St. Thomas Department of English

Join our community of thinkers and writers in the Literature and Writing major! 📚💡 Develop your writing and critical thinking skills while exploring key social and cultural issues. Cultivate valuable skills like creativity, collaboration, and emotional intelligence. Our 40-credit program (past the core English course) covers a range of topics, including Environmental Literature, Sports and Social Justice, Victorian Gothic literature; Native American literature; literature from a Christian perspective; and author-focused classes on James Baldwin, Mary Shelley, and J. R.R. Tolkien. This major provides an excellent foundation for students looking towards law school.

Develop essential writing skills for any discipline or career with our 16-credit Professional Writing minor. Choose from courses like Professional Editing, Business Writing, and more, and tailor your focus with an elective from outside the English Department.

In this course, we'll focus on writing fantasy, broadly conceived. We'll read different types of contemporary fantasy--portal/quest fantasy, immersive fantasy, intrusion fantasy, and liminal fantasy--and try our hand at writing them. We'll explore typical fantasy structures and try out ways to break the mold. Over the course of the semester, you will write a couple of short stories or the opening to a novel, as well as many shorter exercises and prompts. Prerequisite: ENGL 255 Intro to Creative Writing.

Today is the 234th birthday of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a major poet and writer from the British Romantic Period. Celebrate the day by reading from his poem "Ozymandias": I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, / The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: / And on the pedestal these words appear: / "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Book Review from Dr. Amy Muse:
Maggie O’Farrell’s Land makes me want to study abroad in Ireland to learn about colonial history and map-making and search out magical wells in copses of trees. The novel, narrated by the land itself, takes us on an epic sweep of centuries of Irish history, felt deep in the bog by a girl and her dog; and intimately follows each member of a family in the decades following the Great Hunger as they seek physical, intellectual, and spiritual nourishment in western Ireland, Canada, and India.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."--James Baldwin, from his 1962 essay "As Much Truth As One Could Bear."

Today we remember the birthday of James Baldwin, the civil rights activist and author of such major classics as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk. But perhaps he is the best known for his powerful book The Fire Next Time, which tells of his early life in Harlem and the impact of racial injustice. It consists of two "letters, " written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

Ishmael. Captain Ahab. Giant white s***m whale. Yes, you guessed it: it's Herman Melville's Moby Dick! Today is Melville's birthday and we remember this classic epic, as well as many of his other titles, including Typee; The Confidence Man; and Billy Budd, Sailor, just to name just a few. And who can forget his short stories, including Benito Cereno and of course Bartleby, the Scrivener (Mr. "I would prefer not to"!). Happy birthday Herman!

Just a few seats remaining in our Paranoid: Conspiracies in literature course! We live in a world of conspiracy theories spread by social media, tabloid magazines, and an endless number of TV shows. The objective of the course is neither to promote nor debunk any particular theory, but to examine the role that conspiracy theories play as modern mythologies, dramatizing our fears and anxieties, and (strangely enough) our enduring (and possibly naïve) hope that things will one day get better.

Explore 19th-century gaming by studying popular Victorian games, their role in shaping the period’s literature (think Wuthering Heights), and our adaptations of Victorian culture in contemporary video games such as Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and the card game, Marrying Mr. Darcy. Study (and play!) literature-based role-playing, parlor, board, and video games, among others. You’ll also get to create a Victorian game using Twine, a simple software tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories.

Learn how various forms of writing have developed and evolved historically and within various contexts (cultural, political, social)—and by extension, what it means to write in these forms today. Receive instruction in setting, character, voice, point of view, literal and figurative imagery, rhythm and sound patterns, and literary structures; and practice writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Assignments include close readings of literary texts that model craft techniques, weekly writing exercises that encourage exploration and development of craft, and workshop discussions to develop your analytic and critical skills.