Alex Harrington ’19
Time flies at Macalester, especially when you’re having fun (and an English major). As another semester draws to a close, a brave new class of senior English majors take the plunge into their capstone projects. Whether you are anxiously awaiting your own capstone experience, or curious to relive it, The Words has the inside scoop on all things capstone.
Every semester, the English department offers two capstone classes: one for students on the creative writing track and one for those on the literature track. This semester, the courses were taught and designed by Professor Marlon James and Professor Amy Elkins, respectively.
Traditionally, the creative writing capstone is an intensive workshop experience, sometimes focusing on a particular genre (a past example includes Novella, offered last spring by Professor Peter Bognanni). Students craft their own body of creative writing with critical support from the professor and the class. Professor Marlon James, according to the class description, adheres to this design, but encourages students to “bring the genre (or total disregard for it).” In the course description, Professor James continues, “one of the great benefits of Projects In Creative Writing will be its LACK of focus,” because, “learning alongside someone doing something completely different is the POINT.”
The Words’s own Spencer Brownstein ’18 is a member of Professor James’s capstone class. He said of the structure, “The majority of time in each class period is dedicated to individuals and their projects. Each person gets about a half hour in the spotlight, with another half hour at the beginning of each class dedicated to a mini lecture/conversation.” Topics of conversation have included writing action sequences, beginning and ending a story, and writing antagonists. Brownstein noted that class format is especially convenient for his own project, which is episodic installments of the first season of an “animated adventure series for young adults, heavily influenced by Avatar: The Last Airbender and the standard anime canon.” The project, self-described by Brownstein as “super nerdy,” is “also meant as subtle social commentary about mixed race identity somewhat reflecting on [his] own experiences as a half-Asian-half-white-person.”
The literature track capstone focuses on a new topic of in-depth scholarly research every semester. This semester, Professor Amy Elkins teaches on Virginia Woolf: Film, Theory, Media. Professor Elkins told The Words,
This course emerged from a longstanding passion for Virginia Woolf’s prose and an equally longstanding fascination with how her literary genius, iconic feminism, and cultural celebrity continue to circulate in the 21st century. In talking with rising seniors last year, I noticed that several of them had an interest in film and critical theory, and I saw an opportunity to expand the Woolf canon across media. Virginia Woolf: Film, Theory, Media is a course that embeds four major works by Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Three Guineas) in a range of more-and-less direct responses to Virginia Woolf. —Professor Amy Elkins
Preparing the syllabus, Professor Elkins made sure to include “texts and ideas that speak to students’ personal scholarly commitments but that also provide enough diverse material to challenge and deepen their thinking about their projects.”
Therese Deslippe ’18 said she has “loved learning about Virginia Woolf,” and “Professor Elkins is so passionate about her that it rubs off on me.” Deslippe’s project focuses on “non-normative genders and how that impacts the institution of family in literature.” She said that because of the course she feels, “comfortable tackling big issues like queer theory” where she might not have before. Deslippe continued to say, “I feel like I can rely on my classmates and my professor kind of like we’re all a team.”
The course has impacted students not only in structure, but content as well. Deslippe uses Woolf’s Orlando in her project. Samuel Dembling ’18, another student in the course, compares “Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, with NW, a novel by Zadie Smith.” Dembling argues that while both books “offer panoramic portraits of social life in London . . . at dramatically different points in the city’s history . . . both wrestle with the question of what it means to belong to a community—one that is both local and global—and that both draw on modernist narrative techniques in order to help answer this question.”
If studying Virginia Woolf this way sounds appealing to you, not to worry! Professor Amy Elkins is developing a film adaptation class called Virginia Woolf and Film that she hopes to teach next year. Congratulations from The Words to all English majors who completed their capstones this semester!