Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Reading Wilderness — LIT2236.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Credits: 4
For generations, the passage west and the idea of wilderness have provided resonant subject matter for American writers. In the words of Wallace Stegner, "the wilderness idea is something that has helped form our character and certainly shaped our history as a people." The course will explore how our understanding of wilderness has evolved from perceived notions of untouched
Environment Literature

Reading Wilderness — LIT2236.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Credits: 2
For generations, the passage west and notions of wilderness have provided resonant subject matter for American writers. In the words of Wallace Stegner, “the wilderness idea is something that has helped form our character and certainly shaped our history as a people.” But if that idea is rooted in perceived notions of untouched earth, today it has more to do with managed
Literature

Readings in Chaucer — LIT2124.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Rebecca Godwin
Credits: 4
Our overriding aim is simple: to read, discuss, write about, and generally immerse ourselves in Geoffrey Chaucer's masterworks, The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. In that process, we'll aim to get sufficiently comfortable with Middle English to read, delight in, and even imitate that rich language. We'll also consider something of Chaucer's life and times as
Literature

Reality and Dreams: Robert Musil and the Vienna Secession — LIT4148.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
The Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) never lived to complete his multi-volume Modernist masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Written obsessively over more than twenty years and conceived of as an ironic epitaph to the culture of Mitteleuropa that had slid blindly into the catastrophe of the First World War, the novel–and its author–became embroiled in the dark
Literature

Recent Fiction From India and Pakistan — LIT2132.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
In this class we will look at novels and stories that have been published by Indian and Pakistani writers over the last twenty years, in the context of the history of the post-Partition subcontinent. We will read works by an array of authors, possibly including Aravind Adiga, Rohinton Mistry, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Mirza Waheed, Amit Chaudhuri, H.M. Naqvi, and Amitav
Literature

Reckless Desire — LIT2545.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 2
I'm not a scientist, but I'm going to full-throatedly argue, scientifically and unimpeachably, that every living creature harbors a desire, whether conscious or instinctive, often more than one desire at a time. A bevy of tree nuts. A good place to take a winter's-long nap. A cup of coffee. A better job. An easier time of it all. Life is rife with desire. And what's more,
Literature

Reinventing the Frost House — LIT2324.02

Fall 2017
Instructor: Megan Mayhew-Bergman
Credits: 2
What and who are writers’ houses for? In this course, we will ask this question in relation to the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, looking at Frost’s legacy as a poet, work done while in residence there, and archives, interiors, and grounds. With guest speakers and individual research, we’ll confront the challenges and goals of house museums and make
Literature

Relation, Reflection, Refraction: Contemporary South American Fiction — LIT2424.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
Contemporary South American fiction is rife with urgency, politics, and history, as well as narrative mischief, layering, and literary gamesmanship. It is a highly self-conscious stream of writing, with novelists in conversation--and conflict--with earlier writers, with their contemporaries, and with novelists of their own creation. Highly divergent stylists have perforce
Literature

ReVisions Rebellions, Revolution: Latin American Women Writers — LIT2516.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
Since the 17th century women writers have been a steadily rebellious, even revolutionizing force in Latin American letters. A number of the writers we’ll read together are also visual and/or performance artists, and intensely political, dealing in formally challenging ways with the residues of 20th-century state terror; as well as the legacies of colonialism; themes of
Literature Cultural Studies and Languages

Richard Wright and James Baldwin — LIT2193.01

Spring 2027
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

Everybody’s Protest Novel

“As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possible be,” James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and later rival Richard Wright. “We were linked together, really, because both of us were black.” But while

Literature

Richard Wright and James Baldwin — LIT2193.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
“As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possible be,” James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and later rival Richard Wright. “We were linked together, really, because both of us were black.” Now that the two writers have been found new relevance--and controversy--in a post-Black Lives Matter world, we can read their major works together, side by side, and
Black Studies Literature

Richard Wright and James Baldwin — LIT2193.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: benjamin anastas
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
"As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possible be," James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and sometimes rival Richard Wright. "We were linked together, really, because both of us were black." Now that both writers have been canonized, we can read their major works together, side by side, and identify the resonances and irreconcilable differences that
Literature

Richard Wright and James Baldwin — LIT2193.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
“As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possibly be,” James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and sometimes rival Richard Wright. “We were linked together, really, because both of us were black.” Now that both writers have been canonized, we can read their major works together, side by side, and identify the resonances and irreconcilable differences that
Literature

Robert Frost and the Rural Authentic — LIT2353.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Stephen Metcalf
Credits: 2
Robert Frost was born in 1873, the year Thomas Hardy published Far From The Madding Crowd, and he died in 1963, the year Bob Dylan brought out Freewheelin’. In a life that spanned the better part of the 20th century, Frost experienced the emergence of modern America. His poetry–with its focus on the small New England village and the family farm, and its exquisitely preserved
Literature

Robot Dreams: Artificial and Human Identities in Literature and Popular Culture — LIT2402.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In this course we will trace artificial intelligence (AI) in literature and film from the industrial revolution to the ‘hive mind’ of rave music and the age of the Internet. What is the proper response to the prospect of ‘dehumanization’, and to the absorption of individual identity into mass culture? In attempting to answer this question, writers and filmmakers often find
Literature

Russian Jewish Literature and Film — LIT2203.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Alexandar Mihailovic
Credits: 4
The roots of Russian Jewish literature reach back into the Pale of Settlement of the pre-revolutionary era. The vibrant cosmopolitan city of Odessa on the Black Sea provided an important cultural model for the style and political stance of Jewish literature written in Russian. Although Stalin’s purges and the second World War affected all social levels and ethnic groups within
Literature

Sacred to Profane in the Whirlwind of History — LIT2506.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
We will read an international selection of 20th and 21st century Jewish writers who wrestle with religion, myth, history, and language. The agon extends to writing itself—narrative forms, notions of reality, memory, horror, and, in the face of it all, outrageous humor and invention. Expect to read Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Yoel Hoffman, David
Literature

Scenes — DRA4379.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Michael Giannitti
Credits: 4
To write a play, write a scene. And then another. And then another. In this course, we will take a close look at how scenes work by reading great scenes and considering them in the context of their plays. What function does the scene serve in the play? How does the scene work, moment by moment? Where does conflict appear, and how is character revealed? What surprises and power
Drama Literature

Schools and Movements in American Poetry — LIT2315.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This course will survey the evolution of, and revolutions in, the American poetry from 1950 to the present by exploring the work of various aesthetically and culturally linked groups of American poets that came to prominence in the decades following the Second World War: the Beats, the Confessional Poets, the Black Mountain School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York
Literature

Screenwriting Story Studio: The Horror! The Horror! — LIT2584.01

Fall 2026
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Days & Time: TH 8:30am-12:10pm
Credits: 4

This introductory screenwriting course will focus its attention on, well, maybe you've guessed it, the horror script. We'll be reading feature-length horror screenplays, discussing the various ways to make someone shudder or scream or white-knuckle the arms of their theater seat (or loved one), and in the process we will spend time learning the various structural and formal

Literature

Screenwriting: Scene and Structure — LIT2354.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Reading contemporary screenplays and story treatments, we will discuss the structure and scene work that goes into writing a successful screenplay. Almost without fail, all screenplays utilize a familiar and easy to learn three-act structure, but the very best screenwriters manipulate this structure nimbly via character development, excellent dialogue, and strong storytelling
Literature

Screenwriting: Scene and Structure — LIT2326.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Reading contemporary screenplays and story treatments, we will discuss the structure and scene work that goes into writing a successful screenplay. Almost without fail, all screenplays utilize a familiar and easy to learn three-act structure, but the very best screenwriters manipulate this structure nimbly via character development, excellent dialogue, and strong storytelling
Literature

Screenwriting: Story Studio — LIT2509.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
A good movie begins with a good script. A good script begins with a good story. In this class, we will explore the basics of structure and format for a feature-length screenplay, but the majority of the course we will be focused on storytelling, the development and polishing of good, strong stories. We will ask what goes into a good story, and how do you take those elements and
Literature