Class Schedules

This introductory English course covers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and Two Spirit literature in America—with a focus on resistance and resilience. We will examine how American culture and politics have shaped and been shaped by LGBTQ2S+ writing and art. We’ll appreciate intersections of race, ethnicity, and class in historical and 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 creative project, a 5-7 page essay, and an optional escape room scenario. Authors we’ll read include: Jewelle Gomez, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Qwo-Li Driskill, Gloria Anzaldúa, Allison Bechdel, 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 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 WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course serves as an introduction to law and literature. How does literature shape law and vice versa? How does literature help us to better understand the human desire for revenge, retribution, confession, witnessing, judgment, remorse, and forgiveness? Readings will come from a variety of literary traditions and periods: fairy tales, early modern drama, essays, short stories, film, and literary and legal theory. This course counts as a foundation course for the English major. This course also 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 thetop of my skull.” Emily Dickinson described poetry as “feel[ing] physically as if thetop of my head were taken off.” In this introductory creative writing course, we willexplore different kinds of writing that might shake loose our brains and hone anorientation toward curiosity and wonder. When we read or write, we are both inand out of ourselves—where does a poem or story take us without physicallymoving us? Where else can our minds go? What inspires us, moves us, makesus daydream? Together, we will work to find our own personal answers to thesequestions by experimenting with form, content, and style. In this cross-genreclass, you will write and workshop several creative pieces. Classes will consist ofreadings, discussions, writing exercises, and responses to each other’s work, andculminate in a final portfolio of original creative pieces across genre.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This introductory 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

This introductory 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

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 introductory 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

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 survey provides an introduction to the masterpieces of medieval and early modern literature, from Beowulf to Paradise Lost. What is old, middle, and early modern English? How does lyric formally (and thematically) differ from epic and romance? When did drama acquire its characteristic structure? In addition to these poetic considerations, we will explore the key controversies that roiled pre-modern cultures pertaining to race, gender, and religion. Readings will highlight the imagination, poetics, and politics of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney Herbert, and John Milton. This course satisfies either the Medieval or Renaissance period requirement for the major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Videogames dominate entertainment culture. But like all popular forms of entertainment, they are often looked down upon as aesthetically superficial, intellectually uncomplicated, and somehow bad for you. They are "just pop culture." Like Shakespeare was in his time. Like the novel was when it was invented. And like film and television shows were when they were invented. This course takes seriously the deep intellectual and aesthetic value of videogames and of videogame making. Videogames are expanding the possibilities and the borders of storytelling and narrative design. They are pushing the limits of coding wizardry. They have also become one of the most creative popular-cultural sites for experimenting with and understanding other minds and identities. In this class, students will work in interdisciplinary teams to bring world-building narrative techniques to an immersive visual setting while exploring technical challenges involved in programming and game development through hands-on projects. Prerequisite(s): None if taken as the English cross-list.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

From E. M. Forster's Lucy Honeychurch, who "entered into a more solid world when she opened the piano," to James Baldwin's Sonny, who "moved in an atmosphere which wasn't like theirs at all," fictional musicians encounter trouble when negotiating the conflicting realms of art and society. Experts in one kind of expression, they fail in others. What draws these characters to music? What does it offer them? What is its value to us? In the musical novel and short story, we encounter music as an agent of violence, of consolation, of transcendence and redemption as well as damnation. We witness empathy through music, but we also learn that shared feeling can be both beautiful and dangerous, that music unites and divides. This course combines the close reading of literary texts (as well as works of literary theory and musicology) with the examination of the musical contexts that inform and inspire them. We will explore, for example, the relationship between Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Unconsoled and Richard Wagner's music drama Parsifal. We will talk about syncopation in "jazz" by Charles Mingus and Toni Morrison. We will watch Marguerite Duras and Katherine Mansfield turn innocuous music lessons into spaces of wretchedness. We will try to understand what David Mitchell's young composer Robert Frobisher means when he says, "One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner."

