27 courses with the subject EN, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
EN 1219Introduction to Creative Writing1/3
In this introductory course, students will learn about the craft of writing poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. They will study contemporary published poems, essays, and stories written by international masters and use these texts as inspiration for their own creative work across genres. They will also read and respond to the work of their peers. Through an equally balanced studio/research approach, this course will develop students’ skills as literary critics and creative writers. Students may not receive credit for both EN 1219 and EN 121X.
EN 1257Introduction to African American Literature and Culture1/3
This course examines the formation and history of the African American literary tradition from slave narratives to contemporary forms in black popular culture. The course will explore some genres of African American writing and their relation to American literature and to black cultural expression. This course will be offered in academic years ending in odd numbers.
EN 1259Introduction to Contemporary Chicana/o Literature1/3
This course examines literary works of multiple genres produced by Chicana/o writers from WWII to today, with particular emphasis on the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the contemporary relevance of issues such as land and education rights for immigrants. Writers studied may include the novelist Sandra Cisneros, the cultural critic Gloria Anzaldúa, the memoirist JP Brammer, and the short-story writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This course will emphasize civic involvement and will offer students the opportunity to engage with political activists and other public groups involved with immigration in America. Students cannot receive credit for both this class (EN 1259) and EN125x, Intro to Contemporary Chicana/o Literature. This course will be offered in academic years ending in odd numbers.
This course surveys the aesthetics, forms, histories, and politics of poetic expression from ancient, modern, and contemporary periods, focusing primarily on English-language examples while simultaneously incorporating works across world literatures, in original texts or in English translations. Attention may be given to epic, dramatic, and lyric modes, to elegies, odes, repeating forms (sonnet, villanelle), and short forms (epigram, haiku), and to specific architectures of poetry including address, assonance and consonance, closure, lineation, meter, rhyme, rhythm, and stanzaic structure.
This writing workshop aims to help students develop or improve the skills of written expression, emphasizing presentation and discussion of original work. Offerings may include themed courses covering multiple genres or specialized workshops in single genres of focus such as fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. This course may be repeated for different genres.
This course begins with selections from John Milton’s provocative version of Adam and Eve’s original sin in Paradise Lost. Focusing on Milton, John Donne and others, we will examine the theme of sin—political, religious, and sexual— in early modern literature. The events of the English Reformation profoundly influenced these writers, and their personal struggles against societal institutions have greatly influenced subsequent literary expressions of rage and rebellion. Students will also be reading texts by contemporary writers such as David Mamet which address the theme of sin in the modern city. This course will be offered in academic years ending in even numbers.
EN 2226Infected Shakespeare: Venereal Disease, Madness, Plague1/3
With his many references to syphilis, Bubonic Plague, mental illness, and other serious afflictions, Shakespeare illuminates the harsh reality of living in 16th and 17th-century England. This course explores Shakespeare through the historical lens of early modern medical practice. Students will study plays such as Hamlet, Richard III, and The Winters Tale alongside accounts by surgeons, doctors, midwives, and others who diagnosed, dissected, and (sometimes) cured. We will also pay close attention to the superstitions, misinformation, and downright strange treatments included in some of these accounts. Through creative and expository writing, students will analyze the impact of disease on Shakespeare’s writing. This course is intended for students interested in any one of the following: drama, English literature, the history of medicine, biology, other fields of life sciences. This course will be offered in academic years ending in odd numbers.
This course will examine the many ways in which dramatists, essayists, filmmakers, novelists, and poets have articulated ecological and environmental concerns. Topics to be discussed may include changing attitudes towards terms like ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’, the effects of technology on the environment, issues of conservation and sustainability, the dynamics of population growth, the treatment of animals, the production of food, and the presence of the spiritual in nature. Materials will include works by writers such as Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Winona LaDuke, Wangari Maathai, Thomas Malthus, Arne Naess, Nicolas Roeg, and Gary Snyder. This course will be offered in academic years ending in odd numbers.
A survey of major modern British authors. The works of many of these writers reflect the political, religious, and social issues of the twentieth century. New psychological insights run parallel with experiments in the use of myth, stream of consciousness, and symbolism. Authors studied may include Hardy, Conrad, Owen, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and Orwell. This course will be offered in academic years ending in even numbers.
Participants in this course will examine outstanding works of 19th-century English poetry and fiction, and consider questions of identity, beauty, judgment, and social responsibility. Writers covered may include such figures as Jane Austen, John Keats, Charles Dickens, and Robert Browning.This course will be offered in academic years ending in odd numbers.
This course focuses on the problem of how to live in the modern world. Emphasis will be placed on the way moral issues evolve within the complications of individual lives, as depicted in fiction. Such authors as Conrad, Kesey, Camus and Ellison show characters struggling with the questions of moral responsibility raised by love, religion, death, money, conformity.
EN 2252Science and Scientists in Modern Literature1/3
This course surveys the ways in which modern literature has represented science and scientists. Beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the origin of what Isaac Asimov calls the “damned Frankenstein complex” is examined. More complex presentations of science and scientists occur in twentieth-century works like Brecht’s Galileo, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The course covers major modern works of fiction and drama, including such literary forms as the play, the novel of ideas, and the utopian novel. Attention is focused on the themes (ideas) in, and the structure of, these works.
An investigation into one or more major movements or periods in American literature, focusing on aesthetic formations such as sentimentalism, realism, modernism, or postmodernism, on cultural formations from Transcendentalism and Regionalism through the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat Generation and the Native American Renaissance, or delivered through chronological engagements by century, by decade, or by other suitable framings attending to specific communities or sets of writers. This course may be repeated for different topics.
This course will examine literary works from two or more languages, modes, and/or traditions, often connecting these works to other works of expressive culture in the visual and performing arts. Some iterations may turn on a broader survey, others on more particular engagements with wider inflections. Material introduced beyond English will rely on translations but may also include attention to work in the original language. Attention to drama, poetry, and prose from various periods and places will encourage students to connect themes across cultural, formal, and historical divides, utilizing interdisciplinary and theoretical methods in the process of their reading and writing. Students who have previously taken EN 230X cannot take this course for credit. This course may be repeatable for different topics.
This advanced workshop in creative writing allows for sustained attention to the writing of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, or multiple genres. Investigation will also focus on the reading and discussion of exemplary literary works, with an emphasis on contemporary practice. Regular writing exercises and class visits from established authors will help to create a community of writers grounded in diverse methods. This course may be repeated for different genres.
This course examines the concept of “strange” and the figure of the “stranger” in a wide range of written and visual texts, from Shakespeare to Albert Camus to the 2017 horror/comedy film Get Out. We will focus on depictions of religious, racial, gendered, and other forms of alienation and otherness, from both an insider’s and outsider’s perspective. This course will be offered in academic years ending in odd numbers.
Take a vacation from the rational, quantifiable, and verifiable, and dip your toes into the ineffable. Unbridled, boundary-bending, and binary-busting, supernatural literature makes space for lived (and undead) experiences outside the mainstream. This course will examine the following questions: How are supernatural stories culturally situated? How is language used in supernatural texts, and when and why does it break down? What can we learn about the “real” through studying the fantastic? Course content will vary with each offering. Potential areas of focus might include magical realism, the supernatural and folklore, the gothic and gender, the gothic and race, the contemporary ghost story worldwide, and monstrosity and the grotesque. This course may be repeated for different topics. This course will be offered in academic years ending in odd numbers.
This course examines the poetries and poetics of various modern and contemporary American traditions, focusing on schools and styles from the Modernists and Objectivists through the Black Arts Movement, Confessional Poetry, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Attention will also be given to recent innovations in digital poetry, multiethnic poetry, and performance poetry. The course will include poets such as Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Joy Harjo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Myung Mi Kim, and Saul Williams. This course will be offered in academic years ending in odd numbers.
Participants in this seminar will examine the English novel from its origins in the eighteenth century to its twentieth-century forms, exploring the rich variety of ways a writer may communicate a personal and social vision. The novels treat love, travel, humor, work, adventure, madness, and self-discovery; the novelists may include Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Wodehouse, and Woolf.
This course offers a deep exploration of the vibrancy of Black American life and thought through the lens of African American literature. Students will actively and critically read selected African American texts considering the historical contexts in which they were produced as well as analyzing their formal elements. While the course will focus on Black American experience in the United States, it will do so in dialogue with the larger diasporic Black experience. The topics will rotate regularly, alternating between close examination of different authors, genres, themes, or movements while preparing students for the HUA capstone experience. Examples of authors are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. Examples of genres are slave narratives, sermons, autobiographies, dramas, spirituals, blues, and drama. Examples of themes are race and the law, freedom struggles, and intersections between race and class, gender, and sexuality. Examples of movements are the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Lives Matter Movement. This course may be repeated for different topics.
This course investigates American literature as it relates to a specific theme, issue, controversy, or question. Attention might center upon topics from childhood and friendship to captivity and freedom, and from immigration and labor to law and war, drawing on or even focusing more decidedly upon aspects of identity including but not limited to class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexuality Authors might extend from nineteenth century exemplars including Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman to twentieth and twenty-first century figures such as Philip K. Dick, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Richard Wright. This course may be repeated for different topics.
