|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
3.00 Credits
This course will explore the role of food, drink, and consumption in a wide range of literature spanning the 18th through 21st centuries. The course aims to whet students' appetites by introducing them to new and fruitful ways of engaging with texts that are inspired by critical perspectives and methodologies including cultural studies, feminism, and the growing interdisciplinary field of food studies. Reading assignments for the class will be "omnivorous," including material from many different genres including poetry, fairytales, cookbooks, novels, short stories, and film. Students will be encouraged to think critically about both the texts they read and foods they ingest, though the primary aim of the class is to equip students with the tools necessary to fully savor a rich variety of literary texts.
-
3.00 Credits
Life-writing is a capacious term that can be used to describe a variety of private and public statements about the self. Some of these are easily recognizable as artistic representations of subjectivity (for example, memoirs, diaries, letters, self-portraits) and some less so (for example, legal testimony, graphic novels, blogs, even medical forms have been read as part of the complex project of articulating subjectivity). This course will attend to a wide variety of forms of life-writing in order to trace shifting notions of what counts as a self and track the complex project of defining and representing subjectivity. A broad range of critical approaches to subjectivity and definitions of the autobiographical project will assist us as we attempt to map changing notions of the self. Many, but not all, of our primary materials will be drawn from the twentieth century, some from the current decade: texts may include selections of writings by Wordsworth and Rousseau, Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Virginia Woolf's Sketch of the Past, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, selections from Samuel Delany's The Motion of Light in Water, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, photography by Cindy Sherman, Jo Spence and others, self-portraits by Frieda Kahlo, considerations of Web projects, My Space sites, political and legal testimony or "witnessing," and other examples of autobiography "at work" will also be considered. Requirements: participation, short commentaries, and three essays: two around 5 pages, and one of eight to ten pages.
-
3.00 Credits
What we consider the "Modern Novel" is changing. This term no longer applies only to novels written in the United States and Western Europe from 1890-1940. Instead, studies of the Modern Novel are moving beyond nation; the Modern Novel is now being recognized as a global phenomenon. This is a new approach to Modernist studies and is one that is gaining momentum. In this course we will read some of the greatest Modern Novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will look at literary Modernism from an expanded time period (1857-1966) and from nations as disparate as the United States, Russia, the Sudan, and the Dominican Republic. Along the way we will discuss themes that are common to the study of the Modern Novel, such as psychoanalysis, colonialism and the role of the artist. We will ask ourselves questions, such as: Should literature from disparate countries be compared, or does this international comparison lessen or even ignore the significance of the national qualities in their writing? Should novels more that 100 years apart both be considered "Modern?" Should the Modern Novel have specific qualities, and what qualities should those be? Should texts only be read in their original language?
-
3.00 Credits
What does it mean to "pursue happiness?" Is happiness found in the fulfillment of passion, necessity, or in the rejection of both? Is it found in the acceptance of God's providence and the realization of salvation, or is happiness an escape from history and what history has taught us about meaning? According to the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable human right. But what exactly does that right entail? These and other questions will be at the heart of this course's investigation of the history and formal features of the novel. The selection of novels will include works by Voltaire, Jane Austen, and Ian McEwan, just to name a few, which we will read alongside a short selection of philosophical and political texts pertinent to our investigation into what it means to pursue "happiness."
-
3.00 Credits
This course will explore connections between the themes of love and memory, especially remembrance of the dead, in English and American literature. From the ghost of Hamlet's father with its plea of "Remember me" to the lost child in Toni Morrison's Beloved, the living are haunted by their memories of the dead and by the knowledge that they too will die and either survive in or vanish from human memory. Why do we, as individuals and as a culture, turn to novels, plays, and poetry to preserve or come to terms with our memories of those who have died? Can these forms of memory help us to keep-devouring time- at bay or come to terms with mortality? How are the varied literary expressions of human love shaped by concerns about memory and loss? How have writers sought to make others or themselves remembered by future generations of readers? We will consider these questions in novels, plays, and poems, including works by John Donne, John Milton, Emily Brontë, and W.H. Auden, as well as Shakespeare and Morrison. In pursuing the theme of memory, the course will encourage students to explore how later writers remember and transform the traditions of their forebears.
-
3.00 Credits
This course focuses on depictions of heroes and heroines in British texts from the 18th to the 20th century, and on the various ways literature of this period engages the theme of the heroic. As we read examples of both poetry and prose, we will investigate how the hero/heroine functions and changes as a literary figure, and how different heroes and heroines reflect cultural values and developments. More specific topics that will be addressed include: this period's new emphasis on previously "unsung heroes," such as the rural and industrial poor; the growing importance of women as authors and as literary subjects; the portrayal of the poet as a kind of hero; and, at the same time, the ironization of the figure or concept of the hero. Potential authors on our reading list will include: Eliza Haywood, Henry Mackenzie, Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Jane Austen, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.
-
3.00 Credits
Thanks to climate change and Al Gore, the environment has become an increasingly urgent concern in recent years. But the question of how to live in and with nature has vexed humankind for centuries. We will explore the relationship between humans and nature as it is portrayed in prose and poetry from the late seventeenth century through today. In addition to developing an understanding of the depiction of nature in each individual work, we will also track the development of environmental ideas over the course of the centuries with the goal of understanding what the ideas we have about the environment today inherited from the literature of nature. Authors covered will include Milton, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Thoreau and Annie Dillard. Two short papers, a group presentation, mid-term, and final exam.
-
3.00 Credits
If "critique" refers to the analysis of the present towards the transformation of society then this course considers how African American literature has functioned in this creative and critical mode from its inception. Through lecture and class discussion, this course focuses on writings from African American authors pondering the possibilities and goals of reconstructing their communities and the United States at large. We will cover various periods of literary activity, including antebellum slave narratives, the post-Reconstruction era, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts movement. We will cover multiple literary genres - including poetry, slave narrative, novel, and the essay, among others - used in the African American literary tradition placed in their historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. By reading the African American literary tradition in these contexts, we will pursue a number of questions, regarding issues of political agency, the role of the writer as intellectual, the relationship of literature to the folk, and literature as an avenue of recovering alternative histories. We will read material from Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Amiri Baraka, and others.
-
3.00 Credits
A study of how literature of the early twentieth century takes up the relations between women and war.
-
3.00 Credits
Sports and athletics have held prominent roles in human societies since the beginnings of civilization. Across centuries, nation states have used athletic competition for a variety of purposes, from paying homage to distant gods to demonstrating superiority over neighboring tribes/cultures. And the individuals, the "warriors", who excel on those "fields of battle" are venerated as heroes, champions, "gods". In this course, we'll look at a variety of literature (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film, broadcasts of athletic events, etc.) related to sports and athletics. From depictions of wrestlers on temple walls in ancient Egypt to Grantland Rice's New York Herald Tribune "Four Horsemen" article to podcasts of ESPN's "SportsCenter," our investigation of the literature of sport will cover a range of topics - race, gender, class, globalization, and the purposes and functions of athletic competition, to name a few - including the rise of the super star athlete as a "god." Required work: quizzes, two essays, midterm, final examination.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|