Have you been thinking about graduate school, but aren’t quite sure you’re ready? Are you looking for an opportunity to work in a rigorous, intellectual, creatively challenging environment with accomplished, supportive faculty?
With Sampler Courses, GLS offers opportunities to sample a course, on a space-available basis, without applying for degree admission.
Current Course Offerings:
(click on title below for course information and description)
More Information:
Sampler Registration Form
Sampler Policies & Pricing Information
Intersect: Bookmaking & Writing
GLS 8131-51397
Mondays & Wednesdays, June 2-23 NOTE: dates updated
Giddens Learning Center 102E. 6-9pm
2 credits
How can making books by hand animate your creative process, enliven your writing, and increase your problem solving skills? In this class you will discover, in the spirit of experimentation, how working in three dimensions can build writing skills and enhance your abilities to think through and around unexpected problems.
The class is designed for beginning writers as well as more advanced writers looking for new challenges and approaches. We will explore short forms in prose and poetry, e.g., haibun, postcard fiction, short lyric essay, haiku and the ghazal. We'll take a cross-cultural look at artists' books made over the past 100 years, exploring ways in which the artists' inventiveness can guide us as writers, artists, and thinkers. We will be working in several book forms, building toward a final book project that will take advantage of the cross-pollination of new writing and visual landscapes explored in the class.
Instructor: Nancy Walden
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American Landscape & Vision
GLS 8162-51398
Tuesdays & Thursdays, June 3 - June 24
Bush Memorial Library 305. 6-9pm
2 credits
How do writers portray place? How does place influence a writer's vision? In pursuing these questions we will look closely at ways in which writers use, create, and integrate language (including specialized vocabulary), observation, imagery, point of view, history, and research. At what point does the consideration of place and landscape intersect with the development of American culture and character? We will read creative nonfiction (e.g., essay, memoir, biography) and poetry by authors such as James Baldwin, Carol Bly, Annie Dillard, Paul Gruchow, Linda Hogan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomas McGrath, Marilyn Nelson, Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, and Frank Walker.
Requirements will include several writing assignments (ungraded), a short critical essay, and a longer project. The longer project, chosen in consultation with the instructor and in reference to a student's focus in the MALS or MFA program, may be a collection of poems, a work of creative nonfiction, or a longer critical essay.
Instructor: Patricia Kirkpatrick
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The Coming of Age Novel
GLS 8378-51396
Wednesdays, June 4-25. 6-9pm.
Saturday, June 7-21. 9:30am-12:30pm
Giddens Learning Center 105W
2 credits
The coming-of-age novel is an American literary tradition that includes works as diverse as ”The Red Badge of Courage” and ”The House on Mango Street.” Coming-of-age novels follow a child or teen on the journey to adulthood, examining the conflicts he or she must resolve upon the way, e.g., individuality vs. conformity, romanticism vs. realism, and desire vs. responsibility. In this course we will investigate the dramatic and comic possibilities offered by the universal transformation of child into adult, and experiment with these possibilities in our own writing. We will examine how contemporary writers have exploited this developmental stage to craft compelling stories. Course requirements include intensive reading and writing, as well as a revised work of fiction.
Instructor: Brian Malloy
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FALL TERM 2008
Sensation and Ballyhoo
in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction
GLS 8014-16635
Course conducted entirely online (Sept-Dec)
4 credits
This course considers the causes celebres of contemporary literary nonfiction. Where do we stand, as readers and writers, amidst media crossfire over notorious books by James Frey and Augusten Burroughs? How do these hot potatoes compare, in form, content and impact, to more complex, less-discussed debates on books by Lauren Slater, Rigoberta Menchu, or Binjamin Wilkomirski? Do books benefiting from mainstream ballyhoo stand up artistically against less-interrogated works exploring volatile subjects such as race, immigration and gender identity? What do we make of the critical and commercial attention paid to works by Joan Didion, Marjane Satrapi, James McBride, Jean-Dominique Bauby, Edwidge Danticat, Mary Karr, Dave Eggers, Jon Krakauer, Mark Doty, David Sedaris and others?
This class will explore: literary memoirs on bestseller lists; issue-focused nonfiction used as college community texts; reportage bearing witness to personal or political trauma; hybrid works with links to mediums not commonly considered literary, popular histories melding research and novelistic storytelling, and books that have changed popular conceptions of the personal narrative. This course is for anyone who is interested in reading, writing and teaching contemporary creative nonfiction and is intrigued by the literary intersections of American popular culture and artistic production. Students take part in asynchronous online discussion and post one commentary on a book from a supplementary book list.
Professor: Barrie Borich
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Virginia Woolf: Modernism
and the Twentieth Century Soul
GLS 8017-16626
Tuesdays, September 2 - December 2, 6-9 pm
Giddens Learning Center, 224W
4 credits
"On or about December, 1916" Virginia Woolf wrote, "human character changed." Woolf spent her writing life articulating that change. This course will explore Virginia Woolf's work in depth. We will read not just a number of her novels, but also her journals, essays, and letters. In order to put her work in context we will also read a biography of her.
Woolf's work grapples with issues that we've come to think of as being a part of our heritage in the 21st century: alienation, fragmentation, empire and its consequences, feminism, the nature of community and the necessity for a "room of one's own." Her writing, which to this day powerfully influences many contemporary writers, comes back again and again to questions of soul and the spirit: how does an individual find meaning in a century that suddenly seemed so cut off from the values and sources of comfort that the Victorian century that preceded it provided? As we move forward into the 21st century these same questions take on a fresh urgency.
In addition to the above themes, we will explore Woolf's craft as a writer in depth and how her style changed from book to book. And we will speculate on the literary and cultural reasons why that style changed
Students will be asked to do critical papers and a brief presentation to the class. The class format will be discussion and at the end of the course students will be asked to write an essay or assemble a portfolio of creative work that that responds to the central questions which the course raises.
Professor: Jim Moore
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The Arts & Innovation: Crossing Barriers
GLS 8082-16631
Thursdays, August 28 - December 4, 6-9 pm
Bush Memorial Library, 306
4 credits
The arts and industry are linked together in the commercial sphere of society whether from the popular cultural perspective or the fine/classical sphere of reference. Take for example the founding of museums and commercial galleries to protect and showcase art; this area has turned into big business and grows more industrious as civilization progresses. The growth of orchestras and orchestral halls and performing arts centers are some of the most ambitious growth areas in the western world while it expands into the global marketplace. This along with jazz clubs, night clubs, coffee bars, community centers, university courses, community and continuing educational opportunities, travel among many other venues like radio, TV, DC's, film/cinema. The arts and industrial growth at the many levels of cultural interaction has become a mainstay in world economy since the early days of WPA and following World War II when the arts served as one of the primary vehicles of communication throughout the world. In the early 1950s the Museum of Modern Art and the USA Government with the support of other institutions of advanced experimental attitudes organized art exhibitions to serve as ambassadors of freedom around the world. We ask some of the following questions: What is the role of the arts today, and how are the arts integrated into advancing innovation, creative thinking, and commercial/business enterprise? It is our fundamental goal/intent of this seminar to demonstrate how the complex culture of the arts (visual, musical, performative, literary) stimulate consciousness while encouraging imaginative, creative, innovative practices.
The presence of the arts in today's global exchange is inseparable from its infusion in every aspect of commerce and industry, political-social-economic, scientific/medical, environmental, moral/ethical values and broad philosophical landscape. The arts serve as a bridge builder to integrated ways of thinking - the arts are at the core interdisciplinary serving to stimulate creativity and the imagination into new/innovative ways of perceiving the human conditions and the future. This course will include a visit to the Walker Art Center and attendance at one performance in the McGuire theater.
Some Selected Texts: David Hickey, Air Guitar, Michael Rush, New Media In Art, Paul Wood, et al, Modernism in Dispute.
Professor: Roslye B. Ultan
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Reading and Writing Spiritual Memoir
GLS 8165-16619
Wednesdays, September 8 - December 8, 6-9pm
Hamline University Minneapolis Center
4 credits
The literary forms of spiritual memoir and autobiography go back thousands of years. In these testaments, writers link the unique details of their experiences with the sacred with universal themes and structures that cross time and traditions. Whether they are stories about trauma and healing, encounters with the holy, the sacred in the ordinary, or the joys and difficulties of organized religion, the process of writing one's own spiritual journey can itself be a transformative spiritual practice.
In this class we look at literary texts that have been intentionally crafted as spiritual memoir. Readings may include The Snow Leopard by V.S. Naipaul; The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong; The Winged Seed, Li Young Lee; Salvation on Sand Mountain, Dennis Covington; Proverbs of Ashes, Brock and Parker; Standing Alone, Asma No-mani; Faith, Sharon Salzburg; The Jew in the Lotus, Roger Kamenetz; Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton; The Way to Rainy Mountain, Scott Momaday; Honey from the Stone, Chet Raymo; and other poetry and articles. Students will write a critical review/analysis of one of the texts, as will use the texts as guides for their own creative work.
Professors: Julie Neraas with Elizabeth Andrew
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HOW TO REGISTER:
1. Read sampler policies & pricing information;
2. Print a Sampler Registration Form;
(.pdf)
3. Return the form, with payment, to the Graduate School of Liberal Studies office. (orm includes mail and fax information.) Online registration is not available.
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The Graduate School of Liberal Studies offers many opportunities to take GLS courses prior to full admission to a degree-seeking program.
