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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
A consideration of the forms and preoccupations of selected 19th- and 20th-century American novels, with special attention to their major ideas and moral concerns.
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3.00 Credits
A look at what makes a film American. The course will be structured by pairing films from the classic period with films from the more recent past, in order to highlight essential features, particularly genre characteristics, the work of directors, and the performance of "stars." Possible films: It Happened One Night, French Kiss, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity, Body Heat, Basic Instinct, Zero Effect, Shane, Unforgiven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Die Hard, The Godfather, Bound, Silence of the Lambs, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Don Juan de Marco, Moulin Rouge, Crash, The Hours, The Maltese Falcon and others.
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3.00 Credits
An exploration of the complex relationships between poetry, philosophy, and science at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century through American poets as evinced in the works of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens.
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3.00 Credits
In his masterpiece, A Season in Hell, French visionary and boy-genius Arthur Rimbaud proclaimed: "One must be absolutely modern." This remained at the core of the varied, radical artistic explorations that form the category "Modern Poetry." In the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, to be modern meant to keep up with and try to respond to vertigo-inducing, often brilliant and often shocking changes in technology and politics, including the invention of trains and planes, films and cars, and the horrific violence of two world wars. We will study how the intense and greatly varied impulse of modern poetry took shape in the US, from Walt Whitman through Modernism, to the upheavals of the 1960s. In the process, we will discuss such still pervasive questions as what is the value of "the new"? Must the new always be shocking? Can art be political? Should it be? We will also problematize our own positions as historians of this movement. What thinkers, writers and administrators have determined our views of these poets? Is poetry still "modern"? What does "modern" mean today?
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3.00 Credits
This seminar will re-examine Kerouac and his prose in relation to Beat subculture and the larger context of post-World War II American society. Although the work of other Beat writers, such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder will be considered, the primary focus will be on Kerouac. Moreover, the seminar will question the cultural codification of Kerouac as "King of the Beats" and advance the notion that he was a prose artist on a spiritual quest. Or, as Ginsberg aptly put it--an "American lonely Prose Trumpeter of drunken Buddha Sacred Heart."
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3.00 Credits
This course studies the writings of authors, mostly Americans, who achieved prominence in the 1920s: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, H.D., Stein, Cummings, Hughes, and others.
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3.00 Credits
Close readings of selected contemporary experimental women poets.
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3.00 Credits
An investigation of the meeting-ground of poetry, conceptual art, new music, and performance art.
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3.00 Credits
This course pays particular attention to the different social contexts from which narratives emerged in order to see how novels participated in the contemporary cultural and political debates. Each of these works probes some defining notion of American identity, asking who or what constitutes "America." We will also attend to that question by discussing each narrative's formal characteristics and how they meet the author's aims.
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3.00 Credits
This course studies the interconnections among six of our best fiction writers of the last century, tracing the dynamic aesthetic and moral development of American fiction from Fitzgerald through Hemingway, Faulkner, Hurston, and Walker to Morrison.
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