36 courses with the subject ENCW, 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.
ENCW 100The Developing Writer
Students will be enrolled in this course based on a review of a writing exercise by a faculty panel. This course is intended for first-year students who have been advised to take ENCW 100 before taking CORE 120. This course is a general introduction to writing at the college level. We will cover how to beat procrastination, how to write a daring and generative first draft, and how to revise that draft into a polished argument. This course is also a space to explore the norms and expectations of American academic writing. (How informal can you be? Why do professors use so many Latin abbreviations?) We will also learn how to write for different disciplines, how to avoid plagiarism, and how to find useful sources for a paper. Most importantly, we will learn to see writing as a way of thinking: a tool that can help you figure out what you believe and why. Each semester. A student enrolled in this class will be required to complete and pass it before they can register for CORE 120.
CR: 3 This course introduces students to the studio model, developing their skills as readers and writers through the study and discussion of classic and contemporary works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and through the composition and revision of analytical and creative assignments.
ENCW 201The Love Story: On the Page, On the Stage, and In the World
CR: 3 This course explores both classic and contemporary works of literature that examine the endless manifestations and complications of love. Students will complete both analytical and creative assignments. Attendance at SBC events and excursions to the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse, museums, and other sites of interest will allow students to consider how various artistic mediums - opera, poetry, film, and visual art - expand their understanding of this most complex realm of human experience and inspire the creative imagination. Offered alternate years. Students are responsible for the costs of theater tickets. This course counts for the CORE 150 requirement. C150
CR: 3 This course explores the different ways in which classic and contemporary works of fiction cross the boundary between the real and the fantastic. How and why do writers employ the surreal, the magical, and the impossible to address the complexities of human experience? Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments. III.W
CR: 3 This course acquaints students with the personal essay as a literary genre. Readings range widely in subject matter, period, and style in order to afford students and understanding of the different ways in which essays can be “personal”. Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments. III.W
CR: 3 This course explores the relationship between historical and contemporary portraits of the culturally and ethnically diverse city of New Orleans in literature, journalism, film, visual art, and music. Authors and artists to be studied include Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Natasha Trethewey, Brenda Marie Osbey, Spike Lee, Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, and Deborah Luster. Offered alternate years. Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments and will attend SBC arts events. This course counts for the CORE 150 requirement. III.W, C150
ENCW 206Literature and Landscape: O Earth, What Changes Hast Thou Seen!
CR: 3 From Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura to Tennyson’s In Memoriam to contemporary post-apocalyptic poetry and fiction, writers have long reckoned with the history of the natural world and their place in it. This course will explore how artists’ knowledge of the natural world shapes how they respond to it. We will look at the influence of science writers and thinkers on canonical poets, essayists, and fiction writers; we will explore how contemporary writers respond to current conversations about climate change and environmental disaster; and we will engage our own local landscape and our relationship to it. Students will write analytical papers, putting unlikely writers in conversations. Offered alternate years. Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments. III.W
ENCW 207Mapping the Monstrous: Deviant Forms and Bodies in Literature
CR: 3 This course will explore literary representations of monstrosity - both physical and psychological - in literature and film and the ways such works function in relationship to its broader socio-cultural moment. We will attempt to understand how monsters are represented; we will analyze how the monstrous body becomes both screen and metaphor for broader cultural fears of the other; and we will explore the role of the literary monster in constructing its own text through stitching, layering, and methods of literary productivity and procreation. Along the way, students will construct their own monstrous texts and analytical essays. This course counts for the CORE 150 requirement. III.W, C150
CR: 3 Children’s literature hasn’t always existed – at least not as the established genre we know today. This class will trace its history, from fairy tales to didactic texts of the 18th and 19th centuries all the way to the YA boom of the early 2000s and the ideological battleground of book bans in contemporary America. This is also a class on children’s literature as an academic discipline, and we will move beyond the mere appreciation of texts, reading theory and criticism about such subjects as: the dual readership of children’s literature, the gap between adult producers and child consumers, the textual reinforcement or subversion of adult/child hierarchies, and the varied stereotypes constructed around childhood. Also, what differentiates a middle-grade book from a YA book? Let’s find out! The course will include both analytical and creative writing assignments. III.W
CR: 3 What does it mean to be a writer abroad? How does living among and amid other cultures shape the way we see the world? This course, a three-week intensive travel writing class at the VCCA’s residence in Auvillar, France, will introduce students to a range of travel writing literature and approaches to writing about place. Through total immersion in a new environment, students will explore the implications of writing about place as an outsider, the ethical implications of representation, and the ways in which their own particular areas of expertise - be they historical, scientific, or artistic - frame the ways they engage writing about place. Assignments will include both analytical and creative pieces, all of which will use Auvillar or its environs as the primary subject. Students will be responsible for additional travel costs and may apply for the Grant for Experiential Learning. III.W
CR: 3 The first-person narrator in fiction - the “I” of the story - is a unique creature: an enchanter, a confessor, a witness, an unreliable guide. What are the advantages and risks of first-person narration? How is that controlling perspective or point of view established? How does a writer develop and sustain the voice of a first-person narrator? This course will introduce students to a variety of compelling first-person narrators in short fiction and ask students to create a series of persuasive voices for their own stories.
CR: 3.0 In this travel course, students will journey to explore a city’s influence on some of our greatest literary masters. Students will experience the city through the eyes of each writer by visiting the places that shaped and influenced authors’ work. As they read and study the relationship between the city and the literature that reflects its complex history, students will undertake their own immersive writing projects. Complementary readings will be included along with new and underrepresented voices who share a literary lineage with the city. Course will include both analytical and creative assignments. Completion of ENCW 101 is recommended. Students will be responsible for the travel costs of this course and may apply for a Grant for Engaged Learning (GEL) to offset these expenses.
ENCW 214Finding the Thread: Contemporary Poetry Projects
CR: 3 Over the past 15 years, contemporary poetry has witnessed a radical expansion in the number of so-called “project” books: books that depend on the recurrence of specific speakers, lyrical spaces, and/or thematic content. This course will examine how several contemporary “project” books generate their unique governing structures, and how readers encounter poems individually and as parts of the elaborate worlds they construct. Students will study and practice the poetic forms that undergird recent poetic experiments; identify and articulate how newly published project books function in relation to our cultural moment; and create a small poetry project of their own. Course will include analytical and creative assignments.
CR: 3 Many writers explore their obsessions, but how does one turn an obsession into art? This course will explore how different nonfiction writers use obsession and desire as avenues for discovery, how writing on the same subject from different angles can lead to revelation, and how writers can use deep immersion in one topic as a structural device. Students will write both analytical and creative work. Writers whose works will be read include Maggie Nelson, Roland Barthes, Lia Purpura, Van Gogh (letters), Susan Sontag, Lidia Yuknavitch, Susan Stewart, Anne Carson, and David Lazar. III.W
CR: 3.0 This course focuses on how fiction writers use the material of the real world - real places, real people, real events - in the fictional universe, considering how a fiction writer’s research methods and purpose differ from an historian’s. Students will explore the many ways - including through images, film, and virtual reality - information is gathered for successful fictional world-building. Students will read classic and contemporary works, complete analytical assignments, write short stories that arise out of historical or contemporary fact and examine how the imagination transforms fact into fiction. Meets CORE 150 requirement.
CORE 120 and ENCW 101. This course will introduce students to the variety of skills - along with the intellectual and artistic concerns - that are necessary in planning, assembling, editing, and publishing a literary magazine. Students would read and discuss a variety of both print and online literary magazines while also creating work for submission to such magazines. Both the skills developed and the creative work assembled in the course will prepare students to serve as contributors to and editors of Sweet Briar’s student literary magazine, Red Clay .
ENCW 231Writing About Music and Writing Musically
CR: 3 This is a multi-genre, interdisciplinary class ideal for English & Creative Writing and Music students but open to all students interested in exploring the intersection between the written and spoken word and the medium of music. Texts and topics will include shorts stories, poems, and nonfiction essays about music, “ekphrastic” attempts to translate music into writing (and writing into music), music journalism and album reviews, sound poetry, performance writing, and musician/writer collaborations. We will meet controversial questions head-on, for example the common claim that song lyrics aren’t real poetry, and examine terminology common to both music and writing but with subtly different meanings, such as form, exposition, theme, development, cadence, rhythm, and meter. This course satisfies CORE 150.
CR: 3 What makes scary stories scary? What are the genre’s rules, and how can a writer participate in this rich tradition while avoiding the pitfalls of formulaic fiction? Close readings and discussions of stories by familiar names-Stephen King, Shirley Jackson-as well as terrifying upstarts-Aimee Bender, Ron A. Austen, Stephen Graham Jones-will throw into confusion the false binary between “genre” and “literary” and help us examine how the fundamentals of fiction-characterization, conflict, setting, point of view, and voice-mutate when subjected to unspeakable horror. Periodic explorations of films like Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu and Jordan Peele’s Nope will put page-based pleasures into conversation with those glimpsed on the screen. Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments. Taught in alternate years. Meets CORE 150 requirement.
One ENCW course and permission of the instructor. Study at an introductory level of selected topics in literature or writing to be pursued by individual students under the immediate supervision of a program faculty member.
ENCW 101 or a 200-level ENCW course. Commonly referred to as the inventor of the modern short story, Chekhov remains - for many readers and writers - the supreme master of the form. His contemporary counterpart is Alice Munro, born in 1931, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize and often referred to as “Canada’s Chekhov.” This course is a tour through some of Munro and Chekhov’s most beloved short fiction, aided by biographical and critical appreciations. Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments.
ENCW 101 or a 200-level ENCW course. “Do I contradict myself?” writes the iconic American poet Walt Whitman. “Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” In this course, students reflect on the infinite variety of selves that we all possess, reading a range of classic and contemporary poets who have addressed questions of identity through the lenses of race, class, sexuality, and gender. Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments.
ENCW 101 or a 200-level ENCW course. This course examines the rich array of contemporary literature throughout the world. Students will read and discuss the writers’ work and will explore the particular historical, cultural, and political circumstances out of which these works have emerged. Students will be encouraged to apply their own particular interests to their research projects and oral presentations. Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments.
ENCW 101 or a 200-level ENCW class. This course introduces students to cross-genre writing through the lyric essay, a category embracing liminal space between traditional boundaries of poetry and nonfiction. Students will experiment by writing non-narrative forms and analyzing a variety of cross-genre texts, concluding the semester with a final experiment: a class-wide collaborative writing project. Readings might include work by Jenny Boully, Eula Biss, Deborah Tall, John D’Agata, T Fleischmann, and Maggie Nelson.
ENCW 101 The poem is a combination of music and meaning, with each element guided by form or structure. This course teaches rhyme, meter, a variety of forms, and free verse strategies. What elements of form can amplify meaning? How can free verse avoid arbitrary lineation? Students will study poems from different periods and traditions. Students will complete both creative and analytical assignments. It is recommended that students complete at least one other ENCW course in addition to the
ENCW 322Graphic Memoir: Drawing Words and Writing Pictures
ENCW 101. Sometimes a picture needs more than a thousand words, or a story needs none. The combination of text and image offers artists the opportunity to craft powerful narratives, transcending the limitation of either form. In this class, students will write, draw, and study artists who have challenged themselves to leave the comfort of their primary medium in service of innovation and story. Art skills are not required - if you can draw a stick figure, you can take this class. This course will count for CORE 150.
One ENCW course at the 100-level or above and permission of the instructor. Study at an intermediate level of selected topics in literature or writing to be pursued by individual students under the immediate supervision of a program faculty member.
ENCW 377Internship
CR: 1 - 3 Three credits in ENCW and permission of instructor and program chair.
Open only to senior ENCW majors. This course serves as a workshop for senior English and Creative Writing majors completing their creative writing portfolios. Students will compile an annotated bibliography of the literature they have read, compose an introduction to their portfolio project, and -through peer and instructor responses and editing-revise and refine the work to be included in their portfolio. III.O, III.W
At least one 300-level ENCW course and permission of the instructor. Study at an advanced level of special topics in literature or writing to be pursued by individual students under supervision of a program faculty member.
ENCW 470Advanced Honors
CR: 3 Upper-level research or creative project determined in advance by the student in consultation with two faculty members who will serve as primary and secondary project sponsors. The course is required for the Honors Degree, and serves as the capstone experience for Honors students who do not pursue a senior Honors thesis project. This course is typically taken in the student’s junior or senior year.
CR: 3 During this course, a senior is expected to refine and submit their thesis proposal under the supervision of a thesis advisor. The senior will submit their thesis proposal to the Student Advancement Committee by the deadline determined by the Honors Program. Pending approval by the Student Advancement Committee, the student will spend the remainder of the semester beginning the research described in their proposal. If a student does not submit an acceptable thesis proposal as determined by the Student Advancement Committee, they will not be allowed to continue in the pursuit of the Honors Degree/Program Honors. This course will carry the rubric of the student’s major in which the thesis is based.
CR: 3 In this course, the student is expected to continue the research proposed and approved by the Student Advancement Committee in the 471 Proposal/Research course. This work is completed under the supervision of faculty advisors, culminating in the student defending their thesis before a committee.
