Instruction and practice for writing in college. This course does not satisfy the requirements for the English major or minor.

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In this introductory English course, we will listen to a range of “voices,” as represented in a number of literary genres, in order to read a rich variety of experiences and imaginings of what it means to be “American” in the contemporary United States. We will read memoirs, plays, poetry, short stories, and novels by authors such Michael Patrick MacDonald, Richard Rodriguez, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, Suzan Lori-Parks, David Mamet, Wang Ping, Harryette Mullen, Octavia Butler, Lan Cao, and Edwidge Danticat. Requirements include an oral presentation; weekly discussion questions; and three essays of about 5 pages each, one of which must be revised. This course will fulfill the “gateway” requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major. It will also fulfill the college’s U.S. Multiculturalism and Writing general education requirements.

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In this course we trace the development of Shakespeare's stagecraft and poetic imagination, by reading plays spanning the whole of his career in the theater. We'll look at his handling of dramaturgy, language, character, genre, and gender. For our focus, we'll study Shakespeare's exploration of gender within family structures, a matter that obsessed him: fraught relationships between fathers and daughters or mothers and sons; foundlings separated from their parents by tempest, shipwreck, and violence; youths at the threshold between adolescence and adulthood; sisters, brothers, twins, cousins, uncles, step-parents; conception, birth, the rearing of children, wedding; incest, murderous rivalry; families broken up, families re-united. We'll also read essays in cultural history, feminist and queer theory, and narrative theory, especially about character. There will be two essays, some brief responses, a mid-term test, and a final exam. Shakespearean works may include A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Twelfth Night; 1 Henry IV; Macbeth; Hamlet; The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and the Sonnets. No previous experience in Shakespeare, drama, or poetry required. No prerequisites.

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This course is an introduction to poetry. We will read broadly in the English verse of a period in which our own modern realities were first taking shape: the era of revolutionary change extending from the early seventeenth century to the turn of the nineteenth, from Shakespeare to Rochester and Pope to Wordsworth, from the late Renaissance through the Enlightenment to early romanticism. Our goal will be to understand the ways in which poets have arranged the English language to make meaning; to this end, we’ll practice crafts of reading and response that let us experience the poetry of the past as meaningful in the present. We’ll learn to analyze both sound and sense; we’ll search out the material and intellectual contexts in which poetry was written and received; and we’ll learn to operate in various interpretive modes, from paraphrase to imitation to critical analysis, that help us answer the questions that modern poems make us ask. You’ll earn your grade for the course by good-faith participation in class discussion, by submitting a brief response paper at every class meeting, and by completing five small works of different kinds. You will be able, within bounds, to choose the kinds of works that best suit your interests and abilities: you might choose, for example, to write critical essays; to find out and report on historical documents, interpretive strategies, or poets and poems from beyond our syllabus; or to interpret the poetry we encounter in other forms of your own devising. This course fulfills the gateway requirement for English majors, but anyone who wants to read poetry is welcome.

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Introduction to drama, with attention to text and performance practice, and particular focus on the staging of physical, psychological, and political violence. We’ll explore the spectacle and choreography of on-stage violence, the ethics of violent action and its representation, violence in language, and the relation between acts of storytelling and bloodletting, silence and speech/action. After initial encounters with violence and its staging in Greek and Elizabethan drama (Aeschylus, Oresteia; Euripides, Medea, Hippolytus; Shakespeare, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus), we’ll turn to influential and iconoclastic works of twentieth-century British and Irish drama: Oscar Wilde, Salome; J.M. Synge, Playboy of the Western World; Samuel Beckett, Endgame/selected short plays; Brendan Behan, The Hostage, The Quare Fellow; John Osborne, Look Back in Anger; Edward Bond, Saved; Joe Orton, selected plays; Brian Friel, Translations; Frank McGujnness, Someone to Watch Over Me; Sarah Kane, Phaedra’s Love, Blasted; Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats; Caryl Churchill, A Number; Martin McDonagh, Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Pillowman. Course fulfills the gateway requirement for the English major.

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The best way to learn about creative writing is to read and to write. A lot. In this course we will examine poetry, the short story, and creative nonfiction from the writer's perspective in order to figure out what makes these genres tick. We will discuss and critique published works by notable writers in order to enhance our understanding of what exactly separates poetry from prose, how to tell a story, how to use language artfully and purposefully, and how to convey emotional and intellectual meaning. This course is run as a workshop; discussion is the primary method by which we will improve our reading and writing skills. There will be the occasional lecture, but mostly we will be here to respond thoughtfully, imaginatively and constructively to published and student work in order to develop our own creative writing skills.

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In this course, we will dive head first into the creative writing process by reading and writing poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, and nonfiction. We will examine each genre from a writer's standpoint, discussing and critiquing accomplished works to enhance our own writing. We'll study how the works of published authors are built, how their language is crafted, how they convey sensation and emotion, and how they artfully tell a story. The course will be run as a workshop. I will lecture occasionally, but for the most part enriched writing and critical skills will come from discussion. They will come from the careful exploration of your work and the work of others (both Pulitzer-Prize-winning and that of the student next to you).

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What does it means to write like a storyteller? To read like a writer? Intro to Creative Writing will be as much about active reading as it will be about actual writing. To become a better writer, you must learn how to objectively analyze and critique a wide range of texts in your genre. How did the author make that text work? What do EM Forster, Jane Austen, Nabokov, Zadie Smith, Elmore Leaonard and Stephen King have to say about it? But the course is ultimately about your own writing. Intro to Creative Writing will be for many an introduction to the writer inside you, a person that you may be meeting for the first time. It's about the joys and challenges of expression and learning about your abilities and yourself. It's an introduction to the art of fiction, and non-fiction in all their shapes and forms, and the craft of critiquing your work and the work of your peers. The course will be run in both lecture and workshop format; lectures for the basic elements of fiction and non-fiction, and workshops where your own work will be explored and discussed.

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232-01 Victorian Literature (Robert Warde)
* crosslisted with HMCS 232-01

TR 9:40 am-11:10 am Old Main 010

This survey of Victorian literature, focusing on the years of the Queen’s reign (1837-1901), embraces fiction, poetry, and a wide range of nonfiction prose. In addition, we will consider the visual and decorative arts within a framework of industrialization. Special attention is accorded the scientific, political, and social issues of the era, in an effort both to understand nineteenth-century Britain and to explore the ways in which this critical period establishes a foundation for modernism.

We will read three novels: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes. Nonfiction prose includes Edmund Gosse’s memoir, Father and Son, along with selections from not only the canonical Victorian sages (such as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and John Ruskin), but also a variety of other urgent voices discussing everything from “the woman question” to imperialism, evolution, religion, aesthetics, and domestic management. On a more lyrical note, we absorb (and sometimes memorize, and sometimes proclaim loudly) poems by Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, Alice Meynell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many others.

Three pieces of work are required, involving a combination of essays and exams, depending on preference. There may be the occasional, brief in-class quiz. Attendance and participation in group discussion are expected parts of this interdisciplinary experience. Questions? Please email Robert Warde: warde@macalester.edu

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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, both a 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 the 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 Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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This course will provide students with a survey of influential works of American literature from the end of the Second World War up to the present day. We will pay special attention to different ways literature engages the powerful historical forces reshaping American culture in the late 20th century. These historical forces include the submerged traumas of World War II, the changing visions of equality inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, the terrors of the Cold War, a growing environmental awareness, and the growth of a media-driven consumer culture. Students can expect to read a generous selection of novels, short stories, poems, critical essays and perhaps a play or two. Texts will likely include works by Kurt Vonnegut, Ishmael Reed, Ursula K. Le Guin, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, Tim O'Brien, Jamaica Kincaid, Junot Diaz and others. Class time will consist of a mix of lectures, discussions and possible film screenings.

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In this survey course, we will trace the development of an African American literary tradition from the end of the 18th century to the turn of the 20th century, from Phillis Wheatley to Charles Chesnutt. We will explore the longstanding project of writing an African American self as both a literary and a political subject. We will read closely, critically, and appreciatively from multiple genres, including poetry, slave narratives, short stories, essays, and novels. We will supplement our exploration of those texts with critical and theoretical readings. Among the themes that will organize the course are: writing as a political act; generic innovation and subversion; literary representations of gendered and classed experiences of blackness in the United States; aesthetic innovation in relation to political and social change; an ongoing vernacular and/or oral tradition within African American arts and letters; the politics of audience; and the limits of literary representation itself. Requirements include: two papers of about 10 pages each, an in-class presentation, class participation, and a final exam. This course fulfills either the U.S. writers of color or the pre-1900 American literature requirement for the English major. It also fulfills the Writing and U.S. Multiculturalism general education requirements. Prerequisite: A 100-level English course other than ENGL 150.

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From teds to skinheads, punks to football hooligans, rastas to rude boys, glam rockers to goths, mods to malcontents, in this seminar we’ll ramble the streets of postwar London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Cardiff to explore the phenomenon of youth subcultures – their origins, social/economic formations, aesthetic articulations, relationship to other (sub)cultures, and role in urban social upheavals and/or transformations of the last sixty years. Through encounters with influential and iconoclastic fiction, drama, film, music, and cultural theory, we will examine: (1) how specific subcultures emerge out of specific cultural spaces and historical moments, (2) how class, race, gender, sexuality, and diasporic histories define subcultural identities, (3) how the expressive “style” of particular subcultures might encode a revolutionary or reactionary politics, and (4) how/when subcultures move beyond stylistic forms into social movements.

With an initial emphasis on theoretical frameworks generated by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS), as well as the critical response to postwar associations between youth cultures and deviance or criminality, we will examine subcultural studies as a scholarly field that combines disciplinary strategies of sociology, anthropology, literature, history, gender studies, performance studies, and musicology, among others. We’ll also approach these subcultures as lived phenomena enacted through music, photography, film, etc. and explore the relation between subcultures and popular youth culture. Though focused on subcultural formations in the UK, we’ll consider transnational subcultural exchanges, specifically how post-WWII British youth cultures relate to and persist in American youth culture today.

Likely Texts: Cultural theory: Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals; Paul Willis, Profane Culture; Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance; Simon Frith, Sociology of Rock; Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style; Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture; Pratibha Parmar essays; Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle; Steve Redhead, Subculture to Clubcultures. Prose: Alan Sillitoe, “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange; Hanif Kureishi short fiction; Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting; John King, The Football Factory; Gautam Malkani, Londonstani. Drama: John Osborne, Look Back in Anger; Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey; Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and F***ing. Photography: Richard Smith/Chris-Steele Perkins, The Teds. Likely Films: Hard Days Night; Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; The Knack; If…; Quadrophenia; Jubilee; My Beautiful Laundrette; Young Soul Rebels; 24 Hour Party People; Filth and the Fury; Velvet Goldmine; Trainspotting; Control. Likely Music: Beatles, Kinks, The Who, Bob Marley, David Bowie, Sex Pistols, Clash, Cockney Rejects, UK Subs, Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, X-Ray Spex, Specials, Joy Division, The Jam, The Oppressed, Smiths, Asian Dub Foundation, New Order, My Bloody Valentine, Cure, Massive Attack, Gorillaz, M.I.A.

Requirements: Journals (20%); Papers (60%); Participation/Quizzes/Presentation (20%)
Required film screenings (day/time TBD)
Prerequisites: At least one prior course in English or HMCS

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Please see PDF course flyer.

