|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
3.00 Credits
Close reading of recent literature the explores the immigration between Mexico, Latin America, and the United States.
-
3.00 Credits
A survey of American poets and poetry after World War Two
-
3.00 Credits
Close examination of selected works written by Americans from the 17th century through the Civil War.
-
3.00 Credits
A survey of selected seminal works of African-American Literature.
-
3.00 Credits
A consideration of the forms, ideas, and preoccupations of the religious imagination in literature and of the historical relationships between religious faith and traditions and particular literary works.
-
3.00 Credits
No course description available.
-
3.00 Credits
What does it mean to write fiction in the "Naughts" (2000 - 2010)? In the age of MySpace, RSS feeds, American Idol, and YouTube, is the term "fiction" even valid anymore? Or, for that matter, books? In this class, we will read several novels published since January 2001. In addition to covering the usual topics (plot, character relationships, themes, etc.), we'll also think about what it means to write "fictions," to write "novels," in a world, in an America, that is increasingly being parsed into smaller and smaller pieces. A partial list of texts include (subject to change): Mark Danielewski, Only Revolutions: A Novel; Jennifer Egan, Look at Me; Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End; Dinaw Menegstu, The Beautiful Things This Heaven Bears; and Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document: A Novel. We'll also view excerpts of television shows, movies, and other media, as well as attend some campus literary events.Required work: two short essays, midterm, final, occasional quizzes.
-
3.00 Credits
This course explores the relationship between popular myths about the American experience and the actual experience of marginalized subjects in American society. It serves to make concrete a theoretical discussion of citizenship in the context of American Individualism and explores the relationships among social stratification, institutional coercion, and national narratives. As a long view of the last century, Homeland Security considers old forms of terror and surveillance evident in African American literature that anticipates and mimics the fear and anxiety in the nation after September 11. We will consider themes such as space, place, border, home, community, protection, and nationalism. The literature and critical essays under consideration straddle regional, class, gender, and social boundaries to facilitate our understanding of how African Americans within the nation create narratives of cultural fragmentation, exile, and alienation. In the process we will explore the condition of African American migration - like the early-twentieth-century movements to urban centers, and the early-twenty-first century migrations as a result of Katrina - and consider the way mobility may inform new landscapes of hope and displacement. Some of the texts we will read are Passing, The Street, Invisible Man, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, The Color Purple, and Eva's Man. These texts may be considered counter-narratives in the way that they stress exploitation, failure, disillusionment, and exile, but they intervene in formative debates about how to define a national identity and, to echo Langston Hughes, they too sing America. Course requirements: one oral presentation (15%); three 2-page response papers (10% each); one paper proposal; one 10-12 page essay (35%); class participation (20%).
-
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. 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 superstar athlete as a "god." Required work: quizzes, two essays, midterm, final examination.
-
3.00 Credits
Many "Contemporary Fiction" classes conclude with works published around the time that you were born in the mid-to-late 1980s. This course focuses on novels published during the decade in which you are living and examines the interpretive difficulties raised by such works. Without being able to rely on an established history of scholarly criticism or their place among the so-called "great books" of civilization, the reader of contemporary novels must actively consider why these works are worth studying as well as how they function. The major aims of this course are to introduce you to these exciting novels and to provide you with the critical and interpretive framework for determining what contemporary literature is and why it matters. We will focus on eight novels and novellas examining the intersections between self and society and between literary art and the popular cultures of film, television, hip-hop, rock, and comic books. Readings include novels and novellas by Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, David Markson, and Toni Morrison. The course also includes a screening of the film adaptation of Foer's Everything is Illuminated. Because this course is intended for non-majors, each unit will include introductions to the basic tools of literary study including close reading, how to write a literary argument, how to incorporate secondary criticism and theory, and the basic principles of film and television. Course requirements include two 5-7 page papers and one 7-10 page paper.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|