LIT 499-01 Don DeLillo
A study of novels by Don DeLillo, including End Zone, White Noise, Libra, Underworld, Cosmopolis, and Falling Man.
LIT 499-02 Transgender Cinema
This course will examine cinematic representations of transgender identity in the U.S. From the surprisingly early, sympathetic movie about America’s “first transsexual,” The Christine Jorgensen Story (1953), to the contemporary romance, crime stories, and international intrigue, we will explore how these films engage in a larger discursive field that concerns popular understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. How does our cultural fascination/aversion, titillation/anxiety, understanding/misunderstanding of transgender identities serve to teach us about ourselves, our national discourse about diversity and inclusion, and our failures to imagine gender diversity?
LIT 499-03 Representations of the Holocaust:
This seminar will consider and explore a range of Holocaust texts that vary in theme, genre, point of view, and media, as well as closely examine these texts from theoretical perspectives that address controversial issues about Holocaust representation.
For instance, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, author of Night, wrote that only a text written by a witness or survivor can be about the Holocaust; otherwise, it is not about the Holocaust. Philosophers have argued that the only appropriate response to the phenomenon of the Holocaust is silence. Such views cast the Holocaust in a special category of representation. Is the Holocaust so sacred that its representation should be limited? What should the limits be? Who is to say what qualifies and what does not? How will it be remembered if it cannot be represented by each new generation? Should we think about authenticity in Holocaust representations? How do we regard the archive of Nazi photographs that document the Holocaust, such as the iconic photograph in the Warsaw Ghetto of the boy with his hands raised? Should it matter that we are viewing the photograph through a Nazi gaze?
LIT 499-04 Dystopia
Dystopia is marked by social and/or political critique, and thus deals with a wide variety of issues, including class and economics; gender and sexuality; racial, ethnic, and religious difference; disability; ecology; and imperialism. In this class, we will study examples of dystopian fiction often read by young adults, from The Hunger Games and Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion (2002 winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature) to Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale.
The syllabus is available at http://jeangraham.pages.tcnj.edu/research-seminar-dystopia/
LIT 499-05 Violence, Visuality, and Race
In recent years a flurry of critical theories of visuality and materiality have emerged in the humanities. Indeed, poststructuralism has prompted critical reconsiderations of representation and reality, while also complicating our understanding of the relationship between words and images. In keeping with these developments, this course will examine literature by African-American writers and visual art that depicts African-Americans. Our focus will be on the representation of violence in these works. Reading literature and images as texts, we will consider the ways in which visual and literary art illuminate and in some cases speak to each other. We will question the representational possibilities and limitations that each medium encounters. While we will read visual theory, you will find that these works integrate familiar theoretical lenses, including psychoanalysis, new historicism, and deconstruction. This course is intended to be exploratory, an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of disciplines in order to experience African-American artistic expression in light of broad historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic issues. Texts will include, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We will also view a wide array of images that span from the nineteenth century to the present.
LIT 499-06 Global Environmentalisms
This is first and foremost a course in ecocriticism, which means that its theoretical orientation is towards how relationships between humans and the earth are constructed, imagined, codified, and perhaps subverted in literature. Further, this particular course takes a global perspective to explore how, in various lands, differing environmental attitudes relate to both cultural history and geographical realities. Common texts include Animal’s People by Indra Sindha (India), Potiki by Patricia Grace (New Zealand), My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki (U.S. and Japan), and Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World by Sabina Berman (Mexico)..
LIT 499-07 Young Adult LGBTQ Literature
In this seminar, we will be examining narratives about as well as representations of LGBTQ youth in (mostly) contemporary young adult literature (fiction & non-fiction) using a variety of theoretical approaches including gender, post-structural, postmodern, and queer theory. Instructor: Meixner
LIT 499-08 The Trope of Epiphanal Blackness
I employ the term “epiphanal blackness” to define the moment when what it means to be black is textually revealed throughout African American literature. The complicated ideas of race operating in the United States and the “notions” we hold about the meaning of race, both shape and are shaped by these textual moments. The moments when the writers and/or their characters first recognize that their race – perhaps embodied in skin or merely in notions of “blood”- has deep meaning in the context of American identity are ubiquitous in prominent texts in the African American literary canon. This course will explore the contradictions and ambiguities which become fundamental to the way race is conceived: blacks are seen and understood as different, while in their minds they know they also alike, as American, or at least human, but in any event shut out from the dominant society. It is this trope of “epiphanal blackness” and its subsequent implications for the construction of racial identity that we will trace in fiction, autobiography and poetry in the canon of African American literature.
In addition, we will place the study of the trope of “epiphanal blackness” in the context of African American literary theory. Our theoretical readings for this course will work to trace the trope of “epiphanal blackness” in its many thematic manifestations, exploring how spatial geographies, violence, and the constructions of whiteness reveal what it means to be black.