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American author Lawrence Weschler argues that “every narrative voice – and especially every nonfiction narrative voice – is a fiction. And the world of writing and reading is divided into those who know this and those who don’t.” Think of Weschler’s assertion as a stone dropped into water. This course explores the concentric ripples widening out from that stone’s point of impact. Through an examination of American memoirs, mostly written over the past two decades, we will reflect on what constitutes a memoir (how many shapes can it assume?) while discussing the form as a literary construct, an expression of self, an articulation of human experience, and a chronicle of particular cultures at particular moments in time. An approximate reading list is: Frank Conroy, Stop-Time, Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club, Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone, Nicole Lea Helget, The Summer of Ordinary Ways, Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter, John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers, Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking, Alice Kaplan, French Lessons, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading, and D. J. Waldie, Holy Land.

We will also look at selected short essays from The Business of Memory, an anthology edited by Charles Baxter.

Four pieces of work are required over the course of the semester, a combination of exams, analytical essays, and personal essays, depending on preference. There will be occasional very brief in-class quizzes which strive to measure each student’s level of passion and commitment to the enterprise at hand. Attendance and participation in group discussion are both expected.

Questions? Please email Robert Warde: warde-at-macalester.edu

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This course examines Shakespeare’s explorations in comedy and tragicomedy, chiefly through the intersecting lines of gender and genre. We’ll examine how Shakespeare explores the volatile dynamics of families, the procreative body, what counts as gender-crossing, the associations of the feminine with comedy and the masculine with tragedy, the workings of embodiment, passion, physical pain, and appetite. We'll study the differential deployments of gender in romantic comedy, history play, tragedy, and tragicomedy. We’ll look at the ways in which racializing processes intersect with dramatic and gender dynamics in the plays, and the ways in which Shakespeare puts pressure on gender categories through dramatic and narrative thinking. We'll examine how Renaissance people understood gendered bodies and psyches, and how Shakespeare scrutinizes these views in his plays.

Works may include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Othello, Antony & Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. We’ll work intensively with feminist and gender analysis of Renaissance culture, through feminist and queer theory, history of women in the period, and literary theory. Course requirements will include two essays of analysis and investigation, occasional brief responses and a final exam. There is no prerequisite for this course.

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Stories about the “rise of the novel” often begin in England in 1719, the year Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s story about a man all alone on an island was not, however, the only bestselling prose fiction to be published in England that year: equally popular then, though now quite neglected, was Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, or The Fatal Enquiry: A Novel. Though “rise of the novel” has come to be told as a history of triumphant masculine innovations, eighteenth-century Britons recognized the novel most frequently as a new form of women’s writing—writing, that is, mostly for women, often by women, and overwhelmingly about women. In this course we will attempt to follow the readers and writers of eighteenth-century England in thinking of the novel in terms of gender. How, we will ask, did the developing form of the novel record, police, critique and create particular forms of gendered identity? How do such literary formations of gender persist for us, or how have they been forgotten? What bits of our own genders do we owe to the formal features of eighteenth-century novels? Our reading list may include Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719-20); Defoe’s Roxana (1724); Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740); Henry Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews (1741-2); Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752); Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1758); and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). Brief readings from non-literary sources, particularly eighteenth-century philosophical texts (e.g., Locke, Hume, Smith) and twentieth-century intellectual history and literary criticism (e.g., Foucault, Taylor, Hunter, Armstrong, Lynch) may also be assigned as our conversation requires. You’ll earn your grade for this course by good-faith participation in class discussion, by writing a brief response paper for every class meeting, and by revising and expanding some of your response papers into formal essays in criticism. This course satisfies the pre-1900 requirement of the English major and the general education requirement in writing.

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London. Post-imperial city shaped by Caribbean, African, and Asian diasporas, rebuilt from the Blitz, now home to over seven million Londoners. In the wake of postwar “Windrush” labor migrations, colonial independence movements, and recent arrivals of political and economic refugees – and despite severe waves of anti-immigration legislation – the cultural cartography of London has been forever transformed.

From the East End to Hounslow, Brixton to Notting Hill, Thames-side metropolis to sprawling suburbs, in this course we’ll consume London’s diasporic fiction, film, art, and music. We’ll encounter iconoclastic novels about and by Londoners (Sam Selvon, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, among others), exploring how these texts map London’s complex social, cultural, psychological, and architectural landscapes, challenging our conceptions of how a novel can look and sound. In addition to works of fiction, we’ll read theory by George Lamming, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer, Pratibha Parmar, Hazel Carby; view films by Gurinder Chadha, Stephen Frears, Isaac Julien, Mike Leigh, and Danny Boyle; consider popular music as cultural movement (reggae, ska, two-tone, desi and bhangra, hip-hop, fusion); and view works of contemporary visual and performance art.

A series of related questions will animate our discussion: What makes a Londoner? How do migratory histories (diasporic, imperial, refugee) and scenes of racial/ethnic/class conflict inflect the language and voices of contemporary British culture? What is the relationship between the postmodern and postcolonial as literary genres, theoretical movements, and historical frameworks? How does cosmopolitanism relate to histories of diaspora? How do representations of gender, sexuality, and youth cultures populate these texts? How have the horror, gothic, gangster, comedy, and war genres shaped late-twentieth century British fiction and visual culture? How have authors, filmmakers, and artists recorded the individual and communal history of diaspora through the lens of social realism, satire, even documentary?

Likely Texts: David Dabydeen, The Intended; Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack; Hanif Kureishi, Buddha of Suburbia; Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary Fren; Gautam Malkani, Londonstani; Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle; Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark; Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses; Sam Selvon, Lonely Londoners; Zadie Smith, White Teeth; Meera Syal, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee; Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting. Likely Films: Gurinder Chadha, Bhaji on the Beach (1993); Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), Dirty Pretty Things (2002); Isaac Julien, Young Soul Rebels (1991); Mike Leigh, Secrets and Lies (1996); Ken Loach, It’s a Free World (2007); Danny Boyle, Trainspotting (1996), 28 Days Later (2002). Requirements: Biweekly journals (25%); Papers (50%); Participation (25%) *Course fulfills College “Internationalism” requirement* *Course fulfills English major requirement in diasporic literature* *Course approved as part of the Urban Studies Concentration*

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There is a risk in studying Vladimir Nabokov, as those who have can attest. At first, you find he is an author who understands the simple pleasures of the novel. He crafts wondrously strange stories in language so arresting that you may find yourself wanting to read passages aloud to passers-by. Then, you may discover within the novel little hints, here and there, of a hidden structure of motifs. The hints are in the synaesthetic colors of sound, in the patterns on the wings of butterflies, in the tremble of first love, in the etymologies of words. Soon the reader has become a detective, linking the recurring motifs, finding clues everywhere. By then it is too late. The risk in studying Nabokov is that you may not see the world in the same way again.

Nabokov’s life is itself remarkable. He was born into Russian nobility, but fled with his family to Europe after the 1917 Revolution. His father took a bullet intended for another. After his education in England, Nabokov moved to Berlin, and then to Paris, where advancing German troops triggered another flight, this time to the United States. He was not only an accomplished poet, novelist, and translator, but also a lepidopterist. Nabokov found and conveyed both the precision of poetry and the excitement of discovery in his art, scientific work, and life. In this course, we will read a representative selection of both his Russian (in translation) and English language novels, including Lolita and Pale Fire, two of the finest novels of the 20th century. There is no prerequisite for this course.

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The research seminar fulfills the capstone experience requirement for English majors. The goal of the Senior Research Seminar is to launch students on a culminating academic experience organized around the supervised independent study of a topic of particular interest and relevance to them. Students should have a working familiarity with the foundational knowledge in the sub-field(s) relevant to their research project, a mastery of close reading and research skills, and a willingness to engage actively in a rigorous, sustained inquiry into an important topic. The faculty sponsor and student participants will “coach” each other through the process of defining a significant literary research question, developing a thesis, designing an appropriate research program, writing a substantial independent research project, and publicly presenting research findings. This Senior Research Seminar will focus on topics in American literature. STUDENTS MUST COME TO THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS WITH A ONE PAGE SUMMARY OF THEIR PROPOSED RESEARCH TOPIC.

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