Class Schedules

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this discussion-based first-year course, we will study how literature represents extreme human experiences, both joyful and miserable. As we closely read a wide range of works, we will ask ourselves aesthetic and ethical questions: Must literary form stretch to represent the extreme? Must artists, musicians, and writers invent new forms when faced with unprecedented traumas, including pandemic and climate change? How might literature help us to understand the end of a world, or a people, or a way of life? Might literature also help us imagine a future in these seemingly apocalyptic times? How might it offer us understanding and solace, even joy, in the present? We will read primarily fiction, along with poetry, nonfiction and a graphic narrative, to investigate whether other genres and modes work differently at, and with, the extreme. We will also view films and listen to music to discover whether other media may offer alternative, and possibly better, ways to represent ecstasy and apocalypse. Texts, among others, may include: A Handmaid’s Tale, MAUS, Life on Mars, Parable of the Talents, The Book of Delights, and Silent Spring.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will explore and develop the foundational skills of creative writing. We will hone our craft and build a respectful writing community through a series of creative exercises, close reading assignments, and workshops, where we will have the opportunity to share and receive feedback on our own drafts. Over the semester, we will read and discuss poems, stories, and creative nonfiction from a diverse group of published authors, focusing on what we might learn from their approaches to the page, while asking how, among so many unique voices, we might cultivate our own.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course we will dive right into the study of creative writing by reading and writing poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and personal essays. We will study how published authors craft their pieces, how they convey sensation and emotion, and how they artfully tell a story. Along the way, you’ll try your hand at each literary form we study. This is the basic template you can expect on a day-to-day basis. But, beyond this relatively simple pattern, what I hope will happen this term is that you’ll lose yourself to the daring act of creating literature. I hope you’ll disappear into what John Gardener calls the “vivid and continuous dream.” I hope you’ll use your growing knowledge of writing technique and literary history to say something fearless and artful about the world around you. And I hope you will see that what you write matters. Great creative writing aspires to more than just a pleasant diversion from life. At its best, it directly engages with life and even tries to change it. We look to stories, poems, and essays to give us an experience in language that we’ve never had before, to deepen our knowledge of the world, and to allow us into the hearts and minds of others. I hope this semester will be a window into that experience for you.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing can be a terrifying, vulnerable act. Whether we’re investigating our own lives or digging into the depths of a character, writing well requires risk. In this course, we will create and explore through poetry, fiction, and personal essays. We will learn to get lost, to ask the hardest questions. The first half of the semester will focus on generative experiments. We’ll play with different ways of approaching the page and the writing process. We might write one line a day or try to write an entire story in an hour. The second half of the semester, we’ll learn to revise and offer feedback. Editing and redrafting can lead to unexpected awakenings. Often in revising work, we also revise how we see ourselves and our world. We will begin workshopping with the aim of pushing each other to ask deeper questions and to honor and strengthen the heart of a piece. You will leave this class with a stack of drafts and hopefully a better sense of yourself as a person and as a writer.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing, whether in the form of a story, a poem, or a late-night email begging your professor for an extension, is always a creative act. Words arranged on a page create meaning, and in this class we will examine and practice certain authorial choices that go into creative meaning-making. We will do this mainly through the lenses of poetry and fiction, reading widely and carefully with an eye to explore what choices the authors make, and to what end. Essentially, we will be asking over and over what makes a reader feel, experience, and understand. By the end of the semester I hope you'll feel confident with your new toolbox of tricks n skills, and empowered in your creative work to a) Say what you mean to say, b) How you mean to say it, c) With the desired emotional impact.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course is an introduction to the writing of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We will use a variety of exercises, assignments, and readings to help students become comfortable as writers of short stories, personal essays, poetry, memoir, and literary journalism. We will workshop each other’s writing in a supportive, constructively critical manner.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

J.R.R. Tolkien had a “secret vice”: creating imaginary languages based on medieval languages. Come learn how Tolkien drew on the Welsh language and medieval Welsh literature to craft the world of Middle-Earth and the language of the Elves. As we read our way through medieval Wales, we will encounter sorcerer-bards, goddesses, magical treasures, and mysterious creatures (who are rarely what they seem). Studying the basics of the Welsh language will allow us to be enchanted by the strange and poignant stories of the Mabinogion, the Book of Taliesin, and the Book of Aneirin. By the end of the course, we will see why Tolkien believed Welsh to be one of the most beautiful languages in the world.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

