Class Schedules

In this introductory course, we will study African American literature from its origins to the present.We will study major genres and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, The Black ArtsMovement, and Afrofuturism. We will learn to use the tools of literary analysis in order to readclosely, critically, appreciatively—and collectively. Themes of national critique, solidarity, andfuturism will focus our study. Authors will include: David Walker, Langston Hughes, Zora NealeHurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Janelle Monáe, among others. Requirements include:brief written responses to the readings, a presentation, one essay and a revision of it, and a finalproject that will include a written component. This course fulfills either the foundation course inliterature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Today, Shakespeare is venerated as the “Bard” and “wonder of the stage.” His peers were more divided. Early in his career, he was accused of plagiarism (“there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,” fumed Robert Greene) and, after achieving star-status, he was said to be lazy in his editing (“I would he had blotted a thousand [lines],” mused Ben Jonson). How did the imagination and language of this upstart crow shock and delight audiences then—and why do his plays continue to offer entertainment, consolation, and debate today? In this course, we will study some of Shakespeare’s most enduring works, such as Twelfth Night, Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest. Coursework comprises discussion, essays, presentations, and performances (watching professional productions and performing scenes from the plays). This course counts as a foundation course requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course provides an introduction to law and literature. How does literature shape law and vice versa? How does literature help us to better understand the consequences of revenge, the elusiveness of confession, and the tension between justice and law? How does literature "tell the story that must be told"; (M. NourbeSe Philip)? Readings will come from a variety of literary traditions and periods: fairy tales, early modern drama, contemporary film and poetry, and literary and legal scholarship.  This counts as a foundational course for the English major; counts for the Legal Studies Concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Ray Bradbury wrote “toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.” Emily Dickinson described poetry as “feel[ing] physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” In this introductory creative writing course, we will explore different kinds of writing that might shake loose our brains and hone an orientation toward curiosity and wonder. When we read or write, we are both in and out of ourselves—where does a poem or story take us without physically moving us? Where else can our minds go? What inspires us, moves us, makes us daydream? Together, we will work to find our own personal answers to these questions by experimenting with form, content, and style. Throughout this cross-genre class, you will write and workshop several creative pieces. Classes will consist of readings, discussions, writing exercises, and responses to each other’s work. The class will culminate in a final portfolio of original creative work.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises that will be workshopped. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing can be a terrifying, vulnerable act. Whether we’re investigating our own lives or digging into the depths of a character, writing requires risk. In this course, we will create and explore through poetry, fiction, and personal essays. We will learn to get lost, to ask the hardest questions. The first half of the semester will focus on generative experiments. We’ll play with different ways of approaching the page and the writing process. We might write one line a day or try to write an entire story in an hour. The second half of the semester, we’ll learn to revise and offer feedback. Editing and redrafting can lead to unexpected awakenings. Often in revising work, we also revise how we see ourselves and our world. We will begin workshopping with the aim of pushing each other to ask deeper questions and to honor and strengthen the heart of a piece. You will leave this class with a stack of drafts and hopefully a better sense of yourself as a person and as a writer.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing can be a terrifying, vulnerable act. Whether we’re investigating our own lives or digging into the depths of a character, writing requires risk. In this course, we will create and explore through poetry, fiction, and personal essays. We will learn to get lost, to ask the hardest questions. The first half of the semester will focus on generative experiments. We’ll play with different ways of approaching the page and the writing process. We might write one line a day or try to write an entire story in an hour. The second half of the semester, we’ll learn to revise and offer feedback. Editing and redrafting can lead to unexpected awakenings. Often in revising work, we also revise how we see ourselves and our world. We will begin workshopping with the aim of pushing each other to ask deeper questions and to honor and strengthen the heart of a piece. You will leave this class with a stack of drafts and hopefully a better sense of yourself as a person and as a writer.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

J.R.R. Tolkien had a “secret vice”: creating imaginary languages based on medieval languages. In fact, he based Elvish on Welsh, the indigenous, ancient language that predates the arrival of English in Britain. Come study the language and legends of medieval Wales, where the modern fantasy genre was born. Encounter mystical sorcerer-bards, sarcastic goddesses, and ancient creatures of the forest. Learn the fundamentals of the musical Welsh language and become enchanted by the strange and poignant stories of ancient Britain. By the end of the course, we will see why Tolkien believed Welsh to be one of the most beautiful languages in the world.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How can literature help readers find meaning and purpose in times of crisis? In this course, we will study well-crafted narratives serving as windows into the conditions that led to dissent, social strife, and a thirst for liberation in imperial Russia, culminating in the Bolshevik revolution. Under autocracy in Russia, literature was the only public forum for debates about the things that mattered most. In the lead-up to the revolution, Russian literature had a tangible effect on the world by building compassion and sparking indignation, inspiring questions about how things could be otherwise, and by driving readers to action. In the first half of the semester, we will read short stories by authors such as Gogol and Chekhov who left an indelible impression on world literature, and a selection from a novel that served as a bible for revolutionaries. In the second half, we will focus on Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, a story of rebellion against fathers in every sense, written in response to the rise of revolutionary terrorism in Russia. We will conclude with a novella by Tolstoy, Hadji Murat, about the resistance that the Russian state met in its attempt to subjugate the peoples of the Caucasus. We will consider these texts as works of art and as sources of understanding and impact feeding into the Bolshevik Revolution. These narratives about people caught up in unjust systems of power raise questions about how one can and should act under oppressive circumstances. The characters we will encounter grapple with issues of agency and responsibility, as well as the crucial question of who gets to decide what is right and what is wrong in a secular world. As such, these stories bear witness not only to their times, but to ours as well. No previous knowledge of Russian literature or history is required. For our readings we will use English translations that preserve the pleasures of the original texts.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Rural utopias, the romanticization of nature, and the enduring escapism of sustainable living….ducklings in the garden, laundry drying in the sun, and reading poetry under a giant oak tree. What is the appeal of the internet trend known as “cottagecore” and why does it speak to such a diverse range of people—from trad wives to queer teenagers—in our current moment? This course takes cottagecore as our frame of reference for thinking about the intersection of aesthetics, climate change, and ecological readings of literature (known as ecocriticism). We will study pastoral poetry alongside contemporary climate disaster, consider the intersection of rural living and mental health, and follow witchy-sorts into their various dwellings and quaint villages. Students will encounter a range of texts and films in this course alongside rigorous process-oriented writing that will culminate in a class conference on the theme of cottagecore.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Rural utopias, the romanticization of nature, and the enduring escapism of sustainable living….ducklings in the garden, laundry drying in the sun, and reading poetry under a giant oak tree. What is the appeal of the internet trend known as “cottagecore” and why does it speak to such a diverse range of people—from trad wives to queer teenagers—in our current moment? This course takes cottagecore as our frame of reference for thinking about the intersection of aesthetics, climate change, and ecological readings of literature (known as ecocriticism). We will study pastoral poetry alongside contemporary climate disaster, consider the intersection of rural living and mental health, and follow witchy-sorts into their various dwellings and quaint villages. Students will encounter a range of texts and films in this course alongside rigorous process-oriented writing that will culminate in a class conference on the theme of cottagecore.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Our common vocabulary of love presents it as a force that strikes and knocks down its victims. It comes like a fever and it disables cognition. Lovers "fall," they are "smitten," "head over heels," "crazy" for each other. Love is both mania and obsession, both a euphoria that alters one’s view of the world as a whole and an exclusion of the whole world, a radical narrowing of our normally capacious imaginative and perceptual faculties down to the simplest and smallest of human frames: a face, or the sound of a voice. For American authors of the 18th and 19th century, love and madness were twinned sites of altered consciousness that represented the radical "others" of Enlightenment reason, psychic parallels to and extensions of the wilds of the New World and the uncontrollable crowds and freedoms of the new democracy. This course will examine love and madness from multiple perspectives, including the Enlightenment and counter- Enlightenment, gender and sexuality, the American Gothic, violence, and sin. Authors will range from Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allan Poe and Kate Chopin. This course fulfills the 18th/19th century literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this survey course, we will trace an African American literary tradition from 1900 to the present. We will read a range of genres, including drama, poetry (both print and performance/slam), short stories, and novels. Our journey across this rich tradition will be guided by concepts of poetics and performance. Our study will also be informed by activisms both past and present. Among the authors we will study are: W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Claudia Rankine, and Danez Smith. Requirements include: brief written responses to the readings, a presentation, a medium-length essay and a revision of it, and a final reflection essay. This course fulfills the English major requirement of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Poets are often discouraged from being fixated on one subject. But sustained attention is powerful, and repetition is tied to our human need for pattern, ritual, and routine. What pleasures might lie in the familiarity of a revisited subject or image? How might repeating ourselves and returning to our obsessions help uncover new insights, rhythms, and angles of inquiry? In this workshop-based course, we will explore the engine of obsession in the work of artists across disciplines including Mary Szybist, Agha Shahid Ali, Victoria Chang, Mahmoud Darwish, Etel Adnan, and Claude Monet. How far can an image or idea be stretched without losing its luster and capacity for surprise?Throughout the semester, students will write, workshop, and revise original poems to find out.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course we will study fiction writing through the process of reading and writing flash fiction, fairy tales, a diverse array of short stories, and novel openings. We will study a range of published work, discussing elements of craft like: voice, point of view, narrative time, plot, description as emotion, and the unreliable narrator. Everyone will write a series of stories and exercises to put up for workshop. I will lecture each week on an element of craft, but there are no hard and fast rules here. The principles of writing are, at best, valuable hints accrued from centuries of literature, and, at worst, limits to a writer’s developing sensibility. Ideally, by the end of the semester, you will have a firm understanding of the basic tenets of fiction writing and an equally strong understanding of how you might completely dismantle them to seek new ground.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

When we watch movies and TV shows, it’s hard sometimes to remember how these works are actually born. Before the actors say a word, or the post- production team adds that perfect shade of pink to the sunset, a film or television show lives solely on the page. It lives as a piece of writing created in the mind of a storyteller. No matter what happens later, it always begins as a reading experience. In this course, we will concentrate on every aspect of that initial and vital stage of creating visual stories. We will study produced scripts to see how they master visual storytelling, pitch perfect dialogue, and satisfying structure. While there is no paint-by-numbers formula for a perfect screenplay or teleplay, there is a constantly evolving form full of principles the greatest writers have relied on since the birth of these mediums. Throughout the semester we will study this form in depth then we will workshop your developing scripts with an eye toward making them ideal stories for the screen, both large and small.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, students engage in a series of playwriting exercises and read a wide variety of plays. They will read new and contemporary plays that employ different storytelling techniques (i.e., structure, character arcs, staging elements, etc.), embrace the unlimited possibilities of theatricality, and exemplify why we write for the stage. Students will develop a "playwriting toolkit" as they explore their artistic interests following the conventions of time-bound pieces: the 1-minute, 5-minute, 10-minute, and ultimately one-act form. In-class exercises and prompts, and small-group workshopping and reading will challenge each writer's individual development. A mid-term and final play reading series of one-acts will allow students to hear their work in a supportive public setting. May be repeated for credit.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What does it mean to write a world? How can we believably represent an entire cosmos within the space of pages? In this class we'll examine the practice and pleasures of building a fictional world from the ground (literally, in some cases) up. We'll look mostly at speculative fiction -- fantasy and sci-fi -- but we'll examine realistic fiction as well, diving deep into other writers' worlds and studying the building blocks that make them come to life, with a focus on how character and plot are inextricably tied into worldbuilding. We'll play in worlds that already exist and we'll build and write in worlds of our own. Required texts (novels and stories) include authors such as Leigh Bardugo, Octavia Butler, and Vajra Chandrasekera, and we'll also look at some movies/TV/videogames (ex. Marvel/Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Zelda: Breath of the Wild).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

As you, dear reader, no doubt know, the college campus is a very particular space. It is often both a part of and removed from its surroundings (whether those surroundings are miles of cornfields, a small town in New England, or a major Midwestern city) and for students, it is a space marked by its temporality. You are here for four years (give or take) and then you will move on, and out. It is a setting that has been used over and over again in literature, and in this class, we will study a sample of the novels that take place on college campuses, reading works by Zadie Smith, Elif Batuman, and Sally Rooney, among others. We will examine the way these novels address themes such as love, friendship, and institutional power, and discuss the way a campus works as a narrative frame as well as a place. Perhaps you will see something of your own life in these novels; perhaps not. Either way, come prepared to talk about the campus as both a literary device and a personal experience.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

International travelers of the Middle Ages left behind strange and fascinating first-person accounts of travel and trade. In 644 CE, Master Xuanzang returned to the Chinese capital of Xi’an from India, carrying 657 books and vital Buddhist knowledge. In 922 CE, Ahmed ibn Fadlan returned to Baghdad with tales of exotic Viking funerals in the icy north. In 1295 CE, Marco Polo returned to Venice with tales of Kublai Khan’s lavish birthday parties in Mongolia. These and more first-hand written accounts, contextualized by material artifacts and cultural histories, reveal untold stories of a vibrant and interconnected premodern world. The class concludes with considerations of modern immigrant history, following a queer fox spirit from Tang dynasty China to 1990s Vancouver in Larissa Lai’s novel When Fox is a Thousand. This class fulfills the medieval period requirement or Writers of Color requirement for the English major, as well as the Internationalism and WA college-wide requirements.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Based on a real Roman-Celtic tribal warlord of the 400s CE, King Arthur has grown into one of the most recognizable characters of modern literature and film. His name is synonymous with adventure, sword fighting, and chivalry. But Arthur is just as well known for his associates, like the unfaithful Queen Guinevere, the valiant Sir Lancelot, and the magical Merlin. In this class, we’ll trace the earliest, faint glimmers of the Arthurian legend, and watch the stories burst into an international phenomenon by 1138 CE. We’ll see how particular elements of the tales became “canonical” and how others fell into obscurity, diving into the medieval cultural shifts that led to these literary developments. The class culminates with the study of T.H. White’s Once and Future King, the modern novel that defined Arthur and his world for twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences. This class fulfills the medieval period requirement for the English major, as well as the WA college-wide requirement.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How are we, as intersectional beings, embedded in the world’s various systems of power? In what ways does personal and emotional experience come to be shaped by political ideology? This course uses the lens of intersectional feminisms and visual culture to think deeply about the politics of race, class, and gender in literature. We will put theoretical readings by writers such as Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Roszika Parker, and Hélène Cixous into conversation with novels by Zadie Smith and Ali Smith. Jamaican-British writer Zadie Smith writes about technology, education and the Ivory Tower, and the complicated ways gender, sexuality, race, and socioeconomic class intertwine in our lives. Scottish writer Ali Smith’s books explore queer identity, human rights and refugee crises, chronic illness, and the capacity for visual art to connect people across time and space. Both of these writers invite readers into the difficult spaces of life, challenging us to read with compassion while also thinking about how to make the world a better place—in their work, the personal is always political. As a class, we will read a selection of theory alongside novels by “The Smiths” and discuss these texts through a series of creative and scholarly prompts. At the end of the semester, you will create your own multimedia research project in the form of a film-essay. Counts towards the Writers of Color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this team-taught, creative writing/studio art hybrid course, students will contribute to the rich medium of graphic novels by writing, drawing, and inking their own original comic book story. The stories will then be mass-produced into individual zines, and collected into a class-wide graphic novel anthology and ebook. This course has two fundamental goals: To help students work individually on a graphic storytelling project of their own devising: from the cultivation of an initial idea, to the further exploration of that idea through multiple drafts and storyboards, and then finally to sending it out into the world as a “completed” project, which is to say a project that is “good enough for now.” Our second, equally important goal, is to work collectively to build a mutually supportive artistic community dedicated to helping everyone achieve their best work. Along the way, students will also strengthen their technical drawing and design skills, view and analyze examples of visual storytelling from diverse artists, investigate a range of storytelling structures, learn how to communicate more effectively through images, and gain hands-on experience in the publishing process. Prerequisite(s): ART 130 or ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This creative writing course will focus on genres of nonfiction aimed at changing hearts and minds. If you want your voice to be taken seriously, to be heard in the public square, then this course is for you. Genres you will work with will include memoir/personal essay, commentary/op-ed, cultural criticism, profiles, and literary nonfiction. We will read and discuss works by established authors and publications to uncover some of the techniques they have used to make their writing effective, and we will workshop each other’s writing in a supportive, constructively critical manner. The course will be co-taught by Joe Linstroth, a former award-winning journalist with extensive experience in covering some of society’s most pressing issues, writing film reviews, mentoring young journalists, and coaching and editing aspiring op-ed writers. Counts for the creative writing requirement in the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course explores representations of disability and ability in late medieval and early modern England (c. 1500-1700). How was bodymind normativity, ability, and disability defined in the Renaissance? Why did writers turn to literature to explore illness and disability? And where might we discover evidence of disability gain or disability pride in the early modern archive? How do we explore the intersection of race, dis/ability, and citizenship? We’ll be reading a variety of genres: folk and fairy tales, medical treatises, recipe books and herbals (self-help remedy books written for laypeople), law books (which contain some of the earliest definitions of "nonability" and "disability"), jest books, ballads, broadsides, poetry, and dramatic writing. Throughout the semester, we will be reading recent scholarship in disability theory and early modern disability studies. No prior knowledge of the topic or of Renaissance literature is expected. This course counts for the Renaissance period requirement for the English major. Prerequisite: a 100- or 200-level course in English. Familiarity with early modern English is an asset, but not a requirement.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The great African American writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is best known as the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. But his career was vaster still. He was a Soviet screenwriter, Spanish Civil War journalist, African literary anthologist, humorist, playwright, translator, social critic, writer of over 10,000 letters, and much more. This course engages Hughes's full career, bridging race and global issues, politics and art, and makes use of little-known archival materials. This course fulfills the U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What might you learn about a culture and its history if you focused on a narrow moment of time and then read widely what was published within it? That is the question this course seeks to answer by focusing on the year 1859 in Britain. It was a year marked by dramatic publications that changed the literary and scientific world. The first sensation novel—Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, launched a craze for crime and harrowing fiction. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species ignited enormous controversies in the scientific and religious world. 1859 saw the publication of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, cementing the reputation of this new poet laureate. And John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty rubbed shoulders with Samuel Smiles’s Self Help. New periodicals were launched that year, including Dickens’s wildly popular All the Year Round. This course draws its entire reading list from 1859 (including portions of everything mentioned above, and much more), inviting you to delve deeply into the literature, popular culture, science, social commentary, and controversies of the day. It seeks to examine the relationship between politics, novels, innovation, and empire, offering a mid-century vision of Victorian culture through multiple media, archival projects, and a reading experience that is designed to help you think about what it would have been like to be alive then, entering into some of these multiple conversations. This course fulfills the 18th/19th c British lit period requirement for the major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This capstone course has two fundamental goals. One: To help students work individually on a creative project of their own choosing, from the cultivation of an initial idea, to the further exploration of that idea through multiple drafts, and then finally to sending it out into the world as a “completed” project, which is to say a project that is “good enough for now.” Our second, equally important goal, is to work collectively to build a mutually supportive arts community dedicated to helping everyone achieve their best work. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150, plus one creative writing Crafts class at the 200- or 300-level. Capstone courses are intended to be a culminating experience for the major. Students without Senior status will need instructor permission to enroll.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This capstone seminar will provide a workshop environment for advanced students with clearly defined projects in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama or a combination of genres. The seminar will center initially on a group of shared readings about the creative process and then turn to the work produced by class members. Through the presentation of new and revised work, and the critiquing of work-in-progress, each student will develop a significant body of writing as well as the critical skills necessary to analyze the work of others. Course may be repeated for credit if the topic is different. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150, plus one creative writing Crafts class at the 200- or 300- level. Capstone courses are intended to be a culminating experience for the major. Students without Senior status will need instructor permission to enroll.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this introductory course, we will study African American literature from its origins to the present. We will study major genres and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism. We will learn to use the tools of literary analysis in order to read closely, critically, appreciatively—and collectively. Themes of prophecy (what W. E. B. Du Bois termed “second sight”), literary experimentation, and beauty will focus our study. Authors will include: David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Danez Smith, and Ross Gay. Requirements include: a presentation, brief written responses to the readings, one medium length essay and a revision of it, and a final project that will include a written component. This course fulfills either the foundation course in literature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will focus on some of Asian American Literature’s salient texts and recurring themes. Through readings and class discussion, we will explore issues of ethnicity, race, gender, and community in the work of authors like Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Trung Le Nguyen, Solmaz Sharif, and Ocean Vuong, among others. We will also examine the political formation of the term “Asian American;” question narratives like the “model minority;” and consider how news media, pop culture, and the publishing industry have played a role in shaping the production and reception of Asian American writing. Class events will include guest lectures from Asian American authors with recently published books.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Today, Shakespeare is venerated as the “Bard” and “wonder of the stage.” His peers were more divided. Early in his career, he was accused of plagiarism (“there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,” fumed Robert Greene) and, after achieving star-status, he was said to be lazy in his editing (“I would he had blotted a thousand [lines],” mused Ben Jonson). How did the imagination and language of this upstart crow shock and delight audiences then—and why do his plays continue to offer entertainment, consolation, and debate today? In this course, we will study some of Shakespeare’s most enduring works. Coursework comprises discussion, essays, presentations, and performances (watching professional productions and performing scenes from the plays). This course counts as a foundation course requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The machines echoed us. Now, we echo the machines. In a world that automates art and reduces people to data, we will return to what remains uniquely human: the impulse to imagine, to make, and to share. Think of this course as part book club, part writing workshop, part philosophy circle. You’ll take on creative challenges that invite risk and discovery— from personal narratives to game design, oral storytelling to digital experiments. With each project, you’ll be asked not just what you want to create, but why it matters — to you and to others. Along the way, we’ll read and discuss novels where creativity becomes a lifeline, a way to find joy, meaning, and community. We’ll turn to philosophers, ancient and modern, to explore how creation can be a wellspring of purpose and possibility in turbulent times. And we’ll close, finally, with science fiction—to ask what kind of future we’re heading toward, and whether there’s still time to rewrite it.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

You know it when you see it: tweed blazers, a pile of leatherbound books read by dripping candlelight, Gothic architecture, boarding schools, crunchy leaves, and old paintings. Dark Academia is an internet subculture devoted to the material and visual culture of universities and student life. But it’s also an aesthetic shaped by literary history and the socioeconomics of higher education. In this class, we will study the politics of aesthetics by way of Dark Academia—murder, magic, and various forms of rogue bookishness included! Students will read novels by writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Donna Tartt, and Oscar Wilde (with some detours into film and television) as we think critically about academia itself—as a lifestyle, as the pursuit of knowledge, and as a neoliberal system.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Ray Bradbury wrote “toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.” Emily Dickinson described poetry as “feel[ing] physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” In this introductory creative writing course, we will explore different kinds of writing that might shake loose our brains and hone an orientation toward curiosity and wonder. When we read or write, we are both in and out of ourselves where does a poem or story take us without physically moving us? Where else can our minds go? What inspires us, moves us, makes us daydream? Together, we will work to find our own personal answers to these questions by experimenting with form, content, and style. In this cross-genre class, you will write and workshop several creative pieces. Classes will consist of readings, discussions, writing exercises, and responses to each other’s work. The class will culminate in a final portfolio of original creative work.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, you’ll explore the art of storytelling in all its form— fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Through playful exercises, focused assignments, and inspiring readings, you’ll experiment with short stories, personal essays, memoir, and poetry, finding your own voice along the way. We’ll spend time workshopping each other’s writing in a supportive, thoughtful environment designed to help you take creative risks and grow as a writer. Whether you’re drafting your first poem or refining a story, you’ll learn to read closely, revise purposefully, and discover the joy of shaping language that moves others and forges connection.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writers are makers of magic. How else would an author manage to move us to tears or keep us racing through a story, desperate to find out what happens next? How could a poet otherwise manage to articulate powerful sensations or experiences that we might recognize but haven’t put words to before? In this course, we’ll attempt to break the spells woven by great writers down to each minute flourish and see how we might weave our own literary magic, infused with our unique voices and perspectives, with what we discover. First, we’ll read work by a diverse list of published authors and consider the myriad choices a writer makes alone at their desk, as they’re drafting and revising, to make action and emotion come alive on the page. Then, we’ll take up our pens—and sometimes a prop or two—and create our own fiction and poetry through a combination of freewriting and creative exercises. This course contains a collaborative workshop component wherein some of your writing will be read, discussed and encouraged by your peers. The semester will conclude with the curation of a portfolio of your favorite writing from the course, revised and re-imagined.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises. This course must be completed at Macalester as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course approaches the dynamic field of publishing, from acquisitions of literary titles to their entrance into the marketplace, from the writer's hands to the editor's desk to the reader's library. With explorations into the history of the book, new technologies, and the vibrant literary scene in the Twin Cities and beyond, this course illuminates the complex realities of how literature meets our culture.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will study some of the greatest films of all time, alongside the poets and poems that inspired them. Our selections will be an eclectic mix of art documentaries, biopics, and romantic dramas—from Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams to the 1990s classic Poetic Justice (starring Tupac and Janet Jackson with poetry by Maya Angelou). Students will learn to engage with poetic intertextuality in film, alongside writing film analysis, literary analysis, and poetry, and we will experiment with film-poems. This course will be conducted as a weekly seminar.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this team-taught, creative writing/studio art hybrid course, students will contribute to the rich medium of graphic novels by writing, drawing, and inking their own original comic book story. The stories will then be mass-produced into individual zines, and collected into a class-wide graphic novel anthology and ebook. This course has two fundamental goals: To help students work individually on a graphic storytelling project of their own devising: from the cultivation of an initial idea, to the further exploration of that idea through multiple drafts and storyboards, and then finally to sending it out into the world as a “completed” project, which is to say a project that is “good enough for now.” Our second, equally important goal, is to work collectively to build a mutually supportive artistic community dedicated to helping everyone achieve their best work. Along the way, students will also strengthen their technical drawing and design skills, view and analyze examples of visual storytelling from diverse artists, investigate a range of storytelling structures, learn how to communicate more effectively through images, and gain hands-on experience in the publishing process. Prerequisite(s): ART 130 or ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, we will study African American literature from the end of the 18th century to the turn of the 20th century, from Phillis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells. Themes of the course include: reading and writing as subversive acts and African American literature as an agent of political and social change. We will also connect crises surrounding Black citizenship in the United States, so often represented by African American writers before 1900, to the present, honoring their legacy of national critique and Black solidarity. We will also foreground early African American literature as art, reading it closely and appreciatively. Requirements include: brief written responses to the readings, a presentation, a medium-length essay and a revision of it, and a final reflection essay. This course fulfills the English major requirement either of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color or a course on 19th-century American literature.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Poets are often discouraged from being fixated on one subject. But sustained attention is powerful, and repetition is tied to our human need for pattern, ritual, and routine. What pleasures might lie in the familiarity of a revisited subject or image? How might repeating ourselves and returning to our obsessions help uncover new insights, rhythms, and angles of inquiry? In this workshop-based course, we will explore the engine of obsession in the work of artists across disciplines including Mary Szybist, Agha Shahid Ali, Victoria Chang, Mahmoud Darwish, Etel Adnan, and Frida Kahlo. How far can an image or idea be stretched without losing its luster and capacity for surprise? Throughout the semester, students will write, workshop, and revise original poems to find out.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This advanced workshop course focuses in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing fiction, building on the work done in ENGL 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, writing from models of the short story (both classic and contemporary), working with the technical components of fiction (e.g., plot, setting, structure, characterization), or developing linked stories or longer fictions (or other methodology selected by the instructor: see department postings for details). It will involve extensive readings and discussion of fiction in addition to regular fiction writing assignments. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor, with the approval of the Chair. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, students engage in a series of playwriting exercises and read a wide variety of plays. They will read new and contemporary plays that employ different storytelling techniques (i.e., structure, character arcs, staging elements, etc.), in order to embrace the unlimited possibilities of theatricality, exemplifying why we write for the stage. Students will develop a "playwriting toolkit" as they explore their artistic interests. In-class exercises, prompts, small group workshopping, and related readings will challenge each writer’s individual development. A mid-term check-in and in class readings of final plays will allow students to hear their work out loud in a supportive public setting. May be repeated for credit.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This creative nonfiction course will focus on the basic elements of narrative journalism. Students will conduct interviews and research to create powerful stories that may be print, audio, and/or web-based.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this co-taught, cross-listed History and English course, we will use baseball as a lens to explore historical movements and literary genres. In the history half of the course, we will consider the past two hundred years, both in the United States and abroad, making connections between Jackie Robinson and desegregation, free agency and the labor movement, American empire and the globalization of the game, and an Indigenous women’s softball team and shifting gender roles in Yaxuna, Mexico. In the literary half of the course, we will read and discuss writers who have used the game to better understand their personal experiences and the world around them. Readings may include fiction, essays, narrative profiles, comic book memoirs, labor histories, performance studies analyses, and oral history projects, by a wide variety of authors. We'll also go to Target Field to see a Twins game. By the end of the semester, students will have completed a personal chapbook of four short baseball essays, both literary and historical. Meets the post-1800 requirement and the Global and Comparative fields. Appropriate for first-year students..

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will read some of the best novels of the twentieth century—classics of queer literature. We will study how queer writers navigated censorship and discrimination and created radical visions of love, hope, and joy. E.M. Forster wrote a novel about queer love be published only after his death; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a trans character who lives for hundreds of years; and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room takes us to a Parisian gay bar. These queer masterpieces (among others!) paved the way for a dynamic canon of queer literature and theory, and our class will seek to understand the enduring impact of these texts. Students will read deeply and undertake a semester-long zine project.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Doctor, occultist, magician. The great healers of the Renaissance fashioned themselves not as surgeons (how barbarous), but magi. They sought to cure ailing patients through a combination of drugs, bloodletting (with a knife or leeches), and magical remedies (amulets, casting, exorcism). What might it have been like to be a doctor or a patient in an age of enchantment? What did “holistic” medicine look like during the Renaissance and after the Reformation? How did literature shape cultural understanding of the doctor- patient relationship, nursing as gendered labor, and disease as a blight or a curse? In addition to reading plays, poems, and short prose romances, we will examine the writings of notable Renaissance doctors and healers, chart the rise of royal and civic hospitals, and learn about the transmission of scientific and medical knowledge from the East to the West. Students will have the chance to conduct independent and original archival research and hone their writing skills in community. This course counts for the Renaissance period requirement for the English major and the Community and Global Health Concentration. No prerequisites, but familiarity with early modern English is an asset.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course opens with ghost stories from the heyday of the genre: specters and haunts from the pens of nineteenth-century masters, including the likes of Amy Levy, Charles Dickens, Grant Allen, and Oscar Wilde, Henry James (The Turn of the Screw) and Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights). In both short stories and novels, we will explore both what terrifies and how. What are the formal qualities of a good ghost story? What are the requirements it places on readers? To what degree are ghosts historically or culturally specific? With these readings for a strong base, the second half of the course considers the legacies of these Victorians in recent novels (by Helen Oyeyemi and Sarah Waters) and short stories. How do the shadows of the past haunt the present, in terms of unhealthy fascinations, or whispers of doubt, or standards of greatness to which a writer must rise? Are modern ghost stories forever in the debt of long-dead writers? How do the Victorians themselves haunt our present moment? Is steampunk or Victorian nostalgia a ghostly presence of the nineteenth century in the twenty-first? This course considers both old and new ghost stories, stories that are tied to the nineteenth-century and those that attempt to break free of it, to investigate how narratives of the things that haunt us can reveal things about ourselves or our cultural moments. This course satisfies the 18th/19th c. British requirement on the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course serves as an introduction to all things wyrd, wonderful, and horrific in medieval literature. Though the genre recognized today as Horror has its roots in 18th century Gothic literature, narrative techniques and tropes that send shivers down the spine can be found throughout the medieval corpus. From 9th-century England to 15thcentury Japan and everywhere in between, medieval stories are littered with fearinducing landscapes, monstrous and mythical creatures, strange and supernatural events, and grotesque and gory details. These stories did more than simply spook medieval audiences; these stories expressed the real, deep-seated fears held by the communities that created and shared them and imparted important social and moral lessons. Readings will be prose, poetry, chronicles, and religious texts from across the medieval world and may include Beowulf, The Mabinogi, Tsuchigumo zōshi, Shahnameh, and The Decameron.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What can a short text do that a long text can’t? This course will look for answers to this question by reading and discussing short prose works from the 12th century to the present. It will also introduce students to the field of Comparative Literature, the study of literature across national, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries. We will pursue the history of the novella—which is not a short novel but a literary form in its own right—from its emergence in the Renaissance (Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre) to its modern adaptations in German and French romanticism (Claire de Duras, Goethe, Kleist), the 19th century (Flaubert) and modernism (Kafka), through to contemporary authors like Annie Ernaux. We will explore the complexities of the essay from Michel de Montaigne, who created the genre in the 16th century, through Francis Bacon, whose scientific method relied on it, to its use as a hybrid form between science and literature in the early twentieth century (Freud) or by anticolonial writers (Fanon). And we will focus on the form that epitomizes the rhetorical virtue of brevitas: the aphorism, from the 17th century moralists (La Rochefoucauld), through the secular pietism of the 18th century (Lichtenberg), the 19th century’s answers to nihilism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), the uncompromising pessimism of Adorno, and the aphoristic art fiction of Sophie Calle. Our aim is to explore how these forms persist but are also being reworked by contemporary and postcolonial Francophone and German-speaking authors. In addition to works in these three genres, we will read short theoretical works fundamental to the discipline of Comparative Literature by Franco Moretti, Emily Apter, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Discussion questions will include: what are the literary and rhetorical effects of brevity? How can words gain by being few? What happens when texts get longer? How is literature a form of knowledge and science a form of literature? Taught in English, but students with knowledge of French and/or German will have the opportunity to read the texts and write on them in the original. Two short papers, one final paper with revision and project presentation. No prerequisites.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines nineteenth-century British prose through questions of gender, race, class, and nationality—specifically considering what constitutes a “lady” by various cultural/historical standards and how the construction of ideal femininity worked with and against ideals of masculinity in the period. None of the books we will read suggest all women are (or can be) ladies; nor are all of the men who populate them monsters. Seeking nuance in these terms, the course asks: How were nineteenth-century gender norms complicated by class and race, and what is the space between the ideal and the monstrous? How is a monstrous woman constructed differently than a monstrous man? What makes monstrosity redeemable or irredeemable? What if the world’s monstrosities are not humans but made by them? We’ll read a vampire novel (Carmilla), as well as books centering everything from labor rights to inherit ance laws to sci-fi feminist utopia. We’ll read some nonfiction prose addressing political issues of the day, and simulate the Victorian reading experience by consuming one novel in small weekly installments all semester, following the sensational exploits of petite, blonde Lady Audley to the point where we ultimately discover her Secrets. Along the way, you'll get a taste of the Gothic (Jane Eyre), the Condition-of-England novel (Mary Barton), and colonial fantasy (The Man Who Would Be King), among other fictions weird, monstrous, funny, and fearless. This course satisfies the 18th/19th c. British requirement on the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Traces the development of theoretical accounts of culture, politics and identity in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and related lands since the 1947-1991 decolonizations. Readings include Fanon, Said, Walcott, Ngugi and many others, and extend to gender, literature, the U.S., and the post-Soviet sphere. The course bridges cultural representational, and political theory. Prerequisite(s): Prior internationalist and/or theoretical coursework strongly recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this literature capstone course, each student will choose and develop a project that best reflects their individual interests in literary studies and that represents a culmination of their work in the English major. The choice of topic and method is up to each student, with guidance from the professor. All projects will be developed in intellectual community with others in the class. Course requirements include a research proposal for the project, the capstone project itself, and presentation of that project at the English department capstone events at the end of the semester. Prerequisites: One prior English course numbered in the 100s (excluding 101 or 150), plus one literature course at the 200- or 300- level. Students without senior status will need instructor permission to enroll.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This seminar will provide a workshop environment for advanced students with clearly defined projects in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or a combination of genres. The seminar will center initially on a group of shared readings that elucidate elements of the creative process and craft and then turn to the work produced by class members. Through the presentation of new and revised work, and the critiquing of work-in-progress, each student will develop a significant body of writing as well as the critical skills necessary to analyze the work of others. Students will be required to meet with the instructor via Zoom two weeks before the official start of the course to discuss the course’s format and their creative projects. Capstone courses are intended to be a culminating experience for the major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials