Class Schedules

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, Celeste Ng, Chang-Rae Lee, 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

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this discussion-based first-year course, we will study how literature represents extreme human experiences, both joyful and miserable. As we closely read a wide range of works, we will ask ourselves aesthetic and ethical questions: Must literary form stretch to represent the extreme? Must artists, musicians, and writers invent new forms when faced with unprecedented traumas, including pandemic and climate change? How might literature help us to understand the end of a world, or a people, or a way of life? Might literature also help us imagine a future in these seemingly apocalyptic times? How might it offer us understanding and solace, even joy, in the present? We will read primarily fiction, along with poetry, nonfiction and a graphic narrative, to investigate whether other genres and modes work differently at, and with, the extreme. We will also view films and listen to music to discover whether other media may offer alternative, and possibly better, ways to represent ecstasy and apocalypse. Texts, among others, may include: A Handmaid’s Tale, MAUS, Life on Mars, Parable of the Talents, The Book of Delights, and Silent Spring.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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 writing community through a series of creative exercises, close reading assignments, and workshops, where we will have the opportunity to share and receive feedback on our own drafts. Over the semester, we will read and discuss poems, stories, and creative nonfiction 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.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing, 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 mainly 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 course is an introduction to the writing of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We will use a variety of exercises, assignments, and readings to help students become comfortable as writers of short stories, personal essays, poetry, memoir, and literary journalism. We will workshop each other’s writing in a supportive, constructively critical manner.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This 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

J.R.R. Tolkien had a “secret vice”: creating imaginary languages based on medieval languages. Come learn how Tolkien drew on the Welsh language and medieval Welsh literature to craft the world of Middle-Earth and the language of the Elves. As we read our way through medieval Wales, we will encounter sorcerer-bards, goddesses, magical treasures, and mysterious creatures (who are rarely what they seem). Studying the basics of the Welsh language will allow us to be enchanted by the strange and poignant stories of the Mabinogion, the Book of Taliesin, and the Book of Aneirin. By the end of the course, we will see why Tolkien believed Welsh to be one of the most beautiful languages in the world.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

To the average reader, the field of publishing can seem somewhat opaque. How does a novel go from scribbled notes to finished paperback? What goes into editing, printing, and marketing a short story collection? This course will shed light on this exciting field through a combination of readings, talks with publishing professionals, in-class discussion, and hands-on work. We will learn about publishing by tracing the literary work through the processes of acquisition, editing, production, marketing, and publicity, and into the hands of the reader. Additional topics will include recent trends in technology, book editing, book reviewing, and the roles of the literary agent, and the independent publisher. We will take advantage of the extraordinary publishing resources in the Twin Cities and beyond through guest speakers. Assignments will include writing query letters and catalog copy, presenting publisher profiles, editing a short story, and writing a final paper on publishing issues. This course is designed for readers who want to know how the book they’re holding got into their hands, for writers who want to know what happens when they send their manuscripts to publishers, and for those interested in publishing as a future career.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will study African American literature from the end of the 18th century to the turn of the 20th century, from Phillis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells. Themes of the course include: reading and writing as subversive acts, representation of gendered and classed experiences of Blackness, and literary production and innovation as agents of political and social change. We will also connect the crises surrounding Black citizenship in the United States, so often represented by African American writers before 1900, to the present, honoring these early writers’ ongoing legacy of national critique and Black solidarity. We will also foreground early African American literature as art, as an at once aesthetic and political project, 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

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This creative nonfiction course will focus on the elements of long-form narrative journalism, including both print and audio storytelling. Students will learn to write stories that are clear and compelling as well as factual and precise. They will study the differences between writing for the eye and the ear. Students will learn how to identify strong story ideas, conduct interviews and structure a narrative for maximum impact. They will also write frequently, edit each other, and receive detailed suggestions on their writing from the instructor. This course will be taught by audio journalist and Macalester alumnus Curtis Gilbert ’02. Curtis works for APM Reports, a national investigative reporting group based at American Public Media. He recently led a year-long collaboration between three news organizations that resulted in the seven-part podcast series Sent Away.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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. Fill out the interest survey to request permission: https://forms.gle/GH8YAJZ4hhkJqLe28. Prerequisite: COMP127 (COMP225 recommended)

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Where do our memories reside? Our collective memories, our shattered memories, our forgotten? How do we gather that which has been torn or forcefully buried? How do we hold memory or its absence in our language? This advanced poetry course will center on the movements of memory—how it haunts, fades, blurs, comforts, distorts; how it reaches for us, and how we reach back. We will read both prose (memoir and fiction) as well as poetry in order to write towards all that we can and cannot remember.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

A great detective story is arguably one of the most interactive of genres, as it pulls on the reader to step into the world of the mystery and try to solve it alongside the investigators who people the pages. This course traces evolutions in the genre, from 19th-century icons like Sherlock Holmes through early-20th-century hardboiled detectives and into very contemporary fiction. We’ll consider professional and amateur detectives, read authors as wide-ranging as Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Colson Whitehead, watch at least two films (including 1934’s The Thin Man, featuring the delightful Nick and Nora Charles), and read one novel in serial installments all semester long. We will explore how detective characters are rooted in the cultural moments of their creation, what kinds of fans different detectives produce, and read some short pieces about the genre by some its greatest writers. The course will emphasize the pleasures of reading (Cliffhangers! Clues! Misdirection!) and what we can learn from thinking hard about what is so satisfying about a great mystery, adeptly solved. Coursework will be wide-ranging and playful, and may include creative as well as critical assignments, or research filtered through the lens of detection.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Go into almost any bookstore and you’ll find a similar method of organizing books: by genre. Rows of romance novels in one corner, thick tomes of fantasy and science fiction in another, young adult fiction over by the children’s books. But how do booksellers, librarians, readers and writers determine what genre a piece of fiction falls into? In this class, we will read novels and short stories in five popular genres – literary realism, fantasy, science fiction, mystery/crime, and romance – while trying our own writerly hands at each of them. We’ll discuss expectations of culture, market, and readership, and journey through the histories and political implications of each category to understand the present state. Writers we study might include Toni Morrison, J.R.R. Tolkien, Octavia Butler, Miciah Johnson and more. Prerequisite of ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, we'll be reading poetry collections that navigate unexpected worlds--one in an imagined future where humanity has been taken over by octopuses, another in an imagined occupied territory where deafness is a form of dissent. Throughout the semester, we will be creating our own long-form poetry projects. We will borrow the tools of fiction, world-building, and playwriting in order to develop our own poems. This class is for writers hoping to bend the expectations of genre and create something altogether new. Prerequisite of ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Centuries before the advent of industrialized travel, the Silk Roads connected creators and consumers between China, West Africa, and Iceland. Travelers recorded their experiences and encounters in a range of literary forms and left their legacies imprinted in archaeological records. This course invites students to read along the Silk Roads, tracing medieval encounters made possible by these remarkable networks. Texts may include the Ibn Fadlan’s account of his encounter with the Rus, the Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels in Africa, Wu Cheng’en’s novel Journey to the West, Du Fu’s lyric poetry, Basho’s haiku, Marco Polo’s Description of the World, William of Rubruck’s Itinerary, John de Mandeville’s Travels, and the Saga of the Greenlanders. In addition, the class will incorporate studies of material culture, include local collections and artifacts of the exhibits Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads (Aga Khan Museum), Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa, (Aga Khan Museum), and Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shoes of the Sahara (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In times of revolution and repression, Soviet writers and artists turned their work into a forceful means of resistance; dissidents today draw inspiration from these courageous predecessors who risked their lives to speak. In this course, we will explore the literature, visual art, music, and films created in Russia and the surrounding region from the Soviet period into the present day. We start with the political and artistic revolutions in the final days of imperial Russia, then move through the eras of the bloody Bolshevik revolution, the repressive Stalinist regime, and the devastation of World War II. Next, we look at the cultural thaw of the 1960s, the new freedoms of the perestroika era, and the fall of the Soviet Union. We then turn our attention to contemporary Russia under Putin. We will examine cultural texts in their artistic, social, and political contexts, seeking to better understand Russia’s relationship with the West, the experience of ethnic minorities in the Soviet and post-Soviet period, and Russia’s history of authoritarianism, as well as the struggle against it. Studying culture produced in Russia and the region in the Soviet and post-Soviet period will help us to empathize with those who lived through that tumultuous era and kept creative expression alive in the midst of unimaginable hardships. We will also be attentive to the contemporary situation in the wake of Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which has changed global dynamics so profoundly. We will use our course materials to shed light on current events in the post-Soviet sphere, striving to understand how we got here and what hope there might be for the future. This course will include a group project with the aim of supporting refugees displaced by Russia’s war on Ukraine. All readings and discussion will be in English; no previous knowledge of Russian literature or history is required.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A great detective story is arguably one of the most interactive of genres, as it pulls on the reader to step into the world of the mystery and try to solve it alongside the investigators who people the pages. This course traces evolutions in the genre, from 19th-century icons like Sherlock Holmes through early-20th-century hardboiled detectives and into very contemporary fiction. We’ll consider professional and amateur detectives, read authors as wide-ranging as Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Colson Whitehead, watch at least two films (including 1934’s The Thin Man, featuring the delightful Nick and Nora Charles), and read one novel in serial installments all semester long. We will explore how detective characters are rooted in the cultural moments of their creation, what kinds of fans different detectives produce, and read some short pieces about the genre by some its greatest writers. The course will emphasize the pleasures of reading (Cliffhangers! Clues! Misdirection!) and what we can learn from thinking hard about what is so satisfying about a great mystery, adeptly solved. Coursework will be wide-ranging and playful, and may include creative as well as critical assignments, or research filtered through the lens of detection.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

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. 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.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

It is perhaps easiest to think of race in the nineteenth century in terms of the colonizing projects of empire. In fact, however, leisure travel, the growth of industrial capitalism and globalization, and new models of class hierarchies and notions of gender all gained strength in the nineteenth century in part through their intersections with rhetorics of race. This course will interrogate notions of race as they were being invented—exploring how they were popularized and used to dominate, how they failed, and how they were resisted in 19th-century Britain. We will read canonical and non-canonical texts, including works by writers of color, visual images, scientific theories, fiction, and non-fiction. Considering locations throughout the British empire, we will explore intersections of race with the history of British slavery, colonial settlement, gender politics, enfranchisement, war, and religion. The class will also produce a collaborative digital final project: a full scholarly edition—including appendices, annotations, and a scholarly introduction—of a nineteenth-century text by a writer of color, to be chosen by the class. (Prior years have taken on the first novel by a Bengali novelist to be written in English and a travel narrative by a Hindu Brahmin touring through England and France.) Course may count for the 18th & 19th century British literature requirement or the Writers of Color requirement on the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Language is magic: we can make noises at each other or make marks on a page and others can “see” what’s inside our minds! Language is even more magical when we consider its ability to do things: it can change people’s status (e.g. declaring someone a knight or husband/wife), harm others (e.g. using slurs), and turn literal falsehood into truths (e.g. metaphors or fiction) among others. In this class, you’ll be introduced to classic and contemporary topics surrounding language: how it is that words refer to objects, how context shapes meaning, how language and reality/thought are connected, and whether emoji and music are languages.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This capstone course has two fundamental goals. One: To help students work individually on a creative project of their own choosing, from the cultivation of an initial idea, to the further exploration of that idea through multiple drafts, and then finally to sending it out into the world as a “completed” project, which is to say a project that is “good enough for now.” Our second, equally important goal, is to work collectively to build a mutually supportive arts community dedicated to helping everyone achieve their best work.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course focuses on traditionally underrepresented or marginalized American literatures. Readings may cover a wide range of genres, such as novels, poetry, creative nonfiction, plays, and graphic narratives, in order to explore various identities and differences within a national context. The course will also provide an introduction to the methods of literary study, including close reading and literary analysis, both oral and written. Authors and texts assigned will vary by section and instructor. May be repeated once, with different subtitle.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

An introduction to the study of an African American literary tradition. The focus or themes of the course, as well as authors and texts, will vary by semester and instructor, but all sections will emphasize the tradition's major genres, such as slave narratives and slam poetry, and its major movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism. The course will also provide instruction in the methods of literary analysis, including reading closely and writing text-based argument. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on the registrar's web page for the content of individual sections.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This introduction to the study of the novel pays special attention to the genre's history and to the cultural and political significance of individual texts. Authors and texts will vary according to instructor, but all sections will consider the development of the novel across time, include a range of author identities and styles, and provide instruction in intensive close reading and literary analysis. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on its web page for the content of individual courses and sections.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What is Old, Middle, and early modern English? Why do these differentiations matter to the craft of writing in Britain? How were premodern authors shaped by their own societies, and how have influential writers created social change? This course explores how major writers in Britain have used literary language to conceptualize the self against larger social and political phenomena. Starting with the career of Abbess Hilda, the mother of English literature, and ending with the career of Queen Elizabeth, the patron of Shakespeare, we will trace major developments in British literature. Along the way, we will focus on how women affected the arc of British literary history. Authors may include Bede, the Beowulf-poet, Marie de France, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Shakespeare, and Mary Sidney Herbert.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A course studying the ways that literary writing develops thought and feeling about nature and our part in it. In a particular term, the course might address, for example, nature poetry from Milton to Frost; literature and the agrarian; gendered representations of nature; literary figures of relationship among humans and other kinds; nature, reason, and the passions; literatures of matter and of life; time, flux, and change in literary and science writing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will trace the development of an African American literary and cultural tradition from the turn of the century to the present, from writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins to Walter Mosley and Toni Morrison. It will examine the ways that modern and contemporary African American writers and artists have explored political, social, racial, and aesthetic issues in a variety of genres-including autobiographies, poetry, novels, blues songs, photographs, short stories, plays essays, film, visual art, and literary and cultural criticism. Among the many topics the course will consider are: the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the Black Arts Movement, and the current flourishing of African American arts and letters and cinema.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing poetry, building on the work done in ENGL 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, writing from models (traditional and contemporary), formal exercises (using both traditional and contemporary forms), or working with the poetry sequence (or other methodology selected by the instructor: see department postings for details). It will involve extensive readings and discussion of poetry in addition to regular poetry writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This advanced workshop course focuses in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing creative nonfiction, building on the work done in ENGL 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, translating lived experience into the personal essay, or developing narrative journalism, the lyric essay, or a variety of other forms. It will involve extensive readings and discussion of nonfiction in addition to regular nonfiction 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:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The GOAT. Word for word, Emily Dickinson is the most powerful writer in the history of the English language. She is the King of All Media, the feature star in movies, television, radio, lawsuits, museums, and just about every other possible platform of public fascination. Barring Shakespeare, no other English or American poet has been the focus of such fervid public devotion. What’s behind this cult of Dickinson? In our class you will find out. You will study Dickinson’s poems, which are wittily fun, hair-raisingly creepy, romantically uplifting, existentially terrifying, philosophically ingenious, and aesthetically unparalleled. You will also study Dickinson herself. Transformed into a mythical figure since her death in 1886, she has been used as a symbol to embody a range of bitterly conflicting cultural fantasies. To understand the history of Emily Dickinson is to understand some of the most painful—and liberating—ideological revolutions in modern US history. Also, we will write and workshop our own poems. This course fulfills the 19th C American literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Centuries before the advent of industrialized travel, the Silk Roads connected creators and consumers between China, West Africa, and Iceland. Travelers recorded their experiences and encounters in a range of literary forms and left their legacies imprinted in archaeological records. This course invites students to read along the Silk Roads, tracing medieval encounters made possible by these remarkable networks. Texts may include the Ibn Fadlan’s account of his encounter with the Rus, the Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels in Africa, Wu Cheng’en’s novel Journey to the West, Du Fu’s lyric poetry, Basho’s haiku, Marco Polo’s Description of the World, William of Rubruck’s Itinerary, John de Mandeville’s Travels, and the Saga of the Greenlanders. In addition, the class will incorporate studies of material culture, include local collections and artifacts of the exhibits Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads (Aga Khan Museum), Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa, (Aga Khan Museum), and Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shoes of the Sahara (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An advanced course on the novel, considering developments in the form including realism, sensationalism, the domestic novel, the adventure romance, the detective tale, the marriage plot, the social problem novel, and the gothic. Questions of genre and form will be considered, as well as the social and political circumstances that individual novels address: the expansion of empire, codification of gender ideology, hierarchies of power, relationship of humans to the environment, global politics, religious crises, family structures, labor markets, and technologies of travel and communication. Novelists may include Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, and Oscar Wilde. Secondary readings include literary scholarship and additional nineteenth-century documents for cultural contexts, including works by more marginalized voices. Particular themes vary. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will explore African American cultural production and, depending on the instructor, may focus on a particular genre (e.g. novels, short stories, drama, poetry, detective fiction, speculative fiction), or a particular theme (e.g. The Protest Tradition, Black Feminist Writings), or on a particular period (e.g. the 1820s-1860s, the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s), or on a particular author or authors (e.g. Douglass, Du Bois, Baldwin, Wideman, Morrison, Parks). Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course-a mixture of lecture, discussion, study of dramatic texts, writing exercises and in-class analysis of student writing-is intended to reinforce and build upon the skills developed in Playwriting. Topics will include dramatic structure, conflict, characterization, language/dialogue, as well as how to analyze your own work, give and receive feedback and techniques for rewriting. Students will engage in a rigorous development process which will culminate in the writing of a one act play. Prerequisite(s): THDA 242 or ENGL 150, or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This capstone course for the Literature Path is the culminating academic experience of the major. The course consists of three interlocking objectives. The first goal is to provide students with the opportunity to develop an original research project that reflects their deepest aesthetic interests and ethical commitments. Working closely with a faculty member and a small group of peers, students will develop projects that display rigorous literary scholarship and methodological inventiveness. The second goal is to provide instruction in advanced methods of research by studying influential critical approaches from the early twentieth century to the present. Specific theories and methods will be determined in consultation with the instructor. Past courses have emphasized psychoanalysis, post-Marxist criticism, gender, queer, and feminist theory, phenomenology, critical race theory, black feminist theory, post-colonial criticism, poetics, law and human rights, and aesthetics. The final goal is to train students to become advocates of their research agenda. Students will learn to lecture and lead discussion on relevant readings and to share their research with the wider intellectual community in a form that reflects the spirit of the project. Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s (excluding 101 or 150), plus one literature course at the 200- or 300- level. Capstone courses are intended to be a culminating experience for the major. Students without Senior status will need instructor permission to enroll.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials