Class Schedules

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In this introductory English course, we will study an African American literary tradition from some of its earliest works to the present. We will study major genres, including slave narratives and poetry, and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. We will learn to use the tools and vocabulary of literary analysis in order to read closely, critically and appreciatively as we explore how African American writers have constructed individual and collective identities and have experimented with aesthetic form to produce new meanings. Themes of poetics and performance will organize and focus our study. Authors will include: Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, and Claudia Rankine, among others. Requirements include: an in-class oral presentation, a written response to each primary reading, two essays of about 5-7 pages (one of which must be revised), and a final project that will include a written component. This course will fulfill either the foundation course in literature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this discussion-based first-year course, we will study how literature represents extreme human experiences. As we read a wide range of texts, we will ask ourselves aesthetic, political, and ethical questions: Must literary form stretch itself to represent joy or misery? How can an author help us to understand the end of a world or of a people? Must writers invent new forms when faced with unprecedented traumas? Can apparently opposed extremes, such as joy and misery, have common sources? How might utopia become dystopia? How can we imagine environmental apocalypse so as to avoid causing it? How might the current political climate in the U.S. contribute to our concern with the extreme and its representation? We will read primarily fiction, but also poetry and nonfiction to investigate whether other genres and literary modes work differently at, and with, the extreme. We will also view films and listen to music to discover whether other media may offer alternative, and possibly better, ways to represent ecstasy and apocalypse, joy and misery. Texts, among others, that we will study: The Road, A Handmaid’s Tale, Herland, Life on Mars, and Silent Spring.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this class, we'll enter into a study of the novel by examining how authors have constructed their own fictional versions of pop stars over the years, with an eye towards discussing how these imaginary pop stars reflect and/or subvert the cultural contexts in which they were created. We'll look both at novels that imagine pop stars from the ground up, and at novels that fictionalize real-life stars, reading widely from authors such as Zadie Smith, E.T.A. Hoffman, Colette, and Marlon James. We'll ask what exactly constitutes a pop star, and examine how the novel form has evolved alongside historical and contemporary ideas about fame.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This introduction to the study of the novel pays special attention to the genre's history and to the cultural and political significance of individual texts. Authors and texts will vary according to instructor, but all sections will consider the development of the novel across time, include a range of author identities and styles, and provide instruction in intensive close reading and literary analysis. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on its web page for the content of individual courses and sections.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will focus on the basic elements of creative writing. You will be asked to read and discuss work by major writers, to critique each other’s work, and to write multiple drafts of original works of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout the semester our focus will be on helping you to discover and nurture your creative voice, and then express that voice with force and conviction. Authors under consideration will include the Grimm Brothers, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, and Layli Long Soldier. All literary genres—sonnets, slam poems, personal essays, narrative podcasts, kitchen sink realism, and intergalactic space operas—are welcome here.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What makes a story move, a poem sing, an essay say? How do writers get from blank pages to thinking, feeling readers? In this first foray in creative writing, we’ll begin to explore the huge range of things language can do, and try a few of them out ourselves. Together we’ll read like writers, write like readers, and work the muscles of our imaginations. Our concentrated study of a range of texts will introduce you to the mechanics of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Frequent writing exercises will help develop your technique, and prepare you to compose a handful of longer, more thought-out pieces. Discussing your classmates’ writing, you’ll also train to be good literary citizens. The course will consist, in other words, of serious play and playful work. Come prepared, and by the end, you’ll know more about the practice of literature, your own process as a writer, and possibly yourself.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What makes a story move, a poem sing, an essay say? How do writers get from blank pages to thinking, feeling readers? In this first foray in creative writing, we’ll begin to explore the huge range of things language can do, and try a few of them out ourselves. Together we’ll read like writers, write like readers, and work the muscles of our imaginations. Our concentrated study of a range of texts will introduce you to the mechanics of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Frequent writing exercises will help develop your technique, and prepare you to compose a handful of longer, more thought-out pieces. Discussing your classmates’ writing, you’ll also train to be good literary citizens. The course will consist, in other words, of serious play and playful work. Come prepared, and by the end, you’ll know more about the practice of literature, your own process as a writer, and possibly yourself.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing, whether in the form of a story, a poem, or a late-night email begging your professor for an extension, is always a creative act. Words arranged on a page create meaning, and in this class we will examine and practice the choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this mainly through the lens of poetry and fiction, writing and critiquing our own poems and stories and reading work by a wide range of writers including Ada Limón, Agha Shahid Ali, George Saunders, Carmen Maria Machado, and even JK Rowling. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel empowered in your creative work to a) Say what you mean to say, b) How you mean to say it, c) With the desired emotional impact.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course surveys roughly 1000 years of English literature from Beowulf to Paradise Lost. What’s old, middle, and early modern English? What’s a lyric, epic, and romance? When did drama acquire its characteristic structure? How did epochal events like the invention of the printing press, the Reformation, the union of Scotland and England under James VI and I, and the English Civil War alter the nature and practice of writing and reading? In addition to the study of poetic and dramatic voice, form, context, we’ll explore the impact of medieval and early modern literature on modern notions of interiority, intersubjectivity, embodiment, gender, sexuality, and race. This course can satisfy either the Medieval or the Renaissance category in the pre-1900 requirement of the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Against the swirling backdrop of political discourses about women in the Islamic world, this course will engage with feminist and postcolonial debates through literary works by Muslim women writers. The course will begin with an exploration of key debates about women's agency and freedom, the Islamic headscarf, and Qur'anic hermeneutics. With this in mind, we will turn to the fine details of literature and poetry by Muslim women. How do these authors constitute their worlds? How are gendered subjectivities constructed? And how do the gender politics of literary texts relate to the broader political and historical contexts from which they emerge? Themes will include an introduction to Muslim poetesses and Arabic poetic genres, the rise of the novel in the Arabic speaking world, and Muslim women's literary production outside of the Middle East: from Senegal to South Asia, and beyond.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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, novels, and a memoir. 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; 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, brief response papers to each new reading, an in-class presentation, class participation, and a final exam. This course fulfills either the literature by U.S. writers of color or the pre-1900 American literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The decades leading up to the Civil War was an era of remarkable literary innovation, experimentation, and expression in the United States. This era also witnessed the emergence of radical political, religious, and social movements in response to racial, economic, and gender inequalities and exclusions of American institutions. Writers directly and indirectly affiliated with these social movements, including Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Jacobs, among others, explored the contradictions and possibilities of American culture and identity. In this course we will read major works by these writers to consider how they imagined and practiced forms of dissent from and resistance to conventions and traditions. Our goal will be to understand the period itself and to comprehend its pervasive influence on the literary and intellectual culture in the U.S. and throughout the world.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing poetry, building on the work done in ENGL 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. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This advanced workshop course focuses in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing fiction, building on the work done in ENGL 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. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor, with the approval of the Chair. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

“Everything has been figured out,” wrote Sartre, “except how to live.” How do we live, and what keeps us living? Michel Montaigne had one answer to these questions when he climbed the stairs of his castle turret five hundred years ago to compose what he called an essai . In French, essayer is “to attempt.” Not persuade, not win over, not opine or enchant. Attempt. We do not answer the question of how to live when we essay; we live the question. And the question brings us to life. Indeed, here are some questions we’ll live in class with the help of brilliant essayists who came before us. Do gifted athletes bring us closer to God? Is it possible to mind-meld with weasels? Can you get stoned at Disney World? Will men ever stop explaining things to Rebecca Solnit? The sky is beyond the limit in this most flexible and innovative literary form -- or beyond the sky, if you’re, say, writing about corporatized space travel. We’ll learn creative research skills and teach each other how to interview. The only limits here are your curiosity and time. As W.H. Auden puts it, “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” Come muddle through the world as it is, in all its heartbreak, grotesquerie, and glory. Come say the unsayable. Come write yourself down.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This is a hybrid course that can count as a literature or Crafts elective: we’ll write both analytically and creatively, and class time will include both discussion and workshop. Each week, we’ll read 20th century poets, respond to them in verse, and consider how other 21st century poets do, too. We’ll imagine literary history as one long, lively conversation between colorful characters, full of shout-outs, clap-backs, and meaningful silences. This approach is particularly germane to 20th century US poetry, where citation became integral to the artform, and different artistic circles often overlapped. Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens once traded drunken insults in Key West. Adrienne Rich urged Elizabeth Bishop to write about being a gay woman, and Bishop urged Robert Lowell to stop airing his dirty laundry in poems. James Wright regularly pranked Robert Bly, and hung out with John Berryman at Macalester. We’ll not only listen in on these conversations, but join them ourselves. This class will welcome all skill levels and approaches—verse-o-phobes and verse-o-philes, artists and scholars alike. There’s no better way to learn to read or write poetry than by seeing how other poets have, forging movements like modernism and Confessionalism by speaking to (and stealing from) one another.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

