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

This course identifies and focuses on key practices in contemporary poetry including Spoken Word, Digital Language Arts, translation, and hybrid or twinned publication between page and screen. Spoken Word speaks to the origins of poetry in public performance. Digital Language Arts open up the funfair of color, animation and sound which print closed down, while also seizing back self-publication --and distribution on an unprecedented scale. Multiplicity seems more apt than singularity today. We are more or less obliged to work across media, disciplines, languages, and political boundaries, and to present work in multiple forms. It's a time of both/and rather than either/or. We will discuss and write about a range of contemporary print, digital, and performance works; students will also compose and publish/perform at least one single-authored or collaborative poem. Contemporary Poetry is one of a set of multimodal courses including Sound Poetry, Visual Poetry, Digital Poetics, and Material Poetics, investigating sensory and material poetic traditions in contemporary culture. All courses have creative, critical, research, and performance/publication commitments.

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.

Elective

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

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 reading will open with several theoretical discussions of postcoloniality, then we will continue with novels and poetry from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The spectre of slavery and its repercussions will reverberate in many of the readings. Through individual projects and a final paper that works with at least one of the theoretical texts and a novel or a book of poetry, students can begin to focus on the area in the field that specifically interests them. Writers may include Chinua Achebe, Isabel Allende, Michelle Cliff, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Lamming, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Derek Walcott.

Elective

The Future as History: From the most daring visions of better worlds to the most apocalyptic depictions of dystopia, this course examines the arts of the future. In studying the formation of human, nonhuman, inhuman, and posthuman relationships to the future, you will read brilliant sci-fi & fantasy authors, consider how art constructs futures in response to the demands of the present, and develop a new understanding of the history of time and the time of history. The workload includes two essays. Authors assigned may include Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, and China Mièville.

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

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

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

The Middle Ages were defined by translation, and at the hub of the interlingual and intercultural networks crisscrossing western Eurasia was the Greek-speaking civilization known today as Byzantium. In this class we approach literature of the medieval millennium (roughly the 5th to the 15th century CE) by focusing on the period's truly global best-sellers: works of fiction, mysticism, folktale, romance, and philosophy that were each translated multiple times from one language to another, and that enjoyed massive popularity in each new cultural setting. Instead of being viewed as an incubator of distinct "national" literatures, the medieval period becomes an opportunity to explore literary forms, themes, and universal human concerns that transcended linguistic, religious, and national borders. Texts studied include both works originally written in Greek as well as others that made their way from Persian, Arabic, Syriac, and Georgian into Greek, and then through Greek into other languages of the Near East and Europe. Readings include but are not limited to: Barlaam and Josaphat; The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher ("the Byzantine Sinbad"); the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius; The Alexander Romance; and John Climacus's Ladder of Divine Ascent. Assessments include a short response paper, midterm examination, and a final research paper.

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

Hell is good to think with. In this course we approach epic and related traditions through depictions of the underworld and the afterlife. Beginning with Homer's Odyssey, our exploration of the seven titular hells will take us through mythological, philosophical, and religious territory in the worlds of Ancient Greece, Rome, Medieval Christianity and Islam, and beyond. In addition to Homer and Milton's Paradise Lost, readings will include selections from Plato, Vergil's Aeneid, an anonymous Byzantine satire, the Book of Muhammad's Ladder, and Dante's Inferno, and will tackle themes of fate, justice, and divine providence, as well as the various...afterlives of these literary traditions themselves. All readings in English translation; no previous experience required. 

Elective