Spring 2026 Course Search

Malicious Compliance, or The Canterbury Tales — LIT2580.01

Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

According to "All Englang," Joan Acocella's essay in The New Yorker, Geoffery Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, "was the freshest, clearest, and sweetest of the great English poets." She goes on to say that, living in the 14th century, he was also perhaps the first great English poet. Still.

Projects in Translation — LIT4606.01

Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

This intensive advanced translation workshop focuses on student work. Meant for those who have taken Ethical Translation and learned the nuts and bolts of translation there – or otherwise have translation and/or extensive foreign language experience – here we dig into your longer translation projects. The aim of the course is to leave with a polished translation that is worthy of publication and a general audience.

Reading & Writing Poetry: Experiments in Multimedia — LIT4615.01

Instructor: An Duplan
Days & Time: MO 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

“When I combine imagery and text, I'm really just trying to surprise myself,” writes poet Diane Khoi Nguyen. In fact, there are many pathways to surprise when we start to experiment with multimedia. Certainly the result must have been surprising when the late John Giorno, in 1968, developed the phone-based, poetry performance project, Dial-a-Poem.

Reading and Writing: the Personal Essay — LIT4617.01

Instructor: Jo Ann Beard
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

The essay is an intellectual and an artistic endeavor, and work in the form means work in thinking—about life, values, our own ideas and the ideas of others. Good personal essays entertain, inform and move us through the rendering of, and reflection over, our own life experiences. Essays and stories by artists such as Virginia Woolf, E. B. White, Daniel Orozco, Annie Dillard, Alexander Chee, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin will provide students with a foundation for approaching and understanding their own stories.

Are We There Yet: Visions of Dystopia — LIT2518.01

Instructor: Faculty TBA
Days & Time: MO 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

It is a commonly felt experience, in our current age of climate crisis, misinformation, pandemics, declining birth rates, late-stage capitalism, and the apparent twilight of democracy, etc., that we are living through (or at, or near) the end of the world. Where do we look for precedents for this feeling? To what extent does this dark life imitate art, or vice versa? Where does ‘dystopia’ end and realism begin?