Topics Courses, Fall '25
ENG 191A: Literature of Extinction
We live in a time that has been called the “anthropocene” or the “sixth extinction,” given the rapid decline and disappearance of living species at a time when the human species has passed 8 billion (at least 8 times more than a population that remained relatively stable for centuries, if not millennia). On the human side, only in the past 100 years, humans have experienced holocausts, mass migrations, pandemics, and the extinctions of many cultures and languages. Our class will explore films, fictions, non-fictions, and poetry that address such extinctions in the living world. Some of the writers we’ll encounter: Margaret Atwood, Anthony Doerr, Camille Dungy, Witi Ihemaera, NoViolet Bulawayo, Hannah Arrendt, David Wojahn, Angela Pelster, David Quammen, and others.
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ENG 245A (W): Narrative Techniques Across Genres
Human beings are wired for stories. Our species has told stories since the beginning but in the last two decades storytelling has exploded across genres and platforms. As we moved from oral to printed stories, books and the printed word reigned for the longest. The arrival of radio, film and television in the 20th century set the stage for what we are experiencing now. This course aims to demystify and analyze what makes up effective narrative. They call it narratology, which is the study of narrative structure. Students in this course will read, critique and analyze news stories, literary pieces, podcasts, books, TV shows and at least one movie adaptation. Students will: develop a language for critiquing and dissecting narratives, articulate what shifts and why when a story moves from one format to another, develop an eye for the ways characters evolve and learn to identify and articulate a narrative’s flaws and strengths.
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ENG 245B: Nature Writing
A hybrid literature/creative writing topics course that both refines students' general analytical, interpretive, and academic writing skills and gives them experience in crafting their own short creative works in the genre. Nature Writing asks students to read examples of contemporary nature writing (mostly nonfiction), while also reflecting on current trends and issues in the outdoor world. Students will write both academic papers and creative nonfiction essays.
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ENG 255A (W): Literature and Living Systems
How should the humanities account for the fact that 39 trillion of the 69 trillion cells in the human body consist of bacteria and other microbial life forms, with the remaining minority comprising the “human” part of us? Or that this teeming human microbiome respires within the gaseous halo of a planet regulated by 3 trillion trees? Or that these trees speak to each other and share resources through subterranean fungal mycelia that join them into a networked intelligence? Or that these “wood wide webs” are merely cells within the respiratory system of Gaia, which cycles gasses between stratosphere and oceanic abyss, and sustains these numberless trees, mycelia, and microbes? Or that Gaia itself, perhaps, is merely the flourishing of a tiny seed that once traveled through space on a piece of rock from Mars or elsewhere, petrified in stasis, before falling to the molten Earth and awakening an ooze of archaic prokaryotes? Science shows us pieces of the living systems that we inhabit, but perhaps only the human imagination, as an emergent function of these systems, can join the pieces together into a fuller understanding of life far above and far below the scale of our perception. This course will explore the ways that writers attempt to conceive our location, status, dependency, vulnerability, and ecstasy within these systems. Our reading will include scientific nonfiction sketching the dimensions of the living world, speculative fiction searching the mysteries of ecology, and ecopoetic meditations on the posthuman condition. Using scientifically informed literature, we will ponder our life and consciousness as part of a living network, in which the human subject is simultaneously cell, organism, and planet. Our writing will explore the paradox of figuring nonhuman scale, experience, and consciousness using the human construct of language.
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ENG 255B / AFST 290A: Contemporary Black Writers
This course will focus on African American writers whose works in the past decade have been instrumental in our understanding of what it means to live in a world fraught with inequalities, but also one that has the potential for growth and joy. We will read across the genres of fiction, drama, poetry, and memoir in our efforts to feel the present-day urgency of Black voices as informed by the historical past. Since this is a “W” course, students will be expected to engage in writing about these works as well as participating actively in class discussion.
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ENG 255C: Melodrama across Media
The term “melodrama” is often used in a derogatory sense, to dismiss categories of people (particularly women, gay men, and people of color) as excessively emotional and artworks as cringingly outdated. And yet, as a genre, melodrama is as modern as sci-fi and horror, and despite its bad reputation, it continues to structure how we make sense of the moral problems and social conflicts around us. In this course, we will study melodrama’s emergence on the early 19th century stage, formed in the crucible of secularism and democratic revolutions, and track its evolution as it migrates from the theatre to the cinema, television, and, finally, social media. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to how the genre constantly re-modernizes itself in order to address new social problems and its circulation to every corner of the globe, from France and Britain to India and Latin America.
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ENG 367A: Global Victorian Genres
What do you think of when you hear the term “Victorian literature”? For many, this period of literary history has become synonymous with stories of corseted women trying to get married on a quaint estate in the English countryside, a world far removed from our frenetic, mobile, and highly globalized lives. Yet the Victorian era actually witnessed the development and codification of many of the genres that continue to shape storytelling worldwide: the Gothic, melodrama, romance, science fiction, and historical fiction. This section of “The Victorian Period” will explore how the genres of modern storytelling developed across the British empire between the years of 1837 and 1901 and subsequently proliferated over time and across the globe. While centering on work produced in the nineteenth century, each unit will conclude with a more contemporary work that illustrates the genre’s afterlife. Assigned materials will include fiction, drama, and films by Charlotte Brontë, Victoria Cross, Rabindranath Tagore, and Tayeb Salih (the Gothic); Elizabeth Robins, Thomas Hardy, Asit Sen, and Mahasweta Devi (melodrama); Alexandre Dumas Fils, Ōgai Mori, and Park Chan-wook (romance); Samuel Butler, Lao She, and Witi Ihimaera (science fiction); and George Eliot, Wilson Harris, and the creators of Netflix series The Crown (historical fiction).
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ENG 395A: AI and the Future of Writing
The emergence of publicly accessible large language models such as ChatGPT represents a meteor impact in creative writing and literary studies, with the potential to alter the future evolution of the entire field. Our course will observe the effects of this impact. Many writers and scholars believe that large language models herald a cosmic crisis for our work: the antithesis of human creativity and critical thinking. Our syllabi outlaw them. Government wants to regulate them. The Writers Guild of America mustered against them. In a recent interview with Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia, whose supercomputers trained ChatGPT, Stephen Witt speculated that journalists like himself would soon be made obsolete by AI, which could instantaneously produce structured, superior prose. Huang assured Witt not to worry: “It will come for the fiction writers first.” And yet, our course will consider the unprecedented opportunities that this meteor strike offers for certain curious and adaptable mammals. What does AI assisted creativity look like? How can we conceive of human writing as viable and vital in the age of large language models? In order to answer these questions, we will survey recent studies of human and AI neural networks and creativity, including Margaret Boden’s The Creative Mind, Marcus de Sautoy’s The Creativity Code, and Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence. We will also review theoretical approaches that predate but also predict large language models, including Italo Calvino’s “Cybernetics and Ghosts” and N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Think. Finally, we will read a selection of recent fiction that speculates about the nature of writing and creativity in the age of AI, including Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook and Richard Powers’ Playground. Our own writing will include experimental exercises derived from these emerging ideas. The questions we pose are moving targets, and their tentative answers will be quickly outdated. The course simply offers an opportunity to assess the transition and evolution of our field at this threshold moment of impact.