Class Schedules

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:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this fully remote 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 national critique, solidarity, and joy will focus our study. Our study will also be shaped by current contexts of protest and pandemic. Authors will include: David Walker, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Claudia Rankine, among others. Requirements include: participation in Zoom and/or Moodle-based discussion and other online activities, weekly written responses to the readings, one medium length essay, and a final project that will include a written component. This course fulfills either the foundation course in literature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major. It also fulfills the college’s USID and WA general education requirements.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course looks at novels from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, exploring how society has labeled and judged transgression. We will consider the following questions: how and why have notions of instability and “madness” been socially determined? What kind of anger is perceived as dangerous, and how have these constructs specifically been built upon gendered and racial ideologies? Course texts may include Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will closely read and imaginatively respond to a variety of poems, short stories, and personal essays in order to develop our own toolbox of writerly techniques. We will discuss writing from authors, both historical and contemporary, including Elizabeth Bishop, Eduardo C. Corral, Jhumpa Lahiri, John Donne, Su Hwang, Emily Dickinson, Z.Z. Packer, and Stephanie Vaughn, with a focus on what we can learn from both the craft and content of their work. We will also consider literature—its creation and reception—as a series of ongoing conversations in order to discern where, among so many voices, we might cultivate our own. Over the course of the semester, we will collaboratively construct a respectful writing community, where we will discuss, produce, and revise creative work with feedback from our peers. This course is a prerequisite for further creative writing courses 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. You will be asked to read and discuss work by major writers, to critique each other’s work, and to write multiple drafts of original works of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout the semester our focus will be on helping you to discover and nurture your creative voice, and then express that voice with force and conviction. Please note that this course must be completed as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing, whether in the form of a story, a poem, or a late-night email begging your professor for an extension, is always a creative act. Words arranged on a page create meaning, and in this class we will examine and practice the choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this mainly through the lens of poetry and fiction, writing and critiquing our own poems and stories and reading work by a wide range of writers including Ada Limón, Agha Shahid Ali, George Saunders, Carmen Maria Machado, and even JK Rowling. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel empowered in your creative work to a) Say what you mean to say, b) How you mean to say it, c) With the desired emotional impact.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing, 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 the choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this mainly through the lens of poetry and fiction, writing and critiquing our own poems and stories and reading work by a wide range of writers including Ada Limón, Agha Shahid Ali, George Saunders, and Carmen Maria Machado. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel 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 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 consequences of revenge, the elusiveness of confession and testimony, and the classic conflict between justice and law? Readings will come from a variety of literary traditions and periods: fairy tales, early modern drama, contemporary film, and literary and legal theory. This course counts as a foundation course for the English major. This course counts for the Legal Studies Concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Geologists tell us that we have entered a new epoch called the Anthropocene, when humans have fundamentally reshaped the planet in ways that put the future of life at risk. This course will consider questions like: When did the Anthropocene begin? Who has the power to define an epoch? How have we represented environmental disasters in the past and present? What are the stories we tell ourselves about human’s relationship to the Earth? Where do we find hope for our futures? A timely look at the concept of “The Anthropocene” provides us with special opportunities for self-reflection, debate and expression. Our fiction and non-fiction readings, film screenings and experiential learning will help us answer if there could be such a thing as a “good” Anthropocene rather than simply an apocalyptic one. We will develop our writing and research skills working on collaborative projects with the Twin Cities as our backdrop. This interdisciplinary course is being co-taught by faculty from three different departments: Andrea Kaston Tange (English), John Kim (Media and Cultural Studies) and Roopali Phadke (Environmental Studies). Students can select which section to join, but all sections will cover the same material and meet at the same time. Students will spend time in their individual section, have opportunities to work with the other two professors, occasionally meet up in one large group that includes all three sections, and take local and regional field trips together.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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

This course combines study of the contemporary global novel with considerations of the natural world—an approach known as “ecocriticism” in literary studies. While students will be introduced to ecocriticism, you will be encouraged to draw on your own interests and experiences with the natural world, in addition to trans-disciplinary approaches from natural history, biology, environmental studies, medicine, environmental psychology, and anthropology. In reading novels by contemporary writers, our class will examine a wide range of responses to the politics of place and the role of climate change, industrialization, and borders. We will also examine how nature takes metaphorical shape in literature, working as a group to understand how fiction draws on the environment to express complex human emotions and interconnections with the non-human world. This course fulfills the Writers of Color requirement on the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

As the US tottered on the brink of its bloody Civil War, a small group of strange and visionary artists started a revolution. During the span of just five years, in one of history's most astonishing creative convergences, the most elegant, profane, unhinged, heart-wrenching, and  influential works of US literature were published. Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and Jacobs - together these artists produced a canon of literature that revealed both the demons and angels of our histories and futures. They invented a spiritual movement of unprecedented optimism at the same time that they despaired over what they had become. Everything that was written in the US afterwards would have to come to terms with the brilliant and disturbing achievements of this cluster of outsiders, mystics, and heroes. In this course we will read the landmark texts of this era from literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is designed to explore the art and craft of dramatic writing. Students will complete weekly reading assignments and exercises that will culminate in the writing of a one-act play. Students will engage in a rigorous development process which will include in-class feedback sessions and script revision. The ultimate goal over the course semester is for each student to develop a consistent, challenging and rewarding individual creative writing practice.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this creative writing workshop course, students will write an original short story in prose and then re-vision that work first as a comic book and then as a short film. No technical skills required! We’re trying new things here, experimenting with different media to discover the ways in which form affects content and vice-versa. Let this Andy Warhol quote be your guide: “Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art."

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this creative writing workshop course, students will write an original short story in prose and then re-vision that work first as a comic book and then as a short film. No technical skills required! We’re trying new things here, experimenting with different media to discover the ways in which form affects content and vice-versa. Let this Andy Warhol quote be your guide: “Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art."

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

All your writing for the past three years has led you to this point. But what did you get instead? A plague torpedoing your momentum, erasing class as you know it, and forcing you to adopt new ways to learn. So, let’s write our way through it. The Original Decameron, written in the 14th-century by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio was itself a response to great plague. The SparkNotes version: The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio himself, probably conceived the thing after the epidemic of 1348. So, for the Fiction capstone you will be writing stories (several stories) but they will all contribute to one publication, a class Decameron (that we might even publish!). Yes, as with the original Decameron we will hew close to several themes, and yes in the end the stories should work together, even loosely, but the main goal is to take what you have learned over the past few years, and push yourselves out of the boundaries of fiction, out of genre, out of your own taboos, even out of what we’ve come to accept as literature. Along with these stories you will encouraged to submit verses, illustrations, photos, doodles, and journal entries to let us know where and how you are as you write. You have written the short story, several flash fictions, or maybe taken a stab at the novella. Now is the time to cap your literary life on a big note, and go for something that adds up to something larger. This is an Advanced Writers Workshop, which means all the time will be spent writing and reading as writers. We will present new and revised work, critique and encourage, and more than anything else work towards that moment where all that’s left to write is THE END. Prerequisites: 1. Candidate must be a rising senior and/or has completed all coursework 2. Permission of the instructor PS: It goes without saying that you should read the actual Decameron. I also highly recommend Pasolini’s film version.

General Education Requirements:

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 the choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this mainly through the lens of poetry and fiction, writing and critiquing our own poems and stories and reading work by a wide range of writers including Ada Limón, Agha Shahid Ali, George Saunders, and Carmen Maria Machado. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel empowered in your creative work to a) Say what you mean to say, b) How you mean to say it, c) With the desired emotional impact.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

