Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Reading and Writing Short Stories — LIT4219.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This is a course for fiction writers on how to write a short story, a genre we’ll define using the formula first proposed by Edgar Allan Poe: a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting. Students can expect to read about forty stories over the semester from a wide range of periods and traditions; write frequent exercises to begin the term; and produce two complete stories
Literature

Reading and Writing Short Stories — LIT4219.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: benjamin anastas
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This is a course for fiction writers on how to write a short story, a genre we'll define using the formula first proposed by Edgar Allan Poe: a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting. Students can expect to read about forty stories over the semester from a wide range of periods and traditions; write frequent exercises to begin the term; and produce two complete stories
Literature

Reading and Writing Short Stories — LIT4211.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Rebecca Godwin
Credits: 4
We'll read some 40 stories in this class-mostly contemporary, although we will include a few glorious others-and look for what makes them, well, stories. That's part one. Part two is writing: first bits and pieces, scenes and dialogue and narrative explorations, and then a couple of polished stories to discuss in workshops and revise. Intensive engagement in reading, writing,
Literature

Reading and Writing Short Stories: Narrative Shape-Shifting — LIT4003.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
The traditional short story often follows a traditional form. A story begins when some clear incident incites a causal chain of events. Over the course of these events, action and tension breathe life into the story until it reaches a climactic scene. When the balloon can get no fuller, it pops, deflates, or sails away (this is known as the denouement). In this class, we will
Literature

Reading and Writing Short Stories: the Technology of Heartbreak — LIT4255.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Reading both contemporary short fiction and work from the canon, we will discuss voice, structure, plot, and character to explore the mechanics of breaking a reader's heart. How do you write a compelling and heartbreaking story that isn't simply a manipulative one-note dirge? How do you jump start that alchemical process that transforms tiny black and white symbols on the page
Literature

Reading and Writing the City — LIT4253.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
Rilke and Walter Benjamin stalked Paris; Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens walked London’s streets at night; H.P. Lovecraft scoured the sewers underneath Providence; a whole universe of writers (Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Joseph Mitchell) saw New York through unromantic eyes. In this course we’ll read fiction and non-fiction about the city from across the urban canon,
Literature

Reading and Writing the City — LIT4253.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In the beginning of the 20th century, when metropolitan life was being chronicled by some of the era’s greatest writers, artists, and thinkers for the depths of its miseries and high of its nervous splendors, only 10% of the world’s population lived in urban centers. Today, more than 75% of the world’s citizens live in cities. The city of our new century bears little
Literature

Reading and Writing the City — LIT4253.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
***Time Change*** Rilke and Walter Benjamin stalked Paris; Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens walked London's streets at night; H.P. Lovecraft scoured the sewers underneath Providence; a whole universe of writers (Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Joseph Mitchell) saw New York through unromantic eyes. In this course we'll read fiction and non-fiction about the city from across
Literature

Reading and Writing the First Novel — LIT4282.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
Some writers are born gradually over a body of early work that allows them to develop a signature style and a series of concerns that will flower over time, while other writers are seemingly born complete--like Athena emerging whole from Zeus's head--with their first novels. We will read a wide selection of remarkable first novels over the term (examples include The
Literature

Reading and Writing the Lyric Essay — LIT4166.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Mark Wunderlich
Credits: 4
***Time Change*** The lyric essay is a term given to work that is both poetic and discursive and that defies clear categorization. In these hybrid forms, the essayist may begin breaking into lines of verse, or poet may engage in a lengthier argument too rangy for the confines of a syllable count. In this course we will read Whitman's Specimen Days, Dickinson's letters, short
Literature

Reading and Writing the Lyric Essay — LIT4166.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Mark Wunderlich
Credits: 4
The lyric essay is a term given to work that is both poetic and discursive and that defies clear categorization. In these hybrid forms, the essayist may begin breaking into lines of verse, or poet may engage in a lengthier argument too rangy for the confines of a syllable count. In this course we will read Whitman’s Specimen Days, Dickinson’s letters, short essays by Virginia
Literature

Reading and Writing the Natural World — LIT4133.01

Spring 2016
Instructor:
Credits: 4
John Burroughs wrote that “Until science is mixed with emotion and appeals to the heart and imagination, it is like dead organic matter; and when it is so mixed and so transformed, it is literature.”  Using this directive, students would be asked to document their own observations of the natural world; field notes and almanac will serve as raw material from which to
Environment Literature

Reading and Writing the Poetry of Trauma and Violence — LIT4264.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
Students will read various poetry collections that deal with different forms of trauma: homophobia, lynching, war, sexual abuse, colonization, and the overall idea of how to define “violence.” There will be time to discuss prosodic interests of our poets as well as discuss how content and form work together to create a seamless work. We will then turn to our own work and
Literature

Reading and Writing the Short Story: The Body — LIT4005.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
Good writing is often described as vivid, visceral, sensual, and therefore rooted in the body. But what makes writing feel embodied? What makes personal bodily experiences feel fleshed out on the page? And how can we use our body as a writing resource? This workshop-based creative writing class will examine the narrative techniques and stylistic choices of a variety of body
Literature

Reading and Writing Travel — LIT4265.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In her poem “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop writes, Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today? / Is it right to be watching strangers at play / In this strangest of theaters? This is the lament of every traveler, and the restlessness of these lines speaks directly to the literary practice we call ‘travel writing.’ We will examine the
Literature

Reading and Writing Travel — LIT4265.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In her poem “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop writes, Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today? / Is it right to be watching strangers at play / In this strangest of theaters? This is the lament of every traveler, and the restlessness of these lines speaks directly to the literary practice we call ‘travel writing.’ We
Literature

Reading and Writing: Autofiction — LIT4522.01

Fall 2020
Instructor:
Credits: 4
The term “autofiction” originated in France in the late 1970s to describe a certain kind of knowing, renegade, and mock-heroic school of autobiographical fiction that fell somewhere between William Burroughs and Marcel Proust. It was “writing before or after literature,” meaning its pretensions were so pure as to be somehow super-literary—the ordinary terms (autobiographical
Literature

Reading and Writing: Hybrid-Genre Works — LIT4140.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Anna Maria Hong
Credits: 4
We will read and discuss an array of hybrid-genre works or writing that combines and coalesces two or more genres: poetry, fiction, criticism, and/or memoir. Some books will also cross media incorporating painting, photography, and film. Reading works by Rosa Alcalá, Dao Strom, Douglas Kearney, Mary-Kim Arnold, Evie Shockley, Elizabeth Powell, Tan Lin, Bhanu Kapil, and others,
Literature

Reading and Writing: Literary Journalism — LIT4141.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
With the practice of journalism undergoing its most profound changes since the invention of the television, this course will steep students in the traditions of criticism, literary non-fiction, reporting and cultural journalism that thrived during the golden age of print and have persisted in the Internet era. We’ll work our way through literary criticism from Robert Boswell to
Literature

Reading and Writing: Looking Beyond the Self — LIT4375.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Paul La Farge
Credits: 4
This writing class will depart from the premise that other people and other lives are interesting, and that it is possible to write about them in fiction. We’ll consider some techniques for gathering knowledge about the world beyond the self, from audio recording to interviews to book research. (Our ability to conduct in-person interviews will likely be curtailed by the
Literature

Reading and Writing: Poetry in Form — LIT4243.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
Poetic form is as diverse as the poets who use them. Stretching from forms as old as the sonnet to as contemporary as the Twitter poem, poets utilize prosody to express specific concerns in shocking and beautiful ways. Every decision counts, and we will learn what those decisions are and the weight they carry for different poets. We will read extensively poems and craft essays
Literature

Reading and Writing: Poetry of Trauma and Violence — LIT4290.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Phillip Williams
Credits: 4
Students will read various poetry collections that deal with different forms of trauma: homophobia, lynching, war, sexual abuse, colonization, and the overall idea of how to define “violence.” There will be time to discuss prosodic interests of our poets as well as discuss how content and form work together to create a seamless work. We will then turn to our own work and
Literature

Reading and Writing: the First Novel — LIT4282.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
Some writers are born gradually over a body of work that allows them to develop a signature style and a series of concerns that will flower over time, while other writers are seemingly born complete–like Athena emerging whole from Zeus’s head–with their first novels. We will read a wide selection of remarkable first novels over the term (examples include Oranges Are Not the
Literature

Reading and Writing: the Missing Person — LIT4138.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Kathleen Alcott
Credits: 4
Traditionally, the fiction writer’s task has been to chart the space between inner and outer lives, illustrating for the reader how one operates on the other. But in the cases of certain fictive persons and their realities, is total access always the best way forward? In this craft seminar on experimental characterization, we will explore works in which the author defines the
Literature