Courses
Below you will find a list of courses taught by Lannan Center affiliated faculty, including the Lannan Center Director and Visiting Lecturers. Most of these courses count towards the Creative Writing Minor. For more information, please visit the Creative Writing Minor website or contact Professor Phil Sandick, Director of Creative Writing. In order to view the complete list of English course offerings, please visit the University Registrar’s page.
Fall 2023
Literary Prose: Around the World in 40 Stories | ENGL 2822
Rabih Alameddine (Lannan Visiting Chair)
What can stories from around the world tell us about who we are, about humanity, about the world in general? As Americans, we tend to think that how we see the world is how everybody else does. We believe the U.S., like the pre-Copernican earth, is the center of the universe and everything revolves around us. Do writers from other countries have different concerns? How are the stories they tell different from ours if they are? Basically, this course is about exploration, about the joys of discovery, and it is about reading and writing.
Spring 2024
Medicine and the Muse: Writing Through Change | ENGL 2275
Aminatta Forna
Students will examine a variety of contemporary texts including fiction, essay, memoir and other narratives which deal with themes of change: illness and health, displacement, environmental change, employment and other changed circumstances, ideas or beliefs. Change is often resisted, but may also be embraced. From the health of our bodies to the borders of our nation states, change defines the arc of human existence.
We will consider the role narrative plays in the creation of identity and a person’s personal history, and how that self-creation may be suddenly and dramatically reconfigured through change.
Most importantly we will write! Creative writing will form a major part of this course. You will be encouraged to mine experiences and observations of people and the world around you to find and explore your voice and different styles of writing. Students will be given practical exercises focussing on elements of the craft of creative writing: perspective, point of view, voice, dialogue, narrative structure. All are welcome, from those who have never written before, to those with some experience and everyone in between. Be prepared to bring your work to the class and to give and receive feedback in classroom workshops. Through this approach you will hone your close reading abilities and writing skills while analyzing central themes of change in its many forms.
This course has been designed in conjunction with the Lannan Literary Festival, March 19-21 2024. Student attendance is a course requirement.
Medicine & the Muse: Writing through Change counts towards credits required for the Creative Writing Minor as well as the Medical Humanities Minor.
Advanced Fiction Writing | ENGL 4275
Tope Folarin
This new workshop welcomes experienced creative writers wanting to complete a longer manuscript: short stories; a novella; graphic novel; or a hybrid of forms including some personal prose. The course is intended for students who have written short creative texts in previous college workshops, and who now seek to build a sequence of stories, chapters, plots and subplots. In this course you may radically revise some of your prior writing as the basis of a new, more extended and synthetic manuscript; or you may have an entirely new project in mind. We will read, critique, and steal from model stories in Ann Charters’s The Story and Its Writer; the Caine Prize story (and its writer); Aminatta Forna’s novel, Happiness–originally written as a short story; craft essays by writers; and other texts. We’ll engage extensively with these works, and with each other’s emergent writing.
Lannan Prose Seminar | ENGL 4260
Rabih Alameddine (Lannan Visiting Chair)
The Lannan Prose Seminar encourages dynamic critical thinking and creativity with a view to examining literary forms and practices; the work of individual authors; the relationship between writing and other arts; and the place of writing in contemporary culture. Fellows study and discuss the work of the year’s scheduled guests in the Lannan “Readings and Talks” series, participate in conversations with the guests, and attend their readings and performances. Fellows then produce an independent final project (creative or critical) under the guidance of the instructor. There are also opportunities for students to develop and share their own writing in several genres. Enrollment in this seminar is limited to the Lannan Fellows.
Lannan Poetry Seminar | ENGL 4260
Caroline Forché
The Lannan Poetry Seminar encourages dynamic critical thinking and creativity with a view to examining literary forms and practices; the work of individual authors; the relationship between writing and other arts; and the place of writing in contemporary culture. Fellows study and discuss the work of the year’s scheduled guests in the Lannan “Readings and Talks” series, participate in conversations with the guests, and attend their readings and performances. Fellows then produce an independent final project (creative or critical) under the guidance of the instructor. There are also opportunities for students to develop and share their own writing in several genres. Enrollment in this seminar is limited to the Lannan Fellows.