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A close look at how pattern, allusion, borrowing, theft, and invention collude in the work of major poets from the Renaissance to the present. Written work will consist of imitation of the assigned poems, and will require extensive revision, collaboration, and responsiveness to peers. Designed to benefit both critical and creative writers, this course seeks to hone skills of observation, listening, and description, as well as to cultivate mastery of the formal and rhetorical vocabularies necessary for careful reading and writing of poetry.

Taught by

DeSales Harrison

This course will explore the complex relationship between gender, race, and media in the Americas before 1865. Our syllabus takes as its starting point expansive understandings of the term ‘media.’ We will read the written word alongside lives and experiences recorded through media such as quilts, samplers, Native American quill work, songs, and recipes. Examining the different authorial roles available to early Americans, we will consider how gender, race, and ethnicity structure one’s relationship to alphabetic letters, and explore the diverse ways in which people used various media to carve out identities for themselves and to enter public discourse.

Taught by

Danielle Skeehan

African American humor has until recently received little academic study. But the many anthologies of folk humor and the visibility of stand-up comedy invite us to examine the presence and rhetorical role of humor, comedy, and irony in African American literature. This course thus centers on a representative group of modern black humorists and explores various approaches (functional, structural, and cultural) for interpreting their works. Authors will include Chesnutt, Hurston, Hughes, Ellison, and Reed. American.

Taught by

Gillian Johns

This seminar puts into a sustained conversation two immensely innovative and hugely influential female authors: Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith. Situating them in their literary, historical, and theoretical contexts, we will examine the ways in which both authors—one writing at the beginning of the 20th century, the other at the beginning of the 21st—explore in their writings the relationship between literature, history, and politics. Texts might include Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and The Waves; Smith’s NW and On Beauty, as well as both authors’ diaries and essays. Written work will lead toward an extensive final research project.

Taught by

Natasha Tessone