: Let’s take, as an arbitrary measure, something that is between twenty and forty thousand words, long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter.”McEwan promptly goes on to name “The Dead” – 15,000 words – as “the great novella,” so clearly rules are made to be broken. Whatever exactly we think the novella is, it offers unparalleled lessons for us in how to forge narrative structure that is lacking in superfluity and enormous of impact. Every week we will read at least one “novella;” sometimes we will read two; we will write weekly brief critical responses to our reading which will focus on craft; and each student will present on one of the assigned works in the course of the semester. Our reading list may include works by such authors as James Joyce, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter, Philip Roth, Shirley Jackson, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Jane Smiley, George Saunders, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jenny Erpenbeck.
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
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
Discussion and critique of fiction manuscripts by students enrolled in the M.F.A. program.
Area: Humanities
Discussion and critique of fiction manuscripts by students enrolled in the MFA program. Some assignments possible.
Area: Humanities
Discussion and critique of poetry manuscripts by students enrolled in the M.F.A. program. Some assignments possible.
Area: Humanities
Discussion and critique of poetry drafts by students enrolled in the MFA program. Some reading and writing assignments possible.
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
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
This course will examine the ways in which the “music” of poetry—rhythm, sound, and affective connotation—may be effectively conveyed to an audience through vocal performance.
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
The goal of this course is to develop our skills and hone our instincts as writing “strategists,” and to recognize and consider the options available to us, particularly in the process of drafting, experimentation, and revision. We’ll examine the various elements of craft by discussing critical essays by writers such as Janet Burroway, John Barth, and Charles Baxter. To deepen our discussion, we’ll look at published fiction to see how different authors utilize, or perhaps defy, these techniques, and to understand why they make the technical choices they do, and how they serve the overall goals of the narrative.
Area: Humanities
This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.
Summer independent research for graduate students.
For Writing Seminars MFA students. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.
For Writing Seminars MFA students. This indicates that they are actively participating as a managing editor for The Hopkins Review.
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
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
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
A workshop devoted to creating compelling short scripts and stories based on personal experience. Analysis of films, memoir, and short fiction, along with collaborative development of student work, will emphasize how unique worlds and world views can reflect a larger shared humanity. All writers welcome. Tell your story!
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
Combining approaches to audio storytelling and multimedia production, this course offers a wide-ranging introduction to the art of podcasting. Students will learn techniques from the innovators of the golden age of radio, read culturally significant radio plays, develop tools for critically listening to and analyzing today’s podcasts, and learn how to research, write for, and produce their own podcasts. Examples will come from a broad sample of narrative, documentary, interview, and discussion-based podcasts. While no formal training in audio production is necessary to take the course, students will be expected to learn the necessary skills to create their own podcasts. In-class demonstrations of microphones, editing software, and approaches to sound design will be offered. The full suite of podcast materials—written copy, cover image, and audio file—will be posted to the JHU FMS Podcasting channel at https://jhufilmandmedia.podbean.com/. Subscribe to the feed on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. $50 lab fee.
Area: Humanities
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
Story design for the screenplay with special attention to the genres of comedy, horror, melodrama, and adventure. Regular workshops, short written exercises, and a longer final project.
Prerequisite(s): AS.061.148 OR AS.061.205 OR AS.061.270 OR permission of the instructor.
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
In this seminar we’ll explore the many ways that contemporary poets tell stories, make music, and create meaning. We’ll read a wide range of contemporary lyric poems, and every week you’ll have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned in fun, low-pressure writing exercises. (No previous poetry-writing experience required!) Planned activities include classroom visits by contemporary poets as well as off-campus trips to poetry readings around town.
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
“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 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
Program in Museums and Society
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