Literature & Creative Writing (LITCW-UH)

This course introduces students to the demands and pleasures of university-level investigation of literature. Students develop the tools necessary for advanced criticism, including close-reading skills, knowledge of generic conventions, mastery of critical terminology, and introduction to a variety of modes of analysis, from the formal to the historical. The course emphasizes the writing and revision strategies necessary to produce sophisticated literary analysis.

This course introduces students to fundamental terms and critical methods employed by literary scholars through an examination of two case studies: epic and drama. Topics to be investigated include: the relationship between text and context, close versus distant reading, the nature of authorship; genre; the interplay of local, national, regional, and world modes of categorization; translation; book history; and the relationship between literature and other forms of art. Each unit of the course is constructed around an anchoring text or texts that will be contextualized both historically and generically through a wide range of primary and secondary readings.

This course introduces students to fundamental terms and critical methods employed by literary scholars through an examination of two case studies: lyric poetry and the novel. Topics to be investigated include: the relationship between text and context; close versus distant reading; the nature of authorship, genre, the interplay of local, national, regional, and world modes of categorization; translation, book history, and the relationship between literature and other forms of art. Each unit of the course is constructed around an anchoring text or texts that will be contextualized both historically and generically through a wide range of primary and secondary readings.

This workshop introduces the basic elements of poetry, fiction, and personal narrative with in-class writing, take-home reading and writing assignments, and substantive discussions of craft. The course is structured as a workshop, which means that students receive feedback from their instructor and their fellow writers in a roundtable setting, and that they should be prepared to offer their classmates responses to their work.

Pidgins, creoles, patois and slang: there are so many Englishes! From Jamaica and Ireland, to America and India, from Spanglish and Hinglish to Londonstani slang and Black English, these languages have been wrought via complex colonial histories and shaped national languages and canon. This course is a broad exploration of writing produced in recent decades by Anglophone writers from the Americas, Africa and South Asia and the theoretical questions raised by such writing. The course will consider fiction and film that ranges from traditionally realist to formally experimentalist, short stories variously characterized as anti-colonial and Afro-pessimist, fiction by new writers and also by Nobel laureates, poetry about immigrant women and also the land-owning elite, and fiction that has been well-canonized as well as important writing that has been more or less forgotten. The course will consider questions of empire, postcoloniality, authenticity, voice and the role of vernacular languages in the writing we characterize as "Anglophone". Writers to be discussed include Langston Hughes, Salman Rushdie, Shani Mootoo, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, June Jordan, Irvine Welsh, and Junot Diaz.

For the first time in history, more people live in cities than in villages. And they're writing about it. There's a global renaissance of books about cities, from Madrid to Mumbai and Chicago. In this course, we will look at writers and filmmakers such as Jane Jacobs, Carmen Martin Gaite, García Lorca, Vargas Llosa, Javier Marías, and Pedro Almodóvar to see how best to capture the urban experience. Using a variety of genres, we will examine the impact on global cities of war, gender and social inequality, populism, migration and climate change. We will consider issues of local politics and urban planning as they are reflected in official and unofficial narratives of city life. This course will draw upon the resources of Madrid and include field trips and guided walks highlighting cultural and political developments, including guided visits to the Prado, Reina Sophia, Casa Cervantes, and an outing to a sports event.

What does it mean to be a "woman writer"? This course will explore and examine that phrase, which has for centuries been used as cause for marginalization and silencing. Students will explore what women's writing from around the world might reveal about the relationships between gender, authority, creativity, power, mobility, and tradition. Do we assume, for instance, the existence of an essential "female" way of writing, shared by women across time and geography? Drawing on both literary and critical materials, students will also consider the complexities and challenges of reading across literary tradition(s) and the ways in which writing from multiple historical and cultural situations represents intersections of gender, race, class, nation, and sexuality. Writers to be considered in this course may include Virginia Woolf, Sor Juana, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lady Murasaki, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldua, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, among others.