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Feeling inundated with media content? Worrying about cancel culture? Spending too much time succumbing to click bait? As it happens, our media mayhem is not that different from the “first mass-media moment,” when a variety of political and technological changes allowed for the democratization of knowledge and the expansion of print media. In this course, we will examine political cartoons, illustrated and serialized fiction, protest poetry, and journalistic inquiries into socio-political topics ranging from women’s identities within society to anxieties over new, seemingly instantaneous communication tools such as the telegraph. We will work with physical and digital archives to “read sideways” in popular periodicals such as Charles Dickens’ Household Words and the satirical Punch magazine. And like the Victorians themselves, we will read at least one novel in its original serialized form. Throughout the course, we will use the nineteenth century’s literature as a means for interrogating our own media anxieties. This course satisfies the 18th/19th-century British literature requirement for the major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Taught in English; there is an optional German component for those who want to have the course count toward their German-taught courses. In this case, students must do the reading and writing assignments and some of their oral presentations in German.What does the internationally (mis)used word "kafkaesque" actually mean? This course approaches Kafka's work both as a case for literary analysis and as one that offers insights into modernism. In one way or another, Kafka sheds light on massive industrialization, bureaucratization, the commodification of art, the destabilization of patriarchy, and the development of technology and media, as well as on the question: what is literature itself. In addition to a selection of Kafka's fiction, we shall read Crumb and Mairowitz's graphic version of Kafka's life and work, allowing students to produce their own graphic group project.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Please Note: This class includes a community-engaged project with a local community partner; students should plan to attend the first day of class and should be motivated to give back to their community through a substantial, ongoing set of projects linked to the class. A tiny island with a colossal impact on literature, Ireland has produced some of the greatest writers of all time. In this course, we will study the political history of Ireland as the backdrop for works by writers such as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Seamus Heaney, Claire Keegan, Sara Baume, Kit de Waal, Roddy Doyle, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill—among others. Students will explore the cultural impact of Irish literature in a range of contexts, from fairies and folklore to human rights and environmentalism. In addition to working on a weekly basis with a community partner, students will explore Irish culture through dance, theater, music, and reading. This course fulfills the WA and Internationalism gen-ed requirements.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
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 subculture 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 (knows 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 should be eager to develop as intrinsically-motivated learners this semester as we encounter a range of texts and films and engage in rigorous process-oriented writing and experiential learning. This course fulfills the WP and Internationalism gen-ed requirements.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Against the swirling backdrop of political discourses about women in the Islamic world, this course will engage with feminist and postcolonial debates through literary works by Muslim women writers. The course will begin with an exploration of key debates about women's agency and freedom, the Islamic headscarf, and Qur'anic hermeneutics. With this in mind, we will turn to the fine details of literature and poetry by Muslim women. How do these authors constitute their worlds? How are gendered subjectivities constructed? And how do the gender politics of literary texts relate to the broader political and historical contexts from which they emerge? Themes will include an introduction to Muslim poetesses and Arabic poetic genres, the rise of the novel in the Arabic speaking world, and Muslim women's literary production outside of the Middle East: from Senegal to South Asia, and beyond.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this survey course, we will trace an African American literary tradition from 1900 to the present. Our journey across this rich tradition will be guided by the concept of art we need now, in our current national context. Among the authors we will study are: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, John A. Williams, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, 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. It also fulfills the college’s WA and USID general education requirements.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

W.H. Auden famously wrote “poetry makes nothing happen,” but is that really true? What is the role of the poet in our increasingly polarized world, and what can (or should) a poem do? In this course, we’ll consider political poetry and the poetics of power: how poets past and present have engaged with, reimagined, or disrupted the language of empire. Readings will cover a wide range of poets and artists including Paul Celan, Mahmoud Darwish, M. NourbeSe Philip, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and June Jordan. As a class, we will explore the intersection of the personal and the political, and write poems of our own that engage with the wider social landscape in all of its wonders and wounds.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In many ways, we are living in a golden age of fantasy fiction. Not only is the notoriously white, Western Europe-centric genre growing rapidly more diverse than ever before, but it’s also being incorporated into the mainstream literary conversation in unprecedented ways. It’s truly a magical time to be reading and writing fantasy! In this class, we’ll situate the modern concept of fantasy fiction in a historical and cultural context, and we’ll explore and practice on a craft level all the things that make fantasy unique: magic systems, worldbuilding, supernatural creatures, etc. We’ll look at sub-genres including epic fantasy, young adult, magic realism, and fairy tale retellings, and read authors such as NK Jemisin, Susanna Clarke, and Tasha Suri. We’ll also welcome several established fantasy writers into the classroom to learn from them, and we may even play a little D&D… so come prepared to take fun seriously!

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

How have contemporary American writers engaged with the personal essay—a form committed to extended meditation, argument, and analysis—in order to respond to the last 150 years of American history and culture? In this creative writing class, we will consider how different American essayists have crafted work that evokes the form's etymological roots (to attempt, to weigh, to try, to test) while exploring complex questions of identity, memory, justice, place, and art. Through class discussion, the composition of our own personal essays, collaborative writing workshops, and a series of class visits from published essayists and editors we will explore how the personal essay's various architectures and modes of attention have been inflected by the complex interplay between socio-historical moment, literary tradition, and authorial intent. Readings will include essays by James Baldwin, Leslie Jamison, Mathew Salesses, E.B. White, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

General Education Requirements:

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. Course may be taken twice for credit.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Word for word, Emily Dickinson is one of the most powerful writers in the history of the English language. She is the King of All Media—appearing everywhere from novels and video games to prestige TV and pop culture myth. Barring Shakespeare, no other English or American poet has inspired such fervent and lasting devotion.In contemporary music, Taylor Swift is an equally unparalleled force—a songwriter whose work inspires a level of obsession, interpretation, and emotional investment rivaling Dickinson’s. Known for her fascination with Dickinson, Swift is also— in one of literary history’s most delightful surprises—her distant cousin.What’s behind the cults of Dickinson and Swift? In this class, you’ll find out. We’ll study their poems and songs—works that are aesthetically joyful and existentially wrenching. And we’ll study their legacies: how both have been mythologized, idolized, and contested, used to embody conflicting fantasies of gender, genius, privacy, power, and pain. To study Dickinson and Swift side by side is to trace some of the most revealing—and unresolved—ideological struggles in modern American life.Students will have the opportunity to write creative nonfiction, poetry, and songs. The course fulfills the 19th-century American literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will examine Japanese American history and literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present with an eye toward Japanese American activism and resistance. Balancing historical accounts and scholarly texts with poems, stories, and novels by Japanese American authors whose work offers a lens into the past, we will interrogate how Japanese Americans have been historically articulated as both enemy spies and a “model minority;” we will also explore the experiences of Japanese Americans in Hawai’i, U.S Imperialism in Asia, Japanese American solidarity with the Civil Rights Movement, and Japanese American organizing against Islamophobia. By pairing critical and creative texts, we will not only consider how Japanese Americans have been positioned within American racial discourse, but also the ways Japanese American activists and activist-writers have challenged and countered such imaginings with their work. We will supplement our class readings and discussions with field trips to Fort Snelling and the College archive in order to better understand the histories of Japanese Americans in Minnesota and even on the Macalester campus. It fulfills the English Department's writers of color requirement.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this research-based creative writing course, students will interpret and contribute to the collective memory of the Twin Cities, using their imagination to fill gaps, silences, and erasures in the archive. We will spend the semester building a digital anthology of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and visual art that memorializes vanished and vanishing places in the metro area. To inform our work, we’ll read about critical archiving, material culture, and digital memorialization, and study models from the arts: short stories, films, odes, lyric essays, collages and museum exhibits. We’ll also learn about the city itself through field trips to the Minnesota Historical Society and selected neighborhoods, focusing on suppressed and marginalized histories like the disappearance of Spirit Island, urban renewal in Cedar Riverside, and ongoing efforts to remember George Floyd. Authors and filmmakers will range from danez smith, Mary-Kim Arnold, Macalester’s own Morgan Adamson, and Guy Maddin. Ultimately, students will learn to engage with and curate archival materials, and create a multimedia creative writing piece for the final site. The course will culminate in a public launch of our digital project. No prerequisite–just an interest in researching for creative writing, making multimedia work, or uncovering the past of the place where you live.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, we will explore Afrofuturism, a flourishing and exciting contemporary movement of writers, artists, musicians, and scholars who imagine, represent, and theorize alternative times (often, but not always, the future) and forms of the human, along with outer spaces and other places wherein Black people are centered. We will explore the artistic, social, and political power of the movement as we closely read, listen to, and view key Afrofuturist texts. Those texts will include, among others: short stories by Samuel Delany, a novel by Octavia Butler, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer “emotion picture,” and Wangechi Mutu’s visual art. We will also read scholarship relevant to the movement, including queer theory and posthuman theory. Course requirements include: brief reading response papers, one expanded response paper, a presentation, and a final project. This course fulfills the English major requirement of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color. It also fulfills the colleges’ WA and USID general education requirements. It has a prerequisite of a 100-level English literature course.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What makes a good story? Your answer to that question may depend on where you're from, or when you were born, or the stories your grandmother heard when she was growing up. In this creative writing workshop course, we will explore narrative structures across a variety of time periods and cultures. Topics may include Aristotelian tragedy, Freytag's Pyramid, Edgar Allen Poe's single effect theory, the Hero's Journey, Kishōtenketsu or the four-act structure of Chinese fairy tales, the nested narratives of The Arabian Nights, non-linear approaches in Latin American fiction, and the place-driven emphasis of stories from Central Africa. Throughout, our goal as a class will be to expand our understanding of how stories can be told. By the end of the semester, every student will have written multiple drafts of two original works of short fiction. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

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:
Writing WC

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 prophesy (what W. E. B. Du Bois termed “second sight”) 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. It also fulfills the college’s USID and WA general education requirements.

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; counts for WA (Writing for Argument); counts for the Humanities.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What makes a good ghost story? And how are ghosts historically or culturally specific? This course opens with ghost stories from the heyday of the genre in English: specters and haunts from the pens of nineteenth-century masters, including the likes of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Emily Brontë. In short stories and novels, including Wuthering Heights, we will explore what terrifies and how. With these readings for a strong base, the second half of the course considers the legacies of these Victorians in more recent novels and short stories. We’ll think about how 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. Considering the relationships between modern ghost stories and the legacies of long-dead writers, we will investigate how narratives of what haunts us reveal things about ourselves or our cultural moments. Projects include writing workshops to develop analytic skills and creative opportunities with the development of an exhibit for a Ghost Museum. First-year-course.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will explore and develop the foundational skills of creative writing. We will hone our craft and build a respectful, collaborative writing community through a series of creative exercises, close reading assignments, and workshops.. Over the semester, we will read and discuss poems and stories from a diverse group of published authors, focusing on what we might learn from their approaches to the page, while asking how, among so many unique voices, we might cultivate our own. This course requires students to devote a significant amount of time outside of class to reading the course texts and writing our own work: creative writing is a way to discover more about ourselves and the world, but such discovery requires attention, contemplation, and practice. Readings will include writing by Jhumpa Lahiri, Ocean Vuong, Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Elizabeth Bishop, Yanyi, and others. This course fulfills the WC general education requirement and serves as a foundation course for the English Major or Minor.

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 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

Writing, whether in the form of a story, a poem, or a late-night email begging your professor for an extension, is always a creative act. Words arranged on a page create meaning, and in this class we will examine and practice certain authorial choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this through the lenses of poetry and fiction, reading widely and carefully with an eye to explore what choices the authors make, and to what end. Essentially, we will be asking over and over what makes a reader feel, experience, and understand. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel confident with your new toolbox of tricks n skills, and empowered in your creative work to a) Say what you mean to say, b) How you mean to say it, c) With the desired emotional impact.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing, whether in the form of a story, a poem, or a late-night email begging your professor for an extension, is always a creative act. Words arranged on a page create meaning, and in this class we will examine and practice certain authorial choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this through the lenses of poetry and fiction, reading widely and carefully with an eye to explore what choices the authors make, and to what end. Essentially, we will be asking over and over what makes a reader feel, experience, and understand. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel confident with your new toolbox of tricks n skills, and empowered in your creative work to a) Say what you mean to say, b) How you mean to say it, c) With the desired emotional impact.

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

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

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—from experiential to digital projects—that invite risk and discovery. With each, you’ll be asked not just what you want to create, but why it matters to you.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:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course serves as an introduction to medicine and literature. How have human health and medical practice been represented in literary texts? How does literature and the tools of literary analysis help us to better understand health, sickness, healing, and caring for ourselves and others? Readings will come from a variety of literary traditions, historical periods, and formal genres, including but not limited to classical myth, fairy tales, drama, poetry, short stories, novels, creative non-fiction, and graphic novels. These will be augmented by theoretical, historical, and bioethical texts. This course counts as a foundation course for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This survey provides an introduction to the masterpieces of medieval and early modern literature, from Beowulf to Paradise Lost. What is old, middle, and early modern English? How does lyric formally (and thematically) differ from epic and romance? When did drama acquire its characteristic structure? In addition to these poetic considerations, we will explore the key controversies that roiled pre-modern cultures pertaining to race, gender, and religion. Readings will highlight the imagination, poetics, and politics of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney Herbert, and John Milton. This course satisfies either the Medieval or Renaissance period requirement for the major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Since the invention of film, audiences have been fascinated by movie medievalisms, depictions of the Middle Ages that are usually romanticized. Audiences love escaping into these 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 this time period really as exciting, romantic, and dangerous as we imagine? In this class, we will dive into medieval movies and use actual historical sources to see how “accurate” the movies are. Expect to study films such as The Green Knight, The Name of the Rose, The Lion in Winter, and The Seventh Seal. In the end, we will find out what modern movies say not just about medieval societies, but about ourselves.This class fulfills the (1) Medieval period requirement for English major and (2) the WA requirement for the college.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this 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.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

The story goes like this. While performing Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus—a play featuring spell-casting, necromancy, and other devilish arts—the actors noticed that “there was one devil too many amongst them.” They stopped the play; the audience panicked. Whether a true story or not (the anecdote comes down to us through a seventeenth-century source), it captures one of the “certainties” of the period: that demons, devils, witches, and other things of darkness are a part of the here and now. In this course, we explore sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries tales of the demonic. At the same time, we examine how authors used the public’s fascination with the supernatural to explore the pressing issues of the day: religious controversies regarding freewill and election, political nightmares of state tyranny and oppression, and social crises surrounding the vanishing culture of hospitality and charity. Hence, just as characters strive to see beyond appearances and outward show, so we shall investigate the religious, political, and legal debates out of which the texts arise. Central to our study are the major works of early modern English literature such as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and lesser known texts such as The Witch of Edmonton, The Discovery of Witchcraft, and King James VI and I’s Daemonologie. No prior knowledge of conjuring is presumed or required.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A parliament of birds. A woman made of flowers. The universe as a giant egg. These are just a few of the fascinating concepts we’ll cover in this course as we explore how medieval thinkers blended science and legend in their understanding of the natural world. Before the Scientific Revolution, people sought to understand how the human body and mind were connected to the non-human world. They asked questions like: How did circuits of the planets affect the human circulatory system? What plants caused death, and which plants could prevent it? Do animals have a language? People answered these questions by drawing on observation, Biblical tradition, Greek and Roman writing, Celtic mythology, and folklore. Contrary to popular belief, medieval scientists believed that Nature was mathematically perfect and beautiful. Of course, it was also mysterious and often frightening. By tracing literary and scientific discourses of nature in the Latin West, we will learn more about the human need to understand and fit into our larger non-human world.This class fulfills the medieval period requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an introduction to the interdiscipline of literature and human rights. We will read a series of beautiful and emotionally wrenching novels, treating them simultaneously as aesthetic artifacts and case studies in human rights. We will discuss the urgent political questions and philosophical paradoxes that define human rights, paying special attention to theories of trauma and torture. We will seek to better understand how spectators of suffering develop—or fail to develop—empathy for strangers by also examining how they can so palpably feel for the dreams, desires, and dignity of fictional persons.This course fills the US Identities and Differences requirement and the framework requirement for the Human Rights and Humanitarianism concentration.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

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-Barnett. Organizing themes of the course will include: reading and writing as subversive acts and African American literature as an agent of political and social change. We will also connect current crises surrounding non-white U.S. citizenship to early African American writers’ recurrent representation of Black people’s exclusion from “inalienable rights.” At the same time, we will 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. It also fulfills the college’s USID and WA general education requirements.

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!

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing screenplays, building on the work done in ENGL 120. The emphasis will be on narrative films, with the objective of writing a feature-length screenplay during the semester. There will be extensive readings and discussion of published and unpublished screenplays in addition to regular writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. 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. Course may be taken twice for credit.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This class, more than anything, is one that demands curiosity. We will start with some sensational 1860s fiction, read a little Victorian race theory, and dip into everything from cookbooks and photography to corsets and children-as-chimney-sweeps. This course will not cover all there is to know about the British empire in the nineteenth century. Instead, it will give you a taste of key issues (technology, labor, gender- and race-based hierarchies, colonial power) and invite you to find questions about which you want to learn more. Through discussion, you will choose a topic focused on 19th-century British culture and then spend the bulk of the semester on deep research—working with databases, archives, and the internet to learn to search smarter. You will come away with research skills such as asking better questions, following leads in multiple directions, balancing primary and secondary materials, and, ultimately finding the arc of a narrative through all that material. This class aims to foster modes of thinking that can help you uncover information that turns a historical “oddity” into a story—an essential skill for anyone who imagines applying humanities training in contexts beyond the classroom. Your findings will yield three projects: a plan for an academic paper, a piece of public writing aimed at a mainstream audience, and a five-minute episode—which you will both write and produce—that will air as part of the class podcast. In each mode, we will talk about essential skills of the genre, including how to pitch public writing and what it means to write for listeners. By the end of the semester, you will have developed archival research skills, the ability to synthesize material in very different ways for different audiences, and a sense of how to get from “look at all this cool stuff I found” to a compelling narrative with a clear point that will keep an audience riveted. Course satisfies 18th-19th century British lit requirement on the major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this hybrid creative writing and literature course, we will explore 20 of the most influential poems written in English during the last century, including work by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, H.D., Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Li-Young Lee. We will consider the way these poems bear witness to the century’s historical tumults and social transformations as well as how contemporary poets have responded—admiringly, critically—to these touchstones of verse. Class assignments will include the opportunity to write poems in imitation of those we’ve read (to immerse ourselves in their grammars of image, line, and metaphor); poetic scavenger hunts; brief, informal presentations; and a final creative or scholarly project. This course will fulfill the writers of color requirement for the English major. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

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

This capstone course invites students to design and execute original research projects that shine new light on a vital question: how does writing make meaning in our world? Through deep engagement with a specific research question, students will develop an original research project that reflects their deepest aesthetic interests and ethical commitments. In gaining deep expertise in a chosen field, students will become advocates for their own research agendas.In Unit 1, students will experiment with their favorite primary sources (texts, films, multimodal pieces) using diverse methodologies of their choice (such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, queer and trans studies, historicism, film studies, critical race theory, disability studies, cultural studies, and ecocriticism). In Unit 2, students will hone their own methodologies and select a broader critical conversation to join. In Unit 3, students will combine, augment, and revise their earlier writing to complete an article-length senior thesis that uses critical, and optionally creative, methods to make an interpretive argument. Finally, students will deliver a department-wide presentation at the end of the semester, demonstrating expertise in their own chosen field of research.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This capstone course has two fundamental goals. One: To help students work individually on a substantial creative project of their own choosing. Our second, equally important goal, is to work collectively to build a mutually supportive arts community dedicated to helping everyone achieve their best work.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials