Class Schedules

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In this discussion-based first-year course, we will study how literature represents extreme human experiences. As we read a wide range of texts, we will ask ourselves aesthetic, political, and ethical questions: Must literary form stretch itself to represent joy or misery? How can an author help us to understand the end of a world or of a people? Must writers invent new forms when faced with unprecedented traumas? Can apparently opposed extremes, such as joy and misery, have common sources? How might utopia become dystopia? How can we imagine environmental apocalypse so as to avoid causing it? How might the current political climate in the U.S. contribute to our concern with the extreme and its representation? We will read primarily fiction, but also poetry and nonfiction to investigate whether other genres and literary modes work differently at, and with, the extreme. We will also view films and listen to music to discover whether other media may offer alternative, and possibly better, ways to represent ecstasy and apocalypse, joy and misery. Texts, among others, that we will study: The Road, A Handmaid’s Tale, Herland, Life on Mars, and Silent Spring.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How would our understanding of early modern drama change if we paid a little less attention to “Shakespeare” and a little more to “Shakespeare and company”? In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, collaborative writing was common. Adaptations and sequels were popular. Few playwrights operated in a vacuum. This course focuses on the collaborative, creative, and competitive processes behind early modern playwriting. We’ll investigate the emergence of “taste,” “authorship,” and “imagined communities” in post-Reformation England and ask questions such as: Who patronized the companies? What is the difference between a “public” and “private” theater? Who attended plays? What did audiences enjoy seeing? How did playwrights actively shape audiences’ political, religious, or social hopes and fears? For possible answers, we’ll examine the careers and works of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, John Webster, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, William Rowley, and Anonymous. Class will attend at least one theater production in the Twin Cities.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

An introduction to the study of poetry. Topics and methods vary, but all sections emphasize techniques of close reading, critical inquiry, and engaged communication fundamental to the discipline of literary studies. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or in its web page for the content of individual courses and sections.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this class, we'll enter into a study of the novel by examining how authors have constructed their own fictional versions of pop stars over the years, with an eye towards discussing how these imaginary pop stars reflect and/or subvert the cultural contexts in which they were created. We'll look both at novels that imagine pop stars from the ground up, and at novels that fictionalize real-life stars, reading widely from authors such as Zadie Smith, E.T.A. Hoffman, Colette, and Marlon James. We'll ask what exactly constitutes a pop star, and examine how the novel form has evolved alongside historical and contemporary ideas about fame.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This introduction to the study of the novel pays special attention to the genre's history and to the cultural and political significance of individual texts. Authors and texts will vary according to instructor, but all sections will consider the development of the novel across time, include a range of author identities and styles, and provide instruction in intensive close reading and literary analysis. Consult the detailed course description in the English department or on its web page for the content of individual courses and sections.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will focus on the basic elements of creative writing. You will be asked to read and discuss work by major writers, to critique each other’s work, and to write multiple drafts of original works of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout the semester our focus will be on helping you to discover and nurture your creative voice, and then express that voice with force and conviction. Authors under consideration will include the Grimm Brothers, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, and Layli Long Soldier. All literary genres—sonnets, slam poems, personal essays, narrative podcasts, kitchen sink realism, and intergalactic space operas—are welcome here.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing, whether in the form of a story, a poem, or a late-night email begging your professor for an extension, is always a creative act. Words arranged on a page create meaning, and in this class we will examine and practice the choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this mainly through the lens of poetry and fiction, writing and critiquing our own poems and stories and reading work by a wide range of writers including Ada Limón, Agha Shahid Ali, George Saunders, Carmen Maria Machado, and even JK Rowling. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel empowered in your creative work to a) Say what you mean to say, b) How you mean to say it, c) With the desired emotional impact.

General Education Requirements:

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 introductory English course, we will study an African American literary tradition from some of its earliest works to the present. We will study major genres, including slave narratives and poetry, and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. We will learn to use the tools and vocabulary of literary analysis in order to read closely, critically and appreciatively as we explore how African American writers have constructed individual and collective identities and have experimented with aesthetic form to produce new meanings. Themes of poetics and performance will organize and focus our study. Authors will include: Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, and Claudia Rankine, among others. Requirements include: an in-class oral presentation, a written response to each primary reading, two essays of about 5-7 pages (one of which must be revised), and a final project that will include a written component. This course will fulfill either the foundation course in literature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course surveys roughly 1000 years of English literature from Beowulf to Paradise Lost. What’s old, middle, and early modern English? What’s a lyric, epic, and romance? When did drama acquire its characteristic structure? How did epochal events like the invention of the printing press, the Reformation, the union of Scotland and England under James VI and I, and the English Civil War alter the nature and practice of writing and reading? In addition to the study of poetic and dramatic voice, form, context, we’ll explore the impact of medieval and early modern literature on modern notions of interiority, intersubjectivity, embodiment, gender, sexuality, and race. This course can satisfy either the Medieval or the Renaissance category in the pre-1900 requirement of the English major.

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

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

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

As the US tottered on the brink of its bloody Civil War, a small group of strange and visionary artists started a revolution. During the span of just five years, in one of history's most astonishing creative convergences, the most elegant, profane, unhinged, heart-wrenching, and  influential works of US literature were published. Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and Jacobs - together these artists produced a canon of literature that revealed both the demons and angels of our histories and futures. They invented a spiritual movement of unprecedented optimism at the same time that they despaired over what they had become. Everything that was written in the US afterwards would have to come to terms with the brilliant and disturbing achievements of this cluster of outsiders, mystics, and heroes. In this course we will read the landmark texts of this era from literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will focus in a variety of ways on the development of skills for writing poetry, building on the work done in ENGL 150. Depending on the instructor, it may approach the creative process through, for example, writing from models (traditional and contemporary), formal exercises (using both traditional and contemporary forms), or working with the poetry sequence (or other methodology selected by the instructor: see department postings for details). It will involve extensive readings and discussion of poetry in addition to regular poetry writing assignments. The course may be conducted to some extent in workshop format; the emphasis will be on continuing to develop writing skills. Course may be taken twice for credit, so long as it is with a different instructor. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

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

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This is a hybrid course that can count as a literature or Crafts elective: we’ll write both analytically and creatively, and class time will include both discussion and workshop. Each week, we’ll read 20th century poets, respond to them in verse, and consider how other 21st century poets do, too. We’ll imagine literary history as one long, lively conversation between colorful characters, full of shout-outs, clap-backs, and meaningful silences. This approach is particularly germane to 20th century US poetry, where citation became integral to the artform, and different artistic circles often overlapped. Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens once traded drunken insults in Key West. Adrienne Rich urged Elizabeth Bishop to write about being a gay woman, and Bishop urged Robert Lowell to stop airing his dirty laundry in poems. James Wright regularly pranked Robert Bly, and hung out with John Berryman at Macalester. We’ll not only listen in on these conversations, but join them ourselves. This class will welcome all skill levels and approaches—verse-o-phobes and verse-o-philes, artists and scholars alike. There’s no better way to learn to read or write poetry than by seeing how other poets have, forging movements like modernism and Confessionalism by speaking to (and stealing from) one another.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

“Kafkaesque” is a word that has become part of everyday vocabulary in innumerous languages, used by millions of people who might or not have ever read Kafka. Evidently, the work of this German-speaking Jewish author from Prague captured something about modern life that no word could express except one deriving from his own name. This is probably why ‘everybody knows’ the word and ‘nobody can explain’ it. To understand therefore the “Kafkaesque” is to understand at once Kafka’s work and modern life, at least as we know it since the early twentieth century. To do so, in this course we are going to read closely some of Kafka’s stories and excerpts from his novels, as well as some influential commentaries on both his work and the conditions of modernity. We shall also have the chance to see and compare adaptations of his work (including his diaries) in the media of graphic novel and film. All readings will be in English. The course requires no pre-knowledge and is appropriate for all level students. This is a core course toward the Critical Theory Concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A historical accident has led to the creation and use of ‘Indian’ in very different geographies—North America and South Asia. We will study what happens when these diverse cultural and political depictions of ‘Indian’ are juxtaposed. Through an intersection of gender with nation, race, class, and sexuality, we will discuss the connections between the concepts of native, ancient, and modern, nation and citizenship, hyphenated and hybrid identities, global cultural consumption, to name some issues. Writers included are Linda LeGarde Grover, Louise Erdrich, Shashi Deshpnde, and Arundhati Roy, among others.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course brings together discourses that have remained somewhat parallel and unrelated--Whiteness Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It is based on the premise that 'whiteness' as an academic/social framework stems from and is intertwined with social and political identity-based movements (feminist, critical race, etc.). In other words, studies of the intersection of gender, race, class, and nation initiated in the post-colonizing imagination seeks to shake up paradigms of power, and whiteness studies shares in this effort. This course explores where and how the notion of 'whiteness' converges and diverges from post-colonialism.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Travel, globalization, capitalism, class politics, feminism, liberalism, and the spread of democracy are typically associated with contemporary political moments. But they all gained strength in part through nineteenth-century rhetorics of race. This course will interrogate notions of race as they were being invented—exploring how they were popularized and used to dominate, how they failed, and how they were resisted in 19th-century Britain. We will read canonical and non-canonical texts, including works by writers of color, visual images, scientific theories, fiction, and non-fiction. Considering locations throughout the British empire, we will explore intersections of race with the history of British slavery, colonial settlement, gender politics, enfranchisement, war, and religion. The class will collaboratively produce a digital final project: a full scholarly edition—including appendices, annotations, and a scholarly introduction—of a nineteenth-century work written by a person of color. Course counts for 19th century British literature distribution requirement.

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. After you register for the class, I will ask you to tell me a little bit about your project via email. I will then assign texts tailored to your work and the work of others. The class will culminate in a presentation and a revised and finished project.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What is America? This introductory English course will interrogate that question by focusing on contemporary U.S. literature by writers of color and from other traditionally underrepresented groups. We will read Native American poetry, African-American detective novels, short stories by Vietnam vets, and plays about drug addiction. To expand our understanding of what literature can be, we will also discuss Beyonce's music videos, Ms. Marvel comics, the recent romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, and the immigration video game Papers, Please. Course requirements include two essays of about 5-7 pages each (one of which must be revised), and a final project that will include a written component. This course fulfills either the foundation course in literature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

