Course Descriptions
Contact
English Department OfficeOld Main, Room 210 651-696-6387
jbeebe@macalester.edu
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English
ENGL 101 - College Writing
Instruction and practice for writing in college. This course does not satisfy the requirements for the English major or minor.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 105 - Identities and Differences in U.S. Literature
This course focuses on traditionally underrepresented or marginalized American literatures. Readings may cover a wide range of genres, such as novels, poetry, creative nonfiction, plays, and graphic narratives, in order to explore various identities and differences within a national context. The course will also provide an introduction to the methods of literary study, including close reading and literary analysis, both oral and written. Authors and texts assigned will vary by section and instructor. May be repeated once, with different subtitle.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 112 - Introduction to African American Literature
An introduction to the study of an African American literary tradition. The focus or themes of the course, as well as authors and texts, will vary by semester and instructor, but all sections will emphasize the tradition's major genres, such as slave narratives and slam poetry, and its major movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism. The course will also provide instruction in the methods of literary analysis, including reading closely and writing text-based argument. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on the registrar's web page for the content of individual sections.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Cross-Listed as: AMST 112
ENGL 115 - Shakespeare
This course will offer an introduction to Shakespeare's work through a survey of his major plays in all genres (history, comedy, tragedy, and romance) plus selected sonnets. Texts and emphasis will vary.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 125 - Studies in Literature
A writing-intensive course in traditional and non-traditional literatures, each section of which will have a different focus, topic, or approach; recent offerings have examined the short story, major women writers, new international writing, and the literary Gothic.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 135 - Poetry
An introduction to the study of poetry. Topics and methods vary, but all sections emphasize techniques of close reading, critical inquiry, and engaged communication fundamental to the discipline of literary studies. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or in its web page for the content of individual courses and sections.
Frequency: Offered every year.
ENGL 136 - Drama
An introduction to the study of drama. Topics and methods vary, but all sections emphasize intensive close reading in combination with examining the cultural and historical contexts in which plays are written and performed. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on its web page for the content of individual courses and sections.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 137 - Novel
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.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 140 - Once Upon a Crime
This course serves as an introduction to law and literature. How does literature shape law and vice versa? How does literature help us to better understand the human desire for revenge, retribution, confession, witnessing, judgment, remorse, and forgiveness? Readings will come from a variety of literary traditions and periods: fairy tales, early modern drama, essays, short stories, film, and literary and legal theory. This course counts as a foundation course for the English major. This course also counts for the Legal Studies Concentration.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 150 - Introduction to Creative Writing
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.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 194 - Topics Course
Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.
ENGL 200 - Major Medieval and Renaissance British Writers
This survey provides an introduction to the masterpieces of medieval and early modern literature, from Beowulf to Paradise Lost. What is old, middle, and early modern English? How does lyric formally (and thematically) differ from epic and romance? When did drama acquire its characteristic structure? In addition to these poetic considerations, we will explore the key controversies that roiled pre-modern cultures pertaining to race, gender, and religion. Readings will highlight the imagination, poetics, and politics of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney Herbert, and John Milton.
Frequency: Offered alternate years.
ENGL 202 - Great Detectives and Plots of Detection
A great detective story is arguably one of the most interactive of genres, as it urges a reader to step into the world of the mystery and solve it alongside the investigators who people the pages. This course traces evolutions in the genre, from 19th-century icons like Sherlock Holmes through early-20th-century hardboiled detectives and into very contemporary fiction. We'll consider professional and amateur detectives in short fiction and novels, watch several films, and read one story in serial installments. We will explore how detective stories are rooted in the cultural moments of their creation and read short pieces about the genre by some of its greatest writers. The course emphasizes the pleasures of reading (Cliffhangers! Clues! Misdirection!) and what we can learn from thinking hard about what is so satisfying about a great mystery, adeptly solved. Texts vary from one semester to the next; authors may include Dorothy Sayers, Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Tana French, Wilkie Collins, Gladys Mitchell, Dashiell Hammett, Rudolph Fisher, Anthony Horowitz. Coursework will be wide-ranging and playful, and will include creative as well as critical assignments.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 208 - Literary Publishing
This course approaches the dynamic field of publishing, from acquisitions of literary titles to their entrance into the marketplace, from the writer's hands to the editor's desk to the reader's library. With explorations into the history of the book, new technologies, and the vibrant literary scene in the Twin Cities and beyond, this course illuminates the complex realities of how literature meets our culture.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 210 - Film Studies
This course will focus on different topics from year to year. Possible topics include Great Directors, Russian Film, French Film, Film and Ideology, Literature and Film, and Images of Black Women in Hollywood Films. Please consult the specific course description in the English department.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 212 - Introduction to Literary Theory
An introduction to the key movements in literary theory, such as structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, new historicism, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, Black and diaspora studies, critical race theory, Black feminist theory, postcolonial studies, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. The course will cover primary texts by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, Audre Lorde, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Barbara Smith, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Katherine Hayles, and Judith Butler, and will emphasize their common engagement with questions of language, textuality, and power.
Frequency: Occasionally.
ENGL 220 - Eighteenth-Century British Literature
A study of British literature from the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 to the revolutionary turn of the nineteenth century, emphasizing relationships between literary language and socio-political change. Readings will include prose fiction, drama, poetry, periodical essays, and philosophy from the period, as well as recent works of literary theory and criticism. Topics may include developments in poetics; the rise of the novel; the politics of satire; free-market economics; gender and sexuality; misogyny; sensibility; and libertinism.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 224 - Video Games: Coding and Narrative
Videogames dominate entertainment culture. But like all popular forms of entertainment, they are often looked down upon as aesthetically superficial, intellectually uncomplicated, and somehow bad for you. They are "just pop culture." Like Shakespeare was in his time. Like the novel was when it was invented. And like film and television shows were when they were invented. This course takes seriously the deep intellectual and aesthetic value of videogames and of videogame making. Videogames are expanding the possibilities and the borders of storytelling and narrative design. They are pushing the limits of coding wizardry. They have also become one of the most creative popular-cultural sites for experimenting with and understanding other minds and identities. In this class, students will work in interdisciplinary teams to bring world-building narrative techniques to an immersive visual setting while exploring technical challenges involved in programming and game development through hands-on projects.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): None if taken as the English cross-list.
Cross-Listed as: COMP 325
ENGL 225 - Musical Fictions
From E. M. Forster's Lucy Honeychurch, who "entered into a more solid world when she opened the piano," to James Baldwin's Sonny, who "moved in an atmosphere which wasn't like theirs at all," fictional musicians encounter trouble when negotiating the conflicting realms of art and society. Experts in one kind of expression, they fail in others. What draws these characters to music? What does it offer them? What is its value to us? In the musical novel and short story, we encounter music as an agent of violence, of consolation, of transcendence and redemption as well as damnation. We witness empathy through music, but we also learn that shared feeling can be both beautiful and dangerous, that music unites and divides. This course combines the close reading of literary texts (as well as works of literary theory and musicology) with the examination of the musical contexts that inform and inspire them. We will explore, for example, the relationship between Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Unconsoled and Richard Wagner's music drama Parsifal. We will talk about syncopation in "jazz" by Charles Mingus and Toni Morrison. We will watch Marguerite Duras and Katherine Mansfield turn innocuous music lessons into spaces of wretchedness. We will try to understand what David Mitchell's young composer Robert Frobisher means when he says, "One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner."
Frequency: Alternate years.
Cross-Listed as: MUSI 225
ENGL 230 - Nineteenth-Century British Literature
A study of literature's place within cultural conversations in the period, emphasizing the diversity of forms circulating alongside the novel, such as poetry, autobiography, drama, political writing, and print journalism. Themes and issues vary by section but may include empire, class and economics, gender norms, politics and reform, education, science, nature, religion, or travel. All sections consider the work of a wide array of authors-from canonical writers such as the Brontes, Mill, Eliot, Dickens, Darwin, the Rossettis, Tennyson, or Wilde to more experimental authors, the voices of colonized subjects, essayists, and visual artists. Articles from widely-circulating nineteenth-century periodicals, in conjunction with current literary theory and criticism provide frameworks for intensive reading and writing about literary texts.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 235 - A Kafkaesque Century
Taught in English; there is an optional German component for those who want to have the course count toward their German-taught courses. In this case, students must do the reading and writing assignments and some of their oral presentations in German.What does the internationally (mis)used word "kafkaesque" actually mean? This course approaches Kafka's work both as a case for literary analysis and as one that offers insights into modernism. In one way or another, Kafka sheds light on massive industrialization, bureaucratization, the commodification of art, the destabilization of patriarchy, and the development of technology and media, as well as on the question: what is literature itself. In addition to a selection of Kafka's fiction, we shall read Crumb and Mairowitz's graphic version of Kafka's life and work, allowing students to produce their own graphic group project.
Frequency: Offered alternate spring semesters.
Cross-Listed as: GERM 365
ENGL 240 - Twentieth Century British Literature
A study of works of British and Irish fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose from 1900 to the present. Along with novelists such as those enumerated under ENGL 341 below, this course treats selected poets such as W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, and Philip Larkin, playwrights from the Irish National Theater at the beginning of the century (Lady Gregory, Sean O'Casey, J. M. Synge) through Samuel Beckett to current dramatists such as Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard, and non-fiction commentary from Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and others.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 245 - Nabokov
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-often detective stories-in language often so arresting 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 shadows and reflections, in the etymologies of words. Soon the reader has become a detective as well, linking the recurring motifs, finding clues are everywhere. By then it is too late. The risk in studying Nabokov is that you may not see the world the same way again.Nabokov's life is itself remarkable. He was born into Russian nobility, but fled with his family to Western 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 Nazi 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 twentieth century. We will explore various aspects of Nabokov's life and art in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of how cultural synthesis inspires artistic creation.
Frequency: Occasionally offered.
Cross-Listed as: RUSS 245
ENGL 251 - Russian Literature on the Eve of Revolution
How can literature help readers find meaning and purpose in times of crisis? In this course, we will study well-crafted narratives serving as windows into the conditions that led to dissent, social strife, and a thirst for liberation in imperial Russia, culminating in the Bolshevik revolution. Under autocracy in Russia, literature was the only public forum for debates about the things that mattered most. In the lead-up to the revolution, Russian literature had a tangible effect on the world by building compassion and sparking indignation, inspiring questions about how things could be otherwise, and by driving readers to action. In the first half of the semester, we will read short stories by authors such as Gogol and Chekhov who left an indelible impression on world literature, and a selection from a novel that served as a bible for revolutionaries. In the second half, we will focus on Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, a story of rebellion against fathers in every sense, written in response to the rise of revolutionary terrorism in Russia. We will conclude with a novella by Tolstoy, Hadji Murat, about the resistance that the Russian state met in its attempt to subjugate the peoples of the Caucasus. We will consider these texts as works of art and as sources of understanding and impact feeding into the Bolshevik Revolution. These narratives about people caught up in unjust systems of power raise questions about how one can and should act under oppressive circumstances. The characters we will encounter grapple with issues of agency and responsibility, as well as the crucial question of who gets to decide what is right and what is wrong in a secular world. As such, these stories bear witness not only to their times, but to ours as well. No previous knowledge of Russian literature or history is required. For our readings we will use English translations that preserve the pleasures of the original texts.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Cross-Listed as: RUSS 251
ENGL 260 - Science Fiction
In the past fifty years, science fiction has emerged as the primary cultural form for thinking about human extinction: climate catastrophe, pandemics, hostile AI, nuclear war. But science fiction has also emerged as the primary cultural form for imagining a near boundless future for humans: cybernetic enhancements, colonies on Goldilocks planets, post-scarcity economies, digital consciousness. Facing such disorienting and sometimes unfathomable changes, science fiction seeks to understand what it means to be a human and to live a meaningful life. Why are we here? What are we to become? How will both the promises and threats of technology change what it means to be a thinking, feeling human?In this course we will examine works of science fiction as complex aesthetic achievements, as philosophical inquiries into the nature of being and time, and as theoretical examinations of the nature of human cognition. We will engage in intensive readings of contemporary texts, including works by Ted Chiang, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others. This class counts toward the Cognitive Science Concentration.
Frequency: Offered yearly.
ENGL 262 - Studies in Literature and the Natural World
A course studying the ways that literary writing develops thought and feeling about nature and our part in it. In a particular term, the course might address, for example, nature poetry from Milton to Frost; literature and the agrarian; gendered representations of nature; literary figures of relationship among humans and other kinds; nature, reason, and the passions; literatures of matter and of life; time, flux, and change in literary and science writing.
Frequency: Offered yearly.
Cross-Listed as: ENVI 262
ENGL 263 - Muslim Women Writers
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.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 265 - Literature and Human Rights
This course is an introduction to the study of literature and human rights. We will seek to better understand the contemporary norms and practices of human rights by examining its deep historical contexts, and by considering the philosophical and religious debates that continue to shape human rights theory and practice. We will also examine theories of trauma and torture, personal accounts of human rights and humanitarian fieldwork, representational ethics, and studies of human rights in film and media. We will scrutinize relevant literary texts as works of art, as case studies in human rights, and as models for understanding how words can change the world, whether in the form of human rights reports and newspaper accounts or of poems and novels. We will seek to better understand how spectators of suffering develop (or fail to develop) empathy for distant persons or for persons considered alien 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 Pheraeus, "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? When does the story become real enough to change you? Our list of authors will span the range of intellectual and ethical endeavor, from ancient Greek plays and philosophy to contemporary US literature.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 272 - Love and Madness in Nineteenth Century American Literature
Our common vocabulary of love presents it as a force that strikes and knocks down its victims. It comes like a fever and it disables cognition. Lovers "fall," they are "smitten," "head over heels," "crazy" for each other. Love is both mania and obsession, 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)
ENGL 273 - American Literature 1900-1945
America in the first half of the twentieth century seemed to be infatuated with the future-with skyscrapers and automobiles, Hollywood cinema and big business. But in an age that also saw the struggle of Progressivism, the Great Depression, and two foreign wars, many voices called attention to the dark side of success. This course will include such authors as Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Walker Evans and James Agee, Eugene O'Neill, and Dashiell Hammett.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 274 - American Literature 1945-Present
The complacent malaise of the Cold War, the turmoil of Vietnam and the Sixties, and the postmodern fascination with computers and visual culture-all of these have had radical consequences for the American literary form. While questioning boundaries between high and low culture, image and reality, and identity and difference, recent American writers work against a pervasive sense of fragmentation to imagine new relations between community and personal desire. The course will consider authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ralph Ellison, Walker Percy, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, John Guare, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, Art Spiegelman, and Neal Stephenson.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 275 - African American Literature to 1900
This course will trace the development of an African American literary tradition from the end of the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century, from authors such as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano to Frances Harper and Charles Chesnutt. The course will investigate the longstanding project of writing an African American self as both a literary and a political subject, and it will consider texts from multiple genres-such as lyric poetry, protest poetry, slave narratives, spirituals, folktales, personal correspondence, essays, short stories, autobiographies, novels, transcribed oral addresses, and literary criticism and theory.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Cross-Listed as: AMST 275
ENGL 276 - African American Literature 1900 to Present
This course will trace the development of an African American literary and cultural tradition from the turn of the century to the present, from writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins to Walter Mosley and Toni Morrison. It will examine the ways that modern and contemporary African American writers and artists have explored political, social, racial, and aesthetic issues in a variety of genres-including autobiographies, poetry, novels, blues songs, photographs, short stories, plays essays, film, visual art, and literary and cultural criticism. Among the many topics the course will consider are: the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the Black Arts Movement, and the current flourishing of African American arts and letters and cinema.
Frequency: Alternate years.
ENGL 277 - Angels and Demons of the American Renaissance (1835-1880)
As the US tottered on the brink of its bloody Civil War, a small group of strange and visionary artists started a revolution. During the span of just five years, in one of history's most astonishing creative convergences, the most elegant, profane, unhinged, heart-wrenching, and influential works of US literature were published. Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and Jacobs - together these artists produced a canon of literature that revealed both the demons and angels of our histories and futures. They invented a spiritual movement of unprecedented optimism at the same time that they despaired over what they had become. Everything that was written in the US afterwards would have to come to terms with the brilliant and disturbing achievements of this cluster of outsiders, mystics, and heroes. In this course we will read the landmark texts of this era from literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives.
Frequency: Every year.
ENGL 280 - Crafts of Writing: Poetry
This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing poetry, building on the work done in ENGL 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.
Frequency: Every year.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.
ENGL 281 - Crafts of Writing: Fiction
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.
Frequency: Every year.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.
ENGL 282 - The Crafts of Writing: Creative Nonfiction
This advanced workshop course focuses in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing creative nonfiction, building on the work done in ENGL 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, translating lived experience into the personal essay, or developing narrative journalism, the lyric essay, or a variety of other forms. It will involve extensive readings and discussion of nonfiction in addition to regular nonfiction writing assignments. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor, with the approval of the Chair.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.
ENGL 284 - The Crafts of Writing: Screenwriting
This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing screenplays, building on the work done in ENGL 120. The emphasis will be on narrative films, with the objective of writing a feature-length screenplay during the semester. There will be extensive readings and discussion of published and unpublished screenplays in addition to regular writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.
ENGL 285 - Playwriting
In this course, students engage in a series of playwriting exercises and read a wide variety of plays. They will read new and contemporary plays that employ different storytelling techniques (i.e., structure, character arcs, staging elements, etc.), embrace the unlimited possibilities of theatricality, and exemplify why we write for the stage. Students will develop a "playwriting toolkit" as they explore their artistic interests following the conventions of time-bound pieces: 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 each writer's individual development. A mid-term and final play reading series of one-acts will allow students to hear their work in a supportive public setting. May be repeated for credit.
Frequency: Every year.
Cross-Listed as: THDA 242
ENGL 286 - Narrative Journalism
This creative nonfiction course will focus on the basic elements of narrative journalism. Students will conduct interviews and research to create powerful stories that may be print, audio, and/or web-based.
Frequency: Every other year.
ENGL 294 - Topics Course
Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.
ENGL 304 - Medieval Heroic Narrative
This course studies the heroic storytelling traditions of the medieval British Isles and Scandinavia. We read poems, tales, myths, and non-fiction of these far northwestern European archipelagos, locating their traditions in migrations and conquests of tribes across Asia and Europe. The course deploys gender theory, narrative theory, and history to explore formations of masculinity and femininity, heroic ethos, gender politics in stories of magic, marvels, enchantment and disenchantment. Works may include: the Scandinavian Volsung Saga and the Saga of King Hrolf Kraki; the Irish legends Sweeney Astray and The Tain ; the Welsh Mabinogion ; the English Beowulf , The Dream of the Rood , Old English riddles, translated excerpts from Bede and from the Iais of Marie de France, Sir Orfeo , The Wedding of Sir Gawain & Dame Ragnelle , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , excerpts from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and from Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur.
Frequency: Offered in alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.
ENGL 308 - Literature and Sexuality
This course examines ways in which literary works have represented desire and sexuality. It looks at how constructions of sexuality have defined and classified persons; at how those definitions and classes change; and at how they affect and create literary forms and traditions. Contemporary gay and lesbian writing, and the developing field of queer theory, will always form part, but rarely all, of the course. Poets, novelists, playwrights, memoirists and filmmakers may include Shakespeare, Donne, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, or Henry James; Wilde, Hall, Stein, Lawrence, or Woolf; Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Frank O'Hara, Baldwin, or Philip Roth; Cukor, Hitchcock, Julien, Frears, or Kureishi; White, Rich, Kushner, Monette, Lorde, Allison, Cruse, Morris, Winterson, Hemphill, or Bidart.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): One 100-level English course.
Cross-Listed as: WGSS 308
ENGL 310 - Shakespeare Studies
Advance study of six or so plays by Shakespeare, with special attention to his development of stage and poetic technique. Plays and the ensuing discussion may focus on particular critical topics, for example Shakespeare and law, Shakespeare and science, gender, race, and identity in Shakespeare, and Shakespeare and film.
Frequency: Offered yearly.
Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.
ENGL 313 - Literature in the Age of Shakespeare
Study of early modern literature (poetry, drama, and prose) by Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth, and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. Discussion and analysis will focus on the inventiveness of form and the relationship between text and historical context.
Frequency: Offered alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.
ENGL 315 - Milton
A study of that pivotal poet in British literary history, John Milton, through Paradise Lost and his lyric and narrative verse. Topics may include Milton's arguments on liberty, gender, justice, religious issues, and his central role for later writers, thinkers, and movements from the 18th century to the present.
Frequency: Offered occasionally.
Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.
ENGL 331 - Nineteenth-Century British Novel
An advanced course on the novel, considering developments in the form including realism, sensationalism, the domestic novel, the adventure romance, the detective tale, the marriage plot, the social problem novel, and the gothic. Questions of genre and form will be considered, as well as the social and political circumstances that individual novels address: the expansion of empire, codification of gender ideology, hierarchies of power, relationship of humans to the environment, global politics, religious crises, family structures, labor markets, and technologies of travel and communication. Novelists may include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, and Oscar Wilde. Secondary readings include literary scholarship and additional nineteenth-century documents for cultural contexts, including works by more marginalized voices. Particular themes vary.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.
ENGL 341 - 20th Century British Novel
Fiction from a range of British and Irish novelists, including authors from the early part of the century such as E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, along with more recent writers such as Iris Murdoch, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, and Julian Barnes. Works will be considered both in their historical contexts and as examples of the evolving form of the novel itself.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.
ENGL 350 - 20th Century Poetry
An analysis of twentieth century poetry from modernists W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost through major midcentury poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Langston Hughes, to contemporary writers such as Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, John Ashbery and C. D. Wright. This course will stress close analytical reading of individual poems.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.
ENGL 362 - Gendered, Feminist, and Womanist Writings
This course investigates how women's writing from different parts of the world (Asian, English, African-American, to name a few) convey visions of the present and future, of the real and the imagined, beliefs about masculinity and femininity, race and nation, socialist and capitalist philosophies, (post) modernity, the environment (ecotopia), and various technologies including cybernetics. Topics may change based on instructor.
Prerequisite(s): Junior standing or permission of instructor, and at least one intermediate-level Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course.
Cross-Listed as: WGSS 310
ENGL 367 - Postcolonial Theory
Traces the development of theoretical accounts of culture, politics and identity in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and related lands since the 1947-1991 decolonizations. Readings include Fanon, Said, Walcott, Ngugi and many others, and extend to gender, literature, the U.S., and the post-Soviet sphere. The course bridges cultural representational, and political theory.
Prerequisite(s): Prior internationalist and/or theoretical coursework strongly recommended.
Cross-Listed as: INTL 367
ENGL 377 - Native American Literature
A study of fiction and poetry by American Indian writers, among them N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s.
ENGL 380 - Topics in African American Literature
This course will explore African American cultural production and, depending on the instructor, may focus on a particular genre (e.g. novels, short stories, drama, poetry, detective fiction, speculative fiction), or a particular theme (e.g. The Protest Tradition, Black Feminist Writings), or on a particular period (e.g. the 1820s-1860s, the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s), or on a particular author or authors (e.g. Douglass, Du Bois, Baldwin, Wideman, Morrison, Parks).
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s.
Cross-Listed as: AMST 380
ENGL 384 - Langston Hughes: Global Writer
The great African American writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is best known as the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. But his career was vaster still. He was a Soviet screenwriter, Spanish Civil War journalist, African literary anthologist, humorist, playwright, translator, social critic, writer of over 10,000 letters, and much more. This course engages Hughes's full career, bridging race and global issues, politics and art, and makes use of little-known archival materials. This course fulfills the U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.
ENGL 385 - Intermediate Playwriting
This course-a mixture of lecture, discussion, study of dramatic texts, writing exercises and in-class analysis of student writing-is intended to reinforce and build upon the skills developed in Playwriting. Topics will include dramatic structure, conflict, characterization, language/dialogue, as well as how to analyze your own work, give and receive feedback and techniques for rewriting. Students will engage in a rigorous development process which will culminate in the writing of a one act play.
Frequency: Spring semester
Cross-Listed as: THDA 385
ENGL 386 - From Literature to Film: Studies in Adaptation
From its earliest days, film has drawn on literature for subject matter and modes of narration. Adaptations of literary sources have formed a significant part of all movies made in the west. This course will study the problems of adapting literature to film, dealing with the representations of time and space in both forms, as well as the differences in developing character and structuring narratives. The course will consider a novel, short story or play each week along with its cinematic counterpart.
Frequency: Alternate years.
Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s.
ENGL 387 - International Storytelling
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.
Frequency: Every year.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150
ENGL 394 - Topics Course
Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.
Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s.
ENGL 400 - Seminar: Special Topics in Literary Studies
A study of a particular topic of interest to students of literature in English. Students will read widely in relevant materials and produce a significant final project.
Frequency: Alternate years.
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.
ENGL 401 - Projects in Literary Research
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.
Frequency: Every year.
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.
ENGL 406 - Projects in Creative Writing
This capstone seminar will provide a workshop environment for advanced students with clearly defined projects in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama or a combination of genres. The seminar will center initially on a group of shared readings about the creative process and then turn to the work produced by class members. Through the presentation of new and revised work, and the critiquing of work-in-progress, each student will develop a significant body of writing as well as the critical skills necessary to analyze the work of others. Course may be repeated for credit if the topic is different.
Frequency: Every year.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150, plus one creative writing Crafts class 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.
ENGL 494 - Topics Course
Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.
Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s.
ENGL 611 - Independent Project
Production of original work, either scholarly or creative, of substantial length, which may develop out of previous course work.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Application through department chair. Sufficient preparation, demonstrated ability, and permission of instructor.
ENGL 612 - Independent Project
Production of original work, either scholarly or creative, of substantial length, which may develop out of previous course work.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Application through department chair. Sufficient preparation, demonstrated ability, and permission of instructor.
ENGL 613 - Independent Project
Production of original work, either scholarly or creative, of substantial length, which may develop out of previous course work.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Application through department chair. Sufficient preparation, demonstrated ability, and permission of instructor.
ENGL 614 - Independent Project
Production of original work, either scholarly or creative, of substantial length, which may develop out of previous course work.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Application through department chair. Sufficient preparation, demonstrated ability, and permission of instructor.
ENGL 621 - Internship
Work in practical (usually off-campus) experiences that explore potential careers, apply an English major's skills, or make a substantive addition to the student's knowledge of literary issues.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Sufficient preparation and permission of instructor. Work with Internship Office.
ENGL 622 - Internship
Work in practical (usually off-campus) experiences that explore potential careers, apply an English major's skills, or make a substantive addition to the student's knowledge of literary issues.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Sufficient preparation and permission of instructor. Work with Internship Office.
ENGL 623 - Internship
Work in practical (usually off-campus) experiences that explore potential careers, apply an English major's skills, or make a substantive addition to the student's knowledge of literary issues.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Sufficient preparation and permission of instructor. Work with Internship Office.
ENGL 624 - Internship
Work in practical (usually off-campus) experiences that explore potential careers, apply an English major's skills, or make a substantive addition to the student's knowledge of literary issues.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Sufficient preparation and permission of instructor. Work with Internship Office.
ENGL 631 - Preceptorship
Work assisting a faculty member in planning and teaching a course.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor. Work with Academic Programs.
ENGL 632 - Preceptorship
Work assisting a faculty member in planning and teaching a course.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor. Work with Academic Programs.
ENGL 633 - Preceptorship
Work assisting a faculty member in planning and teaching a course.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor. Work with Academic Programs.
ENGL 634 - Preceptorship
Work assisting a faculty member in planning and teaching a course.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor. Work with Academic Programs.
ENGL 641 - Honors Independent
Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor and department chair.
ENGL 642 - Honors Independent
Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor and department chair.
ENGL 643 - Honors Independent
Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor and department chair.
ENGL 644 - Honors Independent
Independent research, writing, or other preparation leading to the culmination of the senior honors project.
Frequency: Every semester.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor and department chair.