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How do we put into words the ineffable emotions generated by love and grief? How have writers, across centuries and many different literary traditions, sung the praises of a beloved, or lamented the ache of loss? In this hybrid literature and creative writing course, we will alternate between the close-reading of model texts and generating original poetry and prose written under the influence of literary heroes.

Charles Dickens was certainly the most popular - and arguably the most socially engaged - of Victorian novelists. Dickens cultivated his relationship with his audience, which clamored for his serially-released novels, an enthusiasm for attenuated publication that we, post-Harry Potter readers and tv series watchers, certainly understand. Victorians read his work for its art, its humor, and its fervent report of the joys and the inequities of the world they shared. Historians and sociologists still go to him for that first-hand report; readers continue to be charmed by his brilliant narratives, his unforgettable characters. He was the energetic originator of the Victorian social novel and what we would today call a campaigner for social justice. He is less well known as a contemplative writer, one who reflects on his own memories. But in two important novels, David Copperfield (1849-50) and Great Expectations (1860-61), Dickens, in the voice of a first-person narrator, investigates the larger emotional and psychological issues of his own life. These novels present brilliant, and very different, fictional auto-biographies, and we will be reading them carefully - and in serial parts - with an eye to Dickens' self-awareness, tone, humor, reflections, and conclusions. This IntroSem will expect informed participation, a presentation based on primary materials contemporary with the novels' publication, and a final research project. You'll be encouraged to investigate issues and publications of Dickens' own day, and will be happy, I think, to spend time with some of the remarkable newspapers and journals that helped form 19th-century culture.

"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it." So begins Charles Dickens description of Coketown in Hard Times. And it only seems to get more grim from there. But the world that Dickens sought to portray in the novel was a hopeful one, too. And that tension is our starting point. The intent of this class is to more closely examine mid-Victorian Britain in light of Dickens' novel, with particular focus on the rise of some of our modern social movements in the 19th century. While things like the labor movement, abolitionism, feminism, and environmentalism, are not the same now as they were then, this class will explore the argument that the 21st century is still, in some ways, working out 19th century problems and questions. At the same time, this is also a course that seeks to expand the kinds of sources we traditionally use as historians. Thus, while recognizing that literary sources are particularly complex, we will use Hard Times as a guide to our exploration to this fascinating era. We will seek both to better understand this complex, transitional time and to assess the accuracy of Dickens' depictions of socio-political life.Through a combination of short response papers, creative Victorian projects (such as sending a hand-written letter to a classmate), and a final paper/project, this course will give you the opportunity to learn more about the 19th century and the value of being historically minded.As a seminar based course, discussion amongst members of the class is vital. All students are welcome

In this class, we will explore what the concept of family means for each of us - and how to transform our families' stories into powerful, lasting fiction. Through writing exercises, weekly readings and in-class visits with some of the most exciting contemporary writers working today, we will delve into our own unique ancestral histories and legacies. We will discuss how to work with and shape memories, factual and emotional truths, oral histories, family gossip and lore. We will also examine how to write convincingly about times, places and experiences not our own. Weekly readings will include work by Louise Erdrich, James McBride, Ocean Vuong and Nicole Krauss. Through visits with experts in the field, we will also examine techniques for carrying out enlightening interviews and conducting successful archival research - and, equally important, what to do when there's no one around to answer our questions. Students will come away with a stronger, more focused skillset for writing about their life stories and the people who animate them - the beautiful, challenging, hilarious, maddening people we call our families.

Focus on great dramas about family life (Albee, Kushner, Shephard, Vogel, Kron, Nottage, Parks). Communication in writing and speaking about conflict central to learning in this class.

The text of Shakespeare's plays, as we now read them, are edited and concrete, stabilized in printed form. Yet, in their own moment, Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts were anything but stable; they were messy, fluid, mutable, and subject to the capricious nature of the playhouse. To uncover the production process of early modern theater, we read a selection of plays that engage in metadrama, including Shakespeare's Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and Jonson's Bartholomew Fair.

Historical pirates were violent plunderers, ruthless torturers, and sanguinary murderers, or, to put it mildly: merciless criminals. In fact, in early modern times, pirates were such a bane that Anglo-Saxon Law developed a term to define them: "Enemies of Humanity," and the punishment for piracy was, without fail, "hanging by the neck until dead." And yet, the last three hundred years have portrayed the pirate figure as a free spirit, a hero-like adventurer of sorts, burying fabulous riches on exotic islands, pioneering new modes of life against the oppressive nature of life on land. How do we reconcile pirate's historical reality with our romantic vision of pirates? This course will delve into the intricacies of both cultural histories of piracy and literary practices to disentangle reality from myth, fact from fiction and real-world people from fictional characters. The first part of the course is dedicated to the investigation of the historical aspects of pirate life. Our point of departure will be the "Golden Age of Piracy" (1650-1730). We will study the routine of maritime life, ships as alternative spaces of sociability, the economies of pirating and their relationship with (or antagonism to) the establishment of colonial powers. We will also consider the emergence of sea narratives, through the analysis of travelogues, journals, and newspapers of the time. The second part explores the romance of Caribbean Pirates in Anglophone culture, drawing from a variety of literary and cinematic works spanning the 18th-21st centuries. We will observe how sailors, privateers, pirates, and co. became the protagonists of new genres, and how these figures were leveraged to convey in covert ways discourses on gender and queerness, subversive commentary against authority, and political concerns on nation-building.

While Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. We will read four short novels - Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - to address the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished."

For student-run workshops and research seminars in Ng House / Humanities House. Open to both residents and non-residents. May be repeated for credit. This course code covers several discrete workshops each quarter; sign up for a particular workshop via the Google Form at https://goo.gl/forms/TRU0AogJP3IHyUmr2.