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PLEASE NOTE: These are samples only. Course offerings are subject to
change and not all courses are offered each term or each year. Be sure
to check the online course catalog and the current class schedule for details about pre-requisites, terms offered, class fees, etc.).
Nonfiction Workshops
These
are studio-like courses, devoted to the production of student work.
Taught by the core faculty in nonfiction, these repeatable workshops may
have different foci, depending upon the instructors.
Students will be expected to complement the writing and critiquing of
their work with readings from classic and contemporary examples of the
form.
4 courses, 12 credits
Thesis Development Workshop
This
course will serve to encourage students to develop, focus and move on
to completing work on their theses, depending upon what stage of their
work they are in at the time they take the class.
1 course, 3 credits
Form and Theory of Nonfiction
Examples:
Short Forms: The Short Essay and The Prose Poem; Writing Hybrid
Nonfiction; The Poetic Memoir; Aphorism and The Declarative Impulse in
Nonfiction Writing; Forms of the Essay. This class is to a
large extent a craft class in which students focus more intensely on
specific issues and practices of their genre; but it also has the
difference of incorporating a theoretical component as well, asking
students to not only engage and think about craft and form, but to read
and theorize it.
2 courses/6 credits
History of the Essay
Seneca
to Montaigne to Alice Meynell to Simone Weil etc . . . a linear,
disjunctive, or creative tour into the heart of the essay. The essay is, in many ways, the genre central to the study of literary nonfiction in the United States today. It is the form most taught in nonfiction workshops. This class will introduce students to some of the crucial voices in the history of the form.
1 course, 3 credits
Topics in Nonfiction
In
these classes, Nonfiction faculty will have the opportunity to expose
students to a broad array of canonical and contemporary writers in a
variety of nonfiction genres. This may be single, paired,
or movement author classes (OULIPO’s work, or The Surrealist Essay), or
classes that focus on a specific theme in nonfiction studies, or are
devoted exclusively to exploring the critical necessity of aspects of
nonfiction such as The Devotional Memoir (Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe, etc) or The Journal and Letter as Cognate Forms of the Essay, as
well as Autobiography and Memoir, Travel Literature, Traditional
Biography and the “New” Biography, etc.
2 courses, 6 credits
Electives
Current
Listings in Graduate Literature, which are mostly in poetry and new
classes generated by the English faculty, which will be open in subject
matter, giving graduate students a chance to sample more broadly based
graduate curriculum in English studies.
4 Courses, 12 credits (at least 6 in Literature)
Thesis Hours
Thesis credits, under individual direction by faculty, towards completion of the thesis.
9 credits