English

“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.

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.

Students in this playwriting course develop a familiarity with the craft of writing for the theater. Through careful study of model plays, in-class writing exercises, and work on fully-developed scripts, students create multi-faceted complex characters and build tightly structured scenes, acts, and plays. Students examine core texts by established playwrights, including Marsha Norman, Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, Suzan Lori Parks, and Paula Vogel, alongside meaningful interactions and interviews with working, living playwrights. The primary focus of the course is the rigorous refinement of student work, and to this end, regular readings and workshops of student work take center stage. Each student will not only write original plays, but also write craft essays in response to published work and sensitive, constructive critique of their peers’ works. Emphasis on process, risk-taking, and finding one’s own voice and vision makes this an ideal site for innovation and exploration of students’ own interests, passions, and obsessions.

The goal of this intensive creative-writing course is twofold: 1) to introduce students to the fundamentals of poetry—image, rhythm, sound, diction, form, and figurative language, and 2) to immerse them in the work of several contemporary authors in order to gain an understanding of voice. Students read a wide variety of poets from a wide variety of time periods in order to understand what makes for successful writing. Students also read craft essays in order to develop a genre-specific vocabulary that allows them to thoughtfully analyze and understand their work, their peers’ work, and the work of the published authors they be encounter. Students 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 generously and precisely margin-note the work of their peers, provide a printed critique letter of about a single-spaced page, and critically engage the work in discussion. Ultimately, this class fosters student understanding and appreciation of poetry, as well as their growth as a creative writer.

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.

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).

Writing Seminar: Critical Contexts is a course in essay writing, analysis, and critical thinking. If you've ever finished reading 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. Students will learn different "lenses" through which art and literature can be viewed and acquire new ways of 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.

Text: Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory by Steven Lynn

In Writing Seminar: Writing In Public, students deeply explore pressing issues of the day (e.g., school choice, income disparity, gun control, and more) and then develop their own nuanced written work that incorporates and responds to a variety of diverse opinions on their topics. Rather than attempting merely to “win” an argument, students will pragmatically, diplomatically, and empathetically focus on changing minds and marshaling resources to solve problems. They will be required to reflect on the sources of their own most deeply held beliefs and in so doing develop their capacity to identify and empathize with the sources of others’ beliefs as well. Students will investigate issues they care about through multiple lenses, including personal reflection, research, discussion, and interview/immersion with disparate viewpoints. Students will be expected to seek out and engage opposite points of view.

This analytical writing seminar 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: Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film by Richard Barsam and Dave Monohan

Students taking “Big Books” will read and discuss those long, heavy tomes that explore the question of what it means to be human(e). We will read two novels over the course of the semester: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). With nearly a century and a half between them, these two long works of fiction take distinct approaches to exploring human morality that nevertheless echo one another. The skills-based attention of this course will be on reading. Students will experiment with various types of reading practices for efficiency and efficacy. In short, “Big Books” asks students less to understand Dostoevsky and more to understand themselves as readers. Instead of analytical writing, students will produce a daily reading journal where they will reflect on their assigned reading practice. At the end of each unit, students will choose a selection of their reading journal entries to revise and expand. Students will treat themselves (as readers) as the text of humanistic study. In short, this course will ask students to answer the questions: how and why do we read?

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.

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 resist. Some of our texts document resistance as a subject and others are produced by marginalized peoples, who’ve been oppressed through intersecting systems of power. Our subjects will include contemporary and timely resistance movements. 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 you-- topics that reflect your own identities and interests in the world. So your curiosities and experiences will directly shape the course. This course may anger and inspire you, and by the end of it, you may feel empowered to help create a just world for everyone, through your words or your actions.

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.

Through the study of Black Joy, we gain a fuller picture of the human experience. Literature of Black Joy foregrounds key publications by esteemed BIPOC writers of African descent: literature meant for joy and theory/criticism written to resist. We will activate our cultural competence by engaging in discussions, writing analytically and reflectively, and reading closely inside and outside of class. The required course readings include scholarly chapters/essays and full-length creative works.

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.

What is battle? What does it mean to be a soldier? What does it mean to return from war? What is it about the human condition that leads us, again and again, to attack each other for "the cause"? In this course, we will consider the reasons that we go to war, the ways in which we fight, and what happens when people who have gone to war return. Reading a wide variety of texts will allow us to examine how questions raised in the Trojan War echo forward into modern and present-day conflicts. This course will focus on close reading and in-class discussion; writing will include analytical and creative projects.

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.

“When the lights go out, the theater will still be there to teach us about ourselves.”

A playwright is a builder of sorts-- with Hamlet, Shakespeare did not write a play about revenge; he built a space where revenge is happening in front of us.

The goal for this class is to develop a familiarity with the craft of writing for the theater. Through careful study of model plays, in-class writing exercises, and work on fully developed scripts, students will create multi-faceted, complex characters and build tightly structured scenes, acts, and plays. The class will examine core texts by established playwrights alongside meaningful interviews with working playwrights. The primary focus of the class is the rigorous refinement of student work, and to this end, we will conduct regular readings and workshops of student work. Each student will not only be expected to write original plays but will additionally write craft essays in response to published work and sensitive, constructive critique of their peers’ works. This class's emphasis on process, risk-taking, and finding one's own voice and vision makes this an ideal site for innovation and exploration of the students’ own interests, passions, and obsessions.

Through close reading of nonfiction, poetry, and a novel, students will explore the environmental dimensions of literature and humans’ changing relationship to the natural world.

The first half of the course will be a historical survey of environmentally-engaged texts. We will start with creation narratives (Exodus, American indigenous myths) and then move chronologically through Greek and Roman texts, ancient Chinese wilderness poetry, Anglo-Saxon poems, Shakespeare, Basho, Romantic poetry (British and, later, American), and key texts of Transcendentalism, among others.

The second half of the course will focus on the environment in crisis, focusing primarily on the contemporary moment and its immediate predecessors in the 1950s and 60s (Leopold, Carson), and ideally activating concern and creative thinking about the planet’s environmental future.

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, "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens

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.

In Literature of Migration, students 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. This course pays 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? Students read novels and short stories by authors such as Hamid Mohsin, Viet Than Nguyen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Taiye Selasi, and Julia Alvarez; poetry by poets such as Li-Young Lee, Eduardo Corral, Richard Blanco, Sandra Lim, Ocean Vuong, Sun Yung Shin, and Ray Gonzalez; literary nonfiction by authors such as Francisco Cantú, Valeria Luiselli, Edwidge Danticat, Teju Cole, Kao Kalia Yang, and Vladimir Nabokov; and context and reporting by Hannah Arendt, Ben Mauk, and Susan Sontag.

Through short and long assignments in literary analysis, creative nonfiction that synthesizes multiple texts and perspectives, and a multi-genre final project, students discuss what it means to cross and live with borders and what kinds of stories people can and should tell about migrant and refugee experience.

In this course students explore the various ways gender is defined by self, community, and society. Through novels and supplemental texts, students examine the internal and external forces that shape gender identity and focus on the construction of gender. In addition to analytical papers, personal reflections, creative pieces, and class presentations, students are responsible for at least two media projects that address construction of gender within popular culture and advertising.

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.

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.

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.