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In this poetry workshop, we will spend the first half of the quarter reading and writing in traditional forms and the second half innovating from those forms. When discussing poetry, what do we mean when we talk about craft? What is prosody and why is it important? What are the relationships between form and content? What does a modern sonnet look like? We will consider how a writer might honor a tradition without being confined by it. The culmination of the course will be a project in which the student invents (and writes in) a form of their own. All interested students are welcome beginners and experts alike.

Because mystical, spiritual, and altered states of experience have always been a part of human life, we've always been trying to write about them. While some try to claim these subjects are frivolous, dated, or even dangerous, writers keep coming back to them, including some of the best writers of our time. Lucky for us, the results have been exhilarating. In this class, we'll look at a range of writers and forms to understand how these ancient subjects are handled in the contemporary context, including works by journalists Michael Pollan and Jia Tolentino, Scientists Robin Wall Kimmerer and Oliver Sacks, fiction writers Denis Johnson and Hillary Mantel, and poets Max Ritvo and Christopher Wiman. Most importantly, we'll write our own pieces of questioning, exploration, and awe.

In this course we'll explore how an effective first chapter immerses us in the voice of the narrator, introduces a series of themes and problems, indicates character desires and fears, and most importantly enchants and inspires its readers. We'll write short reaction papers and hold discussions in small and large groups. In the second half of the quarter, students will compose their own first novel chapter of around 8-12 pages, and we'll workshop them in class. The final goal is to have a revised first chapter, a short outline for the rest of a book, and an increased knowledge of writing original and irresistible opening chapters.

Technology changes how and what we read. In this course we will study how digital technology has changed literature: the ways in which it is written, to how it is distributed, and what we can do with it. Our readings will include literature produced collaboratively within fan fiction communities, literature written and distributed in social media posts, interactive fiction that borrows from innovations in games, and fiction 'written' by AI language models.

This is a creative writing course for writers of all genders who are interested in thinking about patriarchy and how to resist it. Our course will aim to complicate the idea that men benefit from patriarchy and are its primary enforcers, while the rest of us are simply suffering under it. We'll ask ourselves how patriarchy is bad for ALL of us, and how ALL of us are implicated in its perpetuation. Do we ALL have the reasons and the resources to leave patriarchy--and can we start to leave it right now? We'll read works of scholarship and literature that investigate patriarchy as a human relational problem. We'll write fiction and nonfiction in which we explore the ways patriarchy has shaped us, challenge ourselves to resist its manifestations in our relationships, envision a future without patriarchy, and begin to live that future right now. Most crucially, we will practice creating a space in which all of us can speak without fear of judgment about our experiences of a fraught topic.

Queer Stories is a creative writing class open to any and all students, regardless of how they define their gender or sexuality. The goals of the class are to read widely in the canon of twentieth and twenty-first century queer prose literature, and to write critical and creative work that engages with the styles, modes, and subjects of these writers. As we read and discuss texts, students will consider a variety of questions: How has queer romance, relationships, and sexuality been represented over the years, in both coded and explicit ways? How have writers grappled with representing our evolving sense of gender as a continuum rather than a binary? How have queer writers interrogated or understood the concept of family? How do queer writers handle the question of the "universal" reader to whom, arguably, they might be speaking? (In a 2012 interview with Lambda Literary, book critic Daniel Mendelsohn argues,contentiously, "It is precisely the gay book's ability to be interesting to a straight reader that makes it a great book.") Lastly, students will also create writing of their own that in some way draws upon the aesthetics or sensibilities of the authors we have read. These pieces may be short stories, personal essays, or texts that--in the spirit of queerness--blur or interrogate standard demarcations of genre. The content of this work might grapple with questions of gender and sexuality, but it might instead be queer in its affect, outlook, or style. In both the reading and writing they do in this class, students will engage with work that deviates from literary convention in the lives it represents and the ways in which it represents them.

Isolated in the moorlands of Yorkshire and raised in evangelical strictness by an eccentric father, the Bronte children imagined stories of personal power and political intrigue, based on the news they read. The eldest of the three sisters, Charlotte, grew up to become a major novelist of the Victorian age. Her younger sister, Emily, became a poet and a novelist of wild genius. The youngest sister, Anne, wrote two arresting novels before her early death. The lone brother, Branwell, squandered his talents -- and much of the family's money -- before his death at thirty-one. In 1847, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte's Withering Heights, and Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey surprised literary London, and voiced an angry, sensual, urgent response to the Victorians' nagging "Woman Question." These eccentric novels register the tedium, the aspirations, and the frustrations of these gifted women. We will consider historical, cultural, and biographical questions, as we study these early novels, the children's juvenilia, and a representative later work. Each student will have the chance to investigate one of these women more deeply, and share their discoveries with the the seminar.

In this course, we will consider the first volumes of three ambitious literary projects: Marcel Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME; Elena Ferrante's NEOPOLITAN NOVELS; and Karl Ove Knausgaard MY STRUGGLE. These writers, and the novels they wrote, may seem, at first glance, to be very different. Proust was a gay French writer, born in 1871. Ferrante is a reclusive Italian novelist whose identity has, for many years, been a mystery (including her year of birth). Knausgaard is a kind of literary rock star, a Norwegian novelist of immense fame. But all three novelists share a fascination with childhood, and all three novelists have produced works that walk a very fine line between fiction and memoir, imagination and memory. In reading the first volumes of these three long novel sequences, we'll consider what aspects of the writer's life are fit for the page. At what point does the novelist's allegiance to the recollection of their own particular past give way to their invention of a fictional world we can only dwell in? What is the difference between Proust, Ferrante and Knausgaard's first-person narrators and Proust, Ferrante and Knausgaard themselves? And what lessons might we draw from these novelists and novels when it comes to writing about our own childhood experiences?

The college campus is a fascinating place, where people from different backgrounds come together for different purposes. So it is no wonder that many novelists have turned their attention upon the college campus as a setting for their novels. In this Sophomore Seminar, we will read three fantastic campus novels, and use these books as means of exploring big questions about the purpose of an undergraduate education.