Participants in this seminar will delve into the workings of memory--a term that encompasses several different kinds of remembering and recollecting. What makes something memorable? Can we choose or shape what we remember? Does memory constitute identity? How has technology altered what and how we remember? As we ponder such questions, our primary focus will be on literature (including Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Nabokov, and Toni Morrison). We'll also draw on philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science and explore creative arts such as drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, book arts, film, and music. Students will write in several genres--creative, critical, and reflective-and experiment with different ways of collecting, curating, and presenting memories in media of their choice.

A workshop in the writing of short lyrics and the study of the art and craft of poetry.

Topic for Fall 2026: Non-Fiction Essay

This creative writing workshop encourages students to explore the genre of creative non-fiction. We will look at examples of the rich variety of non-fiction essays, which includes travel writing, personal essay, memoir, humor essay, lyric essay, food writing, and the hermit crab essay. And, of course, draft and revise our own essays. Of particular importance in this course is working on basic strong writing and research skills.

A survey of American Drama that takes a journey through America’s history from the early 20th century to the present. Issues explored will include: family trauma; the American Dream; evolving ideas of race, class, gender and sexuality; and identity. Works will include: Thornton Wilder’s classic about small-town America, Our Town; Lorraine Hansberry’s story of a Black family’s struggle, A Raisin in the Sun; Tony Kushner’s meditation on the AIDS era, Angels in America; Melinda Lopez’s story of Cuban emigrés, Sonia Flew; Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer winner about class, race and social inequality, Sweat; the filmed version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton; and the playwright Celine Song’s film about transcultural romance, Past Lives.

This course examines how that icon of modernity, New York City, has been depicted in literature and the arts, from its evolution into the nation’s cultural and financial capital in the nineteenth century to the present. We’ll consider how urban reformers, boosters, long-time residents, immigrants, tourists, newspaper reporters, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have shaped new and often highly contested meanings of this dynamic and diverse city. We'll also consider how each vision of the city returns us to crucial questions of perspective, identity, and ownership, and helps us to understand the complexity of metropolitan experience. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, Berenice Abbott, Andre D. Wagner, and others. We’ll close the semester with films set in New York.

The roles played by Jews in the development of modern American literature are complex and contradictory. Influential American authors expressed anti-Semitic views in their correspondence and work, and prejudice excluded Jews from many literary and cultural opportunities well into the 20th century. Nonetheless Jewish publishers, editors, critics, and writers were extraordinarily influential in the development of the field, founding leading publishing houses, supporting freedom of expression and movements like modernism and postmodernism, and writing some of the most influential and lasting works in the tradition. In this course, we will explore the ways Jews have been represented in American literature and their roles in modernizing and expanding the field. Fulfills the English Department’s Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

A journey through the dark side of the American imagination. Where classic Hollywood filmmaking trades in uplift and happy endings, Film Noir inhabits a pessimistic, morally compromised universe, populated by femmes fatales, hard-boiled detectives, criminals and deviants. This course will explore the development of this alternative vision of the American experience, from its origins in the 1940s, through the revival of the genre in the 1970s, to its ongoing influence on contemporary cinema. We’ll pay particular attention to noir’s redefinition of American cinematic style, and to its representations of masculinity and femininity. Films we are likely to watch include Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. We’ll also read a number of the gritty detective novels from which several of these films were adapted.

An advanced, intensive writing workshop, open to six students, named for a late Wellesley professor who valued good writing. This is a class in writing non-fiction prose, the kind that might someday land a writer in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Our genre is often called "literary journalism," and here the special skills -- technical precision, ability for physical description, and psychological insight -- necessary for writing fiction are applied to real-life events and personalities. We will read and emulate authors like Joan Didion, Hilton Als, Janet Malcolm, Robert Mcfarlane, and Terry Castle, and each student will produce a 5,000 word-piece of their own.

In the 21st century, the historical novel has moved globally into literary fiction--novels characterized by complex narrative structures, richer use of language, and more wide-ranging questions about history, time, identity. What makes a novel precisely historical? Why do recent literary historical fictions often toggle between the past and present, as characters in the present look to the past for their own histories? How do historical novels embrace genre hybridity by incorporating science fiction or the gothic? How do these novels not only use history as their setting, but seek to question our notions of history? Texts range from the Ugandan epic Kintu (Jennifer Nansuguba Makumbi), to You Dreamed of Empires A (Álvaro Enrique)--a mashup of the encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma in Tenochtitlan, to Han Kang''s Human Acts--the visceral account of the 1980 democratic uprising in South Korea. All texts will be read in English.

A survey of major developments in literary theory and criticism. The emphasis is on breadth of coverage. Discussion will focus on important perspectives and schools of thought from Plato to the present day. We will consider, for instance, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, post-colonialism, race theory, and post-humanism as they have contributed to the interpretation of literature.

Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience and was immensely successful. Shakespeare is also universally regarded as the greatest playwright in English. In this introduction to his works, we will try to understand both Shakespeare’s popularity and greatness. To help us reach this understanding, we will focus especially on the theatrical nature of Shakespeare’s writing. The syllabus will likely be as follows: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. 

The Black woman writer's efforts to shape images of herself as Black, as women, and as an artist. The problem of literary authority for the Black woman writer, criteria for a Black woman's literary tradition, and the relation of Black feminism or "womanism" to the articulation of a distinctively Black and female literary aesthetic.