To the average reader, the field of publishing can seem somewhat opaque. How does a novel go from scribbled notes to finished paperback? What goes into editing, printing, and marketing a short story collection? This course will shed light on this exciting field through a combination of readings, talks with publishing professionals, in-class discussion, and hands-on work. We will learn about publishing by tracing the literary work through the processes of acquisition, editing, production, marketing, and publicity, and into the hands of the reader. Additional topics will include recent trends in technology, book editing, book reviewing, and the roles of the literary agent, and the independent publisher. We will take advantage of the extraordinary publishing resources in the Twin Cities and beyond through guest speakers. Assignments will include writing query letters and catalog copy, presenting publisher profiles, editing a short story, and writing a final paper on publishing issues. This course is designed for readers who want to know how the book they’re holding got into their hands, for writers who want to know what happens when they send their manuscripts to publishers, and for those interested in publishing as a future career.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will study African American literature from the end of the 18th century to the turn of the 20th century, from Phillis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells. Themes of the course include: reading and writing as subversive acts, representation of gendered and classed experiences of Blackness, and literary production and innovation as agents of political and social change. We will also connect the crises surrounding Black citizenship in the United States, so often represented by African American writers before 1900, to the present, honoring these early writers’ ongoing legacy of national critique and Black solidarity. We will also foreground early African American literature as art, as an at once aesthetic and political project, reading it closely and appreciatively. Requirements include: brief written responses to the readings, a presentation, a medium-length essay and a revision of it, and a final reflection essay. This course fulfills the English major requirement either of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color or a course on 19th-century American literature.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

When we watch movies and TV shows, it’s hard sometimes to remember how these works are actually born. Before the actors say a word, or the post production team adds that perfect shade of pink to the sunset, a film or television show lives solely on the page. It lives as a piece of writing created in the mind of a storyteller. No matter what happens later, it always begins as a reading experience. In this course, we will concentrate on every aspect of that initial and vital stage of creating visual stories. We will study produced scripts to see how they master visual storytelling, pitch perfect dialogue, and satisfying structure. While there is no paint-by-numbers formula for a perfect screenplay or teleplay, there is a constantly evolving form full of principles the greatest writers have relied on since the birth of these mediums. Throughout the semester we will study this form in depth then we will workshop your developing scripts with an eye toward making them ideal stories for the screen, both large and small.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, students engage in a series of playwriting exercises and read a wide variety of plays. They will read new and contemporary plays that employ different storytelling techniques (i.e., structure, character arcs, staging elements, etc.), embrace the unlimited possibilities of theatricality, and exemplify why we write for the stage. Students will develop a "playwriting toolkit" as they explore their artistic interests following the conventions of time-bound pieces: the 1-minute, 5-minute, 10-minute, and ultimately one-act form. In-class exercises and prompts, and small-group workshopping and reading will challenge each writer's individual development. A mid-term and final play reading series of one-acts will allow students to hear their work in a supportive public setting. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite(s): Coursework in Theater and Dance, or in creative writing is recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, students engage in a series of playwriting exercises and read a wide variety of plays. They will read new and contemporary plays that employ different storytelling techniques (i.e., structure, character arcs, staging elements, etc.), embrace the unlimited possibilities of theatricality, and exemplify why we write for the stage. Students will develop a "playwriting toolkit" as they explore their artistic interests following the conventions of time-bound pieces: the 1-minute, 5-minute, 10-minute, and ultimately one-act form. In-class exercises and prompts, and small-group workshopping and reading will challenge each writer's individual development. A mid-term and final play reading series of one-acts will allow students to hear their work in a supportive public setting. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite(s): Coursework in Theater and Dance, or in creative writing is recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This creative nonfiction course will focus on the elements of long-form narrative journalism, including both print and audio storytelling. Students will learn to write stories that are clear and compelling as well as factual and precise. They will study the differences between writing for the eye and the ear. Students will learn how to identify strong story ideas, conduct interviews and structure a narrative for maximum impact. They will also write frequently, edit each other, and receive detailed suggestions on their writing from the instructor. This course will be taught by audio journalist and Macalester alumnus Curtis Gilbert ’02. Curtis works for APM Reports, a national investigative reporting group based at American Public Media. He recently led a year-long collaboration between three news organizations that resulted in the seven-part podcast series Sent Away.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Videogames dominate entertainment culture. But like all popular forms of entertainment, they are often looked down upon as aesthetically superficial, intellectually uncomplicated, and somehow bad for you. They are “just pop culture.” Like Shakespeare was in his time. Like the novel was when it was invented. And like film and television shows were when they were invented. This course takes seriously the deep intellectual and aesthetic value of videogames and of videogame making. Videogames are expanding the possibilities and the borders of storytelling and narrative design. They are pushing the limits of coding wizardry. They have also become one of the most creative popular-cultural sites for experimenting with and understanding other minds and identities. In this class, students will work in interdisciplinary teams to bring world-building narrative techniques to an immersive visual setting while exploring technical challenges involved in programming and game development through hands-on projects. Fill out the interest survey to request permission: https://forms.gle/GH8YAJZ4hhkJqLe28. Prerequisite: COMP127 (COMP225 recommended)

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Where do our memories reside? Our collective memories, our shattered memories, our forgotten? How do we gather that which has been torn or forcefully buried? How do we hold memory or its absence in our language? This advanced poetry course will center on the movements of memory—how it haunts, fades, blurs, comforts, distorts; how it reaches for us, and how we reach back. We will read both prose (memoir and fiction) as well as poetry in order to write towards all that we can and cannot remember.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

A great detective story is arguably one of the most interactive of genres, as it pulls on the reader to step into the world of the mystery and try to solve it alongside the investigators who people the pages. This course traces evolutions in the genre, from 19th-century icons like Sherlock Holmes through early-20th-century hardboiled detectives and into very contemporary fiction. We’ll consider professional and amateur detectives, read authors as wide-ranging as Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Colson Whitehead, watch at least two films (including 1934’s The Thin Man, featuring the delightful Nick and Nora Charles), and read one novel in serial installments all semester long. We will explore how detective characters are rooted in the cultural moments of their creation, what kinds of fans different detectives produce, and read some short pieces about the genre by some its greatest writers. The course will emphasize the pleasures of reading (Cliffhangers! Clues! Misdirection!) and what we can learn from thinking hard about what is so satisfying about a great mystery, adeptly solved. Coursework will be wide-ranging and playful, and may include creative as well as critical assignments, or research filtered through the lens of detection.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Go into almost any bookstore and you’ll find a similar method of organizing books: by genre. Rows of romance novels in one corner, thick tomes of fantasy and science fiction in another, young adult fiction over by the children’s books. But how do booksellers, librarians, readers and writers determine what genre a piece of fiction falls into? In this class, we will read novels and short stories in five popular genres – literary realism, fantasy, science fiction, mystery/crime, and romance – while trying our own writerly hands at each of them. We’ll discuss expectations of culture, market, and readership, and journey through the histories and political implications of each category to understand the present state. Writers we study might include Toni Morrison, J.R.R. Tolkien, Octavia Butler, Miciah Johnson and more. Prerequisite of ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, we'll be reading poetry collections that navigate unexpected worlds--one in an imagined future where humanity has been taken over by octopuses, another in an imagined occupied territory where deafness is a form of dissent. Throughout the semester, we will be creating our own long-form poetry projects. We will borrow the tools of fiction, world-building, and playwriting in order to develop our own poems. This class is for writers hoping to bend the expectations of genre and create something altogether new. Prerequisite of ENGL 150.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Centuries before the advent of industrialized travel, the Silk Roads connected creators and consumers between China, West Africa, and Iceland. Travelers recorded their experiences and encounters in a range of literary forms and left their legacies imprinted in archaeological records. This course invites students to read along the Silk Roads, tracing medieval encounters made possible by these remarkable networks. Texts may include the Ibn Fadlan’s account of his encounter with the Rus, the Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels in Africa, Wu Cheng’en’s novel Journey to the West, Du Fu’s lyric poetry, Basho’s haiku, Marco Polo’s Description of the World, William of Rubruck’s Itinerary, John de Mandeville’s Travels, and the Saga of the Greenlanders. In addition, the class will incorporate studies of material culture, include local collections and artifacts of the exhibits Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads (Aga Khan Museum), Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa, (Aga Khan Museum), and Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shoes of the Sahara (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In times of revolution and repression, Soviet writers and artists turned their work into a forceful means of resistance; dissidents today draw inspiration from these courageous predecessors who risked their lives to speak. In this course, we will explore the literature, visual art, music, and films created in Russia and the surrounding region from the Soviet period into the present day. We start with the political and artistic revolutions in the final days of imperial Russia, then move through the eras of the bloody Bolshevik revolution, the repressive Stalinist regime, and the devastation of World War II. Next, we look at the cultural thaw of the 1960s, the new freedoms of the perestroika era, and the fall of the Soviet Union. We then turn our attention to contemporary Russia under Putin. We will examine cultural texts in their artistic, social, and political contexts, seeking to better understand Russia’s relationship with the West, the experience of ethnic minorities in the Soviet and post-Soviet period, and Russia’s history of authoritarianism, as well as the struggle against it. Studying culture produced in Russia and the region in the Soviet and post-Soviet period will help us to empathize with those who lived through that tumultuous era and kept creative expression alive in the midst of unimaginable hardships. We will also be attentive to the contemporary situation in the wake of Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which has changed global dynamics so profoundly. We will use our course materials to shed light on current events in the post-Soviet sphere, striving to understand how we got here and what hope there might be for the future. This course will include a group project with the aim of supporting refugees displaced by Russia’s war on Ukraine. All readings and discussion will be in English; no previous knowledge of Russian literature or history is required.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A great detective story is arguably one of the most interactive of genres, as it pulls on the reader to step into the world of the mystery and try to solve it alongside the investigators who people the pages. This course traces evolutions in the genre, from 19th-century icons like Sherlock Holmes through early-20th-century hardboiled detectives and into very contemporary fiction. We’ll consider professional and amateur detectives, read authors as wide-ranging as Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Colson Whitehead, watch at least two films (including 1934’s The Thin Man, featuring the delightful Nick and Nora Charles), and read one novel in serial installments all semester long. We will explore how detective characters are rooted in the cultural moments of their creation, what kinds of fans different detectives produce, and read some short pieces about the genre by some its greatest writers. The course will emphasize the pleasures of reading (Cliffhangers! Clues! Misdirection!) and what we can learn from thinking hard about what is so satisfying about a great mystery, adeptly solved. Coursework will be wide-ranging and playful, and may include creative as well as critical assignments, or research filtered through the lens of detection.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What makes a good story? Your answer to that question may depend on where you’re from, or when you were born, or the stories your grandmother heard when she was growing up. In this creative writing workshop course, we will explore narrative structures across a variety of time periods and cultures. Throughout, our goal as a class will be to expand our understanding of how stories can be told. By the end of the semester, every student will have written multiple drafts of two original works of short fiction.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

It is perhaps easiest to think of race in the nineteenth century in terms of the colonizing projects of empire. In fact, however, leisure travel, the growth of industrial capitalism and globalization, and new models of class hierarchies and notions of gender all gained strength in the nineteenth century in part through their intersections with rhetorics of race. This course will interrogate notions of race as they were being invented—exploring how they were popularized and used to dominate, how they failed, and how they were resisted in 19th-century Britain. We will read canonical and non-canonical texts, including works by writers of color, visual images, scientific theories, fiction, and non-fiction. Considering locations throughout the British empire, we will explore intersections of race with the history of British slavery, colonial settlement, gender politics, enfranchisement, war, and religion. The class will also produce a collaborative digital final project: a full scholarly edition—including appendices, annotations, and a scholarly introduction—of a nineteenth-century text by a writer of color, to be chosen by the class. (Prior years have taken on the first novel by a Bengali novelist to be written in English and a travel narrative by a Hindu Brahmin touring through England and France.) Course may count for the 18th & 19th century British literature requirement or the Writers of Color requirement on the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Language is magic: we can make noises at each other or make marks on a page and others can “see” what’s inside our minds! Language is even more magical when we consider its ability to do things: it can change people’s status (e.g. declaring someone a knight or husband/wife), harm others (e.g. using slurs), and turn literal falsehood into truths (e.g. metaphors or fiction) among others. In this class, you’ll be introduced to classic and contemporary topics surrounding language: how it is that words refer to objects, how context shapes meaning, how language and reality/thought are connected, and whether emoji and music are languages.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This capstone course has two fundamental goals. One: To help students work individually on a creative project of their own choosing, from the cultivation of an initial idea, to the further exploration of that idea through multiple drafts, and then finally to sending it out into the world as a “completed” project, which is to say a project that is “good enough for now.” Our second, equally important goal, is to work collectively to build a mutually supportive arts community dedicated to helping everyone achieve their best work.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this introductory course, we will study African American literature from its origins to the present. We will study major genres and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, The Black Arts Movement, and Afrofuturism. We will learn to use the tools of literary analysis in order to read closely, critically, appreciatively—and collectively. Themes of national critique, solidarity, and futurism will focus our study. Authors will include: David Walker, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Janelle Monáe, among others. Requirements include: brief written responses to the readings, one medium length essay and a revision of it, 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

