LIT 499-01 Talking Back to the Canon
Jo Carney
Monday/Thursday 11:00am-12:20pm
The scholarly discourse on adaption, appropriation, and intertextuality is dynamic, extensive, and productively contentious. Adaptation theory has emerged as a robust field of critical study in its own right as literary retellings and revisions of works considered “canonical” keep appearing at a prodigious rate. In this seminar we will read canonical works paired with literary adaptations and appropriations focusing on what takes place in the process. Works may include Beowulf and Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife, Shakespeare’s Othello an
LIT 499-02 The New Black Renaissance
Cassandra Jackson
Monday/Thursday 9:30-10:50am
LIT 499-03 The Tragic Vision
Lincoln Konkle
Thursday 5:30-8:20pm
“The Tragic Vision” refers to more than just the genre of tragedy in theatre and drama; it is a way of looking at life, a worldview, a philosophical outlook most famously expressed in the great tragedies by the Greeks and Shakespeare but also manifested in modern plays. Though it could be argued that all literature and art imply a worldview, tragedy seems to more explicitly reflect on the meaning of life, addressing such timeless issues as why do we suffer? (Is it due to fate—in one form or another—or our free will choices?) Perhaps this is why great philosophers from Aristotle to Nietzsche have written treatises on tragedy; they try to answer the same questions as tragedy. Over the course of the semester we will read classical Greek, Shakespearean, and modern tragedies, and major theories of tragedy to gain an in-depth knowledge and appreciation of tragedy and the tragic vision. In addition, we will read a novel and a few poems, view a film, and analyze rock/pop song lyrics to see if it is possible to convey the tragic vision in genres or art forms other than theatre.
LIT 499-04 “Diaspora and Transmigrant Identity in Asian American Literature”
Jia-Yan Mi
Monday/Thursday 2-3:20pm
This course offers a critical study on the social and cultural formation of Asian American ethnic identity in Asian American literature. By selecting texts produced from various Asian ethnic communities (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and Vietnamese), we will explore a variety of complex issues of racialized identity, gender, sexuality, class, autobiography, history, and ethnic narrative in a volatile context of transnational immigration, multiculturalism, borderless globalization and diasporic citizenship.
Throughout the semester, we will focus on these critical issues:
1. What does it mean to be Asian American and at what point does an immigrant become an American?
2. How do Asian Americans represent themselves in ethnic minority literature and what are the narrative strategies that are deployed to articulate their responses to the cultural and racial debates and contradictions?
3. How is the cultural articulation of their immigrant experiences crucial to the shaping of Asian American ethnic identities?
4. How is the representation of Asian American immigrant experiences linked to the issues of social formation, race, gender, and diasporic identities in a broader context of American history?
It is hoped that the study of Asian American literature and culture will help students gain better and deeper knowledge of the critical issues of race, ethnicity, and gender in minority literature in particular and American literature in general. Through the technique of close reading and engaged discussions, students are expected to acquire a more sophisticated point of view in reading and analyzing literary texts.
LIT 499-05: Green Children’s Literature?
Meixner
Monday 5:30-820pm
In this seminar, we will be looking specifically at contemporary children’s and young adult literature that focuses on the “environment,” climate change, climate anxiety, and climate justice. We will read fiction, non-fiction, poetry, as well as a variety of digital texts drawing on scholarship from the fields of children’s literature, ecocriticism, and queer theory.