LIT 270 Topics in Literature: The Art of the Podcast
Professor: Susanne Davis
Meetings: This online course meets synchronously (meeting virtually through Canvas) and asynchronously (in which you work independently). During synchronous sessions, you are expected to be logged into Canvas and meeting online with your cameras and microphones on. Additional details will be provided via Canvas and your instructor at the start of the course.
Summer Session II June 12-July 13
3 days per week T,W,TH
online synchronous 5-:7:45 p.m. Tu 6/13, Tu 6/27. TH 6/29, TH 7/13
online asynchronous 5-7:45 p.m. W 6/14-W 7/12, Tu 6/20, and 7/11, TH 6/15, 6/22, 7/6
What is the art of the podcast? In this course, students will consider the podcast voice as a presence of witness. Students will explore podcasts both analytically and creatively.
LIT 310 Literature for Young Readers
Professor: Emily Meixner
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 9:00am-12:15pm- Summer Mini Session 1 (May 22-June 9)
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
Meetings: This is a blended learning course with Synchronous On-Line meetings. We’ll have synchronous meetings online on Tuesdays, and on Thursday July 20, Thursday July 27 and Thursday August 3. The rest of the work will be asynchronous. Summer Session 3 (July 17-August 17)
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 371/AAS370 Topics in African American Literature
Professor: Samira Abdur-Rahman
Meetings: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 2:00-4:00pm Summer Session 2 (June 12-July 13)
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 499 Seminar in Research and Theory: Narrative Theory
Professor: Felicia Steele
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 11:00am-12:20pm Special Offering 8-Week Summer Session (June 12-August 11)
This section will examine novels and post-novels that exemplify, complicate, or challenge two of Mikhail Bakhtin’s central contributions to narrative theory: heteroglossia and the chronotope. In addition to critical texts in narrative theory, we will read novels (and texts that resist that label) that often manipulate dialects, narrative voices, perspectives, genres, or media. Our readings may include: Henry Roth, Call it Sleep; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach; Will Eisner, New York.
ENGL 597 Politics of Poetic Form
Professor: Laura Neuman
Meetings: June 12-July 7, 2023
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. No in-person meetings on campus.
Contemporary poets claim experimental techniques such as interruption, disruption, rupture, fragmentation, swerve, paradox, and ambiguity can be used to radical ends – to resist normative, habitual ways of making sense, for instance, or to offer radical political critiques of social, political and economic systems. In poetry, claims of an alignment between a political stance and a formal technique run both ways: narrative poets working with the lyric, for instance, have been accused of selling out, or selling trauma to their listeners, while failing to transform the underlying conditions according to which their readers understand such traumas to take place. Meanwhile, experimental poets are often accused of burying their messages behind obscure and overly difficult techniques, creating work that is illegible, inaccessible to all but a privileged few, and thus not politically effective. In this graduate seminar, we’ll consider poems and poetics from various sides of this quandary. Is there an alignment between politics and form? When they do align, what factors, historically or contextually, might be at play? Why have poets so long claimed a politics to aesthetic choices? When do such claims serve or undermine poems or their readers? These questions will be the focus of our inquiry.
ENGL 670 Literature of Science
Professor: Mindi McMann
Meetings: July 17-August 5, 2023
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 5:30-8:00; Wednesdays asynchronous assignments. No in-person meetings on campus.
This graduate seminar explores the intersections of science and literature, focusing specifically on how we tell stories about science, human (and other) bodies, and biotechnology. Some questions we will consider are: What can fiction tell us about how we understand science and technology? How does science affect our understandings of subjectivity and what constitutes a person? What role does the body play in our understandings of science, and how do these new understandings impact how we tell stories about those bodies and their role in our society? What may separate distinctly human experiences from the experiences of others deemed less than human often by both literary and scientific discourses? To begin answering these questions, we will read theorists such as Donna Harroway and Bruno Latour, and authors such as Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Julio Cortazar.