Literature

Students in this class will read a weekly selection of Pulitzer Prize winning plays and be required to analyze and explore these plays beat by beat in class discussion and weekly critical writing exercises. This is an in-depth script interpretation class in which theme, dramatic structure, arc, character development, tone, style and extensive study of the given playwrights

In this class, we will begin by investigating sound, music, image, and form in poetry and how these poetic elements are presented in fiction. From fiction, we will study narrative, character, plot, and setting. Finally, we will progress towards personal nonfiction, fusing the elements of our poetry and fiction investigations. We will read classical and contemporary texts

In this seminar, we will train our eyes on all six of Jane Austen’s novels — Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma — with an aim to discover what connects and binds Jane Austen’s heroines together, what separates these women from each other, and to explore Austen’s evolution as a writer through the

"Live forever!" is the chosen mantra of the louche, monied and relentlessly insular group of Classics students at the center of Donna Tartt's now classic literary suspense novel The Secret History. Under the influence of their classics professor Julian Morrow--a "divine" with special status on the campus of Hampden College, a dark mirror-image of our own campus-

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

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

From Blade Runner to Ex Machina,

This workshop course in nonfiction will ask students to generate essays in conversation with canonical essayistic works, both classical and contemporary, as well as traditional and experimental. We will read Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Roman orators such as Plutarch, examine Sei Shonagon and Kenko, muse on Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, and William

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

What is Autofiction?

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 the nihilistic experimentalism of

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

This Senior Projects course in Literature is two-pronged. Firstly, the course offers space and time to develop your thesis in any formal genre including literary fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and scholarly essay, or any approved project in a hybrid or other genre. (Note that all translation theses will be directed to Translation Atelier, where your

In this exploration of Shakespeare's comedies, we will focus our attentions on the marriage plot, the movement from disorder to order, the means by which the world is set to rights when a man marries a woman, whether or not they love each other or are right for each other, or if perhaps one of them is trapped in a love-potion spell cast on them by Robin Goodfellow, or maybe

This course will serve as an immersion in the work of several major American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, noted for their humor, irreverence, disjunctive experimentation, charm, and wildness, and collectively known as the New York School. We will begin by focusing on the original generation of New York School poets: John Ashbery, Frank OHara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler,

This course for translators of all levels—from absolute beginner to seasoned translators with an ongoing practice—offers space, time, guidance and community to work on self-directed translation projects. In other words, the class operates as an atelier. It is comprised of a major workshop component to get feedback on work and to direct revisions and progress; and