We often take for granted a period of human life commonly called adolescence, the teenage years, or young adulthood, and yet we have a difficult time clearly defining—and living—this transitional stage in life. When does childhood end and adulthood begin? Legal, medical, psychological, and personal definitions of adolescence conflict. What are the defining traits, dangers, and expectations associated with it? How do we see ourselves in that stage of life, and how do others see us? How do race, gender, and sexuality affect how we experience young adulthood? To address these questions, we will explore early adulthood in literature across genres, from early modern drama to modern novels and poetry. Students may read work by Joyce Carol Oates, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gary Soto, among others. We will also focus on building academic writing skills.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What relationships exist between theater, current events, and the public? From the Renaissance requirement that all plays had to be vetted and approved by the royal court censor to the kerfuffle over the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton delivering an address directly to then-VP-elect Mike Pence in the audience, theater has always been political. It has been a means of offering public commentary, challenging or upholding norms, voicing a protest, or offering an alternative view that presents a world the writers would prefer to live in. In ENGL 136, we will read plays—both classic and modern—as literary texts and talk about the craft that went into their writing. We will also take field trips to see several plays at different theaters in Minneapolis and St. Paul; we will study theater reviews and write some of our own; we talk about technical aspects of productions (like lighting and costumes); and we will think, talk, and write about the relationship between the dramatic arts and current events. As part of our larger goal of putting theater in context, the "current" events we study will include Greek, Renaissance, and Victorian ideas about gender roles, 1950s McCarthyism, recent debates about the intentions of the founders who framed our Constitution, imperial exploration and exploitation of racial others, public debates about sexuality and identity, and many other issues.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course we will read some of the most popular novels ever written in the United States. They will be heart-wrenchingly beautiful, tear-jerkingly sad, gut-bustingly funny, and seriously weird. We will discuss love, death, the meaning of life, beauty, cruelty, freaks, war, and comedy.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Writing, whether in the form of a story, a poem, or a late-night email begging your professor for an extension, is always a creative act. Words arranged on a page create meaning, and in this class we will examine and practice the choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this mainly through the lens of poetry and fiction, writing and critiquing our own poems and stories and reading work by a wide range of writers including Ada Limón, Agha Shahid Ali, George Saunders, Carmen Maria Machado, and even JK Rowling. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel empowered in your creative work to a) Say what you mean to say, b) How you mean to say it, c) With the desired emotional impact. Note that this course must be completed at Macalester as a prerequisite for the further study of creative writing in the English Department.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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 will focus on the basic elements of creative writing. You will be asked to read and discuss work by major writers, to critique each other’s work, and to write multiple drafts of original works of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout the semester our focus will be on helping you to discover and nurture your creative voice, and then express that voice with force and conviction. Authors under consideration will include the Grimm Brothers, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, and Alison Bechdel. All literary genres—sonnets, slam poems, personal essays, narrative podcasts, kitchen sink realism, and intergalactic space operas—are welcome here. Also, please know that this course must be completed at Macalester as a prerequisite for the further study of creative writing in the English Department.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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 semester is that you’ll lose yourself entirely 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, 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

In this introductory English course, we will study an African American literary tradition from some of its earliest works in the 19th century to the present. We will study major genres and movements in that tradition, from slave narratives to slam poetry, and from the Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturism. We will learn to use the tools and vocabulary of literary analysis in order to read (or listen) closely, critically and appreciatively as we explore how African American writers have constructed individual and collective identities and have experimented with aesthetic form to produce new meanings—and even to imagine new forms of the human. Authors (and performers) include: Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Danez Smith, and Janelle Monáe, among others. Requirements include: an in-class oral presentation, a written response to each primary reading, two essays of about 5-7 pages (one of which must be revised), and a final project that will include a written component. This course will fulfill either the foundation course in literature requirement or the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In the early decades of the twentieth century, women writers recorded a rapidly changing, revolutionary world: WWI and WWII, the popular rise of feminism and the invention of birth control, increased travel and transportation, psychoanalysis and trauma studies, new technologies such as snapshot photography and cinema, the experimental avant-garde movement in art, and new ideas about architecture and domestic space. Most importantly, they pushed the boundaries of the literary establishment, championing new ways of understanding race, gender, human sexuality, and equal rights for women. In this course, you will read works by modernist women writers alongside groundbreaking theories of feminist embodiment. In addition to studying texts by women such as Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, Anaïs Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Bowen, we will study other modernist art forms and take a class trip the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

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. The spring 2019 offering of this course counts for the writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an introduction to the interdiscipline of literature and human rights. We will read a series of beautiful and emotionally wrenching novels, treating them simultaneously as aesthetic artifacts and case studies in human rights. We will discuss the urgent political questions and philosophical paradoxes that define human rights, paying special attention to theories of trauma, race, empathy, evil, gender, disability, torture, genocide, and slavery. We will seek to better understand how spectators of suffering develop—or fail to develop—empathy for strangers by also examining how they can so palpably feel for the dreams, desires, and dignity of fictional persons. In The Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney describes the tyrant Alexander Pherӕus, “from whose eyes a tragedy well made and represented drew abundance of tears; who without all pity had murdered infinite numbers, and some of his own blood, so as he that was not ashamed to make matters for tragedies, yet could not resist the sweet violence of a tragedy.” What is the line that separates those who are merely moved from those who are moved to act? Authors will include Julia Alvarez, John Edgar Wideman, Chris Abani, Chang-rae Lee, Dave Eggers, Ted Chiang, Sophocles, Louise Erdrich, Thomas Glave, Colson Whitehead, Ursula Le Guin, Richard Powers, and Edwidge Danticat. This course fills the Framework requirement for the Concentration in Human Rights and Humanitarianism.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

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. This course fulfills the 18th/19th century literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What is home? What place can we call it home? Who has the right to have a home? Does this right apply to all life—humans, birds, animals, plants, rivers and mountains? What does home mean to people and all life in transit: migrants, immigrants, asylum-seekers, war, economic and environmental refugees? Should we apply these questions to butterflies, birds, fish, caribous, elephants, plants, and planet earth alike? How is migration related to the instincts of survival? How is it related/situated in space, location, cartography, maps, hippocampus, memory, language, poetry, stories? In this workshop, we’ll explore the concept of Home, in transit and permanent, physical and spiritual, historical and present, biological and linguistic, hippocampus and poetry, memory and story... We’ll read classic and contemporary poetry on the theme of “Home and Migration,” from Odyssey, Shijing(Book of Songs), “Genesis” (Testament), to contemporary poets Sherman Alexies, Allison Hedgecoke, Patricia Smith, Tyehimba Jess, Eduardo Galeano, and Gary Snyder, and to books on The Origin and Evolution of Earth, and on natural and industrial disasters: Facing the Wave, A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami…Through the masters’ stories/poetry, we’ll find our own place called Home, and write our own story of home, migration and transformation, in prose poetry, collage and lyrical poetic forms, a a chapbook (10-12 poems on the theme), or for returning poets, as a book manuscript.

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

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 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:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

The quote, “plays are meant to be seen, not read” means that playwrights must write to create an experience for their audience. This class is focused on the fundamentals of developing a play, while also learning how to take full advantage of theatrical elements that can help enhance their story on stage. Students will read a variety of new and contemporary plays with different storytelling techniques that embrace the unlimited possibilities of theatricality, and exemplify why we write for the stage. In this course students will develop a “playwriting toolkit” while exploring their artistic interests through a series of time-bound conventions: the 1-minute, 5-minute, 10-minute, and ultimately one-act form. In-class exercises and prompts, and small-group workshopping and reading will challenge writers' development. A mid-term and final play reading series will allow students to hear their work read in a supportive public setting.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Taught by writer and journalist Stephen Smith (Executive Editor and Host of APM Reports, the national documentary series from American Public Media). This course will focus on creating vivid, economical prose as a foundation for nonfiction writing. The fundamental elements of narrative journalism will be explored. Students will do research and interviews for print journalism pieces. Students will write frequently, will edit each other, and will receive detailed suggestions on their writing from the instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What we now call Romanticism—that brief explosion of literature, culture, and politics that began with the 1789 French Revolution and more or less ended in the mid-1820s—may well be the most momentous period in British literary history. A wide range of political movements familiar to us today find their genesis in these few tumultuous decades, including radicalism, anarchism, abolitionism, nonviolent resistance, women’s rights, and animal rights. Arguably, a number of our contemporary ideas about literature and the arts emerged during this time as well, as did many of the frameworks through which we understand our own possibilities for social change. In this course we’ll study the literature of the Romantic period and consider how its political projects are related to its revolutions in poetics and aesthetics. We’ll be interested in how writers reimagine the French Revolution’s failed promises of liberté, égalité, fraternité, and justice, particularly in light of the persistence of slavery, patriarchy, and class-based inequality. Rather than taking these political concepts as ahistorical ideals to which we should continue to aspire, however, we’ll inspect how exactly they’re constructed in Romantic texts and—with the help of poststructuralist, feminist, and Afro-pessimist theorists—query their contradictions as well as their broader functions and implications. We’ll also be especially interested in how Romantic literary works that might appear to have little to do with politics nevertheless enact forms of resistance to things as they are and register a desire for things to be otherwise. To these ends, our course will approach Romanticism not only as a literary-historical period, but also as a poetics that defies historicization and as a resource for thinking through our own political present. Authors include Jane Austen, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth. We’ll also read theoretical works by Sara Ahmed, Jacques Derrida, Mary Favret, Sara Guyer, Saidiya Hartman, Barbara Johnson, Paul de Man, Marjorie Levinson, Tilottama Rajan, Rei Terada, and Frank B. Wilderson III. This course will fulfill the 18th/19th century literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A historically small area of Ireland—called the Pale—was held under British rule in the late-medieval period. To be “beyond the pale” is to cross over some invisible, often arbitrary, boundary, to be inconveniently and antisocially out of line. Many postcolonial Irish and Caribbean writers have been forced to exist beyond the pale politically and in terms of their access (or lack of it) to the literary establishment. This idiomatic connection to Ireland has a more concrete resonance in Jamaica, where the Irish are the second largest ethnic group after people of African descent, and many of Jamaica’s place names derive from Irish locations. Taking up these fascinating links, this course will explore the significance of Irish-Caribbean literary and cultural connections in visual art, dance (live Irish musicians and a céilí dance instructor will visit our class!), poetry, theatre, cine-essay documentary film, and fiction. We will ask what it means to be from a small island in a globalizing world by reading authors such as Claude McKay, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Marlon James, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, and Eavan Boland. This course will fulfill the literature by U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Fiction writer Eudora Welty once described place as “one of the lesser angels” of literary craft, but also considered it a fundamental “source of knowledge” and “a definer and a confiner of what I’m doing.” In this creative writing class, we’ll consider how a variety of texts—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film, graphic novels—rely on setting as an engine for storytelling, and use their insights to propel our own writing. Our inquiry into time, place, and space will range across forms and genres, encompassing realism, historical fiction, sci-fi, satire, elegy, paean, the personal essay and the travel narrative. Coursework will include regular reading responses, discussion leadership, and workshop pieces, one of which will be revised for the final portfolio. Intro to Creative Writing (ENGL 150) is a prerequisite. First-years and non-majors welcome.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

What, and how, can a musical subject contribute to a work of literature? How do the two artforms interact, where do they intersect, how do they illuminate, even change, one another? In this course, we will read and discuss the following novels, with an aim towards developing musical perspectives on them: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (1995); Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992); Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2002); Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry (2017); Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915); Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889); and Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899). We will also read short fiction by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Katherine Mansfield, Marguerite Duras, and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), as well as excerpts from works by David Mitchell and E. M. Forster.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

‘U-topia’ means ‘a place (topos) that doesn’t exist’ and ‘Eu-topia’ means ‘a good place.’ How do people of various gender identities envision a better state yet-to-be (utopia) as well as a fear of catastrophe or nightmare (dystopia)? This course investigates how women's literary writing from different parts of the world (Bangladeshi, British, African-American, Canadian, to name a few) produce visions of the present and the future, of the real and the imagined, beliefs about masculinity and femininity, socialist and capitalist philosophies, modernity, the environment (ecotopia), and various technologies including cybergenetics. Texts by Thomas More, Frantz Fanon, and Noam Chomsky are included. We will explore how these texts provide some ways to think about our gendered, racialized, and classed roles, and how we can think about MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the Million Man March, and Charlottesville, along with our own fantasies and realities of sociopolitical change.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this advanced course, we will study the longstanding tradition of African American women’s theory—that is a, body of thought that analyzes and challenges systemic U.S. oppressions while centering and valuing a wide range of black women’s perspectives and experiences. We will begin with 19th century contestations of notions of “ideal” womanhood and will extend our study into the 21st century, including theories of intersectionality and queer-of-color and black transgender theory. Authors may include: Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hills Collins, Kara Keeling, and Omise’eke Tinsley, among others. We will also consider art and music as black feminist theory, studying figures such as Wangechi Mutu and Janelle Monáe. Course requirements include: weekly 1-page responses to the reading, one essay of about 5 pages, one 1-hour presentation, and a substantial final individual project. This course fulfills the U.S. writers of color requirement for the English major.

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

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

When Sally Potter's film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando was released in 1992, it was heralded as a new cult classic: "This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetized. Throughout Ms. Potter's Orlando, as in Woolf's, there [is] a piercing kind of common sense and a joy that, because they are so rare these days in any medium, create their own kind of cinematic suspense and delightedly surprised laughter." Played by Tilda Swinton, Orlando—a genderqueer prince who lives for over 200 years—challenges audiences to consider the surrealism of high modernism alongside Woolf's own radical politics surrounding gender and sexuality. This exciting complexity runs through many of Woolf's literary works (including her own studies of early cinema) and their subsequent adaptations. In this class, we will read film and adaptation theory alongside literary works by Woolf. We will also watch movies from the early years of cinema, such as Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette films, in addition to more modern adaptations such as The Hours and Japanese animation.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

From Game of Thrones and Marco Polo to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, many popular TV shows and movie franchises draw on fantasies of the medieval past. The “medieval” often conjures images of a brutish and backwards time before we evolved into what we think of as a cultured, ethical present; while at the same time it offers us a world of welcome escape where magic, dragons, and wizards abound. This seminar will explore popular medievalism in modern media and their literary origins in the medieval period. In the first half of the course, we will read medieval romance and travel literature that showcase global perspectives in conflict and exchange. We will ask, how do these texts represent and navigate difference? In what ways do they produce or critique cultural exoticism and hierarchies of racial, ethnic, and religious identities? We will turn to modern media and examine the use of the “medieval” in the geopolitics and cultural conceptions of our own time. In what ways, for example, does the Netflix Marco Polo series rely on a medieval past to reinscribe orientalist attitudes in the present? This course will fulfill the medieval literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

When is writing an act of resistance? In what ways can we participate in protest, change, and social movements as writers? And, once committed, how do we craft work that is both polemical and poetical, artful and activist? In this creative writing class, we will consider how texts in different genres—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film—engage with political struggle, and use their insights to guide our own writing. Coursework will include regular reading responses, discussion leadership, and two workshop pieces, one of which will be revised for the final portfolio. Likely texts include Spike Lee, Carmen Maria Machado, Danez Smith, Maggie Nelson, Valeria Luiselli, and Solmaz Sharif. Intro to Creative Writing (ENGL 150) is a prerequisite. First-years and non-majors enthusiastically welcomed.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

When we think of travel writing, we most often think of tourism: happy vacationers on sandy beaches. But of course the movements of people around the globe are not always entirely voluntary, nor have they always been benign. This course considers travel broadly—from the luxuries of tourism to the desperation that can led to emigration—and in terms of the hierarchies and technologies that have enabled/forced people to move around the globe. It opens with a deep dive into nineteenth-century travels and a range of archival documents: guide books, letters, travel diaries, commissioned travel narratives, short stories, cultural histories, and military accounts. Contemporary scholars and theorists offer useful lenses for interrogating the writings and perspectives of often-colonizing travelers. We also tackle the meta-questions of the value of doing such study: why do we read historical/literary documents, and what does reading do to/for us? How does reading affect what we do to/for/with others? As we explore our relationship to literature and the humanities more generally, one important goal of this course is to help you articulate what you are taking away from your literature major and, as a consequence, what you are bringing into the world. In the final third of the semester, you will use these theoretical frameworks—both about travel and about the value of humanities study—to shape individual research projects on travel/migration. These may consider historical or contemporary texts, including recent discussions about immigration in US or British contexts, and will produce analyses for which one explicit goal will be thinking about how the past informs our understanding of the present, of nationality, and of the relationship between the self and the other.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This first-year course will focus on the basic elements of creative writing. You will be asked to read and discuss work by major writers, to critique each other’s work, and to write multiple drafts of original works of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout the semester our focus will be on helping you to discover and nurture your creative voice, and then express that voice with force and conviction. Authors under consideration will include the Grimm Brothers, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, and Alison Bechdel. All literary genres—sonnets, slam poems, personal essays, narrative podcasts, kitchen sink realism, and intergalactic space operas—are welcome here. Also, please know that this course must be completed at Macalester as a prerequisite for the further study of creative writing in the English Department.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

As the US tottered on the brink of its bloody Civil War, a small group of strange and visionary artists started a revolution. During the span of just five years, in one of history’s most astonishing creative convergences, the most elegant, profane, unhinged, heart-wrenching, and influential works of US literature were published. Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and Jacobs – together these artists produced a canon of literature that revealed both the demons and angels of our histories and futures. They invented a spiritual movement of unprecedented optimism at the same time that they despaired over what they had become. Everything that was written in the US afterwards would have to come to terms with the brilliant and disturbing achievements of this cluster of outsiders, mystics, and heroes. In this course we will read the landmark texts of this era from literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this creative writing workshop course, students will write an original short story in prose and then re-vision that work into a variety of visual media, such as photography, comics, and film. No artistic or technical skills required--just a willingness to try new things and experiment with form. Readings may include selections from the Grimm Brothers, "Calvin and Hobbes," Kara Walker's art installations, the work of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, and Barry Jenkins's "Moonlight." Prerequisite: ENGL 150 taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This capstone course for the Literature Path is the culminating academic experience of the major. The course consists of three interlocking objectives. The first goal is to provide students with the opportunity to develop an original research project that reflects their deepest aesthetic interests and ethical commitments. Working closely with a faculty member and a small group of peers, students will develop projects that display rigorous literary scholarship and methodological inventiveness. The second goal is to provide instruction in advanced methods of research by studying influential critical approaches from the early twentieth century to the present. Specific theories and methods will be determined in consultation with the instructor. Past courses have emphasized psychoanalysis, post-Marxist criticism, gender, queer, and feminist theory, phenomenology, critical race theory, black feminist theory, post-colonial criticism, poetics, law and human rights, and aesthetics. The final goal is to train students to become advocates of their research agenda. Students will learn to lecture and lead discussion on relevant readings and to share their research with the wider intellectual community in a form that reflects the spirit of the project. Prerequisite(s): One prior English course numbered in the 100s (excluding 101 or 150), plus one literature course at the 200- or 300- level.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

All your writing for the past three years has lead you to this point. You have written the short story, several flash fictions, or maybe taken a stab at the novella. Now is the time to cap your literary life on a big note, and go for a full length work of fiction. Move beyond focus to scope; move beyond the short narrative to a piece 50,000 words or more. Can it be done in 15 weeks? Some have done it in four. Some were even good. First we will absorb all that Kazuo Ishiguro teaches us about having a “crash month.” Then we will explore writers who have pulled off great novels in a short time (Hint: these novels are usually short). We will look at novels such of Beasts Of No Nation, and The Lover that manage both brevity and scope. How do we get to page 2? What is expected of the first ten pages? How do we make it past page 100? And how do we get there without being intimidated by the whole task? How do we extend conflict? Whose point of view is best? Should it be science fiction, social realism or neither? How do you balance reveal and conceal, complication and tension, while still giving your story muscle? This is an Advanced Writers Workshop, which means all the time will be spent reading and writing. We will present new and revised work, critique and encourage, and more than anything else work towards that moment where all that’s left to write is THE END.*Yes the semester is 14 weeks, but as I expect that you will have a clearly defined project, a synopsis and the first six pages, will be due the week BEFORE class begins.Prerequisite: ENGL 150, Introduction to Creative Writing, taken at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials