English & Creative Writing

Academic Department Introduction

We believe literary study to be creative and critical in equal measure. Our courses range from introductory writing to in-depth studies of influential writers, genres, historical periods, theories, and themes in English, American, and world literatures in English. Critical courses span a broad range of topics and approaches, from Shakespeare to the Harlem Renaissance to speculative fiction. Numerous courses in creative writing include poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children, and writing for film, television, and video games. Our creative writing and critical courses are not separated from each other but closely intertwined and mutually supportive. In all courses, we foster and develop a deep, complex, passionate response to literary language.

Learning goals

Acquire a knowledge of English literary history, including canonical and contemporary works from diverse traditions.
Recognize and demonstrate an ability to work with critical methodologies employed in the discipline of literary studies.
Read literature with deep attention and responsiveness to content, language, and form.

Programs of study

English major and minor

Students form and develop the skills of analysis, interpretation, and argument through the intensive study of writers and their works in literary, cultural, and historical contexts.

Major requirements

Minor requirements

English & creative writing major

In addition to acquiring the skills of analysis, interpretation, and argument, students develop a distinctive literary voice and study the history and cross-cultural diversity of the genres, traditions, and styles in which they are working.

Major requirements

Course highlights

Milton

ENG227

Milton helped set the standard of literary power for generations of writers after him. His epic Paradise Lost exemplifies poetic inspiration, sublimity, creativity, originality, and unconventionality, offering a richness of meaning and emotion that seems to provoke violently incompatible interpretations, even radical uncertainty about whether his work is good or bad. This course will focus on how this poem challenges and expands our views of God, evil, heroism, Hell, good, Heaven, pain, bliss, sex, sin, and failure in startling ways. We will consider Milton as the prototype of a new kind of poet who pushes meaning to its limit, from his early writings, to Paradise Lost, to Paradise Regain'd at his career's end, and sample the range of critical responses his poetry has elicited.

Gotham: New York City in Literature, Art, and Film

ENG258

This course examines how that icon of modernity, New York City, has been variously depicted in literature and the arts, from its evolution into the nation’s cultural and financial capital in the nineteenth century to the present. We’ll consider how urban reformers, boosters, long-time residents, immigrants, tourists, newspaper reporters, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have shaped new and often highly contested meanings of this dynamic and diverse city. We'll also consider how each vision of the city returns us to crucial questions of perspective, identity, and ownership, and helps us to understand the complexity of metropolitan experience. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Paule Marshall, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, and Berenice Abbott, and others. Filmmakers may include Vincente Minnelli, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee.
The Black, the Lady, and the Priest: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Race

ENG317

This course takes its title from Duby’s magisterial history The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, which studies medieval marriage and its implications for marriage and gender relations in modernity. We will build on Duby’s work by considering how medieval romance literature has constructed not only marriage but also race. We will read medieval romances that depict religious differences as physical differences, especially skin color, and we will consider texts in the theological, philosophical, and historical contexts that informed their creation and reception. We will also consider the afterlives of medieval romance in modern love stories that are concerned with race. We will inquire, what do blackness and whiteness mean in chivalric literature and the history of love? And is modern race actually medieval? Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Explore all courses

Places and spaces

The Department of English & Creative Writing has a common room with a terrace; both are used for quiet study, socializing, and department events.

English & Creative Writing Department Common Room

Research highlights

In her most recent book, The Natural Laws of Plot (Penn Press, 2022), Professor Yoon Sun Lee argues that plot cannot be considered merely as an abstract shape or form. In realist novels, plot is interested not only in human aims but in non-human forces, laws, and structures that operate at various scales independently of any character’s intention or desire. Emerging together with natural philosophy, the plots of realist novels helped envision a unified, objective world within and against which any action unfolds.
Professor Cord Whitaker’s research asks how the Middle Ages matter to the modern study of race and racism. His book, Black Metaphors (Penn Press, 2019), uses rhetoric, theology, and literature to establish the variety of medieval treatments of color and difference. Black Metaphors illuminates the process by which one interpretation among many became established as the truth, and demonstrates how modern movements—from Black Lives Matter to the alt-right—are animated by the medieval origins of the black-white divide.
Limerence (Rebel Satori Press, 2023), a poetry collection by Professor Tavi González, probes the inextricable tension, pain, pleasure, and danger in relationships between men. González’s experiences of love, sexual desire, and romance are not sentimental, as they are often intertwined with questions of consent and violence. Poignant and searing, the poems ask readers to appreciate and reexamine the meaning of love, trust, and safety.

Opportunities

Internships

The Writing Program and the Department of English & Creative Writing jointly sponsor funded summer internships at Slate, W.W. Norton & Company, Maven Screen Media, Calligraph, and Speculum.
Special Collections

The College owns first and early editions of many novels and poetry collections, illuminated manuscripts, and 573 love letters between the Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, which students are invited to view.

Beyond Wellesley

Many of our alums work in publishing, journalism, media, education, and the tech industry. They hold positions as writers, editors, and teachers, among other professions. Recent employers include Hachette Book Group, Publicis Sapient, and City Year.