An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year students are pre-registered for this course by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming Transfer students, along with continuing Sophomore, Junior, and Senior undergraduates, enroll in their designated section(s) through Workday.

Major Requirement | BFA

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year students are pre-registered for this course by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming Transfer students, along with continuing Sophomore, Junior, and Senior undergraduates, enroll in their designated section(s) through Workday.

Major Requirement | BFA

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year students are pre-registered for this course by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming Transfer students, along with continuing Sophomore, Junior, and Senior undergraduates, enroll in their designated section(s) through Workday.

Major Requirement | BFA

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year students are pre-registered for this course by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming Transfer students, along with continuing Sophomore, Junior, and Senior undergraduates, enroll in their designated section(s) through Workday.

Major Requirement | BFA

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year students are pre-registered for this course by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming Transfer students, along with continuing Sophomore, Junior, and Senior undergraduates, enroll in their designated section(s) through Workday.

Major Requirement | BFA

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

First-year students are pre-registered for this course by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming Transfer students, along with continuing Sophomore, Junior, and Senior undergraduates, enroll in their designated section(s) through Workday.

Major Requirement | BFA

Epic narratives seem antagonistically devoted to their predecessors in the genre and to the cultural mythologies of their own times. Students in this course will read a series of epics written from antiquity to the present and consider as well the genre's incursions into film. Texts might include: Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, and Walcott's Omeros. There will be midterm and final examinations, an independently researched essay, and regular short writing assignments.

Elective

The course title 21st Century Poetry bristles with question marks, even if they are invisible: 21st Century Poetry where? 21st Century Poetry in what languages? 21st Century Poetry in 2026? Isn’t that too soon? Why not just teach Contemporary Poetry? We’re a quarter-century in—enough to investigate what might be distinctive about 21st century poetry. And enough distance for perspective on poetry of the previous century.

The 20th century came in with a roar, at least as reflected in European and Anglophone poetry— Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism. The 21st century—a new millennium as well as a new century—came with a sense of dread: Y2K, 9/11, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crash. How did poetry respond?

Certain subjects remain constant: war, death, nature, joy. Certain movements bridge both centuries: Slam, Spoken Word, electronic literature. And poetry remains constant in being bound always to both tradition and innovation. Even the 20th century slogan “Make It New” has roots in 12th century neo-Confucian scholarship and possibly the Shang Dynasty (second millennium BCE). And Anne Carson’s 21st century “book” Nox is an epic unfolding inside a poem by Catullus (c.84-c.54 BCE).

But much has changed. In this course we will study collections, movements, media, archives, institutions, disciplinary reach, business, economics, technology, publications, priorities, practices, and poetics particular to 21st century poetry in English or translation. Some practitioners bridge both centuries. Some were born in the 21st. Texts may include Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), David Jhave Johnson’s Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications (2016), Harryette Mullen’s Regaining Unconsciousness (2025), a contemporary anthology, and essays by Anne Carson.

There will be a midterm and final. Students will also undertake a research project and do exercises related to the thinking and writing conditions of 19th, 20th, and 21st century poetry, which may result in poems.

Elective

 

In this class, we will explore the future of literature and language art made with and about computers. We investigate the real danger and the revolutionary power of data, software, social media, memes, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence and we will cultivate new ways of relating to digital technology. We will examine the genealogy of writing as a technology in order to gain a better understanding of current and future possibilities. What is the role of the artist in computer-generated artwork? How will the co-evolution of human and machine affect the future of language art? In this course, we will discuss the ethical, aesthetic, and critical dimensions of artificial intelligence and machine learning in relation to the production of new forms of language art. In this class, we examine how artists can use computers as a tool or a collaborator to create the language art of the future. Students will learn to think analytically critically about computer mediated language art and and learn to articulate their process and goals for their work. Students should expect weekly readings, writing and creative assignments that will nourish a final project.

Elective

In this class, we will explore the future of literature and language art made with and about computers. We investigate the real danger and the revolutionary power of data, software, social media, memes, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence and we will cultivate new ways of relating to digital technology. We will examine the genealogy of writing as a technology in order to gain a better understanding of current and future possibilities. What is the role of the artist in computer-generated artwork? How will the co-evolution of human and machine affect the future of language art? In this course, we will discuss the ethical, aesthetic, and critical dimensions of artificial intelligence and machine learning in relation to the production of new forms of language art. In this class, we examine how artists can use computers as a tool or a collaborator to create the language art of the future. Students will learn to think analytically critically about computer mediated language art and and learn to articulate their process and goals for their work. Students should expect weekly readings, writing and creative assignments that will nourish a final project.

Elective

We are all familiar with the moral of the story that comes at the end of a fairy tale. Charles Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood cautions unmarried young ladies not to let "wolves" into their beds, while the Grimm's "Little Red Cap" chastises girls for not listening closely to their mothers. Traditional versions of these tales are conduct manuals, cautionary tales, and homemaking primers for young girls, but they also address the underlying uncertainties associated with growing up and entering adulthood. Over the years, the fairy tale has been retold or reimagined to reflect shifting gender norms, and changing cultural anxieties around the transition to adulthood. Most recently, adaptations on the large and small screens have asked us to consider the motivations of the fairy tale's most notorious female villains in the context of traditional gender roles such as wife and mother.

This course will examine tellings and retellings of four classic fairy tales: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard. We will read and watch classic versions, contemporary retellings, and film and television adaptations of these texts that both challenge and reinforce ideas of gender normativity, contextualized by readings in feminist theory, gender studies, and psychoanalytic theory. We will also put these western tales in conversation with other similar literary texts and folk tales from around the world, and yes, we will talk about Disney.

Elective

Students will emerge from this class with a thorough overview of Woolf's life, world, and life's work. The heart of the course will be our study of Virginia Woolf's major novels: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. However, our reading list will also include short stories, essays, and selections from her published letters and diaries. In particular, students can expect to become skilled readers of the stream of consciousness style of narration that characterizes Woolf's fiction and to engage with themes that run through much of her writing such as the creative process, modern subjectivity, sexuality, gender, domestic space, and war. Open to sophomores and above.

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

A subculture characterized as part youth rebellion, part artistic statement, punk has lingered and transmogrified in popular discourse since its heyday in the 1970s. In this class we'll delve into the history of social, musical, and aesthetic manifestations of punk in the U.S. and UK and investigate the connections between punk's DIY, anti-authoritarian ethos and the politics of the late-twentieth century. We'll embrace a cultural studies framework to examine punk production in its various material and discursive forms-- music, fashion, film, manifestos, revolutions, etc. Throughout, we'll turn a critical eye towards investigating expectations and performances of gender, race, and class in a range of punk communities (i.e. Queercore, Riot Grrl, etc). Our discussions and your writing will be informed by scholarly books and articles, narrative accounts of punk, film screenings, and a lot of loud music.

Elective

Horror stories are a literary & artistic expression of anxiety. It's not odd at all that we still write about ghosts when we're busy churning up & examining the crimes of our ancestors, or that we write contagion stories (zombies!) during a pandemic, or apocalyptic horror as we face the effects of climate change. Horror stories can be-as is true of any literature-artful, profound, entertaining, and -as Ezra Pound would say-news. We'll read a selection of stories-fundamental classics, lesser-known but influential stories, and contemporary attempts-to identify genre characteristics and to locate elements that define the genre's power. We'll also read works written about horror by horror authors and test their claims. To deepen our understanding of the genre even further-in addition to essays & exams-students will have the option to try their hand at writing an original horror story.

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

To be a lesbian, according to Monique Wittig, seems the simplest and most complex mode of desiring: she who was interested in 'only' half of the population and had a violent desire for that half. In a world overcrowded by the voices and bodies of men, how does a lesbian carve out physical and imaginative space to let her desires free? This course will explore how this question has been addressed by daring, renegade lesbian writers who have used the medium of textual narrative to produce both history and future. Rather than reading these novels as historical document, sociological artifact, or even personal testaments, we will digest them as performance, wish-fulfillment, blueprint for a world in which love and sex between women reign.

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 considers the fiction of the Japanese British Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro in a world literary context. Based on a selection of his short stories and novels we will discuss, among other things, the different critical perspectives relevant to reading globally in terms of which both the author and his work have often been read, including the manner in which putative signs of Englishness and "Japaneseness" have been attributed especially to his early texts. At the same time, we will consider the intriguing ways in which the author's fiction comments implicitly on its own reading as well as ways of reading world literature. The course also has a film component in that we will view and discuss a film adaptation of one of Ishiguro's novels as well as two other relevant films as a basis for examining how the author's adaptive use of certain narrative techniques has helped shape his style and fictional worlds. In this way, the course engages questions related to ethics, knowledge, cultural translation, narrative and cultural representation, as well as interpretation and critique central to both Ishiguro's fiction and the reading of world literature.

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