Class Schedules

What is America? This introductory English course will interrogate that question by focusing on contemporary U.S. literature by writers of color and from other traditionally underrepresented groups. We will read Native American poetry, African-American detective novels, short stories by Vietnam vets, and plays about drug addiction. To expand our understanding of what literature can be, we will also discuss Beyonce's music videos, Ms. Marvel comics, the recent romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, and the immigration video game Papers, Please. Course requirements include two essays of about 5-7 pages each (one of which must be revised), and a final project that will include a written component. This course fulfills either the foundation course in literature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

We often take for granted a period of human life commonly called adolescence, the teenage years, or young adulthood, and yet we have a difficult time clearly defining—and living—this transitional stage in life. When does childhood end and adulthood begin? Legal, medical, psychological, and personal definitions of adolescence conflict. What are the defining traits, dangers, and expectations associated with it? How do we see ourselves in that stage of life, and how do others see us? How do race, gender, and sexuality affect how we experience young adulthood? To address these questions, we will explore early adulthood in literature across genres, from early modern drama to modern novels and poetry. Students may read work by Joyce Carol Oates, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gary Soto, among others. We will also focus on building academic writing skills.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

It’s entirely possible for one to analyze the meanings of most texts—their themes, morals, historical significances, and so on—without paying much attention to the formal and linguistic elements that produce such meanings. Fortunately, poems make this difficult and ask us to attend more closely to how language does the things that it does. How, for example, can a single word generate multiple, even conflicting, interpretations concerning its significance? How do the rhetorical devices foregrounded in poetry—such as metaphor, metonymy, apostrophe, and personification—structure the modes of relation through which we organize our lives? How do various arrangements of words move us to tears, open new worlds, instigate actions, and even make nothing happen (as W. H. Auden famously poeticizes the power of poetry)? This introductory course will take up such questions as we develop our abilities to read, write, and think as students of literature. While our primary focus will be on learning how to engage with the subtleties of poetic language, this engagement will lead us to consider the broader philosophical, political, and cultural issues that our readings raise, concerning, for example, the place of poetry in modern life, the relation between poetry and politics, and the very question of what poetry is. This course counts as a foundation course toward the English major, but all students are welcome and no prior knowledge or experience is expected.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What relationships exist between theater, current events, and the public? From the Renaissance requirement that all plays had to be vetted and approved by the royal court censor to the kerfuffle over the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton delivering an address directly to then-VP-elect Mike Pence in the audience, theater has always been political. It has been a means of offering public commentary, challenging or upholding norms, voicing a protest, or offering an alternative view that presents a world the writers would prefer to live in. In ENGL 136, we will read plays—both classic and modern—as literary texts and talk about the craft that went into their writing. We will also take field trips to see several plays at different theaters in Minneapolis and St. Paul; we will study theater reviews and write some of our own; we talk about technical aspects of productions (like lighting and costumes); and we will think, talk, and write about the relationship between the dramatic arts and current events. As part of our larger goal of putting theater in context, the "current" events we study will include Greek, Renaissance, and Victorian ideas about gender roles, 1950s McCarthyism, recent debates about the intentions of the founders who framed our Constitution, imperial exploration and exploitation of racial others, public debates about sexuality and identity, and many other issues.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course we will read some of the most popular novels ever written in the United States. They will be heart-wrenchingly beautiful, tear-jerkingly sad, gut-bustingly funny, and seriously weird. We will discuss love, death, the meaning of life, beauty, cruelty, freaks, war, and comedy.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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. Note that this course must be completed at Macalester as a prerequisite for the further study of creative writing in the English Department.

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 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, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, and Alison Bechdel. All literary genres—sonnets, slam poems, personal essays, narrative podcasts, kitchen sink realism, and intergalactic space operas—are welcome here. Also, please know that this course must be completed at Macalester as a prerequisite for the further study of creative writing in the English Department.

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

In this course we will dive right into the study of creative writing by reading and writing poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and personal essays. We will study how published authors craft their pieces, how they convey sensation and emotion, and how they artfully tell a story. Along the way, you’ll try your hand at each literary form we study. This is the basic template you can expect on a day-to-day basis. But, beyond this relatively simple pattern, what I hope will happen this semester is that you’ll lose yourself entirely to the daring act of creating literature. I hope you’ll disappear into what John Gardener calls the “vivid and continuous dream.” I hope you’ll use your growing knowledge of writing technique and literary history to say something fearless and artful about the world around you. And I hope you will see that what you write matters. Great creative writing aspires to more than just a pleasant diversion from life. At its best, it directly engages with life and even tries to change it. We look to stories, poems, and essays to give us an experience in language that we’ve never had before, to deepen our knowledge of the world, to allow us into the hearts and minds of others. I hope this semester will be a window into that experience for you.

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

In this introductory English course, we will study an African American literary tradition from some of its earliest works in the 19th century to the present. We will study major genres and movements in that tradition, from slave narratives to slam poetry, and from the Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturism. We will learn to use the tools and vocabulary of literary analysis in order to read (or listen) 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—and even to imagine new forms of the human. Authors (and performers) include: Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Danez Smith, and Janelle Monáe, 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:
U.S. Identities and Differences
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In the early decades of the twentieth century, women writers recorded a rapidly changing, revolutionary world: WWI and WWII, the popular rise of feminism and the invention of birth control, increased travel and transportation, psychoanalysis and trauma studies, new technologies such as snapshot photography and cinema, the experimental avant-garde movement in art, and new ideas about architecture and domestic space. Most importantly, they pushed the boundaries of the literary establishment, championing new ways of understanding race, gender, human sexuality, and equal rights for women. In this course, you will read works by modernist women writers alongside groundbreaking theories of feminist embodiment. In addition to studying texts by women such as Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, Anaïs Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Bowen, we will study other modernist art forms and take a class trip the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

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. The spring 2019 offering of this course counts for the writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an introduction to the interdiscipline of literature and human rights. We will read a series of beautiful and emotionally wrenching novels, treating them simultaneously as aesthetic artifacts and case studies in human rights. We will discuss the urgent political questions and philosophical paradoxes that define human rights, paying special attention to theories of trauma, race, empathy, evil, gender, disability, torture, genocide, and slavery. We will seek to better understand how spectators of suffering develop—or fail to develop—empathy for strangers by also examining how they can so palpably feel for the dreams, desires, and dignity of fictional persons. In The Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney describes the tyrant Alexander Pherӕus, “from whose eyes a tragedy well made and represented drew abundance of tears; who without all pity had murdered infinite numbers, and some of his own blood, so as he that was not ashamed to make matters for tragedies, yet could not resist the sweet violence of a tragedy.” What is the line that separates those who are merely moved from those who are moved to act? Authors will include Julia Alvarez, John Edgar Wideman, Chris Abani, Chang-rae Lee, Dave Eggers, Ted Chiang, Sophocles, Louise Erdrich, Thomas Glave, Colson Whitehead, Ursula Le Guin, Richard Powers, and Edwidge Danticat. This course fills the Framework requirement for the Concentration in Human Rights and Humanitarianism.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

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. This course fulfills the 18th/19th century literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What is home? What place can we call it home? Who has the right to have a home? Does this right apply to all life—humans, birds, animals, plants, rivers and mountains? What does home mean to people and all life in transit: migrants, immigrants, asylum-seekers, war, economic and environmental refugees? Should we apply these questions to butterflies, birds, fish, caribous, elephants, plants, and planet earth alike? How is migration related to the instincts of survival? How is it related/situated in space, location, cartography, maps, hippocampus, memory, language, poetry, stories? In this workshop, we’ll explore the concept of Home, in transit and permanent, physical and spiritual, historical and present, biological and linguistic, hippocampus and poetry, memory and story... We’ll read classic and contemporary poetry on the theme of “Home and Migration,” from Odyssey, Shijing(Book of Songs), “Genesis” (Testament), to contemporary poets Sherman Alexies, Allison Hedgecoke, Patricia Smith, Tyehimba Jess, Eduardo Galeano, and Gary Snyder, and to books on The Origin and Evolution of Earth, and on natural and industrial disasters: Facing the Wave, A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami…Through the masters’ stories/poetry, we’ll find our own place called Home, and write our own story of home, migration and transformation, in prose poetry, collage and lyrical poetic forms, a a chapbook (10-12 poems on the theme), or for returning poets, as a book manuscript.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

When we watch movies and TV shows, it’s hard sometimes to remember how these works are actually born. Before the actors say a word, or the post-production team adds that perfect shade of pink to the sunset, a film or show lives solely on the page. It lives as a piece of writing created in the mind of a storyteller. No matter what happens later, it always begins as a reading experience. In this course, we will concentrate on every aspect of that initial and vital stage of creating visual stories. We will study produced scripts to see how they master visual storytelling, pitch perfect dialogue, and satisfying structure. While there is no paint-by-numbers formula for a perfect screenplay or teleplay, there is a constantly evolving form full of principles the greatest writers have relied on since the birth of these mediums. Throughout the semester we will study this form in depth then we will workshop your developing scripts with an eye toward making them ideal stories for the screen, both large and small.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

The quote, “plays are meant to be seen, not read” means that playwrights must write to create an experience for their audience. This class is focused on the fundamentals of developing a play, while also learning how to take full advantage of theatrical elements that can help enhance their story on stage. Students will read a variety of new and contemporary plays with different storytelling techniques that embrace the unlimited possibilities of theatricality, and exemplify why we write for the stage. In this course students will develop a “playwriting toolkit” while exploring their artistic interests through a series of time-bound conventions: the 1-minute, 5-minute, 10-minute, and ultimately one-act form. In-class exercises and prompts, and small-group workshopping and reading will challenge writers' development. A mid-term and final play reading series will allow students to hear their work read in a supportive public setting.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Taught by writer and journalist Stephen Smith (Executive Editor and Host of APM Reports, the national documentary series from American Public Media). This course will focus on creating vivid, economical prose as a foundation for nonfiction writing. The fundamental elements of narrative journalism will be explored. Students will do research and interviews for print journalism pieces. Students will write frequently, will edit each other, and will receive detailed suggestions on their writing from the instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What we now call Romanticism—that brief explosion of literature, culture, and politics that began with the 1789 French Revolution and more or less ended in the mid-1820s—may well be the most momentous period in British literary history. A wide range of political movements familiar to us today find their genesis in these few tumultuous decades, including radicalism, anarchism, abolitionism, nonviolent resistance, women’s rights, and animal rights. Arguably, a number of our contemporary ideas about literature and the arts emerged during this time as well, as did many of the frameworks through which we understand our own possibilities for social change. In this course we’ll study the literature of the Romantic period and consider how its political projects are related to its revolutions in poetics and aesthetics. We’ll be interested in how writers reimagine the French Revolution’s failed promises of liberté, égalité, fraternité, and justice, particularly in light of the persistence of slavery, patriarchy, and class-based inequality. Rather than taking these political concepts as ahistorical ideals to which we should continue to aspire, however, we’ll inspect how exactly they’re constructed in Romantic texts and—with the help of poststructuralist, feminist, and Afro-pessimist theorists—query their contradictions as well as their broader functions and implications. We’ll also be especially interested in how Romantic literary works that might appear to have little to do with politics nevertheless enact forms of resistance to things as they are and register a desire for things to be otherwise. To these ends, our course will approach Romanticism not only as a literary-historical period, but also as a poetics that defies historicization and as a resource for thinking through our own political present. Authors include Jane Austen, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth. We’ll also read theoretical works by Sara Ahmed, Jacques Derrida, Mary Favret, Sara Guyer, Saidiya Hartman, Barbara Johnson, Paul de Man, Marjorie Levinson, Tilottama Rajan, Rei Terada, and Frank B. Wilderson III. This course will fulfill the 18th/19th century literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A historically small area of Ireland—called the Pale—was held under British rule in the late-medieval period. To be “beyond the pale” is to cross over some invisible, often arbitrary, boundary, to be inconveniently and antisocially out of line. Many postcolonial Irish and Caribbean writers have been forced to exist beyond the pale politically and in terms of their access (or lack of it) to the literary establishment. This idiomatic connection to Ireland has a more concrete resonance in Jamaica, where the Irish are the second largest ethnic group after people of African descent, and many of Jamaica’s place names derive from Irish locations. Taking up these fascinating links, this course will explore the significance of Irish-Caribbean literary and cultural connections in visual art, dance (live Irish musicians and a céilí dance instructor will visit our class!), poetry, theatre, cine-essay documentary film, and fiction. We will ask what it means to be from a small island in a globalizing world by reading authors such as Claude McKay, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Marlon James, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, and Eavan Boland. This course will fulfill the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Fiction writer Eudora Welty once described place as “one of the lesser angels” of literary craft, but also considered it a fundamental “source of knowledge” and “a definer and a confiner of what I’m doing.” In this creative writing class, we’ll consider how a variety of texts—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film, graphic novels—rely on setting as an engine for storytelling, and use their insights to propel our own writing. Our inquiry into time, place, and space will range across forms and genres, encompassing realism, historical fiction, sci-fi, satire, elegy, paean, the personal essay and the travel narrative. Coursework will include regular reading responses, discussion leadership, and workshop pieces, one of which will be revised for the final portfolio. Intro to Creative Writing (ENGL 150) is a prerequisite. First-years and non-majors welcome.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

What, and how, can a musical subject contribute to a work of literature? How do the two artforms interact, where do they intersect, how do they illuminate, even change, one another? In this course, we will read and discuss the following novels, with an aim towards developing musical perspectives on them: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (1995); Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992); Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2002); Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry (2017); Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915); Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889); and Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899). We will also read short fiction by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Katherine Mansfield, Marguerite Duras, and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), as well as excerpts from works by David Mitchell and E. M. Forster.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

*No prerequisite* ‘U-topia’ means ‘a place (topos) that doesn’t exist’ and ‘Eu-topia’ means ‘a good place.’ How do people of various gender identities envision a better state yet-to-be (utopia) as well as a fear of catastrophe or nightmare (dystopia)? This course investigates how women's literary writing from different parts of the world (Bangladeshi, British, African-American, Canadian, to name a few) produce visions of the present and the future, of the real and the imagined, beliefs about masculinity and femininity, socialist and capitalist philosophies, modernity, the environment (ecotopia), and various technologies including cybergenetics. Texts by Thomas More, Frantz Fanon, and Noam Chomsky are included. We will explore how these texts provide some ways to think about our gendered, racialized, and classed roles, and how we can think about MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the Million Man March, and Charlottesville, along with our own fantasies and realities of sociopolitical change.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this advanced course, we will study the longstanding tradition of African American women’s theory—that is a, body of thought that analyzes and challenges systemic U.S. oppressions while centering and valuing a wide range of black women’s perspectives and experiences. We will begin with 19th century contestations of notions of “ideal” womanhood and will extend our study into the 21st century, including theories of intersectionality and queer-of-color and black transgender theory. Authors may include: Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hills Collins, Kara Keeling, and Omise’eke Tinsley, among others. We will also consider art and music as black feminist theory, studying figures such as Wangechi Mutu and Janelle Monáe. Course requirements include: weekly 1-page responses to the reading, one essay of about 5 pages, one 1-hour presentation, and a substantial final individual project. This course fulfills the U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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. This course fulfills the U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

When Sally Potter's film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando was released in 1992, it was heralded as a new cult classic: "This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetized. Throughout Ms. Potter's Orlando, as in Woolf's, there [is] a piercing kind of common sense and a joy that, because they are so rare these days in any medium, create their own kind of cinematic suspense and delightedly surprised laughter." Played by Tilda Swinton, Orlando—a genderqueer prince who lives for over 200 years—challenges audiences to consider the surrealism of high modernism alongside Woolf's own radical politics surrounding gender and sexuality. This exciting complexity runs through many of Woolf's literary works (including her own studies of early cinema) and their subsequent adaptations. In this class, we will read film and adaptation theory alongside literary works by Woolf. We will also watch movies from the early years of cinema, such as Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette films, in addition to more modern adaptations such as The Hours and Japanese animation.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

From Game of Thrones and Marco Polo to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, many popular TV shows and movie franchises draw on fantasies of the medieval past. The “medieval” often conjures images of a brutish and backwards time before we evolved into what we think of as a cultured, ethical present; while at the same time it offers us a world of welcome escape where magic, dragons, and wizards abound. This seminar will explore popular medievalism in modern media and their literary origins in the medieval period. In the first half of the course, we will read medieval romance and travel literature that showcase global perspectives in conflict and exchange. We will ask, how do these texts represent and navigate difference? In what ways do they produce or critique cultural exoticism and hierarchies of racial, ethnic, and religious identities? We will turn to modern media and examine the use of the “medieval” in the geopolitics and cultural conceptions of our own time. In what ways, for example, does the Netflix Marco Polo series rely on a medieval past to reinscribe orientalist attitudes in the present? This course will fulfill the medieval literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

When is writing an act of resistance? In what ways can we participate in protest, change, and social movements as writers? And, once committed, how do we craft work that is both polemical and poetical, artful and activist? In this creative writing class, we will consider how texts in different genres—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film—engage with political struggle, and use their insights to guide our own writing. Coursework will include regular reading responses, discussion leadership, and two workshop pieces, one of which will be revised for the final portfolio. Likely texts include Spike Lee, Carmen Maria Machado, Danez Smith, Maggie Nelson, Valeria Luiselli, and Solmaz Sharif. Intro to Creative Writing (ENGL 150) is a prerequisite. First-years and non-majors enthusiastically welcomed.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

When we think of travel writing, we most often think of tourism: happy vacationers on sandy beaches. But of course the movements of people around the globe are not always entirely voluntary, nor have they always been benign. This course considers travel broadly—from the luxuries of tourism to the desperation that can led to emigration—and in terms of the hierarchies and technologies that have enabled/forced people to move around the globe. It opens with a deep dive into nineteenth-century travels and a range of archival documents: guide books, letters, travel diaries, commissioned travel narratives, short stories, cultural histories, and military accounts. Contemporary scholars and theorists offer useful lenses for interrogating the writings and perspectives of often-colonizing travelers. We also tackle the meta-questions of the value of doing such study: why do we read historical/literary documents, and what does reading do to/for us? How does reading affect what we do to/for/with others? As we explore our relationship to literature and the humanities more generally, one important goal of this course is to help you articulate what you are taking away from your literature major and, as a consequence, what you are bringing into the world. In the final third of the semester, you will use these theoretical frameworks—both about travel and about the value of humanities study—to shape individual research projects on travel/migration. These may consider historical or contemporary texts, including recent discussions about immigration in US or British contexts, and will produce analyses for which one explicit goal will be thinking about how the past informs our understanding of the present, of nationality, and of the relationship between the self and the other.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This seminar is for advanced creative writers who are ready for an ambitious semester-long project. The genre is up to you. It might be a novella, a chapbook of poems, a collection of stories or personal essays, or a feature screenplay. Throughout the semester, you will put up sections of your project for workshop, while evaluating the work of your peers. We will also read published works and craft essays to help guide our efforts along the way. After you register for the class, I will ask you to tell me a little about your project via email. Then I will 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