Literature

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Time & Day Offered
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Muriel Spark and the Vanishing Novel — LIT4534.01

Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
Muriel Spark, beginning in the late 1950s, produced a string of fiercely ambitious and savagely witty novels that harnessed the experimental power of the French nouveau roman and skewered the pieties of life in the postwar period of the 20th century. The problem of knowing; the relationship of art to life; the godlike power of authorship; the criminal scheming of flesh-driven

Muriel Spark and the Vanishing Novel — LIT4534.01

Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: TU 4:10pm-6:00pm
Credits: 2

Muriel Spark, beginning in the late 1950s, produced a string of fiercely ambitious and savagely witty novels that harnessed the experimental power of the French nouveau roman and skewered the pieties of life in the postwar period of the 20th century. The problem of knowing; the relationship of art to life; the godlike power of authorship; the criminal

Nasty Women of Antiquity — LIT4278.01

Instructor: Monica Ferrell
Credits: 2
This seminar in comparative mythology will serve as a journey through the narratives produced by a number of ancient and pre-modern civilizations that feature a complex female character. In these stories, feminine archetypes are not nurturing mother or fertility goddesses but warriors, witches, choosers of the slain and of rulers, ethically ambiguous and often terrifying

Native (North) American Literature — LIT2567.01

Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
Native storytelling has thrived in recited, sung, painted, etched, sculpted, and danced forms since centuries before European colonists arrived on the North American continent. Against the backdrop of this long, linguistically complex, and multi-national artistic tradition, we will closely read the works of Indigenous North American authors, studying how their formal and

Niedecker, Graham, Ford — LIT4259.01

Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
This is an advanced literary study of three women poets who seem connected aesthetically through the modernist school of poetics, focusing on fragmentation, lyricism, formal inventiveness, and interrogation of self and self's participation/existence in their specific time. What bridges exist between Lorinne Niedecker, an early objectivist poet; Jorie Graham, arguably one of the

Nonsense, Surrealism, and The Absurd — LIT2407.01

Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This course will consider the multifarious ways writers have sought to subvert linearity, coherence, logic, and reason. We will begin with contemporary prose poet and fabulist Sabrina Orah Mark and then move backwards into the strange and satirical 1970s fictions of Donald Barthelme, a master of the collage form; the surrealist short fictions of Argentina's Julio Cortazar; and

North of the Border: Mexican-American Literature — LIT2257.01

Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
What does it mean to be American in a country that once belonged to your ancestors? 35 million Mexicans live in the United States, yet their own stories have been historically underrepresented in both literature and academia in comparison to other Hispanic groups. This course will read and discuss the Mexican-American experience as its evolved through various labels – Latino,

Not Quite Passing: Understanding Racial Identity in America — LIT2254.01

Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
In this class, students will confront the idea of “passing,” which is what happens when someone tries to get something tangible to improve their daily quality of life by occupying a space meant for someone else. Passing can happen in any context (you can pass for another gender, social class, or sexual orientation), but most often occurs in the context of race. This course

On Sustaining a Practice of Documentation — LIT2002.01

Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
The violence enacted on marginalized people is met with a poetry of resistance: art and literature as a political tool accessible to the masses. What service do poetics and artists' practices offer to liberation, memory, and grief? Through a critical analysis of documentary poetic practices within a Black feminist framework, this course seeks to identify a common thread across

Origins of the English Novel — LIT4145.01

Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
The first English novel appeared more than a hundred years after the publication, and translation into English, of Don Quixote. Where did the English novel come from? And how did it develop? We will read the works of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and excerpts from those who came before them. Students will write two essays. Corequisite: Students are required to be in

Origins of the English Novel — Canceled

Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
Credits: 4
The first English novel appeared more than a hundred years after the publication (and translation into English) of Don Quixote. Where did the English novel come from? And how did it develop? We will read Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, among others. Students will write two essays.

Out of Dark Noise: The History of Black Documentary Poetics — LIT4357.01

Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
“Dark noise,” as Black video artist Lawrence Andrews calls it, is an alternate truth-building system. The idea of dark noise indicates a sort of failed consensual reality, or in Audre Lorde’s terminology, a “chaos of knowledge.” Dark noise is the area outside of the state-sanctioned truth that the justice system, for instance, relies upon. As such, we will use the phrase “dark

Pakistani Fiction — LIT4269.01

Instructor: Brooke Allen
Credits: 4
The literature of the Indian subcontinent has a rich and ancient history. The violent partition of India in 1947 and the birth of the new nation of Pakistan saw a new national consciousness and literature emerge. In this class we will read the work of a variety of Pakistani writers. Authors considered will probably include, but might not be limited to, Jamil Ahmad, Fatima

Pathways: An Introduction to Writing — LIT2110.01

Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Beginning writers will explore the steps of the writing process as a path for discovery and communication. Weekly papers explore several modes of writing, including description, nonfiction narrative, and both analytical and argumentative essays. The course primarily emphasizes the art of essay construction by focusing on rhetorical patterns, by introducing research techniques,

Pathways: An Introduction to Writing — LIT2110.01

Instructor: wayne hoffmann-ogier
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Beginning writers will explore the steps of the writing process as a path for discovery and communication. Weekly papers explore several modes of writing, including description, nonfiction narrative, and both analytical and argumentative essays. The course primarily emphasizes the art of essay construction by focusing on rhetorical patterns, by introducing research techniques,

Pathways: An Introduction to Writing Essays — LIT2393.01

Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Credits: 4
Beginning writers will explore the steps of the writing process as a path for discovery and communication. Weekly papers explore several modes of writing, including description, nonfiction narrative, and both analytical and argumentative essays. The course primarily emphasizes the art of essay construction by focusing on rhetorical patterns, by introducing research techniques,

Pathways: An Introduction To Writing Essays — LIT2393.01

Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Beginning writers will explore the steps of the writing process as a path for discovery and communication. Weekly papers explore several modes of writing, including description, nonfiction narrative, and both analytical and argumentative essays. The course primarily emphasizes the art of essay construction by focusing on rhetorical patterns, by introducing research techniques,

Perfect Vacuums: Critical Studies of Nonexistent Texts — LIT4177.01

Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
In this class, using Stanislaw Lem's 1971 book, A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books as a jumping off point, we will discuss the influence and power of nonexistent texts in literature and pop-culture, and we will turn our critical eye to our own invented and imagined nonexistent texts, bounding across space, time, and genre as we do, with the goal of

Persona Poetry: An Overview — LIT2517.01

Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 2
The mask, or persona, is a common construction in creative, focusing on building a personality in a work by manipulation of rhetorical strategies, sound, and perspective. Writers such as William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Ai, Kevin Young, Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, and many others have relied on their ability to create convincing characters in order to satirize, criticize,

Plains Songs: Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Alice Munro — LIT2550.01

Instructor: Doug Bauer
Credits: 4
The fictions of Cather, Porter and Munro form a sequential chronology of influence and inheritance that spans the 20th century. Drawing deeply from their origins in Nebraska, Texas, and Ontario respectively, each of these writers explores the place from which she came and the various places her characters are subsequently drawn to – in some cases familiarly rural, in others

Plays From Plays From Plays — DRA2155.01; first seven weeks

Instructor: Kathleen Dimmick
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
Where do plays come from? In this course we’ll look at the bloodline of plays: origination myths, tales, folklore, and, of course, other plays. We’ll read and discuss plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Buchner, Zola and their followers – Racine, Alfred Jarry, Sarah Kane, Neal Bell, Elizabeth Egloff, and others.

Playwriting - Storytelling Across Media — DRA2184.01

Instructor: Michael Giannitti
Credits: 4
What makes Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag a singularly perfect work of art that we can’t stop watching? How exactly does Beyonce’s cinematic album Lemonade capture and sustain our emotional attention, outside of her inherent god-like energy? How can I write a play that “feels” like that? In this introductory course, we will take a “study what you love” approach to playwriting.

Poems into Print — LIT4424.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

Poetry is as much a visual medium as it is a sonic one. What do we learn about the process of composing poems by experimenting closely with their visual aspects? How does working simultaneously with both text and image impact the creative process? What happens when writers break out of the Google doc and engage with the physical process of

Poetry Performance — LIT2533.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 4
Though poetry was an oral art form before it was anything else, its contemporary relationship to performance is varied and complex. What does it mean to write a poem that comes alive in the air? What happens to poems when they become embodied? And how have questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality historically shaped (and been shaped by) the work at the intersection of

Poetry & Technology — LIT4393.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: MO 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 2

Since the arrival of Large Language Models like ChatGPT, many have wondered—even panicked—about how this new technology would impact creative writing. But literature has always been shaped by the technology of its time. In this 2-credit class, we will look beyond the common assumption of poems as ideally “timeless” to examine how poetry