English

In Carleton’s English department, we are passionate about the study of literature and the teaching of writing. We offer a major in English as well as a minor in creative writing. The diverse backgrounds and specialties of English department faculty are reflected in the variety of our literature courses and creative writing workshops. Our courses examine a range of genres, historical eras, literary and cultural traditions, and critical approaches.

The skills in reading, interpretation, writing, creativity, and communication taught in the English department are essential to all fields of study, whether artistic, humanistic, or scientific. These skills also transfer readily to a broad range of careers.

Major Requirements – 72 Total Credits

Foundations – Required 6 credits

One designated 100-level course that develops skills of literary analysis and introduces the concept of genre 

• ENGL 100.01: Controlling Narratives (25/FA)
• ENGL 100.02: Literary Revision: Authority, Art, and Rebellion (25/FA)
• ENGL 100.03: Novel, Nation, Self (25/FA)
• ENGL 112: Introduction to the Novel
• ENGL 114: Introduction to Medieval Narrative (not offered 2025-26)
• ENGL 115: The Art of Storytelling
• ENGL 118: Introduction to Poetry
• ENGL 131: Speculative Fiction
• ENGL 135: Imperial Adventures (not offered 2025-26)
• ENGL 137: Terrorism and the Novel (not offered 2025-26)
• ENGL 141: Latinx Voices in the Age of Trump
• ENGL 144: Shakespeare I
• ENGL 149: Tolkien and Herbert
• ENGL 187: Murder (not offered 2025-26)

Historical Eras – Required Minimum 36 credits

36 credits in literature courses numbered 200-394 (excluding 220 and 295) which must include:

Critical Methods Course – Required 6 credits

• ENGL 295: Critical Methods

Senior Seminar Course – Required 6 credits

• ENGL 395.01: The Writings of Virginia Woolf (25/FA)
• ENGL 395.01: The Romantic Mode (26/SP)

Senior Integrative Exercise – Required 6 credits

• ENGL 400: Integrative Exercise

Other Major Requirements

Of the 72 credits required to complete the major:

Additional Departmental Notes

Double-majors considering completing the integrative exercise during the junior year will need written approval from the departmental chair.

Minor Requirements – 36 Total Credits

The English Creative Writing Minor is intended for students who wish to gain experience in creative writing by taking a series of writing workshops accompanied by the study of literature relevant to their writing interests. Students must complete 36 total credits as described below.

Additional Departmental Notes

English majors who wish to also minor in Creative Writing may do so, but they may not count more than 18 credits of their major toward the 36 total credits for the minor.

• ENGL 100.01 Controlling Narratives

  Do we lose control in hurrying to seize it? Gyasi's fictional character poses the question, "Do we have control over our thoughts?" Ta-Nehisi Coates' experiences convince him that he has no control over his own body. In addition to Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom and Coates' Between the World and Me, we will read an autobiography, a memoir, essays, as well as an anthropologist's narrative on college life and discuss the differing scenarios in which control might be beyond reach, negotiated, staged, wrested away, or strategically ceded. Equally important: Is the control you exercise over your own writing constant or sporadic?

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1
  • Prerequisites:

    Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.

  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation
  • Faculty: Kofi Owusu 🏫 👤

• ENGL 100.02 Literary Revision: Authority, Art, and Rebellion

  The poet Adrienne Rich describes revision as "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction." This course examines how literature confronts and reinvents the traditions it inherits. Through a diverse selection of fiction, poetry, and drama, we will examine how writers rework literary conventions, "rewrite" previous literary works, and critique societal myths. From Charles Chesnutt to Charles Johnson, from Henrik Ibsen to Rebecca Gilman, from Charlotte Bronte to Jean Rhys, from Maupassant and Chekhov to contemporary reinventions, we will explore literary revision from different perspectives and periods.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1
  • Prerequisites:

    Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.

  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation
  • Faculty: Nancy Cho 🏫 👤

• ENGL 100.03 Novel, Nation, Self

  With an emphasis on critical reading and writing in an academic context, this course will examine how contemporary writers from a range of global locations approach the question of the writing of the self and of the nation. Reading novels from both familiar and unfamiliar cultural contexts we will examine closely our practices of reading, and the cultural expectations and assumptions that underlie them.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1
  • Prerequisites:

    Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.

  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation
  • Faculty: Arnab Chakladar 🏫 👤

• ENGL 109 The Craft of Academic Writing

  This course is designed to demystify the practice of academic writing and to introduce students to the skills they’ll need to write effectively in a variety of academic disciplines and contexts. Students will learn how to respond to other authors’ claims, frame clear arguments of their own, structure essays to develop a clear logical flow, integrate outside sources into their writing, and improve their writing through revision. All sections will include a variety of readings, multiple writing assignments, and substantial feedback from the course instructor.

  • Offered: Winter 2026, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: No Exploration WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level
  • Faculty: Nancy Cho 🏫 👤 · Bret Vukoder 🏫 👤

• ENGL 112 Introduction to the Novel

  This course explores the history and form of the British novel, tracing its development from a strange, sensational experiment in the eighteenth century to a dominant literary genre today. Among the questions that we will consider: What is a novel? What makes it such a popular form of entertainment? How does the novel participate in ongoing conversations about family, sex, class, race, and nation? How did a genre once considered a source of moral corruption become a legitimate literary form? Authors include: Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, and Jackie Kay.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation ENGL Tradition 1
  • Faculty: Jessica Leiman 🏫 👤

• ENGL 114 Introduction to Medieval Narrative

  This class will focus on three of the most popular and closely connected modes of narrative enjoyed by medieval audiences: the epic, the romance, and the saint’s life. Readings, drawn primarily from the English and French traditions, will include Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, and legends of St. Alexis and St. Margaret. We will consider how each narrative mode influenced the other, as we encounter warriors and lovers who suffer like saints, and saints who triumph like warriors and lovers. Readings will be in translation or highly accessible modernizations.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation ENGL Tradition 1 MARS Core Course MARS Supporting EUST Transnational Support

• ENGL 115 The Art of Storytelling

  Jorge Luis Borges is quoted as saying that “unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.” This course focuses attention primarily on the short story as an enduring form. We will read short stories drawn from different literary traditions and from various parts of the world. Stories to be read include those by Aksenov, Atwood, Beckett, Borges, Camus, Cheever, Cisneros, Farah, Fuentes, Gordimer, Ishiguro, Kundera, Mahfouz, Marquez, Moravia, Nabokov, Narayan, Pritchett, Rushdie, Trevor, Welty, and Xue.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation
  • Faculty: Kofi Owusu 🏫 👤

• ENGL 118 Introduction to Poetry

  “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought”—Audre Lorde. In this course we will explore how poets use form, tone, sound, imagery, rhythm, and subject matter to create works of astonishing imagination, beauty, and power. In discussions, Moodle posts, and essay assignments we’ll analyze individual works by poets from Sappho to Amanda Gorman (and beyond); there will also be daily recitations of poems, since the musicality is so intrinsic to the meaning.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation SPAN Literature for Language
  • Faculty: Constance Walker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 131 Speculative Fiction

  This course uses "speculative fiction" as umbrella term for categories and (sub)genres that include science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror. Deviation from the norm is our norm. You will have to teach your eyes to hear, and your ears to see. Above all, your multisensory engagement should allow for a reality check: does speculative fiction replicate or repudiate known stereotypes of women and blacks, in particular? What do you find (un)appealing about speculative fiction? We will read a variety of short fiction from the DARK MATTER anthology as well as longer narratives by Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation
  • Faculty: Kofi Owusu 🏫 👤