“Kafkaesque” is a word that has become part of everyday vocabulary in inumerous languages, used by millions of people who might or not have ever read Kafka. Evidently, the work of this German-speaking Jewish author from Prague captured something about modern life that no word could express except one deriving from his own name. This is probably why ‘everybody knows’ the word and ‘nobody can explain’ it. To understand therefore the “Kafkaesque” is to understand at once Kafka’s work and modern life, at least as we know it since the early twentieth century. To do so, in this course we are going to read closely some of Kafka’s stories and excerpts from his novels, as well as some influential commentaries on both his work and the conditions of modernity. We shall also have the chance to see and compare adaptations of his work (including his diaries) in the media of graphic novel and film. All readings will be in English. The course requires no pre-knowledge and is appropriate for all level students. This is a core course toward the Critical Theory Concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A historical accident has led to the creation and use of ‘Indian’ in very different geographies—North America and South Asia. We will study what happens when these diverse cultural and political depictions of ‘Indian’ are juxtaposed. Through an intersection of gender with nation, race, class, and sexuality, we will discuss the connections between the concepts of native, ancient, and modern, nation and citizenship, hyphenated and hybrid identities, global cultural consumption, to name some issues. Writers included are Linda LeGarde Grover, Louise Erdrich, Shashi Deshpnde, and Arundhati Roy, among others.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course brings together discourses that have remained somewhat parallel and unrelated--Whiteness Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It is based on the premise that 'whiteness' as an academic/social framework stems from and is intertwined with social and political identity-based movements (feminist, critical race, etc.). In other words, studies of the intersection of gender, race, class, and nation initiated in the post-colonizing imagination seeks to shake up paradigms of power, and whiteness studies shares in this effort. This course explores where and how the notion of 'whiteness' converges and diverges from post-colonialism.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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. Prerequisite(s): Prior internationalist and/or theoretical coursework strongly recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What makes a good story? Your answer to that question may depend on where you’re from, or when you were born, or the stories your grandmother heard when she was growing up. In this creative writing workshop course, we will explore narrative structures across a variety of time periods and cultures. Topics may include Aristotelian tragedy, Freytag’s Pyramid, Edgar Allen Poe’s single effect theory, the Hero’s Journey, Kishōtenketsu or the four-act structure of Chinese fairy tales, the nested narratives of The Arabian Nights, non-linear approaches in Latin American fiction, and the place-driven emphasis of stories from Central Africa. Throughout, our goal as a class will be to expand our understanding of how stories can be told. By the end of the semester, every student will have written multiple drafts of two original works of short fiction.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Travel, globalization, capitalism, class politics, feminism, liberalism, and the spread of democracy are typically associated with contemporary political moments. But they all gained strength in part through nineteenth-century rhetorics of race. This course will interrogate notions of race as they were being invented—exploring how they were popularized and used to dominate, how they failed, and how they were resisted in 19th-century Britain. We will read canonical and non-canonical texts, including works by writers of color, visual images, scientific theories, fiction, and non-fiction. Considering locations throughout the British empire, we will explore intersections of race with the history of British slavery, colonial settlement, gender politics, enfranchisement, war, and religion. The class will collaboratively produce a digital final project: a full scholarly edition—including appendices, annotations, and a scholarly introduction—of a nineteenth-century work written by a person of color. Course counts for 19th century British literature distribution requirement.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Want to write something long and substantial, but don't exactly know what it's going to be about yet? No problem. You're right where you should be. This workshop seminar will provide advanced creative writers with the opportunity to embark on a semester-long project in the genre of their choice: a poetry chapbook, a novella, a collection of essays or short stories, a screenplay, or perhaps some combination of forms. After you register for the class, I will ask you to tell me a little bit about your project via email. I will then assign texts tailored to your work and the work of others. The class will culminate in a presentation and a revised and finished project.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This introductory English course covers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer literature in America. We will examine how American culture and politics have shaped and been shaped by LGBTQ writing and art. We will look at historical texts that helped to create queer and trans identities in America and appreciate intersections of race, ethnicity, and class as we move into current work. And we'll explore what it means to queer a text, a life and a culture. Requirements include written responses to reading, two 5-7 page essays (one of which must be revised), and a final project with a live presentation. Authors we might read include James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Allison Bechdel, Leslie Feinberg, Dorothy Allison, Rachel Pollack, Charlie Jane Anders, Malinda Lo, Kai Cheng Thom, Parvez Sharma, Junauda Petrus.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Shakespeare has been called the “star of poets” and “wonder of the stage.” How do his plays delight, puzzle, and instill “wonder”? How did he transform Renaissance poetry? In this course, we will focus on some of Shakespeare’s most enduring works, including the Sonnets, Twelfth Night, Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. Our study comprises class discussion, essays, presentations, and performances (watching professional productions and performing scenes from the plays). We will analyze Shakespeare’s formal and stylistic technique. We will examine issues of character, action, and plot. For centuries, Shakespeare has inspired writers to perfect their craft and pursue their creative ambitions. You are invited to participate in this exciting and evolving literary tradition.