In this course we will think in a focused way about the uses of the laboratory model for Humanities Research and Teaching. What features of early humanities laboratories might we revive or redirect? What liabilities to the lab model are legible either from the example of the Chaucer Laboratory, or in other examples today?
Learn more about this courseIn this course, we’ll investigate the roles of borders and boundaries, terrain and territory, commonlaw and jurisdiction. Starting with the premise that the definition of persons is as artificial as the boundaries that limit or signify nation-states, we’ll see how Shakespeare’s plays anatomize and test our modern conceptions of places and persons.
Learn more about this courseThis course explores the reasons—sociohistorical, philosophical, and political—for this rise, fall, revival, and revivification. It also seeks to understand the formal dimensions and aesthetic power of epistolary fiction.
Learn more about this courseA central goal of the class will be to defamiliarize the histories of both nineteenth-century fiction, and 20th-century novel theory, by reconsidering them as part of one complex lineage.
Learn more about this courseIn this introduction to cultural theory we'll focus on the foundational texts and intellectual history of cultural studies. Beginning with the Frankfurt School’s turn toward the problem of culture and methods derived from psychoanalysis, we'll proceed to the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies’ incorporation of structuralism, and thence to the challenge of poststructuralism.
Learn more about this courseThis seminar will explore the rich array of voices that constitutes nineteenth-century American poetry, from William Cullen Bryant, Lydia Sigourney, and Margaret Fuller to Walt Whitman, James Whitcomb Riley, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. This class meets at the Lilly Library, which means that the emphasis of our work with this semester will be on the ways in which primary material (manuscripts, first editions, objects in the collections of the Lilly) can help us better understand and recover the practice of writing and reading poetry in the 1800s as well as the development of American print culture.
Learn more about this courseThis course explores the reasons—sociohistorical, philosophical, and political—for this rise, fall, revival, and revivification. It also seeks to understand the formal dimensions and aesthetic power of epistolary fiction.
Learn more about this courseIn this seminar we will explore race and ethnicity in American comic strips, comic books and graphic novels. After laying the historical foundation of American comics in the early twentieth century we will situate the bulk of our inquiry in the decades following the Second World War.
Learn more about this courseWe will treat the course title as a question: What is the relationship between rhetoric and public culture? Of course, that is a question with various and multiform answers, and we will draw upon theory and criticism with roots in both “communication” and “English” traditions as we survey the ways that academic rhetoricians have described, analyzed, enacted, critiqued, and advocated for some of them.
Learn more about this courseThe aim of this course will dither appropriately, appraising the inscrutable dynamism of his thinking while also striving to make it do real work in the hard-scrabble here-and-now of life, particularly where that life meets language.
Learn more about this courseThis course has two main purposes: 1) to provide Associate Instructors teaching W131 for the first time with various strategies for connecting reading and writing, preparing assignments, and evaluating student writing; and 2) to engage new instructors in reflective practice through readings, speakers, and discussion of a variety of approaches and materials.
Learn more about this courseThrough reading and experience we will explore the creative process as well as the assumptions and practices unique—and not so unique—to creative writing classes.
Learn more about this courseOur workshop will focus on the art of mystery in fiction. Broadly defined, mystery is the unknown, a question whose answer may or may not be revealed throughout the course of a narrative.
Learn more about this courseThis graduate course in poetry writing is limited to students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In this poetry seminar, we will explore the craft and creation of poetry with an emphasis on story telling.
Learn more about this courseIn this course we will be thinking about and writing (about) lyric biographies, a term and genre that this course will help us to define and undefine, to point at and admire as it evades us. We will probably be reading, among other things, the work of Imani Perry, Terrance Hayes, Chris Kraus, Sam Stephenson, Fleur Jaeggy, Hilton Als, Sarah Manguso, Saidiya Hartman, and probably a few others.
Learn more about this course
The College of Arts