• ENGL 135 Imperial Adventures

  Indiana Jones has a pedigree. In this class we will encounter some of his ancestors in stories, novels and comic books from the early decades of the twentieth century. The wilds of Afghanistan, the African forest, a prehistoric world in Patagonia, the opium dens of mysterious exotic London–these will be but some of our stops as we examine the structure and ideology and lasting legacy of the imperial adventure tale. Authors we will read include Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Transnational Support

• ENGL 137 Terrorism and the Novel

  Novels share some key attributes with acts of terrorism. Both focus our attention on questions of plot, responsibility, and effect. Both often ask us to question how a person’s character or background influences unanticipated subsequent events. Like terrorists, many novelists hope their work will draw attention to forgotten causes and influence public opinion through a combination of shock and sympathy. This course will explore a few of the many novels dedicated to terrorism, whether from the perspective of perpetrators, victims, or authorities. The reading list will include examples from Britain, America, and South Asia.  

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation

• ENGL 141 Latinx Voices in the Age of Trump

  The last few years have placed Latinx communities under siege and in the spotlight. The demands of the census and new policies around immigration mean that who counts as Latinx and why it matters has public visibility and meaning. Simultaneously, the last few years have seen an incredible growth of new literary voices and genres in the world of Latinx letters. From fictional and creative nonfiction accounts of detention camps, border crossings, and asylum court proceedings to lyrical wanderings in bilingualism to demands for greater attention to Afrolatinidad and the particular experiences of Black Latinxs–Latinx voices are rising. We will engage with current literary discussions in print, on social media, and in literary journals as we chart the shifting, developing terrain of Latinx literatures. Offered at both the 100 and 200 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Democracy Activism CL: 100 level ENGL Tradition 2 LTAM Electives AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity ENGL Foundation
  • Faculty: Adriana Estill 🏫 👤

• ENGL 144 Shakespeare I

  A chronological survey of the whole of Shakespeare's career, covering all genres and periods, this course explores the nature of Shakespeare's genius and the scope of his art. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between literature and stagecraft ("page to stage"). By tackling the complexities of prosody, of textual transmission, and of Shakespeare's highly figurative and metaphorical language, the course will help you further develop your ability to think critically about literature. Offered at both the 100 and 200 levels, coursework adjusted accordingly. Declared or prospective English majors should register for ENGL 244.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific MARS Core Course MARS Supporting THEA Minor Playwriting THEA Literature Criticism History
  • Faculty: Pierre Hecker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 149 Tolkien and Herbert

  This course will study the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert, with an emphasis on their best-known texts, Lord of the Rings and Dune. These books are often cited as the highest achievements in their respective genres (fantasy and science fiction), and share intriguing similarities, including the One Ring and Spice/Mélange, the perils of power, environmental concerns, blockbuster film treatments, and obsessive world-building. We will also consider secondary works by each author, including Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, selections from his letters, and Herbert’s Dune Messiah, the sequel to Dune. Critical approaches will include ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and Bloom’s anxiety of influence.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation
  • Faculty: Tim Burbery 🏫

• ENGL 160 Creative Writing

  You will work in several genres and forms, among them: traditional and experimental poetry, prose fiction, and creative nonfiction. In your writing you will explore the relationship between the self, the imagination, the word, and the world. In this practitioner’s guide to the creative writing process, we will examine writings from past and current authors, and your writings will be critiqued in a workshop setting and revised throughout the term.

  • Offered: Fall 2025, Winter 2026, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing
  • Faculty: Gregory Hewett 🏫 👤 · Gwen Kirby 🏫 👤 · Christopher Tradowsky 🏫 👤

• ENGL 187 Murder

  From the ancient Greeks to the Bible to the modern serial killer novel, murder has always been a preeminent topic of intellectual and artistic investigation. Covering a range of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, drama, and film, this transhistorical survey will explore why homicide has been the subject of such fierce attention from so many great minds. Works may include: the Bible, Shakespeare, De Quincey, Poe, Thompson, Capote, Tey, McGinniss, Auster, French, Malcolm, Wilder, and Morris, as well as critical, legal, and other materials. Warning: not for the faint-hearted.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 100 level ENGL Foundation

• ENGL 202 The Bible as Literature

  We will approach the Bible not as an archaeological relic, nor as the Word of God, but “as a work of great literary force and authority [that has] shaped the minds and lives of intelligent men and women for two millennia and more.” As one place to investigate such shaping, we will sample how the Bible (especially in the “Authorized” or King James version) has drawn British and American poets and prose writers to borrow and deploy its language and respond creatively to its narratives, images, and visions.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Foreign Literature ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 RELG Pertinent Course RELG XDept Pertinent

• ENGL 203 Other Worlds of Medieval English Literature

  When medieval writers imagined worlds beyond their own, what did they see?  This course will examine depictions of the afterlife, the East, and magical realms of the imagination. We will read romances, saints' lives, and a masterpiece of pseudo-travel literature that influenced both Shakespeare and Columbus, alongside contemporary theories of post-colonialism, gender and race. We will visit the lands of the dead and the undead, and compare gruesome punishments and heavenly rewards. We will encounter dog-headed men, Amazons, cannibals, armies devoured by hippopotami, and roasted geese that fly onto waiting dinner tables. Be prepared. Readings in Middle English and in modern translations.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 MARS Core Course MARS Supporting EUST Transnational Support

• ENGL 205 “Passing Strange”: Shakespeare’s Othello and its Modern Afterlives

  One of the most intimate and devastating plays in all dramatic literature has also continuously been at the center of societal debates around race, representation, and civil rights. Moving from Shakespeare’s Renaissance to important historical and civil rights figures like Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson to reimaginings by contemporary artists, we will explore how Othello has served as a vehicle for social change. The class will be taught in conjunction with the campus visit of writer, actor, and anti-apartheid activist Bonisile John Kani, OIS, OBE, the first Black actor to play Othello in South Africa. 

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: AFST Literary Artistic Analysis CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific MARS Supporting

• ENGL 206 William Shakespeare: The Henriad

  Shakespeare’s account of the Wars of the Roses combines history, tragedy, comedy, romance, and bildungsroman as it explores themes of power, identity, duty, family, love, and friendship on an epic scale. We will read and discuss Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V, and attend the Guthrie Theater’s three-play repertory event.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific MARS Supporting THEA Literature Criticism History

• ENGL 207 Princes. Poets. Power

  Can you serve power without sacrificing your principles or risking your life? We examine the classic explorations of the problem–Machiavelli’s Prince, Castiglione’s Courtier, and More’s Utopia–and investigate the place of poets and poetry at court of Henry VIII, tracing the birth of the English sonnet, and the role of poetry in the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific MARS Supporting

• ENGL 208 The Faerie Queene

  Spenser’s romance epic: an Arthurian quest-cycle, celebrating the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, and England’s imperial destiny. Readers encounter knights, ladies, and lady-knights; enchanted groves and magic castles; dragons and sorcerers; and are put through a series of moral tests and hermeneutic challenges.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 MARS Supporting

• ENGL 210 From Chaucer to Milton: Early English Literature

  An introduction to some of the major genres, texts, and authors of medieval and Renaissance England. Readings may include works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the lyric poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific MARS Core Course MARS Supporting

• ENGL 211 Haunting the Margins of American Literature

  Nineteenth-century Americans were hardly strangers to ghosts and the world beyond. In fact, many actively sought communion with the dead by attending table-rapping séances and sitting for spirit photographs. This class will analyze a variety of literary hauntings from the long nineteenth century to explore the cultural anxieties and desires they might represent. Paying particular attention to questions of race, gender, and sexuality, we will consider how figures ghosted from history become present in ways that demand attention and, at times, redress. Authors will include Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 2

• ENGL 212 Adventures in Special Collections

  This interdisciplinary course gives students hands-on experience working in Special Collections. Carleton’s extraordinary holdings include rare and ancient books, manuscripts, artists’ books, private press specimens, first editions, and other artifacts and ephemera. Students will investigate the hidden lives of these objects and learn about material culture, conservation, curation, descriptive bibliography, book history, and the cultural, political, and ethical challenges that shape collection and stewardship.

  • Offered: First Five Weeks, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
  • Tags: CL: 200 level EUST Transnational Support
  • Faculty: Pierre Hecker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 213 Being Queer in Nineteenth-Century America

  What forms of community, gender identification, and desire were imagined as possible in the literature and life writing of nineteenth-century Americans? How did race and class shift the terms of what could be imagined, and how did these possibilities change with the sexual taxonomies developed by scientists? This course will explore these questions by reading American literary texts from 1799 to 1899 alongside shorter works of history and theory. We will consider not only the discourse around wealthy, white “romantic friendships,” but also the ways that poor and non-white bodies were deemed queer in conduct manuals and scientific texts.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Democracy Activism AMST Production Consumption of Culture CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 2 GWSS Elective

• ENGL 214 Revenge Tragedy

  Madness, murder, conspiracy, poison, incest, rape, ghosts, and lots of blood: the fashion for revenge tragedy in Elizabethan and Jacobean England led to the creation of some of the most brilliant, violent, funny, and deeply strange plays in the history of the language. Authors may include Cary, Chapman, Ford, Marston, Middleton, Kyd, Tourneur, and Webster.

  • Offered: First Five Weeks, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific MARS Supporting THEA Minor Playwriting THEA Literature Criticism History
  • Faculty: Pierre Hecker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 215 Modern American Literature

  A survey of some of the central movements and texts in American literature, from World War I to the present. Topics covered will include modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat generation and postmodernism.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Survey 1 CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 AMST Production Consumption of Culture

• ENGL 216 Milton and Modernity

  John Milton wrote what is perhaps the most influential, and arguably greatest, poem in the English language. In this work (Paradise Lost), and indeed throughout his corpus, Milton engaged his literary predecessors extensively, yet he also anticipated modern concerns in striking ways. We will read his major works (“Lycidas,” the sonnets, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained), as well as prose selections, attending to his use of sources, and to the ways Milton presages debates over free speech and book banning, Darwinism, the multiverse, and AI.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific MARS Core Course
  • Faculty: Tim Burbery 🏫

• ENGL 217 A Novel Education

  Samuel Johnson declared novels to be “written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life.” This course explores what sort of education the novel offered its readers during a time when fiction was considered a source of valuable lessons and also an agent of corruption. We will read a selection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children’s literature, seduction fiction, and novels of manners, considering how these works engage with early educational theories, notions of male and female conduct, and concerns about the didactic and sensational possibilities of fiction. Authors include Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Charles Dickens.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1 GWSS Elective

• ENGL 218 The Gothic Spirit

  The eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw the rise of the Gothic, a genre populated by brooding hero-villains, vulnerable virgins, mad monks, ghosts, and monsters. In this course, we will examine the conventions and concerns of the Gothic, addressing its preoccupation with terror, transgression, sex, otherness, and the supernatural. As we situate this genre within its literary and historical context, we will consider its relationship to realism and Romanticism, and we will explore how it reflects the political and cultural anxieties of its age. Authors include Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Emily Bronte.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific GWSS Elective
  • Faculty: Jessica Leiman 🏫 👤

• ENGL 219 Global Shakespeare

  Shakespeare’s plays have been reimagined and repurposed all over the world, performed on seven continents, and translated into over 100 languages. The course explores how issues of globalization, nationalism, translation (both cultural and linguistic), and (de)colonization inform our understanding of these wonderfully varied adaptations and appropriations. We will examine the social, political, and aesthetic implications of a range of international stage, film, and literary versions as we consider how other cultures respond to the hegemonic original. No prior experience with Shakespeare is necessary.

  • Offered: Second Five Weeks, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 MARS Supporting EUST Transnational Support THEA Literature Criticism History
  • Faculty: Pierre Hecker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 220 Arts of Oral Presentation

  Instruction and practice in being a speaker and an audience in formal and informal settings.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Grading: S/CR/NC
  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: No Exploration
  • Tags: CL: 200 level

• ENGL 222 The Art of Jane Austen

  All of Jane Austen's fiction will be read; the works she did not complete or choose to publish during her lifetime will be studied in an attempt to understand the art of her mature comic masterpieces, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific
  • Faculty: Constance Walker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 223 American Transcendentalism

  The last time US citizens were so politically polarized as now was in the 1840s and 50s, a period that gave rise in New England to the loose band of social and religious reformers known as the Transcendentalists. This interdisciplinary course investigates the major figures of the movement—Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman— alongside less well-known figures, grappling with their experiments in living and writing, and contextualizing in the disruptions of the times their collective search for better ways of doing life and thought, labor and politics, friendship and education.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 2
  • Faculty: Peter Balaam 🏫 👤

• ENGL 224 Cruel Summer, 1816

  A circle of poets and writers, friends and lovers, spend the summer in Geneva sightseeing, arguing, telling ghost stories, reading and writing passionately together—and changing the course of literary history.  We’ll explore the personal and artistic relations between Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, reading the works they wrote in conversation with each other including Frankenstein, “Prometheus,” and Prometheus Unbound, as well as studying diaries, manuscripts, biographical accounts, and films.  Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1
  • Faculty: Constance Walker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 227 Imagining the Borderlands

  This course engages the borderlands as space (the geographic area that straddles nations) and idea (liminal spaces, identities, communities). We examine texts from writers like Anzaldúa, Butler, Cervantes, Dick, Eugenides, Haraway, and Muñoz first to understand how borders act to constrain our imagi(nation) and then to explore how and to what degree the borderlands offer hybrid identities, queer affects, and speculative world-building. We will engage the excess of the borderlands through a broad chronological and generic range of U.S. literary and visual texts. Come prepared to question what is “American”, what is race, what is human.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Space and Place CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 GWSS Elective LTAM Electives LTAM Pertinent Courses AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity

• ENGL 228 Banned. Censored. Reviled.