A study of literature's place within cultural conversations in the period, emphasizing the diversity of forms circulating alongside the novel, such as poetry, autobiography, drama, political writing, and print journalism. Themes and issues vary by section but may include empire, class and economics, gender norms, politics and reform, education, science, nature, religion, or travel. All sections consider the work of a wide array of authors-from canonical writers such as the Brontes, Mill, Eliot, Dickens, Darwin, the Rossettis, Tennyson, or Wilde to more experimental authors, the voices of colonized subjects, essayists, and visual artists. Articles from widely-circulating nineteenth-century periodicals, in conjunction with current literary theory and criticism provide frameworks for intensive reading and writing about literary texts.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this fully remote course, we will trace an African American literary tradition from 1900 to the present. We will read a range of genres, including drama, poetry, nonfiction and fiction. Our study of this rich tradition will be organized by three themes: second sight, jazz, and Audre Lorde’s famous concept that “poetry is not a luxury.” Our study will also be informed by activisms past and present and by current contexts of pandemic and protest. Among the authors we will study are: W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, N. K. Jemisin and Ross Gay. Requirements include: participation in Zoom and/or Moodle-based discussion and other online activities, brief written responses to the readings, one expanded response, a medium-length essay, and a final reflection. 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 USID and WA general education requirements.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will study poems and criticism in order to further develop our own approaches to reading and writing—practices that we will conceptualize as conversations with other authors and the page. Accordingly, we will converse with a wide range of writers from the past and present, including Natalie Diaz, John Clare, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, Terrance Hayes, Adrienne Rich, Christopher Smart, Cathy Park Hong, and Seamus Heaney. We will explore the formal qualities and cultural exigencies that define some of the diverse poetries under the umbrella of English language verse, moving from blank verse and sonnets to vers libre and procedural poetics as a means of expanding and deepening our techne. Over the course of the semester, we will collaboratively construct a respectful writing community, where we will discuss, produce, and revise creative work with feedback from our peers.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

“Human nature hasn’t changed in 1000 years,” Margaret Atwood once said. “Just check the myths.” And from myths come monsters. And demons. And witches, knights, shapeshifters, magic and curses, as well as lands that take up an entire universe (yet curiously missing people of colour), as well as cities that boast the kind of wonders that make us wish it was reality. Then there is the speculative fiction that might still become fact, whether it’s Handmaid’s Tale predicting the erasure of rights for women, or The Last Man examining who is left after a worldwide plague. Fantasy is of course just making stuff up, but it is also a world where the different, the other, the queer, the marginalized can become the star. Fantasy doesn’t even have to be a (tired) medieval rewrite—after all, those vampires and werewolves running around in skinny jeans, and playing in alt rock bands are fantasy too. This is what you will be doing next semester: writing Fiction about things that go bump in the night. Worlds totally foreign yet absolutely familiar. People with powers. Myths, epics, folktales, legends, monsters, and magic. Or maybe just how surreal it is going to class in the midst of a pandemic. In an age where the incredible is now the matter of fact, the one thing you will not be running out of, are stories. In this class, the “ending” is just the beginning of where your imagination will take you. Prerequisite: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing) taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing screenplays, building on the work done in ENGL 120. The emphasis will be on narrative films, with the objective of writing a feature-length screenplay during the semester. There will be extensive readings and discussion of published and unpublished screenplays in addition to regular writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Oral history — personal memories shared via interview and spliced with other points of view — is a unique, dialogic form used in both fiction and non-fiction to create a Rashomon effect surrounding a set of events, a place, an institution or a person/group. In this hybrid literature and creative writing course, we will be reading extensively from a large sampling of books and articles that effectively use the oral history form — subjects include the making of Angels in America, Edie Sedgwick, the American Basketball League, a fictional rock band, and more! — in order to compose our own oral histories about or based on real people, places, and events. Think of people's stories as instruments of the orchestra and we, the conductors of the symphony. Whether that symphony is about Covid-19, George Floyd, the tenants on your block, the Macalester football team or your hometown's idiosyncratic tradition is up to each of us to discern, and to learn about through generous and attentive listening and/or research. Students will complete this project-based course with a 30 page fictional or nonfictional oral history and a sophisticated understanding of the genre's canonical texts and common tropes. This course can count as a Crafts class on the Creative Writing path of the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Virtual reality (VR) for gaming and entertainment has exploded in popular culture. VR engages the senses (visual, auditory, and haptic) in revolutionary ways, allowing users to immerse themselves in new worlds, to become rather than play a character. As a result, VR has quickly emerged at the front edge of experimentation in storytelling and narrative design. It has also become one of the most creative popular-cultural sites for experimenting with understanding other minds and identities. Cross-listed between Computer Science and English, this course is an introduction to the challenge of building immersive virtual reality (VR) games through the lens of narrative and storytelling. 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. Permission of the instructor is required to register. Fill out the interest survey to request permission: https://forms.gle/kFHKzy518zAhJZzHA

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In Shakespeare’s England, whipping, branding, mutilation (of the hand, nose, ears, or face), pillorying, hanging, burning, and beheading were common forms of legal punishment. The rigors of early modern law may seem strange or “barbaric” to us, yet we may recognize the intentions behind the laws: to restore order, to keep the peace, and to stabilize social relations. To grasp what justice meant to the early moderns and, in turn, what it means to us today, we will examine some of Shakespeare’s most challenging plays through the lens of legal and political philosophy. Plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Othello stage a spectrum of responses to insult, injury, and violence. At the same time, the texts trouble the division between good and evil, justice and revenge. Our agenda is two-fold: to deepen our reading of Shakespearean drama and to use our knowledge to investigate difficult and still unresolved questions about the problem of evil, the dialectic between law and justice, and the meaning of the “good life.” This WA course satisfies the Renaissance period requirement for the English major and it counts for the Legal Studies Concentration. Prerequisites: A 100- or 200-level English course.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A study of a particular topic of interest to students of literature in English. Students will read widely in relevant materials and produce a significant final project. Prerequisite(s): On 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 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. The class will be taught remotely. This course fulfills the U.S. Identities and Differences requirement.

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

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 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

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this special “mod” edition of Musical Fictions, we are going to take a few deep dives into complementary literary and musical works. We’ll read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995) alongside a study of Richard Wagner’s music drama Parsifal (1882). Both are quest narratives involving some sort of Holy Grail; together, these epics teach us about the relation between art and religion. We’ll read Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz (1992) as an experiment in reproducing the musical structures of jazz in literary form, and with the help of jazz scholars, we’ll practice hearing those structures in John Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme (1964). And we’ll read Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011) in tandem with creating, annotating, and analyzing a playlist of the music--real and imagined punk, pop, and rock--featured in the book. We’ll even try our hands at producing some creative writing of our own, inspired by recorded tracks that we love. In addition to these three long novels and their musical counterparts, we’ll read short fiction by James Baldwin, Zadie Smith, Garth Greenwell, Langston Huhgues, Willa Cather, and others. Here, we’ll discover more about the place and function of the musician in the world, and about the ways in which difference (of race, class, gender, and sexuality) shapes attitudes towards music.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this fully remote survey course, we will trace an African American literary tradition from the end of the 18th century to the turn of the 20th century, from Phillis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass to Charles Chesnutt. The themes of the course include: writing as a political act, representations 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’ legacy of national critique and Black solidarity. Requirements include: brief written responses to the readings, a medium-length essay and a revision of it, and a final reflection. This course fulfills the English major requirement either of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color or a course on 19th century American literature.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

This course is designed to explore the art and craft of dramatic writing. Students will complete weekly reading assignments and writing exercises that will culminate in the writing of a one-act play. Students will engage in a rigorous development process which will include in-class feedback sessions and script revision. The ultimate goal of the course is for each student to develop a consistent, challenging and rewarding individual creating writing practice.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Who are the writers you return to over and over? The songs you listen to on repeat, the movies you've seen a hundred times? This class is an in-depth, multi-genre study of what it means to be artistically "influenced," and throughout the module we will examine our own influences as a way to understand and develop our own unique voices as writers. We will also engage in imitation, both at the micro level of line and sentence and the macro level of theme and feeling. We'll look at all the little fiddly bits that make up a whole -- syntax, word choice, stress pattern, sentence length -- and all the intangibles, too; the emotions, the moods, the dream landscapes. We will reproduce and repurpose the work of others in order to make our own original works, studying writers like George Saunders, Ocean Vuong, Toni Morrison, Denis Johnson and Alice Sola Kim -- as well as any writers you yourself bring to the table.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This class, more than anything, is one that demands curiosity. We will start with an 1860s sensation novel, read a little Victorian anthropology, dip into some travel writing. We will talk about the developing technology of photography, why little boys had to climb chimneys to sweep them, how philanthropy was racist (and when it wasn’t), and whether corsets were really torturous for women. This course will not give you a neatly framed picture of the “most important” things to know about the British empire in the nineteenth century. Instead, it will give you a taste of some key issues (technology, labor, gender- and race-based hierarchies, colonial power) and invite you to find questions about which you want to learn more. Through discussion, you will choose a topic focused on 19th-century British culture for your own sustained research. We will spend the bulk of the semester on deep research, working with databases, archives, and the internet to learn to search smarter. We will focus on how to ask good questions, follow leads in multiple directions, balance primary and secondary materials, and, ultimately to find the arc of a narrative through all that material. This is not just a class about research skills; it’s a class about ways of thinking that can help you uncover information that turns a historical "oddity" into a story. Writing in the course will include a scholarly paper based on your findings, a short feature article or exhibit aimed at a mainstream audience that draws on some of the best public humanities models, and a five-minute episode to contribute to the class podcast which will be aired at the end of the term. As we work in these modes, guest speakers from the worlds of publishing, museums, and radio will share their craft. By the end of the semester, you will have developed archival research skills, the ability to synthesize material in very different ways for different audiences, and a clearer sense of how to get from “look at all this cool stuff I found” to a compelling narrative with a clear point that will keep an audience riveted. This course counts for the 18th/19th Century British Literature requirement on the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