This course aims to develop students' skills in feature writing for print and online magazines and trade journals. Emphasis will be placed on all stages of development, from a feature's conception and research to its drafting, revision, and publication. Particular attention will be paid to research and reporting techniques as well as to the demands of writing compelling pieces of varied lengths, from short-form to longer features. The course objective is to prepare students to pitch and publish material written for this course, whether in an NYUAD student publication or other venue.

Travel is a form of knowledge. "The traveler," wrote the British travel writer Robert Byron, "can know the world, in fact, only when he sees, hears, and smells it." This course offers a unique opportunity to further expand and deepen the knowledge you'll gain from the respective learning institutions you're traveling to this semester, by making students venture beyond the confines of campus, and engage with the everyday people and proceedings of the places in which those institutions are situated. From their observations, reporting, interviews and research about what they've encountered, students will compose a feature-length narrative in the form of a classic "Letter From…." piece in The New Yorker magazine.

Travel is a form of knowledge. "The traveler," wrote the British travel writer Robert Byron, "can know the world, in fact, only when he sees, hears, and smells it." This course offers a unique opportunity to further expand and deepen the knowledge you'll gain from the respective learning institutions you're traveling to this semester, by making students venture beyond the confines of campus, and engage with the everyday people and proceedings of the places in which those institutions are situated. From their observations, reporting, interviews and research about what they've encountered, students will compose a feature-length narrative in the form of a classic "Letter From…." piece in The New Yorker magazine.

People of movement, categorized as migrants, have always fascinated scholars, artists, and writers. Contemporary mainstream discourse about the Gulf has arguably placed a great deal of emphasis on profession, what people do, their social class, and why they came, especially those on the margins. How have these individuals been represented in the Gulf, by whom, what are their stories and where can we find them? The objective of the class is to try and answer these questions, as well as to produce original material in writing workshops, in order to try and address some of these issues, especially representation.

This course explores the interrelated flows of blood, oil, and capital in global fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, focusing especially on the Anglo-American world and Russia - especially with respect to its ongoing war with Ukraine. By investigating a variety of genres and media - including dystopian fiction and alternative history as well as novel, short story, and film - students will gain insight into the cultural, political, energetic and visceral dimensions of the world’s love affair with fossil fuels. Alongside our fictional readings and viewings, we will explore theoretical concepts like "petropoetics" (Kalinin) and "petrofiction" (Ghosh); "biopolitics" (Foucault) and "necropolitics" (Mbembe); and the notion of the historical past as a kind of “natural” resource. Authors and directors include Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Colson Whitehead, P.T. Anderson, Andrei Platonov, Aleksei Balabanov, Sergei Loznitsa, and Victor Pelevin. All readings, viewings, and discussion in English.

Whatever revelations may appear in my 2018 memoir, they were written, I confess, for literary effect. Why I feel self-conscious about this admission, I'm not sure. As if confession should be salutary for it to be ethical. But whom should it serve? First person narratives are the lifeblood of twelve step programs. Roman law required confession, often forced, to legitimize the legal process. Foucault claims the West relies on confession for the production of truth. Perhaps I doubt I have the authority to claim a reader's sympathy unless I am performing self-abasement. And yet, I've managed to make this course description all about me. In an age of post-colonial guilt and racial melancholy (or so theorized), might confession provide a way to address structural inequities that modernity seems founded upon? What of allyship and the burden readers bear in "hearing" a confession? Does confession hold meaning outside the shadow of power and its implied expression, torture? When and how might confession prefigure reparations? In this course, we will read across cultures and engage with creative writing assignments to interrogate (perhaps a poor choice of words) the craft of confession.

