Research and Discovery
What Students are Reading: Marrow of African American Lit
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Literature and Creative Writing
You will study literature in the broadest sense – canonical texts, popular literature, film and new media – in English or in other languages. Faculty will help you to develop as a writer, whether you are interpreting the literary text of others or creating your own.
About the Major
Students may major in literature or creative writing. Their professors will encourage them to create and study literature across centuries, nations and languages. Consulting with advisors, literature majors will develop an individualized, and potentially interdisciplinary, course of study. Creative writing majors will take a course load that balances literary study with poetry and prose workshops. At each stage, in both majors, the curriculum emphasizes small classes, the exchange and testing of ideas and the development of superior reading and writing skills.
I picked my majors for love and because they were what I was good at. But I also knew very early on that I wanted to work in book publishing and that, career wise, that’s where I wanted to go. So, for me, creative writing was a very practical, career focused, decision.
Danielle Burby — Creative writing and women’s studies major
Studying literature and creative writing increases our appreciation of the powers of the human imagination to use language to create beauty, complexity and emotionally powerful experiences. Studying literature and creative writing within multiple contexts increases our understanding of how historical and cultural forces influence our behavior and experiences.
Careers After Hamilton
- Director, Electronic Publishing, Scientific American
- Executive Editor, Whole Living magazine
- Chief Development Officer, Norman Rockwell Museum
- President, Scholastic Media
- Magistrate, Connecticut State Superior Court
- Composer/Music Publisher, Ceili Rain
- Financial Advisor, Ameriprise Financial Services
- Physician, Senior Deputy Editor, Annals of Internal Medicine
- Communications Manager, IBM
A Sampling of Courses
Food in Literature and Film 118F
Always a necessity and sometimes a luxury, food connects all people to the planet and to one another. This course will explore how authors and filmmakers use food and cooking in their works as a means of exposing complex social relationships, histories, and identities. The list of authors we may read includes Laura Esquivel, Aimee Bender, Isak Dinesen, Franz Kafka, MFK Fisher, Ruth Reichl, and many poets. We will also look at films such as Big Night; Eat, Drink, Man, Woman; and Ratatouille. Writing-intensive. Proseminar.
View All CoursesFinding Identity 149
“Know thyself." Young people struggled with this injunction long before Hamilton adopted the motto. This course explores how young people in literature—from medieval tales of adventure through 21st c. graphic novels—attempt to define their own identity in relation to their families and societies. We’ll explore how intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and culture come together in the construction of identity. Texts may include anonymous medieval works, as well as novels by Jane Austen, Alison Bechdel, Charles Dickens, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Art Spiegelman. Writing-intensive. Proseminar.
View All CoursesCreative Non-Fiction Workshop 309
For students whose work and purpose in creative writing have developed sufficiently to warrant work in creative non-fiction. We will read memoir, travel/nature writing, and literary journalism by a wide range of authors to provide a context in which to examine the work students generate for the class. Part of our task will be to answer the question: What is creative non-fiction? Through a close examination of the texts we read in class, and the process of both writing and critiquing essays, we will attempt to clarify the sometimes vague definitions of the genre.
View All CoursesThe Romantic Poets 335S
The Romantic Period in English literary history has long been defined by the work of six male poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. We will study their poetry in the context of form, history, and politics, and investigate how their work might be seen to form an ideology or movement. We will also read work by poets such as Barbauld, Clare, Burns, and Hemans, popular in their own day, but thought of as ‘minor’ subsequently, in order to evaluate how questions of gender and literary value inform our sense of what is ‘Romantic’. Writing-intensive.
View All CoursesSeminar: Booked: Prison Writing 341
Prisons have been the settings for scenes of tragedy, comedy, romance and social protest. While aware of this use of the prison as a literary device, we will read writers who have actually suffered incarceration. We will read European texts (e.g Plato, Bobby Sands), post-colonial prison writers (e.g. Chris Abani, Ruth First), and the work of men and women inside the American prison system. (Students who are 21 will visit a class run inside a local prison facility.) Prerequisite, two courses in literature. Maximum enrollment, 12. Larson.
View All CoursesThe Hollywood Novel 374
A look at novels dealing with or set in Hollywood and at adaptations of novels to film. Students will write short screen adaptations from short fiction and work together as a team (or in teams) on digital video productions of one or more student screenplays. Writing-intensive.
View All CoursesToday and Tomorrow
