Karin Gottshall
Office
Axinn Center 311
Tel
(802) 443-2598
Email
kgottsha@middlebury.edu
Office Hours
Spring 2024: T/W 11 AM - 12:30 PM and by appointment.

Courses Taught

Course Description

Writing: Poetry, Fiction, NonFiction
An introduction to the writing of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction through analysis of writings by modern and contemporary poets and prose writers and regular discussion of student writing. Different instructors may choose to emphasize one literary form or another in a given semester. Workshops will focus on composition and revision, with particular attention to the basics of form and craft. This course is a prerequisite to CRWR 0380, CRWR 0385, CRWR 0370, and CRWR 0375. (This course is not a college writing course.) (Formerly ENAM 0170) 3 hrs. sem.

Terms Taught

Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024

Requirements

ART

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Course Description

The Structure of Poetry
This course is a workshop for beginning students in the field of creative writing. Students will read a selection of poems each week and write their own poems, producing a portfolio of their work at the end of the term. There will be an emphasis on revision. Students will be introduced to a range of forms as well, including prose poems, epistles, the tanka, the long poem, and the sonnet. 3 hrs. lect.

Terms Taught

Fall 2020, Winter 2021, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Winter 2023, Fall 2023

Requirements

ART

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Course Description

Advanced Poetry Workshop: The Walk of a Poem
As Lyn Hejinian writes, “Language makes tracks.” Poets from Chaucer to Whitman to O’Hara have used walking as a poetic method, thematic subject, narrative device, and pedestrian act. The walk is literal and imaginary, metrical and meandering; it traverses urban grids and bucolic landscapes, junctions of space, time, and lexis. In this workshop we will read the topographies of poems, focusing on lyrical cities from Paris to Harlem, Thoreauvian ambles through woods and field, and other literary wanderings and linguistic itinerancies, in order to examine how language gets made and mirrored in the act of moving through place. Students will also set out on walks through the local landscape as they produce their own work. Students will address crucial questions and challenges focused on the craft of poetry through rigorous readings, in-class writing exercises, critical discussions, collaborations, and the development of a portfolio of writing, including drafts and revisions. By the end of the course, students will have engaged deeply with the practice of poetry, established a writing discipline, honed their skills, generated new work, explored by foot, and extended their sense of the possibilities of a poem.(any 100-level CRWR course and Instructor Approval). 3 hrs. sem.

Terms Taught

Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024

Requirements

ART

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Course Description

Special Project: Creative Writing
Approval Required.

Terms Taught

Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Winter 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Winter 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Winter 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Winter 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Winter 2025, Spring 2025

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Course Description

Senior Thesis: Creative Writing
Discussions, workshops, tutorials for those undertaking one-term projects in the writing of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction.

Terms Taught

Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025

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Course Description

Special Project: Literature
Approval Required.

Terms Taught

Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022

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Course Description

Senior Thesis: Critical Writing
Individual guidance and seminar (discussions, workshops, tutorials) for those undertaking one-term projects in literary criticism or analysis. All critical thesis writers also take the Senior Thesis Workshop (ENAM 700Z) in either Fall or Spring Term.

Terms Taught

Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022

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Course Description

Special Project: Literature
Approval Required. (Formerly ENAM 0500)

Terms Taught

Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025

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Course Description

Senior Thesis: Critical Writing
Individual guidance and seminar (discussions, workshops, tutorials) for those undertaking one-term projects in literary criticism or analysis. All critical thesis writers also take the Senior Thesis Workshop (ENAM 700Z) in either Fall or Spring Term. (Formerly ENAM 0700)

Terms Taught

Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025

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Course Description

Reward for Being: Emily Dickinson and her Influence
In this seminar we will focus on Emily Dickinson, the 19th century American poet whose work, as scholar Susan Howe writes, “penetrates to the indefinite limits of written communication.” We will immerse ourselves in the letters and poems of Dickinson, with a particular focus on her relationship to her own literary vocation. We will also investigate the influence Dickinson has had on American poets in the 20th and 21st centuries. Texts will include primary sources as well as a biography of and critical work on Dickinson. 3 hrs. sem.

Terms Taught

Spring 2020, Fall 2020

Requirements

CW, LIT

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Course Description

The Poetics of Lullaby
In his lecture on the art of Spanish lullaby, poet Federico García Lorca observed that, “In melody…history’s emotion finds refuge.” The situation of lullaby, as a transitional gesture between waking life and sleep, has made it a natural depository for human wishes, terrors, and fantasies across centuries and cultures. We will investigate the seemingly universal language of lullaby in its folk and literary traditions around the world. Learning will be both research-based and experiential. Readings and papers will include scholarship on individual songs and poems within their contexts, and field work will explore lullaby as a living folk tradition.

Terms Taught

Spring 2022

Requirements

CMP, CW, LIT

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