ENGL 105-01 |
Identities and Differences in U.S. Literature: Introduction to Asian American Literature |
Days: MTWRF
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Time: 08:00 am-09:15 am
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Room: HUM 217
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Instructor: Michael Prior
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Avail./Max.: Closed -1 / 20
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Details
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
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ENGL 150-01 |
Introduction to Creative Writing |
Days: MTWRF
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Time: 03:15 pm-04:30 pm
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Room: MAIN 003
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Instructor: Rachel Gold
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Avail./Max.: Closed 0 / 16
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Details
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
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ENGL 150-02 |
Introduction to Creative Writing |
Days: MTWR
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Time: 07:00 pm-08:45 pm
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Room: MAIN 003
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Instructor: Emma Torzs
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Avail./Max.: Closed 1 / 16
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Details
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
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ENGL 150-03 |
Introduction to Creative Writing |
Days: MTWRF
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Time: 01:45 pm-03:00 pm
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Room: MAIN 002
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Instructor: Melissa Cundieff
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Avail./Max.: Closed 1 / 18
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Details
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
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ENGL 150-07 |
Introduction to Creative Writing |
Days: MTWRF
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Time: 09:30 am-10:45 am
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Room: OLRI 300
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Instructor: Melissa Cundieff
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Avail./Max.: Closed 2 / 18
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Details
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
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ENGL 194-01 |
Once Upon a Crime |
Days: MTWRF
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Time: 09:30 am-10:45 am
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Room: MAIN 003
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Instructor: Penelope Geng
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Avail./Max.: Closed 0 / 22
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Details
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
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ENGL 208-01 |
Literary Publishing |
Days: MTWR
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Time: 08:00 pm-09:45 pm
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Room: MAIN 011
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Instructor: Steven Woodward
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Avail./Max.: 3 / 20
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Details
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
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ENGL 225-01 |
Musical Fictions |
Days: MTWRF
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Time: 01:45 pm-03:00 pm
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Room: MUSIC 113
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Instructor: Mark Mazullo
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Avail./Max.: Closed 0 / 16
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*Cross-listed with MUSI 225-01*
Details
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
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ENGL 275-01 |
African American Literature to 1900 |
Days: MTWRF
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Time: 01:45 pm-03:00 pm
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Room: OLRI 170
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Instructor: Daylanne English
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Avail./Max.: Closed 2 / 20
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Details
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
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ENGL 282-01 |
The Crafts of Writing: Creative Nonfiction |
Days: MTWR
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Time: 08:00 pm-09:45 pm
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Room: MAIN 002
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Instructor: Sally Franson
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Avail./Max.: Closed 2 / 16
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Details
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
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ENGL 285-01 |
Playwriting |
Days: MTWR
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Time: 07:00 pm-08:45 pm
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Room: THEATR 202
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Instructor: Miranda Hall
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Avail./Max.: Closed 1 / 12
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*Cross-listed with THDA 242-01*
Details
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
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ENGL 294-01 |
Crafts of Writing: Imitations/Influences |
Days: M W F
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Time: 11:00 am-01:30 pm
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Room: MAIN 003
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Instructor: Emma Torzs
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Avail./Max.: Closed 0 / 16
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Details
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
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ENGL 294-02 |
Down the Rabbit Hole |
Days: MTWRF
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Time: 09:30 am-10:45 am
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Room: MARKIM DAVIS
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Instructor: Andrea Kaston Tange
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Avail./Max.: Closed 0 / 20
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Details
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
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ENGL 384-01 |
Langston Hughes: Global Writer |
Days: M W F
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Time: 11:00 am-01:30 pm
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Room: CARN 404
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Instructor: David Moore
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Avail./Max.: Closed 2 / 20
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*Cross-listed with AMST 384-01 and INTL 384-01*
Details
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
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ENGL 386-01 |
From Literature to Film: Queer Muses in Film |
Days: M W F
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Time: 11:00 am-01:30 pm
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Room: MAIN 009
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Instructor: Amy Elkins
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Avail./Max.: 5 / 20
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*Cross-listed with WGSS 394-01*
Details
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
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ENGL 401-01 |
Projects in Literary Research |
Days: M W F
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Time: 11:00 am-01:30 pm
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Room: MAIN 011
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Instructor: Penelope Geng
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Avail./Max.: Closed 1 / 13
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Details
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
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