A craft course with substantial reading component. This class explores enduring tropes in literature across time and cultures, introducing students to the idea that writing is a live and ever evolving, and thus ever significant medium. By taking contemporary works and tracing them back to their origins, students learn to place the work of various writers, including their own, in a meaningful literary continuum. Sequences might include Ovid to Kafka to Francine Prose; Shakespeare to Angela Carter or Jane Smiley; Beowulf to Grendell; The Tempest to Brave New World; Charlotte Bronte to Jean Rhys; Sophocles to Anne Carson.