Naomi Lebowitz, Joseph Loewenstein, and Doreen Salli Just as the popular film Shakespeare in Love imagined a young Shakespeare struggling to better his rival Marlowe, so did writers of the past respond to what they read.
Great writers are, above all else, great readers.
In this year-long seminar we explore the major works of chief figures in English literary culture, among them Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Austen, Keats, and Dickens. We study authors whose originality lies in the ways they resist, embrace, and repudiate the efforts of those who wrote before them. In the spring semester, you also enroll in a linked writing course emphasizing both critical and creative writing. You write poems, fiction, and critical prose that engage the literary works under scrutiny in the companion course through analysis and imitation. As happened in the past, we intend for you, the reading writer, to become the writing reader.