Class Schedules

This introductory English course covers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and Two Spirit literature in America. We will examine how American culture and politics have shaped and been shaped by LGBTQ2S+ writing and art. We will look at historical texts that helped to create queer and trans identities in America and appreciate intersections of race, ethnicity, and class as we move into current work. And we'll explore what it means to queer a text, a life and a culture. Requirements include written responses to reading, a journal, a creative project, and a 5-7 page essay. Authors we’ll read include: Charles Brockden Brown, Jewelle Gomez, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Qwo-Li Driskill, Gloria Anzaldúa, Allison Bechdel, Malinda Lo, Kai Cheng Thom, Tommy Pico, Mariko Tamaki, and Junauda Petrus.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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 prophesy (what 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, Claudia Rankine, 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

The 2020 pandemic was marked by a global turn to the handmade, from learning the art of baking and DIY political yard signs to crocheting, embroidery, woodworking, painting, collage, and more. But this phenomenon has roots that go beyond our contemporary moment, and writers have frequently tapped into the resources of craft in their novels, short fiction, poetry, and life-writing. In this first-year course, we will study the ways subversive stitching and other activist craft practices have shaped the work of resistance in contemporary literature and theory. We will take a global and experimental approach to these questions, studying Southern and Indigenous quilting practices, the poetics of silk worms, legacies of Irish handiwork and global migration, and poetry inspired by Japanese kintsugi (in which broken pots are mended with gold), Botswana’s “careless seamstress,” and the legacies of race and art in Jamaican hybrid identity. Students will study these texts through writing and hands-on research, experimenting with various craft forms along the way. No art or craft experience required; all curious makers and scholars are welcome!

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course we will read some of the most popular novels ever written in the United States. They will be heart-wrenchingly beautiful, tear-jerkingly sad, philosophically bold, and seriously weird. We will discuss love, death, the meaning of life, cruelty, beauty, loneliness, artificial intelligence, and mystery.

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 bydripping candlelight, Gothic architecture, boarding schools, crunchy leaves, and oldpaintings. Dark Academia is an internet subculture devoted to the material and visualculture of universities and student life. But it’s also an aesthetic shaped by literaryhistory and the socioeconomics of higher education. In this class, we will study thepolitics of aesthetics by way of Dark Academia—murder, magic, and various forms ofrogue bookishness included! Students will read novels by writers such as KazuoIshiguro, Zadie Smith, Donna Tartt, and Oscar Wilde (with some detours into film andtelevision) as we think critically about academia itself—as a lifestyle, as the pursuit ofknowledge, and as a neoliberal system.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course we will dive right into the study of creative writing by reading and writing poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and personal essays. We will study how published authors craft their pieces, how they convey sensation and emotion, and how they artfully tell a story. Along the way, you’ll try your hand at each literary form we study. This is the basic template you can expect on a day-to-day basis. But, beyond this relatively simple pattern, what I hope will happen this term is that you’ll lose yourself to the daring act of creating literature. I hope you’ll use your growing knowledge of writing technique and literary history to say something fearless and artful about the world around you. And I hope you will see that what you write matters. Great creative writing aspires to more than just a pleasant diversion from life. At its best, it directly engages with life and even tries to change it. We look to stories, poems, and essays to give us an experience in language that we’ve never had before, to deepen our knowledge of the world, and to allow us into the hearts and minds of others. I hope this semester will be a window into that experience for you.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course will focus on the basic elements of creative writing. Students will be asked to read and discuss published work by writers across a wide range of cultures, to support one another through peer workshops, and to write multiple drafts of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout the semester our focus will be on creating an artistic community that encourages everyone to discover and nurture their own individual creative voice, and then to express that voice with force and conviction.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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. We will approach theblank page as a place of possibility and lean into our sense of bewilderment. As a group, we’ll open the door to open-endedness and see what (or who!) walks through. Throughout this cross-genre class, you will write 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

