Literature & Creative Writing   

These transcendent memoirs of "Otherness," grounded in music and poetry, in constant motion between history and biography, defiance and empathy, pain and joy, will take participants across three continents and three writers: Joy Harjo, Ahed Tamimi, and Shailja Patel. These are sagas about the survival of spirituality and creativity in the face of racism, violence, humiliation, and dispossession. They convey with clarity the strength, perseverance, love, laughter, and irony that are necessary to keep living and fighting against enormous odds. Works of unwavering moral conscience, battle cries for justice, these passionate, and brilliant memoirs shine a floodlight on people and places the world too often discounts. They will rattle our souls.

This course examines Latin American societies through a cultural analysis of gender roles, sexual identities, age, and family relationships. In addition, from a conventional and academic perspective, members will explore the novellas in their social and historical contexts. The specific themes explored will be highlighted by two short novels.

Where and what is “nature,” and what happens when it is represented in literature? This course examines the ways in which writers in English have engaged with the natural environment. We will read a range of authors from the advent of industrialization in the late eighteenth century up to the present age of climate change and consider how they have celebrated the “natural world” and looked critically at human effects on ecosystems. Our texts will include poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, from a range of authors including Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, and Barbara Kingsolver. Throughout, we will be attentive both to the literary qualities of writings about the environment and to their historical and political contexts.

Emerson revered self-reliance and individualism, distrusted organized religion, loved the outdoors, and believed in improving society.  Emerson is the writer we all meant to read but got scared off by attempting "Nature." He writes so beautifully that, when you have finished reading an essay, you are, at least for that moment, a believer. But later we find ourselves asking, “What did he say?" and this course hopes to answer that question. We will read selections from his amazing essays and his luminous poems.

Sholem Aleichem’s Fiddler on the Roof won fame with its portrayal of Tevya and his daughters. But this portrayal was from a male writer’s viewpoint. What additional insights might a female writer of that time have provided? Unfortunately, few stories by Yiddish women writers were available in English. Thanks to the women’s movement, Jewish feminists in the 1990s found and translated women’s stories. The sixteen stories in Yenta Mash’s On the Landing, finally published in 2018, reveal the events of these women’s lives—from shtetl to Gulag to Israel. During each class session, a lecture will lead into discussion of two of Mash’s stories.