  What makes a work of art dangerous? While present-day attacks on books, libraries, and schools feel unprecedented, writers and artists have always had to fight efforts to suppress their work, often at great personal and societal cost. We will study literature, films, graphic novels, images, music, and other materials that have been challenged and attacked as offensive, taboo, or transgressive, and also explore strategies of resistance to censorship.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: ACE Theoretical AMST Democracy Activism CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 AMST Production Consumption of Culture

• ENGL 229 The Rise of the Novel

  This course traces the development of a sensational, morally dubious genre that emerged in the eighteenth-century: the novel. We will read some of the most entertaining, best-selling novels written during the first hundred years of the form, paying particular attention to the novel’s concern with courtship and marriage, writing and reading, the real and the fantastic. Among the questions we will ask: What is a novel? What distinguished the early novel from autobiography, history, travel narrative, and pornography? How did this genre come to be associated with women? How did early novelists respond to eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of reading fiction? Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific GWSS Elective

• ENGL 230 Studies in African American Literature: From the 1950s to the Present

  We will explore developments in African American literature since the 1950s with a focus on literary expression in the Civil Rights Era; on the Black Arts Movement; on the new wave of feminist/womanist writing; and on the experimental and futuristic fictions of the twenty-first century. Authors to be read include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kevin Young, and Tracy Smith.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: AMST Democracy Activism CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 AFST Literary Artistic Analysis AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity

• ENGL 231 Lyric America: Power of the Word

  A thematic and formal exploration of the traditions of American poetry. Against all odds, and frequently against violent histories, American poets have turned again and again to locate in the power of the word the resources to make something happen– psychologically, morally, politically, religiously. Ideal for students of creative writing before, after, or simultaneously with ENGL 160, 271, and/or 371.

  Recommended Preparation: ENGL 118 or other ENGL "Foundations" course, or equivalent.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Creative Writing ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 2

• ENGL 232 Narrative and Friendship

  "Friendship has splendors that love knows not," writes Mariama Bâ. And Alice Walker reports that when women "have asked for love, [they] have been given children." The love thing has also inspired some of the most insipid prose and atrocious incidents ever concocted and inflicted on readers. Our selected texts will suggest that it is the nurturing of friendship, not the mislabeling of an instantaneous falling–presumably "in love," that underwrites plot and character development over the course of a narrative. Final assignment in lieu of final exam will be creative writing: original short story featuring friends-friendship and/or love-lovers.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level

• ENGL 233 Writing and Social Justice

  Social justice is fairness as it manifests in society, but who gets to determine what fairness looks, sounds, feels like? The self-described Black Canadian poet Dionne Brand says that she doesn’t write toward justice because that doesn’t exist, but that she writes against tyranny. If we use that framework, how does that change our own writing and our own notions of justice in our or any time? What is the role of literary writing, especially fiction, the essay, and poetry in the collective and individual quest to understand and build conditions that could yield increased potential for social justice? In this course, students will read, analyze, discuss, and write about various texts that might be considered to be against myriad tyrannies, if not necessarily toward social justice. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Phillip Metres, Toni Morrison, Myung Mi Kim, and M. NourbeSe Philipe.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Democracy Activism CL: 200 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 AFST Literary Artistic Analysis AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity

• ENGL 235 Asian American Literature

  This course is an introduction to major works and authors of fiction, drama, and poetry from about 1900 to the present. We will trace the development of Asian American literary traditions while exploring the rich diversity of recent voices in the field. Authors to be read include Carlos Bulosan, Sui Sin Far, Philip Kan Gotanda, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Milton Murayama, Chang-rae Lee, Li-young Lee, and John Okada.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST America in the World AMST Survey 1 CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity
  • Faculty: Nancy Cho 🏫 👤

• ENGL 236 American Nature Writing

  A study of the environmental imagination in American literature. We will explore the relationship between literature and the natural sciences and examine questions of style, narrative, and representation in the light of larger social, ethical, and political concerns about the environment. Authors read will include Thoreau, Muir, Jeffers, Abbey, and Leopold. Students will write a creative Natural History essay as part of the course requirements.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Space and Place CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 ENTS Society, Culture and Policy AMST Production Consumption of Culture

• ENGL 238 African Literature in English

  This is a course on texts drawn from English-speaking Africa since the 1950’s. Authors to be read include Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head, Benjamin Kwakye, and Wole Soyinka.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: AFST Survey Course CCST Encounters CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 3 AFST Literary Artistic Analysis

• ENGL 239 The Real Supernatural: Realism and Genre Fiction

  Who put mindreading in my realist novel? This course examines how nineteenth-century writers troubled the boundaries between high realism and supernatural genre fiction. We’ll track these concerns through realist novels (Brontë and Eliot) before turning to popular literature representing the ghastly, the ghoulish, and the vampiric, like Carmilla. We will consider newspapers, paintings, and scientific tracts, anchoring ourselves in nineteenth-century culture. Probing the overlap between realistic representations of life and more fantastic modes of writing, we will unpack the shared concerns and rhetoric that knit these two categories closely together.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW English Literature ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1

• ENGL 240 Join Us: Victorian Era Conformity and Rebellion

  Repression breeds rebellion. Themes of nonconformity and self-determination run through Victorian literature, as characters struggle to assert their independence and worth against religious, sexual, and social norms. In this course, we will explore nineteenth-century celebrations of the divergent and rebellious, surveying major writers like James Hogg, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. We will also take frequent detours into the eccentric poetry and short fiction of the period, thinking about experimental writing as a type of literary nonconformity.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW English Literature ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1

• ENGL 241 Latinx Voices in the Age of Trump

  The last few years have placed Latinx communities under siege and in the spotlight. The demands of the census and new policies around immigration mean that who counts as Latinx and why it matters has public visibility and meaning. Simultaneously, the last few years have seen an incredible growth of new literary voices and genres in the world of Latinx letters. From fictional and creative nonfiction accounts of detention camps, border crossings, and asylum court proceedings to lyrical wanderings in bilingualism to demands for greater attention to Afrolatinidad and the particular experiences of Black Latinxs–Latinx voices are rising. We will engage with current literary discussions in print, on social media, and in literary journals as we chart the shifting, developing terrain of Latinx literatures. Offered at both the 100 and 200 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Democracy Activism CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 LTAM Electives AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity
  • Faculty: Adriana Estill 🏫 👤

• ENGL 242 Queer Literature: The Pre-Stonewall Origins

  The LGBTQ+ movement turned on the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Prior to that, queer life was largely illegal and underground in the United States and most places globally. Queer content in literature was censored and banned. This course explores the strategies queer writers used to circumvent censorship and get published. Writers whose work we will read, discuss and analyze are: Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith and James Baldwin.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 GWSS Elective

• ENGL 244 Shakespeare I

  A chronological survey of the whole of Shakespeare's career, covering all genres and periods, this course explores the nature of Shakespeare's genius and the scope of his art. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between literature and stagecraft ("page to stage"). By tackling the complexities of prosody, of textual transmission, and of Shakespeare's highly figurative and metaphorical language, the course will help you further develop your ability to think critically about literature. Offered at both the 100 and 200 levels, coursework will be adjusted accordingly. Non English majors should register for English 144.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific MARS Core Course MARS Supporting THEA Literature Criticism History
  • Faculty: Pierre Hecker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 245 Bollywood Nation

  This course will serve as an introduction to Bollywood or popular Hindi cinema from India. We will trace the history of this cinema and analyze its formal components. We will watch and discuss some of the most celebrated and popular films of the last 60 years with particular emphasis on urban thrillers and social dramas.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: ASST South Asia CAMS Extra Departmental CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 3 ASST Literary Artistic Analysis SAST Support Literary Artistic Analysis
  • Faculty: Arnab Chakladar 🏫 👤

• ENGL 246 Film, Literature, and Culture in Mumbai and Seoul Program: Beyond Bollywood

  While the output of the popular Hindi film industry of Mumbai, also known as Bollywood, has global reach and renown, other genres of films produced in Mumbai are not as well-known or studied. In this course, students will encounter independent feature films, documentaries and short films that will expand their understanding of the larger world of Hindi cinema in particular, and Indian cinema more broadly.

  • Offered: First Five Weeks, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Film, Literature and Culture in Mumbai and Seoul program.

  • Tags: ASST Literary Artistic Analysis ASST South Asia CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 3
  • Faculty: Arnab Chakladar 🏫 👤

• ENGL 247 The American West

  Wallace Stegner once described the West as "the geography of hope" in the American imagination. Despite various dystopian urban pressures, the region still conjures up images of wide vistas and sunburned optimism. We will explore this paradox by examining both popular mythic conceptions of the West (primarily in film) and more searching literary treatments of the same area. We will explore how writers such as Twain, Cather, Stegner and Cormac McCarthy have dealt with the geographical diversity and multi-ethnic history of the West. Weekly film showings will include The Searchers, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Unforgiven, and Lone Star. Extra Time Required, evening screenings.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Space and Place CAMS Extra Departmental CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 ENTS Society, Culture and Policy AMST Production Consumption of Culture
  • Faculty: Michael Kowalewski 🏫 👤

• ENGL 248 Visions of California

  An interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which California has been imagined in literature, art, film and popular culture from pre-contact to the present. We will explore the state both as a place (or rather, a mosaic of places) and as a continuing metaphor–whether of promise or disintegration–for the rest of the country. Authors read will include Muir, Steinbeck, Chandler, West, and Didion. Weekly film showings will include Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown and Blade Runner.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Space and Place CAMS Extra Departmental CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 ENTS Society, Culture and Policy AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity
  • Faculty: Michael Kowalewski 🏫 👤

• ENGL 249 Modern Irish Literature: Poetry, Prose, and Politics

  What can and should be the role of literature in times of bitter political conflict? Caught in partisan strife, Irish writers have grappled personally and painfully with the question. We will read works by Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney, among others, and watch films (Bloody Sunday, Hunger) that confront the deep and ongoing divisions in Irish political life.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific

• ENGL 251 Contemporary Indian Fiction

  Contemporary Indian writers, based either in India or abroad, have become significant figures in the global literary landscape. This can be traced to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children in 1981. We will begin with that novel and read some of the other notable works of fiction of the following decades. The class will provide both a thorough grounding in the contemporary Indian literary scene as well as an introduction to some concepts in post-colonial studies.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: ASST South Asia CCST Encounters CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 3 SAST Capstone ASST Literary Artistic Analysis SAST Literary Artistic Analysis SAST Support Literary Artistic Analysis

• ENGL 253 Food Writing: History, Culture, Practice

  We are living in perhaps the height of what might be called the “foodie era” in the U.S. The cooking and presentation of food dominates Instagram and is one of the key draws of YouTube and various television and streaming networks; shows about chefs and food culture are likewise very popular. Yet a now less glamorous form with a much longer history persists: food writing. In this course we will track some important genres of food writing over the last 100 years or so. We will examine how not just food but cultural discourses about food and the world it circulates in are consumed and produced. We will read recipes and reviews; blogs and extracts from cookbooks, memoirs and biographies; texts on food history and policy; academic and popular feature writing. Simultaneously we will also produce food writing of our own in a number of genres. 

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity AMST Space and Place CL: 200 level
  • Faculty: Arnab Chakladar 🏫 👤

• ENGL 254 Fictional Worlds

  What makes the imaginary world created by a novel feel “real”?  What aspects of narrative contribute to our sense of being immersed in a coherent and convincing universe?  From the Victorians who addressed letters to Mr. Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street, to fans of a Middle Earth that now encompasses multiple books and films, readers have always been drawn to narratives that create a place that seems capacious and vivid enough to enter.  In this course, we will look at world-building from the eighteenth century through the present, comparing novels to other contemporary media in order to develop an understanding of the way in which the impulse towards “realism” has shaped narrative in a variety of different forms. Works to be studied include books and stories by Daniel Defoe, A. Conan Doyle,  J.R.R. Tolkien, and Octavia Butler, as well as Villeneuve’s film of Dune.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Pertinent

• ENGL 255 The Poetics of Disability

  Scholar Michael Davidson has suggested that “perhaps the closest link between poetry and disability lies in a conundrum within the genre itself: poetry makes language visible by making language strange.” In this class we will read a wide range of poets who tackle ideas of normalcy and “ability” by centering disability consciousness and culture. We will engage with poetry’s capacity as a genre to destabilize our assumptions and generate new imaginaries. Alongside contemporary U.S. poetry, we will study contemporary theory in the field of disability studies in order to better understand the critical conversations around the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: ACE Applied CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2

• ENGL 256 Excavating Histories: Archival Research Methods

  This course will introduce the fundamentals of working with special collections and archives, including ethical best practices and methods of research and interpretation. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, we will explore questions such as: What constitutes an archive? What motivates people to create and seek out archives? Whose lives and histories have been privileged in the cultivation of archives, and what is being done to address these disparities? What are the limits of archiving as a means of redress? Course work will include in-person visits to collections at Carleton and beyond, as well as research in digitized collections nationwide.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: ACE Theoretical CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 2 DGAH Critical Ethical Reflection DGAH Literary Artistic Analysis
  • Faculty: Emily Coccia 🏫 👤

• ENGL 257 Fandom and the Queer Digital Commons

  In this introduction to fan studies, students will engage with foundational and emerging scholarship, as well as popular media that represent key sites in the development of modern fandom. A famously “undisciplined” discipline, fan studies draws on a variety of intellectual traditions, and we will read broadly to consider what fandom includes, where its politics emerge, and how to engage as ethical researchers. This course foregrounds modern queer fan cultures to explore the shifting relationship between creators and audiences and the tensions within fan communities. Television and films from the 1960s to the present will serve as weekly case studies.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 GWSS Elective DGAH Critical Ethical Reflection DGAH Literary Artistic Analysis
  • Faculty: Emily Coccia 🏫 👤

• ENGL 258 Playwrights of Color: Taking the Stage

  This course examines work by U.S. playwrights of color from the 1950s to the present, focusing on questions of race, performance, and self-representation. We will consider opportunities and limitations of the commercial theater, Off-Off Broadway, ethnic theaters, and non-traditional performance spaces. Playwrights may include Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, Cherrie Moraga, August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Philip Gotanda, Maria Irene Fornes, Anna Deavere Smith, and Chay Yew. We will watch selected film adaptations and attend a live performance when possible. 

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 THEA Minor Playwriting AFST Literary Artistic Analysis AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity THEA Literature Criticism History

• ENGL 259 Creative Travel Writing Workshop

  Travelers write. Whether it be in the form of postcards, text messages, blogs, or articles, writing serves to anchor memory and process difference, making foreign experience understandable to us and accessible to others. While examining key examples of the genre, you will draw on your experiences off-campus for your own work. Student essays will be critiqued in a workshop setting, and all work will be revised before final submission. Some experimentation with blended media is also encouraged. This course was formerly listed as CCST 270.

