Arts Core Courses

The past few years have seen a proliferation of major awards for works of contemporary world literature that have been translated into English (among them the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle Book in Translation Prize). While such awards certainly elevate translation as a mode of writing comparable to that of other literary arts, they also raise important questions about the production, circulation, and reception of translated literature in the Anglosphere. In this course, we will read a number of recent award-winning books in English translation (both poetry and prose), considering how these books traveled from origin to translation, and how we as readers engage with them – as translations and as literary texts. How are translations made? How do we evaluate books that have two writers: author and translator? What larger forces (social, aesthetic, commercial, political) are at work when deciding which translated books will hold value for Anglophone readers? We’ll explore these questions through weekly readings and discussions, student presentations, critical analyses and creative responses. As a final project, students will develop their own evaluative rubrics from which to award a prize to one of the translations we’ve read.

Ancient Mesopotamian flood narratives, Cold War nuclear Armageddon, existential climate catastrophe: as long as literature has existed, we have used it to speculate on our own demise. In this Intro to Genres course, we will explore apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing, how it intersects with other genres, how it has fluctuated or remained stable as a genre over time, and how it reveals our changing cultural anxieties about what threatens us as a species. We will read broadly across poetry, fiction, nonfiction and film, exploring the various flavors of apocalyptic writing, from scientific excess to natural disasters, and examining the role style and tone play in creating meaning around devastation. Representative authors will include T.S. Elliott, Rachel Carson, Elissa Washuta, Carmen Maria Machado, Ursula K. Leguin, and Chris Marker. Students will be asked to write and workshop their own creative writing in a chosen genre and produce a critical essay that focuses on one thematic element of the class.

In this class we’ll think about and try to generate literary forms capable of holding, inviting, or emitting a kind of otherworldly glow; expressing or representing access to some other mode of being. How have writers done this in the past?

We’ll look to a wide range of sources for models, including the visionary writings of William Blake, poems by Allen Ginsberg, narratives by early Christian mystics (Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen), Buddhist sutras, 20th century phenomenological artworks and writing about them (including films and/or writing by Joan Jonas, Michael Snow, Robert Irwin, and Peter Kubelka), poetry and narratives of channeling (Alice Notley, James Merrill), writings of and about psychedelic experience (Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna), immersive experimental poetics (M. NourbeSe Philip), and contemporary Thai experimental film (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), among others.

Students will leave this class with an enhanced familiarity with an array of visionary forms and their history in Western writing and poetics, as well as hopefully new or renewed access to another mode of writing and thinking for themselves

An inquiry into what makes art “good” or “lasting,” particularly in the age of our algorithm-shaped exposure. Students will read “viral” texts across three genres from ~1750 to 2024, including Matthew Lewis, 20th century gossip columns, and BookTok sensations like R.F. Kuang. Texts will be read in conversation with both historical and contemporary writing on craft, allowing students to respond both critically and creatively to the virality of these texts, ultimately deciding for themselves how we can begin to approach the role of the artist in the age of the algorithm.

Perhaps no other narrative genre is more compelling or popular than the mystery. True Crime, Thrillers, and Whodunits consistently top the charts of bestsellers each year. In this Arts Core class, we will explore the mechanics of this fascinating genre. We will take the classic mystery tale written by masters like Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler as an archetype, then examine what can be done with them. Together, we’ll dive into tales of intrigue by Poe and Kleist, psychological thrillers by Patricia Highsmith and Jeffery Eugenides, neo-noir films such as Chinatown, noir-poetry by Deryn Rees-Jones and Sean O’Brien, and postmodern mystery-parodies like those of Jorge Luis Borges. Together, we'll look at the way they hang together, the desire and fear that drives them, and the secrets they tell—or try to keep hidden. Along the way, we will attempt to design and plot our own mysteries, and find ways to improve them in a workshop setting.

Despite common misconceptions, women have been at the forefront of the speculative genre from its earliest inceptions. They have not merely defied the limitations and restraints of literature as defined by their contemporary society, but invented whole worlds and genres which continue to influence writers and writing as a whole today—from Mary Shelley’s 1818 publication of "Frankenstein" to Virginia Woolf’s 1928 publication of "Orlando," and even Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novel, “The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World." This course will be a brief foray into the strange and yet familiar worlds of various women across the history of speculative writing, ranging from Mary Shelley to Ursula K. Leguin, from Lady Cavendish to Margaret Atwood, from Alice Walker to Octavia E. Butler.

In this course, we’ll study the subgenre of immigrant literature, and through the examination of novel excerpts, short stories, poetry, plays, biographies, and memoirs, we’ll discuss the politics and aesthetics of canonized writers such as Amy Tan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Emma Lazarus, as well as lesser-known writers. From the outset, we’ll discern the characteristics that define immigrants, refugees, exiles, expatriates, and how they, therefore, might show up differently on the page. We’ll consider how authors create engaging characters, by articulating their characters’ evolving sense of identity in the face of conflicting notions of “otherness,” assimilation, and acculturation. To gain a better understanding of how authors shape compelling, and moreover, believable plots, we’ll examine the push and pull factors that situate immigrants differently in the new land, and how their host societies regard them. In short critical papers, we’ll analyze the trends, features, and conventions of the subgenre, and in short exercises, you’ll write a story, poem, essay, or play about immigrants, informed by research, that utilizes the catalogue of questions, techniques, and practices that we identify.

“Obscenity” is a term for what is repulsive, abhorrent, excessive, or taboo in a society; and yet many artworks once considered to be obscene are now celebrated as landmarks of world literature, from the ancient poetry of Sappho to modern novels like Ulysses. In this course, we will study literary works that have been banned or censored as “obscene” to examine our own perspectives, attitudes, and assumptions as literary artists. How does obscenity shape our understanding of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, or public and private speech? What are the uses of obscenity in constructing new possibilities for literary expression? Authors studied will include Toni Morrison, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilda Hilst, and Allen Ginsburg; and we will supplement these readings with works of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and case law. Students will produce their own original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to reimagine what is permissible—and possible—in language and society for contemporary literary artists.

In the aftermath of war, we attempt to make sense of the senseless. We grapple with the pieces, we organize, we mold, and we give shape to the shapeless. In this course, using the Nigeria-Biafra War as a case study, we’ll investigate the practices that constitute authorship of war. We’ll read works by writers of the war generation, like Ken Saro-wiwa, as well as those who have inherited it, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We’ll identify and study their methods for reconstructing the past—lived experiences, research, and the imagination. We’ll consider the ethics of leaps of the imagination as we read works of realism alongside the speculative, like Nnedi Okorafor’s AfricanFuturist comic book take LaGuardia. We’ll study narratives like Chinelo Okparanta’s queer coming-of-age story Under the Udala Trees to consider what it means to depart from the national narrative in order to recover silenced or erased voices. In critical papers, we’ll analyze how genre, form, and media inform these works. Using the questions, techniques, and practices we identify, you’ll be asked to write and research narratives using a real war as its basis.

Some of the most compelling pieces of writing across all genre deal with, and often feature, deeply problematic central adversarial characters without which the poem, story, or essay would have no forward motion, and no cause to exist. From Capote’s In Cold Blood to Milton’s Paradise Lost, from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Sabato’s The Tunnel, literature returns again and again to the question of evil and the concept of opposition. This course is designed to explore this question alongside authors who have devoted their lives to understanding the role of evil in literature, its necessity, its appeal, its frivolity and its betrayal. The course will be divided into three section, each section devoted to a specific genre during which two to three texts will be explored, discussed and analyzed in class, and at the end of which one brief analysis paper will be due. One creative piece, in any of the three major genres, exploring the said topic will be due at the end of the course.