ENGL 231
Literature of the Sea
Last Offered Spring 2020
Division I
Cross-listed MAST 231
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Taking advantage of our maritime museum, coastal setting, and three field seminars, we study canonical and lesser-known novelists, short-story writers, dramatists, and poets who set their works in the watery world, often in the exact places where we travel as a class. We read, for example–depending on fall or spring semester–Ernest Hemingway when sailing on the Straits of Florida, John Steinbeck when exploring Cannery Row on Monterey Bay, and Mark Twain on a steamboat on the Mississippi. We read Kate Chopin on the sands of the Gulf of Mexico, Rudyard Kipling out on Georges Bank, and Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick aboard Mystic Seaport’s historic whaleship, the Charles W. Morgan, a vessel nearly identical to the vessel he climbed aboard at age twenty-one. In the classroom we examine these works through a mixture of lecture, small-group discussion, and writing. To further appreciation and analysis, this interdisciplinary course uses students’ emerging knowledge of maritime history and marine science.