Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Reading and Writing Poetry — LIT4313.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
Students will examine the choices other writers make in their work, through reading a range of selections in contemporary and 20th-century poetry. We will also devote time to discussions of prosody, poetic form, and structure. We will then examine the choices we ourselves make in our work and turn in a new poem every week, each generated through a assignment or prompt. Students
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry in the Age of Social Media — LIT4254.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: alex dimitrov
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This course is a writing workshop designed to investigate, challenge, and use contemporary methods of production and distribution of poetry. Working on the page and online, we will write and read poems in relationship to online culture, popular culture, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram) and platforms of communication such as texts messages, email, YouTube, etc
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Conjuring El Duende — LIT4147.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
For Federico García Lorca, the duende was an elusive, powerful aspect of the poem. Poetry that embodies the duende carries within it the capacity to transmit life’s most tragic and enraptured states. The duende is the mark of a fully realized poetics. As poets, then, what does it mean to channel Lorca’s duende into our own writing? Is Lorca’s creative ecstasy possible for us
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: First Book, Last Book—Considering Prosodic Evolution — LIT4279.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
We will focus on the first (or near-first) and last (or near-last) book of several authors of poetry with an intense exploration and dissection of the prosodic tools deployed in each book. We will investigate and compare/contrast the structure of the books including order of poems, sections and section titles, and how the poems themselves are written. Each author will also be
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Games and Experiments — LIT4387.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 4
As poets, we're often conducting little experiments on the page: What happens if I break the line here? Can I make this a sestina? How many rhymes is too many rhymes? In this advanced poetry workshop, we will dig into the experimental impulse and explore rigorous play as a method for expanding our artistic capabilities. We will use games, missions, kinetic activities, and
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Image and Detail — LIT4536.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This poetry workshop focuses on the ways writers deploy language to achieve precision, vividness, sensory richness, singularity, and emotional resonance. We will begin by developing an understanding of the difference between a detail and a visual image, and the distance between the abstract concept of a thing and the sense of the concrete thing itself. We will go on to explore
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Image and Detail — LIT4536.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This poetry workshop focuses on the ways writers deploy language to achieve precision, vividness, sensory richness, singularity, and emotional resonance. We will begin by developing an understanding of the difference between a detail and a visual image, and the distance between the abstract concept of a thing and the sense of the concrete thing itself. We will go on to explore
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Lyric Persona — LIT4130.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Anna Maria Hong
Credits: 4
Lyric poems express the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of a single, first-person speaker, often aligned with the poet themselves. Persona poems or dramatic monologues invoke the mask of another figure—fictional character, animal, plant, object, or person—to convey idea, emotion, and voice. Reading a diverse array of poems by poets from different eras, nations, and
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Poetics and Perception — LIT4356.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Dan Chelotti
Credits: 4
In this intensive poetry writing workshop, we will study essays, poetic theories, and manifestos that argue for varying models of perception and approaches to perception on the page. We will begin with 19th century poets such as Dickinson and Wordsworth and as the semester progresses, we will read increasingly more contemporary work: poets to be read may include Lorine
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Poet’s Proof—Existential, Ephemeral, Ethereal, Empirical, and Other Evidences — LIT4377.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
In her 1983 essay, “A Poet’s Prose,” Susan Sontag set out to demarcate what exactly marks exemplary prose written by poets. Similarly, in this course, we will aim to demarcate “A Poet’s Proof;” that is, we will attempt to name and showcase the very many intangible evidences that a poet brings forth in making manifest in language those otherwise hazy, hidden, and invisible
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Refusals and Mythic Transformations — LIT4532.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
What happens when a poem no longer behaves, when an orderly book of verse begins to display signs of the disorderly? In this course, we will examine poetry books that begin well behaved only to enter into the realm of rebellion. The poet seems to have derailed from their tidiness, their perfected planned lines. The outcome is often explosive, both formally and linguistically,
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: the Art of Revision — LIT4239.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Credits: 4
Kevin Young writes about the haunting qualities of revision in The Grey Album, “…I have been thinking about the idea of a shadow book—a book that we don’t have, but know of, a book that may haunt the very book we have in our hands.” Every writer must become enamored with the art of revision, and become familiar with the many shadows, or potential iterations, of any poem. In
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak — LIT4276.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This workshop-based poetry course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how the poems
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak — LIT4292.01

Fall 2026
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Days & Time: TH 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

This workshop-based creative writing course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how

Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak — LIT4292.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This workshop-based creative writing course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak — LIT4292.01

Fall 2020
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This workshop-based poetry course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how the poems
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 — 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: 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

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 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