Upcoming Courses

The student will gain a working knowledge of these concepts and terms: memoir, personal essay, portrait, travel essay, literary journalism, narrative voice, dialogue, metaphor, image, scene, narrative summary, reflection, and research.  The student will read selected texts and discuss craft elements in works of literary nonfiction.  The student will develop writing skills by doing exercises and writing assignments in several modes of nonfiction writing (i.e., portrait, travel essay, memoir).

The student will gain a working knowledge of these concepts and terms: memoir, personal essay, portrait, travel essay, literary journalism, narrative voice, dialogue, metaphor, image, scene, narrative summary, reflection, and research.  The student will read selected texts and discuss craft elements in works of literary nonfiction.  The student will develop writing skills by doing exercises and writing assignments in several modes of nonfiction writing (i.e., portrait, travel essay, memoir).

The student will gain a working knowledge of these concepts and terms: memoir, personal essay, portrait, travel essay, literary journalism, narrative voice, dialogue, metaphor, image, scene, narrative summary, reflection, and research.  The student will read selected texts and discuss craft elements in works of literary nonfiction.  The student will develop writing skills by doing exercises and writing assignments in several modes of nonfiction writing (i.e., portrait, travel essay, memoir).

With careful attention to language, form, and subject, poetry offers ways to be empowered and engaged with our experiences of place, time, and relations to others. The writer Meena Alexander has said, “[P]oetry’s task is to reconcile us to the world—not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense, to return us in love, the province of the imagination, to the scope of our mortal lives.” Poetry creates new worlds with language, the material of communication, information, expression, connection, meaning, seeing, hearing, and sensing. This is a course that will rely on a collaborative work environment. Throughout the course we will read a variety of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as essays about the poem to support our growing knowledge of the forms and concepts relating to the craft of writing poetry. You will be expected to write original poetry, participate in critique (workshop), and read assigned texts.

The beginning course in the undergraduate poetry-writing sequence. Method of instruction: class discussion of student poems, with some readings of modern and contemporary poetry. Workshop sections are limited to 20 students. Priority enrollment given to Creative Writing majors and minors.

The beginning course in the undergraduate poetry-writing sequence. Method of instruction: class discussion of student poems, with some readings of modern and contemporary poetry. Workshop sections are limited to 20 students. Priority enrollment given to Creative Writing majors and minors.

The 200-level course introduces the student to craft terms and concepts through lecture, exercises, and reading selections. The workshop method introduces the sharing and critique of original student work in breakout discussion groups. Students gain a working knowledge of basic craft terms and concepts such as character, plot, setting, narrative time, dialogue, point-of-view, voice, conflict resolution, and metaphorical language. The group will analyze readings from published authors are analyzed from a writer’s perspective. Students will identify and hone the writing skills necessary for success in fiction writing. Students complete exercises based on these elements and write at least one complete short story.

This course will introduce you to the craft and practice of fiction writing, with a focus on the short story. In this class, we’re going to attempt to do four things: (1) learn the elements of technique in the fiction genre, where we will emphasize the close study of major craft elements like character, plot/narrative arc, setting, point-of-view, voice/style, etc; (2) learn to read as writers, where we will engage with published works in classic and contemporary literature, with a view to identifying craft elements and strategies; (3) learn the language and culture of critique through workshops of original work (each student will submit at least one original story for workshop); and (4) demystify the writing life, where we will discuss creative writing practices and processes and discover artists with whose work we can develop personal connections.

The 200-level course introduces the student to craft terms and concepts through lecture, exercises, and reading selections. The workshop method introduces the sharing and critique of original student work in breakout discussion groups. Students gain a working knowledge of basic craft terms and concepts such as character, plot, setting, narrative time, dialogue, point-of-view, voice, conflict resolution, and metaphorical language. The group will analyze readings from published authors are analyzed from a writer’s perspective. Students will identify and hone the writing skills necessary for success in fiction writing. Students complete exercises based on these elements and write at least one complete short story.

The 200-level course introduces the student to craft terms and concepts through lecture, exercises, and reading selections. The workshop method introduces the sharing and critique of original student work in breakout discussion groups. Students gain a working knowledge of basic craft terms and concepts such as character, plot, setting, narrative time, dialogue, point-of-view, voice, conflict resolution, and metaphorical language. The group will analyze readings from published authors are analyzed from a writer’s perspective. Students will identify and hone the writing skills necessary for success in fiction writing. Students complete exercises based on these elements and write at least one complete short story.

The 200-level course introduces the student to craft terms and concepts through lecture, exercises, and reading selections. The workshop method introduces the sharing and critique of original student work in breakout discussion groups. Students gain a working knowledge of basic craft terms and concepts such as character, plot, setting, narrative time, dialogue, point-of-view, voice, conflict resolution, and metaphorical language. The group will analyze readings from published authors are analyzed from a writer’s perspective. Students will identify and hone the writing skills necessary for success in fiction writing. Students complete exercises based on these elements and write at least one complete short story.

This reading-based course will introduce students of creative writing to the most important terms and concepts utilized across the three genres taught at the University of Arizona: poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction. While we will spend the majority of our time reading, analyzing (from the perspective of craft) and discussing published work across a variety of literary styles, students will also have a chance to experiment in their own writing with some of the tools and approaches highlighted throughout our readings and across the three genres.

“Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.”

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Our challenge as writers can perhaps be no more succinctly expressed than with these words. This introductory fiction workshop will ask you to do “the most difficult thing in the world” with the aim of expanding your thinking, your writing, and your thinking about writing. Using interdisciplinary, embodied and interactive exercises, you will be given the opportunity to explore a range of different approaches to working with theme, style, plot, character, voice, idea, and emotion. You will be asked to leave behind preconceived projects and expectations, to take risks, generate new writing, to read and respond to a diverse and rigorous reading list, and to engage generously with your peers.

All readings for this course will be made available by the instructor on D2L.

Practice in writing short fiction.

This course is an intermediate poetry workshop, but it also acts as an introduction to poetic forms and “formations.” This class will be part workshop, part poetic analysis of exemplary traditional and inspired form poems. There has been over the last three decades much debate about the place of traditional poetic forms in American poetry today, but we can all agree that some of our finest poets wrote—and are writing—sometimes in traditional form, and that practicing forms is good foundational training in technical discipline, compression, and revision. In this course, we will be concerned with the study, analysis, and writing of good poetry in both traditional and invented forms. We will also consider a poet’s role in society as well as that of art.

We will begin by discussing vibrant examples, including some contemporary poetry that is formally influenced, but not strictly speaking traditionally formal. Each student will be asked to produce and to workshop formal, free verse, and invented poetry herself/himself. Writing in forms can help make one aware of the value of each word—and syllable—as well as each sound and stress.  The class will be a forum in which matters of poetic form—large and small—are explored and tried out. Our goal will be that even those with great formal expertise will have the opportunity to challenge themselves and expand their range of skills.

Black Lives Matter is one of the civil rights movements that we will examine to consider how disenfranchised groups have mobilized to demand their rights at pivotal moments in our history.  We will begin with nineteenth-century abolitionist and suffragist movements, then turn to women’s and civil rights movements in the 1960s, and conclude with GLBTQ and immigrant rights movements. We will examine how activists’ rhetorical strategies have evolved along with changes in media in ways that are shaping the distinctive historical experiences of Gen Z. These examinations will help us assess how the COVID pandemic has exacerbated systemic racial and economic inequities. 

This workshop course culminates with creating a short documentary film on a social justice issue using the Adobe multimedia applications that are freely available to all UA students.  The other major assignments are a testimonial essay and an intergenerational essay in which students will interview people from other generations on their perspectives on a social justice issue.

ENGL 373B covers Anglophone literature from the Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 to the end of the Victorian Age, in two hemispheres and on two islands. As such, it addresses a wide variety of texts associated with exploration, colonialism, slavery, power, sex, gender, race, and human relationships to Nature and to concepts of deity and the self. We’ll read works in a variety of forms—satire, drama, poetry, prose fiction, political address, dictionary entries—and literary movements and periods, including Restoration, Early American, Augustan, Federalist and Early Republic, Gothic, Romanticism, Victorian, Realism, and Decadence. Weekly writing, two essays, and a final exam.

This course teaches the skill of literary analysis, with an emphasis on close reading, through the rigorous study of poetry, short fiction, and novels. The themes for the texts are the pastoral and the rural, subjects that roughly concern the construction of “nature” as beauty on one hand, and explore the relation of individual identity to society on the other. Some of the writers we will read are: Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Christopher Marlowe, C. Day Lewis, and Emily Dickinson. Students will learn both basic and advanced terms for the study of literature, will be introduced to some key concepts in literary theory, and will be prepared, through a demanding course of analytical writing and revision, for the raised expectations of precision, originality, organization, and logic that they will encounter in the upper-division courses.

As a gateway course for the English major, this class will focus upon the basic elements of literary analysis. To that end, we will take texts apart in order to see how they create specific effects and meanings. We will in particular attend to properties of sound, syntax, rhetoric, form, and narrative in a variety of works in a variety of genres in order to create coherent readings of literary works. This course will, in particular, move in a cumulative mode, from the smallest units of the English language—phonemes and syllables—to the more expansive concerns of performance and narrative. We will also examine how a well-developed practice of close reading informs basic theories of literary criticism, and we will use these theories by the end of the semester. Our readings will range from Old English lyrics to contemporary poetry, and from Shakespearean drama to modern short stories. This is a writing intensive course, meant to prepare you for upper division work in the department.

Introduction to the various modes, techniques, and terminology of practical criticism.

This is a course in “close reading.” The reading assignments will be short, to allow us to pay close attention to individual texts and individual passages. We’ll read many poems some short stories, and perhaps one novel, with an eye toward mastering the close reading techniques crucial to the sort of literary analysis we practice in upper-division literature courses (and beyond). For this live online course, regular attendance at Zoom classes and regular participation in online discussion boards are required. Students will write roughly 7-8 short papers (1-2 pp. each), and 2 slightly longer papers (3-5 pp. each). There are no exams.

Questions? Please email the instructor at nathanso@arizona.edu

This course will focus on a variety of 19^th- and 20^th-century short stories drawn from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, and Sherman Alexie. Some of the main threads tying together these stories are elements of the grotesque, the labyrinthine, paradox, and the uncanny, often as challenges to hegemonic culture. Thus, the texts have thematic and structural echoes. We will, unfortunately, be reading some of these works in translation. I have tried to locate the best translations available. If you read German or Spanish fluently, the class will be grateful for any comments on the accuracy of the translations. We will discuss the stories in the context of various literary theories and methodologies, including biographical, historical, and philosophical contexts, Marxism, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and cultural studies. Stories will be read as closely as time permits. The syllabus may, for this reason, be flexible. Students will write comments and observations on readings in preparation for class and will have occasional in-class writing periods. The course also requires a midterm essay and a final essay, and complete an annotated bibliography in preparation for the final essay. Instructions for these assignments will be posted on D2L. Students will share their work in class as part of the participation grade. 

This course will focus on a variety of 19^th- and 20^th-century short stories drawn from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, and Sherman Alexie. Some of the main threads tying together these stories are elements of the grotesque, the labyrinthine, paradox, and the uncanny, often as challenges to hegemonic culture. Thus, the texts have thematic and structural echoes. We will, unfortunately, be reading some of these works in translation. I have tried to locate the best translations available. If you read German or Spanish fluently, the class will be grateful for any comments on the accuracy of the translations. We will discuss the stories in the context of various literary theories and methodologies, including biographical, historical, and philosophical contexts, Marxism, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and cultural studies. Stories will be read as closely as time permits. The syllabus may, for this reason, be flexible. Students will write comments and observations on readings in preparation for class and will have occasional in-class writing periods. The course also requires a midterm essay and a final essay, and complete an annotated bibliography in preparation for the final essay. Instructions for these assignments will be posted on D2L. Students will share their work in class as part of the participation grade

This is a Writing Emphasis Course for the Creative Writing Major. Discussion of student stories in a workshop setting.

This is the advanced workshop in nonfiction, which, we should start by admitting, isn’t a genre. Nonfiction is just a descriptor, and not a very good one, since intelligent people don’t entirely agree about what it describes and what rules of engagement practitioners and readers expect. Instead we often use the term creative nonfiction (a little better) or (even better) literary nonfiction, which at least properly owns its snobbery. More specifically, what we’re interested in is nonfiction writing that aspires to art and complexity and is serious about its craft. More often than not we’ll be talking about the essay, which is both a sort of writing as well as a way of thinking and of being, even. Essaying is a way of engaging with the world. Essay, as you probably know, comes from the French, meaning to try, to attempt. That is, what we’re doing is inherently experimental. Well, why should that surprise us? The history of literature is the history of experimental literature. So we’ll be experimenting.

This workshop will be partly generative, but much of our time will focus on your own works in progress. We’ll discuss your work—its best qualities, its shapes and possible shapes, its subjects, its moves, its material, its methodology, and directions for improvement and expansion—as a group. We do this not just to improve the work on the table in front of us, but as a way of talking about what we’re working on ourselves. So when we’re workshopping an essay on sea turtles or lobotomies or doll parts or goth songs or Final Fantasy XII by student Y, we are always talking about your work. It is often easier to clearly see and talk about others’ work than your own.

Research is super important to the nonfiction writer. A case could be made that research is the central skill of what we do. Though we can write about ourselves, we’re not always that interesting (we become a lot more interesting by having something besides ourselves to explore). And we only find out what we think by researching and writing about the world and its details.

This is the advanced course in the undergraduate poetry-writing sequence. Our class time will mostly be divided between close reading seminars and studio time in which we draft out of a range of prompts and exercises, transitioning to whole-group critiques when appropriate. We will read contemporary and canonical poets across cultures and write brief craft analyses of their work. While this course is about writing better poems, it is ultimately about learning new ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being; it’s about expanding your tool kit for self-invention and for world-invention. Students may present longer works for discussion and may work toward culminating projects such as chapbook manuscripts and longer poem sequences. Class size is limited to 15 students. Creative Writing majors and minors will be given priority.

During the first half of his career, Shakespeare wrote most of his romantic comedies, most of his history plays, and several of his best tragedies, including Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. We shall read a selection of these plays, paying close attention to language, character, and dramatic action. We shall also endeavor to keep in mind that Shakespeare was himself an actor and that his plays came to life on a stage. We will demystify the plays and make them accessible to modern readers. Two exams during the course, a final, and a term paper.

A general overview of the profession covering prominent theories, methodologies, and procedures influencing the field.

In this upper-division seminar, we will delve into Victorian literature and culture, focusing on the latter half of the nineteenth century. We will learn about the British Empire and opposition to it in this period. We will also study scientific, artistic, and sexual movements of these decades, as well as economic and political ideas. We will consider the figure of the "New Woman” in life and art, as notions of gender equality changed in Britain and beyond. We will also reflect on current debates in Victorian studies: what counts as Victorian literature? Who decides and on what basis? In terms of reading, expect to sample gothic short stories and marriage plots gone awry; imperialist and anti-imperialist fiction and history; burlesques, poems, essays, and more. While Victorians were prolific – think of the many novels published serially in periodicals – our reading will be manageable!

Specific titles may include: George Eliot, “Janet's Repentance” (realist short story); Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (vampire novella); Vernon Lee, Hauntings (ghost stories); William Howard Russell, excerpts from My Diary in India, in the Year 1858-9 (journalistic memoir); Charles Dickens, letters (on political controversies and social issues); Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (play, adapted from her novel of the same name); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Bildungsroman); Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole (autobiography); Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (children’s literature, fairy tales); Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (young adult historical fiction / adventure); Charles Darwin, excerpts from On the Origin of Species (science writing); Friedrich Engels, excerpts from The Condition of the Working Class in England (writing on labor and industrialization); poetry ranging from “dramatic monologues” to political ballads housed in Scottish and English archives.