In this first year course we will dive right into the study of creative writing by reading and writing poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and personal essays. We will study how published authors craft their pieces, how they convey sensation and emotion, and how they artfully tell a story. Along the way, you’ll try your hand at each literary form we study. This is the basic template you can expect on a day-to-day basis. But, beyond this relatively simple pattern, what I hope will happen this term is that you’ll lose yourself to the daring act of creating literature. I hope you’ll use your growing knowledge of writing technique and literary history to say something fearless and artful about the world around you. And I hope you will see that what you write matters. Great creative writing aspires to more than just a pleasant diversion from life. At its best, it directly engages with life and even tries to change it. We look to stories, poems, and essays to give us an experience in language that we’ve never had before, to deepen our knowledge of the world, and to allow us into the hearts and minds of others. I hope this semester will be a window into that experience for you.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

The first decades of the 20th century produced some of the most innovative works in literary history, permanently transforming how we see, hear, and otherwise perceive the world around us. More than any aesthetic movement before or since, modernists including Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust were keenly aware of both the limits of language and the inevitability of their transgression. They used words in ways that stretch sense to the point where it breaks, but with the aim of revealing a richer domain of finer-grained perception that is obscured by our everyday linguistic and intellectual habits. Over the course of the semester, we will read literary and theoretical accounts that both thematize and perform their own linguistic (in)capacities: to represent, to translate, to obscure, to estrange, to reveal. We will also examine some instances of modernist music, painting, and film. Our aim is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of how words work, contrasting linguistic phenomena with other forms of expressive media, and inquiring into the potential of language to articulate non-linguistic modes of experience. All readings in English. The course has no prerequisites and is open to first years.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

To many readers, the field of publishing seems opaque. How does a novel go from scribbled notes to finished paperback? What goes into editing, printing, and marketing a collection of stories or poems? This course will shed light on this rapidly evolving field through a combination of readings, in-class discussion, talks with local publishing professionals, and hands-on work. We will learn about publishing by producing our own anthology, tracing literary work from the hands of the author, through the processes of acquisition, editing, production, marketing and publicity, printing and finally into the hands of the reader. Additional topics will include trends in publishing technology, interior design and typesetting, magazine and book editing, and the roles of the literary agent, the independent publisher, and the book reviewer. We will take advantage of the extraordinary publishing resources in the Twin Cities through guest speakers and field trips. Assignments will include submitting your own writing, editing projects, presenting publisher profiles, and writing a final paper on publishing issues. This course is designed for readers who want to know how the book they’re holding got into their hands, for writers who want to know what happens when they send their works to publishers, and for those interested in publishing as a future career. Note: This is not an introductory writing class. Though all are welcome, students who have completed their first-year writing requirement are more successful. In addition, students who have sufficient creative material (poems, stories, or essays) ready for inclusion in the anthology will find it more fulfilling.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In the past fifty years, science fiction has emerged as the primary cultural form for thinking about human extinction: climate catastrophe, pandemics, hostile AI, nuclear war. But science fiction has also emerged as the primary cultural form for imagining a near boundless future for humans: cybernetic enhancements, colonies on Goldilocks planets, post-scarcity economies, digital consciousness. Facing such disorienting and sometimes unfathomable changes, science fiction seeks to understand what it means to be a human and to live a meaningful life. Why are we here? What are we to become? How will both the promises and threats of technology change what it means to be a thinking, feeling human? In this course we will examine works of science fiction as complex aesthetic achievements, as philosophical inquiries into the nature of being and time, and as theoretical examinations of the nature of human cognition. We will engage in intensive readings of contemporary texts, including works by Ted Chiang, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others. This class counts toward the Cognitive Science Concentration.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What is “nature writing,” and how is our sense of the balm that nature can provide tied to legacies of the Victorian period? This class considers these questions through a combination of readings, field trips, and scholarly and creative explorations of your relationship to the natural world. Although “nature” is not only plants, the nineteenth-century British fascination with plants makes them an excellent organizing motif. From exploring the globe for exotic specimens to fill out London’s Kew Gardens to devising flower dictionaries to send encoded messages to their beloveds, Victorian engaged with plant life in myriad ways. Readings for the course will cover many genres, and may include poetry (John Clare, Gerard Manly Hopkins), children’s books (Beatrix Potter, Frances Hodgson Burnett), travel writing (Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley), novels (Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells), evolutionary science (Charles Darwin), and horticulture (John Louden, Gertrude Jekyll). We will considering these texts within key historical frames including extractive imperial practices, scientific systems of classification, the question of wild versus domesticated spaces/species, and gendered norms that shaped affective responses to nature. And we will put ourselves into nature—taking long walks together, visiting gardens and Como Conservatory, and observing, sketching, and writing about local natural environments. The class aims to offer some critiques of Victorian worldviews, imperial structures, and strategies, while still locating hope. How might the Victorians’ deep attention to the natural world inspire and sustain our own relationships to nature’s wonders and its fragilities? (This course satisfies the 18th/19th century British requirement on the English major. First-day attendance required.)

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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 will include forging Black solidarity and writing as means of self-construction and resistance. We will also foreground early African American literature as art, as an at once aesthetic and political project, reading it closely and appreciatively. We will frame our semester’s work with sound studies, exploring how this literary tradition engages with oral culture and with the sonic. Requirements include: brief written responses to the readings, a presentation, a medium-length essay and a revision of it, and a final reflection. 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

As human beings, we give shape to our thoughts and emotions through language, and form is a particularly useful constraint when we do so through poetry. In this course, we will study form in poetry as projects of pattern making and breaking. We’ll consider both the histories and contemporary applications of poetic forms such as the sonnet, pantoum, ghazal, haibun, and others. One of the most exciting things about poetry in the twenty-first century is that living poets are working in invented forms as well as traditional ones that have reached us across cultures. Together, we’ll investigate the idea from Kierkegaard that “the more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention.” Expect to read poems across time and technique, to write and rewrite, and to turn an eye to the world in search of forms known and yet-to-be. You might just be asked to invent one of your own! 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.), 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

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

This creative nonfiction course will focus on the elements of long-form narrativejournalism, including both print and audio storytelling. Students will learn to write storiesthat are clear and compelling as well as factual and precise. They will study thedifferences between writing for the eye and the ear. Students will learn how toidentify strong story ideas, conduct interviews and structure a narrative for maximumimpact. They will also write frequently, edit each other, and receive detailed suggestionson their writing from the instructor. This course will be taught by audio journalists Annie Baxter and Curtis Gilbert. Annieand Curtis have several decades of combined experience reporting and editing atMinnesota Public Radio and American Public Media. Annie currently works as an editorat The Wall Street Journal’s flagship podcast, The Journal. Curtis, a Macalesteralumnus, is currently an editor at APM Reports, a national investigative reporting group.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In her article “If Fiction Changes the World, It’s Going to Be YA,” journalist Emily Temple states that young adult books are primed to do work for the social good because of their timeliness, their willingness to take on big political issues, and their wide readership. In the last few decades, the young adult genre has been growing in scope and in ambition, and much of it is being written by exciting new authors, closer to the age of their protagonists. In this class we will study some new and foundational texts of the genre, discussing subjects like depiction of mental illness, the political implications of fantasy novels, and the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign. Meanwhile, you will be working on your own YA projects, learning for yourself what makes these books tick. This course serves as a creative writing elective in the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Since the invention of film, audiences have been fascinated by fantastic depictions of the Middle Ages on screen. Audiences love escaping into mysterious worlds of adventure with kings, warriors, and princesses. But how much do these movies really have to do with the historical Middle Ages? Do they illuminate truths or manufacture lies? Was medieval Europe really as exciting, romantic, and dangerous as movies imagine? In this class, we will use actual primary materials to explore how the medium of film adapts, subverts, and appropriates elements of the medieval past. In the end, we will discover what our favorite “medieval” movies say not just about medieval societies, but about ourselves. Assignments include semi-weekly film screenings, primary source readings, and quizzes; pair presentations; monthly readings on theories of medievalism; and two essays plus a film script. This class fulfills the pre-1800 Medieval requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Who are the writers you return to over and over? The songs you listen to on repeat, themovies you've seen a hundred times? This class is an in-depth, multi-genre study ofwhat it means to be artistically "influenced," and throughout the semester we willexamine our own influences as a way to understand and develop our own unique voicesas writers. We will also engage in imitation, both at the micro level of line and sentenceand the macro level of theme and feeling. We'll look at all the little fiddly bits that makeup a whole – syntax, word choice, stress pattern, sentence length – and all theintangibles, too; the emotions, the moods, the dream landscapes. We will reproduceand repurpose the work of others in order to make our own original works, studyingwriters like George Saunders, Ocean Vuong, Ross Gay, and Mary Oliver – as well asany writers you yourself bring to the table.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Doctor, occultist, magician. The great healers of the Renaissance fashionedthemselves not as surgeons (how barbarous), but magi. They sought to cure ailing patientsthrough 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 ageof enchantment? What did “holistic” medicine look like during the Renaissance and after theReformation? How did literature shape cultural understanding of the doctor-patientrelationship, nursing as gendered labor, and disease as a blight or a curse? In addition toreading plays, poems, and short prose romances, we will examine the writings of notableRenaissance 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

In this writing workshop, we will practice transmuting artistic experience into words. We will look at visual art, listen to music, and watch theatrical and dance performances, and in response, we’ll practice different modes of incorporating our reactions into creative and critical writing. We’ll read fiction, poetry, personal essays, criticism, reviews, memoirs, etc. and we’ll try our hands at each form, gaining a sense of what is involved in describing the color of a cello’s sound, the gestures of a dancing body, or the intangible emotions we feel when we stand in front of a painting. In a final project, students will choose an artistic form and a mode of response and develop a larger-scale piece of writing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In Shakespeare’s England, whipping, branding, mutilation (of the hand,nose, ears, or face), pillorying, hanging, burning, and beheading were common forms of legalpunishment. The rigors of early modern law may seem strange or “barbaric” to us, yet we mayrecognize the intentions behind the law: to restore order, keep the peace, and stabilize socialrelations. What can Shakespearean drama teach us about the human desire for justice,retribution, and forgiveness? To grasp what justice meant to the early moderns and, in turn,what it means to us today, we will study the representation of law and justice in plays byShakespeare and his contemporaries. We will read early modern and contemporary legal andpolitical theory, and attend shows or lectures related to the topics of this class. This coursesatisfies the Renaissance period requirement for the English major and counts as a course for the Legal Studies Concentration. Prerequisite: a 100- or 200-level English course or permission of the instructor.

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 class, we will explore how love resides at the very heart of the African American literary tradition by studying how African American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries have consistently expressed, theorized, and embraced love. Our readings will represent multiple kinds of romances and sexualities, yet all will center the love that both emerges from and helps to create Black collectivity, solidarity, and joy. Our readings will also reveal and challenge the oppressive forces that Black love and lovers so often must withstand. Authors will include: W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Samuel Delany. In addition, we will read some scholarship related to the course topic and to our texts. Course requirements include: discussion questions on our readings, a presentation, a short essay, and a final project. This course fulfills the U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major. Prerequisite: One prior English course numbered in the 100s.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This capstone course will give English majors in the Literature Path the opportunity to use a diverse set of advanced analytic methods to design and craft an independent research project on the broad topic of trans/formation, focusing on formative elements of identity like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and species. The semester will be divided in three units that scaffold to the capstone project itself. First, students will engage deeply with primary and secondary materials from the Middle Ages that illuminate processes of medieval trans/formations. Together we will read stories of magical transformation (encountering a transgender knight in Roman de Silence, a trans-racial convert in King of Tars, and tranimalities in the Mabinogi) together with the work of critical theorists like Homi Bhabha, Glorida Anzaldúa, Susan Stryker, Mel Chen, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Donna Haraway. Students will develop analytical skill in historicist, postcolonial, feminist, trans*, and ecocritical approaches, and select the direction of their capstones through a research proposal. Second, students will begin independent research processes, developing their own approaches with annotated bibliographies. Finally, students will write and craft capstones, which may incorporate digital or multimodal material. Assignments will include weekly readings, a class presentation, a research proposal, an annotated bibliography, a written capstone project, and a department-wide presentation of the project. Students will be able to select any project of their choosing, providing the primary text/s engage with the theme of transformation or social/literary formation processes in some way. Projects are welcome to focus on modern or historical material.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

As a literary form, "the novella" is often defined by what it is not: too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel. In this capstone class, however, we will study the novella as a discrete form unto itself, perfectly suited to read in one or two immersive sittings and uniquely able to develop story and character with elegant concision. We will explore the history, architecture, possibilities and delights of fictional works that range from 10,000 to 40,000 words, reading novellas in genres including literary realism, horror, and fantasy, from authors such as Victor LaValle, Claire Keegan, and James Welch. Over the course of the semester students will write and workshop their own ~15,000 word novella, with emphasis on character, structure, and sentence-level craft.

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, 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:

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:
Humanities

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:

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:
Humanities

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