Program Details : University Catalogs : University of Minnesota

ENGL 3001W - Textual Analysis: Methods (WI)

Credits:	4.0 [max 4.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3001W/3001V
Grading Basis:	A-F only
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

This course is designed for English majors and minors, as well any students interested in and attracted to literature and reading. Our concern will be to develop the intellectual foundations to move past our base, instinctive reactions to literature to deeper modes of reading, interpretation, and written analysis/argument. Our goal will be to develop the skills of slow-motion, skeptical reading: to savor the crafting of literary form and to explore how literary rhetoric engages our intellect and emotions; to read not simply for superficial content, but to engage and question the multi-faceted operation of literary texts. In terms of foundational writing skills for the English major, we will work on the development of compelling written literary arguments by breaking the writing process down into various phases. We will work with the basics of argumentation: developing a strong, coherent thesis, drafting, the logic of argument, revision, proper citation and effective use of primary and secondary sources, and more. prereq: [English major or minor or approved BIS or IDIM program with English area]

ENGL 3001V - Honors: Textual Analysis: Methods (WI)

Credits:	4.0 [max 4.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3001W/3001V
Grading Basis:	A-F only
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

This course is designed for English majors and minors, as well any students interested in and attracted to literature and reading. Our concern will be to develop the intellectual foundations to move past our base, instinctive reactions to literature to deeper modes of reading, interpretation, and written analysis/argument. Our goal will be to develop the skills of slow-motion, skeptical reading: to savor the crafting of literary form and to explore how literary rhetoric engages our intellect and emotions; to read not simply for superficial content, but to engage and question the multi-faceted operation of literary texts. In terms of foundational writing skills for the English major, we will work on the development of compelling written literary arguments by breaking the writing process down into various phases. We will work with the basics of argumentation: developing a strong, coherent thesis, drafting, the logic of argument, revision, proper citation and effective use of primary and secondary sources, and more. prereq: Honors, [English major or minor or approved BIS or IDIM program with English area]

ENGL 3007 - Shakespeare (LITR)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3007/EngL 3007H
Typically offered:	Every Fall, Spring & Summer

For over four hundred years, William Shakespeare has remained the most quoted poet and the most regularly produced playwright in the world. From Nelson Mandela to Toni Morrison, from South African playwright Welcome Msomi to Kuwaiti playwright Sulayman Al-Bassam, Shakespeare's works have continued to influence and inspire authors and audiences everywhere. This course examines representative works of Shakespeare from a variety of critical perspectives, as cultural artifacts of their day, but also as texts that have had a long and enduring vitality. This is a required course for English majors and minors, but it should also interest any student who wants to understand why and how Shakespeare continues to be one of the most important literary figures in the English language. English majors/minors must take this course A-F only grading basis.

ENGL 3007H - Honors: Shakespeare (LITR)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3007/EngL 3007H
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

Plays from all of Shakespeare's periods, including at least A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, the history plays, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and The Winter's Tale. prereq: Honors or instr consent

AMIN 3201W - American Indian Literature (LITR, DSJ, WI)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	AmIn 3201W/EngL 3201W
Grading Basis:	A-F only
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

Comparative studies of oral traditions, modern literature from various tribal cultures.

CHIC 3507W - Introduction to Chicana/o Literature (LITR, DSJ, WI)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	Chic 3507W/EngL 3507W
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

Cultural, intellectual, and sociopolitical traditions of Mexican Americans as they are represented in creative literature. Genres/forms of creative cultural expression and their significance as representations of social, cultural, and political life in the United States. Novels, short stories, creative non-fiction, drama, essay, poetry, and hybrid forms of literature.

ENGL 3003W - Historical Survey of British Literatures I (HIS, WI)

Credits:	4.0 [max 4.0]
Typically offered:	Every Fall, Spring & Summer

This course will provide a historical survey of British literature from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. Our focus will be on tracing the interactions between literature and wider British culture as well as on tracing the development of literary form during this period. You should leave this course being able to identify major literary trends and authors and link them to corresponding formal techniques and innovations. You should also have a sense of the major historical and political events, rulers, and social conditions in Britain at this time. Additionally, because this is a writing intensive course, you will leave this class familiar with the process of writing a research paper with a literary focus, which includes finding and successfully incorporating contemporary scholarly research about your topic into your paper, crafting an original argument, utilizing textual evidence, and evaluating existing scholarship.

ENGL 3004W - Historical Survey of British Literatures II (HIS, WI)

Credits:	4.0 [max 4.0]
Typically offered:	Every Fall, Spring & Summer

In this wide-ranging survey of British and post-colonial literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, we will explore representative literary texts and genres from British Romanticism, the Victorian period, Modernism, and the postwar era. Besides analyzing the language, aesthetic features, and technical construction of these literary artifacts, we will examine our readings as reflections of and reactions to social upheavals like the Industrial Revolution, challenges to the traditional role of women, scientific discoveries that sparked religious doubt, and the First World War. Additionally, because this is a writing intensive course, you will familiarize yourself with the process of writing a research paper with a literary focus, which includes finding and successfully incorporating contemporary scholarly research about your topic into your paper, crafting an original argument, utilizing textual evidence, and evaluating existing scholarship.

ENGL 3005W - Survey of American Literatures and Cultures I (LITR, DSJ, WI)

Credits:	4.0 [max 4.0]
Typically offered:	Every Fall, Spring & Summer

This writing-intensive course will survey the Anglophone literature of what would become the United States from the arrival of English settlers to the Civil War. We will define "literature" broadly to not only include fiction and poetry but also the sermon, the letter, the essay, the autobiography, and other non-fictional forms. Course topics will include the Puritan theology that cast such a long shadow over the American cultural imagination; the fraught literary construction in the Revolutionary era of a national identity under the influence of such Enlightenment ideals as reason, civility, cosmopolitanism, and sympathy; the Gothic doubts about democracy that attended the literature of the early republic; the rise in the mid-nineteenth century of a radical intellectual and social movement in Transcendentalism; the antebellum ideological struggles over such political issues as slavery, industrialism, women's rights, and Native American rights; and the self-conscious cultivation of a national literary aesthetic in the Romantic prose and poetry of the period later critics would come (controversially) to call "the American Renaissance."

ENGL 3006W - Survey of American Literatures and Cultures II (LITR, DSJ, WI)

Credits:	4.0 [max 4.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3006W/EngL 3006V
Typically offered:	Every Fall, Spring & Summer

This course will survey some of the major literary figures, aesthetic movements, and thematic concerns of US literature from the Civil War to the present. Our investigation will identify common traits in the literature that causes it to fit within three very broad literary historical categories: realism, modernism, and postmodernism. We will explore what makes literature created by the people of the United States distinctly "American" during a period that extends from the Civil War and the outlawing of slavery to women's suffrage, workers' movements, the Great Depression, the First and Second World Wars, and the civil rights movement. In addition to reading and analyzing the literature itself in terms of style, form, genre, and language, we will study it in historical context: the complex interplay between the political, the social, the cultural, and the literary in the United States. This approach rests upon the notion that literature is not created in a vacuum; it is influenced by and influences the world in which it is created.

ENGL 3025 - The End of the World in Literature and History (HIS)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3025/RelS 3627
Typically offered:	Periodic Fall & Spring

For at least two and a half millennia, prophets, politicians, and poets have crafted terrifying accounts about the end of the world. This comparatist seminar examines the way different cultures have imagined a final apocalypse with particular attention to the political and social consequences of their visions. Students will read texts that focus on pandemic, extraterrestrial attack, nuclear holocaust, prophecy, cybernetic revolt, divine judgment, resource depletion, meteoric impact, or one of the many other ways in which humans write of their demise. They will use literary analysis to explore the many historical and contemporary wastelands they will encounter. They will write short papers and give in-class presentations on different kinds of apocalypse.

ENGL 3101 - Knights and Pilgrims in Medieval Literature (LITR)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3101/MeSt 3101
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Fall Odd Year

Medieval writers and readers were fascinated by stories about knights and about pilgrims. In this course, we study some of the best-known and most compelling narratives and poems from the Middle Ages. Although written hundreds of years ago, these literary works speak to us of the human desire to strive for meaning and excellence, to work toward shared ideas of community, and to explore worlds beyond the sometimes narrow confines of home. Knights and pilgrims appear as central figures in a wide range of literary works. Some of the texts are humorous, like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in which pilgrims, from social classes ranging from knights to tradespeople, travel together and tell stories. Some are exciting and emotional, like Malory's retelling of stories about King Arthur and his knights. Others provide us with explorations of longing for change: in these works people search for new kinds of social and spiritual life such as Margery Kempe's autobiographical account of her experiences as a pilgrim to Rome and the Holy Land. Still others, such as Langland's Piers Plowman, which incorporates pilgrimage and chivalric quest, critique and explode static ideas about social problems such as poverty and hunger. Some draw our attention to the dangers and turmoil involved in love and relationships, such as Marie de France's courtly, aristocratic lays: Marie's knights and ladies take up the search for love and meaning. Some, finally, invite us to imagine ourselves in mysterious otherworlds, such as Mandeville's Travels and Sir Orfeo, both of which focus on travel and self knowledge. These exciting and challenging works continue to speak to us about the quest to pursue ideals and to change the world and ourselves.

ENGL 3102 - Chaucer

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3102/MeSt 3102
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

Major/representative works written by Chaucer, including The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and the dream visions. Historical, intellectual, and cultural background of the poems. Language, poetic theory, form.

ENGL 3132 - Between Heaven and Hell: The King James Bible as Literature

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Typically offered:	Spring Even Year

This course examines the lives and stories of heroic figures in the Bible. We approach the Bible as a literary work and explore themes, characters, symbolism, and narrative techniques. Our text, the King James version of the Bible, is the most important translation in terms of American and English literary traditions. Our emphasis in the course is on the Biblical heroes who are represented as living their lives in this world (the world between heaven and hell).

ENGL 3134 - Milton and Rebellion

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3134/EngL 3134H
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Periodic Fall & Spring

Milton?s three great Restoration poems?Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes?are the focus of this course. We?ll approach them by tracing Milton?s growth as poet: first, by familiarizing ourselves with the religious and social ideas found in his writings down to the Poems of 1645; and second, by studying the political ideas Milton initially set forth in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). Concurrently with our study of these earlier works, you?ll be reading Paradise Lost, which you should complete by the end of the spring break. At that point, you?ll be in a position to interpret Milton?s three Restoration masterpieces in the light of his grand?and rebellious?aim of reforming England?s civil and religious community, an aim Milton boldly reaffirms in 1660 in defiance of the Restoration of monarchy.

ENGL 3141 - The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century: Sex, Satire, and Sentiment

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Periodic Fall & Spring

This course will introduce you to some of the best literature of the Restoration and eighteenth century in England. Think of this course as a challenge: how can you, as someone who will spend most of your life in the 21st century, learn to appreciate and learn from literature written in far different times and places? A lot depends on your willingness to empathize with ways of thinking and being that are quite different from your own and your comfort with believing that other ages were just as complicated and as interesting as the one you live in. Typical authors include Dryden, Behn, Swift, Pope, Fielding, and Burney.

ENGL 3151 - British Romantic Literature and Culture (LITR)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Typically offered:	Fall Odd Year

In British Romantic Literature and Culture, students read poetry and prose written during the Romantic Period (1780-1832). Romantic authors permanently changed the way literature treats numerous subjects: nature, the imagination, revolution, war and politics, the role of the poet, the depiction of common life and language, and the representation of personal experience, to name a few. This was a period of great stylistic innovation, as authors experimented with the use of symbolism and the adaptation of classical mythology and explored medieval/gothic images and themes. Possible authors to be studied in this course include Jane Austen, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth.

ENGL 3161 - Victorian Literatures and Cultures (LITR)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	EngL 3161/EngL 3161H
Typically offered:	Periodic Fall & Spring

Why is the twenty-first century so obsessed with the nineteenth? From steampunk to political rhetoric, from movies to sex, writers and artists look back to the Victorian era for inspiration and challenge. One reason might be that Britain was the first country to experience the full effects of industrialized capitalism, with the opportunities and misery that it created. It also developed one of the largest empires in history, an empire whose legacy continues to shape global politics in good and bad ways. For all these reasons, understanding the Victorians is key to understanding ourselves. Women writers like Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot have always been at the center of Victorian studies, so the history and politics of gender are vital to Victorian literature. Class likewise remains inescapable in Victorian fiction with its sharp sense of a world divided into haves and have nots; depictions of the catastrophic effects of the factory system on the urban poor pervade Victorian literature and challenge readers to ponder how, and if, reading might lead to political action. Race has increasingly reshaped understandings of the literature of the period; although Britain abolished slavery in 1833-34, the period saw both a heightening of racist rhetoric and representation and the growth of a market for works by writers of color from the colonies, including Mary Seacole, J. J. Thomas, and Toru Dutt. Digital tools have made the present moment an exciting one in which to study this literature because so much information is now available: Victorian writing has become hyperaccessible for those with access to computers. For this class, this accessibility means that students have the opportunity not just to learn exiting knowledge about the period but to discover new truths about it for themselves. This course aims to empower students to find their own paths to understanding and representing the Victorians as a way of revising how they see their present.

ENGL 3212 - American Poetry from 1900

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Typically offered:	Spring Even Year

Famous and lesser-known poems from the Modernist era, the time of Frost, HD, Pound, Eliot and the Harlem Renaissance. The course attends to the intellectual and cultural background of the poets, poetic theory and form.

ENGL 3221 - American Novel to 1900

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Typically offered:	Fall Even Year

Novels, from early Republic, through Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe, to writers at end of 19th century (e.g., Howells, Twain, James, Chopin, Crane). Development of a national literature. Tension between realism and romance. Changing role of women as writers and as fictional characters.

ENGL 3222 - American Novel from 1900

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	AmSt 3222H/EngL 3222/Eng 3222H
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

In this course, we will read and study novels of twentieth and twenty-first century American writers, from early 1900's realism through Modernists (e.g., Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald) to more contemporary writers (e.g., Baldwin, Ellison, Erdrich, Roth, Pynchon). We will explore each text in relation to literary, cultural, and historical developments and question the narrative and stylistic strategies specific to each work.

ENGL 3597W - Introduction to African American Literature and Culture I (LITR, DSJ, WI)

Credits:	4.0 [max 4.0]
Course Equivalencies:	Afro 3597W/EngL 3597W
Typically offered:	Every Fall

African American oral tradition, slave narrative, autobiography, poetry, essay, fiction, oratory, and drama, from colonial era through Harlem Renaissance.

ENGL 3598W - Introduction to African American Literature and Culture II (LITR, DSJ, WI)

Credits:	4.0 [max 4.0]
Course Equivalencies:	Afro 3598W/EngL 3598W
Typically offered:	Every Spring

African American oral tradition, autobiography, poetry, essay, fiction, oratory, drama. From after Harlem Renaissance to end of 20th century.

ENGL 4152 - Nineteenth Century British Novel

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

British novel during the century in which it became widely recognized as a major vehicle for cultural expression. Possible topics include the relation of novel to contemporary historical concerns: rise of British empire, developments in science, and changing roles for women; formal challenges of the novel; definition of realism.

ENGL 4232 - American Drama by Writers of Color (DSJ)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	AAS 4232/EngL 4232
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Periodic Fall & Spring

Selected works by African American, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American playwrights. How racial/ethnic differences are integral to shaping different visions of American drama. History of minority/ethnic theaters, politics of casting, mainstreaming of the minority playwright. Students in this class will have the opportunity to participate in service-learning.

ENGL 4233 - Modern and Contemporary Drama (AH, CIV)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Periodic Fall & Spring

Why did the polite Danish homes of 1879 bar discussions of Henrik Ibsen?s A Doll?s House? How did Oscar Wilde surreptitiously signal his sexuality through a satire of Victorian seriousness in The Importance of Being Earnest? How do contemporary playwrights such as August Wilson or Lynn Nottage bring forgotten moments of African American history to light? This course shows how modern and contemporary theater presents original perspectives on human identities and relationships as well as encourages audiences to see the world in new ways. This course focuses on the close analysis and interpretation of plays written by dramatists from around the world from the late-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The plays we will study are set in Europe, Great Britain, North America, Africa, and Asia, and we will examine each carefully in light of the unique historical and social contexts in which they were produced, their creation and uses of aesthetic form, and their impact on individuals and communities. Through the course, you will become familiar with such dramatic forms as the well-made play, modern satire, realism, expressionism, symbolism, epic theater, and absurdism. Each of these is interesting not only as a distinctive mode of artistic presentation, but also as it offers different perspectives on historical moments and present-day concerns about people and their communities. Theatrical works illustrate how the meanings ascribed to physical bodies are at the heart of social differences such as gender, sexuality, class, race, disability, and national identity. We will look at each play in its original cultural context as well as through the creative lens of more recent productions and assess how both historical and more recent reimagining changes the meaning of the work. We will also make use of the rich theatrical resources and cultural organizations available in communities such as the Twin Cities.

ENGL 4311 - Asian American Literature and Drama (LITR, DSJ)

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	AAS 4311/ENGL 4311
Grading Basis:	A-F or Aud
Typically offered:	Fall Odd Year

Literary/dramatic works by Asian American writers. Historical past of Asian America through perspective of writers such as Sui Sin Far and Carlos Bulosan. Contemporary artists such as Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, and Han Ong. Political/historical background of Asian American artists, their aesthetic choices.

ENGL 5593 - The African-American Novel

Credits:	3.0 [max 3.0]
Course Equivalencies:	Afro 3593/Afro 5593/EngL 3593/
Typically offered:	Every Fall & Spring

Contextual readings of 19th-/20th-century black novelists, including Chesnutt, Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Petry, Morrison, and Reed.

University Catalogs

English Minor