Topics Courses, Spring '25
ENG 255A African American Women Playwrights
W Course
(also offered as AFR ST 290 and WGSS 290)
Prof. Debby Geis
Tu/Thurs 2:20-3:50pm
African American Women Playwrights
Many readers may be familiar with groundbreakers like Lorraine Hansberry, whose Raisin in the Sun has become part of the canon of Civil Rights era reading. But in the 1960s and 1970s, African American women playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange were doing experiments with language and theatricality that had never been seen before. And from the 1980s into the present, we continue to witness important works by writers like Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks (the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama), Lynn Nottage, and many others.
This course focuses primarily on works by these more recent playwrights, with specific attention to ways that race/racism and gender/sexuality-- as well as social class and professional marginalization--have affected their work and become integral to their plays. This is a course that will require active participation; since it is also a “W” class, students will do a variety of writing exercises and more formal papers.
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ENG 255B Poet, Seeker, Lover, Friend
W Course
Prof. Andrea Sununu
MWF 2:50-3:50pm
Poet, Seeker, Lover, Friend
Drawing inspiration from Eudora Welty's aphorism "all serious daring starts from within," this course will analyze poetry, fiction, and drama while asking questions about the directions that even a "sheltered life" can take. Core poems will include the fourteenth-century poem Pearl, seventeenth-century poems of love and friendship by John Donne and Katherine Philips respectively, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and Mary Jo Salter’s “Elegies for Etsuko.” We will also read Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and The Winter’s Tale, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. Four of your five papers will be analytical in focus; your penultimate paper will consist of a creative letter or monologue that incorporates research on secondary sources into your explication of poems by Donne, Philips, or Eliot.
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ENG 255C Topics: Viking Myths and Modern Myth-making
W Course
(also offered as WLIT 215)
Prof. Amity Reading
MWF 12:30-1:30
Viking Myths and Modern Myth-making
This course introduces students to a wide range of texts from the Viking-Age North Sea region (ca. 793–1300 CE), beginning with the first Norse territorial expansions into Anglo-Saxon England and ending with the widespread Christianization of Iceland and Norway. The course will include selections from Old English poetry, the Eddas (prose and poetic), Norse þáttr, Icelandic sagas, Icelandic law, Arabic travel narratives, and various other documents that tell the story of cultural contact between the Viking peoples and their neighbors near and far. We will consider the act of encountering literature in translation, investigate the historical and etymological origins of the term Viking, and probe the assumptions behind pop culture representations of medieval Scandinavians. The course will also address the appropriation of Viking culture by modern special interest groups. What are the past and present myths surrounding Viking culture, and how can we begin to uncover the truth about this complex group of peoples?
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ENG 302A: Creative Writing II Fiction Topics: The Art of Revision
Prof. Ivelisse Rodriguez
Tu/Thurs 10:00-11:30am
Creative Writing II Fiction Topics: The Art of Revision
To become a writer, you have to learn how to revise. The last step in the writing process is wrangling with yourself (your ego); getting out of the way; and realizing that revision is about giving your story the best life it can have. In this class, we will focus on creating a revision practice by making an honest list of what needs to be changed in your story. We will start by focusing on the macro and then the micro revisions through exercises that teach you how to take apart your story and put it back together.
You are expected to have a story you want to revise by the first day of class.
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ENG 343A: Creative Writing II: Dramatic Topics: Adaptation
(also offered as COMM 319 and FLME 311)
Prof. Chris White
Thursday 12:40-3:30
Creative Writing II: Dramatic Topics: Adaptation
An experimental writing workshop focused on crafting short creative adaptations. We will work with more traditional adaptation assignments but we will also include on-line, more video-centered formats. Both traditional as well as more exploratory writing assignments will help you identify a personal response to a preexisting story or work, mine what is most inspirational and useful to you, and craft an authentically new version—either in a completely new genre, or by fusing the original with a new genre. In addition to short stories, we may utilize true events/memoir, your own previous writing work, poetry, and film footage as source material for exercises and/or assignments. We are all adapting together in our fast-paced world, and in this class, we’ll sometimes work collaboratively to create things one of us couldn't have created alone.
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ENG 398- Horror and Speculative Films from the Black Diaspora
(Also offered as FLME 321, AFST 390A)
Prof. Karin Wimbley
MW 2:20-3:50; Film screening Tuesdays 7:00-9:50 pm
This course explores horror and speculative films emerging from black filmmaking traditions across the globe. Specifically, we will track how Black filmmakers use horror and speculative films to explore the lived experiences of African and African-descended people, critique systems of wealth and power, ponder the meaning of life and death, and complicate static notions of what it means to be black in the world. Course films include (but are not limited to) Mati Diop’s Atlantics (Senegal, 2019), Mbithi Masya’s Kati Kati (Kenya/Germany, 2016), Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum (Senegal, 2021), Nia DaCosta, Candyman (US, 2021), and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (US, 2017).
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