In this introductory course, we will study African American literature from its origins to the present. We will study major genres and movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and Afrofuturism. We will learn to use the tools of literary analysis in order to read closely, critically, appreciatively—and collectively. Themes of prophesy, literary experimentation, and beauty will focus our study. Authors will include: David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Claudia Rankine, and Ross Gay. Requirements include: a presentation, brief written responses to the readings, one medium length essay and a revision of it, 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

The texts for this course investigate something that directly or indirectly connects everyone: what it means to leave a place, or one's home, or one's land, and to return to it, willingly or unwillingly. This idea is inherently open-ended because physical spaces are, of course, not our only means of departure and/or return--but also our politics, our genders, our relationships with power, and our very bodies. Revolution, too, surrounds us, on both larger and private scales, as does looking back on what once was, what caused that initial departure. We will read such novels as On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Vietnamese-born, diasporic poet and writer Ocean Vuong, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Korean-born adoptee by American parents and trans novelist Patrick Cottrell, Ceremony by Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, among others.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course we will dive right into the study of creative writing by reading and writing poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and personal essays. We will study how published authors craft their pieces, how they convey sensation and emotion, and how they artfully tell a story. Along the way, you’ll try your hand at each literary form we study. This is the basic template you can expect on a day-to-day basis. But, beyond this relatively simple pattern, what I hope will happen this term is that you’ll lose yourself to the daring act of creating literature. I hope you’ll disappear into what John Gardener calls the “vivid and continuous dream.” I hope you’ll use your growing knowledge of writing technique and literary history to say something fearless and artful about the world around you. And I hope you will see that what you write matters. Great creative writing aspires to more than just a pleasant diversion from life. At its best, it directly engages with life and even tries to change it. We look to stories, poems, and essays to give us an experience in language that we’ve never had before, to deepen our knowledge of the world, and to allow us into the hearts and minds of others. I hope this semester will be a window into that experience for you.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This workshop-based course focuses on reading and writing poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction to hone your skills with all forms of writing and increase the power of your creativity. In-class workshops will help you to discover and nurture your creative voice, and connect to others with passion and persuasion. Please note that this course must be completed as a PREREQUISITE for the further study of creative writing at Macalester.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Writing can be a terrifying, vulnerable act. Whether we’re investigating our own lives or digging into the depths of a character, writing well requires risk. In this course, we will create and explore through poetry, fiction, and personal essays. We will learn to get lost, to ask the hardest questions. The first half of the semester will focus on generative experiments. We’ll play with different ways of approaching the page and the writing process. We might write one line a day or try to write an entire story in an hour. The second half of the semester, we’ll learn to revise and offer feedback. Editing and redrafting can lead to unexpected awakenings. Often in revising work, we also revise how we see ourselves and our world. We will begin workshopping with the aim of pushing each other to ask deeper questions and to honor and strengthen the heart of a piece. You will leave this class with a stack of drafts and hopefully a better sense of yourself as a person and as a writer.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

How do our favorite stories compel us to read on? Why do some poems make us feel as if “the tops of our heads have been taken off,” as Dickinson once described? In this course, students will explore and articulate the specifics of what moves and excites them in fiction and poetry and develop their unique voice by writing their own stories and poems. We’ll read work by a diverse list of published authors and consider how to reimagine, repurpose, or even subvert the elements of craft that most intrigue us in their writing through responses and creative exercises. For class workshop, students will honor and encourage one another’s creative visions through attentive reading and discussion of peer writing in a supportive environment. At the conclusion of the semester, students will leave the class with a revised portfolio of the work they’re most proud of.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What is Old, Middle, and early modern English? Why do these differentiations matter to the craft of writing in Britain? How were premodern authors shaped by their own societies, and how have influential writers created social change? This course explores how major writers in Britain have used literary language to conceptualize the self against larger social and political phenomena. Starting with the career of Abbess Hilda, the mother of English literature, and ending with the career of Queen Elizabeth, the patron of Shakespeare, we will trace major developments in British literature. Along the way, we will focus on how women affected the arc of British literary history. Authors may include Bede, the Beowulf-poet, Marie de France, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Shakespeare, and Mary Sidney Herbert.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this survey course, we will trace an African American literary tradition from 1900 to the present. We will read a range of genres, including drama, poetry, nonfiction and fiction. Our study of this rich tradition will be organized by three themes: second sight, jazz, and joy, including the aesthetics, power, and political potentiality of joy. Our study will also be informed by activisms past and present. Among the authors we will study are: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, and Ross Gay. Requirements include: brief written responses to the readings, one expanded response paper, a medium-length essay and a revision of it, and a final reflection essay. This course fulfills the English major requirement of a course focused on literature by U.S. writers of color.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What does it mean to re-envision a draft? To birth three new poems out of one? In this course, we’ll focus on making and remaking. (As in: this is a class about revision but not the kind of revision where we tear things apart and “fix” what’s broken. Rather, we’ll be treating each draft as a portal, something that might guide us somewhere altogether new.) We’ll model our drafting and re-drafting processes off of unexpected sources such as collage and ecosystems. We’ll read texts that inspire our remaking. And we’ll craft a portfolio of poems in the process!

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

As memoirist and author Melissa Febos puts it: The narrator is never you, and the sooner we can start thinking of ourselves on the page that way, the better for our work. That character on the page is just this shaving off of the person that was within a very particular context, intermingled with bits of perspective from all the time since — it’s a very specific little cocktail of pieces of the self and memory and art … it’s a very weird thing. And then it’s frozen in the pages. With each essay and work of nonfiction we produce in this largely-workshop based class, the character we portray, the narrator we locate, is never stagnant, instead we are developing a persona, wrought from the experience of our vast selves and our vast experience. To that end, in this course, you will use the tools and stylistic elements of creative nonfiction, namely fragmentation, narrative, scene, point of view, speculation, and research to remix and retell all aspects of your experience and selfhood in a multiplicity of ways. I will ask that you focus on a particular time period or connected events, and through the course of the semester, you will reimagine and reify these events using different modes and techniques as modeled in the published works we read. Meanwhile, we will read Melissa Febos's Body Work: The Radical Work of Personal Narrative, which will aid our discussions and help us to better understand the difference between persona and the self.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In many ways, we are living in a golden age of fantasy fiction. Not only is the notoriously white, Western Europe-centric genre growing rapidly more diverse than ever before, but it’s also being incorporated into the mainstream literary conversation in unprecedented ways. It’s truly a magical time to be reading and writing fantasy! In this class, we’ll situate the modern concept of fantasy fiction in a historical and cultural context, and we’ll explore and practice on a craft level all the things that make fantasy unique: magic systems, worldbuilding, supernatural creatures, etc. We’ll look at sub-genres including epic fantasy, young adult, magic realism, and fairy tale retellings, and read authors such as NK Jemisin, Susanna Clarke, and Charlie Jane Anders. We’ll also welcome several established fantasy writers into the classroom to learn from them, and we may even play a little D&D… so come prepared to take fun seriously!

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In her article “If Fiction Changes the World, It’s Going to Be YA,” journalist Emily Temple states that young adult books are primed to do work for the social good because of their timeliness, their willingness to take on big political issues, and their wide readership. In the last few decades, the young adult genre has been growing in scope and in ambition, and much of it is being written by exciting new authors, closer to the age of their protagonists. In this class we will study some new and foundational texts of the genre, discussing subjects like depiction of mental illness, the political implications of fantasy novels, and the “We Need Diverse Books” campaign. Meanwhile, you will be working on your own YA projects, learning for yourself what makes these books tick. This course serves as a creative writing elective for the English major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this creative writing crafts course, students will read, discuss, and write their very own fanfic, which for the purposes of this class we’ll be defining as “stories set in a preexisting fictional universe.” Topics may include Sherlock Holmes retellings, Kirk/Spock romance zines, and Virgil’s extension of the Homeric epics. Like the world of fanfic at its best, this course is designed to create an inclusive and mutually supportive community of artistic expression. Prerequisite: ENGL 150 (Intro to Creative Writing).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Word for word, Emily Dickinson is the most powerful writer in the history of the English language. She is the King of All Media, the feature star in movies, television, radio, lawsuits and criminal investigations, novels, AI language models, cookbooks, museums, a video game, and just about every other possible platform of public fascination. Barring Shakespeare, no other English or American poet has been the focus of such fervid public devotion. What’s behind this cult of Dickinson? In our class you will find out. You will study Dickinson’s poems, which are teasingly fun, hair-raisingly creepy, romantically uplifting, existentially wrenching, philosophically staggering, and aesthetically gorgeous. You will also study Dickinson herself. Transformed into a mythical figure since her death in 1886, she has been used as a symbol to embody a range of bitterly conflicting cultural fantasies. To understand the history of Emily Dickinson is to understand some of the most painful—and liberating—ideological revolutions in modern US history. This course fulfills the c19th-American literature requirement for the English major.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Centuries before the advent of industrialized travel, the Silk Roads connected creators and consumers between China, West Africa, and Iceland. Travelers recorded their experiences and encounters in a range of literary forms and left their legacies imprinted in archaeological records. This course invites students to read along the Silk Roads, tracing medieval encounters made possible by these remarkable networks. Texts may include the Ibn Fadlan’s account of his encounter with the Rus, the Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels in Africa, Wu Cheng’en’s novel Journey to the West, Du Fu’s lyric poetry, Basho’s haiku, Marco Polo’s Description of the World, William of Rubruck’s Itinerary, John de Mandeville’s Travels, and the Saga of the Greenlanders. In addition, the class will incorporate studies of material culture, include local collections and artifacts of the exhibits Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads (Aga Khan Museum), Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa, (Aga Khan Museum), and Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shoes of the Sahara (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Calling all weirdos! Artists, dancers, musicians, actors — writers. This is a class for anyone who wants to learn to transmute artistic experiences into words. We will look at visual art, listen to music, and watch theatrical and dance performances, and in response, we’ll practice different modes of incorporating our reactions into our creative and critical writing. We’ll read fiction, poetry, personal essays, reviews, etc. and we’ll try our hands at each form, gaining a sense of what is involved in describing the color of a cello’s sound, the gestures of a dancing body, or the intangible emotions we feel when we stand in front of a painting. In a final project, students will choose an artistic form and a mode of response and develop a larger-scale piece of writing.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

A seminar bringing together questions in philosophy of literature and philosophy of race. In the first third of the class, we'll discuss the relationship between literary form and philosophy, and whether literature "tells the truth"; in the second third, we'll focus on the philosophy of race, looking at contemporary work on the metaphysics and phenomenology of race, and in the last third, we'll bring literature and race together by examining works such as Citizen, Interior Chinatown, and There, there.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines the nineteenth-century British novel through questions of gender, race, and nationality--specifically considering what constitutes a "lady" by various cultural/historical standards and how the construction of ideal femininity worked with and against ideals of masculinity in the period. None of the books we will read suggest all women are (or can be) ladies; nor are all of the men who populate them monsters. Seeking nuance in these terms, the course asks: How were nineteenth-century gender norms complicated by class and race, and what is the space between the ideal and the monstrous? How is a monstrous woman constructed differently than a monstrous man? What makes monstrosity redeemable or irredeemable? What if the world's monstrosities are not humans but made by them? Obviously, we could not have a course like this without a vampire novel (Carmilla), but we will also read a range of genres that enable us to talk about labor rights, domestic ideals, love, inheritance politics, colonial monstrosities, and even scifi feminst utopia ("Sultana's Dream"). We will tackle the problem of genre: what does it mean to have a course focused on "the novel," when nonwhite writers in the period worked predominantly in every other genre but long-form fiction? And we will consider those voices by including other short forms (a short story, a novella, and some non-fiction), plus some work by Nobel-winning Bengali author, Rabindranath Tagore. To simulate the Victorian reading experience, we will also consume one novel in small weekly installments all semester, following the sensational exploits of petite, blonde Lady Audley to the point where we ultimately discover her Secrets. Along the way, you'll get a taste of the Gothic (Wuthering Heights), the Condition-of-England novel (North and South), and colonial fantasy (She), among other things, exploring fictions weird, monstrous, funny, and fearless. This course satisfies the 18th/19th c British literature requirement on the English major. Prerequisite: one 100- or 200- level literature course.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course-a mixture of lecture, discussion, study of dramatic texts, writing exercises and in-class analysis of student writing-is intended to reinforce and build upon the skills developed in Playwriting. Topics will include dramatic structure, conflict, characterization, language/dialogue, as well as how to analyze your own work, give and receive feedback and techniques for rewriting. Students will engage in a rigorous development process which will culminate in the writing of a full-length play. Prerequisite(s): THDA 242 or ENGL 150, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials