Class Schedules

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

Today, Shakespeare is venerated as the “Bard” and “wonder of the stage.” His peers were more divided. Early in his career, he was accused of plagiarism (“there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,” fumed Robert Greene) and, after achieving star-status, he was said to be lazy in his editing (“I would he had blotted a thousand [lines],” mused Ben Jonson). How did the imagination and language of this upstart crow shock and delight audiences then—and why do his plays continue to offer entertainment, consolation, and debate today? In this course, we will study some of Shakespeare’s most enduring works, such as Twelfth Night, Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest. Coursework comprises discussion, essays, presentations, and performances (watching professional productions and performing scenes from the plays). This course counts as a foundation course requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

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

Societal understandings of mental health have shifted significantly over time. From early representations and misrepresentations, to increased inclusivity and discussions around neurodiversity, literary protagonists reflect many of these changing social constructs. This course will look at novels from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries and explore the following topics: how have class, gender, and race shaped literary portrayals of mental health? What misconceptions have lingered over time? What kind of relationships do writers represent between the individual and modern society, and how do communities and support systems within the texts shape and alter their narrative trajectories? Possible course texts include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful.

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

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

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 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 introductory course will focus on the basic elements of creative writing. Students will be asked to read and discuss published work by writers across a wide range of cultures, to support one another through peer workshops, and to write multiple drafts of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout the semester our focus will be on creating an artistic community that encourages everyone to discover and nurture their own individual creative voice, and then to express that voice with force and conviction.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on the development of skills for writing poetry, short fiction, and/or creative nonfiction through a close study of the techniques involved in these forms, analysis of model literary works, and frequent writing exercises 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? How does the lyric formally (and thematically) differ from the epic and romance? When did drama acquire its characteristic structure? In addition to these formal questions, we will examine the historical events alluded to by the literature, such as the expansion of global trade and trans-Atlantic slavery and the reformation of religion and manners. Readings include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, Principal Navigations, The Tempest, and Paradise Lost. Because this body of literature (the “canon”) has had a profound influence on modern fantasy and romance genres, we will reflect on the phenomenon of “medievalism” (the fetishization of medieval and early Renaissance aesthetics) and how it can, at times, feed a possessive investment in whiteness. This course counts for the medieval or Renaissance period requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The nineteenth century featured some of literature’s most famous “monsters.” These creatures both embodied and navigated rising tensions in the period, including shifts with industrialization, colonization, and scientific discovery. But what really makes these monsters so “monstrous?” What fears and anxieties do they encompass and displace? What kinds of gendered social norms and values do they challenge or negotiate? Possible course texts include a variety of poetry, short fiction, and novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In the past fifty years, science fiction has emerged as the primary cultural form for thinking about human extinction: climate catastrophe, pandemics, hostile AI, nuclear war. But science fiction has also emerged as the primary cultural form for imagining a near boundless future for humans: cybernetic enhancements, colonies on Goldilocks planets, post-scarcity economies, digital consciousness. Facing such disorienting and sometimes unfathomable changes, science fiction seeks to understand what it means to be a human and to live a meaningful life. Why are we here? What are we to become? How will both the promises and threats of technology change what it means to be a thinking, feeling human? In this course we will examine works of science fiction as complex aesthetic achievements, as philosophical inquiries into the nature of being and time, and as theoretical examinations of the nature of human cognition. We will engage in intensive readings of contemporary texts, including works by Ted Chiang, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others. This class counts toward the Cognitive Science Concentration.

General Education Requirements:

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

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

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this buffet sampler of a creative writing course, students will explore 32,000 years of storytelling—from cave paintings to video games, with stops along the way to consider creation myths, epic poetry, religious texts, fairy tales, photo essays, short stories, television pilots, and more. By the end of the semester, students will have read across a wide range of cultures, created original work across a wide range of narrative forms, and participated in a mutually supportive community of artistic expression.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

“Everything has been figured out,” wrote Sartre, “except how to live.” How do we live, and what keeps us living? Michel Montaigne had one answer to these questions when he climbed the stairs of his castle turret five hundred years ago to compose what he called an essai . In French, essayer is “to attempt.” Not persuade, not win over, not opine or enchant. Attempt. We do not answer the question of how to live when we essay; we live the question. And the question brings us to life. Indeed, here are some questions we’ll live in class with the help of brilliant essayists who came before us. Do gifted athletes bring us closer to God? Is it possible to mind-meld with weasels? Can you get stoned at Disney World? Will men ever stop explaining things to Rebecca Solnit? The sky is beyond the limit in this most flexible and innovative literary form -- or beyond the sky, if you’re, say, writing about corporatized space travel. We’ll learn creative research skills and teach each other how to interview. The only limits here are your curiosity and time. As W.H. Auden puts it, “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” Come muddle through the world as it is, in all its heartbreak, grotesquerie, and glory. Come say the unsayable. Come write yourself down.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

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 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

What do you look at every day, and never really see? The worn-out laces of your favorite shoes, the smudged screen of your computer, the landscape of your own palms? In this class we will engage in the practice of opening our writerly eyes and turning our visual experiences into words, as well as working with our auditory, gustatory, and overall sensory experiences. We’ll look into the history of “sketchbooks” and “sketches” in general, as well as creating and keeping our own sketchbooks throughout the semester, and we’ll examine how literary trends in physical description vary across time and place. We’ll also use the art of looking as an entrypoint into exploring a deeper form of artistic research, and if able we’ll visit museums and libraries together. We will also study how subjectivity and POV impact sensory verbal descriptions. No actual artistic knowledge or skill is required, but you should arrive with a spirit of inquiry and experimentation. Prerequisite: ENGL 150, Intro to Creative Writing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In a 2017 interview with Margaret Atwood, the renowned novelist Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) asserts that "women’s rights are just a watery paint on the walls of history. We must not forget." This course will investigate the extent to which that assertion holds true, especially in relation to Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit, trans, and non-binary people. We will explore the intersections, as well as disconnections, between white and POC feminisms and Indigenous feminisms through our readings of Indigenous literature across a variety of genres. The course will highlight critical differences of Indigenous feminisms from other feminisms, and why they are essential to the studies of decolonization and sovereignty.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In this creative writing workshop course, students will write a young adult short story or the first few chapters or a novel or webcomic with a 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 employ plot twists to keep readers guessing by examining current young adult stories and novels—in both text and webcomic formats. Plus we’ll spend time rewriting and editing our stories, chapters and comic scripts with the goal of a polished work by the end of the class. We’ll read authors including Malinda Lo, Bethany C. Morrow, Darcie Little Badger, Daniel Jose Older, Nnedi Okorafor and Mariko Tamaki. We’ll work through parts of The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults. Prerequisite: ENGL 150, Introduction to Creative Writing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

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 visual medium, 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.” Prerequisite: ENGL 150, Introduction to Creative Writing.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

How can literature help readers find meaning and purpose in times of crisis? In this course, we will study well-crafted narratives serving as windows into the conditions that led to dissent, social strife, and a thirst for liberation in imperial Russia, culminating in the Bolshevik revolution. Under autocracy in Russia, literature was the only public forum for debates about the things that mattered most. In the lead-up to the revolution, Russian literature had a tangible effect on the world by building compassion and sparking indignation, inspiring questions about how things could be otherwise, and by driving readers to action. In the first half of the semester, we will read short stories by authors such as Gogol and Chekhov who left an indelible impression on world literature, and a selection from a novel that served as a bible for revolutionaries. In the second half, we will focus on Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, a story of rebellion against fathers in every sense, written in response to the rise of revolutionary terrorism in Russia. We will conclude with a novella by Tolstoy, Hadji Murat, about the resistance that the Russian state met in its attempt to subjugate the peoples of the Caucasus. We will consider these texts as works of art and as sources of understanding and impact feeding into the Bolshevik Revolution. These narratives about people caught up in unjust systems of power raise questions about how one can and should act under oppressive circumstances. The characters we will encounter grapple with issues of agency and responsibility, as well as the crucial question of who gets to decide what is right and what is wrong in a secular world. As such, these stories bear witness not only to their times, but to ours as well. No previous knowledge of Russian literature or history is required. For our readings we will use English translations that preserve the pleasures of the original texts.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

‘U-topia’ means ‘a place (topos) that doesn’t exist’ and ‘Eu-topia’ means ‘a good place.’ So, a good place that doesn’t exist? How do people of various gender identities envision a better state yet-to-be (utopia) as well as a fear of catastrophe or nightmare (dystopia)? This course investigates how women's literary writing from different parts of the world (Bangladeshi, British, African-American, Canadian, to name a few) produce visions of the present and the future, of the real and the imagined, beliefs about masculinity and femininity, socialist and capitalist philosophies, modernity, the environment (ecotopia), and various technologies including cybergenetics. We will explore how these texts provide some wayá to think about our gendered, racialized, and classed roles, and how we can think about MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Charlottesville, and neoliberal nation-states, along with our own fantasies and realities of sociopolitical change. Texts by Thomas More, Frantz Fanon, Noam Chomsky, and Silvia Federici are included, along with literature by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Zitkála-Ša, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, music by The Eagles and A Tribe Called Red, and samplings of popular culture. No prerequisites, though familiarity with feminist and queer vocabularies and approaches recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course brings together discourses that have remained somewhat parallel and unrelated--Whiteness Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Before and during the pandemic, these intertwine in similar but also radically different ways. The course is based on the premise that “Whiteness,” as an academic/social framework, stems from and is intertwined with social and political identity-based movements (feminist, critical race, indigenous, etc.). This course explores where and how the notion of 'whiteness' converges and diverges from post-colonialism. The goals are to learn how “Whiteness” is a category to define identity and to analyze experiences in literature and in our lives, to understand what “Post/Colonialism” is as a historical experience for so many of us and as a field of study, to intersect the two and interpret literature and culture, and to move towards decolonial knowledge and praxis by reflecting on the ways in which we are positioned at the intersection of these histories. Literature by James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Gordimer, Zadie Smith; music by Pete Seeger and Macklemore, and films by Hector Babenco and James Cameron are included. No prerequisites, though familiarity with feminist and queer vocabularies and approaches recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Modernism is both a historical period (1900-1945) and an aesthetic movement associated with experimental literary forms (surrealism, manifestos, stream-of-consciousness), cross-cultural collaborations, political and anti-war activism, and new perspectives on sexuality and gender. While often considered “difficult,” modernist texts challenge convention and create new worlds for marginalized voices. This class reads modernist texts (and some of their later adaptations) alongside queer theory, a field of inquiry that centers the study of LGBTQ+ identities and intersectional interpretations. Queer literary theory helps us read against the heteronormative grain, thinking in more inclusive, dynamic terms about sexuality as fluid and expressive and about queerness as a generative concept for not only personal identity but for a range of political and social relations.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This 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:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Since the 1990s, fans have moved from the margins to the mainstream. Fans wield enormous power over the global media market. Early fandom scholarship emphasized the utopian values of fans, but recent work—based on the research and personal testimony of fans of color—reveal the phenomenon of harmful “colorblindness” in fandom. One thing is clear: a good deal of cultural knowledge is made outside of the academy in so-called “amateur” collaborative and communal spaces. What does this moment of “undisciplining”—the breaking down of disciplinary expertise and its attendant mystique—mean for literary studies? For the humanities? As you transition from being a student to a graduate, how do you see yourself applying the resources of literature to shape your relationship to communities in the years to come? Like other capstones, this one aims to create a space for both solo and communal reading, debate, and reflection. Students will design a research paper on a topic of their choosing. No prior knowledge of literary theory is assumed.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This seminar is for advanced creative writers who are ready for an ambitious semester-long project. The genre is up to you. It might be a novella, a chapbook of poems, a collection of stories or personal essays, or a feature screenplay. Throughout the semester, you will put up sections of your project for workshop, while evaluating the work of your peers. We will also read published works and craft essays to help guide our efforts along the way. After you register for the class, I will ask you to tell me a little about your project via email. Then I will assign texts tailored to your work and the work of others. The class will culminate in a presentation and a revised and finished project.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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.

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

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 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:

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

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:

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:

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