New York City and Abu Dhabi is a laboratory for studying NYC and AD, works written about them, as well as creating new works inspired by them. New works - poems, short stories, short plays, visual essays, or films - that will serve as a map for possible journeys as they reinvent and talk back to debates on immigration and space, culture and literature. A cross-disciplinary and cross-border conversation that examines how urban life and the cityscape create imaginative spaces, and the way words create cities. NYC & AD as global spaces will be explored in the works of writers with backgrounds from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean. How does the city shape the form of writing and language? How has literature challenged certain theories on space, and narratives constructed around urban identities? Students get the unique opportunity to meet numerous residents, from theater makers, designers, architects, artists, filmmakers, feminists, actors, comedians, chefs and bodega owners as well as be part of a podcast series and/or publish in one of the most important international literary magazines, Words Without Borders.

This course develops students' understanding of theoretical approaches that have been central to literary and cultural studies. The course considers such questions as: What is literature? What is a text? What kind of work does a literary scholar or cultural critic do? What does it mean to read literature in translation? How does language shape meaning? How do we construct meaning from a text - and why does that meaning matter? And, crucially: what is at stake in how we answer these questions? Topics to be covered include classical theories of literature and poetics (Plato, Aristotle, Bharata, Adūnīs), mimesis and representation, discourse analysis and new historicism, Marxism and neo-Marxism, reception-aesthetics and reader response, world literature theory, gender and sexuality theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, hybridity theory, posthumanism, climate theory, and cosmopolitanism. For their final papers, students will explore the work of a theorist not assigned on the syllabus.

This course explores a selection of canonical and non-canonical works of literature from pre-Islamic Arabia to the so-called 19th-century Arab Renaissance. Through this course students will examine poetic and prosaic texts, while revising their understanding of literary genres and categories, especially in relation to the tradition of Arabic literature. Students will also learn about the major approaches to the study of this literary tradition, while immersing themselves in its rich language, imagery and historical moment. Readings include selections from: pre-Islamic heroic poetry; Umayyad love poetry; Abbasid courtly poetry and its influence on the Andalus; libertine poetry in all its registers from the early Abbasid to the Mamluk period. Prose literature will include the Qur'an; hadith; apocrypha of the prophets; picaresque maqāmāt; The Arabian Nights; and proto-novels from the 19th century.

This class will study the interactions among 20th and 21st century literature, art and architecture in New York City. How has New York been imagined, celebrated, critiqued, analyzed by the poets, architects, artists who have lived and worked here since 1900? What functions has the city taken on for those many cultural producers who have arrived here from across the globe, and across the US? We will look at case studies of writers, artists and architects coming from China, Mexico, Germany, Italy, England, Holland, Puerto Rico, Missouri, Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. James, Hughes, O'Hara, Baraka, Mayer, Notley, Torres, Alurista, Matta-Clark, Hammons, Smithson, Koolhaas, Mies van der Rohe, Piano, Pope L, Acconci, Rosler, Zoe Leonard, Renée Green, and Kara Walker will be read in relation to larger literary and political movements including Nuyorican Poetics, the New York School, Language writing, Feminism, the Black Arts Movement, Queer liberation, the Tiananmen Square Protests, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, The Pictures Group.

In postcolonial texts, representation and revolution intersect, as authors, filmmakers, and theorists re-invent literary and cinematic forms and seek to reconceive colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. Through this course, students will compare British, Caribbean, Latin American, South Asian, and African texts, including novels by Conrad, Rushdie, and Salih; films by Pontecorvo and Sembene; and selections from the critical writings of Anderson, Fanon, Said, and Spivak. Students will examine contradictions between Enlightenment concepts of reason, universal freedom, and rights, which established a common humanity of mankind while simultaneously justifying European sovereignty over non-Western peoples. The course examines how tradition and modernity; savagery and civilization; religiosity and secularism; self and other; subjectivity and collectivity; and violence and non-violence played a role in empire and decolonization while challenging received understandings of universalism. Finally, students examine how postcolonial studies is being re-shaped and in turn re-shaping understandings of the "Arab Spring" and the Anthropocene.

Can art start a revolution? What distinguishes propaganda from art when art gets wrapped up in politics? This course explores these questions in specific examples of writers and artists who not only represented revolution but also participated in performing revolution and effecting political change. We will consider how revolutions spill across the boundaries of several nations - as in 1789-91, 1811-21, 1848, 1917, 1968, etc. - and become part of world history thus compelling us to revise how we read literature comparatively across times, places and languages. This movement shows us how different authors engaged with revolution, creating their own manifestos and visions of utopia. Revolutions always reveal the contradictions built into capitalist modernity, and by reading their movements across borders, we begin to understand not only the dimensions of political change but also the possibilities of social change. We will read focus on four major case studies that demonstrate literature's direct involvement in political change: 19th-century Russian literature; 19th-20th century African American Literature; 20th century Latin American literature; and 20th-century Arabic literature.

Across human history, translation has mediated among traditions, languages, cultures, communities, and their histories. Yet, in the modern colonial projects, translation became a tool not to celebrate difference, but to turn difference into hierarchy. This course examines this relationship between language and colonization. It will cover how colonial projects transformed translation in service of colonization, and how it continues to do so in complex cultural encounters that are marked by differences in power. The course will draw on readings across multiple disciplines and histories to present an overview of the complex web of issues that connect the violence of modern colonization with meanings, languages, practices, and concepts. The course will also explore how the colonized subjects understood this process of linguistic colonization, and how they responded to it across different geographies. Class discussions will revolve around drawing connections between our readings and our understanding of translation both as a practice for colonization as well as in response to colonization.

Do the Turkish German filmmaker Fatih Akin, the Lebanese Brazilian novelist Milton Hatoum, the Japanese Peruvian poet José Watanabe, the Singaporean Australian writer Kim Cheng Boey, and the Tunisian Swedish novelist Jonas Hassen Khemiri have anything in common? In an increasingly multicultural, multilingual, transnational yet increasingly divided world, what insights do the works of these architects of the imagination offer about tell us about their culture, history and traditions. How do they add to the ongoing dialogue between East and West - on cultural translation, migration, the refugee crisis, conflict and love? How do they help us pose fundamental questions? This course is a laboratory for the exploration of major cinematic and literary oeuvres by the Asian and Arab diaspora living in cosmopolitan cities worldwide. As a starting point, the course offers historical grounding for the various Asian and Arab migration histories globally; and continually explores what is Asianness / Arabness including recurring terms and themes such namely identity, home, memory and so forth.

"The personal is political": Popularized by feminist activists in the 1970s, this phrase suggested that mundane experience - domestic work, reproduction, childcare, as well as gendered education and socialization processes - were deeply implicated in larger systems of political power. Narrating those experiences, calling them into question, was a political act that stood to reorder society. In the decades since, the notion has become commonplace. But how do writers - of any gender or other identity category - most effectively discuss and describe the political implications of their subjective experiences? What forms and platforms are most appropriate, and for which audiences or ends? In this workshop, students read a range of classic and recent works of personal writing (Woolf, Orwell, Baldwin, Adichie, Coates, and others) and develop their own voices as they grapple with the politics of individual experience. Group discussions and peer workshops will be supplemented by individual conferences with the professor.

Cliché is perhaps the only thing a poem cannot abide. Clichés are not just trite or overused phrases. They are the images, ideas, and narratives that make up the shared body of knowledge we often call "common sense," that is, the cultural assumptions that readers take for granted and consequently skim over in search of language and ideas that do not fit easily into routinized neural pathways. What constitutes cliche is subjective; each poet discovers this threshold for her or himself. In the writing process, we poets often reach for clichés and common - all too common - sense thinking in times of crisis or discomfort instead of boldly depicting the thing that likely inspired the poem in the first place. Language that is flat and unimaginative can signal, paradoxically, the very passages in a poem that are the most emotionally fraught. Rather than simply discarding them, we might consider ways to honor the original sentiments buried within that stale language.

The word "short" in the realm of creative writing should never be equated with expediency or ease. Indeed, everyone from poets to writers of fiction, personal essays, or long-form feature pieces will tell you that the tighter the space within which to express oneself, the more daunting becomes the challenge of doing so effectively. That is the very challenge which this course is designed to address. How to incorporate into the short feature's abbreviated space all the same elements of a long feature: voice, point-of-view, character, drama, dialogue, scenes. In his famous sonnet Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room, William Wordsworth underscores the various ways in which the strictures of the sonnet - a mere14 lines ruled by a set meter and rhyme scheme - compel a writer to more ardently and imaginatively fly the very confines of the form, and thus arrive at places they might not have otherwise. This same dynamic informs the many published short features we'll be reading and discussing in this class, and will, of course, come into play in the writing of the three roughly 1,000-word short features that students will be asked to compose.

Every serious writer at some point asks: What is form? What is style? And how do I form my own style? In this course we will write our way towards answering each of those questions. Part laboratory, workshop, playground, and bootcamp, we'll examine exemplars from modern literature, but more importantly we'll write a lot: short pieces of narrative prose (micro stories, under 200 words), allowing for more focused experimentation, discussion, and revision towards acquisition of vital skills such as crafting the perfect sentence, writing humor, choosing the right perspective, knowing what to edit and when to cut, and understanding literary mechanisms in order to sharpen your techniques in wielding them. Because writers should be limited only by attempting the impossible, never by the bluntness of our tools. This course will prepare you for advanced creative writing electives, and the capstone, by helping you speak more clearly on the page. For style, according to the novelist Ali Smith, "is what happens when voice and form meet and fuse into something more than both." Through the alchemy of creative writing we'll find out what that something is.

This course is an introduction to questions that are central to both literary scholarship and creative writing. The course will foster an understanding not only of theoretical and methodological concepts, but also an understanding of practice and poetics. Through a range of readings and a variety of assignments, both analytical and practical, students will tackle issues of language, translation, interpretation, structure, and technique from methodological and practical perspectives. This course will prepare students for their capstone project and it is strongly suggested, although not required, that students take the course in their junior year.

Is there such a thing as global cultural heritage? This course presents a case study that resituates James Joyce's monumental novel Ulysses a book that describes a single day in a single city and is steeped in naturalistic historical detail as a global text that is "worldly" in its outlook and its self-conscious positioning within Western literary history. The course contextualizes the novel within Joyce's oeuvre through readings of Dubliners, Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and selections from Finnegans Wake and within the histories of epic and Anglophone modernism. The course brings a number of scholarly methodologies to bear on Joyce's work including close reading, deconstruction, distant reading, gender studies, literary history, new historicism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and reader response.

Is there such a thing as global cultural heritage? This advanced research seminar uses the Star Wars media phenomenon as a case study in the creation and circulation of a contemporary saga. The course examines the saga's multicultural influences, from Greco-Roman tragedy to Zen Buddhist philosophy, taking into account the ways that Star Wars has been transformed by fans across the world. Proposing that the Star Wars phenomenon can serve as a public platform for philosophy, the course examines Star Wars as a "cosmos-politan" text engaged with ideas of difference, and poses questions about the interplay between globalization/cultural imperialism and global texts in the age of Disneyfication.

For the poet Aimé Cesaire, from the tiny island of Martinique, there was the master narrative of the middle passage, that brought African slaves to the Americas; there was the movement of labor and capital that circled the Caribbean in slavery's aftermath; and there was the circulation of ideas that produced the radical collages of surrealism. This course examines a range of narratives of flight - that of the refugee, the immigrant, the exile, the migrant worker - in fiction, poetry, film, theater, painting and music. It also examines critical theories of migration on refugeeism, displacement, and immigration, in order to ask: How does "flight" produce new aesthetic forms? How have scholars theorized the range of concepts and problems engendered by such movement? Along the way, we will read about Iraqi refugees, Vietnamese "boat people", Indian painters, the Jewish dispossessed of World War II. Towards the end of the term, we use this theoretical vocabulary to consider the ocean still to cross (une mer encore à traverser) in relation to two contemporary crises: flight across the Mediterranean and the refugeed Rohingya of Myanmar.

How do works of literature capture, hold, and train our attention? We live in a time when attention and attention disorders have captured both the scientific and the popular imagination. Turning their "attention to attention," like never before, scientists are identifying the rich variety of attentional modes our brain is capable of, as well as a contemporary addiction to, "narrow-focus attention." This course plumbs the rich offerings of literature describing a wide spectrum of attentional modes, as well as training, enriching and potentially even healing its reader's attention. Indeed, long before modern science, modernist literature excelled at both describing human attention and complexly engaging it through its novel experiments. Modernism has long been seen as a Western European interwar phenomenon, with current scholarship vigorously expanding our understanding of these limits. This course will include close examinations of some best-known Western European classics, but will also explore some of the long-overlooked origins, expressions, and subsequent migrations of modernism elsewhere, from Europe's Eastern margins, to the Harlem Renaissance and modern Chinese literature.

This course explores the relationship between sound and text. How do writers translate their acoustic environments through their writing? How does noise infiltrate and affect the content and form of their work? Students will consider the creative value of noise in poetry and fiction across time and space through depictions of bustling cityscapes, the din of warfare, clattering factories, and grinding machinery. What types of sonic cues are gendered, racialized, or class-coded? Through close readings, students will place perceptions of noise in their cultural and historical contexts. Theoretical and critical readings will complement literary texts, allowing students to blend literary analysis with the interdisciplinary field of sound studies as they practice both close reading and close listening. In addition to reading and discussing how authors translate sound into text, students will explore their acoustic surroundings through "soundwalks" and write about them in their own "sonic translation" projects to better understand the creative potential of noise in literature.

This course centers on the generative intersection of art and non-fiction: in other words, documentary forms. Documentaries are compelling because they are driven by a desire to investigate, educate, reveal. They often do this by claiming objectivity and reality rather than claiming subjectivity and fiction. During the semester students will therefore explore the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and point of view in three mediums: poetry, film/video, and visual art, with an emphasis on poetry and text that pushes the boundaries of conventional prose and journalism.

An advanced fiction workshop that offers students the opportunity to hone their writing through peer critique and in-depth craft discussions. Extensive outside reading deepens students' understanding of fiction and broadens their knowledge of the evolution of literary forms and techniques. The thematic focus of these courses will vary depending on the instructor. There may be multiple sections of this course running in the same semester, each of which may have a different topic.

This course focuses on writing poetry by experimenting with a variety of poetic forms and writing prompts, including 20th-century and contemporary poetry and statements and essays written by poets. Students will write poetry as well as learn terms for critical analysis. Some of the threads of inquiry and inspiration that will run through the workshop include: What is poetry? What does it do? What is the state of poetry now? What does it mean to write and read poems in English if it is not your home or only language? In addition to workshopping peers' poetry, participants will learn about the chapbook tradition, make their own small books of between 15 and 25 pages, and organize readings to experiment with various performance-based approaches to poetry.

The capstone experience provides seniors with the opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor and to conduct extensive research on a topic of their choice or engage in an extended creative project. The program consists of a two-part capstone seminar and a year-long individualized thesis tutorial. (Students receive credit for the seminar in the fall and for the project in the spring.) During the fall semester, students define their projects, develop a bibliography, read broadly in their chosen topic, begin their research, and draft a substantial portion of the project.

In the spring semester, students continue to work one-on-one with their capstone advisor(s) and to attend the capstone seminar. During the first seven weeks of the term, students develop a full draft of their project, which may include revision and re-articulation of key theoretical and/or aesthetic choices. Students work with their capstone advisor(s) to produce successive drafts of the project. The capstone experience culminates in the public presentation of the capstone project and the defense of the project before a panel of faculty reviewers.