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Virginia Woolf noted that “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache… let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. He is forced to coin words himself.” This linguistic poverty has never stopped us from trying to describe what it’s like to inhabit a human body, coining new words to get at what it is to be embodied. This course interrogates how our language for ourselves has morphed over the last century as the world has become increasingly technologized and the boundaries of the human and nonhuman have become less and less clear. We’ll pay close attention to the way the body can be constructed to uphold and reinforce categories of race, gender, sexuality, and ability, dictating who or what is considered fully human, and we’ll investigate how authors of the past century have bucked our normative images of what a human body looks like or feels like. We’ll read everything from modernist classics by Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein to Afrofuturist texts by Ishmael Reed and N.K. Jemisin and contemporary poetry and fiction by authors like Danez Smith and Carmen Maria Machado. You’ll practice building arguments based on close reading in two 5-7 page papers as well as frequent short response assignments, and you’ll have the opportunity to engage the ideas of this course creatively (if you wish) in a culminating project.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

The definition of literary theory—the lenses through which we interpret a work of literature—belies the contentious debates that have shaped how we make meaning from what we read. Philosophers, cultural theorists, and literary critics develop new lenses to rectify the inadequacies of previous approaches; these lenses spark debate that lead to even more modes of interpretation. In this course, we will delve into some of the most influential controversies that have shaped the way we understand literature. Possible readings include works by T. S. Eliot, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Edward Said, Aimé Césaire, Donna Haraway, and others. The semester will culminate with an extended close reading of one novel—like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—through the theoretical lens of your choice. We won’t be able to survey the whole of literary theory this semester, but we will delve deeply into a few of the major debates that have shaped our process of literary interpretation.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course focuses on the Victorian period in England, critically examining how food and other consumable products create shared experiences through which culture is produced and understood. Considering consumption in a wide range of ways—from dinner-party etiquette to commercial efforts to create desires for conspicuous consumption—we will discuss ideas of taste and explore the cultural meanings of food in the nineteenth century. We will read a social problem novel from the “hungry forties,” indulge in famous literary feasts that display the excesses of the booming 1860s, and consider the relationships between food, gendered ideals, and sexuality. Non-fiction from the period provides background on everything from working conditions in factories to Victorian arguments about prostitutes, all in the service of trying to regulate consumption. Theoretical analyses of industrial capitalism, literary circulation, and consumer cultures will frame some discussions; hands-on experiments with 19th century recipes will frame others.This course fulfills the 18th/19th-century British literature period requirement on the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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 Kate Chopin. This course fulfills the 18th/19th century literature requirement for the English major. (4 credits)

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this survey course, we will trace an African American literary tradition from 1900 to the present. We will read a wide range of genres, including drama, poetry (both print and performance), and novels. Our journey across this rich tradition will be shaped by concepts of poetics and performance. Our study will also be informed by activisms both past and present. Among the authors we will study are: W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, and Danez Smith. Requirements include: two 7 to 10-page essays, in-class presentations, brief written responses to the readings, engagement with relevant social media, and a final reflection essay. This course fulfills the English major requirement of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This creative nonfiction course will focus on the elements of long-form narrative journalism, including both print and audio storytelling. Students will learn to write stories that are clear and compelling as well as factual and precise. They will study the differences between writing for the eye and the ear. The course covers identifying strong story subjects, conducting interviews and structuring a narrative for maximum impact. Students write frequently, edit each other, and receive detailed suggestions on their writing from the instructors. This course will be team-taught by Curtis Gilbert and Annie Baxter, audio journalists who’ve worked at both the local and national level. Curtis and Annie have deep experience reporting daily news and documentary-length work. Curtis also brings expertise in accountability-focused journalism as a correspondent for APM Reports, an investigative unit at American Public Media. And Annie, a former reporter at the national show Marketplace, more recently has moved into podcasting and is currently the editor of two podcasts

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This is a course about adaptation, translation, and the relationship between drama and music. It is also a course about the history and politics of these two art forms. Like many people in the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Verdi adored Shakespeare. He adapted three of Shakespeare’s plays—Macbeth, Othello, and The Merry Wives of Windsor—for the Italian operatic stage. Today, Verdi’s Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff are beloved and frequently produced, yet few grasp the revolutionary spirit behind Verdi’s adaptations let alone the political undertow of Shakespeare’s texts. Using “Adaptation” as our theoretical framework, we’ll tackle the problem of translation, reception, and the politics of art by asking such questions as: for whom was this art created and under what cultural, religious, and political conditions? How does the text imagine a multiplicity of subjectivities (inflected by racial, gender, and religious difference)? How do these fictional subjectivities challenge the expectations of audiences? What national and international artistic traditions influenced Shakespeare and Verdi? What is gained or lost through adaptation?

