Class Schedules

This course will focus on some of Asian American Literature’s salient texts and recurring themes. Through readings and class discussion, we will explore issues of ethnicity, race, gender, and community in the work of authors like Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Celeste Ng, Chang-Rae Lee, and Ocean Vuong, among others. We will also examine the political formation of the term “Asian American;” question narratives like the “model minority;” and consider how news media, pop culture, and the publishing industry have played a role in shaping the production and reception of Asian American writing. Class events will include guest lectures from Asian American authors with recently published books. The class will be taught remotely. This course fulfills the U.S. Identities and Differences requirement.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course serves as an introduction to law and literature. How does literature shape law and vice versa? How does literature help us to better understand the human desire for revenge, retribution, confession, witnessing, judgment, remorse, and forgiveness? Readings will come from a variety of literary traditions and periods: fairy tales, early modern drama, essays, short stories, film, and literary and legal theory. This course counts as a foundation course for the English major. This course also counts for the Legal Studies Concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course approaches the dynamic field of publishing, from acquisitions of literary titles to their entrance into the marketplace, from the writer's hands to the editor's desk to the reader's library. With explorations into the history of the book, new technologies, and the vibrant literary scene in the Twin Cities and beyond, this course illuminates the complex realities of how literature meets our culture.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this fully remote survey course, we will trace an African American literary tradition from the end of the 18th century to the turn of the 20th century, from Phillis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass to Charles Chesnutt. The themes of the course include: writing as a political act, representations of gendered and classed experiences of Blackness, and literary production and innovation as agents of political and social change. We will also connect the crises surrounding Black citizenship in the United States, so often represented by African American writers before 1900, to the present, honoring these early writers’ legacy of national critique and Black solidarity. Requirements include: brief written responses to the readings, a medium-length essay and a revision of it, and a final reflection. This course fulfills the English major requirement either of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color or a course on 19th century American literature.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This advanced workshop course focuses in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing creative nonfiction, building on the work done in ENGL 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, translating lived experience into the personal essay, or developing narrative journalism, the lyric essay, or a variety of other forms. It will involve extensive readings and discussion of nonfiction in addition to regular nonfiction writing assignments. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor, with the approval of the Chair. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This survey provides an introduction to the masterpieces of medieval and early modern literature, from Beowulf to Paradise Lost. What is old, middle, and early modern English? How does lyric formally (and thematically) differ from epic and romance? When did drama acquire its characteristic structure? In addition to these poetic considerations, we will explore the key controversies that roiled pre-modern cultures pertaining to race, gender, and religion. Readings will highlight the imagination, poetics, and politics of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, William Shakespeare, Mary Sidney Herbert, and John Milton.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Against the swirling backdrop of political discourses about women in the Islamic world, this course will engage with feminist and postcolonial debates through literary works by Muslim women writers. The course will begin with an exploration of key debates about women's agency and freedom, the Islamic headscarf, and Qur'anic hermeneutics. With this in mind, we will turn to the fine details of literature and poetry by Muslim women. How do these authors constitute their worlds? How are gendered subjectivities constructed? And how do the gender politics of literary texts relate to the broader political and historical contexts from which they emerge? Themes will include an introduction to Muslim poetesses and Arabic poetic genres, the rise of the novel in the Arabic speaking world, and Muslim women's literary production outside of the Middle East: from Senegal to South Asia, and beyond.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In this fully remote advanced course, we will explore Afrofuturism, a flourishing and exciting contemporary movement of writers, artists, musicians, and scholars who imagine, theorize, and represent other times (often, but not always, the future) and alternative forms of the human, along with outer spaces and other places wherein Black people are centered. We will closely read, listen to, and view key Afrofuturist texts, including short stories by Samuel Delany, a novel by Octavia Butler, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer “emotion picture,” and Wangechi Mutu’s visual art, among other texts. We will also read scholarship and theory relevant to the movement, including queer theory and posthuman theory, along with definitions and theorizations of Afrofuturism. Course requirements include: brief written responses to the texts, an essay of 5-7 pages, a presentation, and a final project. This course fulfills the English major requirement of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color. It has a prerequisite of a 100-level English literature course.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This seminar will provide a workshop environment for advanced students with clearly defined projects in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama or a combination of genres. The seminar will center initially on a group of shared readings that elucidate elements of the creative process and then turn to the work produced by class members. Through the presentation of new and revised work, and the critiquing of work-in-progress, each student will develop a significant body of writing as well as the critical skills necessary to analyze the work of others. Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor required. Capstone courses are intended to be a culminating experience for the major. Students who enroll in the course will be required to meet with the instructor via Zoom two weeks before the start of the course to discuss the course’s format and their creative projects.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

Reading Plays: Latinx and Latin American Theater guides students in close readings of dramatic literature, in particular of plays that are typically left out of the traditional theatrical canon. This edition of the course will focus on texts by Latinx and Latin American playwrights. Students will learn about the socio-historical context of each play, and in-class exercises will introduce them to the foundation of script analysis: they will examine the play’s given circumstances, dialogue, dramatic action, characters, and style. Students will read a new play every week; examples of titles the course may explore are: Information for Foreigners (Griselda Gambarro, Argentina); Symphony Dream (Diogo Liberano, Brazil); Death and the Maiden (Ariel Dorfman, Chile); Fefu and her Friends (Maria Irene Fornes, Cuba/United States); The Sanchez Huerta Girl Killed Herself (Claudia Ríos, Mexico); Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru); Marisol (José Rivera, United States/Puerto Rico). Texts are in translation, if desired the instructor may be able provide a copy of Latin American plays in either Portuguese or Spanish. Assignments include weekly in-class writing exercises and short critical papers.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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:
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

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 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:

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

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 approaches the dynamic field of publishing, from acquisitions of literary titles to their entrance into the marketplace, from the writer's hands to the editor's desk to the reader's library. With explorations into the history of the book, new technologies, and the vibrant literary scene in the Twin Cities and beyond, this course illuminates the complex realities of how literature meets our culture.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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.

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.

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