Course Schedule Spring 2025 - Expanded Course Descriptions

English 10B offers a survey of literature in English from 1700-1900, and is the second part of the required ENL 10 sequence for English majors. Our focus in this class will be on literature written between 1700 and 1900 in the English-speaking world. This is a reading and writing intensive class, designed to improve your critical reading and critical writing abilities and to prepare you for upper-division courses in the major. Our key goals for the class are:

• To improve your skills in close reading, attention to textual detail, and reading texts within a historical context
• To introduce you to some of the most important literary and cultural developments in the English-speaking world from 1700 to 1900
• To explore a wide range of genres, modes, and forms of literary writing
• To strengthen your writing and research skills generally and to give you practice in writing literary analysis and research papers for the English major

Some of the topics we will explore in this class include: transatlantic print culture, the rise of the novel, forms of autobiography, Gothic and Romantic literature, the globalization of English literary forms, early science fiction, and literature’s relation to major historical contexts such as nationhood, colonialism, slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the changing natural world. Assignments will include frequent in-class writing exercises, two papers, class participation and attendance, and an in-class final exam.

This creative writing course will introduce students to primary elements of literary practice and craft. You should love short stories, because we will be reading and writing short stories (not novels, though working in short form teaches you a lot about working in other forms). Whether you are writing about real or wholly imagined things, about young people or old people, animals or vegetables, here you will practice writing in the spirit of making something of lasting beauty and significance (even if we are all beginners for the rest of our lives). We not very much interested, in this class, in formulaic writing, or learning to produce what might be popular or broadly marketable; we are interested, rather, in finding what writing can help us do as we try to understand ourselves and engage inventively with our world via language (and if we're loved or paid for it, hooray!)

You'll be exposed to thinking about elements of craft like scene and summary, the role of physical detail, the nuance of point of view, creation of character, control of time, etc. but this quarter I also want to focus, in particular, on what happens when you try to locate your own "fingerprint" in your writing: what makes your writing yours.

In this course, we will be engaging with some of the seminal works of John Milton, including Paradise Lost and a sample of his early poetry and prose. Our way of reading will explore the built environment of the story as poem: its sound, its verse, its rhetoric, and its characters. We will be particularly attentive to the worlding (that is the world building) that the language of the poem enacts. Simultaneously, we will be exploring the poem as story by noting its origins, atmosphere, and climate environs. We will follow its crosshatching of multiple worlds and life forms—including human beings, vegetal, mineral, animal, and more-than-human entities—as they traverse space and time. We will be attentive to how matter, energy, information, and physical laws or cosmology, as well as religious views, constrain and construct domains. We will also examine Milton’s unconventional representations of creation, the natural world, and human systems such as justice and government. As we read, we will ask what it means to be human and how the stories we tell might create interpenetrating dimensions, alternate planes, and potential futures.

Required Text: Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited, with Introduction, by David Scott Kastan. Hackett, 2005. ISBN 978-0-87220-733-2.

General Education: Arts & Humanities (AH); Writing Experience (WE).

Shakespeare and New Technologies: From AI to VR

This course examines how recent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are shaping Shakespeare’s delivery to 21st century audiences. We will read about and, when possible, explore first-hand Shakespeare projects that employ VR, AI, and related technologies alongside Shakespeare plays that are the focus of these projects, including The Tempest and Hamlet. What are the limitations and affordances of recent technologies for reimagining Shakespeare in the 21st century? To what extent do these technologies help us gain new insights into Shakespeare’s plays? How are experiments with new technologies changing more traditional ways of experiencing Shakespeare in classrooms, theaters, popular media, and public spaces? Are these changes beneficial and, if so, for whom and why?

One aim of the course is to offer students interested in early modern drama an opportunity to learn more about a hot topic in the field of the Shakespeare studies. An additional aim is to help students think about how a passion for Shakespeare could be channeled into career paths where new digital technologies have been gaining traction: K-12 teaching, theatre production, game-making, and academic scholarship. To that end, students will focus their term project on a career path that most interests them. For instance, those on a teaching path might create course materials for teaching Shakespeare with new technologies; those on a game-making path might prototype a game designed to be played using one of these technologies; those on a theatre path might write a pitch for a theatre production that uses a particular technology to adapt a Shakespeare play; those on a scholarship track might write a research essay examining one or more digital Shakespeare projects.

Students do not need any background or familiarity with VR, AI, and other digital technologies in order to take this course. They just need to be open to experimenting with them.

Living, Loving, and Dying with John Donne 

This course offers a deep dive into the works of John Donne (1572-1631). Donne’s radical reinvention of poetic form and his passionate engagement with life, love, and death offer a unique window into the human experience. His use of metaphysical conceits subverts expectations at every turn, irrevocably expanding the worldview of the reader. The first part of this course, Living, will focus on Donne’s intense and (very) intimate relationship with God as well as how that relationship manifests in and challenges both poetic and prose form. The second part of this course, Loving, will examine the bawdy and sensual world of Donne’s abundant love poetry from his collection Songs and Sonnets. The final part of this course, Dying, will consider Donne’s lifelong fascination with death as it appears in his elegies, sermons, and Biathanatos, a controversial defense of self-homicide. Through immersive exploration of Donne’s poetic forms, close reading of his complex works, and an engagement with the historical and cultural milieu of the early modern period, students will gain a deeper understanding of both the human condition and the rich, evolving landscape of English literature.

Walk into any bookstore or public library and the vast and sprawling landscape of young adult literature stretches out before you. Once a tiny section tucked into a dark corner of the children’s department, this category of literature has come into its own in recent decades. Texts written for and about young adults have captured the imagination of millions of both teen and adult readers and inspired many major film franchises, television series, and other adaptations.

In this course, we will explore YA fiction that encompasses a range of literary genres and perspectives, from enduring coming-of-age stories and novels to today’s popular print and digital texts. We will read fantasy, science fiction, dystopian, and graphic novels. We will also explore visual media, film, fan culture, and online publication contexts for young adult texts. In addition to building a definition for young adult literature as we read and discuss our texts, we will also explore the recurring themes and the innovative formats and narrative styles that characterize this continuously-evolving body of literature.

R 1510-1600 120 VRHIES (Conference)

This is a graduate level fiction writing workshop. If you are not a student in the MFA program in Creative Writing, please contact the professor for permission to enroll, and include a short sample (under 10 pages) of your fiction writing with your request.

I want the course to be a place of refuge and invention. You can work on long or short form fiction, fiction that is conventional or unconventional in form. Your fiction can be practically nonfiction and it can be practically poetry. It can reach, in form, toward the other arts. It just has to be literary in its ambitions.

My approach privileges intensity and awareness of language textures and narrative shape, and asks each student to make each new work press the boundaries (intellectual, emotional, formal) of previous work. Making an immaculate-feeling piece of art is the ultimate goal, and we will work toward making your stories as beautiful as they can be, but I am less interested in you crafting pieces that conform to an ideal, imagined “story,” than I am in you challenging yourself artistically. Writers need to fail, and they need to play. Revision is also essential to this challenge. You are expected, therefore, to engage in revision, not always in order to be "done" with a work, but to deepen and push at a work. Consistent, thorough attention to peer fictions both in writing and in discussion is required.

On the first day of class, we’ll figure out, based on who is here, what ways we need to be reading together.

R 12:10-15:00 

Any attempt to define nonfiction succinctly is doomed to fail, but such an attempt is full of conversational potential, so we will try, on the first day of class to do just that. Nonfiction is known as the third genre, in some ways it is just getting its legs underneath it, and there is the feeling within the genre that anything at all might happen. Which I find exciting. In this class we will explore several subgenres that exist within the extremely broad and, in my opinion badly named category of nonfiction: the lyric essay, the memoir, and political and environmental journalism in particular.

We will talk about how to make a beautiful essay as opposed to, say, a beautiful story or poem, and how we decide what material should take which form. We will talk about what we call "truth" in these complex political times, and how it figures into this genre we insist on defining by its negative. As in any class in artistic writing, there will be a great deal of focus on metaphor, voice, form and structure. We will discuss artistic choices available to the essayist such as point of view, tense, narrative stance, tone, scene versus summary, dialogue, beginnings and endings.

A friend of mine, C Marie Fuhrman who also happens to be the author of one of the books we are going to read this quarter, asked a class I was co-teaching with her today, how are you going to write words that bust the plaque off of the hearts of the people who read them. That is a question I would like us to keep front of mind as we move through the quarter.

Each student will be expected to turn in two new essays or memoir chapters during the course of the quarter and turn in either a revision or a new essay/chapter at quarter’s end. There will be reading assignments throughout the quarter and weekly writing exercises early on that will give way to workshop after a few weeks.

M 12:10-15:00 120 VRHIES