Julia Gordon
In this class, we will be reading and watching the “worst” of genre fiction—the most derided, mass-produced works (“slop,” in other terms)—and the “best” of genre fiction—novels and films that were dismissed upon release but later became revered. What distinguishes “generic” genre fiction from the great works of genre that are remembered for centuries? What do we, as readers and viewers, want from these types of works?
We will consider what differentiates the great works of genre fiction from mere pulp and what we mean when we judge a work to be “good” or “bad.” Potential texts include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and samples of contemporary BookTok “romantasy” pulp. Potential films include They Live, Blue Velvet, and Fifty Shades of Grey.
We will ask, what exactly drives the appetite for books and films that struggle to surprise us? One could argue that it is simply a mass crisis of taste and judgement, but to do so would neglect the very real influence that these allegedly “low-brow” genres have on “high-brow” arts and culture. Why are “bad” books and movies often so fun and pleasurable? Does our experience of enjoying “bad” art feel different from how we enjoy “good” art? Should commercial success have any place in how we evaluate artistic merit?
Assignments will include regular discussion posts, a creative writing project, and a final essay (8-10 pages). No exams, no prerequisites.
Maryn Gardner
Did you know researchers at the Duke Lemur Center are studying how to apply lemur hibernation patterns to humans for deep space travel? Or that from 1930-1965, the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory studied extrasensory perception (ESP), telepathy, psychokinesis, pre-cognition, and clairvoyance?
Contemporary audiences are familiar with popular science fiction tropes like mad science, deep space travel, world-altering technologies, and human bioengineering. And yet, scientific communities engage in real, urgent research on these same subjects. So how do historical and contemporary practices of science overlap with representations of science in science fiction? When does science become science fiction? When does science fiction become science?
This course will trace representations of science in British and American speculative literatures and film from the 1800s to the present. We will examine historical periods such as the Victorian period, the World Wars, the Space Race, the age of the Internet, and our present moment. We will compare historical case studies, such as CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb’s mind control experiments, in tandem with popular science fiction works. Course materials will feature a blend of primary, secondary, and historical science texts, including stories from H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Ted Chiang, and films such as2001: A Space Odyssey,Interstellar,Arrival,Godzilla Minus OneandOppenheimer.
Our class will aim to understand how new sciences and technologies have shaped fictional, scientific imaginaries as well as how science fiction stories have influenced scientific innovation and technological development. As we compare historical and literary archives of science, we will consider how science fiction is accurate or inaccurate in its portrayal of scientific practices and histories. What kinds of scientific imaginaries are believable, and what kinds are not?
Grades will be based on seminar participation, two short essays, and a final essay or creative project. No exams will be given. No pre-requisites necessary. Assignments: Weekly entries in Keyword Journal ~250-300 words, Close Reading Essay ~ 3 pages, Argumentative Essay ~5 pages, Creative Assignment: Speculating New Science Fictions ~open format
Sarah Beckwith
“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” -- Henry James
Throughout the class we will be paying close attention to what writers do in various genres, media, and idioms of human voicing. We will be noticing how poets, novelists, and dramatists of various historical periods notice the world, and also noticing ourselves noticing. How do we learn to read –skillfully and with acumen-- poetry, plays, and prose, and what are we doing when we read? How do we do things with words? How might these arts of attention provoke us or inspire us to our own expression, to try to become people on whom nothing is lost, as Henry James marvelously put it?
In Literature classes we have the privileged luxury of working in the same medium as the writers we study: words. In this course we’ll aid our study of literature by writing quite a bit ourselves. I ask students to build their own primers or handbooks to develop a critical vocabulary. We will work with forms of parody and imitation too in order to work close up with form. We will also be keeping notebooks of our reading and writing, a record, refinement, practice, and development of the art of attention. We will think about and also use the form of the essay, our medium for testing things out against ourselves (from essayer, Fr. ).
We will look at a range of poetic forms, (ode, sonnet, free verse, elegy, dramatic monologue, lyric, epic) and think of poetry as witness (Czeslaw Milosz), and redress (Seamus Heaney), lament, celebration, and prayer in many idioms of human voicing. We will also read a range of fascinating novels in which each succeeding writer rewrites his or her forebears: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre,(1847), Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which rewrites Bronte’s novel from the point of view of Antionette Cosby, the Dominican heiress of Bronte’s tale. As our third novel we will read Caryl Phillips, A View of the Empire at Sunset (2019), Phillips’ take on Jean Rhys and theforms of estrangement and belonging at the heart of empire.
Our explorations and investigations of theatre will focus on Antigone in Greek and South African variants: Sophocles Antigone, and Athol Fugard, The Island.
Michael D'Alessandro
From The Hunger Games to Fahrenheit 451 to Ex Machina, American culture has become saturated with visions of speculative “other” societies. But why exactly have utopian and dystopian stories become so central to our national landscape? How can so-called utopias allow specific populations to thrive while so many others fail? Moving across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this course examines the genre through social, cultural, and political lenses. We investigate traditional examples of utopias and dystopias—from planned communities to futuristic authoritarian regimes—at the same time that we test the boundaries of utopian and dystopian definitions.
Throughout, we ask critical questions of the utopian and dystopian genres, such as: how have speculative futures illuminated fears around changing economic structures, gender dynamics, and race relations? In what ways do utopias and dystopias offer insight into ideals of individualism and fears of conformity? What aspects of United States history have unfolded as real-life utopias and dystopias? Finally, how distinct are the concepts of utopia and dystopia?
Fiction and film lie at the center of our exploration, but we also engage genre theory, television shows, and cultural criticism. Texts include Octavia Butler’sParable of the Sower, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ira Levin’sThe Stepford Wives, and Suzanne Collins’sThe Hunger Games.Films include Steven Spielberg’sMinority Report,Alex Garland’sEx Machina, and Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer.
Evaluation consists of weekly response posts, one essay, two exams (a midterm and final), and an oral presentation. Also, as this class is a discussion seminar, most of our time—and a sizable percentage of the evaluation—will focus on class participation.
Seats are reserved for sophomores and first-years only. Prospective majors and minors welcome. No prerequisites necessary.
Corina Stan
Aristotle’s lament “Oh, my friends, there are no friends” has been quoted or paraphrased by famous philosophers like Montaigne, Kant, and Nietzsche. How do we understand this paradoxical thought today? We’ll ponder the question along two lines: 1) with an eye to the foundations of our personal bonds: do all friendships grow out of shared interests or concurrence of opinion? A common history? Well-calibrated proximity and distance? What about AI companions? 2) by tracing the long history of a mistranslation originating in Diogenes Laertius’sLives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.Apparently Aristotle didn’t say that there were no true friends, but something closer to: he who has many friends, has none. Perhaps this insight is even more relatable today! (By the way, is there a sense in which written culture is just a huge effort to address previous failures of communication, to account for partial understandings, or to clarify misinterpretations? How can we write in such a way as to avoid misunderstandings?) Are misunderstandings avoidable in friendship? Or is a resilient relationship possible only through deliberate misunderstanding, that is, if we set aside or generously mistranslate an other’s occasionally infelicitous words, gestures, and actions, making allowances for the trivial ways humans fail one another?
This course targets theimprovement and refinement of students’ close reading and argumentative writing skills. It aims to create an awareness of reading and writing as a patient process of discovery and self-discovery, one that involves a concerted effort to understand other people’s ideas on their own terms and represent them accurately before engaging with them critically; a genuine desire to explore various possibilities and craft an informed position that goes beyond what’s familiar and comfortable; a fine balance of openness and self-confidence to welcome feedback from other readers and to revise intelligently. It proceeds under the assumption that onebecomes,rather than is born, a writer (even a natural gift must be cultivated!), and that learning to write well is a lifelong endeavor for all of us. With these goals in mind, reading assignments will be relatively short, but writing will be a weekly practice.
Over the course of the semester, students will complete three critical papers: a short analytical one; an argumentative paper in which they will rely on several sources that we'll discuss in class; a more complex research paper that requires independent work identifying and studying sources relevant to the topic of each student’s choice. No prerequisites.
Cathy Shuman
The word, the line, the sentence; the image, the thought, the story – these will be our building blocks as students explore and experiment, write, workshop, revise, and polish work in three genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Along the way, we will analyze published examples of each genre for inspiration and ideas.
JP Gritton
This is a chance to experiment in three genres of creative writing: fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In addition to exploring elements of the craft—setting, characterization, voice, point of view, and so on— this class seeks to explore the ways in which poets and storytellers are engaged in ongoing “conversations” with one another. As a class, we’ll explore explicit responses writers have made to the work of others. In poetry, for instance, the first line of Langston Hughes’ “I, Too” forms an “answer” to Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” In fiction, we might read Joanna Pearson’s “Riding” as a response to “Little Red Cap” by the Brothers Grimm, or explore how Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” replies to Ray Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (a story which is itself a “cover” of Plato’s Symposium). Through our own writing and through the careful reading of others’, we’ll explore a literary “grammar” before situating ourselves in ongoing and ever-evolving conversations among storytellers and poets.
Faulkner Fox
This course gives students an opportunity to explore and practice four genres of creative writing--creative nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry. Part of each class will be devoted to discussion of student work; part to talking about writing craft and the writing life; and part to close reading of published essays, stories, plays, and poems. There will be weekly writing assignments, and students will submit a final portfolio.
Dominika Baran
Memory, narrative, and identity are inextricably linked with each other, both from the perspective of individual experience and in the context of social and cultural life of communities. Who we believe we are is built on the story of our lives, which is made up of memories. But memories are not permanent imprints; rather, memory is a dynamic and continuously evolving process, influenced by social interaction and storytelling. This course explores how everyday narratives both reflect and remake the memories on which they are built, and how shared storytelling shapes group and individual identities.
Richard So
Can a machine be creative? This question — once the province of science fiction — has become one of the most urgent and contested issues of our time. This course explores the relationship between artificial intelligence and creativity from historical, theoretical, and scientific perspectives. We begin with the long history of attempts to automate aesthetic and cultural production, from Renaissance automata through modernist experiments with chance and algorithmic composition. We then turn to key theoretical and philosophical writings — from Kittler to Boden to Turing — that have shaped how we think about machine creativity, before engaging the current computer science literature on large language models, cognition, and aesthetic generation.
Throughout, we pair theory with practice: students will experiment directly with generative AI tools to produce creative output and reflect critically on what those experiments reveal. Our goal is not only to assess what today's AI systems can and cannot do, but to interrogate the concept of creativity itself — its cultural assumptions, its historical contingency, and what happens when the boundary between human and machine authorship begins to blur. We'll also reckon honestly with the darker side of AI-generated content: the rise of "slop," low-quality mass-produced text and imagery that is reshaping cultural ecosystems in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Evaluation consists of two short papers, one creative experiment with written reflection, and active participation in seminar discussion.
Charlotte Sussman
This class will explore both the stories doctors tell about themselves, and the stories that have been told about them. We will begin by considering what “becoming a doctor” has meant to people of different genders, ethnicities and social classes. We will go on to investigate some of the roles doctors play in modern society, and the ethical dilemmas that accompany those roles. Issues to be discussed include: doctors at the intersection of science and social management; the ethics of empathy between doctors and patients; doctors as border crossers; and what it means to cure someone. Student work will include two 4-6 page papers and an exam.
Taylor Black
Taking its inspiration from the lurid and provocative mondo films popular during the 1960s, MONDO WEIRDO surveys works by and about some of the most fabulously eccentric American artists and stylists from the 20th century. It examines how “the weird” has been represented and commodified across mediums.
From iconic figures such as Miles Davis, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Andy Warhol to more obscure cult personalities such as Quentin Crisp, Dorothy Dean, Valerie Solanas, and A.J. Weberman, this course seeks out iconoclastic figures with extreme personalities and unforgettable works of art and almost-art. Through fiction, feature films (David Lynch, John Waters), documentaries (A Portrait of Jason, Grey Gardens), essays, memoirs, visual art, and popular music, while also considering historical context to understand the political, social, and economic conditions in which these works emerged. In doing so, students will be exposed to a whole cosmos of American artists and cult figures while also learning how to perceive and describe these eccentric geniuses in ways that are anything but average.
Through two short writing assignments (2-4 Pages) and one longer essay (7-8 pages) or creative project at the end of the term, students will expand their powers of perception and description while being encouraged to uncover the eccentric within themselves.
Astrid Giugni
Writing at the beginning of the 17thcentury, Captain John Smith describes the hardship and the wonder of a shipwreck in the Bermudas: “all Sea-men [expected] an enchanted den of Furies and Devils, the most dangerous, unfortunate, and forlorn place in the world, and they found it [instead] the richest, healthfullest and pleasantest they ever saw.” Smith’s narratives, like those of his fellow “adventurers,” presented to its readers a new, and potentially limitless, world. How did English audiences imagine this distant world? How could the settlers build a better world in this new land? In this class, we will explore how early modern writers described the “new” worlds they found and built imaginary one—of bustling cities, distant continents, and cross-cultural encounters—in poetry, plays, and autobiographical narratives.
Focusing on texts ranging from John Smith’s A True Relation, to the collaborative city comedy Eastward Ho!, and to John Donne’s poems—intertwining metaphors of exploration with daring love poetry—we will examine how Renaissance authors constructed persuasive fictions about exploration, wealth, religion, and “strangers.” Students will also experiment with AI and natural-language-processing tools—mapping character networks, modeling thematic clusters, and analyzing rhetorical patterns—to reveal the hidden structures underlying these works.
The course focuses on travel narratives, poetry, and plays from the 17th century. Students will study literary works that engaged and re-imagined the role of British “adventurers” in Europe, the Middle East, and the New World, including John Smith’s “A True Relation," Andrew Marvell’s “Bermudas,” Hakluyt’s “Principal Navigations,” John Donne’s poetry and sermons, and Sandys’ “A Relation of a Journey.” The goal is to understand these works of art within their historical context--how do English narratives represent the New World for their audiences?
Tsitsi Jaji
This course embraces the idea that the best way to become a writer is to read/listen to as much as possible. Writers will develop an awareness of the way language shapes our world and how we may be involved in remaking both language and our world through poetry. We aim to listen and look at the world differently, and to cultivate skill in reading poetry from a range of historical and geographical. In addition, we welcome working poets to speak about their craft. Together we will work to usher the imagination onto the page and into the world of sound, taking care as we attend to each other’s writing. We will adopt the practice of reading and writing daily. Over the course of the semester each writer will produce a chapbook of poems and explore how to publish work written in the class.
JP Gritton
In addition to composing their own pieces of short fiction, students will read work by masters of the short form. These stories are lenses through which we’ll explore the building blocks of the narrative craft— character, point of view, setting, plot, as well as voice—and they will complement chapters from Janet Burroway’s guide to narrative craft,Writing Fiction. Students who remain in the course will be required to purchase this text; it will provide a kind of technical ballast as we explore fiction and essays by the likes of David Mura, Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and others. In addition to our weekly meetings, conducted in person (/via zoom,if whether or circumstances demand), we’ll maintain a robust online presence on the class’s Canvas site.In addition to regular attendance, students may be asked to: post discussion questions on readings, as well as to in/formally “workshop” classmates’ fiction in class/on the discussion board. In addition to weekly writing exercises, students will submit one fully revised short story at semester’s end, along with a final portfolio “letter” that articulates their revision process.
Amin Ahmad
Writing a story can be overwhelming: Where does inspiration come from? How do we harness our own experiences? How do we begin and end a story? How do we create a world on the page? How do we get through writer’s block?
To answer these questions, we will examine craft techniques underlying different kinds of stories: We will read and analyze realistic stories, fairy tales, detective stories, magical realism, fantasy and science fiction. We’ll also learn to create different points-of-view, create a plot and build complex characters.
All along, we will discuss how to develop a writing practice that works for you. Each class will involve a writing exercise that will prepare you for writing longer stories, and homework assignments will allow you to harness your creativity.
This is an intensive class—come prepared to read a lot, write a lot, and to experiment with your writing. Since this is a workshop-based class, attending class sessions is required.
Cathy Shuman
In this introduction to creative nonfiction, you will write about your reality -- the places, experiences, and stories you care about -- while exploring and experimenting with prose techniques and structures. Over the course of the semester, students will work on creative exercises leading through workshops and revision to the production of three polished essays. Along the way, we will read and discuss selected examples of published creative nonfiction to help us develop techniques for creating our own. No previous creative writing experience is required for this course.
Marianna Torgovnick
The subtitle of this seminar is Meditation and the Art of Writing. Each class includes a short meditation but focuses on you and your creativity. We read and discuss short examples of important non-fiction genres—memoir, reviews, photo essays, and others the class brings to the table—as well as experience some music, videos, and pieces of art. The examples inform that week’s meditation (all secular in nature), with the goal of enabling you to write fluidly and to revise effectively.
Members of the class collaborate as a writing group attentive to your goals which can range from self-expression, through online posts, to various forms of publication. The major assignment for the seminar is revising and expanding one-three pieces of writing done during the term (the number depending on length and complexity) into polished creative non-fiction.
Julianne Werlin
This course is an introduction to the literature and culture of the European Renaissance. Major authors will include Shakespeare, Cervantes, Teresa of Avila, Montaigne, Marguerite de Navarre, Erasmus, Thomas More, Luther, Vasari, and Machiavelli. Innovations in literature, including new forms of poetry and storytelling, the growth of print, and the development of the theater, will be set beside the transformed worldview created by global exploration and colonialism, the Reformation, and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution.
The class will include visits to the Nasher and Rubenstein. Grades will be based on a midterm, final exam, quizzes, and short writing assignments.
Codes: HI; ALP, CCI
Timothy Heimlich
The period spanning 1790-1830 witnessed one of the great flowerings of literature in English. The era is defined by revolutions. The aftershocks of the American Revolution instigated a crisis in British imperialism: What was the ultimate purpose of empire, writers like Edmund Burke and Olaudah Equiano wondered, and under what circumstances might it be considered a morally defensible project? The epoch-making French Revolution called into question centuries of received political wisdom and ushered in modern geopolitics, along with creating new ideas about liberty, national identity, and the limits of human potential. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions drove one of the largest-scale social transformations in European history, in which Britain became a predominantly urban, rather than rural, nation, and in which economic life both inside and beyond British borders metamorphosed. These latter revolutions also accelerated the long-term processes we now refer to as anthropogenic climate change.
These revolutions in turn sparked literary revolutions that responded to, contributed to, and advanced them. William Blake pioneered new modes of painting and printing alongside a new mythology. Following the lead of Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge reinvented the lyric form, powering it to the position of most esteemed poetic genre. Subsequent poets including Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Felicia Hemans advanced their experiments in radical new directions. Meanwhile, in the hands of writers like Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Walter Scott, novels began selling thousands and then tens of thousands of copies, earning international audiences and making their authors stars in the process. This course samples the writing of these authors and more; course requirements include a close reading assignment and two essays.
Kate Turner
Telegraphs and telepathy; photographs and gossip; seances and scientific procedure. Writers in the Victorian era (1837-1901) were fascinated by such contradictory modes of knowing, obsessed with the boundaries between feeling, thinking, and “fact.”
In this class, we’ll read a range of Victorian literature (realist novels, early science fiction and horror, and mystery stories) that investigates how Victorian writers and thinkers conceived of the connections between body and mind, fact and emotion, evidence and feeling. To study what we know and how we come to know it, we’ll also consider how historical conditions like imperialism, industrialization, and globalization shaped Victorian literary imaginations. What “counts” as knowledge and what doesn’t? What is the relationship between belief and reality? What happens to categories like gender, race, sexuality, or even personhood as the nature of knowledge itself changes? And what do we have to learn from the Victorians as we inhabit the world they left behind?
Selected course texts may include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We’ll also look at short fiction, poetry, and drama by authors like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, as well as nonfiction texts by political and scientific thinkers including Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill. Assignments will include several short close reading essays (2-3 pages) and a final paper (5-7 pages). No prerequisites, no exams.
Aarthi Vadde
Joyce is a challenging and paradoxical writer: brainy and bodily, egotistical and insecure, obsessed by his hometown (Dublin) and intent on escaping it. His masterpiece Ulysses turned 100 years old in 2022.The novel to end all novels, the influence of Ulysses on twentieth-century literature is unparalleled.In this seminar, we will dedicate ourselves to reading Ulysses in its entirety alongside A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (necessary priming for Ulysses).We will also look at some of Joyce’s earlier writings (possibly a short story fromDubliners). No prior exposure to Joyce is required to take this course or do well in it. What is required is a willingness to read very slowly, to reread, and to take the plunge of discussing a writer who said this about Ulysses: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."Assignments will include a midterm paper (5-6pgs), final paper (10-11pgs), and up to four short response papers (1-2pg) to complement class discussion. Required texts: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the Gabler edition of Ulysses
Taylor Black
This course will reckon with representations of the region of the United States that, as William Faulkner describes in Absalom, Absalom!, has been “dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.” Our ongoing subject here is the post-Civil War South, with a particular emphasis on the recent past. The historical lens of slavery produces a condition of grotesquerie that itself has blossomed into fields of insanity. Our tour of the South will seek these out, focusing in on the unsavory, haunted and peculiar figures we meet along the way—figures, who, according to Flannery O’Connor, are “not images of the man in the street…[but] images of the man forced out to meet the extremes of his own nature…the result of what our social history has bequeathed to us, and what our literary history forces our writers to attempt.”
So, rather than consider works that romanticize or apologize for the South’s sordid history, our syllabus will be populated by works that offer distorted visions of Southern life, history and culture. We will consider depictions of the South in fiction (novels, plays and short stories), music (country, blues, bluegrass, gospel), film and television. This evolving character analysis of the region will tend toward the fantastic, terrible and estranged. With this in mind, your assignments will help you develop strategies for understanding and writing about forms of representation that are, in and of themselves, uncanny and highly stylized.
Allison Neal
How did American literature become modern? Surveying a variety of US poetry and prose written between 1915 and 1960, this course traces the evolution of American literature amidst vast global and national upheavals, including two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early years of both the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement. We’ll explore the exciting formal and political revolutions of early modernism, following it through to its peak during the roaring 1920s. We’ll then turn to the documentary realism of the 1930s and 1940s, before encountering the early countercultural rebellions of the 1950s. Throughout, we’ll think about questions of the national, the local, and the global; the relationship between formal innovation and realism; and the balance between the individual and the collective.
The course will include an equal mix of poetry and prose. We’ll read novels by Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Vladmir Nabokov and poetry by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, H.D., Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, George Oppen, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Allen Ginsberg.
You will be graded on class participation and two essays.
Chris Ouma
How does one talk about African literature? What is African literature? African literature is constituted as a canon by cohorts of what can be considered 'major writers'. Here we mean not just novelists, we are also taking about playwrights and poets from all corners of the continent. In this course, we will be engaging with a Pan-African diet of African writers in English, including those whose works have been translated into English from French, Portuguese and African languages. From the timeless 'Epic of Sundiata' in Mali, across the earliest novels by Thomas Mofolo (Lesotho) to the advent of modern African literature in the age of Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Mariama Ba (Senegal), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (Kenya), the course will move across a couple of centuries towards our present moment: the age of Chimamanda Adichie and her contemporaries. We will watch films, we will listen to music. We will move like an epic - across the ages, through text, sound and image - with a feast of African imagination. There will be four single page reflective essays, a 4-6 page mid term essay and 6-9 page final essay.
David Aers
This class focuses on three extraordinary works, coming from and exploring a range of ethical, psychological, and religious issues. The first half of the semester is devoted to a long, tragic Romance: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. This is a kaleidoscope story of desire and sexuality in a besieged city. Chaucer elicits complex and conflicting feelings as he reflects on issues of gender, power, and ethics. How do the explicitly Christian judgements and prayer of the closing stanzas relate to a long, complex poem about love and war among Trojan and Greek people? The set text you will need for class is in Chaucer’s own English, Troilus and Criseyde, edited by Barry Windeatt from Penguin Classics (paperback). This includes a good introduction, glosses of difficult words on each page as well as detailed notes. It may be worth reading a translation into modern English before you read Chaucer’s own language; I recommend the prose translation by Barry Windeatt in the Oxford World Classics Series (Oxford University Press)
In the second half of the semester, we move from late medieval Catholic England to the very different culture of the English Reformation. We study two astonishingly powerful, moving plays: the tragedy King Lear and the late play, The Winter’s Tale, a multi- generic work, which incorporates forms of life which elsewhere in Shakespeare lead to utter devastation (King Lear). Here, however, Shakespeare searches out the resources for reconciliation and redemption in the face of catastrophic sin. The best introduction to the themes here is Sarah Beckwith’s Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. You have a wide choice of acceptable editions of Shakespeare’s plays which we are studying. If you want a copy of the complete works, I suggest either the Oxford University Press Edition by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s or the Riverside Shakespeare (Houghton Mifflin).
Before the first class, students should have read the introduction to the set text and (at least) the first two books of Troilus and Criseyde. This is a long, beautiful, and demanding text, and you need to have read into it carefully before classes begin.
It is also worth taking a look at two websites run by Harvard University which will help introduce you to works in Middle English as well as Chaucer himself. The first is “The English Language Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” under the tab “Middle English Basic Pronunciation and Grammar.” The second is Harvard’s “Geoffrey Chaucer Website” which has tabs that explore everything from “Chaucer’s World” to “How to Read Chaucer.” These will both be excellent resources for you, especially as you first begin to read Troilus and Criseyde.
Grades, Class Format, and Expectations
This is a seminar and attendance with participation is mandatory. Unwarranted absences will result in failing the course. The grade comes from two essays (8-10 pages) which must be submitted by the given deadline to count. There will be no exams.
Please also note: laptops and other electronic devices are not to be used in class. Why? Because this is a seminar aimed to foster a dialogic sense of learning. This is very different to a lecture class. In my experience, laptops impede the kinds of attention and communication I consider essential to a flourishing seminar. Uses of all forms of AI should be acknowledged in footnotes to the essay as should any form of secondary writing.
Akhil Sharma
Discovering the Stories We Want to Tell
All writers draw from their pasts. Learning how to relate to our histories, what matters and what does not, is a way of discovering our “voice”. This course is focused around writing non-fiction/memoir as a stepping stone to writing fiction.The primary criteria for grading include: thoughtful comments in class on the pieces submitted; the quality of the work submitted (both its artistic merits and its competency in terms of grammar, coherence, and legibility). Students will regularly receive guidance as to what their grade is likely to be.
Allison Neal
This course will offer a survey of modern and contemporary US poetry, focusing primarily on poetry of the twentieth century. Along the way, we’ll read a variety of poetry criticism and theory to help us track this vast, varied, and innovative body of literature. We’ll pursue two main lines of inquiry. First, how did modern American poets experiment with genre (the lyric, in particular) and form (poetic voice, address, meter, rhythm)? Second, what relation does this formal innovation have to the poetry’s social and historical contexts? We’ll read poetry by Robert Frost, Paul Dunbar, H.D., Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich, among many others. We’ll also explore great poetry criticism and theory by writers including Theodor Adorno, Barbara Johnson, Allen Grossman, Jahan Ramazani, Virginia Jackson, and more.
In this course, you will be graded on class participation, creative assignments (consisting primarily of your own poetic imitations), a short assignment (3-4 pages), and a long essay (7-8 pages).
Joseph Donahue
The goal of the course is to deepen students’ engagement with the history and practice of poetic art in the twentieth and twenty first century. Reading assignments will be drawn from the canon of post WWII avant-guarde poetry and literary art. Lectures will provide an historical and cultural context for the works we are reading, and about the controversies and challenges that inform the poetics of the late nineteen forties to the present. The course proceeds from the premise that a deeply internalized command of literary history is critical to the development of any serious writer. Students will be expected to read closely, to acquire an overall grasp of modernism and its development into what is now called the postmodern, and above all to participate in discussions. Further, students will be expected to investigate on their own initiative the texts towards which their own writing leads them. In class and out of class we will explore the possibilities for contemporary poetic practice suggested by earlier works. We will look at a wide range of poems with attention to both how they are made and to the personal urgency that makes the poem more than an exercise, that creates surprise or sorrow or exhilaration in the reader. Our main focus will be on writing poems, or creating letter-based artworks, and on developing both a critical and a generous approach to each other’s work.
Akhil Sharma
This course will include discussion of basic techniques such as writing effective dialogue and developing complicated characters inside of a plot. The focus, however, will be on developing a voice and then trying to use that voice as the engine of a narrative. Voice is often what distinguishes a work.
Each week will have a writing assignment and each week will require a close reading of a short story.The primary criteria for grading include: thoughtful comments in class on the pieces submitted; the quality of the work submitted (both its artistic merits and its competency in terms of grammar, coherence, and legibility). Students will regularly receive guidance as to what their grade is likely to be.
Joseph Donahue
This seminar takes up life and times of a foremost lyric poets in world literature, Emily Dickinson, whose poetry explores like no other extremes of ecstasy and despair. In taking up these compact and powerful poems, we will track how the poet draws on the world around her, on nature, artworks, religion, on the history of her time, on conventions of love and elegy, on the joys and suffering of those around her, in the writing of her astounding works. Requirements: a midterm, a final, a term project, and class participation.
Priscilla Wald
Climate change, resource exhaustion, an increase in natural disasters, from tornados, hurricanes, floods to droughts, heat domes, earthquakes, and, of course, pandemics: these, we are told, are problems with “the environment.” We are living, it seems, in the Age of the Anthropocene, when humanity has become a geological force.
Racism, unprecedented poverty, inadequate health care, and urban blight in the midst of rising affluence: these, too, are problems with “the environment.”The world population has exceeded eight billion; we are putting increasing pressure on the planet, with dangerous consequences, as the Covid-19 pandemic has made so starkly clear. Social hierarchies and inequities, as we have seen over time, take their toll on every aspect of the planet; the natural and social worlds are fully integrated entities.
So, what is this “environment,” and why does this question matter, now more than ever? How might a better understanding of how that term is circulating and being used help us move beyond our impasses and think productively about how to live more justly, compassionately, and responsibly in our world? What can we learn from the stories we tell about the environment not only in fiction, film, and the mainstream media/journalism, but also in scientific, legal, and political documents? How might we change that story, and with what consequences?
This class will address these questions by considering the global and the local, with special attention to the very ground on which Duke is standing: the Southern Piedmont, the city of Durham, the Duke campus, and the Duke Campus Farm.Beginning with early human settlement, when the earth began to get a human-natural history of its own, we will consider three historical moments — settlement; plantation culture and enslavement, and the ongoing struggles for Civil Rights from the late 1960s into the Environmental Justice and Environmental Health Movements in the present—to show how science, law, and cultural forms (literary and cinematic as well as scientific works, legal cases, policy documents, and the news media) contribute to the changing idea of “the environment.” The class will include site visits to Duke Forest and the Duke Campus Farm and a walking tour of downtown Durham.
We will trace the idea of the environment not only across time, but also across geographical space, as we consider how ideas take root locally, and also circulate through social, cultural, economic, legal, political, agricultural, academic, and other networks, reshaping the ever-changing relationship between the local and the global.
Xinyu Dong
What does it mean to leave one’s homeland and create a new home elsewhere? How do immigrant families across generations negotiate the meanings of “home” amid displacement and mobility? This course explores the complex experiences of the Asian diaspora by focusing on the immigrant home as a microcosm of social change: the dreams and longings of the first generation, the in-between and evolving identities of the second, the affective and often physical labor of sustaining new homes in unfamiliar worlds.
Building on scholarship in Asian American studies, inter-Asia studies, and transnational film studies, the course examines narrative films by Asian American directors and filmmakers across Asia that portray diasporic life and identity. Screenings include Didi (Sean Wang, USA, 2024), Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, USA, 2020), The Namesake (Mira Nair, USA, 2006), The Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang, USA, 1993), Pushing Hands (Ang Lee, USA, 1991), Song of the Exile (Ann Hui, Hong Kong, 1990), and A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan, 1985). We will ask how filmmakers visualize the spatial and temporal dimensions of the immigrant home – whether as a lost origin, a site of return, or a resilient space of rebuilding – and how these homes witness generational tension, cultural conflict, and reconciliation.
Students will develop interpretive skills and cinematic vocabulary for analyzing how film form mediates questions of memory, migration, and belonging. Course requirements include eight screening-reading response posts (~250 words each) and two take-home essay-question exams (a midterm and a final, ~1600 words each). Films are in English or subtitled in English; all readings are in English. No prerequisites.
Nathaniel Mackey
Advanced Writing Workshops build on the work done at the intermediate level, and are intended for the most well-prepared and gifted creative writing students. Pre-requisite: English 320S or consent of the instructor if prior work merits admission to the class (as judged by the instructor).
Timothy Heimlich
In the decades following the 1707 Acts of Union that created the modern United Kingdom, a synthetic Anglocentric British cultural identity was fabricated, consolidated, and centralized. At the same time, residual Scottish, Irish, and Welsh cultural difference became increasingly interesting to poets, novelists, and other artists both inside and outside the imperial core. These “Celtic” (the term is a misnomer) identities ultimately became a sustained cultural obsession over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, animating much of the most-read and most-discussed literature of the period. This course investigates the origin, influence, and legacy of that interest, with a special focus on the role of Celtic difference within rapidly mutating discourses surrounding race and empire. The course is organized in three units (Scotland, Ireland, and Wales), focusing on canonical and less frequently read (but historically extremely popular) poems, novels, and essays produced about each of the three largest Celtic countries. Authors discussed will include Thomas Gray, Evan Evans, James Macpherson, Edward 'Celtic' Davies, Anna Maria Bennett, John Pinkerton, Maria Edgeworth, William Wordsworth, Sydney Owenson, Susan Ferrier, Thomas Moore, Walter Scott, Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Machen, and William Butler Yeats, among others. Students will also read classic critical explorations of these writers. Course requirements include one long essay (25 pages).
Charlotte Sussman
This course is part of a Bass Connections Team project, and “Sharing Ground: The Humanities, Academic Freedom, and the Future of the University,” a joint Duke-NC State Sawyer Seminar. Instructor permission is required to register: please contact charlotte.sussman@duke.edu.
Debates about free expression and academic freedom typically center on law, policy and political science. Yet the humanities — disciplines rooted in interpretation, dialogue, pluralism and collective meaning-making — have long shaped how societies understand intellectual freedom, dissent, and democracy. Nevertheless, the humanities are frequently overlooked as drivers of academic freedom, despite their unique ability to illuminate how freedom operates as a lived cultural practice rather than merely a legal principle. This course responds to that gap by investigating how humanistic perspectives— from literature and philosophy to archives, performance and visual culture — can strengthen democratic life within the university and beyond.
The course will begin with a series of case studies of the role played by the arts and humanities in debates about free expression and academic freedom. We will familiarize ourselves with important theories of free expression, histories of banned books and performances, and literary and theatrical representations of struggles over academic freedom. Students will meet and hear presentations from visiting scholars on how freedom is defined in the study of music, philosophy, and religion, among other topics.
In the later part of the course, students will develop a collaborative project that draws upon archives of academic freedom and freedom of expression at Duke and elsewhere.
Evaluation will be based on presentations, short pieces of writing, and a long project proposal and annotated bibliography.
Corina Stan
In this course we will focus on Hannah Arendt as a political theorist of the human condition in relation to the work of two literary figures much on her mind, Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, as well as the contemporary novelist Jenny Erpenbeck (Visitation, The End of Days.) We will read closely novels and short stories alongside Arendt’sThe Human Condition, as well as excerpts fromThe Origins of Totalitarianism, Responsibility and Judgment, “Crisis of Culture”, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution, On Violence, her writing on Kafka, and other short essays. Our purpose will be twofold. On one hand, to situate Arendt as a post-Kantian thinker whose work we’ll read in conversation with Martin Heidegger’s; understand her concepts of personhood, judgment, intersubjectivity, consciousness and self-consciousness, being a human agent as a distinct act, thinking as “the human way of striking roots, of taking one’s place in the world,” language as the medium of human expressivity; and analyze the conceptual elaborations her thought generated in the work of other thinkers (Zerilli, Esposito, Agamben, Shuster, Greif, Herd); finally, we will place Arendt in conversation with thinkers of post-colonial humanism (Césaire, Fanon, Wynter.) On the other hand, we will seek to understand Arendt’s deployment of literature in her writing (her invocation of Conrad’sHeart of DarknessinThe Origins of Totalitarianism, her views on Kafka’s “parables of the modern man”) and her criticism of the novel form, as well as the ways, conversely, in which novels like Erpenbeck’s illuminate Arendt’s conception of the human. All along, we will reflect on what it means to read literature as fiction and as philosophy, as well as in conversation with philosophy and political theory.
Richard So
This course provides graduate students with a concise historical and theoretical overview of university-based literary criticism, with the goal of helping them better situate their own research within the longer history of the discipline. Readings cover the major theoretical paradigms that have defined literary criticism since the mid-20th century: New Criticism, deconstruction, postmodernism, New Historicism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, sociology of literature, race and gender studies, and postcolonial theory. Students will leave with a strong theoretical foundation for engaging more contemporary approaches as they develop their own scholarly projects. Evaluation consists of a conference-style paper and active seminar participation.