Literature & Writing

This course will look closely at a small selection of plays adapted from other works. At its core this is a dramaturgical practice and methods course. Students will investigate impulses and processes for re-envisioning, re-working, re-purposing another’s text. We will read and discuss some theories of adaptation (mostly, but not exclusively, as they pertain to collaborative art making practices) as well as a sampling of contemporary criticism. A central goal of the course will be to better understand how the term adaptation is understood across disciplines and to fuel a complex discussion about what might make a theatrical adaptation feel relevant or effective in a given context. We will also look closely at moments in history that have instigated a serious ‘looking back’, spurring a collective creative impulse to re-visit and re-invent previously established works. One could argue that we are currently living in such a cultural moment. Please note: this course requires a significant reading load. Students will be required to close read/view all adapted texts, all original source materials and a variety of supporting texts (as described above). We will also draw from film, visual art and music for this study. Evaluation will be based on a sequence of short practical assignments and demonstrated engagement with the course materials through live discussion and a shared class blog.

The Monster is real, and it’s calling. -Michelle Mcnamara

Grew up reading Nancy Drew and Miss Marple? Can’t let a day go by without listening to a murder mystery podcast like Serial or My Favorite Murder? Love binge-watching shows like Killing Eve and Big Little Lies? Consider watching true crime documentaries your hobby? Then this is the class for you.

This college seminar will allow you to delve into the world of murder, mysteries, and the mayhem caused by these through a woman’s eyes. Be it a woman sleuth, a femme fatale, or a damsel in distress, women have been inextricably related to the world of crime. It is no wonder that they make up almost 75% of the listeners of true-crime podcasts and 80% of CrimeCon attendees (Times.com). We will study this phenomenon by paying close attention to not only literary genres like novels, short stories, and non-fiction writing but also non-literary (and multimodal) genres that include pop-culture favorites like TV shows, documentaries, and podcasts, some of which are mentioned above. Other works that we might consider are Sharp Objects (fiction), Dial A for Aunties (fiction), I’ll be Gone in the Dark (non-fiction), Mommy Dead and Dearest (documentary), and The Keepers (documentary).

Since this class also meets the writing requirement, part of your focus will be understanding writing as a dynamic literate activity by composing varied works. For example, you’ll write short reflection posts responding to questions like “Why women kill”?, opinion or review pieces that could appear in The New York Times, conduct interviews, and work on a term-long genre evolution project. All these are different genres and might target a specific audience: me, online readers, fans, or your peers. You will be evaluated on class participation, written work, and a final project.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, written work, and a final project. Lots of attention will be paid to peer review and revision as well.

As a Pakistani-American teenager from New Jersey, Kamala Khan must contend with being a non-white female offspring of an immigrant family, a reality further complicated by her newfound superhero abilities. In this college seminar course, we will dive into the world of Kamala Khan as she follows in the footsteps of her role model and the first Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers, one of the few female superheroes in the universe. She’ll change your idea of a superhero and what it means to be one as she balances her personal and superhero identity and navigates questions of race, religion, culture, power, and teenage angst.

We will explore all the abovementioned ideas and more as we read three to four volumes of Ms. Marvel comics (2014 onwards), paying attention to storytelling through the genre of sequential art. We will also watch the recent TV adaptation (2022) and finally pair the two with theories of race, Islamophobia, gender, and current world politics. Since this class also meets the writing requirement, part of your focus will be on understanding the writing process by composing varied works. For example, you’ll write short blog posts responding to questions like, “Are comics literature?”, opinion pieces that could appear in The New York Times, and fan fiction. All these are different genres and targeted at a specific audience, me, online readers, fans, and your peers. You will be evaluated on class participation, written work, oral presentation, and a final project.

Picture this: you and your friends are grabbing burgers and you overhear someone order a pop. You instantly get the urge to correct them because soda is the proper word you were taught. Later, the server brings the coke they ordered, which further increases your urge to intervene because they actually ordered Sprite. After all, soda is the correct word. Or is it? Which word is correct? Actually, they all are.

Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages and from a linguistic standpoint, all languages are equal. Yet, humans are continuously judged, evaluated, and discriminated against based on how they speak and write in professional, academic, and everyday settings. These seemingly innocuous comments about correctness have harmful effects on people who don’t conform to perceived language standards. As a result, various forms of discrimination and policies that exist continue to marginalize people due to misinformation and in some cases, disinformation. In this class, we will examine the intersections of language, ideology, and discrimination in everyday, educational, and professional settings while developing our research practices.

Classes will be facilitated through weekly reading discussions and discourse analysis of data (i.e., data sessions) in small and whole group activities. Readings will address the intersections of language and discrimination, such as accentism, racialization, language subordination, and social identities. The class will provide foundational concepts from applied linguistics and related fields, such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The course is also focused on developing your research literacies and project management skills. You will learn how to develop and carry out a project, evaluate the credibility of information, and various types of data. Labs will be used to create space for data sessions and peer-reviews.

Through discourse analysis, you will apply concepts you learned in class to develop your understanding of linguistic diversity and language related issues. Projects can utilize print and digital media to address, for instance, monolingual policies and their impact in educational or workplace settings, intersections of language and gender or race, and various forms of linguistic discrimination in the US or other contexts.

There are no prerequisites and this course is suitable for students who are curious about language, discourse, social issues, as well as research. Students will be evaluated based on completed assignments, such as readings and other homework, research projects, peer-review, and overall class contributions, including lab sessions. You must be prepared to reflect on implicit biases and perceptions of language and rethink how you approach and conceptualize research. This course meets both the writing requirement and HS requirement as it develops genre knowledge, rhetorical awareness, understanding of writing as dynamic and iterative processes, and research literacies grounded in social sciences.

This course is designed for science students developing their professional communication skills. It will improve the students’ writing ability by introducing them to writing for the scientific community and for the lay public. The course involves understanding the protocols for writing a scientific paper based on lab or field data, including learning to write an abstract and literature review. Students will also learn and apply visual and oral communication skills to construct and present a scientific poster. In addition to working with the instructor and in-class peer reviews, students will work on the content of their writing and grammar with writing tutors.

This course will explore heroines from two Hindu epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, alongside the Greek mythological figures Ariadne, Medusa, Circe, and Galatea. Both sets of heroines have generated deeply rooted cultural archetypes. Central to the upbringing of more than half of the Indian population through comic books, TV shows, movies, and the like, the Hindu epics have set the standard for what an ideal Hindu woman should be, bolstering the patriarchal system in the name of religion and culture. Much like Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships” in Greek mythology, some of these women have been the cause of wars of “epic proportions.” Others have become infamous archetypes for women’s witchiness and trouble-making, especially in Greek epics Western authors have retold. Myths of their beauty or its opposite have long been part of these narratives, but do we hear them speak? What do we know about the power they yield? Epics and mythologies have been unable to provide us with concrete answers.

Therefore, we will turn to female authors like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kavita Kané, Volga, and Vaishnavi Patel for the Hindu epics and Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, and Rosie Hewlett for the Greek tales. These authors have created spaces where women’s voices can be heard and analyzed, where archetypal and epic types can be studied as multifaceted humans. We’ll not only read their novels closely but also supplement their work with feminist theory and short videos. Eventually, we’ll trace how these epics stay relevant with regard to the construction of gender and sexuality in the modern Indian and Western world.

Students will be evaluated based on class participation, an oral presentation, response posts, final paper, and a multimodal project. This class will be good for students who are interested in reading feminist literature and theory and understanding the enduring power of epics and myths as well as the contemporary feminist purpose in giving their heroines voice. Reading the Indian epics alongside the Greek tales will provide an opportunity for ample comparison of patriarchal systems and how they developed in representative cultures from the East and West.

Ways we engage with writing and literacy have shifted dramatically due to technological innovations, raising urgent questions about ethics, authorship, voice, and academic integrity and (dis)honesty. How can we develop our writing knowledge and literacy skills alongside rapidly changing tools? What challenges, issues, and opportunities do technological developments offer for the ways in which writing and learning will happen throughout life? This course examines what ethical, legal and safety issues arise in the use of digital technologies and resources and how they might shape authorship and a writer’s voice and agency. The goals are to: 1) deepen understandings of key developments in writing technologies and related social transformations; 2) strengthen abilities in fair, inclusive, effective, ethical methods of dialogue and collaboration; 3) strengthen abilities for metacognitive learning; 4) and deepen genre knowledge and rhetorical awareness through explorations in the contexts of various discourse communities.

Weekly writing assignments and collaborative learning activities are facilitated through readings, case studies, and projects. Readings include short works that explain and critically analyze ongoing developments in writing related technologies. Class sessions alternate between mini-lectures and seminar discussions exploring changing historical contexts and socio-technologies of writing. Writing activities include peer review, structured collaborations, and individual as well as group exercises with various multimodal genres. There are two class sessions per week.

Students must come prepared to challenge themselves and others in supportive ways. This course fulfills the first-year writing requirement but is also appropriate for more advanced students interested in exploring issues of ethics, authorship, academic integrity and (dis)honesty from a human ecological perspective.

Students are evaluated on class participation and contributions in individual and group activities/assignments that demonstrate progress in meeting the four course goals.

This course will serve as a workshop both for creating our own short fictions as well as a forum for reading and responding to work by established authors. As a class we will get down to business; we will read and discuss amazing short stories and amazing authors; we will learn how to offer constructive criticism of each other’s work; and we will write, we will write, we will write. Class meetings will combine analysis of published work with a discussion of how individual writers approach their craft. We will study the conflict, character, plot and music of prose. The focus of this class will be literary fiction. I define literary fiction as work that is concerned not just with what happened, but why it happened. It is character driven and explores the motivations, desires, drives and consequences of the complex human experience. It is the stuff of life. Representative authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Amelia Gray, Makoto Kawabata, Gish Jen, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Milan Kundera, Mary Gaitskill, James Baldwin, Junot Diaz. Students are expected to create four shorter and one longer piece of fiction, respond to published writers, lead weekly discussions, participate in class response to fellow writers, and to revise their own work in substantive ways.

It feels like pizza has always been considered American, but we know that it was originally brought to the US by Italian immigrants. Both the US and Italy claim pizza as a national dish, and this type of debate about where food comes from—and who it belongs to—is highly connected to our national and local identities. As humans continue to migrate across borders and blur the boundaries in digital spaces, our identities continue to develop as we interact with each other and different types of food. We will consider how this movement shapes our ideas of ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ and how one becomes the other, as well as the line between honoring a culture and appropriating it.

We will examine the intersections of the genre conventions, rhetorical situation, and the writers’ identities to understand how these elements work together when producing texts. We will learn key composition concepts (genre, rhetorical situation, and multimodality) and support the development of your genre research skills. We will use these concepts and conduct genre research to examine various food writing genres, such as narratives, recipes, and social media posts to understand how writing is an activity that goes beyond putting words together on a piece of paper. These activities will support your overall genre research skills and deepen your understanding of writing, which can be transferred to other writing activities beyond this course. Classes will be based on genre analysis activities and group discussions. We will read works that address food writing genres and identity, and we will watch documentaries that explore the intersections of food, identity, and migration. Course assignments include your reproduction of a food writing genre, weekly reading responses, reflections and narratives to document your learning trajectory, which will also be used for assessment purposes.

This class is a study of, and a writing workshop in, poetic forms. We will look at constraints, techniques, and directions of contemporary poetry through intensive reading, writing, and criticism of our own poetic work. This background is useful and significant for the study of poetry at any level, and is especially helpful in light of the fact that, for better or worse, free verse techniques have dominated poetry in the twentieth century. This course is valuable for practiced poets, emerging poets, and prose writers alike. Forms of Poetry asks students to pay attention, create poetry of attention, and revel in poetry that is attentive to language; this process will help students develop voice and lyrical content in their own writing. We will look older, “received forms” (Sonnet, Ghazal, Villanelle) and create our own forms by using experimental techniques (homophonic translation, concrete poetry, erasure, nonsense words (i.e. Jabberwocky)) and look to end the term with the amazing Japanese form, Zuihitsu. You might be thinking: Why write with these crazy constraints or in these old timey poetic forms? And what the heck is a Zuihitsu? Those are good questions, questions we will address on a weekly basis. Over the last seventy years, the debates over poetic expression have been shaped in visceral ways, from “raw” versus “cooked,” “academic” versus “beat,” “formal” versus “antiformal.” This class is designed to deepen your knowledge of these debates and to inspire you to draw upon a variety of modes in your own writing. Evaluations: Students will be expected to contribute to a class blog, write several poems a week, revise poetic output, participate in class workshop, and hand sew a chapbook of their own revised, creative work.

Why do fairy tales capture the attention of adults and children all over the world and endure in popular literary and cinematic forms? What do they reveal to psychologists, biologists, historians, linguists, artists, anthropologists, and educators? Do they politicize or de-politicize? socialize or subvert? What is the postfeminist, postmodern response to the Brothers Grimm? What do fairy tales convey about animal behavior, entomology, and cosmology? How might the tales shape human limitations, moral values, and aspirations? This course will explore the storytelling and re-telling of literary, cultural, and scientific stories from a comparative perspective, imagining their interpretations and how they may be re-told with an eye toward new understandings of human interrelationships, of a given sociohistorical moment, the culture of COA, and the larger culture. Students will read folklore and fairy tales, view several films, and discuss essays by writers such as Cristina Bacchilega, Bruno Bettelheim, Ruth Bottigheimer, Michel Butor, Italo Calvino, Robert Darnton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maria Tatar, and Jack Zipes. Contemporary works by writers, visual artists, and musicians inspired by traditional tales will also be explored. Writers may include Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Michael Cunningham, Neil Gaiman, Tanith Lee, Naguib Mahfouz, Haruki Murakami, Helen Oyeyemi, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Francine Prose, and Anne Sexton. Reflections may center on recurrent motifs and patterns; and social, sexual, moral, scientific and political content, with emphasis on race, gender, and class structure. Students will be evaluated on two short papers; one creative project that may be expressed in writing, visual art, music, or dance; and a final written assignment in any genre—poems, plays, fiction or nonfiction.

As someone who writes every day, you have probably noticed that it’s more common to text LOL to a friend, as opposed to writing “LOL things were busy” when emailing to ask a professor for an extension on a paper. Similarly, you probably expect this course description to include certain information about the course rather than tips for becoming a viral sensation on TikTok. Why do these differences exist? What is the point of knowing the differences? And how is this relevant to writing?

In this course, you will explore different kinds of writing (genres) to understand how the context shapes the way we write. The explorations of various everyday, academic, and professional genres will help refine the rhetorical skills that you already have and develop your awareness of how writing is used in different contexts. The goal is to build your knowledge of writing and make your repertoire of languages and literacies visible so you can transfer these skills and write in other courses and non-academic settings.

The class activities will provide you with many hands-on opportunities to explore and analyze writing in a collaborative setting with your peers in small and large group activities. You will complete inquiry-based projects to examine different genres and reflect on your evolving understanding of writing. Your learning will be evaluated based on these assignments and activities. By the end of the course, you will have developed the language to talk about writing and built the skills, agency, and confidence to engage in different kinds of writing activities in academia and beyond.

This is an intermediate / advanced course in which students will explore the connections between and among modern US women’s novels focusing on intersectional identities. We will strive to better understand the nature and significance of differences between as well as common patterns or themes that shape women’s and intersectional/mixed-race/mixed-identity fictional narration. Historical perspective, cultural, class, ethnic, religious, other differences, and prescribed gender roles will all be relevant. We will read women’s fiction by authors such as Gloria Naylor, Janet Campbell Hale, Toni Morrison, Linda Hogan, Julie Shikeguni, Sandra Cisneros, Graciela Limón, Nora Okja Keller, Cristina Garcia, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sigrid Nunez, and Amanda Peters. Participants will read carefully, prepare and ask questions of each other, write response papers, and carry out an independent multimodal project to be presented to the class. The project will focus on one or more additional texts: fictional, theoretical, cultural, or historic. Presentations will be made in groups that put the outside texts into broad cultural and historical perspective and/or discuss them in terms of trends in women’s literature, immigrant literature, women’s literature of the United States, multicultural/intersectional narratives, or some other course theme. The selection of the outside text for the project will give participants the opportunity to fill in perceived gaps in their reading or to explore a particular narrative or cultural form — or identity position — in greater depth. The reading load for this course is relatively heavy. Evaluation will focus on preparation, participation, insight, critical thinking, response papers, and the outside project — both its oral presentation and development in an appropriate form (visual, narrative, analytic, curricular, etc.). The course has been designed for students with previous college-level literary experience and/or an interest in gender and identity studies.

The main goal of this course is to guide students to produce interesting, accurate, well-written, compelling articles about people, processes, and events. The course aims to give students an understanding of the principles of American journalism, the structure of journalistic writing, the techniques for identifying, sourcing, and gathering information, and insight into how news is disseminated and read, watched, or listened to in the digital age.

Students will produce several short articles for the course, learning the basics of story development, interviewing, research, and covering meetings and events. Students will be tasked with thinking critically, understanding and using news judgment, and developing skills for efficiency and self-critique. They will be introduced to the history of American journalism, the ethics and laws specific to the field, and the modern media landscape. Students will also learn about and practice photojournalism. A final project in the course will include significant research and utilize students’ skills in interviewing, observation, and documentation learned over the term.

Students will be evaluated on the following criteria: the quality of their reporting, the effectiveness of their revisions, and participation in class discussions and peer review sessions. Students taking this course should have sufficient sentence structure, grammatical, and word usage skills to communicate effectively in writing. Students that are not confident in those areas may enroll, but should strongly consider taking the course for credit/no credit.

How can witnessing and reporting other worlds—whether a country, a village, a river, a mountain, or a back alley–make us more sensitive travelers, sharpen awareness of cultural biases, and empower place-based writing? This course highlights the allure, the dangers, uncertainties, risks, and joys of travel expressed in student writing. What words, images, foods, music, rituals, or other sources of inspiration spark curiosity and passions that make us want to go places?

Genre analysis, writing, and transdisciplinary research projects will deepen a sense of place as the course explores the rhetoric of travel and its transformative impacts. Students will experiment with, for instance, flash-essays, chronicles, interviews, journals, and field notes. Research projects will spotlight judicious selection of relevant sources, integration of data, and inclusion of multimodal elements. We will consider, too, the relation between travel writing and ethnography, between travel and gender, racial, religious, and ethnic components. Conveying impressions after short or extended excursions, students will recognize and develop which rhetorical strategies are appropriate for particular purposes, situations, audiences, discourse communities, and genres. Maps, films, infographics, letters, newspaper articles, guidebooks, blogs, Instagram posts, diaries, and logs constitute genres that may be examined and created. Students will further hone their craft in writing workshops, conversations, conferences, and presentations.

Short excerpts that reflect the intimate connection between travel and writing will be discussed, and the various rhetorical strategies employed by writers such as Matsuo Basho, Tu Fu, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Kingsley, James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Taras Grescoe, Bill Bryson, Annie Dillard, William Least Heat-Moon, Anthony Bourdain, Eileen Myles, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Hans M. Carlson. Whether an Inuit film for global audiences, or the map of a route across the North American continent by water, or notes in a diary from the Hindu Kush, for example, the course materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also report and shape the world and what it means to us. Evaluations will be based on class discussions, writing projects, and presentations.