  CCST 259 is cross listed with ENGL 259.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Grading: S/CR/NC
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice IS, International Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has enrolled in any of the following course(s): Any Carleton OCS course or Non-Carleton OCS course with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing CCST Reflecting Cross-Cultural Experience EUST Transnational Support
  • Faculty: Peter Balaam 🏫 👤

• ENGL 260 Ireland Program: Creative Writing in Ireland

  In this creative writing course, you will have the opportunity to put your study abroad adventures in Ireland into journal writing, short stories, poems and creative nonfiction (i.e. non-academic essays). The primary mode of instruction will be the workshop, where your writing is the centerpiece for discussion and critique. To supplement our work, and to inspire us, we will be reading select examples of literature by contemporary Irish writers and poets, some of whom will visit our class to talk about their careers, work, and the state of Irish literature today. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  • Offered: Summer 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice IS, International Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS English Religion in Ireland Program.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing EUST Country Specific
  • Faculty: Michael McNally 🏫 👤 · Gregory Hewett 🏫 👤

• ENGL 263 Hybrid Memoir and Creative Nonfiction

  This course explores innovative approaches to forms such as the personal essay, memoir, and travel writing. Students will experiment with various craft techniques, such as story structure, voice, and literary devices, and craft their own original personal narratives. We’ll read authors such as Ocean Vuong, Sarah Minor, Alexander Chee, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, while generating new material through weekly writing exercises and reflections. These techniques will help students navigate difficult topics, break free from writing ruts, and develop fresh perspectives on their story. We'll foster a collaborative writing space, practice the art of feedback, and build a portfolio of work.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Grading: S/CR/NC
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing
  • Faculty: Marianne Manzler 🏫

• ENGL 264 Ballet in a Phone Booth: Writing Flash Fiction

  They say flash fiction is the perfect art for an era of short attention spans—but a great piece of flash arrests as well as lingers, staying with a reader for a lifetime. In this class, we will learn, in the words of Russell Baker, to do “ballet in a phone booth.” We’ll discuss how setting, plot, characterization, and more work in limited space; how to break rules and take risks; and what stories thrive in 1,000 words. Students will read published pieces, write their own, participate in workshop, and talk to flash magazine editors and professional flash fiction writers.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing

• ENGL 267 Studies in Description

  Why do we describe things? Why do writers put so much care into their descriptions of objects and inner states? What authority do they draw from precise descriptive language? What is an “exactly perceived” detail? How do phrases carry sensory information? This class explores the power of description in capturing perceptions and making pictures of the world more felt. To understand the range of technical strategies involved in description, we will read and imitate the acute sensory visions of Basho, Issa, Hopkins, Rilke, and a range of American poets. Each week the reading will be a springboard for written exercises.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing

• ENGL 268 Writing with AI

  Is “Writing with AI” a contradiction in terms? Is all AI writing just a remix of other, better writing by humans? Can we create interesting, engaging, creative writing in collaboration with AI? This course will grapple with these questions as we take multiple AI tools for a spin. We’ll use AI to create a variety of texts, including stories, games, images, and essays. Along the way, we’ll think about how writing with AI affects the ways we work and think as writers, and what we gain and lose by using it.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: WR2 Writing Requirement 2 No Exploration
  • Tags: CL: 200 level DGAH Critical Ethical Reflection
  • Faculty: George Cusack 🏫 👤

• ENGL 269 The Art of Time in Fiction

  All stories are bounded by time: the time a narrative takes to unfold, from a single day to a century; the time between writing a story and the story’s events; the time it takes a reader to consume a narrative. In this course, we will ask, how does a writer choose the scope of their story? How do writers approach events that happened a week ago versus one hundred years ago? How does length impact a reader’s emotional experience? Students will write short imitations of published work as well as original stories, and read short stories, novels, and critical essays.

  Recommended preparation: ENGL 160

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Creative Writing ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop
  • Faculty: Gwen Kirby 🏫 👤

• ENGL 270 Short Story Workshop

  An introduction to the writing of the short story. Each student will become familiar with contemporary short stories, complete a number of short writing exercises, and have discussed in class two full-length stories (from 3,000 to 7,000 words in length) and give constructive suggestions, including written critiques, for revising the stories written by other members of the class. Attention will be paid to all the elements of fiction: characterization, point of view, conflict, setting, dialogue, etc.

  • Offered: Fall 2025, Winter 2026
  • Grading: S/CR/NC
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One 6 credit English course excluding Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing
  • Faculty: Gwen Kirby 🏫 👤

• ENGL 271 Poetry Workshop

  This workshop offers you ways of developing poetic craft, voice, and vision in a small-group setting. Your poetry and individual expression is the heart and soul of the course. Through intensive writing and revision of poems written in a variety of styles and forms, you will create a significant portfolio.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One 6 credit English course excluding Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing

• ENGL 272 Film, Literature, and Culture in Mumbai and Seoul Program: Representing Mumbai

  In Mumbai we will read a range of poems, short stories, novels and non-fiction that take Mumbai/Bombay as their setting and discuss the ways in which the heterogeneous cosmopolitanisms of the city are both represented and re-articulated in writing on the city. While our focus will be on Mumbai/Bombay, the course will also function as an introduction to twentieth century and contemporary Indian writing.

  • Offered: First Five Weeks, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 3
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Film, Literature and Culture in Mumbai and Seoul program.

  • Tags: ASST Literary Artistic Analysis ASST South Asia CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 3
  • Faculty: Arnab Chakladar 🏫 👤

• ENGL 274 Ireland Program: Irish Literary Pasts and Presents

  In Dublin and Belfast we will read and discuss works by Irish writers from the early twentieth century on the Irish Literary Revival and the political and cultural currents leading up the Easter Rising and Irish independence; we will also read works by early twenty-first century Irish writers in conversation with those crucial moments in Irish political and cultural self-fashioning from a century ago. We will also meet with writers and attend readings, lectures, films, and plays.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Irish Literature in Ireland Program.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific

• ENGL 275 Film, Literature, and Culture in Mumbai and Seoul Program: Documenting Mumbai and Seoul

  Under supervision of the program director, students will work together in small groups to conceive and produce text and image based projects that will knit their experience of Mumbai and Seoul together. Students will draw on the breadth of guided program outings in both cities as well as on their own explorations to produce work that expresses their understanding of the cultural contexts of and connections between these two vibrant metropolises as well as their own experience of them.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Film, Literature and Culture in Mumbai and Seoul program.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level
  • Faculty: Arnab Chakladar 🏫 👤

• ENGL 279 Living London Program: Urban Field Studies

  A combination of background readings, guided walks and site visits, and individual exploration will give students tools for understanding the history of multicultural London. Starting with the city’s early history and moving to the present, students will gain an understanding of how the city has been defined and transformed over time, and of the complex cultural narratives that shape its standing as a global metropolis. There will be short written exercises (creative and analytical), informal mini-presentations, and a final group presentation focused on a specific urban site.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Grading: S/CR/NC
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies No Exploration
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Living London Program.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level EUST Country Specific
  • Faculty: Constance Walker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 281.07 London Lives

  London has been a vibrant, multi-ethnic nurturing ground of creative lives and communities for over two millennia.   We will explore the city as home and inspiration for the creators of brilliant art, architecture, fiction, and film, looking at how the city shaped their lives and works. Visits will include field trips to Dickens’s Spitalfields, Woolf’s Bloomsbury, and Ali’s Brick Lane, among others. Students will also have the opportunity to study a London writer, artist, or creator of their choice. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Living London Program.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific THEA Literature Criticism History
  • Faculty: Constance Walker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 282 Living London Program: London Theater

  Students will attend productions (at least two per week) of classic and contemporary plays in a range of London venues both on and off the West End, and will do related reading. We will also travel to Stratford-upon-Avon for a three-day theater trip. Class discussions will focus on dramatic genres and themes, dramaturgy, acting styles, and design. Guest speakers may include actors, critics, and directors. Students will keep a theater journal and write several full reviews of plays.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Living London Program.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level EUST Country Specific THEA Pertinent Course THEA Literature Criticism History
  • Faculty: Constance Walker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 288 California Program: The Literature of California

  An intensive study of writing and film that explores California both as a place (or rather, a mosaic of places) and as a continuing metaphor–whether of promise or disintegration–for the rest of the country. Authors read will include John Muir, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion and Octavia Butler. Films will include: Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Zoot Suit, Boys in the Hood and Lala Land.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Tags: AMST Space and Place CL: 200 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 ENTS Society, Culture and Policy AMST Production Consumption of Culture

• ENGL 294 Directed Research in English

  Students work on a research project related to a faculty member's research interests, and directed by that faculty member. Student activities vary according to the field and stage of the project. The long-run goal of these projects normally includes dissemination to a scholarly community beyond Carleton. The faculty member will meet regularly with the student and actively direct the work of the student, who will submit an end-of-term product, typically a paper or presentation.

  • Offered: Fall 2025, Winter 2026, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 1 – 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: No Exploration
  • Tags: CL: Faculty Research

• ENGL 295 Critical Methods

  Required of students majoring in English, this course explores practical and theoretical issues in literary analysis and contemporary criticism.

  • Offered: Fall 2025, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 200 level ENGL Pertinent
  • Faculty: Peter Balaam 🏫 👤 · Nancy Cho 🏫 👤

• ENGL 301 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

  Chaucer's Canterbury Tales include the sublime, the scandalous, the sacred, and the seriously silly. As experiments in polyvocal narration, metafiction, and the possibilities of the English language, they have influenced six centuries of writers. We will read them in Middle English (no previous knowledge necessary). Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 1 ENGL Tradition 1 MARS Core Course MARS Supporting

• ENGL 319 The Rise of the Novel

  This course traces the development of a sensational, morally dubious genre that emerged in the eighteenth-century: the novel. We will read some of the most entertaining, best-selling novels written during the first hundred years of the form, paying particular attention to the novel’s concern with courtship and marriage, writing and reading, the real and the fantastic. Among the questions we will ask: What is a novel? What distinguished the early novel from autobiography, history, travel narrative, and pornography? How did this genre come to be associated with women? How did early novelists respond to eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of reading fiction? Authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific GWSS Elective
  • Faculty: Jessica Leiman 🏫 👤

• ENGL 323 Romanticism and Reform

  Mass protests, police brutality, reactionary politicians, imprisoned journalists, widespread unemployment, and disease were all features of the Romantic era in Britain as well as our own time. We will explore how its writers brilliantly advocate for empathy, liberty, and social justice in the midst of violence and upheaval. Readings will include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and their contemporaries.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific

• ENGL 324 Cruel Summer, 1816

  A circle of poets and writers, friends and lovers, spend the summer in Geneva sightseeing, arguing, telling ghost stories, reading and writing passionately together—and changing the course of literary history.  We’ll explore the personal and artistic relations between Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, reading the works they wrote in conversation with each other including Frankenstein, “Prometheus,” and Prometheus Unbound, as well as studying diaries, manuscripts, biographical accounts, and films.  Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1
  • Faculty: Constance Walker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 326 Seductive Fictions

  Stories of virtue in distress and innocence ruined preoccupied British novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This course will focus on the British seduction novel, considering the following questions: What was the allure of the seduction plot? What does it reveal about sexual relations, gender, power, race, and class during this period? How does the seduction plot address and provoke concerns about novel-reading itself during a time when the genre was considered both an instrument of education and an agent of moral corruption? Authors may include: Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Susanna Rowson, and Bram Stoker.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better. NOT open to students who have previously taken ENGL 395 Seductive Fictions.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific GWSS Elective

• ENGL 327 Victorian Novel

  Puzzled about nineteenth century novels, Henry James asks, 'But what do such large loose baggy monsters with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?'' (“Preface,” Tragic Muse). What, indeed? These novels have defined the form of "the novel" for nearly 200 years. Through close reading, historic context, and visual studies, we will examine the prose, design, publication, and illustrations of Victorian editions, and consider how we (re)define and interpret the nineteenth century novel now. Students will create a photographic portrait project. Authors include George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Seacole, and Lewis Carroll.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific GWSS Elective

• ENGL 329 The City in American Literature

  How do American authors “write the city”? The city as both material reality and metaphor has fueled the imagination of diverse novelists, poets, and playwrights, through tales of fallen women and con men, immigrant dreams, and visions of apocalypse. After studying the realistic tradition of urban fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, we will turn to modern and contemporary re-imaginings of the city, with a focus on Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Selected films, photographs, and historical sources will supplement our investigations of how writers face the challenge of representing urban worlds.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: AMST Space and Place CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2

• ENGL 332 Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald

  An intensive study of the novels and short fiction of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The course will focus on the ethos of experimentation and the "homemade" quality of these innovative stylists who shaped the course of American modernism. Works read will be primarily from the twenties and thirties and will include The Sound and the Fury, In Our Time, Light in August, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Go Down, Moses.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: AMST Space and Place CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 AMST Production Consumption of Culture

• ENGL 338 Dickinson, Moore, Bishop

  An intensive study of lyric invention and innovation in the work of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. Starting with formalist readings and historicizing the poetic subjects they pursued in common (self and society, loss and knowledge, nature, gender, the senses, the body), we will explore their practice, reception, and influence in relation to changing Modernist poetics, 1860 to 1970, and to specifics of place: Amherst, Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 2 ENGL Tradition 2

• ENGL 344 Reading Queerly

  What might it mean to cultivate a queer relationship to reading? Is it a question of identity? That is, does a queer critic read queerly? Might it be a matter of argument? Is reading against the grain inherently queer? Or could it be that queer reading is defined by an affective relationship to the text? We will explore a range of multimedia primary sources and foundational works of queer literary criticism, considering how reading emerged as a privileged site for articulating and embodying queerness. Primary sources range from Henry James and Shakespeare to David Bowie, Prince, and Taylor Swift.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One ENGL Foundations course with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level GWSS Elective ENGL Historical Era 3
  • Faculty: Emily Coccia 🏫 👤

• ENGL 350 The Postcolonial Novel: Forms and Contexts

  Authors from the colonies and ex-colonies of England have complicated our understandings of the locations, forms and indeed the language of the contemporary English novel. This course will examine these questions and the theoretical and interpretive frames in which these writers have often been placed, and probe their place in the global marketplace (and awards stage). We will read a number of major novelists of the postcolonial era from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and the diaspora as well as some of the central works of postcolonial literary criticism.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CCST Encounters CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 3 AFST Literary Artistic Analysis EUST Transnational Support

• ENGL 352 Toni Morrison: Novelist

  Morrison exposes the limitations of the language of fiction, but refuses to be constrained by them. Her quirky, inimitable, and invariably memorable characters are fully committed to the protocols of the narratives that define them. She is fearless in her choice of subject matter and boundless in her thematic range. And the novelistic site becomes a stage for Morrison’s virtuoso performances. It is to her well-crafted novels that we turn our attention in this course.

  Not offered in 2025-26

  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: AMST Space and Place CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 2 AFST Literary Artistic Analysis AMST Production Consumption of Culture AMST Race Ethnicity Indigeneity

• ENGL 359 Contemporary World Literature

  Our focus is on contemporary writers. Specifically, we will privilege genre-bending fiction published within the last two decades in which we encounter a continuum, not a line of demarcation, between us and them, insider and outsider, here and there, then and now, femaleness and maleness, North and South, the local and the global. Authors to be read include Zinzi Clemmons, Teju Cole, Esi Edugyan, Mohsin Hamid, Tommy Orange, Zadie Smith, and Colson Whitehead.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): One English Foundations including (100) course with a grade of C- or better or received a score of 5 on the English Literature and Composition AP exam or received a grade of 6 or better on the English Language A: Literature IB exam AND 6 credits from English courses (100-399) not including Independent Studies and Comps with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Historical Era 3 ENGL Tradition 3
  • Faculty: Kofi Owusu 🏫 👤

• ENGL 360 Ireland Program: Creative Writing in Ireland

  In this creative writing course, you will have the opportunity to put your study abroad adventures in Ireland into journal writing, short stories, poems and creative nonfiction (i.e. non-academic essays). The primary mode of instruction will be the workshop, where your writing is the centerpiece for discussion and critique. To supplement our work, and to inspire us, we will be reading select examples of literature by contemporary Irish writers and poets, some of whom will visit our class to talk about their careers, work, and the state of Irish literature today. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  • Offered: Summer 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice IS, International Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS English Religion in Ireland Program.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing EUST Country Specific
  • Faculty: Michael McNally 🏫 👤 · Gregory Hewett 🏫 👤

• ENGL 370 Advanced Fiction Workshop

  An advanced course in the writing of fiction. Students will write two to three short stories which will be read and critiqued by the class. In addition to writing, students will read and discuss short story collections by contemporary masters of the genre, asking questions about what it means for a writer to have an artistic project and encouraging students to think about their own aims as fiction writers.

  Recommended preparation: ENGL 270

  Repeatable: This course is repeatable with instructor permission.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Grading: S/CR/NC
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): ENGL 160 or ENGL 161 or ENGL 263 or ENGL 265 or ENGL 270 or ENGL 271 or ENGL 273 or CAMS 271 or CAMS 278 or CAMS 279 or CCST 270 or THEA 246 with a grade of C- or better.

    Students who have previously taken ENGL 370 must request a prerequisite override from the instructor.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing
  • Faculty: Gwen Kirby 🏫 👤

• ENGL 371 Advanced Poetry Workshop

  In this workshop, students choose to write poems from a broad range of forms, from sonnets to spoken word, from ghazals to slam, from free-verse to blues. Over the ten weeks, each poet will write and revise their own collection of poems. Student work is the centerpiece of the course, but readings from a diverse selection of contemporary poets will be used to expand each student’s individual poetic range, and to explore the power of poetic language. For students with some experience in writing poetry, this workshop further develops your craft and poetic voice and vision.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: ARP, Arts Practice WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student has completed any of the following course(s): ENGL 160 or ENGL 161 or ENGL 263 or ENGL 265 or ENGL 270 or ENGL 271 or ENGL 273 or CAMS 271 or CAMS 278 or CAMS 279 or CCST 270 or THEA 246 with a grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENCW Creative Wtg Workshop ENGL Creative Writing
  • Faculty: Gregory Hewett 🏫 👤

• ENGL 381.07 London Lives

  London has been a vibrant, multi-ethnic nurturing ground of creative lives and communities for over two millennia.   We will explore the city as home and inspiration for the creators of brilliant art, architecture, fiction, and film, looking at how the city shaped their lives and works. Visits will include field trips to Dickens’s Spitalfields, Woolf’s Bloomsbury, and Ali’s Brick Lane, among others. Students will also have the opportunity to study a London writer, artist, or creator of their choice. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: IS, International Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Acceptance in the Carleton OCS Living London Program.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Tradition 1 EUST Country Specific THEA Literature Criticism History
  • Faculty: Constance Walker 🏫 👤

• ENGL 394 Directed Research in English

  Students work on a research project related to a faculty member's research interests, and directed by that faculty member. Student activities vary according to the field and stage of the project. The long-run goal of these projects normally includes dissemination to a scholarly community beyond Carleton. The faculty member will meet regularly with the student and actively direct the work of the student, who will submit an end-of-term product, typically a paper or presentation.

  • Offered: Fall 2025, Winter 2026, Spring 2026
  • Credits: 1 – 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: No Exploration
  • Tags: CL: Faculty Research

• ENGL 395.01 The Writings of Virginia Woolf

  Virginia Woolf is regarded as one of the chief modernist writers, as well as one of the twentieth-century's most important feminist thinkers. She revolutionized the novel and the concept of time in fiction, as well as ideas of gender and sexuality. She, along with other members of the Bloomsbury Group, was also a critic of World War I and the build-up to World War II. In this course we will read the majority of her novels, as well as selected essays, diary entries, and letters. Articles by literary critics will offer various contexts for our discussions. Some works included: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and "A Room of One's Own."

  • Offered: Fall 2025
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student must have completed any of the following course(s): ENGL 295 AND one 300 level ENGL course with grade of C- or better. Not open to students who have taken ENGL 353.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Advanced Seminar ENGL Tradition 1
  • Faculty: Gregory Hewett 🏫 👤

• ENGL 395.01 The Romantic Mode

  In Anglo-US literary study, “Romanticism” usually delineates an historical period beginning with the French Revolution and coming to an end with realism and modernism. Following recent Marxist theorists, in this Advanced Seminar we will construe the Romantic as an expressive resource, a mode of thought beholden to no particular period and instead a form of cultural critique available to artists, writers, and thinkers across time. An interdisciplinary approach to the topic with primary literary sources drawn from Rousseau, Wordsworth, Burke, Marx, Thoreau, Cather, Chaplin, and beyond.

  Repeatable: Course is repeatable provided the topics are different.

  • Offered: Spring 2026
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: LA, Literary/Artistic Analysis WR2 Writing Requirement 2
  • Prerequisites:

    Student must have completed any of the following course(s): ENGL 295 and one 300 level ENGL course with grade of C- or better.

  • Tags: CL: 300 level ENGL Advanced Seminar
  • Faculty: Peter Balaam 🏫 👤

• ENGL 400 Integrative Exercise

  Senior English majors may fulfill the integrative exercise by completing one of the four options: the Colloquium Option (a group option in which participants discuss, analyze and write about a thematically coherent list of literary works); the Research Essay Option (an extended essay on a topic of the student’s own devising); the Creative Option (creation of a work of literary art); or the Project Option (creation of an individual or group multidisciplinary project). The Research Essay Option is open to students who have completed a senior seminar in the major by the end of fall term senior year. The Creative Option is open only to students who have completed at least two creative writing courses (one of which must be at the 300 level) by the end of fall term senior year.

  • Offered: Winter 2026
  • Grading: S/NC
  • Credits: 6
  • Liberal Arts Requirements: No Exploration
  • Prerequisites:

    Student is an English major AND has Senior Priority.

  • Faculty: Peter Balaam 🏫 👤