Class Schedules

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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:

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:

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