Writing seminars
*Please note that English courses will have new 4-digit numbers effective Spring 2025. ENGL 114 will become ENGL 1014.
Watch a Video Introduction to ENGL 1014!
Spring 2025 Sections
01. Home. TTh 1.00-2.15
Where do you call home? Is your sense of home fixed to specific places, persons, languages, or memories? Must the idea of home always suggest rootedness? What does it mean to feel at home? In this course, we examine the affective responses elicited by various notions of home, from feelings of nostalgia and familiarity to estrangement, and we consider the ways in which generic and particular spaces enable or constrain individual agency and constitute our relation to others. Unsettling the easy boundary between the private and the public, we will seek to understand what various imaginings of home reveal about our collective and individual desires and anxieties, and we will examine the social and political forces at play in the making of home. Drawing from multiple disciplines and different modes of argument including essays, poetry, song, and film, we will study how home overlaps with spirituality, language politics, hierarchies of gender and labor, and educational opportunities, and how climate crises, pandemics, global economies, and immigration policies impact home. As we examine the debates and contests over space, we will think about who has the right to belong where and what it means—for instance—to belong at Yale. Informed by various theories and poetics of home, at the end of the course, we will revisit the places that make us.
02. The Once and Future Campus. TTh 11.35-12.50
Once again universities are back in the headlines. Florida is remaking its flagship university system along partisan lines; deans encourage disciplines in the humanities to reduce hiring; and the rise of LLMs forces even once-confident departments such as computer science to rethink outcomes. A raft of small colleges closed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, already rich institutions accept enormous donations from the likes of Stephen Schwarzman and Kenneth Griffin, whose names will adorn buildings and graduate schools presumably forever.
Do universities have values? And is that even the right question to ask? Should universities equip students narrowly for the jobs that already exist, or rather give them well-rounded educations to meet an uncertain future? Can universities promote social justice or must they entrench inequality? None of these questions is settled, and each has a long history. What would our ideal university look like?
This course takes a long view of the global university, especially the American college and with a special emphasis on Yale, to bring the values and goals of higher education into focus. We will read for these themes across a wide range of forms including university reports, scholarly articles, economics and sociology, administrative emails, a documentary film, a recent horror movie, and selections out of novels. Emphasis on non-fiction and college writing in addition to archival skills. Occasional class sessions at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Authors to include John Henry Newman, Owen Johnson, William F. Buckley, R. O. Kwon, and Mariama Diallo.
03. The Tortured Artist. TTh 9.00-10.15
“Men have called me mad,” Edgar Allan Poe writes, “but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” An orphan plagued by debt, addiction, death, and the deep depression we so often associate with troubled genius, Poe belongs to what Taylor Swift pointedly calls “The Tortured Poets Department.” History is suspiciously crammed with so-called tortured artists, from Van Gogh cutting his ear off to Beethoven becoming deaf to his own music, and the long list of suicides from Sylvia Plath to Kurt Cobain. But where did the trope of the tortured, starving, or mad artist originate? Does scientific evidence actually suggest a correlation between creative types and suffering? What has made centuries of humans so drawn to these unhappy artists? While engaging with the music, literature, and visual art of Frida Kahlo, Oscar Wilde, Giacomo Puccini, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jonathan Larson, and more, we’ll consider the ways these artists have been curated, flattened, and mythologized through secondary sources such as contemporary reviews, museum exhibits, and biographies. We’ll also read from psychology, philosophy, and criticism to explore the roles of catharsis, mental health, and genius in the artistic process. Students will experience some of these works firsthand in visits to the art gallery, Beinecke, and musical performances, and think critically and creatively about how we might better shed light on the dark picture society continues to paint of the tortured artist.
04. Experiences of Chronic Illness: The Twentieth Century to the Present. TTh 4.00-5.15
What does it mean to be sick in our modern world––a world in which environmental and industrial changes have corresponded to a rise in chronic diseases? This course explores the lived experiences and histories of chronic illness through diverse narratives from the twentieth century to the present. We will engage with memoir, literary theory, social media, film, and foundational texts in the medical humanities to understand the personal, social, and cultural dimensions of chronic illness. Some of our texts document personal experiences with chronic conditions, revealing how these authors understand themselves in relation to their illness. Other sources theorize illness more broadly. We will discuss ethical issues in healthcare that influence all of us in some way, such as misdiagnosis, misinformation, racial and gender discrimination in healthcare, the long-term effects of COVID-19, medical justice, and more. Above all, we will consider the many ways authors and sources define “chronic” and “illness,” questioning and reshaping our conceptions of these terms throughout the semester. Readings will include work by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Elaine Scarry, Vinita Agarwhal, and Megan O’Rourke.
05. Architecture of a Haunting. MW 2.30-3.45
What makes a place haunted? This course studies both real and fictional haunted places to deconstruct the cultural phenomenon of haunting. We start by investigating why our modern, seemingly rational, society still believes in ghosts. Why do we love telling ghost stories? Why are legends of haunted houses, libraries, asylums, and prisons so prominent in U.S. literature, folklore, and film? What kinds of cultural imaginings does this media narrate? Alongside architectural critics, folklorists, and sociologists, we will discuss the institutional, geographic, and architectural histories that shape a place, as well as the folkloric and literary histories that reflect our social experience within.
Since this is a writing course, we’ll also discuss the value of re-telling these ghost stories. Why do so many academic writers adopt narratives of haunting in their academic work? What can these haunted histories tell us about the places we dwell? Studying haunted places and their fictions, we scrutinize those boundaries between the factual and the fictive developed by scientific, legal, and historic discourses. We follow critics like Avery Gordon, Achille Mbembe, and Grace Cho in imagining a method of writing that can account for the perceptible and imperceptible traces of human life. Under the guidance of these scholars, we’ll discuss how to represent the individual, subjective realities of everyday life while deconstructing the institutional structures that house a haunting. We ask: what suppressed voices emerge in these ghostly re-tellings? How are these writers resuscitating non-dominant discourses and for what purpose? How are they attempting to reconstruct, re-build, or represent lost histories? Finally, to what extent can stories of hauntings both critique the structures creating the haunting and produce a new method for inhabiting place? What haunts us and why?
06. Mind Reading. MW 11.35-12.50
I know what you’re thinking. Well, maybe not, but, within reason, I might be able to guess: Because you’re reading a course description, perhaps you’re thinking about your Spring schedule, and because the class has a slightly supernatural title, maybe you’re thinking I’m promising more than I can realistically deliver. And while it’s true that this course won’t actually teach psychic powers, we will explore the habit of ‘reading’ minds—of figuring out what other people are thinking—that is, arguably, a fundamental and essential characteristic of human communication and cognition. Also called the Theory of Mind, this capacity is what lets you finish your loved ones’ sentences, intuit people’s emotions from their expressions, and read between the lines in everyday conversations. In this course, we’ll read recent work from psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics to explore this seemingly psychic capacity: How did it develop? What are its limits? And what are the limits of our understanding of it? In thinking through these curiosities and open questions, we’ll also consider whether mind reading is a universal or culturally specific phenomenon and how descriptions of these ‘theories of mind’ have their own power to shape our views of neurodivergence, disability, and interpersonal connection in our communities. Along the way, we will ask what Mind Reading can teach us about reading texts and writing them. How do you imagine what your audience knows, and how might you change their minds with your argument? We’ll approach the processes and techniques of essay writing with these questions in mind, building towards a practice of writing as thinking—and as thinking into and alongside the minds of others.
07. What is a Social Movement? TTh 2.30-3.45
By any means necessary is a slogan with a history. In the US, it is usually associated with Malcolm X. But Malcolm borrowed the phrase from Frantz Fanon, who made the slogan popular among militants in the struggles for liberation from colonialism. And although the revolutionary mood that slogan gathered owes much to the Cold War and liberation movements in the global South, that mood passed through revolts against masters of every kind in much of the global North. This class explores the history of collective action in the postwar US in order to ask what is a social movement? Are the burning of the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, #NODAPL riots, #MeToo no-platforming, and risings against police violence part of the antiracist, feminist, anticapitalist, and climate justice movements born in the 1960s? Or do they suggest that something new is afoot in the twenty-first century? What about Trump-ism and the Capitol riot? Who struggles for freedom from what, why and how, in short? And why do we divide the manifold dynamics of those struggles into discrete “movements”? Readings will be drawn from the writings of militants as well as scholars, and span movement histories, critical theory, and contemporary inquiries into ongoing social struggles.
08. Colonialism and the Climate Crisis. MW 9.00-10.15
This course will introduce students to several of the most pressing debates and questions surrounding the climate crisis, with special attention given to analyzing the capitalist world-system and the history of Western imperialism and colonialism. We begin with a brief survey of the recent scientific literature on climate change, then turn to 19th and early 20th-century Marxist and anti-colonial theory in order to consider the promise and peril of industrial development from a broader historical and political perspective. The main focus of our discussions, however, will be contemporary analyses of the climate crisis by scientists, social scientists, activists, and political theorists, which take up issues such as the “green transition,” resource extraction, competition, and war-making, the unevenness of climate impacts, borders and migration, the governance of geoengineering, and the specter of civilizational collapse. In addition to our readings in science, philosophy, and political economy, we will read and discuss Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), a science fiction novel about the climate crisis that has had an outsized impact among researchers, activists, and policy makers.
09. Creative Obsessions. TTh 11.35-12.50
What is the nature of creativity? Is there such a thing as “creative genius,” or are most creative endeavors achieved through hard work and practice? Can it be taught? From childhood crushes to white whales, artists, scientists, and writers have transformed ordinary obsessions into expressions of beauty and wonder. But as much as we praise the imagination and the work it produces, it can have a darker side; creative types are sometimes linked to mental instability, substance abuse, and self-delusion. This class will allow you to explore and write about the many varieties of creativity. We’ll read scholarly work from different academic disciplines, such as neuroscience, psychology, and education, as well as professional writers, artists, and musicians. What is the relationship between creativity and obsession? Creativity and addiction? Are we motivated by external validation or an inward drive to manage, or even escape, reality? Readings may include work by such writers as Gloria Anzaldua, Maurice Sendak, Richard Deming, and Albert Einstein, and we’ll watch one film exploring a creative personality (Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.)
10. One Hundred Years of Sexuality. MW 4.00-5.15
What was it like to be gay in America in 1925? What can considering the experiences of queer people in the past teach us about how we think about gender and sexuality today? How are questions of sexuality entangled with other axes of identity like race, gender, and ability? Sexual orientation is a relatively recent addition to the catalog of human tools of self-understanding, yet one about which many people feel deeply. Sexual and gender identities of the past cannot always be easily – or helpfully – mapped in accordance with our contemporary terminologies. But thinking about our bodies and their desires is and has always been a crucial part of our human existence. In this course, we will approach a wide array of scholarly and creative explorations of queerness in America from the past hundred years as a gateway through which to explore broader questions about sexuality and culture. Our texts will include work by historians, social scientists, queer theorists, literary writers, filmmakers, and more. Through discussion, writing, and other activities, we will interrogate our cultural preoccupations with queerness both in the past and in the present and consider what it means to define ourselves through sexuality.
11. Queerness and Class. MW 1.00-2.15
This class develops your skills in rhetoric, research and composition through an investigation of the intersections of queerness and class. The idealization of ‘queer community’ conceals class conflict between LGBTQIA+ peoples, and the complicity of the queer bourgeoisie in gentrification, neoliberalism, and exclusionary class normativity. At the same time, queer activists, writers and artists have developed new strategies to oppose exploitation, commodification and racial capitalism. We begin by close reading speeches by queer and trans activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson to think through these tensions and contradictions, before turning to queer critiques of Marxism and Marxist critiques of Queer theory. In the latter part of the course we will attempt to reconcile these divergent perspectives by investigating the Compton Cafeteria Riot, radical Queer of Color theory, autoethnographies of the gay working classes and speculative histories of Black Lesbian life in early 20th century Harlem. The course will close by looking at representations of queer class antagonisms in poetry, performance art and cinema.
12. Black and Indigenous Ecologies. TTh 1.00-2.15
“Red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth”
—Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1965)
Who gets to define the meaning of ecology, along with the earth we stand on, and how is this definition bound up with the legacies of colonial power, empire, slavery, and other forms of racialized oppression? And what new modes of ecological thought might emerge once we engage with the perspectives of indigenous peoples and communities of color—traditionally excluded from dominant environmentalist discourses—and their alternative ways of thinking and imagining a relation to the earth? Through readings in anthropology, geology, critical race studies, philosophy, literature, and poetry, this course explores the ecologies and counter-ecologies born of anti-imperial opposition, from 1492 to the present. Struggles for liberation, as we will examine, are never separable from struggles for land, food, water, air, and an earth in common. From Standing Rock to Sao Paulo, the Antilles to New Zealand, and Mauna Kea to Lagos, we will engage with anti-colonial and anti-racist attempts to craft an image of the earth no longer made in the ecocidal image of imperialist Western Man (or the anthropos of “Anthropocene”), and to imagine a future to be held and composed in common by all.