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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
The personal essay may contain rumination, memoir, anecdote, diatribe, scholarship, fantasy, and moral philosophy. Students read and write about the personal essay from its origins to the present day as well as craft their own personal essays. Readings range from founding father Montaigne to classic practitioners Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf; students also explore International essayists such as Wole Soyinka and American voices from Thoreau to Annie Dillard. Offered during Interim.
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3.00 Credits
This course focuses on verbal folklore: narratives, songs, and shorter forms such as proverbs. It explores their intrinsic qualities as literary creations and also the ways in which they operate together in combination or in dialogue. The folktale and the epic, for example, incorporate a variety of these forms, such as the proverb, the song, or the riddle, to form a complex whole. Prerequisite: FYW or equivalent.
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3.00 Credits
The history of British colonization of America, Africa, Asia, and Australia coincides with the history of the novel's emergence as the major literary genre in English. This course examines this parallel history by considering the ways in which the colonial experience has been represented in novels from the 18th century to the present. We will read six novels, tracing this development in America, Africa, and Asia, and discuss the novels both in relationship to the development of the novel in general, and to their place in colonial or postcolonial history. Offered during Interim.
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3.00 Credits
Students read novels and short stories by twenty to thirty Australian and New Nealand authors, including Keri Hulme, Janet Frame, Frank Sargeson, Patricia Grace, Henry Lawson, David Malouf, Richard Flanagan, and Kim Scott. They encounter distinctive voices and strategies and discuss issues of cultural identity, natural environment, indigenous peoples, and gender. Prerequisite: FYW or equivalent.
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3.00 Credits
Students explore poetry and prose from the earliest periods in the development of the English language and literature -- by Caedmon, the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, Lady Mary Wroth, Donne, Milton -- and investigate how literary conventions and social history interact. From sermons to sonnets, students examine 1000 years of literary history and ultimately follow the voyage of English from Britain to the Americas. Prerequisite: Prior or simultaneous study in English 185.
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3.00 Credits
Students study literary developments from the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries. Topics examined include the influence of the Puritan Revolution on literature; satiric modes practiced by Dryden, Pope and Swift; the rise of the novel; the Romantic movement; Transcendentalism; and the development of American identity as seen in writers such as Franklin, Fuller, and Douglass. Prerequisite: English 221.
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3.00 Credits
A study of the Arthurian legend, from its Celtic origins through the classic medieval romances of Chrétien and Malory, to the Victorian adaptations of Tennyson and the Pre-Rapha lites, to contemporary novels and film. The course focuses on the myth's characteristic forms and ideas: the errant knight's adventures, the grail quest, and triangulating desire and adulterous love. Prerequisite: FYW or equivalent.
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3.00 Credits
These courses treat specific periods in British literature and examine the relationship between literary texts and movements and their particular cultural, political, and historical contexts. Each offering of this course examines a different literary era and emphasizes specific literary and historical issues. Students may register for the course more than once provided a different era is studied. Prerequisite: FYW or equivalent. The Middle Ages focuses upon Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature, including the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and Malory, in the context of emerging ideas such as heroism, the role of women, and the relationship between secular society and the Church. The Renaissance examines radical literary changes in English literature, as they occur in Spenser, Shakespeare, Lanyer, Donne, and Milton, in such contexts as the Protestant Reformation and strife over Puritanism, court politics under Elizabeth and James, and the English Civil War. The Age of Enlightenment focuses upon neoclassical poetry and satire and the emergence of the novel. Writers such as Dryden, Behn, Swift, Pope, and Fielding are read in the context of political and social revolutions, the African slave trade, and the growth of modern capitalism. The Romantic Period considers the outburst of literary creativity in such poets as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats and such prose writers as Wollstonecraft, Scott, Austen, and Mary Shelley, in the context of revolutionary politics, encounters with nature and the rise of industrialized, consumer capitalism. The Victorian Period, a time of British political and cultural dominance, examines the work of such writers as Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dickens, and the Bront s, in the context of scientific, industrial and colonial growth, religious skepticism, and challenges to class and gender inequalities. Modern British Literature focuses on the literature reflecting modern turbulence, innovation, and alienation, as in Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Eliot, in the context of World War, social and economic crises, and radical artistic experimentalism.
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3.00 Credits
Students read and discuss children's literature from a variety of cultures and time periods. Beginning with world folklore and children's classics as background, students explore an array of picture books, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that exemplifies the best in fantasy, science fiction, and realism for children and young adults. Special emphasis is given to two relatively new subgenres: multicultural literature and the contemporary problem novel. Prerequisite: FYW or equivalent.
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3.00 Credits
Students examine literary works, forms, and movements as part of a larger cultural history. Each offering of this course emphasizes a different historical issue or period. Students consider the extent to which literary texts are produced by common cultural and historical conditions and how literature shapes the historical accounts we inherit. Recent offerings include "Romanticism," "'50s Beat Literature," and "Writing America: 1620-1800." Prerequisite: FYW or equivalent. For more information on this course please see the following website: http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/english/courses/
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