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In this class, we will begin by investigating sound, music, image, and form in poetry and how these poetic elements are presented in fiction. From fiction, we will study narrative, character, plot, and setting. Finally, we will progress towards personal nonfiction, fusing the elements of our poetry and fiction investigations. We will read classical and contemporary texts from diverse authors and voices, while also crafting individualized creative work. Students are expected to also write critically on creative texts.

This seminar will study the mid-20th century revolution in poetic style and content known as "confessional poetry," a school of poetry that gave voice to the private and personal, highlighting extreme autobiographical experience, as well as subjects that were previously seen as improper or taboo, including mental health, sexuality, suicidal ideation, trauma, menstruation, abortion, postpartum depression, divorce, family dysfunction, rage, and despair.

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age in 1931. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution fueled by new communications technology, mass popular entertainment, Jazz and the Blues, and a bold “collaborative energy” (Ann Douglas) between the Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the predominantly white figures who were grouped together as the Lost Generation.

In this course we will undertake a comprehensive survey of American Transcendentalism through a close examination of the major writings from this tumultuous period. We will read the major figures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau), as well as a host of lesser known members of the Transcendental Club (Orestes Brownson, Ellery Channing, poet Jones Very). We will also read some of the most withering critiques that the movement inspired, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satiric novel of the Utopian Brook Farm community, The Blithedale Romance.

In this course we are tackling the Shakespeare history plays, examining the imperialistic and violent movements of Henrys and Richards, et al, exploring betrayals, battles, the War of the Roses, British history -- as understood in our contemporary time and compared to how it was understood by Shakespeare, who cut his teeth on the histories, spreading both English lore and his own poetic voice far and wide in service of King (Queen) and Country.

Halfway through John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, he admits to the reader in his call to the Muses that he has "fallen on evil days" and into unwelcome solitude, caught "[i]n darkness, with dangers compassed round." Milton wrote Paradise Lost under epically gnarly circumstances -- jailed and fined for backing the failed removal and execution of the King, going blind, having lost his wife and son to illness.

This 2-credit course is an introduction to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which inaugurated a distinctly American free verse by breaking with European formal traditions of poetry. We will read the entire original 1855 version (a self-published volume with only twelve poems) as well as selections from some of the subsequent editions that Whitman published over his lifetime (including the 1892 “deathbed” edition, which contains 383 poems!).

Mystics––historically portrayed as passionate, dangerous, romantic, heretical, satanic––are a thorn in the side of organized religion. From the very beginnings of recorded human time, the presence and practice of mystics has been controversial. Sufi mystic al-Hallaj’s pronouncement that he was “the Truth” was received as blasphemy by the orthodoxy. His execution followed shortly after. Christian mystics of the 4th and 5th centuries were relegated to practicing outside the peripheries of the Roman Empire, in relative secrecy.

Designed to help beginner translators with no experience build their own ethical translation practices—with attention to issues of race, gender, and queerness—this course offers an introduction to translation via a hands-on approach. What pronouns do you use when translating from a language that doesn’t have gendered pronouns? Do you translate slurs? We will tackle these questions, plus the basics, thinking about a work’s tone, audience, and sociohistorical context in order to bring it to life in English.

“I, at least, am not a Marxist”&�Բ�����;Karl Marx