SOME COURSE DESCRIPTIONS BELOW HAVE BEEN EXPANDED TO PROVIDE MORE INFORMATION. FOR OFFICIAL COURSE DESCRIPTIONS REFER TO THE SAINT MARY’S COLLEGE BULLETIN.

ENLT 151 Utopian and Dystopian Literature (3)
In “Utopian and Dystopian Literature,” students will read and discuss literary works that construct visions of the world as it could be and think through the ethical and moral implications of those imagined societies. As we read narratives of “ideal” societies and societies in the process of collapse, we will explore the concepts of making and unmaking – of gender, memory, knowledge, and place – and consider how literary engagements with ideas of creation and refashioning enable individuals to experiment with ways of being in the world. Course texts will include: Plato’s Republic; Thomas More's Utopia; Shakespeare's As You Like It; Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower; and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, amongst others. This course also satisfies an LO2 Women's Voices .

ENLT 151W Utopian and Dystopian Literature (4)
The content of this course is similar to that of ENLT 151: Utopian and Dystopian Literature.  This course also satisfies an LO2 Women's Voices and  provides students the opportunity to earn the W .

ENLT 151W Animals, Monsters, Ghosts (4)
This course introduces students to reading and writing about literature at the college level. Throughout the semester, we’ll practice skills necessary for literary analysis, including close reading, using textual evidence, and developing strong interpretive arguments. We’ll read short stories, novels, poetry, and drama with a focus the powerful animals, strange monsters, and terrifying ghosts that populate American literature. We’ll ask: Why are powerful nonhuman beings so common in American literature? How do authors use nonhuman elements to shape their narratives? How might these representations be significant? This course also satisfies an LO2 Women's Voices and  provides students the opportunity to earn the W .

ENLT 151W Inherited Tales (3.5)
A unit of a tandem, taken in conjunction with RLST 101W Introducing Religious Studies: World Religions in Dialogue (CRN 71290).  Childhood stories often frame adults' worldviews. Fairy tales and myths certainly influence the worlds later authors have created. Beginning with tales from diverse cultures, this class will explore common literature tropes and female figures, such as the Damsel in Distress, the Star-crossed Lovers, and the Child Run Amok. Then we'll move forward in time, seeing how these tropes and figures were reinvented in texts that include Persepolis and Hadestown. The aim is to discover what's new and what's lasting in global literature. Students will learn to read, analyze, and compose texts in order to become more engaged and critical of literature. This course also satisfies an LO2 Women's Voices and provides students the opportunity to earn the W.

ENLT 151W Telling Time: Narratives of Memory and Anticipation  (4)
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” -Augustine, Confessions (Book XI).  Augustine of Hippo asked this question about the nature of around 400 CE, and you would think that we would’ve made some progress by now. Time, and/or Space, is the container of experience. We move through time. We measure the elapsed duration between past and present events. We anticipate the future. But aside from the discrete, measurable units that govern our lives, what does time do? How does it work? What constitutes it? 

Time is not memory or anticipation. It is not history or narrative. Yet, it central to all these things and more. This course will ask students contend with the concept of time as a fundamental component of the human experience—one that seems to demand our attention primarily when we sense it is running out. During the semester, we will interrogate theories of memory and consciousness from the worlds of science, philosophy, literature, poetry, and drama. We will consider how the texts under scrutiny integrate and augment broader theories of temporality, reality, and being. Finally, we will ask how art helps humans cope with, grapple with, and survive time itself.  So, what is time, aside from that thing we never really seem to have enough of? To be honest, we probably don’t have the time to answer that question. But we can try. This course also satisfies an LO2 Women's Voices and provides students the opportunity to earn the W.

ENLT 151W Women and Embodiment: Disability, Medicine, and Feminism (4)
This course introduces students to reading and writing about literature at the college level. Throughout the semester, we’ll practice skills necessary for literary analysis, including close reading, using textual evidence, and developing strong interpretive arguments. As we read novels, short stories, poetry, and drama from across time and continents, we will engage with disability studies and feminism as interpretive lenses. We’ll question: What is disability studies, and how can it intersect with literary interpretations of gender, race, class, and sexuality? How is disability and illness represented in literature and performances? How have women authors critiqued medical institutions and their treatment of women’s bodies? To what extent have feminist movements included or excluded women with disabilities? This course also satisfies an LO2 Women's Voices and provides students the opportunity to earn the W.

ENLT 238 Jane Austen (3)
A study of Jane Austen’s fiction in the context of her life and times. We’ll read several of her major novels.  This course also satisfies an LO2 Women's Voices.

ENLT 244 Tolkien and Modern Fantasy (3)
This course explores the importance and the pleasures of fantasy through the work that defined the genre, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the first part of the course, we will read works that anticipate Tolkien's novel and that influenced and inspired him. In the middle part of the course, we will read The Lord of the Rings carefully. In the course's last part, we will consider some major works of recent fantasy to see what some of Tolkien's most notable successors do—thematically, stylistically, and politically—with the model for the genre he established.  Post-Tolkien readings will include Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, short stories by Charles de Lint and N.K. Jemisin, and other works by contemporary fantasy writers.