Courses

Walk, Think, Create

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. –Friedrich Nietzsche
That's the best thing about walking, the journey itself. –Edward Abbey
Walking, the most common form of human movement, is often equated with intellect, thought, and creativity. In this capstone course, students explore walking’s literary manifestations and theoretical anchors as well as use walking as the basis for their own creative activity and intellectual inquiry. Walking has long been popular for creative and intellectual stimulation. In 18th and 19th-century England, leisurely walks became a cult-like pursuit. Walking developed into an established religion explained by the idea of “getting back to nature,” a response to industrialization. Later, Charles Baudelaire established the notion of the flaneur or urban walker. In the U.S., Thoreau codified the experience of walking as essential to intellectual work. Walking has long been associated with all manner of activity: street walkers, political protest, pilgrimage, and madness and homelessness. In this course, we consider famous walkers, both rural and urban. We investigate walking’s aesthetic appeal, looking at art works made by walking.

Lifewriting, a Graduate Seminar

Lifewriting often brings to mind autobiographies, biographies, and oral history, but in this course we will challenge that idea at every turn. So, while Michel de Montaigne, Thomas DeQuincey, and Virginia Woolf will serve as touchstones, we also look at the lives of places and things in texts like Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge and Steven Connor’s Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things. We consider l’autofiction, a literary form that combines entirely real content and entirely fictional form, where authors and artists insert themselves into their own fictions in search of a self. Any course on lifewriting must address the roles of memory and invention, but we also come at the idea of memory through stories of haunting, such as W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and an audio recording of a Joseph Cornell seance. We take a close look at intellectual autobiographies and ask why we’re so interested in writer’s lives and the curious things that accrue to those lives.

Prose (Fiction & Nonfiction)

Everyone has a story. In this course you’ll learn narrative tools techniques to capture the stories that arise from your life and your imagination. Be prepared to journey to far off places inside and outside the self as we explore the basic components of story: description, characterization, dialogue, plotting, scene, sequel, and more. You’ll spend class time writing, learning craft, and giving feedback on each other’s work. Together we will build a writing community where everyone’s vision is taken seriously and supported.

Creative Nonfiction

This course immerses students it the most fluid genre in creative writing: creative nonfiction. Students will examine a variety of forms including the braided essay, the segmented essay, flash nonfiction, the memoir, the narrative essay, the research essay, the profile, and dozens of examples of experimental nonfiction. Students will read works from Michel Montaigne, who introduced the essay form in the late 1500s, to the many present day practitioners of the form, analyzing the works for craft and technique, and then they will experiment by responding in class and out of class prompts. Students will participate in writer’s workshops and write several creative letters during the semester commenting on their own progress as a writer and reflecting on their writing and revising goals. By the end of the semester, they will hand in a portfolio of revised work along with a final letter that describes their revision process and their vision for themselves as a writer.

Graduate Seminar: The Composed Life

This is an intensive writing course designed to give you skills that will contribute to your success in the scholarly world beyond graduate school. Using a hands-on methodology, the course will engage every stage of the writing process, from concept to draft, revision, polish and submission for both grant/fellowship proposals and scholarly articles. In the first half, we will cover the grant/fellowship writing process in its entirety, including how to design a fundable project and how to match your interests to funding agencies. Your assignment will be to conceptualize a project, draft a proposal and bibliography, solicit letters of recommendation, draw up a budget and write a budget narrative. In the second half, we will navigate the minefield of professional journal publication, addressing questions such as: what does “publishable” mean? What are the differences between seminar papers, conference papers, dissertation chapters, and articles? Your assignment will be to turn a seminar paper you have written for a previous course into a publishable piece. You will learn how to choose the right journal for your work, signpost your article in ways that signal you are entering a specific scholarly conversation, evaluate the “originality” of your contribution, and ensure your article answers the questions all good writing answers: what’s at stake and why should readers care? In addition, you will learn the importance of communicating with program directors (in the case of grants and fellowships) and editors (in the case of journals), how to read and respond to readers’ reports, and what to do next, after your proposal or article is either accepted or rejected. Finally, you will get some practice turning your scholarly work into creative pieces marketable for a larger reading audience.

Creative Writing in the Genres

In this introductory course, student explore three major literary genres: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from a writer’s point of view. They develop their voice, style, and overall craft by studying an array of contemporary writers and by writing your own creative pieces. Students also learn the value of journal keeping. The point of a notebook, said writer John Gregory Dunne, is to jumpstart the mind. This journal is a place to record writing prompts given both in class and as homework, and also a place to jot down ideas and scenes that occur to you whenever the mood strikes. Students will discuss an array of literary works, listen to craft talks, respond to writing prompts, and participate in small group writer’s workshops. Students write several creative letters during the semester commenting on their own progress as a writer and reflecting on a revising goals. By the end of the semester, they will hand in a portfolio of revised work along with a final letter that describes their revision process and vision as a writer.

Honors College

As writers, most of us many voices. Our voices and styles change as we do, evolving or devolving across situations and lifetimes. In this course, you will choose a topic that your are personally and intellectually passionate about and use that topic to engage different audiences for different purposes. You will try on different voices and practice a variety of styles from journaling, social media writing, personal essays, and artistic forms to narration, reflection, analysis, comparison, argumentation, and resesarch writing. The course will cover those styles you’re likely to encounter in your college career while highlighing the value of writing beyond your university experience. You will leave the course knowing which voices and styles work best for you and why, keeping in mind what writer Elena Poniatowska said: “One does not develop a style. One develops onself.” Class readings will be grouped thematically and provide examples and prompts.

Graduate Seminar: The Age of Wonder

This course will consider Romantic literature in the context of travel, exploration and science between the years 1768, the year Captain James Cook embarked on the most important scientific journey of the 18th century, and 1833, the year slavery was banned in the colonies. We will investigate how discourses that have come to be called Romantic arose when and how they did partly in response to scientific manipulations of explorers’ encounters with foreign places and peoples. We will discuss how, in this era, old scientific disciplines, such as astronomy and botany, were transformed, and how new ones, like craniology and comparative anatomy, were brought into being. Scientific disciplines and explorer's accounts pushed literature of the period toward new subjects, forms, and styles. Works as diverse and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Wordsworth’s Excursion, Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Keats’s sonnets, responded to explorers’ and scientists’ latest discoveries. But as much as this was an era of appropriation, it was also an age of curiosity and wonder. In examining the role of exploration and its role in science and literature, we will read a range of sources, from post-colonial critics, to philosophers, feminist theorists, historians of science, ethnographers, popular writers, and literary scholars. The course will be structured to create an environment in which all are encouraged to go beyond the limitations of their previous work.

British Romantic Literature

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” These words were written by William Wordsworth as he witnessed the changes in politics, geography, race relations, gender roles, and industry erupting around him in 1790 England. But the British Romantic period (1780-1850) was also a time when people turned inward. While Jane Austen pioneered a brand new inner voice for her heroines, William Blake created a mythology based on his private demons. Meanwhile, Wordsworth penned an epic about the growth of the individual mind. As we cover the topics of childhood and nature, slavery and exploration, the picturesque and the sublime, haunting and the Gothic, and ruins and rustics, we consider how writers and artists looked outward in order to see inward. Throughout the course, we invoke the concept of “serious noticing.” How can literature and art make us better noticers? How does it make us able to see in less conventional ways? How does it enable us to grasp the vivid and strange around us, to look again at our surroundings and ourselves?

Literature and Culture of the American West

Works of science, literature, biology, history in relation to major issues facing the American West. In this course, we will discuss the question: What is Wilderness? Americans have portrayed the less tamed regions of our land in a variety of ways:  as a hostile place full of evil, as a rugged frontier that shaped individuals into Americans, as a protected sanctuary for endangered species, and as a spiritual center and home to first peoples. We will focus on writings, films, and art that explore the range of definitions and responses to the nation’s wild spaces, especially in the American West.  Students will explore these issues in class discussions, writing assignments, and creative project and create our own definitions of what makes a place “wild.”

Introduction to Literature

We are story animals and we dwell in language. In this course you'll develop a crucial life skill--interpretation--that you already use all the time: listening to music, texting a friend, fighting with your sibling, or watching two neighbors talk on the front porch, you're using your knowledge of plot, and character to make sense of your experience. By increasing this knowledge, this course will make you a better "reader" of your world. But, much of the appeal of literary texts lies in their beauty, humor, and how they make us feel. So, while this course will improve your ability to function in the world, it also will help you to escape from it. As you read, write, and think over the course of the semester, please keep the following objectives in mind: deeper appreciation of language and literature; broader understanding of the humanities; expanded cultural literacy; improved communication and writing skills; effective use of technology.

Reading Now

A freshman course designed around reading and responding to various literary forms of Contemporary literature.  It focuses on terminology, techniques, and critical interpretation of literature written in the past eighteen years (literature written NOW, not before you were born). The course prepares students for further study of literature, and enhances reading comprehension and writing skills. The course will also help students cultivate the art of noticing. Noticing is a mental discipline like any other . Noticing is also the one basic mental practice shared by the sciences and the humanities, and is indispensable to both. We will cultivate the art of noticing things one doesn’t normally see as we examine poems, novels, stories, essays, plays and works of visual art. Evaluation will be based on writing done in and out of class in a journal each student will be required to keep. Journals and papers will be turned in as a portfolio at the end of the class for a cumulative evaluation interview.

Graduate Seminar: Romantic Ecology

This course focuses on literary and historical Romanticism, with an emphasis on concepts of nature and place in nineteenth-century writings, as well as on Romantic Ecology’s relationship to the American Environmental Movement. Drawing upon theoretical, literary, and scientific works from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as contemporary ecological literary criticism, environmental literature, and philosophy, we will ask what makes a piece of writing "environmental literature," and how such literature shapes environmental consciousness and action, and how Romantic perspectives question the human place in the world, the relationship between human perception and the natural world, and our co-existence as human beings in the larger living organism of the earth. Students will write a seminar paper and participate in a writer's workshop. They will develop a "personal ecology project," combining art, science, and literary studies, and they will give one or two presentations.