Course Offerings by term

In this course, students practice writing fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry while exploring the boundaries between genres. The workshop format includes guided peer critique of sketches, poems, and full-length works presented in class and discussion and analysis of literary models. In Fall, students concentrate on writing techniques. In Spring, the workshop is theme-driven. May be taken twice for credit.

This course addresses the dark side of the imagination: monsters, vampires, hauntings and demons. It opens students to the history and genealogy of the fascination with excess, the supernatural, and horror, tracing the development of a genre from its 18th- century inception through to its late bloom in the Victorian era; leaving it to students to pursue through their pick of twentieth- and twenty-first gothic. Authors studied include Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, the Marquis de Sade, James Hogg, R.L. Stevenson, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. The course also attends to visual representations of gothic in painting, ballet, television, and film.

This course is a quest for understanding of the conventions of medieval romance, a genre of predilection for establishing codified, recognizable normative femininities and masculinities through the lens of gender, sexuality and feminist and queer theory. We will explore medieval texts and the social contexts of their production and reception, the aspirations and contradictions of the idealized, and the heteronormative world of knighthood and courtly love.

Whether a story is an imaginative transformation of life experience or an invention, the writing must be well crafted and convincing, driven not only by plot and theme but also through characterization, conflict, point of view, and sensitivity to language. Students produce and critique short stories and novel chapters while studying fiction techniques and style through examples.