Courses

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.

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?

This course examines how first-person narrators present, define, defend, and construct the self. We will read an assortment of autobiographical and fictional works, focusing on the critical issues that the first-person speaker "I" raises. In particular, we will consider the risks and rewards of narrative self-exposure, the relationship between autobiography and the novel, and the apparent intimacy between first-person narrators and their readers. Authors will include James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Jacobs, Sylvia Plath, and Dave Eggers.

Everyone’s a critic! To unpack the relationship between critique and art, we will indulge in some of fiction’s finest haters—think Vladimir Nabokov, Ottessa Mossfegh, and Shirley Jackson. We will also reconsider and learn to appreciate outsider and overlooked art, exploring historical and contemporary debates around “good” and “bad” art. Who creates taste? Which cultural forms gain our approval, and which get excluded? We will practice diverse forms of contemporary critique—essays, music and book reviews, the Substack screed—ultimately building to our own considered, philosophical works of cultural criticism.

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.

Repeatable: This course is repeatable for up to 12 credits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

This interdisciplinary course, taught in conjunction with a full-scale Carleton Players production, will explore Shakespeare's complex "comedy," Measure for Measure. We will investigate the play’s historical, social, and theatrical contexts as we try to understand not only the world that produced the play, but the world that came out of it. How should what we learn of the past inform a modern production? How can performance offer interpretive arguments about the play’s meanings? Mixing embodied and experiential learning, individual and group projects may involve dramaturgy, stagecraft, literary analysis, music, and research in Special Collections. Offered at both the 200 and 300 level for THEA majors ONLY; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

ENGL 209 is cross listed with THEA 209.

Gorgeous language, unhinged poets, forbidden desire, and murderous bar fights are just the beginning as we encounter the transgressive brilliance and daring of early modern poetry, drama, and prose. We will explore a culture shaped by scientific discovery, religious upheaval, and curiosity about the human condition through works by Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Aemilia Lanyer, William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, John Donne, Isabella Whitney, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, and others. This is art forged in the crucible of power, sex, skepticism, and faith; it is not for the timid.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 nineteenth 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 Bram Stoker, A. Conan Doyle,  J.R.R. Tolkien, and Octavia Butler, as well as Villeneuve’s film of Dune.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is a creative writing course about writing and place, specifically London. Students will have the opportunity to write short stories, poetry, and non-academic essays (also referred to as creative nonfiction). We will be reading select examples in these genres by contemporary writers and poets based in the United Kingdom, some of whom will visit our class. The primary mode of instruction will be the workshop, which involves large and small-group critique and discussion. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

As readers, we rarely consider the technologies, practices, and transactions that deliver us our texts. This course introduces students to the material study of writing, manuscripts, books, printing, and digital media. It attends to the processes of copying, revision, editing, and circulation; familiarizes students with the disciplines of descriptive bibliography, paleography, and textual criticism; and introduces the principles of editing, in both print and electronic media. It offers hands-on practice in most of these areas.

ENGL 285 is cross listed with DGAH 285.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shaping experience into story is one of our inherited birthrights. To write from facts is rigorous; to write creatively from facts means embracing a dialectic between order and anarchy. This workshop will give students training and practice in the writing of memoir, essay, and other types of creative nonfiction– foregrounding the true, the real, and the witnessed—yet with much room for the subjective, fabulist, and speculative. Participants will strengthen their creative writing skills and produce new work combining narrative modes of fiction, lyrical modes of poetics, and fact-based storytelling techniques fundamental to journalism and documentary arts.

This is a creative writing course about writing and place, specifically London. Students will have the opportunity to write short stories, poetry, and non-academic essays (also referred to as creative nonfiction). We will be reading select examples in these genres by contemporary writers and poets based in the United Kingdom, some of whom will visit our class. The primary mode of instruction will be the workshop, which involves large and small-group critique and discussion. Offered at both the 200 and 300 levels; coursework will be adjusted accordingly.

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.

This seminar focuses on Toni Morrison as creative artist and scholar-critic. Our first class meeting will be devoted almost entirely to stage-setting name-dropping: Henry James' prefaces; Woolf's essayistic explorations; Nabokov's reflections on literariness; critical theorizing by Ellison, Achebe, Gordimer, Ngugi, Coetzee, and Rushdie. When we turn our full attention to Morrison, we do so with the understanding that the supposed "barrier" between critic and creative artist is a spurious construction. We will treat selected Morrison novels and essays as paired sites for critical interrogation.

Repeatable: Course is repeatable provided the topics are different.

Nineteenth-century writers were obsessed with the past: they rewrote it in historical novels, unsettled it in ghost and time travel narratives, and attempted to pin it down by deploying anthropology, archaeology, and folklore. This was a national project, critical to the making of British imperial identity. Can history be re-imagined to liberatory ends? Or are we doomed by cause and effect? Writers include George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and many lesser-known practitioners of odd short fiction. We will also consider the theoretical and scientific underpinnings of these texts by examining excerpts from 19th c. anthropology and museum studies.

Repeatable: Course is repeatable provided the topics are different.