This course is an intensive course intended to bring inexperienced writers up to speed with the fundamental skills required in academic writing. The Comprehensive track runs in parallel with the Writing Fundamentals sibling course, but, with twice the contact hours, it elevates student competence more gradually, at a pace more appropriate for inexperienced writers. Successful completion of the course grants access to Writing from Research (ENG 102).

The course surveys the major writers from the Anglo-Saxon period, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment such as the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Swift, and Samuel Johnson.

This course explores the city of Rome through writing. On-site classes provide an interdisciplinary, studio-art approach to the generation of written work. Through the studied practice of descriptive writing and the examination of setting as a vital literary component, students will create their own textual map of the Eternal City.

This course serves as an introduction to the variety of forms and themes of dramatic literature. Major problems treated by dramatists will be examined, as well as genres: tragedy, comedy, farce, melodrama, tragicomedy, and the thesis play.

This course examines Italy and its impact on British and American writers, investigating the complicated ways Italy figures in the Anglo-American imagination. Selected readings, discussion and analysis from the writings of Hawthorne, James, Wharton, Forster, Lawrence, Pound and others will be discussed.

The intensive study of five or six of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies set in Italy, ancient and early modern, with attention to English attitudes toward Italy and Shakespeare’s use of Italy, the nature of comedy and tragedy, and the shape of Shakespeare’s career.

Nonfiction is a genre that has grown more diverse and creative than ever, embracing all styles from serious to whimsical and encompassing every topic imaginable. This course will focus on the creative process and the generation of several different forms of writing within the nonfiction genre, including the personal essay, the memoir, biography, and the journalistic or magazine profile

This advanced writing course is designed to develop students’ skills in writing fiction expressly for children and young adults. The course will focus on the writing process and the approaches to writing for various age groups within the genre, specifically examining story structure, character, plot, and theme. In addition to writing and work-shopping their own work, students will read and analyse texts from classic and contemporary children’s and YA literature.

Modernism was an international movement that drew from influences throughout Europe in its desire to break with the past and create a new way of expressing experience--to “Make it New”— to use Ezra Pound’s famous phrase. This course will examine the characteristics that define the “Modern” in literature, but we will also examine how the modernist aesthetic influenced other cultural and artistic expression in the early decades of the twentieth century

As the British Empire began its decline in the wake of World War II, an outpouring of literature emerged from its former colonies. As Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie pointed out, the empire was writing back “with a vengeance.” In this course we will read and analyze contemporary works by writers from Africa, The Caribbeans, India, and Britain. In addition, this course will examine how these authors negotiate the legacies of empire, ongoing processes of de-colonization, and evolving forms of neo-colonialism. We will also look at pivotal post-colonial theoretical texts that investigate issues of identity, nationalism, language, diaspora, race, gender, and hybridity.

This course will examine the life and expatriate writings of Ernest Hemingway, exploring his themes, style, and narrative technique. We will examine not only issues of style and technique but also how Hemingway’s expatriate experience influenced his writing.

This course will lead students through the process by which a manuscript becomes a published book, with weekly hands-on workshops in acquisitions, developmental editing, course adoption, and book publicity. Questions we will consider include: To what extent is selecting work a political act, a form of literary activism, an intervention into the existing canon ? How can editors actively build community around innovative multicultural texts? And what steps can editors take to ensure that their books are adopted into educators’ curriculum, boosting sales as well as creating conversation and dialogue around a particular book? It will include guest speakers from global publishing houses and award-winning presses.

A seminar in which students select a publication, production or research project to complete over the course of two semesters. Students are required to choose a project in creative writing (fiction, poetry, drama, or creative non-fiction), or a scholarly thesis, work with an advisor to complete their projects over the course of their final two semesters as seniors.

This course introduces students to the rigors and discipline of the writing process, stage by stage, from choosing a topic, to collecting information, brainstorming, planning and outlining, drafting, revising and editing, to proofreading and finalizing. Each stage is punctuated with assignments and exercises that familiarize students with the rhetorical modes, from description, to comparison/ contrast, narration, classification, extended definition, cause-effect, and argument. In in-class and at home work, students will practice producing grammatically correct and logically sound claims, arranged in coherent paragraphs; understand and develop the thesis statement; learn to distinguish between primary and secondary sources; learn to annotate sources, and incorporate quotes in their writing with proper lead-in sentences and follow-up; begin familiarizing with citation styles; learn to use information technology, from research to writing and formatting.

This course surveys the major writers from the Romantic and Victorian periods and through the twentieth century such as Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickens, Arnold, Browning, Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf.

The course is a study of American literature from the colonial, though the romantic, realist/naturalist, modernist and contemporary literary periods, with particular focus on the major writers Particular emphasis is placed on the diversity and representativeness of American literature.

This introductory level literature class is designed to help students acquire the skills for reading, appreciating, writing, and critically analyzing fiction. This course intends to introduce the students to basic concepts about literary technique, elements of fiction, and innovation while honing their critical thinking skills.

This course is an overview in literary editing for publication. We will explore in-depth the publishing industry for both writers and editors. Students will develop skills such as copyediting, revision, query letters, literary critique and analysis, and submitting and reviewing work.

This course focuses on the practice of writing lively, research-informed essays.

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Using examples from Juvenal to Jon Stewart, this course examines elements of comedic and satiric technique, style, and genre. It will investigate the psychological, social, and political functions of laughter and comedy, as well as satire’s most common targets and its various forms. Through practical exercises, literature, and screenings of TV, film, and stand-ups, students will explore what and why we find some things funny.

Food writing is defined in many ways: cookbooks to non-fiction essays, restaurant reviews to travel and personal narratives. This course will examine food writing in its various professional forms and will instruct students in approaches to writing about food for publications.

This course will examine the literature and history of The Grand Tour, from it origins in the Renaissance and its heyday in the eighteenth century to the sentimental tourism of the nineteenth century and its evolution into modern tourism. We will take an interdisciplinary approach and examine theory, history, non-fiction accounts, and literary travel writing.

From the Iliad to Beowulf to Saving Private Ryan, war is a constant of human experience and as such a major topic in all forms of cultural and artistic expression. This course will examine the various literary responses to war and the ways in which artists and writers have negotiated power, violence, and resistance within the context of military conflict.

This course explores the themes of crime and punishment in modern literature, especially the treatment of guilt as experienced through the individual consciousness of the perpetrator, of the accused, and in the relation between jailer and prisoner. Some of the questions we will address are: how does each text define what constitutes a crime? Is crime understood and defined in absolute or in relative terms? Do any of the texts speak to how responsibility for criminal acts is (or should be) apportioned between the individual, society, and institutions? What specific form does punishment take in each novel, and how is the form of the punishment related to the structure of the text? Where does the authority to punish come from, in each case? Do the texts offer an explanation or a critique of the prevalent system determining crime and punishment? These and other questions will guide the analysis of the assigned texts to understand how the selected authors confront problems of crime and punishment in the modern world.

This course prepares students to plan, research, and write academic-level research papers au- tonomously. Students are guided through all writing stages, from preparing an articulated re- search proposal, to collecting sources and arranging them in an annotated bibliography, to out- lining, drafting, and, finally, completing the paper in accordance with current MLA guidelines. Each stage is also punctuated with writing drills in the form of in-class essays, citing and quot- ing drills in the form of worksheets, annotation drills on select academic sources related to the class theme, and a thorough overview of the use of library resources, both material and elec- tronic. Students will also practice discussing and explaining their project in workshop sessions.

This course is a seminar on the principles of effective expository writing with a focus on the critical perspectives and theories that enliven contemporary literary, art, and cultural studies. Through an historical survey of critical theory, including an introduction to relevant terminology, the course will cover various types of arguments, appropriate to different concerns and cultural contexts. The theory addressed in this course spans theories of race, class, gender and national identity, postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, Marxist critique, and psychoanalytic approaches. Writing assignments will provide students with the opportunity to apply these theories to literary works, film, painting, and built space.

This introductory level literature class is designed to help students acquire the skills for reading, appreciating, and critically analyzing poetry. This course intends to introduce the students to some basic concepts about literary technique and innovation.

This course explores the creative process, giving students concrete ways to enhance their creative thought and writing. Through writing assignments and numerous inventive classroom exercises, students learn how to write more interesting characters, fascinating plots and colorful stories.

The aim of the course is to situate select theoretical and literary texts within the post-modern aesthetic, and to understand both postmodern theory and post-modern writing as commentary on, and reaction to, a world disenchanted of the myth of progress, suspicious of the legitimacy of authority, and filled with anxiety over the attribute of authenticity in identity, experience, and “things in the world.”

This is a workshop-based approach to writing stage plays. It focuses on the process of creating character, scene, and story, first through analyzing great plays of the Western dramatic tradition and then through writing original works of drama.

In this course students will learn a broad array of concepts and methods in literary studies and writing, taken directly from the self-reflective work of creative writers and the critical work of scholars. The acquired knowledge and expertise will enable students to navigate upper division courses in writing and literature, and to approach the capstone project, with competence, poise, and style.

Wedged between the Romantic and Modern periods, Realism in literature is a substantive and stylistic course correction from the sentimental excesses of its predecessor and an essential stepping stone in the development of the psychological acuity of its successor. This course explores the character and legacy of realism, with its unique and surprising blend of Enlightenment values, progressive politics, and sharp critique of the alienating effects of intense urbanization in the techno-scientific 19th century. Realist writers tackled urban poverty and degradation, the “new woman”, race, and immigration, inventing new narrative techniques to match the novelty of the human experience in the heart of the age of empire, expansion of capital, and mass society.

This workshop instructs students in the mechanics of travel writing from research, interviewing techniques and pitching editors to crafting essays and articles for newspapers, magazines, books, and the internet.

This is an upper-level writing intensive course that focuses on the technique of writing about various arts using journalism’s forms, principles and ethics.

This course looks at the intersection of literature and race in major literary works from a comparative perspective. Similarly themed novels are read against each other, as well as their historical, cultural, and literary context/co-text, represented by a mix of contemporary primary (documental) sources, and scholarly analysis. In this process, students will understand the (often contradictory and controversial) ways in which literature tackles crucial ethical, social, or political issues with its unique tools and methods, and how it impacts, and is impacted by, its socio-cultural environment.

A seminar in which students select a publication, production or research project to complete over the course of two semesters. Students are required to choose a project in creative writing (fiction, poetry, drama, or creative non-fiction), or a scholarly thesis, work with an advisor to complete their projects over the course of their final two semesters as seniors.