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EnglishCOURSES Introductory Courses These courses are especially appropriate for non-majors. 101 COLLEGE WRITING Instruction and practice for writing in college. This course does not satisfy the requirements for the English major or minor. Every year. (4 credits) 105 AMERICAN VOICES American literature contains a greater variety of voices than most other national literatures. Each section of this course explores some aspect of that wide range of voices and may include the writing of women, of minority groups, or of various sub-groups from the dominant literary culture. Consult the detailed course descriptions in the English department or on its web page for the content of individual sections. Every year. (4 credits) 110 INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE This course provides an introduction to major authors, periods, and movements in African American literature. It will also provide an introduction to methods of literary study and analysis. It will cover a range of genres, including poetry, slave narratives, essays, short stories, novels, and plays, by authors such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Essex Hemphill, and Suzan-Lori Parks. It will also cover movements such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Depending upon section and instructor, this course may be primarily lecture. No prerequisites. Alternate years. (4 credits) 115 SHAKESPEARE This course will offer an introduction to his work through a wide-ranging survey of his major plays in all categories (history, comedy, tragedy, and romance) plus maybe some poetry. Texts and topics will vary. Every year. (4 credits) Gateway to the Major Courses These courses are especially appropriate for students intending to major in English but are also appropriate for non-majors. Note that students must take 150 as a prerequisite for any other course in creative writing at Macalester. Students must take one course among 105-137 as a prerequisite for all literature courses numbered 300 or above. We encourage all English majors to take a course numbered 135-137 during their first two years, keeping in mind that no more than two 100-level courses may be counted toward the major, with the exception of English 150, Introduction to Creative Writing, which may count along with two other 100-level courses other than 101. 125 STUDIES IN LITERATURE A writing-intensive course in traditional and non-traditional literatures, each section of which will have a different focus, topic, or approach; recent offerings have examined the short story, major women writers, new international writing, and the literary Gothic. Every year. (4 credits) 135 POETRY, 136 DRAMA, 137 NOVEL These introductory courses focus on the study of a literary genre. Depending on the section and instructor, the course will focus on the history and development of a single genre (poetry or drama or novel) with a focus on literatures of a specific nation across a century or more, or the course will focus on cross-cultural or transnational comparative study of a single genre (poetry or drama or novel) across a century or more. All sections will emphasize methods and tools for critical thinking and literary analysis, including close reading, literary-critical vocabulary, and the interpretation of literary form in relation to content. All sections will also emphasize the processes and techniques of writing literary analysis and will include some attention to research skills and the use of literary criticism or theory. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on its web page for the content of individual courses and sections. At least one of these courses (135, 136, or 137) is offered every semester. (4 credits) 138 LITERATURE IN THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES A course designed to pair selected works of literature with major trends and topics in literary theory, likely to cover some relevant landmarks in the history of poetics, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and/or political activism. Particular texts will vary. Alternate years. (4 credits) 150 INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING The focus of this course is the development of skills for writing poetry and prose through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises. This course must be completed at Macalester as a prerequisite for the further study of creative writing at Macalester. Every semester. (4 credits) Intermediate Courses 200 MAJOR MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE BRITISH WRITERS This course surveys selections from major works of three writers foundational to the literature of the British Isles and other literatures in English: the late-medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser, and the 17th-century writer John Milton. Study of selections from The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost will highlight the formative role of these writers in literary explorations of gender, the religious imagination, politics and ideas of liberty, and the historical emergence of a specifically poetic history. Alternate years. (4 credits) 205 INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY In the 20th century, the field of literary studies was entirely transformed, borrowing insights from other disciplines and influencing them in turn. Its interactions with politics, philosophy and pop culture have created new insights into cultural theory. This class will survey some of the most prominent schools of recent critical theory, including such topics as the New Criticism, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, queer theory, black feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory. Readings may include essays by T. S. Eliot, Bakhtin, Adorno, Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Deleuze, Greenblatt, Sedgwick, Butler, Gilroy, Spivak, Bhabha, Anzaldua, Spillers, Said, or Žižek. Alternate years. (4 credits) 208 LITERARY PUBLISHING This course approaches the dynamic field of publishing, from acquisitions of literary titles to their entrance into the marketplace, from the writer’s hands to the editor’s desk to the reader’s library. With explorations into the history of the book, new technologies, and the vibrant literary scene in the Twin Cities and beyond, this course illuminates the complex realities of how literature meets our culture. Alternate years. (4 credits) 210 FILM STUDIES This course will consider film as an audiovisual art form, with attention to developments in cinema technology throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Course will likely focus on a particular genre (Western, War, Horror, Film Noir, Gangster, Documentary), national cinema (French, Italian, British, Irish), or auteur director (John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee). Close reading of films in conversation with film and cultural theory. Required weekly film screenings. Alternate years. (4 credits) 220 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE A study of British literature from about 1660 to 1800. The course will examine the works of writers such as John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Fanny Burney, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, William Blake, and Jane Austen. There may be some texts by continental writers, such as Voltaire, included. Emphasis upon the period’s major genres and modes of writing, such as drama, lyric poetry, satire, the epistolary novel, and the gothic novel. Recent criticism of this period will be considered as well. Alternate years. (4 credits)
230 ROMANTIC LITERATURE This course will examine the works of writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Emphasis on their participation in a literary tradition that cultivated imaginative spontaneity and emotional exuberance. Readings and discussions will locate literary developments in the historical contexts of the French Revolution and British colonial conquest. Topics include representations of sublime landscapes, solitary meditation, and European travel. Alternate years. (4 credits) 232 VICTORIAN LITERATURE A study of British literature and culture from the 1830s to about 1900, emphasizing poetry and non-fiction prose alongside fiction. Authors include Alfred Tennyson, Harriet Martineau, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Margaret Oliphant, William Morris, Algernon Swinburne, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill. This course focuses on literary and historical developments of the period: the industrial revolution, the rise of domesticity, the development of realism, the emergence of the detective novel. Critical readings might locate poetry and fiction in the context of Victorian music, painting, and architecture. Alternate years. (4 credits) 240 TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE A study of works of British and Irish fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose from 1900 to the present. Along with novelists such as those enumerated under English 341 below, this course treats selected poets such as W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, and Philip Larkin, playwrights from the Irish National Theatre at the beginning of the century (Lady Gregory, Sean O’Casey, J. M. Synge) through Samuel Beckett to current dramatists such as Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard, and non-fiction commentary from Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and others. Alternate years. (4 credits) 242 ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE A study of literature written in English-speaking countries other than the U.S. and Great Britain, including but not limited to: Canada, Ireland, India, Pakistan, Australia, South Africa, Anglophone Africa, and the Anglophone Caribbean. Course may consider multiple literary genres (drama, poetry, prose fiction, essays), in addition to visual art, film, and critical/theoretical contexts. We’ll consider how twentieth-century independence movements, as well as particular colonial and post-colonial histories, have reframed the languages and contours of contemporary literature into more transnational and/or diasporic contexts. We’ll also examine the meanings, cultural assumptions, and limitations of the term “Anglophone” and consider what’s at stake in acts of textual and cultural translation. Potential topics include: Anglophone Literature and Violence; Afro-Caribbean Literature; Anglophone Prison Literature; Anglophone Fiction and Film. Alternate years. (4 credits) 264 LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS The literature of the United States exists in a broad hemispheric context which will be the subject of this course. Specific focus will vary, but may include Caribbean literature (including francophone and hispanophone in translation), Latin American literature in a comparative U.S. context, Canadian literature, or other combinations in the writings of the Americas. Alternate years. (4 credits) 265 JUSTICE (Same as Environmental Studies 265) In this course we will examine texts by, about, and for workers for social justice. Our method will be interdisciplinary. With an eye toward aesthetics, we will examine novels and plays that have at their center protagonists who have been called to realize a vision of the just society or, more desperately, to stand alone against seemingly inevitable assaults upon human dignity. We will at the same time examine philosophical and sociological accounts of political action, including works that evaluate the effectiveness of different individual and organizational strategies for social change. Central issues may include obedience and disobedience, economic justice, eco-activism, globalization, human rights, gender, race, and the question of personal vocation—that is, how do we bring together our ethical commitments and our working lives? Central figures will range from Sophocles to Naomi Klein, Zola to James Baldwin. Students will be provided extensive opportunities for service and experiential learning in local organizations committed to social justice. Alternate years. (4 credits) 266 FIELD, FOLK, AND TABLE: LITERATURE OF SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE (same as Environmental Studies 266) What counts as sustainable creation of our food, and what do literary writers explore about farming it? This course studies writers of essays, fiction, poetry, and visual arts on questions of sustainable agriculture, food supply, labor, and justice. We’ll look at current critical issues that concern agrarian writers: agricultural labor and laborers, migration and immigration, sufficiency, dearth and abundance, with the specific purchase on these issues that literature offers. Readings from Michael Pollan, Raymond Williams, Willa Cather, Thomas Hardy, Thoreau, Hesiod, Virgil; we’ll study Coyote and Monkey, Zen monks, ancient goddesses, theologian-cooks, farmers, anthropologists, singers, food writers; paintings and lyric poems on agrarian motifs of ploughman, orchard and meadow, seedtime and harvest, and farm animals. Alternate years. (4 credits) 267 LITERATURE AND ENVIRONMENT: POETRY OF DWELLING (same as Environmental Studies 267) This course studies a wide array of poetry, along with selected creation myths, cosmologies, and essays, to consider poets’ sense of habitation in environment. What environs us? How do we find just principles of dwelling? How do poets evoke the vitality of sensory experience within elemental environments? What forms and genres lend themselves to literary investigation of how to inhabit a place? Are broad scientific virtues of exactitude of observation, and a contemplative spirit, also virtues in environment poetry? Readings from poets and cosmologists of ancient China, ancient Greece and Rome, Britain, and especially from 20th- and 21st-century poets of the United States, among them Robert Frost, Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Gary Snyder, Alice Oswald; essays from the fields of literary history, anthropology, religious studies, architecture. Alternate years. (4 credits) 269 ENVIRONMENTAL CLASSICS (Same as Environmental Studies 280) What has the environment meant to past generations? How have writers shaped the ways we understand our relationships with the natural world? This course explores these questions, drawing in roughly equal measure on “classic” texts from the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Required for Environmental Studies majors. It is recommended that students complete this course during the spring of their sophomore year. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor or two of the following: Environmental Studies 133, 215, 234. Spring semester. (4 credits) 270 LITERATURE AND SEXUALITY (Same as Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 270) This course examines ways in which literary works have represented desire and sexuality. It looks at how constructions of sexuality have defined and classified persons; at how those definitions and classes change; and at how they affect and create literary forms and traditions. Contemporary gay and lesbian writing, and the developing field of queer theory, will always form part, but rarely all, of the course. Poets, novelists, playwrights, memoirists and filmmakers may include Shakespeare, Donne, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, or Henry James; Wilde, Hall, Stein, Lawrence, or Woolf; Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Frank O’Hara, Baldwin, or Philip Roth; Cukor, Hitchcock, Julien, Frears, or Kureishi; White, Rich, Kushner, Monette, Lorde, Allison, Cruse, Morris, Winterson, Hemphill, or Bidart. Alternate years. (4 credits) 271 AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC This course focuses on American literature from the late 18th century to just before the Civil War. It will be concerned with the ways in which the attempt to build a democratic republic is taken up and critiqued in a range of literature from the period. Included will be such writers as Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Susanna Rowson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Herman Melville. Alternate years. (4 credits) 272 NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE This course examines an array of American literature written in the second half of the nineteenth century, including poetry, autobiography, essays, stories and novels. It might focus on a particular moment in the late nineteenth century, a particular group of authors, or a particular thematic concern, but it will be concerned to trace out the complicated relation between literary representation and a rapidly changing social, economic, and political landscape. Authors might include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Alternate years. (4 credits) 273 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1900–1945 America in the first half of the twentieth century seemed to be infatuated with the future—with skyscrapers and automobiles, Hollywood cinema and big business. But in an age that also saw the struggle of Progressivism, the Great Depression, and two foreign wars, many voices called attention to the dark side of success. This course will include such authors as Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Walker Evans, James Agee, Eugene O’Neill, and Dashiell Hammett. Alternate years. (4 credits) 274 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1945 TO THE PRESENT The complacent malaise of the Cold War, the turmoil of Vietnam and the Sixties, and the postmodern fascination with computers and visual culture—all of these have had radical consequences for American literary form. While questioning boundaries between high and low culture, image and reality, and identity and difference, recent American writers work against a pervasive sense of fragmentation to imagine new relations between community and personal desire. The course will consider authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ralph Ellison, Walker Percy, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, John Guare, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, Art Spiegelman, and Neal Stephenson. Alternate years. (4 credits) 275 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1900 This course will trace the development of an African American literary tradition from the end of the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century, from authors such as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano to Frances Harper and Charles Chesnutt. The course will investigate the longstanding project of writing an African American self as both a literary and a political subject, and it will consider texts from multiple genres—such as lyric poetry, protest poetry, slave narratives, spirituals, folktales, personal correspondence, essays, short stories, autobiographies, novels, transcribed oral addresses, and literary criticism and theory. Alternate years. (4 credits) 276 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM 1900 TO THE PRESENT This course will trace the development of an African American literary and cultural tradition from the turn of the century to the present, from writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins to Walter Mosley and Toni Morrison. It will examine the ways that modern and contemporary African American writers and artists have explored political, social, racial, and aesthetic issues in a variety of genres—including autobiographies, poetry, novels, blues songs, photographs, short stories, plays, essays, film, visual art, and literary and cultural criticism. Among the many topics the course will consider are: the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the Black Arts Movement, and the current flourishing of African American arts and letters and cinema. Alternate years. (4 credits) 280 CRAFTS OF WRITING: POETRY This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing poetry, building on the work done in English 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, writing from models (traditional and contemporary), formal exercises (using both traditional and contemporary forms), or working with the poetry sequence (or other methodology selected by the instructor: see department postings for details). It will involve extensive readings and discussion of poetry in addition to regular poetry writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. Prerequisite: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing) taken at Macalester. Every year. (4 credits) 281 CRAFTS OF WRITING: FICTION This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing fiction, building on the work done in English 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, writing from models of the short story (both classic and contemporary), working with the technical components of fiction (e.g., plot, setting, structure, characterization), or developing linked stories or longer fictions (or other methodology selected by the instructor: see department postings for details). It will involve extensive readings and discussion of fiction in addition to regular fiction writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. Prerequisite: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing) taken at Macalester. Every semester. (4 credits) 282 CRAFTS OF WRITING: CREATIVE NONFICTION This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing nonfiction, building on the work done in English 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, translating personal experience into autobiography or memoir, or developing the essay form, the opinion piece, the journalistic report or a variety of other forms. It will involve extensive readings and discussion of nonfiction in addition to regular nonfiction writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. Prerequisite: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing) taken at Macalester. Every year. (4 credits) 283 CRAFTS OF WRITING: SCRIPTWRITING This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing plays. The emphasis will be on written dialogue and dramatic action, with the aim of producing brief scripts. There will be extensive readings and discussion of published and unpublished plays in addition to regular writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. Prerequisite: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing) taken at Macalester. Alternate years. (4 credits) 284 CRAFTS OF WRITING: SCREENWRITING This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing screenplays, building on the work done in English 150. The emphasis will be on narrative films, with the objective of writing a feature-length screenplay during the semester. There will be extensive readings and discussion of published and unpublished screenplays in addition to regular writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. Prerequisite: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing) taken at Macalester. Alternate years. (4 credits)
Advanced Courses All of the following courses have a prerequisite of an English course numbered 105-137. 303 CHAUCER Wide-ranging survey of Chaucer’s medieval narrative arts, through study of the great story collection The Canterbury Tales—comic, courtly, bawdy, satiric—and his wry dream-vision poems. Offered occasionally (4 credits) 304 MYTH AND ENVIRONMENT IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE (same as Environmental Studies 304) This course studies poems, tales, myths, and non-fiction of the British and Scandinavian archipelagos in medieval times, focusing on accounts of magic, marvels, enchantment and disenchantment, nature spirits, dragons, demons, shape-shifters, fairies, and uncanny animals. These narratives and character types, surprisingly, constitute medieval literature’s most complex explorations of environment, home and homelessness, invasion and settlement, the fates of indigenous religions and its spirits as Christianity spread, and people’s encounters with seas, forests, lands, weathers, and other humans of those northern worlds. Works will be drawn from the Scandinavian Volsung Saga and The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki; the Irish legends Sweeney Astray, The Life of Saint Gall, The Taìn; the Welsh Mabinogion; the lais of Anglo-French writer Marie de France; the English Beowulf, The Wedding of Sir Gawain & Dame Ragnelle, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and Franklin’s Tale, excerpts from Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, and Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away. We will make connections among scholarship in literary history, religious studies, anthropology, philosophy, and historical geography. Alternate years. (4 credits) 310 SHAKESPEARE: HISTORIES AND TRAGEDIES This course focuses on Shakespeare’s history plays and tragedies. Readings may include Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and the occasional play by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Alternate years. (4 credits) 311 SHAKESPEARE: COMEDY AND TRAGICOMEDY This course will focus on Shakespeare’s comedies, his comic characters, and his late plays, those we’ve come to call romances. Readings may include The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labor’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Cymbeleine, The Tempest, and the occasional play by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Alternate years. (4 credits) 312 RENAISSANCE DRAMA This course examines a selection of plays by Shakespeare’s greatest contemporaries and rivals: among them Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Topics will include secularization, commercialism, staging and performance, meta-theatricality, deception, revenge and violence, black comedy, melodrama, transvestitism, eroticism. Offered occasionally. (4 credits) 313 RENAISSANCE POETRY Lyric and narrative poetry from the end of the Middle Ages to the Restoration, including sonnet sequences, song lyrics, mythological and epic narrative by Sidney, Shakespeare, Campion, Wyatt, Marlowe, Ralegh, Wroth, Spenser, Lanyer, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell, Milton. Offered occasionally. (4 credits) 315 MILTON A study of that pivotal poet in British literary history, John Milton, through Paradise Lost and his lyric and narrative verse. Topics may include Milton’s arguments on liberty, gender, justice, religious issues, and his central role for later writers, thinkers, and movements from the 18th century to the present. Offered occasionally. (4 credits) 317 TOPICS IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LITERATURE This course explores issues in medieval and Renaissance literatures and cultures from the 8th century through the mid-17th century. Depending on the instructor, it may focus on a single author or genre, on a concept, on a thread of literary history, or on a field of relationships between literary and other discourses in a given time frame. Offered occasionally. (4 credits) 321 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL The rise of the novel as illustrated in the works of Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and others. Emphasis upon the writers’ attitudes toward the social and spiritual values of early modern Britain and upon the great variety of forms and moods that invigorated the new genre. Alternate years. (4 credits) 331 NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL Novels by authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Oscar Wilde. This course examines works from literary traditions as diverse as realism, the Gothic, or aestheticism to emphasize the history of the novel. Students will link formal aspects of novels to ideological questions of gender, class, sexuality, and empire. Alternate years. (4 credits) 341 TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL Fiction from a range of British, Irish, and diasporic novelists, including “modernist” authors (E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen), in addition to postwar writers (George Orwell, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith). Works will be considered in historical, cultural, and aesthetic context, with an emphasis on the evolving form of the novel as a literary genre. Please consult English Department website for particular thematic focus. Alternate years. (4 credits) 350 TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY An analysis of twentieth century poetry from modernists W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost through major midcentury poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Langston Hughes, to contemporary writers such as Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, John Ashbery and C. D. Wright. This course will stress close analytical reading of individual poems. Alternate years. (4 credits) 351 TWENTIETH CENTURY DRAMA Study of the development of modern drama from Ibsen to the present by reading and discussion of the major late nineteenth century and twentieth century European and American dramatists such as August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, Lillian Hellman, and August Wilson. Alternate years. (4 credits) 361 THE AMERICAN NOVEL Traces the history of the novel in America from its epistolary beginnings in the late 18th century to its postmodern incarnations in the late twentieth century. Possible authors include Hannah Wester Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon. Alternate years. (4 credits) 362 GENDERED, FEMINIST, AND WOMANIST WRITINGS (Same as Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 310) This course foregrounds how gender constructions and politics inform the writing of a period and place; how various genres use gender-saturated discourses; how the gendered body is represented; images of masculinity and femininity; the status of women as writers, readers, and purveyors of the written word. Examples range from feminist thought in mediaeval women’s writing to gender differences in expatriate Black cultural modernism to transnational women’s literature on utopia. The course will always emphasize gender as a category of critical analysis, and the ways that reading and writing with an eye to gender can transform the futures of texts and their readers. Instructor and focus will vary. Requires junior standing or permission of the instructor, and at least one intermediate-level women’s, gender, and sexuality studies core course. Alternate years starting in 2009–2010. (4 credits) 366 NABOKOV (Same as Russian Studies 366) The scandal surrounding Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel about the nymphet Lolita finally made him a hugely successful celebrity, allowing him to retire from teaching at Cornell University and move to Switzerland to devote himself to fiction, translation, criticism and lepidoptery. This was only one of the many metamorphoses Nabokov underwent while in exile, moving from Russia to the Crimea, Cambridge UK, Berlin, Paris, Cambridge MA, Ithaca, Hollywood, and finally Montreux. Members of the Russian nobility, the Nabokovs lost everything with the 1917 Revolution except for their immense cultural capital, which Nabokov transformed into a tremendously productive career as a writer, critic, translator and scholar in Russian, French, and English. This course examines both the Russian (in translation) and English novels. A merciful defier of national, linguistic, cultural and theoretical categories, Nabokov remains paradoxically elusive and monumental, a thrilling and exasperating genius. Spring semester. (4 credits) 367 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Same as Humanities and Media and Cultural Studies 367 and International Studies 367) Traces the development of theoretical accounts of culture, politics and identity in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and related lands since the 1947–1991 decolonizations. Readings include Fanon, Said, Walcott, Ngugi and many others, and extend to gender, literature, the U.S., and the post-Soviet sphere. The course bridges cultural representational, and political theory. Prior internationalist and/or theoretical coursework strongly recommended. Alternate years; next offered Spring 2010. (4 credits) 369 AFRICAN LITERATURE A study of the fiction and poetry of writers from sub-Saharan Africa. The focus will be on fiction since 1945, and readings will be taken both from anglophone writers and from francophone and other writers in translation. Specific content may vary. Alternate years. (4 credits) 377 NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE A study of fiction and poetry by American Indian writers, among them N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor. Alternate years. (4 credits) 380 TOPICS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (Same as American Studies 380) This course will explore African American cultural production and, depending on the instructor, may focus on a particular genre (e.g., novels, short stories, drama, poetry, detective fiction, speculative fiction), a particular theme (e.g., The Protest Tradition, Black Feminist Writings), a particular period (e.g., the 1820s-1860s, the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s), or a particular author or authors (e.g., Douglass, Du Bois, Baldwin, Wideman, Morrison, Parks). Alternate years. (4 credits) 381 LITERATURES AND CULTURES OF THE CARIBBEAN This course will focus primarily on the writing but also on the music and film of the Caribbean. It will examine the works of authors such as Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, George Lamming, Edwidge Danticat, Frances Aparicio, Rosario Ferre, Mayra Santos-Febre, Ana Lydia Vega, Reynaldo Arenas, Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Maryse Condé, Lyonel Trouillot, René Depestre, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Aimé Césaire. It will also examine the works of musicians and performers such as Attila the Hun, Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Boukman Eksperians, Manno Charlemagne, and Haitiando. The course will cover multiple musical genres—among them, calypso, ska, reggae, compa, music rasin, and troubadou. The course material may also include Caribbean films, such as The Harder They Fall, Life and Debt, and Haiti: Killing the Dream. Finally, the course will include extensive readings in literary and postcolonial theory, situating the literature, music, and film within specific historical, political, regional, ethnic, linguistic, national, and postcolonial contexts. Theorists will be chosen from among Paul Gilroy, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Kamau Brathwaite, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Michael Dash, Paul Farmer, Mimi Sheller, Joan Dayan, Laennec Hurbon, Edouard Glissant, Françoise Lionnet, and others. The course may focus on Anglophone, Francophone, and/or Hispanophone texts and be team-taught by faculty from English, French and Francophone studies, and/or Hispanic and Latin American studies departments. Offered occasionally. (4 credits) 382 TOPICS IN AFRICAN DIASPORIC LITERATURE, CULTURE AND THOUGHT The focus of this course is on the literary, cultural and philosophical productions of “blackness” that have preoccupied African Diasporic writers, philosophers, activists and artists from the Eighteenth century to today. The course will focus on a specific literary, cultural or theoretical movement or topic such as Negritude, the Black Arts Movement, Black British Literature, Black subjectivity, Black Nationalism, or African American Literature and Culture from Europe. Writers and theorists may include Prince Hall, Mary Seacole, Olaudah Equiano, Martin Delaney, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Aimé Césaire, René Maran, George Padmore, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Grace Nichols, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall, Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, May Ayin and Joanne Traynor. Offered occasionally. (4 credits) 383 INTRODUCTION TO TWENTIETH CENTURY GAY AND LESBIAN LITERATURE This course traces the broad literary history of gay and lesbian novels and poetry in English. It begins with a look at the earliest invention of the “invert,” “Uranian” and/or “homosexual” in biology, psychology and sociology before moving to the early twentieth century novels that were influenced by these theories. The focus of this course is to trace the ways in which gay and lesbian identity has been constructed as both a model for the “homonormative” and/or a critique of the heteronormative by drawing heavily upon conservative and progressive notions of race, class and gender. Writers may include: Radclyffe Hall, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Leslie Feinberg, Paul Monette, and Jackie Kay. Offered occasionally. (4 credits) 384 LANGSTON HUGHES: GLOBAL WRITER (Same as International Studies 384) The great African American writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is best known as the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. But his career was vaster still. He was a Soviet screenwriter, Spanish Civil War journalist, African literary anthologist, humorist, playwright, translator, social critic, writer of over 10,000 letters, and much more. This course engages Hughes’s full career, bridging race and global issues, politics and art, and makes use of little-known archival materials. Alternate years. (4 credits.) 386 FROM LITERATURE TO FILM: STUDIES IN ADAPTATION From its earliest days, film has drawn on literature for subject matter and modes of narration. Adaptations of literary sources have formed a significant part of all movies made in the west. This course will study the problems of adapting literature to film, dealing with the representations of time and space in both forms, as well as the differences in developing character and structuring narratives. The course will consider a novel, short story or play each week along with its cinematic counterpart. Alternate years. (4 credits) 387 THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE This course will give students the exciting opportunity to see a variety of plays and theatrical events currently being performed in the Twin Cities. Each week we will attend a performance and/or hear from guest speakers (directors, actors, playwrights, designers). Plays will be considered along with readings in performance theory, cultural theory, and theatre history. Response papers, a group presentation and a final project/along with class participation and attendance at all plays will be required. The class is limited to 12 students and must have the permission of the instructor. Alternate years. (4 credits) 401 HISTORY OF A LITERARY GENRE A look at the development of one major literary genre or mode across several historical periods, with sustained scrutiny of key examples, and attention to the relevant criticism and theory. A given year and section might cover the history of lyric poetry, with examples from Sidney to Seamus Heaney; or the history of the novel, from Richardson or Fielding to Toni Morrison or David Foster Wallace; or the history of satire and irony, from Swift to contemporary practitioners. Alternate years. (4 credits) 402 SEMINAR IN BRITISH AUTHORS A study of single authors, pairs of authors, or related groups of authors: e.g., the metaphysical poets, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth and John Keats, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Bloomsbury group. Alternate years. (4 credits) 403 SEMINAR IN AMERICAN AUTHORS A study of single authors, pairs of authors, or related groups of authors: e.g., Herman Melville; Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson; Henry James and his circle; William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor; Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Alternate years. (4 credits) 404 SEMINAR IN CONTEMPORARY THEORY AND CRITICISM Depending on the instructor, this advanced course will either focus on a specific kind of literary or cultural theory (like Marxism, psychoanalysis, or postcolonial theory), or present a series of readings of literary or cultural materials unified by a coherent theoretical perspective. Alternate years. (4 credits) 405 ADVANCED WRITING WORKSHOP This creative writing workshop will center on work in a chosen genre (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scriptwriting) written by class members, with a strong secondary emphasis on the development of group critical skills. Through the presentation of new and revised work, critiquing of work-in-progress, and discussion of extensive reading in contemporary writing of the chosen genre, the workshop will focus on developing constructive criticism of the writing of participants. Prerequisites: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing), and either 280, 281, 282, or permission of the instructor. Every year. (4 credits) 406 PROJECTS IN CREATIVE WRITING This seminar will provide a workshop environment for advanced students with clearly defined projects in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama or a combination of genres. The seminar will center initially on a group of shared readings about the creative process and then turn to the work produced by class members. Through the presentation of new and revised work, and the critiquing of work-in-progress, each student will develop a significant body of writing as well as the critical skills necessary to analyze the work of others. By permission of instructor. Every year. (4 credits) 410 COMPARATIVE STUDIES This comparative course will focus on two or more authors of different nationalities (e.g. Proust, Joyce and Beckett; or Dante, Pound and Eliot) or a comparison of literary movements (e.g. the Irish Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance) or a study of transnational movements, such as romanticism or the symbolist movement. Alternate years. (4 credits) 604 TUTORIAL Closely supervised individual or small group study in which a student explores a selection of texts differing from what is usually covered in the department’s established courses. Prerequisites: sufficient preparation in English courses to provide the necessary context for the area of study chosen and permission of the instructor. Application must be made through the chair of the English department on a form available from the departmental office. Offered occasionally. (4 credits)
614 INDEPENDENT PROJECT Production of original work, either scholarly or creative, of substantial length, which may develop out of study done in English 604, or previous course work. Prerequisites: sufficient preparation, demonstrated ability, and permission of the instructor. Application must be made through the chair of the English department on a form available from the departmental office. Every semester. (4 credits) 624 INTERNSHIP Work in practical (usually off-campus) experiences that explore potential careers, apply an English major’s skills, or make a substantive addition to the student’s knowledge of literary issues. Prerequisites: sufficient preparation in courses to provide the necessary background, consent of the instructor and sponsor, and completion of an Internship Learning Contract (signed by the Director of Internships and the faculty sponsor). Every semester. (1–4 credits) 634 PRECEPTORSHIP Work assisting a faculty member in planning and teaching a course. Prerequisite: invitation by a faculty member. Every semester. (4 credits) 644 HONORS INDEPENDENT Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project. Every semester. (1–4 credits)
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