muse /'myüz/ n. A person or thing regarded as the source of an artist's inspiration; the presiding spirit or force behind any person or creative act.What is it that inspires creativity, especially the creation of great artworks? From classical antiquity, the feminine muse has served as the archetype of inspiration in human form. But inspiration, as we know, can take many forms. In this course, we will look specifically at queer muses who bend the rules of the archetype in works of queer literature and cinema. For example, when Sally Potter's film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando was released in 1992, it was heralded as a queer cult classic. Played by Tilda Swinton, the genderqueer prince and title character, Orlando, challenges viewers to engage with the surreal qualities of high modernism alongside new articulations of gender fluidity and feminism. Similarly, Isaac Julien’s pathbreaking Looking for Langston explores the queer politics of Langston Hughes’s life and poetry as part of the Harlem Renaissance, and the film makes a striking visual companion to newly discovered queer writing by Hughes. As we study various queer sources of inspiration, we will connect feminist and queer theory to ideas of looking, beauty, and cinematic visuality. We will also consider the intersections of race, socioeconomic class, and popular culture in queer representation across media as we try to understand together the forms that queer inspiration might take.

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Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course looks at novels from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, exploring how society has labeled and judged transgression through wrongful confinement. We will consider the following questions: how and why have notions of instability and “madness” been socially determined? What kind of emotion is perceived as dangerous, and how have these constructs specifically been built upon gendered and racial ideologies? What kinds of protests do the novels ultimately erect against societal systems of power? Course texts may include Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

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 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.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course combines study of the contemporary global novel with considerations of the environment—an approach known as ecocriticism in literary studies. While you’ll be introduced to ecocriticism and its intersecting theories of the environment, you will be encouraged to draw on your own interests and experiences with the natural world, in addition to trans-disciplinary approaches from natural history, biology, environmental studies, medicine, environmental psychology, and anthropology. In reading works by contemporary writers, our class will examine a range of responses to the politics of place and cross-cultural experiences of our changing planet. We will also examine how nature takes metaphorical shape in literature, working as a group to understand how fiction draws on the environment to express complex human emotions and interconnections with the non-human world.

General Education Requirements:
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:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this creative writing workshop course, students will write a young adult genre short story with a particular focus on character and voice. We’ll explore how to create stories within the constraints of YA settings, whether those are realist or speculative. We’ll look at how to create plot twists to keep readers guessing by examining current young adult short stories. Plus we’ll spend time rewriting and editing our stories with the goal of a polished, complete story by the end of the module.

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

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Course Materials

In this fully remote advanced course, we will explore Afrofuturism, a flourishing and exciting contemporary movement of writers, artists, musicians, and scholars who imagine, theorize, and represent other times (often, but not always, the future) and alternative forms of the human, along with outer spaces and other places wherein Black people are centered. We will closely read, listen to, and view key Afrofuturist texts, including short stories by Samuel Delany, a novel by Octavia Butler, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer “emotion picture,” and Wangechi Mutu’s visual art, among other texts. We will also read scholarship and theory relevant to the movement, including queer theory and posthuman theory, along with definitions and theorizations of Afrofuturism. Course requirements include: brief written responses to the texts, an essay of 5-7 pages, 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 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

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 that elucidate elements of 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. Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor required. Capstone courses are intended to be a culminating experience for the major. Students who enroll in the course will be required to meet with the instructor via Zoom two weeks before the start of the course to discuss the course’s format and their creative projects.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials