This course traces the ways a war experience is both imagined and remembered in short fiction and films of the long twentieth-century amidst a marked acceleration of both mass warfare and ecological change. In Authoring War, Kate McLoughlin notes that the challenge for war writing is to convey this charged space, to communicate this complex situation-part psycho-physiological, part geographical-that is conflict. In a ground war, knowledge of the terrain can mean the difference between life and death for a soldier. The earth, in this sense can be both refuge of safety, or, harbinger of death. For civilians, home-place is often transformed from a familiar site of sanctuary into a foreign-seeming environment of hostility.

We will read works by both soldier and civilian authors-such as Tim O'Brien, Brian Turner, J.D. Salinger, Tadeusz Borowski, Tamiki Hara, Elizabeth Bowen, and Arthur Machen-and watch films depicting World War I, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts-such as 1917 and Apocalypse Now. As we do so, we will ask: How does the setting of war function as more than mere backdrop? Why does natural imagery become a standard trope for representing some of the most traumatic aspects of the war experience? As we contextualize our readings and viewings by looking to scholars of trauma as well as to environmental historians of war, we will consider some of the ways that the environmental aesthetics of war may be linked to our own hostilities towards the environment in a time of climate crisis.

Elective

What role does poetry play in times of war? Why might we turn to poetry when our collective grief seems most inexpressible? Through an engagement with contemporary poetry, we will learn how formal experiments in language intervene in our capacity to witness, confront, and endure painful encounters with war and loss. What knowledge can poetry produce and bear which would otherwise remain unknowable to us? What ideals and beliefs might we have to suspend, give up, and transform to truly perceive the insights of a poem? Each week, we will read a book of poetry that can hold the impossible contradictions and tensions that emerge in the wake of deep violations of the mind, body, and spirit. Readings may include work by Ilya Kaminsky, Solmaz Sharif, Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Divya Victor, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Bhanu Kapil, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Nazim Hikmet, and Tarfia Faizullah. Students can expect to experiment with writing poetry alongside weekly reflection posts and a final analytical essay.

Elective

Postcolonial literature is the writing produced by people in or from regions that have escaped the yoke of colonialism. Of course, such a definition raises a number of questions, and during the semester we will grapple with the definition. Our readings will open with several theoretical discussions of postcoloniality, then we will continue with novels and poetry from Australia, India, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand, Samoa, and Sri Lanka. This history of trading empires and settler colonies will be a major focus in this course. Through individual projects and a final paper that works with at least one of the theoretical texts and a novel or book of poetry, students can begin to focus on the area in the field that specifically interests them. Writers may include Ciaran Carson, Lionel Fogarty, Keri Hulme, R.K. Narayan, Michael Ondaatje, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Albert Wendt.

Elective

This course, besides revisiting the traditional narrative elements of spy and detective fiction, considers a selection of the increasing number of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century transnational, diasporic, postcolonial, and minority/ethnic authors from around the world who adapt spy and detective fiction conventions for the purpose of social critique. In focusing on issues related to identity, culture, ethics, human rights, justice, and knowledge construction narrated by these fictions, we will examine carefully, for example, the figure of the spy or detective as outsider to and observer of society as well as, in the works at issue here, frequently an immigrant or cultural or social "other." In the process, we will also engage questions central to reading, interpreting, and comparing fiction in a global context.

Elective

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, writes Oscar Wilde, even one's own relations. While the domestic sphere is often understood as a refuge from the quarrels and dangers of the perilous outside world, the family home can also be a site of tension, violence, and competition. Literature and cinema show us time and again that some of the most bitter and bloody conflicts unfold in the intimate battleground of hearth and home. This course tracks the seemingly timeless idea of the family in its historical evolution, from patrilineal dynasties to the nuclear family of suburban postwar America. Why do the horrors of home-life shock and fascinate us? What is gained or sacrificed in the name of “family values,” and why is the gothic so closely tied to the domestic? Texts and excerpts include: Medea, The Tempest, Wuthering Heights, The Turn of the Screw, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” The Importance of Being Earnest, The Metamorphosis, Kindred and Psycho, with secondary readings from No Future and Abolish the Family. Students will write three argument-driven essays including a research project on one of our course-texts.

Elective

In this course, Contemporary Ecopoetries: North Americas+, students will examine poems published after 1970 in order to explore how they encounter, diagnose, and respond to environmental topics such as climate change, extinction, extractivism, (in)justice, place, and toxicity, among other concerns. As the course title indicates, one grounding assumption of the course is that there are many, differently-experienced North Americas. Authors may include Sherwin Bitsui, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Natalie Diaz, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, dg nanouk okpik, Craig Santos Perez, Juliana Spahr, and Natasha Trethewey. Course activities will include reading, analyzing, and discussing poems and critical essays, as well as regular writing assignments. These course activities will prepare students to embark on their own ecopoetries research in order to complete the final project. For the final project each student will produce a mini-anthology on a topic of their choosing that gathers, introduces, and critically responds to a set of existing ecopoetic texts.

Elective

Ekphrasis is a Greek tradition of poetry in which the poem describes a work of art through language, deeply engaging not only in the intended meaning of the art object, but the underlying sociopolitical contexts of the art object’s making, and the poet’s relationship with the object and its artist. In this class, we will consider ekphrasis as a form of art writing that not only describes art, but interrogates the histories and politics that have gone into the making of an art object. Our readings will include a variety of ekphrastic texts, including poetry, memoirs, personal and lyric essays, academic essays, and theory (Barbara Jane Reyes, Le Thi Diem Thuy, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fred Moten, Arthur Jafa, Tiana Clark, Sianne Ngai, Barbara Johnson, Sally Wen Mao, Summer Kim Lee). We will also view films, visual art, performance, and digital media (Jon Berger, Caroline Garcia, Rihanna, Kara Walker, Candice Lin, Julie Tolentino). We will pay particular attention to Asian American and postcolonial literature and art, as identitarian genres attuned to the relationship between visual culture and representation.

Throughout this interdisciplinary course, we will ask such questions as: How does art orient itself toward various audiences, and for what purposes? How does art antagonize its audience, or how does it build community? How do we live with art and how does it determine not only the content of our writing, but our lives? How do we see art, and what are the politics of our viewership? How does visual culture manifest in our understanding of ourselves and each other? You will gain insight in visual culture and experience in writing that will serve as the foundation for advanced work in analytic and creative writing on art and politics. Major course assignments will include three analytical essays and weekly discussion posts. Students should expect three to five hours of reading per week (30 pages of academic writing and/or 50 pages of creative writing per session).

Elective

In an era defined by climate change, pandemics and live-streamed war, this digital language arts course confronts the stark realities of our time. It compels students to decolonize their imaginations and discover new ways of engaging with reality, literature, technology, and the future. We examine how language and literature mediate our relationship with the world and how digital mediums reshape our perceptions of reality and our expectations of the future. Central to this course is the critical examination and creation of digital artifacts that engage with speculative fiction. Students will confront the power of nightmares in speculative horror and explore the promise of alternate utopian visions. These explorations aim to open gateways to potential futures, using innovative literary and digital forms. Through rigorous analysis and creative experimentation, students will develop sophisticated digital artifacts that not only respond to but also critique and reimagine the pressing global crises of our time. Students will engage deeply with the material through extensive reading and weekly discussions that directly influence their creative output. Students will produce creative and critical writing in dialogue with the readings. The semester will culminate in the creation of a collection of digital and written artifacts, laying the groundwork for a rich final project that synthesizes the insights and creative explorations from the course. This course equips students with the tools to critically fabricate narratives that challenge existing paradigms and inspire forward-thinking, enabling them to contribute meaningfully to the discourse on future realities. Artists, writers, and texts include Sun Ra, Sondra Perry, Hito Steyerl, Tabita Rezaire, Gerald Vizenor, Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, Ian Cheng, Sadiya Hartman, Jason Mohaghegh, Larissa Sansour, and selected short stories from "Palestine +100: Stories From a Century After the Nakba" and "Iraq +100: Stories from Another Iraq.

Elective

The ancient Greeks imagined a tribe of warrior women at the edge of civilization, and Western culture has never forgotten them. This course will explore ancient and modern ideas of masculinity and femininity through the lens of stories, art, and film from antiquity to the present about the Amazons and their reimagined sisters in fantasy, science-fiction, and pop culture.  But what is an “Amazon,” anyway? Do they have any basis in reality? Why have “women warriors” been so fascinating in myth, legend, and history? What can stories about Amazons teach us about gender and culture? How do ancient ideas about femininity affect contemporary society and pop culture? Readings may include ancient Greek texts like Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Euripides’ Medea  (all in English translation), DC Comics' Wonder Woman as well as its TV and film adaptations, and secondary material from Adrienne Mayor’s Amazons, Keira Williams’ Amazons in America, Jill Lepore’s Secret History of Wonder Woman et al. Assignments will include weekly reading/viewing responses (discussion posts or low-stakes papers), a short project or presentation on “Visualizing Amazons,” and a larger 8-10 page research paper.

Elective

Making sense of events by giving them order and verbal articulation is considered a primary task of storytelling; and stories, in order to make sense, also require readers to interpret them. However, in this class, we will study stories in prose, verse, and drama that have been designed—as nonsense literature—to disarticulate and disorder. In a post-Enlightenment context, nonsense holds particular interest as an other to modern conceptions of advancing knowledge and logical mastery. Yet, unlike the post-truth nonsense we encounter these days, literary nonsense identifies its parodic, subversive, negating, and complementary relationship to logic and sense, often emphasizes its sight- and sound-based elements, and provokes its readers to read joyfully, with scrutiny, and reflexively. As we read, we will ask: What do works of nonsense say about literature, its function, and materials? How does nonsense literature challenge processes of sense-making used by both writers and readers? What are the relationships between sense and nonsense? How is each variably understood and defined? We will also gain familiarity with common forms of nonsense-making and contextualize instances of its workings in their respective place and time. Texts may include theory by Sigmund Freud, C.S. Pierce, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze; poetry, prose, and drama by authors writing firmly in the “nonsense genre” such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, as well as others whose work carries features of it like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Langston Hughes, Marie Hall Ets, Shake Keane, and Carl Sandberg, as well as translations of Sukumar Ray, August Stramm, Kurt Schwitters, Andre Breton, Christian Morgenstern, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Daniil Kharms. Students will write three 5-page papers and maintain a reading journal.

Elective

Commonly associated with the kitsch of song-and-dance routines, heavy melodrama, and elaborate staging, popular Hindi cinema, exoticised as Bollywood the world over, has come to represent a singular appeal among global movie industries. However, this broad-stroke understanding of Hindi cinema ignores the mechanics of its filmmaking style, its ability to cut through class and religion, and its influence in our markets of narrative, taste, ideas, and politics. There is much to learn about how popular Hindi cinema has helped proliferate cultural aesthetics, create and further social and national identities, and bridge the separation between the Indian audience and the desi diaspora. In this class, we will trace the development of Hindi Cinema, from its socialist early beginnings, to the commercial potboilers of the 70s, the slick multiplex films of the new millennium, and the political dramas of the twenty twenties. We will watch Hindi films (with subtitles) and read critical literature to better understand gender, class, and caste in popular cinema, how stardom shapes cultural production, and the legacy of Hindi movies in a politically energized India.In addition to watching films and reading assigned literature, students will also produce mini-reviews, essays, and presentations throughout the class on films watched and discovered. Students will be required to share three short essays, one long-form feature, and a video essay as part of a group project. 

Required Texts: Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (Routledge); Jerry Pinto, The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood (Penguin)

Elective

Our explorations in this interdisciplinary workshop will center around the interplay of image and text, particularly in film and video. We will tend to the space between words, between images, the movements from one to another, what’s alive in the cracks. How might poetic devices translate to film? How might film theory inspire our writing? What are the myriad ways text, voice and image can layer and entwine?

This workshop is for students interested in practices that live and migrate between moving images and language art. Together we will consider essay films, cinepoetry, video art, installation and live performance. Class time will include screenings, discussions of texts by artists, poets and film theorists, and open-ended prompts for individual and collaborative experiments. No prior experience is necessary, only a desire to engage deeply with films and writing, experiment with new forms and media, and create in thoughtful community.

Elective

The Beginning Poetry Workshop is an elective course introducing students to the art of poetry writing. The course sequentially addresses major commitments of poetry including form/content, sound, line, voice, image, language(s), tradition/convention, experiment, audience, revision, performance, collection, publication, and distribution. Workshop is the heart of the course, animating the practice, discourse, critique, audience, community, and mentorship vital to poets. Every class will also include close reading, discussion of assigned texts, and writing. We will attend public readings, curate and participate in community readings, and welcome poets to our class, when possible. Work can be developed in a range of styles, traditions, and languages. You will leave this class with a collection of workshopped and revised poems, which you will design, self-publish, and distribute in print and/or digital form.

This course is a prerequisite for LAS E421 - Advanced Poetry Workshop in the Spring.

Elective

While the writing of fiction involves only the writer and the page, the group workshop affords the writer the opportunity to explore, develop and refine his or her work in a small community focused on a single goal. This environment of craft and creativity is particularly critical to the beginning writer. As with any craft, revision is the key to effective storytelling. The revision process will be emphasized. Short fiction by leading writers will be read and discussed; elements of craft will be explored; students will learn to deliver criticism in a supportive, constructive way; but learning by doing will comprise the majority of the class. Writing will begin in the first class, leading to small, peer-driven workshop groups and culminating in a full class workshop at semester's end. Students will produce three stories throughout the semester, all of which will be workshopped and revised. The student's engagement in the course, participation and attendance, will drive the final grades.

Elective

The playwriting workshop is an introduction to the basic principles of scriptwriting for live performance. Students will examine the form as a storytelling technology, an intervention, an act of embodied vandalism. We will collectively ask: How do you spawn an idea? How do you construct dialogue on the page? Through rhythm, intent, given circumstances? How do we shape that dialogue into character? Narrative? Alongside dramatic action, how do we construct the physical and fictive environments for story to occur? This class intends for the writer to celebrate excess and work from a point of textual abundance. Students will write and write, then take on the roles of sculptor, carpenter, and architect in order to leave the class having developed a single play. Functioning as both a seminar and workshop, the course will introduce students to a variety of play forms by writers including: Aleshea Harris, Reza Abdoh, Guillermo Calderon, Tim Crouch, Sophie Treadwell. We will use these plays to build a toolkit of generative strategies and address writing as a physical task that seeks a three-dimensional home.

Elective

A workshop-style course which combines English with a studio project for students with an interest in children's picture books. Students will learn to develop storytelling skills (imagination, language, plot, character, and voice) and illustration techniques (characterization, setting, page, layout) by studying picture books and completing writing and illustration assignments. For their final projects, students will be expected to produce an original text, sketch dummy, and two to four finished pieces of art. The class will also include an overview of publishing procedures and published writers/illustrators will be invited to share their experiences and critique students' work.

This is a co-requisite course. Students must also register for LLUS 3612 - Picture and Word.

Elective

The word liary references the seven volumes of Anais Nin's diaries, which, upon their publication, were denounced by Nin's friends as utter fiction, as the "liary." This course will treat this insult as the basis for a literary genre: the fiction of life itself. We will focus on the production of liaries: fiction using real life - your own. But rather than thinking about lived experience as the raw material of fiction which finds expression through words, we will think about words themselves as the medium through which the fiction of life can be constructed. In this course, we will be fully invested in the materiality of words and the functionality of fiction. We will collide with words as if they were a particularly willful batch of clay, to find different ways in which fictionality is created when a word is imagined to give contour to the slippery moments of living.

Elective

The stuff of myth, lore, literature, and cinema, the tender in parts-fraught in others equation between mothers & daughters has spawned art across centuries. And this writing workshop! Welcome to Mothers & Daughters: It’s a Complicated Narrative, where we will read, analyse, and create writing that dives through the heart of this relationship. We will be reading poems, stories, essays, and graphic narratives, look sideways at cinema and television, and examine scholarly material, to consider how mothers & daughters have committed the relationship to art. We will study how authors explore the sharing of space, gender roles and expectations, body and witnessing, and intergenerational trauma in contemporary literature and undertake writing of parent-child relationships. The class will include analysis by way of reflection essays, writing in poetry, fiction/graphic narrative, nonfiction modeled after our readings, and lively classroom discussion.

Readings may include “Motherhood & Daughterhood” by Adrienne Rich, excerpts from The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Sophocles' Electra, Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, The Carrying by Ada Limon, Ladybird dir. by Greta Gerwig, Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel, and poems by Diane Seuss, Dorothy Chang, Preeti Vangani, Ishle Yi Park, Taylor Byas.

Elective

In this forward-thinking course, we will explore the potential of GPT-4 as a catalyst for extending and enhancing literary consciousness. As artificial intelligence reshapes the landscape of language and literature, we will consider how GPT-4, with its advanced generative capabilities, can serve as a creative collaborator in the writing process, pushing the boundaries of human imagination and storytelling.

Students will engage with a range of texts and theories to better understand the implications of AI in the realm of literary art. We will examine the ethical, aesthetic, and critical considerations of collaborating with AI, while also assessing how GPT-4 can help writers tap into new perspectives, styles, and techniques. Throughout the course, students will work on a series of creative assignments that involve both human and AI-generated content, learning to strike a balance between their own instincts and the generative power of the machine.

By the end of the course, students will not only develop a deeper understanding of the potential for human-AI collaboration in literature but also gain valuable insights into their own creative processes. They will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to navigate and contribute to the ongoing conversation surrounding the role of AI in language art. The course will culminate in a final project, which may be a creative work, critical analysis, or research paper, showcasing the student's engagement with the literary possibilities and implications of the GPT-4 era. Topics to be covered in this course include:

• The history of writing technologies and their impact on human consciousness

• The history and development of GPT-4 and the implications for literature and language art

• Strategies for effectively guiding and refining GPT-4-generated content

• Exploring different genres and forms of writing with AI assistance

• Ethical considerations in human-AI collaboration and authorship

• The future of collaborative writing with advanced AI systems

Elective

A study of the works and influence of J.R.R. Tolkien at the intersection of Postcolonial studies, Classics, and Byzantine and Medieval Studies. Particular attention is paid to themes including: the influence of 19th-century scholarship and its fixation on ideologies of the Volk and the genealogies and wanderings of nations; legacies of empire and colonialism; discourses of Orientalism and antisemitism; medieval nostalgias from the Victorian to the Second Elizabethan Era; the Claims of Philology; source criticism and Tolkien's literary/historical influences; distortions and elisions of Byzantium and other cultures in the discursive construction of Western Civilization; and contemporary concerns including racist backlash to the casting of people of color in recent adaptations.

Elective