Class Schedules

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

In this course, we will study a variety of poetic techniques and themes, all while writing our own poems which we will discuss via workshop. As living, breathing humans in 2021 America, understanding how contemporary American poets use language and form will be imperative to you finding “your own voice” as poets. To accomplish this, we will be reading four collections of poetry published in the last few years by some of our country’s leading poets. With the help of craft and thematic readings via Moodle, we will write in- and out-of-class poetry exercises throughout the semester, finding ways to surprise both ourselves (as Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader”), as well as conjure inspiration from both within and out (as Ocean Vuong wrote, "and remember,/ loneliness is still time spent/ with the world"). We will see how form can dictate content, but also how content can dictate form, remembering Robert Creeley’s dictum: “content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content.” There are not too many places in this world where people get excited to discuss poetry—I consider us very privileged to be able to do so in this class. Let’s not take this privilege for granted; use it as an excuse to seek out wildness, to sound unlike what you think a poet “should” sound like, to allow each of your poems to teach you something you didn’t know before, and to carve out a sustaining space for your inner life to thrive, at present and in the future. Using nothing but our words on the page, let’s achieve the effect Dickinson describes above.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will study a variety of poetic techniques and themes, all while writing our own poems which we will discuss via workshop. As living, breathing humans in 2021 America, understanding how contemporary American poets use language and form will be imperative to you finding “your own voice” as poets. To accomplish this, we will be reading four collections of poetry published in the last few years by some of our country’s leading poets. With the help of craft and thematic readings via Moodle, we will write in- and out-of-class poetry exercises throughout the semester, finding ways to surprise both ourselves (as Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader”), as well as conjure inspiration from both within and out (as Ocean Vuong wrote, "and remember,/ loneliness is still time spent/ with the world"). We will see how form can dictate content, but also how content can dictate form, remembering Robert Creeley’s dictum: “content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content.” There are not too many places in this world where people get excited to discuss poetry—I consider us very privileged to be able to do so in this class. Let’s not take this privilege for granted; use it as an excuse to seek out wildness, to sound unlike what you think a poet “should” sound like, to allow each of your poems to teach you something you didn’t know before, and to carve out a sustaining space for your inner life to thrive, at present and in the future. Using nothing but our words on the page, let’s achieve the effect Dickinson describes above.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

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 and natural disasters, plagues that empty continents, and species suicide through war. But science fiction has also emerged as the primary cultural form for imagining a near boundless future through technological progress: artificial superintelligence, cybernetic enhancement of the human, and the possibility of utopian political order. Facing such disorienting and 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 the promises of technology, or the lethal threats of scarcity, 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. Counts toward the Cognitive Science Concentration.

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:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course serves as an introduction to law and literature. How does literature shape law and vice versa? How does literature help us to better understand the human desire for revenge, retribution, confession, witnessing, judgment, remorse, and forgiveness? Readings 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 and a course for the Legal Studies Concentration.

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 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 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

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

In this Intro to Creative Writing course, my goal is to equip you with as many versatile tools and techniques as I can, so that as you pursue your own projects as writers in the future, you have what you need to breathe some life into your vision. Each week will focus on a particular topic or technical component of a piece of writing (voice, setting, plot, etc.), building gradually to a more traditional workshop. While we’ll focus primarily on fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, we’ll also bring in playwriting, film, and visual art to tease out new ideas and approaches. If you don’t think of yourself primarily as a writer, no worries! This is a great class for nurturing your creative side in other disciplines. Whatever your background or interests, by the end of this, you’ll have a portfolio of polished pieces you can be proud of.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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 aim to shed light on this exciting field through a combination of readings, talks with local publishing professionals, in-class discussion, and hands-on work. We will learn about publishing by tracing the literary work from the hands of the author, through the processes of acquisition, editing, production, marketing, and distribution, and into the hands of the reader. Additional topics will include recent trends in technology, magazine and book editing, and the roles of the literary agent, the independent publisher, and the book reviewer. We will take advantage of the extraordinary publishing resources in the Twin Cities through guest speakers and field trips. Assignments will include writing brief book reviews, presenting publisher profiles, editing projects, and writing a final paper on publishing issues. This course is designed for readers who want to know how the magazine or book they’re holding got into their hands, for writers who want to know what happens when they send their works to publishers, and for those interested in publishing as a future career.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Our common vocabulary of love presents it as a force that strikes and knocks down its victims. It comes like a fever and it disables cognition. Lovers "fall," they are "smitten," "head over heels," "crazy" for each other. Love is both mania and obsession, both a euphoria that alters one's view of the world as a whole and an exclusion of the whole world, a radical narrowing of our normally capacious imaginative and perceptual faculties down to the simplest and smallest of human frames: a face, or the sound of a voice. For American authors of the 18th and 19th century, love and madness were twinned sites of altered consciousness that represented the radical "others" of Enlightenment reason, psychic parallels to and extensions of the wilds of the New World and the uncontrollable crowds and freedoms of the new democracy. This course will examine love and madness from multiple perspectives, including the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, gender and sexuality, the American Gothic, violence, and sin.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The long poem defies convention. It lingers in the space between genres. Whether a crown of sonnets or a mythical epic, long poems have deep, historical roots. But contemporary poets are taking this ancient tradition and transforming it. In this course, we’ll focus primarily on living writers who’ve tackled the long poem. We’ll read work by poets such as Natalie Diaz, Ross Gay, and Paisley Rekdal. We’ll analyze how their poems maintain momentum across multiple pages or even a whole book. And then, of course, we’ll write our own. The goal will be to create one long poem that’s developed slowly, through sustained time and attention. Alongside this piece, we’ll create shorter works throughout the semester that engage with the long poem's themes, questions, and formal concerns. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

How do you write so that your subject becomes at once startlingly new and deeply recognizable? This course will focus on the core writing tasks of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Through close reading, writing and discussion we will explore this question at the level of the sentence, the passage, and the story. We will also ask: familiar/strange to whom? and work to make explicit the expectations readers bring to different works. By honing our sense of audience, we will deepen our ability to connect as writers. Potential readings include: Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Justin Torres, Dorothy Tse, Samanta Schweblin, Octavia Butler. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

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

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

Every work of fiction contains multiple experiences of time. You can spend an hour reading a story in which three hundred years pass – or a year reading a book that takes place within a single hour. Fiction has the marvelous ability to propel a reader backwards and forwards and sideways in time, and in this class we’ll examine the tools that let us, as writers, enact that propulsion. We will look at fiction that adheres to linear time as well as fiction that meets time-challenges head on (such as time-travel narratives and stories with multiple timelines), and we’ll learn how to manage our readers’ time – how to get someone whipping through your pages, and how to get them to slow down and savor the moment. Required texts will likely include “This is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, “Cassandra at the Wedding” by Dorothy Baker, and stories by authors such as Mariana Enriquez, Charlie Jane Anders, and Lucia Berlin. This course will count as a creative writing elective. Prerequisite: ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

“Nothing in the world is permanent,” said playwright W. Somerset Maugham, “and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re more foolish not to take delight while we have it.” The aim of this course, therefore, is to grab a semester’s worth of delight via an eclectic array of British and American novels, stories, plays, and essays that take delight as seriously as “high literature” takes suffering. We’ll begin with a few foundational texts before skipping off toward the hijinks of romantic comedy, screwball comedy, observational humor, cozy mysteries, satire, and farce, many of which were penned in decidedly non-delightful circumstances, and by occasionally non-delightful people. As our delight grows, we’ll ask a wide range of questions about genre, form, voice, reception, representation, the politics of taste, and the nature of protest art, paying particular attention to...well, to everything, since attention is delight’s skeleton key. “Look at a child!” cried Dostoyevsky in The Idiot. “Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!” Coursework will include reading responses, two short essays, a presentation and a final project. Creative writers (or those so inclined) will have the opportunity to write creatively for certain assignments. Non-majors are invited, so long as they’re easily delighted.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

If you’ve read a novel, story, or essay by Zadie Smith or Ali Smith, chances are you’re already hooked! And if not, you’re definitely in for a treat. Zadie Smith was born in England to a Jamaican mother and British father and writes about technology, education and the Ivory Tower, and the complicated ways gender, sexuality, race, and socioeconomic class intertwine in our lives. Scottish writer Ali Smith was a Virginia Woolf scholar before she turned to creative writing. Her books explore queer identity, human rights and the refugee crisis, chronic illness, and the capacity for visual art to connect people across time and space. Both of these writers invite readers into the difficult spaces of life, challenging us to read with compassion while also thinking about how to make the world a better place—in their work, the personal is always political. As a class, we will read a selection of novels, short stories, and essays by The Smiths and discuss these texts through a series of creative and scholarly prompts.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Nineteenth-century novels are so often associated with the “marriage plot,” as narratives that trace a heroine’s development toward romance. This course will look at texts that purposely decenter the marriage plot and its traditional associations, questioning the emotional and physical cost in its aftermath and/or absence. We will consider fundamental questions such as, how does this decentering unsettle social norms and disrupt conventional pathways for narrative development? Possible course texts include Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, George Gissing’s The Odd Women, sections from Emily Westmeath’s memoir, and selections of poetry from writers like Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How do we unravel the relationships between body, state, family, and time? How does the state live within us, within our homes? Is there such a thing as an embodied poetics or a liberatory one? In this course, we’ll read poetry collections that confront these impossible questions. We will analyze the work of writers such as Layli Long Soldier, Solmaz Sharif, and Claudia Rankine. We’ll mirror their innovations in form and come up with our own new possibilities. By the end of the semester, each student will have generated a small collection of poems. We will workshop these poems and learn from one another’s work. We will discover together what poetry can open, what impact it can have. Prerequisite: ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course explores representations of disability and ability in late medieval and early modern England (c. 1500-1700). How was bodymind normativity, ability, and disability defined in the Renaissance? Why did writers turn to literature to explore illness and disability? And where might we discover evidence of disability gain or disability pride in the early modern archive? We’ll be reading a variety of genres: medical literature, herbals (self-help remedy books written for lay people), law books, joke books, ballads, poetry, and drama. We will also study recent scholarship in disability theory and early modern disability studies. No prior knowledge of the topic or of Renaissance literature is expected. Prerequisite: a 100-level or 200-level English course.

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. Topics may include Aristotelian tragedy, Freytag’s Pyramid, Edgar Allen Poe’s single effect theory, the Hero’s Journey, Kishōtenketsu or the four-act structure of Chinese fairy tales, the nested narratives of The Arabian Nights, non-linear approaches in Latin American fiction, and the place-driven emphasis of stories from Central Africa. Throughout, our goal as a class will be to expand our understanding of how stories can be told. By the end of the semester, every student will have written multiple drafts of two original works of short fiction. Prerequisite: ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, Natalie Loveless champions feminist methods of creativity and experimentation as a way of approaching research “that is committed, cathected, and sustaining.” Research-creation is "[a]n approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. The creation process is situated within the research activity and produces critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms)." [From the SSHRC website.] As a literary scholar, what does it mean to do interdisciplinary research? What is humane about the humanities? How might a research-creation framework help you become a better custodian of our planet? Or help solve social problems like bigotry, xenophobia, or racism? How does writing across media expand your sense of how academic writing communicates with an audience? Is your academic research intersectional, and why might that be important? Our capstone course will begin with an overview of research-creation as both a research method and as a model for social justice or activism. Students will develop their capstone research paper in consultation with their peers and the professor. The topic is up to you—but you should expect to produce a final project rooted in both creative praxis and traditional research, which will be presented in an academic paper that exists alongside an additional form of creative expression (artwork, photojournalism, podcast, web archive, artist’s book, comic, etc).

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Want to write something long and substantial, but don't exactly know what it's going to be about yet? No problem. You're right where you should be. This workshop seminar will provide advanced creative writers with the opportunity to embark on a semester-long project in the genre of their choice: a poetry chapbook, a novella, a collection of essays or short stories, a screenplay, or perhaps some combination of forms. The class will culminate in a presentation and a finished manuscript project.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will offer an introduction to Shakespeare's work through a survey of his major plays in all genres (history, comedy, tragedy, and romance) plus selected sonnets. Texts and emphasis will vary.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A writing-intensive course in traditional and non-traditional literatures, each section of which will have a different focus, topic, or approach; recent offerings have examined the short story, major women writers, new international writing, and the literary Gothic.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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 in German and participate in extra discussion sessions in German (format and frequency to be determined with the instructor).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 his life and work, allowing students to produce their own graphic group project.

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Humanities

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In the past fifty years, science fiction has emerged as the primary cultural form for thinking about human extinction: climate catastrophe and natural disasters, plagues that empty continents, and species suicide through war. But science fiction has also emerged as the primary cultural form for imagining a near boundless future through technological progress: artificial superintelligence, cybernetic enhancement of the human, and the possibility of utopian political order. Facing such disorienting and unfathomable changes, science fiction seeks with frantic energy 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 the promises of technology, or the lethal threats of scarcity, 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, Lidia Yuknavitch, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Bulter, Stanislaw Lem, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others. A companion film series will include the Matrix and other films in the genre

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Humanities

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

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Humanities

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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.

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Humanities

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

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Fine arts

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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.

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Fine arts

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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.

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Fine arts

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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.

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Fine arts

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

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

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

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

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This course examines ways in which literary works have represented desire and sexuality. It looks at how constructions of sexuality have defined and classified persons; at how those definitions and classes change; and at how they affect and create literary forms and traditions. Contemporary gay and lesbian writing, and the developing field of queer theory, will always form part, but rarely all, of the course. Poets, novelists, playwrights, memoirists and filmmakers may include Shakespeare, Donne, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, or Henry James; Wilde, Hall, Stein, Lawrence, or Woolf; Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Frank O'Hara, Baldwin, or Philip Roth; Cukor, Hitchcock, Julien, Frears, or Kureishi; White, Rich, Kushner, Monette, Lorde, Allison, Cruse, Morris, Winterson, Hemphill, or Bidart. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level ENGL course.

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Humanities

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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.

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Humanities

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Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing. Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s.

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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.

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Humanities

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

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Fine arts

Course Materials