English

Offered Fall, 2022-23

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” -Albert Camus 

The goal of this intensive creative writing course is to think deeply and enthusiastically about the way stories are made. This thinking encompasses a great many things: language, structure, aesthetics, philosophy, and genre, to name a few--and we will do our best to dig into them all. In pursuit of this goal, students will read an anthology of contemporary short fiction, including work by authors such as Karen Russell, Stephen Millhauser, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kelly Link, Raymond Carver, Jamaica Kincaid, Helen Oyeyemi, Ted Chiang, Jim Shepard, and Andrea Barrett. Students will develop their ability to critically engage with the work of their peers--and eventually with their own work--by participation in a rigorous workshop process. Students will margin-note the work of their peers, provide a critique letter, and critically engage the work in discussion. They will have the opportunity to workshop a few brief stories and one longer short story over the course of the semester, and will develop short papers closely examining the craft decisions made in our class anthology. By laying out as many tools for engaging with stories and literature as possible, students will hopefully discover new ways into their obsessions. 

Offered Spring, 2022-23

Creative nonfiction borrows techniques from fiction and poetry to produce writing that can be informative and journalistic, personal and reflective, argumentative and persuasive. It is a modern literary genre that has influenced and been influenced by the many emerging technologies and social networking platforms that ask us to record and engage with a world mitigated by personal experience. 

In this creative writing course, we will investigate the stretch and depth of Creative Nonfiction, examining the many forms, subjects, and lengths it might inhabit, sometimes disagreeing about where an individual text falls in the spectrum of the genre . We will consider to what degree Creative Nonfiction should be true, born of research, personal experience, lyricism, and character. And most importantly, we will produce our own work, using course readings to inspire and challenge our craft and peer feedback to revise it. The course will study and replicate the following forms of Creative Nonfiction: memoir, cultural criticism, reportage, lyric, hybrid, and experimental.

Junior/Senior Elective

The goal of this intensive creative-writing course is twofold: 1) to introduce students to the fundamentals of poetry--image, metaphor, rhythm, sound, diction, tone, and form, and 2) to immerse them in the work of contemporary authors in order to gain an understanding of voice. Students read a variety of poets from a variety of time periods in order to understand what has made for successful writing and the dimensions of the field in which they can play. Students also read craft essays in order to develop a genre-specific vocabulary, and use that vocabulary to thoughtfully analyze and understand the work of published authors in discussion, their peers’ work in workshop, and their own work in revision. Ultimately, the class fosters understanding and appreciation of poetry, as well as growth as a creative writer.

Offered Fall, 2022-23

This analytical writing seminar will focus on grammar and rhetoric: what they are, how they have been used (for good and for ill), and how you can use their methods and vocabularies to be a better reader and a more effective writer. If you’ve ever thought “It just sounds better this way; I don’t know why,” or “There’s something about this sentence that isn’t working, but I’m not sure how to fix it,” this class will equip you with the concepts and skills to articulate those “whys” and “hows”--and then act on them! You’ll learn grammatical and rhetorical concepts not to sound smart when you identify them, but to better articulate how specific rhetorical choices change a work’s meaning, or make that work more or less effective. These are skills you will use as an interpreter of literature, as a critical consumer of other types of texts, and as a writer across genres and disciplines.

Offered Spring, 2022-23

In this class, we will explore the contemporary pop culture figures, works, and phenomena that matter to you. You’ll start this class as experts about its content: you will write about the music you listen to; the shows you watch; the apps you use; and the trends you notice. Over the course of the term, you will learn, and gain practice with, new forms, styles, and voices for writing about the cultural works, moods, and atmospheres that we live with every day. As a basis for that process, we will read a series of essays about internet culture and pop culture of the present and past. These essays will offer models for more personal forms of analytical writing, and for writing in a way that is academic, or formal, but also passionate and full of presence. During the semester, you’ll write essays related to the internet’s place in our everyday life, taste and criticism, and twentieth-century cultural history (accessed through visual art and photography). 

Junior/Senior Elective

Writing Seminar: Critical Contexts is a course in essay writing, analysis, and critical thinking. If you've ever finished a poem or story or book or movie or song and thought, "I don't have a clue what I could say about this," then this course will give you not one but five answers. We will study five different "lenses" through which literature and other “texts” can be viewed, developing your skills for interpreting the world.

In each of the five units, we will first study and practice a particular lens, and then you will apply the lens in your own essay of analysis and interpretation. While the first of these essays will be on a poem, for the rest, you will analyze a cultural work of your own choosing. By writing multiple drafts of essays, you will use writing as a tool of thought. By practicing different styles and structures of analysis and argument, you will become a more adept analyst and writer. Our work will help you in future English classes, in other academic writing, and in thinking about culture of all kinds.

Junior/Senior Elective

This course focuses on "reading" film as literature, exploring and interpreting the rhetoric of images in the American film experience. Students identify the different creative forces behind the visual narrative in film, note the technological, historical, and cultural milestones of the medium, explore the conventions of film's narrative modes, immerse themselves in the theory of literature-to-film adaptation and its narrative consequences, write about all of this in analytical papers, and finally practice what they've learned by adapting a short story and filming a short movie.

Possible texts include Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film by Richard Barsam and Dave Monohan.

Offered Fall, 2022-23

This course interrogates the characterization of monsters and monstrous bodies in literature. It looks at how monsters are depicted in literature, how these depictions have changed over time, and what symbolic weight these depictions might carry. Some essential guiding questions are: Why do we find monsters compelling? How have monsters been used historically to name and work through social anxiety? What do monsters allow us to say about Otherness? What do monsters teach us about being human? The reading in this class spans several centuries and will be diverse in genre (short stories, novels, plays, poems, etc.). Writing assignments are comprised of critical and creative works, and are both individually and collaboratively generated. 

Possible texts include: Frankenstein, Mary Shelley; Dracula, Bram Stoker; The Turn of the Screw, Henry James; Fledgling, Octavia Butler; The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells; Audition, Ryu Murakami, World War Z, Max Brooks, The Reapers and the Angels, Alden Bell, and short works from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and H. P. Lovecraft.

Offered Spring, 2022-23

This is a literature course in which we will discuss, closely read, analyze and reflectively write about the work of key/critical publications by esteemed BIPOC writers of African descent. Our exploration of joy as an act of resistance and the rounding out of story and human experience will take us into various literary forms and artistic voices, such as Ntozake Shange, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dean Atta, Gayl Jones, and Quinta Brunson.

Offered Spring, 2022-23

This course explores a wide range of comedic plays, novels, short stories, parodies, memoirs, articles, and comic stand-up with one goal in mind: to understand how humor allows traditionally underrepresented and marginalized groups of people to speak truth to power and “subvert the status quo in palatable ways.” Skilled humorists are adept at pointing out hypocrisies and model a heightened cultural criticism without losing their capacity for ironic self-examination. Readings and discussion investigate the history and techniques satirists use to critique power structures through the ages, resulting in both analysis and creative writing.

Texts may include Candide by Voltaire; In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders; ‘Fairview’ by Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Nanette by Hannah Gadsby.

Offered Spring, 2022-23

This course examines the representation of pandemic disease in literature, looking at how these representations have changed over time, and what cultural meanings they have produced. We will consider questions such as: What is the relationship between embodied experience and the written word? How has infectious disease been used in literature to articulate or contest contemporary understandings of Otherness? How has literature about pandemics been used to identify and work through social anxieties about immigration, print culture, revolutionary politics, religion? What are the ethical and aesthetic consequences of using disease as a metaphor for something else, or something else as a metaphor for disease? What can pandemics–and the way they’ve been represented in literature–teach us about our collective identities and our responsibilities to each other? 

The readings in this class span time, place, and genre. Students will complete both critical and creative writing assignments.

Possible texts include The Plague, Albert Camus; Angels in America, Tony Kushner; Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag; Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel; and Zone One, Colson Whitehead.

Offered Fall, 2022-23

More than 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare continues to be a cultural touchstone--regularly performed, discussed, and adapted in genres from the silly (the rom-com She’s the Man) to the sublime (the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). In this course, students consider the ways in which the 16th century set the stage for many of the enduring issues of the modern world--but also the ways in which our culture uses and reuses the words of Shakespeare to think through very 21st-century problems. Students will engage with performance and critical analysis, including writing individual critical analyses, presenting their own findings to their classmates, and reviewing adaptations. Three major assignments: analytical paper, journal-style review of a movie adaptation, oral presentation of outside (i.e. extra-textual) research. 

Offered Fall, 2022-23

In this course, we will think critically about nationality, nationalism, and international relations by reading literary works across various kinds of borders that talk back to the United States’ influence on other nations. Writing will include both literary analysis essays and creative assignments, possibly including a project of the student’s own design on a transnational issue of their choice. We’ll explore how Native American, African American, Chicanx, and Latin American writers have rendered crossings and conflicts of cultures, identities, and borders. We will look at literary responses to U.S. military actions through Vietnamese American, Hmong American, Chamorro, Iranian American, and Iraqi writers’ works. We will discover what happens when people, power, and writing flow back and forth across national boundaries, developing our appreciation and critical thinking about the work that books and nations do in the global world.

Spring Course

Poetry often expresses the poet’s own personal experience, creating an opportunity for connection between writer and reader. Poems can also represent shared experiences, sometimes adopting the voices of other individuals or speaking in a collective voice. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” invites Whitman in the opening lines to “Song of Myself.” This course explores how poets, from the 19th century to the present, strive to create connection across differences of time, place, and identity. The course also considers the role poetry can play in building stronger and more understanding communities. Writing assignments include literary analysis, personal reflection, and creative projects. Students explore the role poetry can play in the SPA community, the Twin Cities community, and the American community. Along the way, students learn fundamental tools for understanding, enjoying, and analyzing poetic form. Students then imagine and implement new possibilities for poetry to enrichen the communities to which they belong.

Junior/Senior Elective

Through our explorations of literature-- coupled with history, theory and personal experience-- we will ask what it means to resist and how literature can support or create resistance actions and movements. 

We’ll analyze how texts formal components reflect and/or create their content and themes, and how both content and form resists. Some of our texts document resistance as subject and others are produced by marginalized peoples, who’ve been oppressed through intersecting systems of power. Our subjects will span from contemporary Indigenous people living in the U.S. to the Twin Cities Uprising that occurred in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. We’ll watch documentaries, read lots of poetry, and hear from local activists doing on-the-ground work to combat unjust systems.

Two of the course’s largest assignments will include topics chosen by students-- topics that reflect their identities and interests in the world, their curiosities and experiences will directly shape the course. It is our hope that this course both angers and inspires students and that by the end of it, they feel empowered to help create a just world for everyone, through their words or their actions.

Junior/Senior Elective

We will read a selection of Asian world writers who represent or write about the cultures and experiences that people have cultivated after moving to other places. In addition to exploring themes like homeland and new community, we foreground the genre each writer is working in (or against) and analyze the literary techniques attendant to the demand. Students critically read and write analytically about  diaspora scholars and theorists and give focused, collective attention to works of satire, speculative fiction, short stories and memoir. Possible authors: David Mura, Avtar Brah,Yoko Tawada, Ha Jin, the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, and Vivek Shanbhag. Students complete a work of original creative writing at the end of the course.

Junior/Senior Elective

In this course, we will think critically about nationality, nationalism, and international relations by reading literary works across various kinds of borders that talk back to the United States’ influence on other nations. Writing will include both literary analysis essays and creative assignments, possibly including a project of the student’s own design on a transnational issue of their choice. We’ll explore how Native American, African American, Chicanx, and Latin American writers have rendered crossings and conflicts of cultures, identities, and borders. We will look at literary responses to U.S. military actions through Vietnamese American, Hmong American, Chamorro, Iranian American, and Iraqi writers’ works. We will discover what happens when people, power, and writing flow back and forth across national boundaries, developing our appreciation and critical thinking about the work that books and nations do in the global world.

Junior/Senior Elective

We live in a time of mass migration — across deserts, oceans, and mountains, by foot, train, car, and boat. Sometimes people run from what threatens them — poverty, hunger, violence, and an unstable climate — and, sometimes, people run toward what thrills them: the opportunity for adventure, a new or different life. In Literature of Migration, we will examine literary works that engage with migration, considering what it means to leave one’s home, cross real and imagined borders, and live in exile or diaspora. 

We’ll pay special attention to literary form, the many ways that one renders theirs or another’s displacement. How do form and genre impact storytelling? How does language clarify or frustrate lived experience? Through short and long assignments in literary analysis, class presentations, discussions, and a semester-long creative nonfiction assignment that synthesizes multiple texts and perspectives, we will consider what it means to cross and live with borders and what kinds of stories we can and should tell about migrant and refugee experience.

Junior/Senior Elective

Literary works stand the test of time for a reason. Our experiences with these texts change over time depending on a reader’s maturity, advances in technology, and through the re-envisioning of these texts by other artists. In this course, students examine canonical text and multiple adaptations of the original and analyze these works using myriad lenses. Students complete a number of collaborative, parody, and original writings and projects designed to develop visual literacy, creativity, and analytic skills. The works studied in this semester-long course have been adapted multiple times, and both original and adapted texts make social commentary.  Over time, adaptations maintain a core element of the original text that holds true, even if the commentary made by the new work is different from that of its inspiration. The course provides multiple opportunities for students to engage with adaptation both creatively and critically as they join conversations started (or complicated) by texts written long ago.

Possible “classics” include Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Three Sisters (inspired by the Bronte sisters) or The Cherry Orchard by Anton Checkov, Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum or Fairytales from the Brothers Grimm, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas,  “The Raven” and “Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe,  Stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Anderson, and "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens.

Junior/Senior Elective

Speculative Fiction investigates the ideas, themes, and stakes of literary genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, utopian, and dystopian literature. Students read and view a range of speculative texts from the past one hundred and fifty years, to include novels, novellas, comics, short stories, radio plays, graphic novels, and films. This course asks questions such as “What value do science-fiction and fantasy texts bring to the larger literary world?” “Why and how do different writers envision the future?” “How can science fiction and fantasy be used to comment upon contemporary society?” and “What does it mean to be a human in a world that is becoming increasingly technologized?” Students do a variety of writing, both analytical and creative. They connect ideas between texts and draw conclusions about these observations. They also begin to envision their own futures, literary and otherwise, and leave the course with a more developed sense of the writer (themselves included) as a critic, dreamer, inventor, and visionary.