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

We often regard setting as one of “the lesser angels” of literary craft but, as novelist Eudora Welty reminds us, place is an essential “source of knowledge” for writers of all stripes, a fundamental “confiner and definer” of what we do. Even the Iliad, poet Patrick Kavanaugh writes, was made from “a local row.” In this creative writing class, we’ll consider how a variety of texts—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film—rely on place as an engine for story and song, and use their insights to propel our own writing. Our inquiry will range widely in terms of form and genre, encompassing realism, sci-fi, satire, ode, elegy, personal essay and travelogue. Coursework will include regular reading, reading responses, writing exercises, and workshop. The semester will culminate in a multimedia writing project inspired by a site in the Twin Cities. Likely texts include Tommy Orange, Karen Russell, Angela Morales, Ross Gay, Sally Wen Mao, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, and local writers like Andy Sturdevant and Lesley Arimah. Prerequisite: Introduction to Creative Writing (ENGL 150),

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course, team taught by Matthew Burgess (English/Creative Writing) and Nanette Goldman(Classical Mediterranean and Middle East), will address Homer's Odyssey from several perspectives. Students will be introduced to the poem’s historical context, social purpose, and original composition. They will also learn to analyze the text from a novelist’s point-of-view, focusing on narrative elements like plot structure and characterization. Projects will be of two types, literary analysis and creative writing. By the end of the semester, students will have gained a far richer understanding not only of The Odyssey, but of the writing process itself.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

As a literary form, "the novella" is often defined by what it is not: too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel. In this class, however, we will study the novella as a discrete form unto itself, perfectly suited to read in one or two immersive sittings and uniquely able to develop story and character with elegant concision. We will explore the history, architecture, possibilities and delights of fictional works that range from 15,000 to 40,000 words, reading novellas in many genres including literary realism, horror, and fantasy, from authors such as Victor LaValle, Samanta Schweblin, and Herman Melville. Over the course of the semester students will write and workshop their own ~20,000 word novella, with emphasis on character, structure, and sentence-level craft.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What can a short text do that a long text can’t? This course will look for answers to this question by reading and discussing short prose works from the Renaissance to the 20th century. We will pursue the history of the novella—which is not a short novel but a literary form in its own right—from its emergence in the Italian Renaissance (Boccaccio) to its modern adaptations in German romanticism (Kleist) and French realism (Flaubert). We will explore the complexities of the essay from Michel de Montaigne, who created the genre in the 16th century, through Francis Bacon, whose scientific method relied on it, to its use as a hybrid form between science and literature in the early twentieth century (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud). And we will focus on the form that epitomizes the rhetorical virtue of brevitas: the aphorism, from the 17th century moralists (La Rochefoucauld), through the secular pietism of the 18th century (Lichtenberg), romanticism (Goethe), the 19th century’s answers to nihilism (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), to the crypticism of Kafka, the irony of Brecht, and the uncompromising pessimism of Adorno. Discussion questions will include: what are the literary and rhetorical effects of brevity? How can words gain by being few? What happens when texts get longer? How is literature a form of knowledge and science a form of literature? Requirements: 3 mid-length papers with revisions; one class presentation. Taught in English, but texts will be made available to those who can and would like to read them in the original.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will investigate the current flourishing of African American detective fiction. Guided by the premise that genres perform particular “cultural work,” we will assess the aesthetic and political work being performed by contemporary detective fiction by authors such as Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, and Attica Locke. We will develop historical contexts for our investigation by reading late 19th and early 20th century examples of each of the major types of detective fiction: the classic, the hardboiled, and the cozy. We will also read modern African American detective fiction by Pauline Hopkins, Rudolph Fisher, and Chester Himes. We will view several film adaptations, as well, examining the aesthetic and political shifts that can occur when a literary work is transformed via another medium. Requirements for the course include: presenting on one of our texts, writing a brief response paper for most of our primary readings, and writing one 5-page paper, one 7-10-page paper, and a final short reflection. This course fulfills the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Is race a modern phenomenon or did it exist in the Middle Ages too? What makes something racial? If race is a social construct, is it real? Is religious difference the same thing as racial difference? What is race and why does it have such a hold on us? In this course, we will turn to the unlikely site of medieval literature to think through these questions and come to a deeper understanding of how and why racial ideologies are formed. We will read key pieces of theory and criticism on race alongside medieval romances, travel narratives, sagas, and maps. Students will explore how medieval authors represented racial difference, how race mattered to their conceptions of the world, and how racial formations shifted across historical and geographic contexts. As we think about how literature produces racial ideologies, we will query what the study of race in the Middle Ages can teach us about race in our own time. Students will practice their skills of literary analysis through weekly response papers, develop their research skills by compiling an annotated bibliography, sharpen their skills of public speaking and collaboration by delivering a group oral presentation, and demonstrate their skills of complex synthesis through a final paper of 8-10 pages. This course fulfills the medieval period requirement for English majors.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The story goes like this. While performing Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus—a play featuring spell-casting, necromancy, and other devilish arts—the actors noticed that “there was one devil too many amongst them.” They stopped the play; the audience panicked. Whether a true story or not (the anecdote comes down to us through a seventeenth-century source), it captures one of the “certainties” of the period: that demons, devils, witches, and other things of darkness are a part of the here and now. In this course, we explore sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries tales of the demonic. At the same time, we examine how authors used the public’s fascination with the supernatural to explore the pressing issues of the day: religious controversies regarding freewill and election, political nightmares of state tyranny and oppression, and social crises surrounding the vanishing culture of hospitality and charity. Hence, just as characters strive to see beyond appearances and outward show, so we shall investigate the religious, political, and legal debates out of which the texts arise. Central to our study are the major works of early modern English literature such as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and lesser known texts such as The Witch of Edmonton, The Discovery of Witchcraft, and King James I’s Demonology. No prior knowledge of conjuring is presumed or required. Satisfies the Renaissance period requirement.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This capstone course for the Literature Path is the culminating academic experience of the major. The course consists of three interlocking objectives. The first goal is to provide students with the opportunity to develop an original research project that reflects their deepest aesthetic interests and ethical commitments. Working closely with a faculty member and a small group of peers, students will develop projects that display rigorous literary scholarship and methodological inventiveness. The second goal is to provide instruction in advanced methods of research by studying influential critical approaches from the early twentieth century to the present. Specific theories and methods will be determined in consultation with the instructor. Past courses have emphasized psychoanalysis, post-Marxist criticism, gender, queer, and feminist theory, phenomenology, critical race theory, black feminist theory, post-colonial criticism, poetics, law and human rights, and aesthetics. The final goal is to train students to become advocates of their research agenda. Students will learn to lecture and lead discussion on relevant readings and to share their research with the wider intellectual community in a form that reflects the spirit of the project. Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s (excluding 101 or 150), plus one literature course at the 200- or 300- level. Capstone courses are intended to be a culminating experience for the major. Students without Senior status will need instructor permission to enroll.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this creative writing seminar, we will read a variety of poetry chapbooks and collections in order to explore how we might compose our own. How do we identify the obsessions and aesthetics inherent in our work and then complicate them over the span of a book? How might we cultivate poetic lineages in our writing that will contribute to our artistic growth? How do we theorize our poetics for ourselves? For an audience? Throughout the course, we will consider these questions and others while workshopping poems, discussing craft, and speaking with poets who have recently published first books. We will also visit publishers and archives around the Twin Cities so that we might expand our understanding of small press culture and of the print book as both artifact and experience. Readings for the course might include work from Natalie Diaz, sam sax, Mai Der Vang, Elizabeth Bishop, Safia Elhillo, Li-Young Lee, Su Hwang, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Garcia, Melissa Cundieff, Ocean Vuong, and Carl Phillips. The course will culminate with each student producing a chapbook of poems and a presentation. After registering for the class, students should email the instructor to begin a dialogue about how their interests might be reflected in the course readings.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials