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Summer 2022 Course Offerings

LIT 310 Literature for Young Readers
Professor Emily Meixner
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 9:00am-12:15pm
May 23-June 10, 2022

An introduction to Young Adult literature. In this class you will become familiar with works by a diverse set of widely-read YA authors, read across genres (fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction and graphic novels), and discuss and analyze young adult texts using various theoretical perspectives. Additionally, the course will introduce you to the growing body of critical research being written about literature for young adults.

 

LIT 316/WGS 376 Global Women Writers
Professor Laura Neuman
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 5:00-7:45pm 
June 13-July 14, 2022
This class meets in the Remote Learning Format
Monday, 5:00-7:45 PM (asynchronous, online); Tuesday, 5:00-7:45 PM (synchronous, live in person meeting on campus); Thursday, 5:00-7:45 PM (synchronous, live meeting online)

This course will explore various literatures from around the world, encouraging students to examine the politics of gender, culture, and nation as well as the intersections of those systems of power.  In exploring everything from arranged marriages to women in war, Global Women Writers will provide students – especially those students who have spent much of their lives within the borders of the U.S. – with one of the most challenging and rewarding courses of their college career.  Common themes include feminist politics, post- and neo-colonialisms, reproductive rights, translation, globalization, and activism.

 

LIT 317/ENGL 670 The Witch in Literature in Cornwall/Scotland
Dr. Michele Tarter
Study Abroad Course June 26-July 13

Come to Cornwall and Scotland to study the history and literature of Witches! This 4-credit hour course will begin in London, where we will see a Shakespearean play at the Globe Theatre, take a boat ride along the River Thames, and visit Universal Studios’ Harry Potter Tour!

Then launch with us to Scotland, where we will visit sites of witchcraft and local lore in not only Edinburgh (the place where the Harry Potter series was born) but also in the Highlands-ranging from magical Fairy Glens to Macbeth’s Cawdor Castle, a boat ride in search of the Loch Ness Monster, and an adventure to the Isle of Lewis’ Callanish Standing Stones Stay in Tintagel, by the Cornish Sea, where we will visit the world-renowned Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, visit Merlin’s Cave and King Arthur’s castle ruins, in addition to mystical holy wells and waterfalls.

Our last stop will be at Glastonbury’s magical Tor and Holy Chalice Well, along with a walk around Stonehenge. There are so many magical places to visit, so much history to learn, and so much literature about witches to analyze. Come join us!

For more Information check out the Arlotto Family Center for Global Engagement’s website at: https://studyabroad.tcnj.edu/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.ViewProgramAngular&id=44301
Information sessions on Zoom- Monday, October 18th and Wednesday, November 3rd

LIT 371/AAS 370/HON 270 Topics in African American LIT- African American Autobiographies
Dr. Samira Abdur-Rahman
This class meets June 13-July 14, 2022 in the online learning format both synchronous and asynchronously.  Synchronous Meetings via Zoom on Wednesdays (6/15, 6/22, 6/29, 7/6, 7/13) from 2pm-4:50pm.

This course will examine autobiographical writing by African American writers to explore the myriad strategies and rhetorical techniques that writers use to construct a narrative of their lives. We will also engage with theoretical works within the field of autobiography studies to consider the various methodologies, approaches and terms that literary scholars use to read autobiographical writing. Central to our work will be considering how memory, place, history, politics, culture and art inform the choices that writers make in narrating their lives.

This is a blended learning course that will have weekly face-to-face meetings on Wednesdays with the remainder of the course completed through distance learning activities on Mondays and Thursdays. 

LIT 374 American Literature to 1800
Dr. Michele Tarter
This class meets in the online learning format. Meetings at 10:00am-1:00pm on Monday May 23;  Tuesday, May 31; Thursday, June 9 

There was so much happening in early America, and yet so very few people know about it. In the last few decades, scholars have unearthed tomes of manuscripts dating back to colonial times, and what they’ve found is both fascinating and disturbing. Join us as we look at life and culture in the colonies. We’ll begin with cross-cultural encounters, particularly when the Native American Indians welcomed European explorers and Puritan settlers to what is controversially called “The New World.” We’ll then turn to all forms of dissent literature evolving from this multicultural time period: Indian captivity narratives; witchcraft trial records; slave narratives; Quakers’ travel logs; women’s manuscript diaries and commonplace books; and female seduction novels at the heart of Revolutionary America. This body of material forms the foundation of any study on American culture, thought, and identity formation.

As a online learning course, we will utilize many of the newly digitized manuscripts and primary resources from research libraries around the world.

 

LIT 499 Seminar in Research and Theory: Dystopian Literature
Dr. Jean Graham
May 23- July 14, 2022 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 11:00am-12:20pm

This seminar focuses on dystopian literature, especially those dystopian novels frequently taught at the secondary level.  As dystopian literature critiques society, this focus will enable us to concentrate on gender and other cultural approaches to literature.

** This is an 8 week course spanning over the Maymester Session 1 and Session 2

 

ENGL 552 Seminar in Drama: Hamlet Reincarnated
Dr. Lincoln Knonkle
Summer Session 2: June 13, 2022-July 14, 2022
This course will be taught in the Remote Format

In this seminar we will study Shakespeare’s Hamlet: quarto and folio versions of it, sources for it, and adaptations of it. More specifically, after studying the conflated text most of us have read, we will read the Q2 and folio versions of Hamlet.  Then we will read these sources or models Shakespeare may have used:  Saxo Grammaticus’ “The Life of Hamlet” (handout), Belleforest’s “The History of Hamlet” (in the Bantam Hamlet), and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Finally, we will read adaptations such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and possibly John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius. And we will view film adaptations (e.g., Olivier’s, Zeferelli’s, Branagh’s, perhaps another one or two).

 

ENGL 670-02 Writing Witness
Professor Laura Neuman
Summer Session 3: July 18- August 18, 2022
Mondays, 5:00-7:45 PM: Asynchronous – time to work on reading, writing. Tuesdays, 5:00-7:45 PM: Synchronous – meet online for live seminar. Thursdays, 5:00-7:45 PM: Synchronous – meet for group work and online for live seminar during this time.
We’ll meet for live, synchronous sessions during the time set aside on PAWS on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Please reserve all of that time, though our Thursday evening seminars may be a bit shorter. Our class meetings will be seminar-based, and students will rotate leading discussions on the course texts.

We’ll consider fiction, non-fiction and poetry constellated around acts of witness. In what ways is contemporaneity a negotiation with the role of witness, and how might works of literature enact, complicate, perform, or document the problematics of such a position? We’ll consider the role of memory, documentation, performance, and non-human witness both living and technological.  How might surveillance systems replace the human subject as central witness, in all its ethical entanglements? We’ll track our questions across multiple genres, including whodunit, auto-fiction, memoir, documentary poetics, and more, to look at the ways authors probe the concept of witness and invite the reader’s participation. Texts will likely include Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War; Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer; Jenny Offill’s Weather; Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police; Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plough Over the Fields of the Dead; Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue; M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!; Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography; Rachel Zolf’s No One’s Witness; and Emily Abendroth’s Sousveillance Pageant. 

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