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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Reading and Writing Human Frailty — LIT4343.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Elisa Albert
Credits: 4
Via a survey of mostly contemporary short fiction and close examination of our own efforts, we'll discuss voice, structure, plot, pacing, and most especially language.  We'll question our own unique narrative priorities and trouble the waters with regard to the ethical duties of storytelling.  We’ll interrogate how we as readers are forced to confront discomfort,
Literature

Reading and Writing Literary Journalism — LIT4141.01

Spring 2020
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 Nonfiction: Ambience, Architecture, Environment — LIT4389.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
The places where our stories take place have the power to dramatically change our experiences of those stories. In other words, it’s not just about the people in our narratives, or about dialogue, or even about accurately describing our inner worlds, what we think and perceive. When we read, we are also looking to be located, to be placed somewhere. We can think of places
Literature

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Archival Work — LIT4601.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
The archive––and using archival materials as the generative basis for creative output––is having a moment. The visionary scholar-writer Saidiya Hartman has popularized once unknown terms like “critical fabulation” and “documentary poetics” through genre bending works like Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and erasure projects like poet Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: an
Black Studies Literature

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Childhood and Its Aftermaths — LIT4521.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
In this course, we will read and write nonfiction that, while not entirely focused on childhood, examines the self and present circumstance through a reexamination of the child self. Through reading works such as When You Learn the Alphabet and Fruit Punch by Kendra Allen, Heart Berries by Terese Maire Mailhot, What About the Rest of Your Life by Sung Yim, The Boys of My Youth
Literature

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Childhood and Its Aftermaths — LIT4521.02

Fall 2020
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
In this course, we will read and write nonfiction that, while not entirely focused on childhood, examines the self and present circumstance through a reexamination of the child self. Through reading works such as When You Learn the Alphabet by Kendra Allen, Heart Berries by Terese Maire Mailhot, What About the Rest of Your Life by Sung Yim, The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard,
Literature

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Dreamwork — LIT4385.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
Dreams are oft-dismissed. As a society, we are told that no one is interested in dreams, to not share dreams, that the dreams of others are boring. This course aims to resurrect the dream, to return it to what it used to be regarded as: a vision, a message, a form of meaning, a puzzle to solve, work to be done, mirrors to face--in other words, this course will treat dreams no
Literature

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Mourning and Grief — LIT4458.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
The elegy is typically understood as a poetic form which laments the dead: how might the elegiac essay or memoir work toward or away from the poetic tradition? What might be the qualities of the prose elegy? We will read works such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Literature

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: The Interrotronic Essay: Films of Errol Morris — LIT4609.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

Errol Morris is a filmmaker who is obsessed with his obsessions: his cinematic essays veer towards subjects who themselves are consumed by their own fanaticism. In this class, we will study several films and series that center on what others may simply refer to as “eccentrics,” subjects who, despite knowing that their obsessions may ultimately lead to devastation,

Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry — LIT4313.01

Spring 2016
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 an assignment or prompt.
Literature

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 — LIT4313.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Mark Wunderlich
Credits: 4
Writing poems is not about the expression of the emotions of the writer, but about creating complex, individual works of art that manipulate the emotions of the reader.  In this course we will study the effects of tone, musicality, rhetoric and prosody as they move through a chosen subject, discussing the most effective and artful ways to make poems worthy of the gift of a
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: The Poet's Toolkit — LIT4251.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Monica Youn
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
In this course, students will hone and sharpen their poetic craft through an extensive focus on the materials and techniques of their art form. Starting from the basic building block of the poem - the individual word or sound, students will engage in a series of exercises that are designed to deepen their appreciation of structure, craft, and form. We will devote special
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