This course will introduce you to the full range of Shakespeare's plays, including his comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances. We will pay attention to both dramatic language and historical context in order to read and analyze the plays with as much comprehension and pleasure as possible. Course requirements: attendance, two exams, and two five-page papers. Applicable English Clusters: Great Books, Great Authors [H1ENG010]; Plays, Playwrights, and Theater[H1ENG011]

This course introduces students to some of the most significant literature from the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern literary periods. Beginning with the outbreak of the French Revolution and ending with World War I, the years covered by this course represent a time of dramatic political, economic, and cultural change. The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of industrialism, rapid imperialist expansion, religious crisis, increasing democracy, and shifts in gender and class identity. In exploring this tumultuous time period, the course will focus on an array of novelists, poets, and essayists who will serve as touchstones for the key political, intellectual, and aesthetic problems of their times (e.g. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Dickens, G. Eliot, Browning, J.S. Mill, Arnold, Ruskin, Yeats, and Woolf). Students will not only gain a greater appreciation for individual authors, but they will also be able to situate them within a larger framework of ideas and historical currents. Applicable English Clusters: Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008]; Great Books, Great Authors [H1ENG010]

Survey of American literature in English from its origins in colonial British America to the late-nineteenth-century U.S. We begin with the fascinating diversity of colonial writing (explorers' accounts, sermons, captivity narratives, religious poetry) and end with the first canonical works of "classic American literature" (prose narratives, novels, lyrics) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Alongside this process of literary development, British America is gradually becoming unified around a new national identity—yet, at the same time, constantly threatening to fracture under internal and external pressures. Our focus will be on the literary side of the story, but we'll remain mindful of its relationships to that larger history. Authors will likely include John Winthrop, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Phillis Wheatley, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. Applicable English Cluster: American and African American Studies [H1ENG006]

A "how to" approach to media studies, introducing students to central concepts in the field such as medium specificity, medium plurality, remediation, mediation, media, and communication; to what it means to study the major media of modernity, including print and writing, film and photography, technologies of sound reproduction, television, digital media, video games, and data visualization; to the modes and methods that scholars and critics use in practicing media studies; and how the moment of the digital "revolution" today is raising pressing questions about the genres, media, and styles of thought we both do and should pursue, including within the university. In the course of the semester, you will come into contact with some of the most interesting and influential thinkers and producers of media, including Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Rosalind Krauss, Lisa Gitelman, Theodor Adorno, Nick Montfort, Johanna Drucker, William Kentridge, Pixar, Alexander Gardner, Henry James, Madonna, and Joss Whedon. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

This class provides an introduction to the writing of poetry and fiction. Students will experiment with different poetic and literary forms, and will engage in writing exercises to develop and refine their use of images, characters, and descriptive language. We will begin by studying the basic components of poetry and the short story. The course will conclude with a workshop in which every student will present material to be reviewed by the entire class. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing [H1ENG015]

Poetry writing and reading workshop introducing students to various elements of craft include image, metaphor, line, syntax, meter, and rhyme. Open by permission only. To apply, email 3-5 poems and a list of previous creative writing courses, if any, to the instructor. Applicable English Clusters: Poems, Poetry, and Poetics [H1ENG012]; Creative Writing [H1ENG015]

Credit 2 hours. A course devoted to the understanding and execution of dramatic writing that is unique to the theater. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Creative Writing [H1ENG015]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

The study and practice of longer, more complicated newspaper and magazine stories, such as investigations and profiles. Emphasis will be on the consideration of the various techniques of non-fiction writing. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

Study of newspaper and online editing with emphasis on copy editing; news decision-making; First Amendment issues; and libel and ethics. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

Basic public speaking is the focus of this course. Emphasis is placed on researching speeches, using appropriate language and delivery, and listening critically to oral presentations. ENG 134 contains two quizzes, a final exam, and four speeches to be given by the student. The speeches include a tribute, persuasive, explanatory, and problem-solving address. The course utilizes instructor Curt Smith's experience as a former White House presidential speechwriter. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

The purpose of this course is to give students an appreciation for and knowledge of critical thinking and reasoned decision-making through argumentation. Students will research both sides of a topic, write argument briefs, and participate in formal and informal debates. Students will also be exposed to the major paradigms used in judging debates. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

Students will build their knowledge of debate theory and practice through varsity level intercollegiate competition and research. Applicable English Clusters: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

This course introduces the basic aesthetic and technical elements of video production. Emphasis is on the creative use and understanding of the video medium while learning to use the video camera, video editing processes and the fundamental procedures of planning video projects. Video techniques will be studied through screenings, group discussions, readings, practice sessions, and presentations of original video projects made during the course.

Introductory course to the theories, methods, and practice of set construction, power tools, rigging, stage lighting, drafting, sound, and scene painting. Lab participation in theater program productions required. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

Training in the techniques by which individual actors set forth the characters recorded in dramatic texts. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

This is an introductory course on voice and movement for the actor.

English is a huge banquet of words. Its history is one of invasions and adaptations. Brought to Britain by Germanic tribes in the 5th century, it was matured by violent and peaceful contact with other peoples and ideas. Few other languages are so accepting of neologism as English, so humongous in vocabulary, so malleable of construction. We'll peruse texts from Old, Middle, and Modern English and watch it grow from a Teutonic tongue to the powerful, ductile, and eclectic instrument it is today, spreading to other continents, colonizing, absorbing, and irritating. We'll read texts about linguistic Angst and jouissance by Alfred the Great, Aelfric, Robert of Gloucester, Chaucer, Caxton, Mulcaster, Shakespeare, Locke, Swift, Johnson, Webster, Orwell, and others who praised or blamed our shifty English. Finally, we'll grok urban dialects, vernaculars, slang, lolcat, texting, propriety, and proscription. Is it "based on" or "based off of"? Does it matter? Is English in decline or poised on a new horizon? lol! C U:) Applicable English Cluster: Medieval Studies [H1ENG007]

Chaucer's reputation as "Father of English Literature," though deserved, sometimes obscures the fact that he is perhaps the funniest (lol) writer in our language. He is also among the subtlest, most outrageous, most intellectually curious, most book-learned, and most experimental of authors. Writing at a moment when there was virtually no "serious" poetic tradition in English (hence the paternity claim), Chaucer more or less invented vernacular writing (and style) as a category. He did this in part by placing the writer "Geffrey"—a version of himself—at the heart of many of his fictions, and this entirely likeable, intensely intimate, but totally elusive Chaucerian personality contributes greatly to the pleasure and challenge of reading. His portrayal of sexual identities and relations have unsettled the expectations of twenty generations of readers. Chaucer's language (Middle English) is unfamiliar, and initially requires conscious effort for understanding; it is also one of the most distinctive and direct versions of English that we have, melodious, abrupt, plangent, and guttural by turns, memorable in itself and in the ways it forces us to pay attention to the language we now speak. We will read Troilus and Criseyde (one of the two or three greatest poems in English), a selection from The Canterbury Tales, and a selection of shorter narrative poems. Students will have a chance to read and recite medieval English, and will write two short papers or reports (2-3 pages each), and a longer final paper; there will be a final exam. Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. Applicable English Clusters: Medieval Studies [H1ENG007]; Great Books, Great Authors [H1ENG010].

This course will take up the richly varied literature of the English Renaissance, especially its poetry. Readings will range from love sonnets to heroic dramas, from social satires to religious hymns, from lyric comedies to mad-songs. The poetry of this period sends deep roots into classical and biblical traditions, even as it becomes increasingly exploratory, combining intricate verbal wit, intellectual play, and strength of dramatic voice. Readings will include the poetry of John Skelton, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Donne. We'll also be looking at Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and prose by Sidney, Donne, and Francis Bacon.

In 1660 the Puritans lost control of England; the monarchy was restored, and, after an eighteen-year ban on theater, the English playhouses reopened (with women acting on stage for the first time ever). Comedy flourished in particular, exploring with unparalleled wit such issues as changing gender roles, the institutions of courtship and marriage, and relations between children and parents. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the object of humor was often the theatre itself: playwrights pushed the limits of traditional genres such as the Heroic Tragedy, and introduced elements of farce, opera, and political satire, as well as reflections of middle-class life. This course will examine a variety of plays, while also considering questions of social context, theory and performance. Authors include Behn, Centilivre, Congreve, Dryden, Etherege, Fielding, Gay, Goldsmith, Steele, and Sheridan. Applicable English Cluster: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]

Race-based slavery in America ended over a century ago, but our nation continues to grapple with the legacies of "the peculiar institution." For example, slavery has haunted the literary imaginations of African-American writers over the last century. This course surveys a range of African-American novels in order to analyze the ways in which these texts both portray and represent slavery's lasting effects on American culture, society, and politics. The course also analyzes these novels' connections to—and discontinuities with—slave narratives and postmodernism. Readings include works by Steven Barnes, Arna Bontemps, Octavia Butler, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Margaret Walker, and more. Students will be evaluated on class participation, an in-class presentation, weekly reading responses, and two formal papers. Applicable English Clusters: Literature and Cultural Identity [H1ENG001]; American and African American Studies [H1ENG006]

In this class we will read widely in the writings by these three crucial figures in American nineteenth-century literature. We will relate their work to their cultural and historical moment, and also consider how they become founding figures both in an American literary and poetic tradition and also in the transatlantic development of modernism. Applicable English Cluster: American and African American Studies [H1ENG006]

When the now-classic novels of writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence were published in the first part of the twentieth century, readers were shocked by both their style and content. In the face of revolutionary upheavals in social and political life and in the understanding of human psychology and personal relationships, these writers proclaimed the end of fiction as we know it. Looking back at these novels from our vantage in the twenty-first century, we will reassess what made these works appear so shocking. Pairing earlier twentieth-century novels with novels from the second half of the century, we will also look at the way later writers revised the idea of modern consciousness and the fiction appropriate to it and at the ways they responded to the post-WWII remapping of the British Empire and to the construction of postmodern and postcolonial identities. Applicable English Clusters: Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008]; Novels [H1ENG009]

This literature course will consider both American and international poetry written from 1945 to present. An emphasis will be placed on thinking about poets as translators and about how American poets and readers have thought about poetry translated into English. Applicable English Clusters: Poems, Poetry, and Poetics [H1ENG012]; Creative Writing [H1ENG015]

This course introduces students to several different twentieth-century approaches to literary analysis: from New Criticism to Formalism to Structuralism to Deconstruction to New Historicism to feminist and postcolonial theory, various theoretical movements have asked fundamental questions about (and offered provisional hypotheses on) the nature of signification, interpretation, truth, and knowledge. Not just methods for reading, these approaches challenge us to rethink the relationship between representation and reality, language and life. Students will gain familiarity with all of the major schools of literary theory and engage with them critically through writing assignments and exams.

Dante's Comedy has never ceased to inspire the visual arts, music, theater, cinema, and other manifestations of popular culture. Western art is a repository of artistic representations of biblical and classical traditions arguably pertinent to his text. The Comedy evokes the historical and geographic reality of Dante's world still there to be interrogated. Privileging the visual arts and the illustrations of the poem, students participating in this experimental workshop assess the scope of this visual "territory"; develop analogical thinking by using the Comedy as a source for associations of ideas and imaginative comparisons; find art images in books, museums, and internet, and research on artist, time period, and style; practice analytic thinking by arguing for the significance of images in themselves and in relation to Dante's text; contribute original entries to the Commedia Portal, a student-designed digital companion to the Comedy. Prerequisites: one UR Dante course or permission of instructor.

This course is devoted to an intensive reading of the greatest work of Chinese prose fiction, the eighteenth-century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng). We will pay close attention to the novel's extended reflection on the relations between illusion, reality, and fabrication; its subversion of historical narrative; its construction of architectural and "natural" spaces; its intense obsession with the sensuousness of material culture; and its powerful narration of desire in early modern China. No background in Chinese literature, culture, or language assumed. All readings in English.

The connection between word and image is foundational to the study of both art and literature. Whether the interaction is one of collaboration or hostility, study of the relationship between verbal and visual languages reveals their mutual interdependence on a multiplicity of levels. From consideration of the so-called "sister arts" of painting and poetry and the role of titles, captions, and illustrations to the interaction of the verbal and the visual in graphic novels and ekphrastic criticism, word and image cannot be separated. This course will address a selection of readings and topics designed to introduce the student to a broad range of themes and issues within word and image studies.

Memory has always been central to the work of poetry, whether in poems that celebrate past heroism and past poetry, or in poems that mourn the dead. But the operations of a more private, personal memory, and how this shapes our inner lives and sense of the world, becomes particularly important in modern poetry after Romanticism. Poetry in this tradition—which will be the focus of this class—often dwells on the particulars of childhood, its pains and pleasures, what of childhood vanishes or survives in other forms. This poetry also probes the seductions and disguises of memory, and its collaborations with imagination; it studies the collisions of personal and collective memory. It takes up things forgotten, even repressed, as well as remembered. Readings will include poetry by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and W. S. Merwin, as well as prose by Saint Augustine, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, and Vladimir Nabokov.

What can fiction tell us about the action of imagination? Who imagines what in the formative novels and stories of the twentieth century? What can we learn from imaginative literature about the idiosyncratic workings of the mind, the expressive potential of language, the relevance of the unreal? These are some of the questions we'll ask in this exploration of modern and contemporary international fiction. As we read fiction written in English and in translation, we'll pay close attention to issues of cultural transmission and influence. Authors include Beckett, Kafka, Borges, Woolf, Faulkner, Dinesen, Garcia Marquez, Calvino, and Sebald.

This 4-credit intersession course will be conducted in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, from December 29, 2011, through January 14, 2012. We will have a full range of theater experiences in venues as diverse as theater-in-the-round at the Orange Tree to the multiple stages of the National Theatre, from intimate fringe productions and experimental theater to the extravaganzas of West End. See the Theater in England website for descriptions of the program and syllabuses from the past 20 years. This year we will see the best of what is available (twenty or so plays). We will have seminar discussions of the productions which you will then write about in your journals. The fee for the course is $2,750, which includes tuition, tickets to all plays you see, 17 nights housing at the Harlingford Hotel, and transportation to Stratford-upon-Avon and return. The fee does not include transportation to London and back from the U.S. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

The tangible object at the origin of the onscreen image: the social, cultural and historical value of motion pictures and national film cinemas through an understanding of "Film" as an organic object.

This course examines and participates in making machinima (machine/cinema). Its defining element is that it NOT shoot "real world" objects but use 3D immersive worlds for its imagery in motion, using software to film in "real time." That definition blurs when we consider iClone, Maya, and other capture methods. Halo, Half-Life, WoW, the Sims, and Second Life are popular environments for machinima. Changing as we speak, it is generically ambiguous: does it imitate cinema or is it creating something else? This course examines a genre poised between old and new techniques, its history and applications, and ultimately focuses on the Second Life art machinima, which adapts for its stories the cutting-edge 3D art being created in a permissive virtual world—surreal environments meant to be experienced first by its immersed users ("avatars"). We will open accounts in Second Life, explore its art, make some machinima, analyze the work of experts, and talk about film theory and what virtually happened to us. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

The course will deal with a selection of American films from the richest and possibly most important decade in the history of Hollywood. We will screen and discuss a variety of genres, from horror to documentary, concentrating on the films themselves, their place in the history of cinema, their relevance to social, political, and cultural issues. Supplementary reading will include texts on the period and on films of the time. Two or three papers will be required, along with a final examination. Possible films include King Kong, Frankenstein, Our Daily Bread, Public Enemy, Golddiggers of 1933, Dinner at Eight, etc. Applicable English Clusters: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]; Modern and Contemporary Literature [H1ENG008].

This course will survey the career of Jean-Luc Godard from Breathless (1959) to In Praise of Love (2001). Through close analysis of his films and a range of critical responses we will explore numerous issues that Godard places before us as spectators and critics. While Godard is perhaps most famous, even notorious, for his commitment to politically engaged cinema, his interests in history and aesthetics remain central across this diverse corpus. Although he is known for his experiments in style and medium, he also remains committed to traditional film history and art history. We will explore the complex relationships his films establish between image and word, between sound and image, between stillness and motion. Our analyses will examine the central importance of literature and art history, as well as of popular culture, to the individual films and the corpus as a whole.

This course combines a survey of major historical movements and styles in documentary film with an examination of more recent trends and challenges to the tradition. So, in addition to studying the expository political documentary, ethnographic film, and the direct cinema and cinéma vérité movements, we will explore forms including reality TV, mock documentary, and autobiographical film. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

Recently the large-scale dissemination of erotic and pornographic literature and film has begun to affect the majority of the population in the West. There are two main issues in the course: 1) the history of the changing genres of erotica and the social changes taking place because of its wide dissemination; and 2) the proposition that if societies were different little harm and much good would come from the inclusion of erotica in people's reading and viewing habits: erotic materials, by removing sex from the realm of the forbidden and viewing it as a species of everyday life, can contribute to the education of both sexes and people of all sexual tastes and preferences. Readings in the course will concentrate on classical, early modern, enlightenment, and contemporary erotica, with attention to the contemporary debates about pornography begun by the activism of MacKinnon and Dworkin. Of particular interest in this critique is the claim that erotic materials encourage the practice of violence against women and children, and help to promote a culture dependent on the use of force and violence. The course reviews the current debate on pornography and sexually explicit language as a context for viewing the history of the more familiar erotic materials from classical times, to the Renaissance and eighteenth century, to D. H. Lawrence, and Erica Jong. Applicable English Clusters: Gender and Writing [H1ENG002]; Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

Prominent media scholars have argued that cinema has in the past 30 years shifted from being a photographic medium to being an animated one, largely as a result of the digital turn (or what Lev Manovich calls "the computerization of culture"). Whether you agree with this historical argument, it is impossible to deny that animation has achieved an aesthetic foothold in the contemporary period, enjoyed by popular audiences and praised by elite critics alike. Evidence of this foothold can be found not only in the meteoric rise of Pixar, but also in the extensive use of CGI in films that can only be quaintly thought of as "live action" anymore. In this class, we will seek to understand the aesthetic specificity and cultural significance of animation today by situating it among the arts—visual, literary, and graphic—more broadly. By doing so, we will ask whether we can conceptualize heterogeneous practices of animation using the modernist notion of "medium specificity," or whether we need a more plural notion of what a medium is in order to understand animation now as it takes form among the arts. We will in addition investigate whether an aesthetics of animation has a politics, as the materials we will be exploring together address issues of history, time, and compulsion; gender, race, and ethnicity; war, technology, and commodification; the body and its pyrotechnic, polymorphous potential; and the relationship of humans to the natural and animal worlds. While we will draw on historical and archival animation (some it available through the resources of the Eastman House), contemporary materials are likely to include: the use of silhouettes in contemporary art (Kara Walker) and film (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One); Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (text and film); South African film artist William Kentridge's "drawings for projection" in conjunction with novels by Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee; superhero texts such as the X-Men films, their comic book sources (especially The Dark Phoenix Saga), Pixar's The Incredibles, and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay; Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox and Wes Anderson's stunning adaptation of the illustrated children's novel; autobiographical engagements with the situation of the Middle East such as the animated documentary Waltzing with Bashir and Joe Sacco's graphic narrative Palestine; and graphic engagements with World War II such as Art Spiegelman's Maus and Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660. Applicable English Clusters: Gender and Writing [H1ENG002]; Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

This course investigates technical theater beyond the realms of Eng 170/171 (Technical Theater). It focuses on work related to the scenic design and technical production of the semester's Theater Program productions. Working in small seminars and one-on-one tutorials, the instructor will assist students in learning more in the chosen technical areas and about problem-solving scenic and technical questions raised by the set/s being built. Course work will consist of supervisory responsibilities, one major, and several smaller research projects. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

An introduction to the three-act film structure. Students will read and view numerous screenplays and films, and develop their own film treatment into a full-length script. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing [H1ENG015]

What makes David Sedaris funny? How about the likes of Tina Fey, Mark Twain, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Swift, Nora Ephron, Lord Byron, Wanda Sykes, Dave Barry, Dave Chappelle, and The Onion? In this course we'll seek inspiration from some of the funniest people alive (and dead) while writing our own humor pieces. Students will have a chance to explore a variety of genres, from essays to memoirs to song parodies—and to share work by their own favorite humorists with the class.

Presidential Rhetoric, taught by former presidential speechwriter Curt Smith, helps students critically examine the public rhetoric and themes of the modern American presidency. Particular attention will be given to the symbolic nature of the office, focusing on the ability of twentieth-century presidents to communicate via a variety of forums, including the press conference, inaugural and acceptance speeches, political speech, and prime-time television address. Smith will draw on many of his experiences in Washington and with ESPN/ABC Television to link the most powerful office in the world and today's dominant medium. Applicable English Cluster: Media, Culture, and Communication [H1ENG016]

The focus of World Literature in Translation is to examine what makes a translation "successful" as a translation. By reading a series of recently translated works (some contemporary, some retranslations of modern classics), and by talking with translators, we will have the opportunity to discuss both specific and general issues that come up while translating a given text. Young translators will be exposed to a lot of practical advice throughout this class, helping to refine their approach to their own translations, and will expand their understanding of various practices and possibilities for the art and craft of literary translation.

Set building, prop and costume development, and publicity for current production. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

For actors and stage managers working on the current production. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

For actors and stage managers working on the current production. Applicable English Clusters: Plays, Playwrights, and Theater [H1ENG011]; Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

Students in Stage Management I and/or II (fall/spring) will get an in-depth introduction to and immersion in stage managing a theatrical production. In addition to classwork covering all areas of management skills, safety procedures, technical knowledge, and paperwork, students will be expected to serve as an assistant stage manager or production stage manager on one (or both) Theater Program productions in their registered semester. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

This is an independently designed course, focusing on specific theater or theater-related projects, and demanding significant skill application or acquisition, independent and self-motivated research, including advanced written work, if appropriate. Topics may include elements of theater related to production, management, and/or design. Applicable English Cluster: Theater Production and Performance [H1ENG018]

This is a workshop for students who have completed ENG 121 or have some experience writing fiction on their own and are ready to concentrate on more ambitious projects. We'll read short stories by contemporary writers along with fiction by the students in the workshop, and we'll discuss ways writers can sharpen the conversation between text and reader. We'll also consider editing and reviewing techniques. Students will be expected to write and revise three original stories. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing [H1ENG015]

An advanced creative writing workshop in poetry. Students' poems will be discussed weekly. Creative writing assignments will be combined with brief essay responses to a selection of contemporary poetry books. A special emphasis on translation will also be included. Applicable English Cluster: Creative Writing [H1ENG015]

RESEARCH SEMINAR. This seminar stipulates the following issues as underlying problems of Western civilization: pederasty, slavery, censorship, heresy, witch-hunting, androcentrism and misogyny, violence against children, and war. It studies literary treatments of these issues as well as some nonliterary texts. Emphasis is on how literature (and our responses to it) dealing with these problems reaches forms of understanding that are distinct from what is given by critical and historical accounts. The seminar addresses how the different problems overlap and continue in contemporary societies. We will ask how they are rationalized and treated as normal or as strange aberrations, though rarely as practices that constitute civilization. The seminar proceeds in two phases. The first part, of seven or eight weeks, articulates the themes. Modern readings come from Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, Kafka, Morrison, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, and Freud's commentaries on the problems of civilization. Classical readings will likely include: Plato's Symposium and Republic, Aristotle's biology, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. The second part of the course asks members to present research proposals related to one or more of the stipulated problems. Readings and discussions in this part of the course are determined by the students' research projects.

This course will examine the ways in which writers and artists in the centuries on both sides of 1492 imagined the "contact zone," that cultural ground on which Same and Other meet. We will begin with medieval authors' attempts to define "Europe" against its others. The travels and conquests of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan and India and Gerald of Wales' account of Ireland will set the initial extremities of East and West. The Spanish Jew Benjamin of Tudela, the Venetian Christian Marco Polo's Asia, and the African Muslim Ibn Battuta will provide fact checks for the most popular of all voyage accounts, Mandeville's Travels. We will then examine the import and impact of the numerous printed travels, including those by Columbus and Vespucci to the West, and Vasco da Gama and others to the "East" Indies, with particular attention to the first book in English to name America. Finally we will look at both sober and celebratory accounts of globalization in Las Casas' Destruction of the Indies and Camoens' Lusiads, alongside other "first accounts" in English. Throughout the semester we will also study an extensive archive of images, manuscript illuminations, paintings, woodcuts, broad sheets, pamphlets, charts, and maps that created and enforced a vivid presence for non-Europeans within European consciousness. The course will require a half dozen short response papers during the semester, and a final longer research or analysis essay.

We will read and discuss a rich sampling of the works of Ernest Hemingway, including the short stories, several novels, and some journalism and memoirs. We will also examine the author's life, his relationship to modernism, and his impact on American and world literature.

This course will provide an opportunity to sample an exciting body of contemporary literature, some written by authors already widely acclaimed at the time they received the Nobel Prize and some by writers suddenly catapulted into fame and international recognition. While a central focus of the course will be the reading and discussion of the literature itself, we will also consider how receipt of the prize changed the writers' lives and literary reputations. Since its inception, moreover, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been a site of controversy and debate over aesthetics and politics, and over how literature speaks to both local and global audiences. In the U.S., where less than 5% of the literature published each year is literature in translation, Nobel prize-winning literature (when not originally written in English) is often the only modern literature Americans read in translation. In reading this literature, then, we will consider the question of translation, and the role of the Nobel Prize in creating and promoting an international literature. We will also consider the special challenges this literature poses for us as readers. While the awarding of the prize has often been a source of national pride for the writer's home country, some winners have been censured at home and the criteria for the prize heatedly questioned. Finally, then, we will consider how the prize is awarded, and we will look at some of the particular controversies and debates it has generated.

Two masters of narration, searching to perfect the prose narrative form, yet working different corners of the American canon. Though markedly different in their uses of character, plot, and setting, their works are even more fascinating in juxtaposition, thanks to thematic similarities (travel, confidence men, and the dramas of masculine development) and stylistic ones (the use of comic modes, experiments with narrative irony, instability, and unreliability). And let's face it: a rare treat to spend a semester reading these books. Readings may include, by Melville: Typee (1846); Moby-Dick (1851); The Confidence-Man (1857); "Bartleby the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," and other selections from The Piazza Tales (1856); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924) [1891]. By Twain: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867); The Innocents Abroad (1869); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).

Students taking the PR Internship class help create all publicity materials for events in Todd Theatre or events sponsored by the Theater Program, including drafting press releases, planning marketing campaigns, etc. They distribute publicity materials both on and off campus. Finally, PR Interns staff the box office during productions, interacting with the public and the theater personnel. The PR Internship is an excellent way to get a hands-on introduction to all the basic elements of public relations and marketing. You'll also interact with artists, directors, journalists, and public relations professionals as part of the internship. Interns should have good writing skills and be willing to work creatively. Skills in graphic design are a plus.

Special application required and/or instructor's permission required.