LIT 170-01 Topics in English: The Beatles and their World
Professor: David Venturo
Monday/Thursday 2-3:20pm
The lives and musical careers of the Beatles reflect profound cultural changes that took place in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. In particular, the extraordinary transformation of this group in a decade and a half from one of many local Liverpool bands to the most influential popular music group of all time and an international cultural arbiter offers insight into the modern cultural world. With the Beatles as its focus, this course will explore such topics in modern cultural history as race relations, women’s rights and gender issues, youth culture, consumerism, counterculture and protest, mass media and public relations, as well as, of course, developments in popular music.
LIT 270-01 Topics in Literature: Black British Women Writers
Professor: Mindi McMann
Monday 5:30-8:20pm
Literature written by Black authors is often missing from college syllabi. Literature written by Black British authors is often even harder to find in your courses. Literature written by Black British women writers may be among some of the hardest to find. This course offers an opportunity to study how Black women in Britain represent their experiences and perspectives. We begin with Mary Prince, the first Black woman to publish an autobiography in Britain, and end with Zoë Wicomb¿s 2020 reimaging of Prince¿s life in her novel Still Life. In between, we will study a range of writers and how they developed their voices as Black British women writing under empire and in its wake.
LIT 270-02 Topics in Literature: Gender in East Asian TV Drama (K-Drama)
Professor: Glenn Steinberg
Tuesday/Friday 3:30-4:50pm
K-dramas have become an international sensation, and TV shows from other East Asian countries have gained a world-wide audience through streaming services such as Netflix, Viki, and Amazon Prime. In this course, we look at one East Asian TV genre (romantic comedy) and the portrayal of gender in that genre. How do masculinity and femininity seem to be defined? What are the relations between the genders? Are the boundaries between genders clearly drawn and strictly enforced? How does the portrayal of gender in East Asian romantic comedies differ from – or track closely with – pop culture in the U.S.? How might the portrayal of gender in K-dramas and other East Asian TV shows have contributed to their world-wide popularity?
LIT 270-03CLS 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. 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 299-01 Academic Conference Presentation (Note: this course is 0.5 units)
Professor: Diane Steinberg
Friday 3:30-4:50pm
LIT 299 requires that students have been accepted to the Sigma Tau Delta Conference to be held from 29 March to 1 April 2026 in New Orleans, LA. The half-unit class meets no requirements in the English major and only serves as elective credit for a BA or BS degree. It prepares students to take advantage of the learning and networking opportunities of the Conference and prepares them to participate in the session to which they have been assigned. Students normally participate in COSA and share their Conference experiences with future Conference participants. Lit 299 is graded Pass/NotPass.
LIT 311-01/WGS 314-01 Women’s Autobiography, Diaries and Letters
Professor: Michele Tarter
Tuesday/Friday 9:30-10:50am
This course is an examination of women’s autobiographical literature from many different cultures and time periods. Drawing from a wide spectrum of primary sources, we will study such representative works as 17th-century Indian captivity narratives, 18thcentury cross-dressed Revolutionary War memoirs, 19th-century slave narratives, Victorian maidservants’ journals, pioneer diaries of “the westward journey,” and 20thcentury “fictional autobiographies.” In addition to primary texts, we will study literary criticism and apply many theoretical perspectives to the ever-expanding corpus of women’s literature and life-writing across the ages.
LIT 370-01 Craft of Children’s Literature
Professor: Emily Meixner
Monday/Thursday 3:30-4:50pm
In this course students will explore the work of children’s authors, focusing their attention specifically on the craft of writing picture and middle grade fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. What does it mean to write for children? How do authors decide what to write? What kind of research does writing for children require? What is the process for getting published? Students in this course will develop a language for discussing, analyzing, and evaluating writer’s craft. They will also interact with several authors of children’s books and try their hand at writing a children’s text of their own.
LIT 370-02 Critical Gender in Martial Arts/Kung Fu Cinema
Professor: Jia-Yan Mi
Tuesday 5:30-8:20pm
This course investigates the critical gender dynamics in Chinese martial arts (kung-fu) cinema, tracing its mainstream traditions, sub-genres, and contemporary transnational variations. We will analyze how film constructs and reconfigures ideals of masculinity and femininity, as well as the ideological frameworks that shape its global production and reception. The syllabus spans a wide range of new genres and styles: Hong Kong swordplay epics, the samurai warrior, and its modern reinterpretations, Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow’s comic kung-fu, “heavy metal” and “spooky” kung-fu, hip-hop inflections, Tarantino’s kung-fu pastiche, and the digital martial arts. Topics of discussion include the representation and negotiation of gender roles, heroism, and nationalism, individuality, and collectivity, honor codes and cultural politics, sexuality and desire, the inter play of history and violence, and the significance of stardom and youth culture.
All films will be screened with English subtitles.
LIT 381-01 Literary History of Nature
Professor: Jean Graham
Tuesday/Friday 11am-12:20pm
How has “nature” been conceptualized in literature, from the creation stories of Genesis and Ovid to William Carlos Williams’ white chickens and the deer of N. Scott Momaday and Louise Erdrich? Our focus will be on changing literary and cultural constructions of the relationship between the human and non-natural human world, the idea of “nature” itself, and what may or may not be “natural.” For English majors, this class meets LH. The course is also an option in the Environmental Studies major and minor.
LNG 311-01 Understanding English Grammar
Professor: Diane Steinberg
Tuesday/Friday 2-3:20pm
LNG 311 counts in all the English majors, and in the World Languages and Linguistics major, in the English and the linguistics minors, and in the Publishing and Editing Certificate, the English Language and Literacy Certificate, and the Teaching Writing Certificate. Students may petition LNG 311 to count in the Journalism and Professional Writing programs, and may petition to count LNG 311 as their linguistics course in the English teaching programs. We will practice a traditional syntactic analysis of the English language beginning with parts of speech, parts of the sentence, and phrases and clauses. We will also review morphology and the morphological changes of noun declensions, verb conjugations, and word derivations. Students will be able to teach English Language Arts or edit copy with confidence.
LNG 370-01 Topics in Philosophy and Linguistics: Bullshit, Truth and Knowledge
Professor: Pierre Le Morvan
Tuesday/Friday 11am-12:20pm
This course examines central topics in epistemology that have implications for linguistics. These topics include: What is bullshit and how should we respond to it? What is truth? When are we justified in our beliefs? What is knowledge? When should we be skeptical? How might we respond to skeptical challenges? What are epistemic virtues and vices? Students will be encouraged to learn from great thinkers of the past and of the present, to reflect on their own epistemic values and beliefs, and to take reasoned and informed stands on the issues treated.