English
ENGL 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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 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 Bakara, 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. Alternate years.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 135 - Poetry
An introduction to the study of poetry. Topics and methods vary, but all sections emphasize techniques of close reading, critical inquiry, and engaged communication fundamental to the discipline of literary studies. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or in its web page for the content of individual courses and sections. Offered every year.
ENGL 136 - Drama
An introduction to the study of drama. Topics and methods vary, but all sections emphasize techniques of close reading, critical inquiry, and engaged communication fundamental to the discipline of literary studies. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on its web page for the content of individual courses and sections. Offered every year.
ENGL 137 - Novel
An introduction to the study of drama. Topics and methods vary, but all sections emphasize techniques of close reading, critical inquiry, and engaged communication fundamental to the discipline of literary studies. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on its web page for the content of individual courses and sections. Offered every year. (4 credits)
ENGL 138 - Literature in Critical 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. Every year.
ENGL 150 - Introduction to Creative Writing
The focus of this course is on the development of skills for writing poetry and short fiction 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 year.
ENGL 194 - Topics Course
Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.
ENGL 200 - Major Medieval and 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 for later explorations of gender, the religious imagination, politics and ideas of liberty, and the historical emergence of a specifically poetic history. Offered alternate years.
ENGL 205 - Readings in Critical Method
An engagement with the diverse set of critical reading practices now arrayed under the heading "English." Surveys the most prominent schools of recent theory and their antecedents, covering topics such as: New Criticism, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, feminism, structuralism, deconstruction, queer theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. Emphasis on the strategies of reading, interpretation, and social critique these modes of thought enable. Depending on the topic, texts may include essays by Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, Derrida, de Man, Foucault, Jameson, Deleuze, Butler, Gilroy, Spivak, Said, Agamben, Badiou. Works of literature, film, and visual performance art also introduced. No prior exposure to theory is required or assumed, but a previous English course at Macalester is strongly recommended. Alternate years.
ENGL 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. Every year.
ENGL 210 - Film Studies
This course will focus on different topics from year to year. Possible topics include Great Directors, Russian Film, French Film, Film and Ideology, Literature and Film, and Images of Black Women in Hollywood Films. Please consult the specific course description in the English department. Alternate years.
ENGL 220 - Eighteenth-Century British Literature
A study of British literature from the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 to the revolutionary turn of the nineteenth century, emphasizing relationships between literary language and the continuing experiene of modern life. Readings will include prose fiction, drama, poetry, periodical essays, and philosophy from the period, supplemented as necessary by late-modern material. Topics may include the eighteenth-century literary history of, e.g., description and other poetic figures; free-market economics, sensibility, and other eithical systems; gender and personal identity; and modern forms of feeling. Every year.
ENGL 230 - Nineteenth-Century British Literature
A study of literature's dynamic interaction with historical change in the period that has been called the "Pax Britannica" ("British Peace"), but also "The Age of Revolution," "The Age of Capital," "The Age of Democracy," and "The Age of Empire." Emphais on the diversity of forms emerging alongside the novel; poetry, drama, policital writing, and print journalism. Authors may include Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys (P.B. and Mary), Godwin, Keats, Bryon, Tennyson, Arnold, Rossetti, the Brontes (Charlotte and Emily), Swinburne, Hopkins, Pater, Carlyle, Mill, and Marx. Novelists may include those listed under ENGL 331. Articles and manifestos from Blackwood's, The Westminster Review, The Saturday Review, and Household Words.. Particular themes vary. Alternate years.
ENGL 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 ENGL 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 Theater 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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 260 - Science Fiction: From Matrix Baby Cannibals to Brave New Worlds
In the past fifty years science fiction has emerged as the primary cultural form in the Anglophone literary tradition for thinking about the eco-apocalypse: overpopulation, plague, resource depletion, natural and man-made disasters. It has also emerged as the primary cultural form for imagining a sustainable human future, through technological innovation, a balanced human ecosystem, and human flourishing through utopian principles of social justice. In this course we will examine works of science fiction as complex aesthetic achievements, as philosophical inquiries into the nature of being and time, and as theoretical examinations of the challenge of human sustainability. We will engage in intensive readings of contemporary texts, including works by Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, P. D. James, Octavia Bulter, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Charles Stross, Walter Miller, Stanislaw Lem, China Mieville, Cormac McCarthy, and Kazuo Ishiguro. A companion film series will include the Matrix trilogy and other films in the genre. Offered yearly.
ENGL 262 - Studies in Literature and the Natural World
A course studying the ways that literary writing develops thought and feeling about nature and our part in it. In a particular term, the course might address, for example, nature poetry from Milton to Frost; literature and the agrarian; gendered representations of nature; literary figures of relationship among humans and other kinds; nature, reason, and the passions; literatures of matter and of life; time, flux, and change in literary and science writing. Offered yearly.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 265 - Justice
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.
ENGL 272 - Love and Madness in Nineteenth Century American Literature
Our common vocabulary of love presents it as a force that strikes and knocks down its victims. It comes like a fever and it disables cognition. Lovers "fall," they are "smitten," "head over heels," "crazy" for each other. Love is both mania and obsession, botha euphoria that alters one's view of the world as a whole and an exclusion of the whole world, a radical narrowing of our normally capacious imaginative and perceptual faculties down to the simplest and smallest of human frames: a face, or the sound of a voice. For American authors of the 18th and 19th century, love and madness were twinned sites of altered consciousness that represented teh radical "others" of Enlightenment reason, psychic parallels to and extensions of the wilds of the New World and the uncontrollable crowds and freedoms of the new democracy. This course will examine love and madness from multiple perspectives, including the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, gender and sexuality, the American Gothic, violence, and sin. Authors will range from Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allan Poe and Kate Chopin. (4 credits)
ENGL 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 and James Agee, Eugene O'Neill, and Dashiell Hammett. Alternate years.
ENGL 274 - American Literature 1945-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 the 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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 276 - African American Literature 1900 to 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.
ENGL 277 - Angels and Demons of the American Renaissance (1835-1880)
As the United states lurched toward murderous civil war, a group of passionate, visionary, and bizarre artists set out to discover the soul of America. From 1850 to 1855, in one of the most astonishing creative convergences in literary history, the artists of what would come to be known as the American Renaissance wrote stories and poems that would enlighten, thrill, and terrify generations of readers. With aesthetic wonder and philosophical insight, they revealed both the angels and demons of human nature, inventing a uniquely American spiritual movement of unprecedented optimism at the same time that they damned it all to hell. Their works were spiritual and blasphemous, elegant and profance, beatific and pornographic, irreverently comic and heartwrenchingly sentimental. Everything that was written in America after this period would, in one way or another, have to come to terms with the brilliant and disturbing achivements of this small cluster of artists. In this course we will read texts by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman melville, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Offered yearly. (4 credits)
ENGL 278 - 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 Conde, Lyonel Trouillot, Rene Depestre, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Aima Cesaire. 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, Francoise 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. Alternate years.
ENGL 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 ENGL 120. 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. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor. Every year.
ENGL 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 ENGL 120. 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. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor. Every year.
ENGL 282 - The 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 ENGL 120. 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. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor. Alternate years.
ENGL 283 - The 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. Alternate years.
ENGL 284 - The 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 ENGL 120. 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. Alternate years.
ENGL 285 - Playwrighting and Textual Analysis
This practice-oriented course teaches the basic techniques of playwrighting. All its components, i.e. play analysis (both literature and performance), scene writing exercises, group discussion, and individual advisement, lead to the writing of each student's own play.
ENGL 294 - Topics Course
Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.
ENGL 304 - Medieval Heroic Narrative
This course studies the heroic storytelling traditions of the medieval British Isles and Scandinavia. We read poems, tales, myths, and non-fiction of these far northwestern European archipelagos, locating their traditions in migrations and conquests of tribes across Asia and Europe. The course deploys gender theory, narrative theory, and history to explore formations of masculinity and femininity, heroic ethos, gender politics in stories of magic, marvels, enchantment and disenchantment. Works may include: the Scandinavian Volsung Saga and the Saga of King Hrolf Kraki; the Irish legends Sweeney Astray and The Tain; the Welsh Mabinogion; the English Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, Old English riddles, translated excerpts from Bede and from the Iais of Marie de France, Sir Orfeo, The Wedding of Sir Gawain & Dame Ragnelle, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, excerpts from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and from Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur. Offered in alternate years.
ENGL 305 - Topics in Theory and Method
A focused examination of either: 1) a particular topic in the long tradition of philosophical and conceptual writing known as theory; 2) a specific methodological debate in literary studies relevant to Macalester English majors; or 3) the work of a single critic/theorist (or group of theorists) and his or her (or their) oeuvre(s). Topics might include deconstruction, Michel Foucault, formalism, Fredric Jameson, the Enlightenment, the Frankfurt School, the Black Atlantic, or global feminisms. Offered occasionally.
ENGL 308 - Literature and Sexuality
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.
ENGL 310 - Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies
Close study of half a dozen plays of Shakespeare, with special attention to his development of resources from performance arts and poetry into a powerful form that would come to engage the likes of Bertolt Brecht and other avant-garde theatre artists. Plays will be selected by critical interests and topics, for example gender and race in Shakespeare; masculinity in the Roman plays; the problem of character; Shakespeare and mythology; Shakespeare and later women writers; intercultural Shakespeare; the tragic and the comic. Offered yearly.
ENGL 313 - Literature in the Age of Shakespeare
Study of major works of the English Renaissance by Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, and other poets and dramatists, with special attention to the work done by categories of gender, sexuality,and class in the period's explorations of literary and dramatic genres. Offered alternate years.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 321 - Eighteenth Century British Novels
The literary history of long prose fictions in English, from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. Emphasis on the instability of "the novel" during this formative period in its development. Readings may include prose fictions that were not called "novels" (like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or Richardson's Pamela) as well as prose fictions that were (like Haywood's Love in Excess or Burney's Evelina). Readings in nonfiction, particularly early-modern philosophy and late-modern criticism, assigned as needed. Topics may include the development of realist description, shifting notions of taste, manifestations of gender, modes of didacticism, and forms of character. Alternate years.
ENGL 325 - British Poetry Between Revolutions
British poetry from the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 to around the turn of the nineteenth century, emphasizing changes in modes of poetic form and figuration in the mysterious period between the English civil wars and the French revolution. Themes may include developments in the forms of lyric, the poetry of natural description, hymns and other songs, and poetic modes of ethics. Readings may include poetry by Rochester, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Prior, Watts, Finch, Thomson, Johnson, Young, Gray, Collins, Akenside, Smart, MAcpherson, Goldsmith, Cowper, Beattie, Burns, Darwin, and others; criticism and theory, from the period and later, included as needed. Offered occasionally.
ENGL 331 - Nineteenth Century British Novel
An advanced course on aspects of novel form developed and possibly perfected in the nineteenth century. Formal achievements in realism, sensationalism, the domestic novel, the adventure romance, the detective tale, the marriage plot, and the gothic will be analyzed in light of the social and political changes they emerged to address: the rise of nationalism, the expansion of empire, the codification of gender ideology, the invention of the modern human being. Novelists may include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, William Godwin, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. Criticism introduced as appropriate. Particular themes vary. Alternate years.
ENGL 341 - 20th Century British Novel
Fiction from a range of British and Irish novelists, including authors from the early part of the century such as E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, along with more recent writers such as Iris Murdoch, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, and Julian Barnes. Works will be considered both in their historical contexts and as examples of the evolving form of the novel itself. Alternate years.
ENGL 342 - Anglophone Literature
A study of works written in English from English-speaking countries other than the U.S. and Great Britain. Countries whose literature might be examined in this course include Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and the English speaking countries of the Caribbean. Alternate years.
ENGL 350 - 20th 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.
ENGL 351 - 20th Century Dramatic Literature
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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 362 - Gendered, Feminist, and Womanist Writings
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. Alternate years
ENGL 366 - Nabokov
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. Alternate years, spring semester .
ENGL 367 - Postcolonial Theory
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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 380 - Topics in African-American Literature
This course will explore African American cultural production adn, depending on the instructor, may focus on a particular genre (e.g. novels, short stories, drama, poetry, detective fiction, speculative fiction), or a particular theme (e.g. The Protest Tradition, Black Feminist Writings), or on a particular period (e.g. the 1820s-1860s, the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s), or on a particular author or authors (e.g. Douglass, Du Bois, Baldwin, Wideman, Morrison, Parks). Alternate years.
ENGL 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. Every semester, the course will focus on a specific literary, cultural and 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. Alternate years.
ENGL 384 - Langston Hughes: Global Writer
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.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 394 - Topics Course
Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.
ENGL 400 - Seminar: Special Topics in Literary Studies
A study of a particular topic of interest to students of literature in English. Students will read widely in relevant materials and produce a significant final project. Alternate years.
ENGL 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.
ENGL 404 - Seminar in Contemporary Theory
An advanced consideration of a current problem in literary or critical theory, with attention to its historical. philosophical, and/or institutional contexts. Topics might include "Literature," "Style," "Sovereignty," "Human," "Mediation," "Revolution," "Sex Work," etc. Students will undertake significant self-directed reading and produce a substantial final project. Alternate years.
ENGL 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. Every year.
ENGL 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. Course may be repeated for credit if the topic is different. Every year.
ENGL 410 - Comparative Studies
This comparative course will focus on either two or more authors from different national traditions (e.g. Dickens and Balzac, James and Zola, Ellison and Malraux); a comparison of literary movements (e.g. modernism and the Harlem Renaissance); a study of transnational movements (romanticism, postcolonialism, communism); or a comparision of literary forms from similar historical situations (revolutionary literature, war literature, "the avant garde"). Alternate years.
ENGL 494 - Topics Course
Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.
ENGL 614 - Independent Project
Production of original work, either scholarly or creative, of substantial length, which may develop out of previous course work. Every semester.
ENGL 621 - 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. Every semester.
ENGL 622 - 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. Every semester.
ENGL 623 - 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. Every semester.
ENGL 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. Every semester.
ENGL 634 - Preceptorship
Work assisting a faculty member in planning and teaching a course. Every semester.
ENGL 641 - Honors Independent
Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project. Every semester.
ENGL 642 - Honors Independent
Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project. Every semester.
ENGL 643 - Honors Independent
Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project. Every semester.
ENGL 644 - Honors Independent
Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project. Every semester.