In this colloquium, we move toward discovering and manipulating some of the craft elements in poetry. Each Thursday, a student hands in a short essay examining a particular technique (e.g. consonance) in the assigned poem; and each Tuesday she hands in her poem which makes use of that technique. From Basho's haiku, to free verse, to the sonnet, to the ghazal, we explore and engage. Reading aloud is an important activity, with students reading their own poems to the class on a weekly basis.

Texts: Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook, The Norton Anthology of Poetry 4th edition, and Basho's On Love and Barley.

Offering an introduction to a varied selection of modern plays, this class is mainly meant for students who have little or no experience with reading drama. We will learn about the lives and contributions of major playwrights, experiment with different techniques of analyzing plays, acquire useful terminology, close read and act out scenes, and discuss the role of language, race, and gender in drama. As this is an intensive writing class, you will be expected to write a number of short, informal responses and two five-page papers. There is no final exam.

Last year's selection included the following works:
Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night
Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Peter Shaffer, Equus
Constance Congdon, No Mercy
Bernard Pomerance, The Elephant Man
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Caryl Churchill, Top Girls
LeRoi Jones (Baraka), Dutchman
David Mamet, Oleanna
David H. Hwang, M. Butterfly
Harold Pinter, The Homecoming

From murder in ancient Thebes to murder in a quiet English village, this course traces the development of narratives that hinge upon the detection of a crime. In a variety of short stories, novels, plays, and films, we will analyze the investigation of mysteries, the interpreting of clues, the motivations of investigators, and the finding of solutions. Although detective fiction is often said to originate in the nineteenth century with Poe's Dupin and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, the plot of investigating a murder is as old as Greek tragedy, and the familiar phrase "Murder will out" first occurs in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. After a look at some of the ancestors of the mystery story including Sophocles' Oedipus and a play by Shakespeare, we will study fiction by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Jorge Luis Borges, and Robertson Davies; plays by Agatha Christie and Tom Stoppard; and two films, Rear Window (1954), and Sleuth (1972). If you would like a head start on the semesteris reading you might find a Penguin edition of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone or Robertson Davies' Murther and Walking Spirits. Like all sections of English 120, this one will involve active discussion, consistent attention to student writing, and frequent written assignments.

This colloquium focuses on terror, guilt, and the supernatural in novels, short stories, plays, and poems from the l8th century, when the genre originated, till now, when it still flourishes. Lately I have added a small selection of films to the literature we study: the original Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and the original Haunting (adapted from Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House.") Authors include Horace Walpole, the infamous Matthew G. Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, and a carefully selected writer of Harlequin romance. Students will write four short essays; choices of topics will be provided. If a student wishes, she may omit one essay and instead lead the class in discussion of a work she particularly likes. Students are encouraged (though not required) to be creative and amusing in their essay writing: they may, if they wish, write an original Gothic story or a parody of a Gothic novel. The class ordinarily turns out to be a good deal of fun.

A study of the rhetoric of fiction as it develops from Austen to the present: point-of-view, narrative structure, the representation of consciousness, the creation of meaning through style. Readings in Austen, Dickens, James, Woolf, Faulkner, Nabokov, and others.

Reading, discussing, and writing about classic 19th and 20th century novels that present some women's lives. There will be 6-8 novels, likely all drawn from the following list:

Emma by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Golden Bowl (or The Portrait of a Lady) by Henry James
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

The colloquium will be an attempt to understand the ways in which the literary imagination operates in extremis, specifically in the depiction of a morally and spiritually barren landscape. What devices - mythic, religious, anthropological, imagistic - do literary artists have available for their depictions? If, as Northrop Frye argues, poems are made out of other poems, in what sense are "hells" made out of other "hells"? "Wastelands" of other "wastelands"? (We'll devote a good deal of attention to establishing the differences between visions of hell and of the wasteland.)

A survey of Irish writing in the twentieth century, with attention to representations of Irish history and politics, religious and cultural divisions, and relationships with Britain and the British. We will read carefully to see how aspects of the texts' literary form seek imaginatively to resolve the historical and political problems of Ireland and the Irish. Writers will include James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Edna O'Brien, Jennifer Johnston, Gina Moxley, Roddy Doyle, William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Nuala NiDhomhnaill.

In this colloquium we'll study six plays by Shakespeare, in three of the genres in which he worked: history (Henry V and Richard III), tragedy (Romeo and Juliet and King Lear), and comedy (A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado about Nothing). "Study" will mean reading the plays slowly and carefully, analyzing character, discussing the meaning of lines or scenes of whole plays, examining verbal imagery, speculating about staging, perhaps acting scenes out informally, and so on. But it will also mean watching and discussing cinematic versions of all these plays. Throughout the semester I'll try to give equal emphasis to what's read on the page and what's seen on the screen (and heard on the soundtrack). I hope that students will finish the course with greater understanding of Shakespeare, some beginning familiarity with film technique, and (because we'll often see more than one film version of a given play), an appreciation of differing interpretations. The point of comparing, say, Laurence Olivier's Henry V with Kenneth Branagh's Henry V will not be to prove one better or more definitive than the other, but to reveal how two equally talented director-actors find quite different things in the same play. The aim, finally, is to demonstrate the richness, the "infinite variety," of possible meanings in Shakespeare.

Because this course is a colloquium, it will have two other important features: sustained practice in writing (students will be assigned weekly short papers through the semester, and two longer essays) and continuous practice in discussion. Once or twice we'll spend some time in the library on simple research tasks (e.g., finding reviews of films), and students will also do some modest investigations on the Internet. No final examination.

A study of the ways in which literature - mainly essays, poems and narrative - has been used to understand and value the landscape. Attention to issues of wilderness, ecology, intervention, farming, and landscape design, with emphasis on how writers design and shape, rather than merely react to, their natural environments. Discussions of work by Rachel Carson, Mary Oliver, Henry David Thoreau, John James Audubon, Mary Austin, Wendell Berry, and others. Writing about landscape and at least one field trip will be part of the experience.

This course is designed to sharpen the critical eye of passionate readers of fiction, and to introduce the various elements of craft and technique employed in creating fiction. In other words, students will be writing about short fiction as well as crafting their own short stories. Class time will be devoted primarily to in-depth discussions of short stories by acclaimed writers. We will look closely at how the masters of this distinctly modern form have managed to render, with precision, economy, and what Rick Moody has called "poetical density," a genre of lasting literary value.

Readings will include stories by James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Gina Berriault, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Kate Chopin, Nadine Gordimer, Amy Hempel, Shirley Jackson, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Tim O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, Philip Roth, Peter Taylor, and Eudora Welty. While we will focus primarily on stories in a realist mode, several examples will incorporate elements of experimentation. In addition to readings from an assigned anthology, a collection of stories by a single author will also be discussed.

Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, by Rust Hills, will serve as a guide to discussions on elements of craft, including narrative perspective, dialogue, character development, language and style, openings and endings. As writers, we will consider ways in which autobiography may be used in fiction, how seeds from the writer's own life may be carried on the winds of imagination to germination as fictional "truth."

Writing and revision will be a significant part of the semester's enterprise. Assignments will include a series of two-to-five-page exercises; brief analytical responses to stories by published writers; a full-length story; and a critical essay. At least one fiction exercise by each student will be "workshopped" by the class. Active class participation is essential. There will be no final or mid-term examinations.