LIT 127-01 Genre: Mystery and Crime
Dr. Jo Carney
Monday/Thursday 11am-12:20pm
Essayist Alice Bolin has written that crime fiction as a genre is haunted by the specter of the dead girl: why is it that the plot is so frequently set in motion by the iconic female crime victim? In this class we will examine the popular trope of the dead girl along with the detectives who solve the crimes as represented in contemporary fiction and film.
LIT 225-01 Medical Memoir
Dr. Ira Halpern
Monday/Thursday 2-3:20pm
Medical memoirs are first person narrative texts written from the unique subject position of the author; they may be written by doctors, nurses, researchers, or patients. In this course, students will read a variety of texts that use first-person narration and a variety of other storytelling techniques for multiple purposes: to explain disease mechanisms and medical insights or innovations; to process the trauma of illness or the trauma of working within healthcare; or to illuminate the unique challenges of doctors, nurses, researchers, or patients. Students will work with memoirs of varying lengths and texts published in multiple venues. In this course, we will read medical memoirs by doctors, other health care workers, patients, journalists, and activists as entry points into thinking about historically significant, urgent, and deeply political questions about US health care. We will think about medical memoirs and the issues of social marginalization in terms of race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability that they raise. We will, furthermore, consider illness and injury as forms of social marginalization in and of themselves.
LIT 227-01 Global Animated Film
Professor Christina Maffa-Johnson
Friday 2-4:50pm
This course introduces students to the fundamental aspects of animation as an of form in a global context. Students will develop a fundamental understanding of the history, structure, and conventions of animated film by analyzing a rage of works within this broad tradition.
LIT 234 Global Fairy Tales
Dr. Jo Carney
Monday/Thursday 12:30-1:50pm
For better and worse, common tropes and patterns from the fairy tale genre have heavily influenced contemporary literature, film, and cultural values: emphases on beauty and wealth, heterosexual marriage, social class divisions, serial killers, violent punishments, and more. Yet most people are not familiar with the fascinating tales that form what we call the ¿great fairy tale tradition. In this class we will explore fiction and films from around the world from the 16th century to the present. Check your Disney at the door.
LIT 270-01 Topics in Literature: From Picture Books to Graphic Novels: Visualizing Blackness in the Contemporary Era
Dr. Samira Abdur-Rahman
Monday/Thursday 12:30-1:50pm
This course examines the relationship between visual culture, literature, politics and activism. Beginning with an exploration of Toni Morrison’s The Black Book (1974), we will discuss the relationship between image and text, exploring theories of how to read images and literary works with particular attention to scholarship within the fields of Black and Childhood studies. A central focus of our course will be how writers and visual artists work collaboratively to imagine and document past and contemporary social movements for both young and adult audiences.
Text to be Considered:
Toni Morrrison, The Black Book
Ruby Bridges, Through My Eyes
Rebecca Hall & Hugo Martinez, Wake: The Hidden History of Women Led Slave Revolts
Kyle Baker, Nat Turner
Mat Johnson & Warren Pleese, InCognegro
David Walker & Marcus Kwame Robinson, The Black Panther Party
LIT 270-02 Topics in Literature: Nature in Children’s Literature
Dr. Emily Meixner
Monday/Thursday 3:30-4:50pm
In this course we will consider the ways in which nature is represented, understood, and experienced in picture books as well as middle grade and young adult literature. We will read fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and write both formally and informally to look critically at the role(s) nature and nature in literature plays in children’s lives.
LIT 270-03/CLS 270-02 Topics in Literature: From Metamorphoses to Modernity: Gender, Nature, and the Modern Reception of Ovid’s mythologies
Professor: Isabel Rinaldi
Monday/Thursday 2-3:20pm
This Topics Course will focus on the reception of Greek and Roman mythology from the literature produced in the Classical era by studying the original texts alongside their modern adaptations. The main Classical text for this course will be Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poem that houses the largest collection of mythological stories, and from this text, we will branch out into the modern adaptations inspired by these original tales. By observing the alternate ways contemporary authors interpret and adapt the original myths, students will explore how Ovid’s text has been received both in the past and the present, focusing on the significance of the natural world and gender dynamics represented throughout his use of language. Because these modern adaptations work to offer a new perspective on the source text, granting voices to characters who have been silenced throughout history, students will have the opportunity to study the ways in which the dynamics of gender influence the interpretation of any given mythological story, both the Classical and the modern.
LIT 316/WGS 376-01 Global Women Writers
Dr. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
Monday/Thursday 9:30-10:50am
This course offers a global study of genre-bending narratives of womanhood in the 20th and 21st-centuries. Our objective is to explore various literatures from around the world that test the boundaries of conventional genre to critique the politics of gender, culture, and nation at play in a variety of global circumstances. The explorations will cover a large range of topics, from arranged marriages to women in war in a variety of geographical areas around the world. Common themes include post- and neo-colonialisms, reproductive rights, translation, globalization, and activism. We will read works by authors with origins in Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Guyana, Haiti, and Nicaragua.
LIT 354-01 Middle English Literature
Dr. Glenn Steinberg
Tuesday/Thursday 2-3:20pm
This course is your chance to meet the wild and crazy, complex, conflicted culture that is medieval England. Knights and ladies, monks and friars, peasants and merchants – they’re not really what you expect, but they’re definitely entertaining (at least as funny and outlandish as Monty Python and the Holy Grail). People often think of the Middle Ages as a very homogeneous time period – controlled by the monolithic Catholic Church, enjoying no social mobility, ruled by arbitrary, all-powerful monarchs. In fact, medieval English culture was very diverse, and this course explores that diversity. We begin the semester by looking closely at one genre (romance) in order to examine the diversity of ways in which medieval English people of various stripes conceived of and used that genre, and then groups of students will choose other genres, authors, or traditions in order to select representative readings for their classmates (and explore the diversity of medieval English culture further). Readings will all be in the original Middle English (but you quickly get used to it).
LIT 360-01 British Augustans and Their Rivals
Dr. David Venturo
Tuesday/Friday 11am-12:20pm
This course explores developments in English Literature from 1700 to 1820. The first half of this era marks the great age of Augustan satire, famous for its wit, irony, parody, and mock heroics. The second half of the era features writing famous for its rich insights into human psychology. The aim of the course is threefold: (1) to examine the assigned texts closely; (2) to explore major intellectual, cultural, and political issues of the times; and (3) to achieve an understanding of important issues today in eighteenth-century studies. The reading will include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal; poems by Alexander Pope; John Gay’s play, The Beggar’s Opera; various works by Samuel Johnson; and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. We will conclude the course with two novels: Jane Austen’s Emma and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
LIT 366-01 The 20th Century British Novel
Dr. Mindi McMann
Tuesday 5:30-8:20pm
20th-Century British literature is most often associated with names such as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot (the latter two who aren’t even British). As the producers of what comes to be known as high modernism, these writers ushered in an era of rethinking literary form and tradition. They redefined not just what British literature was, but what literature more generally could be within the context of one of the largest empires the world had known. The wake of decolonization, however, did not just redraw national and cultural boundaries in regions like Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. It also had a direct impact on cultural production within the United Kingdom. In empire’s aftermath, some have embraced the idea of national identity, while others think of identity as historical (forged out of the contact between the British and their colonial ¿Others¿). Both views confront changing demographics as immigrants from former colonies arrive in the British Isles. The first half of this course will focus on the creation of this new, and decidedly imperial, form of writing, while the second half will look at how migration to the metropolitan center and the changing racial profile of Britain takes on these traditions and rethinks them in a decidedly postcolonial and often postmodern context.
LIT 390-01 Collaborative Research
Dr. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
Monday/Thursday 11am-12:20pm
This lab will serve as an academic journal publishing studio. Students with different levels of experience (introductory, intermediate, and intern/assistantship) will learn in-practice as members of an academic editing team. Students will engage with technologies, laws, ethics, and the best practices of editing and production at multiple points in the process. All work will uphold the standards of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and will employ inclusive and collaborative methods of apprentice-style teaching, mentoring, and learning. Beginner students will register in 390 and may continue to intermediate studies in 490 in a subsequent semester. All graduate students and select undergraduate students who satisfactorily complete 490 will be considered for 690. Opportunities to intern with an academic journal will be determined individually and are based on skill, experience, and performance. Distinctive performance may lead to an interview for further opportunities with an academic press.
LIT 493-01 Independent Research
Diane Steinberg
Tuesday/Fridays 2-3:20pm (discussion)
British Novelist Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) never met German philosopher Karl Marx (1818 – 1833). Interested in British culture and seeing in it the future of workers¿ rights, Marx moved to the UK in 1849 and wrote his major work Das Kapital in the British Library. Both Austen and Marx lived through major political, social, and economic upheavals of their times: revolutions, empire-building, urbanization and industrialization, the European colonization of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and many Pacific islands, and early political reforms targeting working class people, women, enslaved people, and other disenfranchised and unempowered groups. Because Austen is a sharp critic of social mores, her novels can be usefully analyzed through a Marxist lens, and this independent research class will work with a few students who want to explore the ¿Marxist Jane Austen¿ and produce a seminar length research paper. Department permission required. Numbers limited. Students may seek permission to use this LIT 493 to replace their second LIT 499 requirement.