Hobart and William Smith Colleges

English and Creative Writing

Program Faculty
Kathryn Cowles, Associate Professor, Chair
Geoffrey Babbitt, Associate Professor
Biman Basu, Associate Professor
Alex Black, Associate Professor
Rob Carson, Associate Professor
Melanie Conroy-Goldman, Professor
Stephen Cope, Associate Professor
Anna Creadick, Professor
Alla Ivanchikova, Professor
Nicola Minott-Ahl, Associate Professor
Daniel Schonning, Professor of the Practice

The stories that enthrall us, the poems that inspire us, the arguments that persuade us to make the world anew. In the department of English, we immerse ourselves in poems, novels, short stories, plays, films, graphic novels, essays, memoirs, songs, performances, digital media, hybrid forms, literary theory, and more besides, endeavoring to understand how meaning takes shape in these texts and to get at the heart of what makes them effective and important.

Our students choose classes from a broad array of offerings in both literary criticism and creative writing—two intertwining streams within our department—as they craft their own path through the major. We aim to introduce students to a wide range of creative and critical approaches as they explore texts spanning multiple genres, written from the Middle Ages right up to the present day, by writers from America, from Britain, and from around the world. Literary studies opens up windows into other places, other times, and other identities, broadening our perspectives and encouraging us to approach a diversity of experiences with generosity, nuance, and empathy.

The department is fortunate to host the Peter Trias Residency, which invites an internationally renowned writer to campus each year to teach an upper-level creative writing workshop, to mentor a select number of advanced creative writers, and to curate a top-tier literary reading series. We are also proud to publish the Seneca Review, one of the country’s most respected literary journals, known in particular for its development of the lyric essay and for its promotion of contemporary poetry in translation. Creative writing students also often contribute to Thel, an impressive literary and art magazine that is edited by students in the department.

Mission Statement

In the English and Creative Writing department, we study literary works in detail and in depth, analyzing the complex and profound ways that exceptional writers use language to construct identities, to reinvent cultures, and to build new worlds. We engage with stories, poems, plays, films, and essays from around the world and across the centuries, broadening our perspectives and deepening our understanding. Our primary goal, however, is to help students develop their own distinctive voices as critical and creative writers as they prepare to refashion the world themselves.

Offerings

English Major (B.A.)

disciplinary, 12 courses
Learning Objectives:

• Develop rigorous critical thinking skills, especially skills related to close reading and to rhetorical and narrative analysis.
• Become eloquent and versatile writers, adept at presenting complex arguments, while also developing their own distinctive voices and creative talents.
• Encounter both historically important texts and also powerful contemporary literary works, situating these texts within their own literary and cultural contexts as well as engaging them in dialogue from our current critical perspectives.
• Undertake substantial research, produce significant writing projects, and collaborate effectively with their peers.
• Engage with a broad diversity of perspectives, reflecting on the ways in which all our experiences are shaped by issues of culture, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and identity.
• Become familiar with the central concepts at stake in contemporary critical theory and cultural studies.

Requirements:
ENG 200; ten elective courses; and a capstone experience (typically a 400-level seminar taken in the junior or senior year). Of the ten electives, three must be at the 300-level or above and no more than two 100-level courses may be counted toward the major. Further requirements include: one Early Period course (pre-1800); one American Literature course; one Global Literature course; one UK/European Literature course; and a three-course concentration. Up to three “cognate” courses taken outside the department may be counted towards the major with the permission of the advisor. A single course may fulfill more than one requirement. Concentrations may be defined by genre, literary history, theme, or field of study. (Examples of concentrations: “the novel”; “early modern literature”; “globalization”; “creative writing”; and “film studies.”)

English and Creative Writing Minor

disciplinary, 6 courses
Requirements:
ENG 200; three elective courses, with no more than one at the 100-level; and at least two courses at the 300-level or above.

Cognate Courses

With permission of the advisor and chair, up to two classes outside the department can be counted toward the major, and up to one class can be counted toward the minor. Typically, these will be classes that involve a significant amount of literary analysis, film analysis, creative writing, and/or critical theory.

Transfer Credits for the Major or Minor
Courses taken at other institutions (except for HWS-sponsored abroad programs) are considered on a case-by-case basis. Students must petition the department for these courses to count towards the English degree.

Course Descriptions

100-level courses in English are designed to introduce students to textual and literary study, to focus on critical analysis and close reading skills, and to build a foundation for critical writing in the discipline. These courses are suitable for first-years, sophomores, or non-majors. Students who are intending to major in English may opt to begin with ENG 200 and other courses at the 200-level. Note that no more than two 100-level courses may be counted toward the major.

ENG 106 Introduction to the Short Story  This course introduces the short story genre, including attention to its history and development. Students read a broad range of examples, including at least one single-author collection or cycle. Assignments allow students to learn the fundamental skills of literary criticism through the practice of formal analysis. (Basu, Staff)

ENG 114 Literature of Sickness, Health, and Disability  This course explores narrative techniques and representational strategies in narratives and other literary representations of illness, health, and various forms of disability (cognitive, physical, emotional, and so forth). Through readings in different genres and from different periods and cultures, we will examine, critique, and deconstruct the ways in which sickness, health and disability - as well as normalcy - are defined in literary and cultural contexts, and how these definitions often intersect with definitions of (and assumptions about) race, class, gender, sexuality, morality, criminality, and other markers of citizenship and identity. (Cope)

ENG 115 Literature and Social Movements  Can books change the world? In the U.S., readers of slave narratives and Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin were swayed to the abolitionist cause. The counterculture went On the Road with Kerouac. Second-wave feminists clutch copies of The Bell Jar, while anti-Vietnam War protestors were fluent in Heller and Vonnegut. Ayn Rand's fiction has been a powerful force for new conservatives, while Malcolm X's autobiography helped radicalize the Civil Rights movement. And why were Occupy protestors wearing masks made famous by a graphic novel? This course considers how literature has shaped and been shaped by social movements. Weaving together contextualizing historical readings and primary documents with poetry, memoir, novels, and other literary forms, students will investigate the relationships between revolution and the word. (Creadick)

ENG 136 Shakespeare on Screen  So far as we can tell, Shakespeare's plays were written for the stage rather than for the page. In other words, they were meant to be experienced in an embodied public performance of sights and sounds, rather than read silently and in solitude. In this introduction to Shakespeare's work, we will draw upon the rich archive of Shakespeare on film to study six of his most influential plays in multiple performances, exploring how different directors brought these plays to life in different ways, working in a new medium and within different social and political contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (Carson)

ENG 152 American Revolutions  From Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Sentiments, America's revolutionaries and reformers have written their own literature. This course will explore the history of politics and culture in the United States from the American Revolution to the Civil War. We will study the work of writers who were for the rights of women and against the removal of Indians from their lands, who were for the liberation of enslaved people of African descent and against the use and abuse of alcohol. We will also read the writings of the early labor and environmental movements. Like the figures we study, we will experiment with different forms to express our ideas and arguments. (Black)

ENG 155 Banned Books  Books, it seems, are dangerous. In the past and the present, they have been challenged, censored, banned, even burned. But which books? By whom? When? Where? And why? The course is arranged as a series of case studies in which we read texts that have been banned at specific historical moments. Why, for example, was Alan Ginsberg's poem HOWL so dangerous that it sparked a landmark obscenity trial in the 1950s? What could cause a novel about black women's resilience like Alice Walker's THE COLOR PURPLE to be targeted by censors in the 1980s? Who could possibly object to HARRY POTTER? And how did Alison Bechdel's graphic novel FUN HOME become a blockbuster, a critical success, a smash on Broadway, and a banned book, too? In the last section of the course, students will choose a book that is being contested in their own historical moment, to determine the patterns at play in the banning of books, and to consider how writers - and readers - might respond to such challenges. (Creadick)

ENG 165 Introduction to African American Literature  We begin with a slave narrative from the nineteenth century, but this course concentrates on African American narratives of the twentieth century, from the Harlem Renaissance through the "protest" novel and black nationalism to black women writers. Students focus on a central concern of the African American traditions, the tension between the political and the aesthetic. Students pay attention to both the aesthetic properties of the literary text and to its political dimensions. In addition to the concerns with race, class, gender, and sexuality, students examine the intricate set of intertextual relations between different writers which constitute the tradition of African American writing. (Basu)

ENG 175 Travel Literature  The mobilities of populations have been crucial to the ways in which human beings have been organized across the planet - in empires, in nations, on continents, in hemispheres. Several factors encourage or deter mobility or travel - technological, economic, demographic, and so on. But travel inevitably introduces an encounter with otherness. We begin and end the course with an encounter with "America." We will encounter embodiments of racial and gendered otherness, but we will also examine the encounter between the human and the machine, the technological otherness of the android. The texts typically include Shakespeare's "The Tempest," Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," Phillip Dick's "Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," Octavia Butler's "Kindred," and George Orwell's "Burmese Days." (Basu)

ENG 185 From Novel to Film  Film today is in a position in our culture analogous to the position the novel once held in literary tradition. It is still largely a medium that belongs to popular culture, and its sense of emotional immediacy, the persuasive power of visual storytelling, and filmmakers' ability to respond to current ideas and trends of thought often means that modern film is a useful window on the age in which a film is made. We will address narrative technique, ask how filmmakers use the visual medium to transform difficult but profoundly arresting narratives into engaging and comprehensible films, while also asking what makes an adaptation effective? Why bother if the book is satisfying? Can an adaptation ever be as good as the book? There is another focus here as well; we also want to raise important questions about how and by whom meaning is made in both novels and films and about the role of the imagination of the reader and viewer in completing the picture. Readings and films may vary. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 200 Critical Methods  This course is required of all majors and minors to prepare students for upper-level study in English and Creative Writing, and may not be exempted. This course will train students in the concepts, vocabulary and research methods required for advanced textual analysis and writing in the discipline. Required books include core reference texts in the discipline and will be supplemented by individual professors. (Staff)

ENG 205 Narrative Theory  What are stories made of? How does their structure and design influence what they can mean and how they are told? This course is an introduction to critical thinkers who have attempted to answer these questions. In addition to working through some fundamental theories about narrative (what it is and how it works), we will also apply what we've learned to some representative texts. Students will come away knowing how point-of-view, temporality, character representation, fictionality, and closure are not only critical to the way stories are told: they radically determine what these stories mean and how we interpret them. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 213 Environmental Literature  In this course students read poetry and prose by writers who concern themselves with the human experience of and relation to nature. These diverse writers artfully evoke the landscape while at the same time contemplating the modern environmental crisis. They approach the question of the meaning of nature in our lives in personal, as well as philosophical and ethical, ways. Cross-listed with Environmental Studies. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 234 Chaucer: Topics  Chaucer composed his poetry in the historical context of peasant risings, religious heresy, English imperialism, and the aftermath of the Black Death and in the literary context of both the Alliterative Renaissance and the influence of the French and Italian traditions. A first topic focuses on a careful reading of The Canterbury Tales and the second concentrates on a comparative study of Troilus and Criseyde and its main source, Boccaccio's II Filostrato. Both courses investigate issues surrounding the authorship, language, audience, and ideologies of Chaucer's work within the larger cultural, social, and political context of late medieval England. (Minott-Ahl, Carson)

ENG 236 Shakespeare  What has made Shakespeare the most influential writer in history? This class offers an introduction to his work and also to the various critical practices we employ in the field of Shakespeare studies. It presupposes no background with the subject - English majors, potential English majors, and non-majors alike are welcome. Through a series of collaborative activities and projects, we will develop a set of critical skills to help us not only to appreciate Shakespeare's works, but also to engage with their language and dramaturgy, to contextualize them historically, and to push back against them politically, and to play with them creatively. (Carson)

ENG 241 English Romantic Poets  This course is a comprehensive look at Romanticism and its proponents, its aesthetic context and the charged political environment in which it developed and thrived. The poets of this movement saw themselves as thinkers and as agents of important change in the world. The poems they wrote were like the words of a magic spell, meant to unleash the power of imagination and speak new political and intellectual realities into being. In addition to reading the works of well known Romantics such as Wordsworth and Byron, the course examines the provocative writings of abolitionists, visionaries, and poets whose support of Revolution in France made them distrusted at home in England. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 242 Victorian Literature  This course investigates origins of the modern world view as anticipated and expressed in nineteenth century English literature: the breakdown of traditional religious beliefs; the alienation and isolation of the individual; changing attitudes toward nature; the loss of communication; the role of education; and the affirmation of art. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 243 The Gothic Novel  This course will explore the Gothic novel from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, when Bram Stoker's Dracula first appeared. Disparaged as sensational reading likely to corrupt young women and as something that distracted men from more important things, Gothic novels were extremely popular from the moment Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto found its way into booksellers' shops. It achieved this success against a backdrop of tightening social structures on the conduct of women of the upper and newly emerging middle classes. We will explore how some 18th century Gothic novels actually reinforce the values and social mores they are accused of undermining, while others subvert values they profess to uphold. We will also explore the ways in which the definition of what is horrible or terrifying changed in response to social and historical realities. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 246 The Literature of Decadence  This course offers an exploration of the phenomenon of decadence in its literary aspect, characterized primarily by the pursuit of heightened experience (sensory and imaginative) in the face of the social and ethical constraints of late nineteenth and early twentieth century European culture. Although our primary emphasis will be on the phenomenon of literary decadence in English, we will read a number of seminal French texts (in translation) and discuss a number of European painters and composers by which late nineteenth century English writers were inspired. We will explore the ways in which decadence can be situated historically in terms of such broader social and cultural phenomena as imperialism, poverty, the emergence of the metropolis, the emergence of socialism, the establishment of commodity capitalism, the "advent" of feminism and the New Woman, and debates about sexuality. (Cope)

ENG 247 Irish Literary Renaissance  This course is designed as a sustained and extensive study of the major texts (poetic, novelistic, dramatic, essayistic) of the "Irish Renaissance" and an Irish Modernism in which thematic concerns with cultural and political nationalism converged with an abiding interest in radical forms of literary experimentation. We will look at these texts in terms of what Seamus Deane has called "Irish Renaissances": those periods of Irish literary flourishing that both inspired and were inspired by Irish Modernism. (Cope)

ENG 250 Early American Literature  This course surveys the development of U.S. literature up to and including the Civil War period. Literary works will be analyzed in terms of both their textual qualities and the social contexts that produced them. Readings may include Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville. (Black)

ENG 251 Recovering African American Literature  This course will study African American literature from the late eighteenth-century to the early twentieth-century. In this period, African Americans developed a literature to express themselves and communicate with each other. They wrote and read poetry by artists like Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar and prose by artists like Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. We will explore these texts in the context of when they were written and read, a time of radical change that these writers and readers helped enact. We will also examine the formation of African Americanist literary scholarship, without which a course like ours would be impossible. We can read this literature because other scholars have recovered it. These texts had been known at one time, but had since become lost, forgotten, or neglected. These scholars performed this work by finding these texts, by researching who wrote and read them, by preparing versions of them that presented what they had learned, and then by teaching and writing about them. In addition to reading, talking, and writing about this literature, we will ourselves engage in the collaborative work of literary recovery. (Black)

ENG 252 American Women Writers: Topics  This course focuses on a selection of women writers who have made important contributions to U.S. literature. Authors, genres, and periods will vary depending on the instructor's area of interest and expertise. (Creadick)

ENG 254 Nineteenth-Centruy American Poetry  American poetry from the nineteenth-century can both seem too much of its own time and way ahead of its time. Poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are, in their own ways, entirely exceptional and wholly representative of verse written before the Modernist Movement. This course will explain why. In addition to spending about half of the term on Whitman and Dickinson, the course will treat the work of a dozen other poets, black and white, who worked in as many different forms. We will read authors who are better known for their prose (Poe, Melville), authors who were popular in their time but have since fallen out of critical favor (Longfellow, Whittier), and a large group of women writers who were described, and were often dismissed , as "poetesses." We will also read prose - like Emerson's essays, Poe's articles, Whitman's prefaces, and Dickinson's letters - that will help us understand them. Together, they will demonstrate for us the diversity of writers and writings from this period. (Black)

ENG 261 Popular Fiction  When a novel acquires a mass readership, does it lose aesthetic value? What is the difference between "literary fiction" and "popular fiction"? Focusing on a genre fiction, cult bestsellers, middlebrow blockbusters, "pulp" or "trash" fiction produced across American history, this course invites students to consider the politics of taste and hierarchies of literary value embedded in popular reading practices. Students will read these literary works alongside a number of primary and secondary texts in order to illuminate the pleasures and anxieties of reading. (Creadick)

ENG 264 Southern Fictions  An introduction to fiction from the American South as well as to fictions of the American South from the mid-19th century to the present. We will analyze works by major southern authors to uncover what if anything they have in common. We will also look at "The South" itself as a kind of fiction - constructed through literature, film and popular culture. Our readings will cluster around subgenres of southern fiction and contemporary "grit lit" movements. We will work to unpack the tensions around sex, race, class and religion that have haunted southern fiction from its beginnings. (Creadick)

ENG 266 Modernist American Poetry  This course is a study of selected major early twentieth century figures, including Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, H. D., Jean Toomer, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. (Cowles)

ENG 267 Post WWII American Poetry  An introduction to contemporary American poetry, this course emphasizes both the close reading of poems and the placing of recent American poetry within its social and literary contexts. (Cowles)

ENG 270 Globalization and Literature  Globalism as a contemporary phenomenon has been in the ascendancy. It is, among other things, an economic, cultural, technological, and demographic phenomenon. Students examine globalism and its related metaphors of hybridity, cosmopolitanism, migrancy, exile, and so on against nationalism and its privileged metaphors of rootedness and identity. If the production of a national subject is no longer the purpose of "discipline," what does it mean to produce a transnational subject? These are some of the concerns of the fiction students read for this course. We typically begin with two famous American novels, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Don DeLillo's White Noise, to examine the impact of globalization on the United States. We then move to two South Asian novels, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Hanif Kureishi's Black Album. We end with two important novels by black women writers, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. (Basu)

ENG 276 Imagining the Middle East  This course will examine representations of the Middle East, its geography, its culture, and its peoples in literature and film. The Greater Middle East is a loosely defined geopolitical entity that extends from Pakistani-Indian border to the Northern shores of Africa. Students will learn about the region as seen and imagined through the eyes of both foreigners and natives, Western and non-Western writers, travel journalists, soldiers, bloggers, colonists, refugees, and migrants. The course will explore the stereotypes that define representations of the Middle East in the West; most specifically, we will address Edward Said's claim that the Middle East became trapped in a swarm of interrelated notions he defined as Orientalism. Said insists that Orientalism is a fiction produced by the western mind and subsequently used to justify colonial exploration, validate the need for human rights interventions, while also constructing the region as a site of an exotic adventure. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 287 Jane Austen in Film  Because Jane Austen's novels are essentially her own, written creations and films based on them are collaborative and characterized by sound, motion, and visual detail, the two media approach narrative in fundamentally different ways. We will consider to what extent a film version of a Jane Austen novel is an entirely new work that is artistically independent of the original. We will also examine the consequences of viewing such films as translations of Austen's novels both for the filmmakers who approach their projects this way and for critics who read the films from this perspective. While we will certainly take into account the techniques employed by directors and screenwriters to create a coherent and effective narrative that captures the original story, according to their notions of what this means, as they strive to keep the finished film within a reasonable running time, it is important to note that this is not a film course. The focus here is on the interplay between two methods of storytelling that results when novels written by an author who deliberately avoids description are made into films. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 290 Creative Writing  This course offers introductory techniques in the writing of both fiction and poetry. The workshop format emphasizes group discussion of the writings of class members. Readings of modern authors supplement discussions of form and technique. This course is normally required as a prerequisite for fiction and poetry workshops. Prerequisite: at least one other ENG course. Not open to students who have taken ENG 190. (Staff)

ENG 300 Literary Theory Since Plato  This course offers a survey and analysis of major trends in the understanding of literature from Plato to the present. (Staff)

ENG 301 Cultural Theory and Popular Culture  Course also listed as AMST 301. This course introduces cultural studies as a major area of contemporary theory which has reshaped the way we think and write about literature. Critical cultural studies, historicism, and reader-response theory have expanded understandings of literary meaning to include production and reception of those texts as well as their ideological content and consequences. Students read theoretical essays by such thinkers as Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, White, Butler, and Baudrillard, as well as examples of scholars applying these ideas to the study of literature and other cultural forms. Students will then become the critics, applying these theories to the contemporary literary, material and popular culture "texts" that surround them - stories, poems, film, photographs, toys, fashion, sports, and music. (Creadick)

ENG 305 Psychoanalysis and Literature  Aside from its aspirations to being medicine or a science, psychoanalysis constitutes a powerful theory of reading, which, in its emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century, corresponds to the revolution in interpretation which continues into our own time. The aim of this course is to study this theory of reading in order to show how it is the foundation of such interpretive concepts and procedures as close reading, text, and the intentional fallacy, as well as being both the source and critique of the modern handling of such interpretational elements as image, myth, and meaning. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 306 Queer Shakespeare  Shakespeare's plays and poems challenge received ideas about gender, sexuality, and personal identity in diverse and often dazzling ways. In this class, we will place some of his works into dialogue with contemporary queer theory and consider what this conversation can teach us. Over the course of the semester, we will address questions from a variety of critical perspectives - theoretical, historical, dramaturgical, poetical, and philosophical. This class is designed for ENG, GSIJ, MDSC, and THTR majors and minors, but open to everyone. (Carson; offered occasionally)

ENG 307 Cowboy to Gamer: Forms of Storytelling Across Media  Storytelling exists across innumerable forms, and those forms change as new technologies are invented. This course aims to build a flexible toolkit for students interested in telling stories in new and emerging media. We will begin with a historic form, popular in the 19th Century, which is a low-fi moving visual form using light, image and sound. We will then explore live short-form story-telling using voice, popularized by the radio program "The Moth." Students will field trip to a local story slam, if possible, and host a slam on campus. We will then develop a basic toolkit for audio recording in order to produce a short piece for podcast. Finally, we will produce a basic text-based interactive digital game. Along the way, we will consider stories told by expert practitioners in each of these media as well as in other emerging and historic forms. The goal is to develop not only skills specific to each medium, but also to give the students a robust vocabulary of storytelling practices applicable to emerging and future media. Students should have taken one class in either Media and Society, English or Writing and Rhetoric. (Conroy-Goldman)

ENG 311 Story and History  Fiction writers have long been enchanted with the writing of historians, at times imitating, at times stealing, and even at times attempting to pass their inventions off as legitimate history. Since the 1960s, historians have also considered the role of fiction in their work. To what extent is history fiction? This course examines the evolution of the relationship between history writing and fiction, moments of cross-over such as falsified documents and hoaxes, and the way contemporary writers wrestle with the murky territory between the two. (Conroy-Goldman)

ENG 314 The Art of Memoir  How can a lived life be transformed into literature? What forms has life-writing taken in the past? Why is memoir one of the most popular literary forms today? Through lecture, discussion, readings, and criticism, this class explores a wide array of memoirs, such as graphic/illustrated memoir, confessional, portrait, or memoir-in-essay. Alongside the works themselves, we study theoretical concepts important to life-writing such as memory, subjectivity, confession, narrative, and affect. In addition to substantial critical papers, students will try their hands at some creative exercises in order to consider how memoirs function internally, as well as in the context of a broader literary landscape. (Creadick)

ENG 335 Fashioning Identity: Clothing. Character, and Social Mobility in 19th Century British Literature  This course seeks to reconstruct the ways clothing restricted bodies and expanded social possibility by exploring the assumptions, the realities, and the understanding people had about clothing through literature from the seventeenth through the 19th centuries. We will read a wide range of literary works and we'll also explore the changing commercial circumstances, including the new markets opened up by imperialistic exploration that allowed people access to an increasingly wide range of goods. Delving into the material culture and historical contexts of the literary works we read, we'll seek to understand how and by whom clothing was made as well as the circumstances that made it easier for middle- and lower-class people to acquire the trappings of wealth and social consequence as industrialization gained momentum. But clothing also communicates and the works of writers from Henry Fielding and Jane Austen to Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw will provide insight into its symbolism and into the trans-formative power of clothing. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 337 The Faerie Queene  Has anyone ever written a poem that is more awe-inspiring than Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene? A rollicking adventure story, a powerful national epic, a searching philosophical meditation and guide for moral conduct, a profound exploration of renaissance theology, a pointed critique of traditional attitudes toward gender and class, a widely imaginative work of fantasy, and, not least, a deeply beautiful poem unto itself: this is surely one of the most fascinating works in all of English literature. We will read the whole poem, top to bottom, paying special attention to historical questions about gender, class politics, and religion. (Carson)

ENG 338 Milton  This course will devote itself to reading Paradise Lost. Our work will be to understand Paradise Lost, its poetics, its structure, its story, its political, theological and sexual ideas; its historical moment of the English revolution. To do this we will read some criticism and history, some of Milton's prose, in the Norton, which he devoted the middle years of his life to writing before Paradise Lost, and we will read some sonnets and early poems to familiarize ourselves with Milton's style and more generally, how a poem makes its meaning. (Carson)

ENG 339 Shakespeare's Contemporaries  Shakespeare was hardly a singular phenomenon: he made his name working within a thriving theatre community in Elizabethan London, where he was seen to be just one of about a dozen notable playwrights of the era. In this class we will read fantastic plays by some of his most notable peers, including Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Webster, and others, whose best work is arguably every bit as important and as impressive as Shakespeare's works. (Carson)

ENG 344 Joyce  This course consists of a sustained and in-depth reading and analysis of the early fiction of James Joyce. We will supplement our readings of Joyce's stories and novels with readings of his dramatic and poetic writing as well as his literary and political essays. Additionally, we will attend to the ways in which Joyce's biography provided material for his writing. Our topics will be varied, but we will pay particular attention to the ways in which the formal and aesthetic dimensions of Joyce's experimentalism intersect with his critical representations of race, class, gender, religion, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, economics, and colonialism. Students should expect to gain an informed appreciation of Joyce's importance to the development of twentieth century literature and intellectual thought, to sharpen their critical and analytical reading and writing skills, and to develop a working knowledge of Irish history and the literary, cultural, and political dimensions of both Irish and European Modernity. (Cope)

ENG 345 Ulysses  Often considered the greatest novel of the twentieth century (and considered by some the greatest novel in history), James Joyce's Ulysses is also among the most difficult novels to read. At once thrilling, edifying, frustrating, baffling, bemusing, seductive, repulsive, compassionate, confounding (the list could go indefinitely), few novels have commanded the scholarly attention of James Joyce's penultimate novel. In this class, we will read the novel in terms of some of the questions that have animated Joyce criticism over the past half-century: is Ulysses exemplary of cosmopolitan Modernism or is it a post-colonial novel? Is it an exercise in misogyny or a proto-Feminist intervention? Elitist or populist? Because the book is so relentlessly allusive, it will be necessary for us to refer to some of the literary, philosophical, and historical materials Joyce incorporated into his novel, including Irish history, Jewish history, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the geography of Dublin, and Thomist philosophy. Although it is not necessary, students who have not already done so might wish to familiarize themselves with Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as the Odyssey and Hamlet, as these are all important foreground materials for Joyce's experiment. (Cope)

ENG 351 Archives of American Literature  Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that "language is the archives of history." This course will explore early American history through literature. In addition to reading historical fiction, autobiography, epic poetry, and other genres that revisit and revise the past, we will investigate how researchers come to know it. In other words, we will study the theory and practice of archives. What do these literary examinations of the country's past say about its present? How is the historical record created and preserved for, and how will it be accessed in, the future? Who and what gets left out, and why does it matter? Our authors, who may include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Marie Child, and Pauline Hopkins, will use writing to reckon with the past. And so will we. (Black)

ENG 353 Media in Early America  Scholars of early American media take printed matter and other cultural objects as artifacts of the lives of Americans. Before the twentieth-century, Americans used letters, journals, books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines to express themselves and to communicate with each other. They were also informed and entertained by paintings, sculptures, panoramas, plays, demonstrations, lectures, sheet music, hymnals, and songsters. Literature, in other words, was one medium among many others. Writers like Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson used language like other artists use their tools. In this course we will primarily study literary language as it was manifested on paper, though we will also examine how other cultural forms, like art and music, were mediated through print. We will interest ourselves in every stage of text's production: from how it was written to how it was read. In addition to exploring technologies of representation before the photograph and the phonograph, we will investigate the ways that digitization changes what we can experience and what we can know, of early American culture. (Black)

ENG 360 Sexuality and American Literature  This course focuses on the literary production of sexuality and subjectivity in America. It considers the works in light of Michael Foucault's theory of the deployment of sexuality and feminist discussions on the politics of sexuality, and looks at the relationships between sexuality, power, and resistance both within novels and within their respective cultural contexts. (Creadick)

ENG 363 The American Epic  All of us belong to different and shared nations, the boundaries of which dilate and contract daily, A nation, unlike a country, doesn't rely on land or borders - it lives in the minds of its people. The epic poem is one artist's attempt to speak of, speak for, and speak into being their chosen nation. In this course, we will examine the multitude of American poets who have made use of this tool - from Walt Whitman to Alice Notley to Tyehimba Jess. We will interrogate the boundaries and vitality of this ancient form and chart its growth into the modern day. By the end of the class, our goal will be to consider more fully how the epic form expands, reclaims, and reimagines the language and culture in which it is written. (Schonning)

ENG 390 Trias Topics Workshop  The Trias Workshop is an intensive, practice-based studio course based in the resident's genre. Students are expected to read assignments in contemporary literature, complete writing exercises, read and critically respond to other students' work, and produce a portfolio of polished, original writing. Students will be expected to attend all Trias events in the fall and to engage with the work of visiting writers. Admissions to the workshop is by application only. (Trias Writer-in-Residence)

ENG 391 Advanced Poetry Workshop  For students highly motivated to write poetry, this course offers the opportunity to study, write, and critique poetry in an intensive workshop and discussion environment. Students will produce multiple poems, write critically in response to contemporary works of poetry, and produce, workshop, and revise a chapbook-length collection of poems as a final project. Class time is divided between discussions of contemporary poetry and workshops on student writing. Prerequisite: ENG 290 or ENG 190 and permission of instructor. (Cowles)

ENG 392 Small Press Book Publishing: Book Contest and Acquisitions Editing  In this course, students will help publish a book. We will focus on small press acquisitions editing through the facilitation of Seneca Review's first biennial Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Contest. The editors of Seneca Review will have narrowed down manuscript submissions to approximately 15 semi-finalists. Over the course of the semester, students will have the opportunity both to learn about and to engage in the acquisitions editorial process by reading, discussing, and evaluating each of the semi-finalist manuscripts and by ultimately helping select five finalists. The TRIAS resident will meet with the class several times and serve as the contest judge. Students will work in small groups to pitch one of the finalist manuscripts to the judge. By engaging in the book publishing and acquisitions process, students will grapple with such questions as: How do lyric essays and hybrid texts work in conjunction with one another in a book-length manuscript? What makes a creative manuscript good and how do we weigh it against competing manuscripts with different strengths? And how can we distinguish between manuscripts that cross the threshold into the realm of literary excellence and those that do not? (Babbitt)

ENG 393 Fiction Workshop II: Theory of Fiction  Writers represent a loose theoretical camp which addresses issues like the creative process, experimental writing, and the relationship between art and politics, in a way that other areas of literacy criticism do not. In this course, we will use writing and readings in theory and cutting edge experimental fiction in order to explore some of these issues. This course is suitable for students strongly committed to fiction writing. Fiction I and Fiction II may be taken in either order. Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor, based on writing sample. ENG 260 is generally required. (Conroy-Goldman)

ENG 394 Workshop: The Craft of Fiction  An intensive workshop devoted to the creation and critiquing of student fiction, this course is suitable for students strongly committed to fiction writing. Students are expected to produce a portfolio of polished stories. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor, based on writing sample. ENG 190/290 is generally required. (Conroy-Goldman)

ENG 396 The Lyric Essay  HWS is the birthplace of the lyric essay. It was in the introduction to the Fall 1997 issue of Seneca Review that esteemed HWS professor Deborah Tall and Hobart alumnus John D'Agata gave the lyric essay its most seminal and enduring definition, which begins by characterizing the new hybrid form as 'a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem, give[s] primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, [and] forsake[s] narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.' We will begin our course examining the essays of Tall, D'Agata, and writers published in Seneca Review. And in order to gain an appreciation of the lyric essay as an inherently innovative, ever-evolving, genre-busting art form, we will proceed to study a wide range of essayists. Students will both create their own lyric essays and respond critically to each other¹s creative work in regularly held workshops. (Babbitt)

ENG 397 Creative Nonfiction Workshop  This is a writing course in creative nonfiction designed for English majors or others seriously interested in working to develop their own voices in the medium of the personal essay. Students read and discuss essays by major contemporary American essayists. They also read and discuss each others' essays in a workshop with an eye toward revision. Participants should be prepared to write one essay a week. Prerequisite: permission of instructor, based on a writing sample. (Staff)

ENG 399 Hybrid Forms Workshop  New publication methods and technologies change art. From the printing press, to the typewriter, the record player, the camera, or the film reel, artists have used new technologies to expand our notions of art and to skirt borders of genres and media. In the advent of the internet and digital technologies, the possibilities for expansion and experimentation have again exploded, and contemporary artists are involved in a renaissance of hybrid forms that has become bigger than the technologies that started it. Poets are using cameras and bullhorns, musicians are using kitchen utensils, translators are using languages they don't actually speak, artists are using old books and exacto knives, sculptors are using live (and not live) human bodies, film directors are using colored pencils and moth wings, dancers are using dirt and armchairs. In this creative writing workshop, the focus will be on hybrid texts that include language in some form. We will track a strange vein of precedent for contemporary hybrid texts across decades and even centuries, we will explore what artists and writers are producing right now, and we will create and workshop our own hybrid texts. We will learn new critical language for talking about such texts, and we will participate in collaborative and guerilla art projects. Artists from outside the English Department who are interested in working with language in some way are encouraged to ask for permission, even if they have not taken ENG 290. Prerequisites: ENG 190/290 or permission of the instructor. (Cowles)

ENG 410 Radical Futures  What does the future have in store? Radical Futures will engage with the question of the future as discussed in contemporary fiction, creative non-fiction, and theoretical texts. Our moment is defined by pervasive anxiety about the future. Three moments of crises are frequently discussed: environmental (climate change, resource depletion, and mass extinctions), economic (automation and rising inequality), and existential (Al research and development forcing us to redefine the notion of the human). In this course, we will discuss texts that push against visions of apocalypse and imagine futures that are both radically different and hopeful. We will discuss radical proposals that inhabit the liminal space between fiction and science, such as cryonics and brain emulation, extinct species revival, socio-economic equality, and space exploration. What role will humanities play in these future developments? Students will be required to write an extensive research paper on one of the topics discussed in the course. (Ivanchikova)

ENG 417 Shakespearean Adaptation  Shakespeare's plays exist in a state of continual reinterpretation, not just through the work of literary scholars and of theatre artists, but also through the creations of adapters who generate entirely new artworks - novels, poems, plays, films, television series, graphic novels, operas, pop songs, video games, dance, visual and performance art - that engage in dialogue with their Shakespearean sources. In this capstone class, we will investigate the world of Shakespeare adaptations, exploring how artists of all sorts have repurposed, transformed, interrogated, satirized, lionized, translated, inverted, and fought back against Shakespeare's works across time, across cultures, and across media. (Carson)

ENG 441 Writing Women: Defining Femininity in Late Nineteenth Century Britain  This course will reconstruct the social and legal conditions under which British women lived in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Together, we will use research skills and techniques learned in previous English coursework to examine the work and lives of women writers who used the print medium to construct a new femininity in this age of increasing female presence in the work force, increasing discontentment with legal and economic disadvantage, and restrictive social mores in a rapidly modernizing and more urban age. In our investigations, we will look at journals and read letters written by women living in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain with a view to understanding their concerns as they understood them. Through close reading and analysis of their writings, we will also explore the ways in which they reproduced and struggled against the discourses that enabled economic and political disadvantage and the simultaneous silencing and exploration of their creativity by a largely male literary establishment. In addition to such writers as Virginia Woolf, Sarah Grand, and Olive Schreiner, we will also examine the male writers such as John Stuart Mill who lent their more audible voices to the causes of gender equality and women's suffrage and George Gissing, who so intimately depicts the lives of ordinary people navigating rapidly changing times. In addition to primary source material and as part of the capstone to the English major, we will also be reading and discussing modern investigations of the New Woman and discussing the approaches and methodologies of the various scholars whose work we will encounter. (Minott-Ahl)

ENG 458 The American 1850's  The 1850's was a period of unprecedented artistic production in the history of the United States, one that's arguably been unmatched since. In the span of ten years, writers like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe published major works of prose and verse that experimented with literary conventions and responded to the times. In addition to attending to issues of form and context, this course will consider the relationship between literature and culture and politics and history. Along the way, we will read foundational works of scholarship, revisit classic debates, and participate in current conversations. As part of this process, students will write and present a research paper, as well as collaborate on other critical and creative projects. (Black)

ENG 464 Capstone: New South Fictions  Some of the most celebrated American literature has sprung from the South, from William Faulkner's high modernist experiments to Alice Walker's poetry and fiction to Barbara Kingsolver's latest Pulitzer prize-winner. But in 2001, a call in the journal American Literature for a "new southern studies" signaled a ground shift in the field. Scholars began to turn away from exceptionalist or essentialist notions of "The South" to raise more skeptical, even hostile critiques of old metaphors, monuments, and monoliths. What has happened in the literary landscape since this turn? New South Fictions picks up at this crossroads, centering contemporary (post-2000) southern writers and writing. As readers of this fiction, we will contend with Appalachian Souths, Future Souths, Native Souths, Queer Souths, Urban Souths, Undead Souths, Weird Souths, and more. Students in this capstone will be positioned as a new generation of literary critics laboring to analyze this new generation of writers. What do these authors have to teach us about the South? And what does this South have to teach us about America, now? New South Fictions is a capstone seminar, which means it is a rigorous course intended for upper-level majors. The expectation is that the student will already have a solid understanding of how to analyze, interpret, synthesize, research, and write about literary texts. The reading load is heavy (expect at least one book per week, plus articles), and the class period is entirely discussion-based and frequently student-led. The course culminates in a lengthy "seminar paper," which will showcase your most advanced scholarly writing in your discipline.

ENG 490 Trias Tutorial  Under the direction of the Trias Writer-in-Residence, students will work towards the production of a full portfolio of creative writing, suitable for publication or submission as a writing sample to graduate school in the field. Students will pursue individualized reading lists, produce new work on a bi-weekly basis, and complete substantial revisions of their efforts

ENG 493 Junior/Senior Seminar: Theory of Fiction  Course also listed as ENG 315. Writers represent a loose theoretical camp, which addresses issues like the creative process, experimental writing, and the relationship between art and politics, in a way that other areas of literacy criticism do not. In this course, we will use writing and readings in theory and cutting edge experimental fiction in order to explore some of these issues. This course is suitable for students strongly committed to fiction writing. Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor, based on writing sample. ENG 190/290 is generally required. (Conroy-Goldman)