Class Schedules

Instruction and practice for writing in college. This course does not satisfy the requirements for the English major or minor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This introductory English course will focus on identities and differences in U.S. literature. We will read a wide range of texts written by writers of color and others from traditionally underrepresented groups, with motifs of performance and poetics organizing and focusing our study. Authors covered will include Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, Layli Long Soldier, Louise Erdrich, Ntozake Shange, Roxane Gay, and Danez Smith, among others. We will investigate how writers use, and experiment with, verse, narrative, image, and voice in order to represent and perform the experiences of people of color and LGBTQ people, and of those whose identities reside at the intersection of those categories. Course requirements include: an in-class oral presentation, a written response to each primary reading, two essays of about 5-7 pages (one of which must be revised), and a final project that will include a written component. This course will fulfill either the foundation course in literature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

For centuries, authors have written narratives about their travel experiences, providing accounts to those back home about their adventures abroad. In this course we will read various forms of travel literature from antiquity to the 21st century. We will examine the relationship between narrative and place: how does travel writing use geography to construct identity, a sense of belonging, and lines of exclusion? The course will introduce students to long histories of race and colonialism, as well as literary modes of “writing back” against those histories. Authors may include Homer, John Mandeville, Christopher Columbus, Richard Hakluyt, James Cook, Mary Seacole, Mary Kingsley, Jamaica Kincaid, Amitav Ghosh, Andrew Pham, Jan Morris, and Pico Iyer. Students will write regular responses to the readings and have an opportunity to write their own travel narratives for their final projects. Other assignments may include a take-home midterm, short essay, and peer reviews.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

It’s entirely possible for one to analyze the meanings of most texts—their themes, morals, historical significances, and so on—without paying much attention to the formal and linguistic elements that produce such meanings. Fortunately, poems make this difficult and ask us to attend more closely to how language does the things that it does. How, for example, can a single word generate multiple, even conflicting, interpretations concerning its significance? How do the rhetorical devices foregrounded in poetry—such as metaphor, metonymy, apostrophe, and personification—structure the modes of relation through which we organize our lives? How do various arrangements of words move us to tears, open new worlds, instigate actions, and even make nothing happen (as W. H. Auden famously figures the power of poetry)? This introductory course will take up such questions as we develop our abilities to read, write, and think as students of literature. While our primary focus will be on learning how to engage with the subtleties of poetic language, this engagement will lead us to consider the broader philosophical, political, and cultural issues that our readings raise, concerning, for example, the place of poetry in modern life, the use and uselessness of poetry, and the very question of what poetry is. This course counts as a foundation course toward the English major, but all students are welcome and no prior knowledge or experience is expected.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores the concept of beauty in its many forms, from feelings associated with beautiful places and people to the history of visual attraction and attention. Reading novels from the late-nineteenth century to the present, we will learn to see beauty from different perspectives and to ask how the visible world intersects with larger social issues. For example, can the beautiful be political? How are shifting gender norms redefining beauty in today's world? What is the relationship between art and narcissism? How do writers use beauty as a tool of critique, celebration, unity, etc.? Can there be beauty in trauma? The novels we will study critique and analyze these issues even as they revel in the complexity of beauty across time, space, artistic forms, media, and cultures.
Students will read literary works by Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Zadie Smith, among others. In addition to lively in-class discussions and multimedia analysis, students will conduct work in Macalester’s IdeaLab and focus on becoming stronger academic writers.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This first-year 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. Authors under consideration will include the Grimm Brothers, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, and Alison Bechdel. All literary genres—sonnets, slam poems, personal essays, narrative podcasts, kitchen sink realism, and intergalactic space operas—are welcome here. Also, please know that this course must be completed at Macalester as a prerequisite for the further study of creative writing in the English Department.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What makes a story move, a poem sing, an essay say? How do writers get from blank pages to thinking, feeling readers? In this first foray in creative writing, we’ll begin to explore the huge range of things language can do, and try a few of them out ourselves. Together we’ll read like writers, write like readers, and work the muscles of our imaginations. Our concentrated study of a range of texts will introduce you to the mechanics of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Frequent writing exercises will help develop your technique, and prepare you to compose a handful of longer, more thought-out pieces. Discussing your classmates’ writing, you’ll also train to be good literary citizens. The course will consist, in other words, of serious play and playful work. Come prepared, and by the end, you’ll know more about the practice of literature, your own process as a writer, and possibly yourself.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What makes a story move, a poem sing, an essay say? How do writers get from blank pages to thinking, feeling readers? In this first foray in creative writing, we’ll begin to explore the huge range of things language can do, and try a few of them out ourselves. Together we’ll read like writers, write like readers, and work the muscles of our imaginations. Our concentrated study of a range of texts will introduce you to the mechanics of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Frequent writing exercises will help develop your technique, and prepare you to compose a handful of longer, more thought-out pieces. Discussing your classmates’ writing, you’ll also train to be good literary citizens. The course will consist, in other words, of serious play and playful work. Come prepared, and by the end, you’ll know more about the practice of literature, your own process as a writer, and possibly yourself.

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

In what ways can a medieval poet help us think in new and expanded ways about our own modern world? In this course, we will read Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English alongside modern adaptations (no previous experience with Middle English necessary or expected). We will explore the poetics and politics of Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century masterpiece, as we delve into the global and multilingual past of medieval England. We will also explore how modern poets, filmmakers, and authors have interpreted Chaucer for present-day audiences. What do adaptations tell us about their particular social, cultural, and political conditions of production; and how do they help us gain more clarity about the original? Contemporary readings will include Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales (2015), the poetry and prose collection Refugee Tales (2016), Kim Zarins’s Sometimes We Tell the Truth (2016), and the 2003 BBC mini-series The Canterbury Tales; and through the digital humanities “Global Chaucers Project,” we will also explore the non-Anglophone translation history of Chaucer’s works. Assignments will include regular quizzes, a take-home midterm exam, a collaborative annotated bibliography, and a final project for which students may produce their own adaptation of The Canterbury Tales.

General Education Requirements:

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

If you’ve taken courses in the humanities, then you’re probably aware of a field that goes by the nickname of “theory.” You may have heard of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, though chances are you haven’t yet studied how their writings grew out of a common engagement with questions of language and textuality. This course offers you the opportunity to do so. Beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure’s influential Course in General Linguistics, we’ll trace the development of literary theory through structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, Black studies, postcolonial theory, trauma theory, affect theory, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. Since our approach will be to treat literary theory as a field of study in itself, we’ll be reading almost exclusively primary texts from this field—though, if you engage these texts seriously, they will most likely change the way you read just about everything, from poems and novels to television shows and text messages. This course will be of interest to students of all levels who are interested in learning about literary theory and are willing to be intellectually challenged. It counts as a core course in the Critical Theory Concentration. Possible authors include J. L. Austin, Roland Barthes, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Cathy Caruth, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Roman Jakobson, Barbara Johnson, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paul de Man, Timothy Morton, Ferdinand de Saussure, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Calvin Warren.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this survey course, we will trace the development of an African American literary tradition from the end of the 18th century to the turn of the 20th century, from Phillis Wheatley to Charles Chesnutt. We will explore the longstanding project of writing an African American self as both a literary and a political subject. We will read closely, critically, and appreciatively from multiple genres, including poetry, slave narratives, short stories, novels, and a graphic novel. We will supplement our exploration of those texts with critical and theoretical readings. Among the themes that will organize the course are: writing as a political act; representations of gendered and classed experiences of blackness in the United States, aesthetic innovation in relation to political and social change, genre and its subversion, and the limits of literary representation itself. Requirements include: two papers of about 10 pages each, brief response papers to each new reading, an in-class presentation, class participation, and a final exam. This course fulfills either the literature by U.S. writers of color or the pre-1900 American literature requirement for the English major. Prerequisite: One of the following: ENGL 105, ENGL 115, ENGL 125, ENGL 135, ENGL 136 or ENGL 137

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

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

Poetry likely predates the written word, and yet each poem reinvents this long tradition, discovering new things that language can be or do. In this course, we will approach verse writing as both craftspeople and mad scientists, shamans and technicians. We’ll study process and product, expanding our writerly toolkits through imitation and practice with fundamentals like line, stanza, genre and inherited form. But we’ll also seek out our own wild poetic geniuses, wading deep into the forests of expression. We’ll write odes and elegies, walking poems and persona poems, villanelles and collages. Coursework will include reading and discussion, in-class writing, workshops, and a final portfolio. Verse-o-phobes and verse-o-philes both enthusiastically welcomed. Prerequisite: ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

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 into a variety of visual media, such as photography, comics, and film. No artistic or technical skills required--just a willingness to try new things and experiment with form. Readings may include selections from the Grimm Brothers, "Calvin and Hobbes," Kara Walker's art installations, the work of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, and Barry Jenkins's "Moonlight." Prerequisite: ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

How To Tell a True Story: Essay. Back when Michel Montaigne invented the essay he knew that it was the journey that was important, not the destination. In nearly every other class you will take at Macalester, an essay isn’t complete without a conclusion. In this class, conclusions are nice if they happen, but they are also beside the point. Even the word “essay” originally meant, “an attempt.” So let’s attempt. Instead of coming to conclusions, we will look at the essay as a forum for exploration. Journeys, more than destinations. You will learn that this is truly the most flexible (and most fun) of literary forms precisely because even one that goes nowhere, can enter challenging and meaningful territory. They can be lyrical or narrative; personal or political; funny or tragic; song like or poetic; show or tell. Follow Patricia Hampl, who on realizing that her childhood memories of piano lessons never happened, wrote an essay about memory vs. imagination. Or Geoff Dyer, who on failing to write a biography of DH Lawrence wrote a book about failing to write a book. Or Phillip Lopate, whom one day just stood in front of a mirror and wrote down everything he saw. It's not about writing better. It’s about seeing better. And letting your new eyes lead to new writing. See you in class. Prerequisite: English 150 (Introduction to Creative Writing) taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, we will study historical, literary, and institutional contexts for the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017. We will equally study how activist-intellectuals, both past and present, have challenged white supremacy and advanced social justice. First, we will trace the origins of the events in Charlottesville, reading early American literary texts that constructed the nation and its racial hierarchies, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1787). We will also read African American writers’ challenges to those constructions, such as David Walker’s Appeal (1829). We will then trace the legacies of those early texts, reading 19th and 20th century authors such as Thomas Dixon, Charles Chesnutt, and James Baldwin. We will extend our study to the present, considering contemporary writers such as Claudia Rankine. Finally, we will examine Jefferson’s University of Virginia, in particular, and the academy, more broadly, as sites for the construction and perpetuation, but also potentially for the dismantling, of white supremacy and perhaps even race itself. Throughout, we will apply the methods of literary studies as we close-read literature, as well as scholarship, journalism, and social media. The class and the syllabus will be dynamic, responding to current events and to the interests of the students in the class. Requirements include: extensive participation, a brief essay of about 5-7 pages, an in-class presentation, a final individual project, and contributions to a collective open-access digital project documenting our work and our suggestions for further scholarship and activism.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What does love have to do with diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice? How does romance intersect with experiences of immigration, hybridity, language, class, and family? How do same-sex desire and sexuality shape experiences of culture, especially when it comes to trauma, memory, and identity? In Britain, cultural and racial diversity have a long and dynamic history, and contemporary novels grapple with these issues—and many more. In this class, we will work towards greater cultural understanding and read some of the greatest works of contemporary British fiction by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Ali Smith, Monica Ali, Aminatta Forna, Zadie Smith, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Our readings follow characters navigating their identity in the midst of romantic entanglements, sexual awakenings, and larger questions of what it means to love and be loved in a global world.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Jane Austen is still very much with us today. The mid-1990s saw an explosion of cinematic and televised adaptions of her novels. A flurry of Austenian mash-ups followed, merging zombies, vampires, and sea monsters with the trappings of the Regency era. Austen erotica, meanwhile, has not only emerged but boomed in recent years: in addition to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, we now have works such as Pride and Promiscuity and Spank Me, Mr. Darcy. Just what makes Austen so lastingly compelling and yet so open to diverse modes of adaptation and appropriation? This course approaches this question through an in-depth study of her novels and of some of their prominent film adaptations. We’ll attend to Austen’s particular narrative and rhetorical techniques (such as free indirect discourse and irony), consider how these techniques do or do not lend themselves to adaptation, and explore how the formal innovations of cinema foreground other, less noted elements of her writing. We’ll also pay particular attention to how Austen registers the social and political issues of her time (e.g. gender inequities, the marriage imperative, the slave trade, the Napoleonic wars), and query why most adaptations tend to simplify or simply occlude such issues. Finally, we’ll be interested in examining what Austen’s novels have to say about our own political present, particularly with regard to issues of race, gender, and class. Readings include Austen’s major novels, a number of their adaptations, and works of theory and criticism by Marilyn Butler, Mary Favret, William Galperin, Claudia Johnson, Devoney Looser, Deirdre Lynch, D. A. Miller, Emily Rohrbach, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others. No prior knowledge of Austen or of film studies is required.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What might you learn about a culture and its history if you focused on a narrow moment of time and then read widely what was published within it? That is the question this course seeks to answer by focusing on the year 1859 in Britain. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species came out in 1859, igniting enormous controversies in the scientific world. That was also the year that the first sensation novel was published, launching a craze for crime and harrowing fiction. It saw the publication of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, cementing his reputation and confirming that he had been the right choice for poet laureate in 1850. And it was the year that John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty rubbed shoulders with Samuel Smiles’s Self Help. New periodicals were launched that year, including Dickens’s wildly popular All the Year Round. This course draws its entire reading list from 1859 (including portions of everything mentioned above, and much more), inviting you to delve deeply into the literature, popular culture, science, social commentary, and controversies of the day. It seeks to examine the relationship between politics, novels, innovation, empire, and more, offering a mid-century vision of Victorian culture through multiple media, archival projects, and a reading experience that is designed to help you think about what it would have been like to be alive then, entering into some of these multiple conversations.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This workshop will study and experiment with prose poem forms, such as collage, list, narrative, and lyrical prose. We’ll read poems from 300 BC Zhuangzi’s lyrical prose to contemporary masters Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, John Olson, Sherman Alexie, Eduardo Galeano. Our experiment will focus on the play and risk of language and consciousness through the form and content of prose poetry. Deep revision is a must, i.e., each poem will be revised and workshopped 2-3 times. The end result is a 15-25 page chapbook. So this workshop aims to achieve the impossible: play with a new genre, learn deep revisions, and produce a manuscript. If you love to play, flow, and rise to challenges, then this workshop is for you.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Today we often hear people dismiss the Western (mostly European) philosophical tradition as a bunch of "dead white men." In other words, the argument goes, these thinkers harbored such passe notions as universal truths, a universal subject, and an individual in total control of itself and endowed with a pure reason unadulterated by rhetoric, imagination, fiction, and politics. Why should we bother with "dead white men" now that we understand that truth depends on historical context, that the self is decentered by the unconscious, that identity is constituted by gender, race, class, and other cultural factors, that truth is linked to power, and that ideology is omnipresent? Unfortunately, this all-too-familiar attitude overlooks its own faulty presupposition: it presumes a clear-cut break between philosophical tradition and contemporary thought, as if contemporary thought had no tradition out of which it emerged and could, therefore, merely discard what preceded it. Hence the popularity of phrases like "philosophy is dead." It is all the more ironic to see this attitude prevail in the West at the very moment that multiculturalism has become our cause celebre : all cultural traditions are supposed to be "respected," except the West's own tradition. (Perhaps as a new way for the West to reinstate surreptitiously its superiority as the sole culture with no tradition?) This course pursues a close reading of texts by various "dead white men" as the unconscious (i.e., repressed and, for that matter, all the more powerful) undercurrent of contemporary thought. Assigned texts will include: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, as well as texts by twentieth-century thinkers that stress the dependence of contemporary thought on philosophy. No pre-knowledge required; all readings in English. With different reading lists this course may be taken more than once for credit

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

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.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

All your writing for the past three years has lead you to this point. 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 a full length work of fiction. Move beyond focus to scope; move beyond the short narrative to a piece 50,000 words or more. Can it be done in 15 weeks? Some have done it in four. Some were even good. First we will absorb all that Kazuo Ishiguro teaches us about having a “crash month.” Then we will explore writers who have pulled off great novels in a short time (Hint: these novels are usually short). We will look at novels such of Beasts Of No Nation, and The Lover that manage both brevity and scope. How do we get to page 2? What is expected of the first ten pages? How do we make it past page 100? And how do we get there without being intimidated by the whole task? How do we extend conflict? Whose point of view is best? Should it be science fiction, social realism or neither? How do you balance reveal and conceal, complication and tension, while still giving your story muscle? This is an Advanced Writers Workshop, which means all the time will be spent reading and writing. 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.

*Yes the semester is 14 weeks, but as I expect that you will have a clearly defined project, a synopsis and the first six pages, will be due the week BEFORE class begins.

Prerequisite: ENGL 150, Introduction to Creative Writing, taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials