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Summer 2025 Course Offerings

LIT 310-101 Literature for Younger Readers
Professor: Meixner
Meetings: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 9am-12:15pm
Summer Mini Session May 27-June 13

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 376-201 Global Women Writers
Professor: Laura Neuman
Meetings:  First 5-week Summer Session. This is a blended learning course with Synchronous On-Line meetings. We’ll have synchronous meetings online on the following Tuesdays and Thursdays: June 17, 19, 24, 26 and July 1, 3, 8, 15.  With two optional meetings on July 10 and 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.

Our class will meet online for synchronous meetings on Tuesdays (5:30-7:30 PM) and for shorter meetings (6-7:30 PM) on 2 Thursdays.  The rest of the work will be asynchronous time (writing, reading, and responding to peer work), or project work that you can schedule at your convenience (for instance, meeting with a small group of students to plan a presentation or discuss the week’s reading). 

 

LIT 499-401 Seminar in Research and Theory: Narrative Theory
Professor: Steele
Meetings: Special Offering 8-Week Summer Session Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 11am-12:20pm fully remote June 16-August 7.

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 670-201 Studies in LIT: Monsters and Memories: Gothic Literature of the African Diaspora
Professor: Abdur-Rahman
Meetings: Summer Session II June 16-July 17
Mondays -Online Independent & Collaborative Activities & Virtual Student Hours
Tuesdays & Thursdays – Zoom Meeting 5-7:45pm
Fridays -Online Independent & Collaborative Activities
Note: There are no in-person meetings on campus.

This course centers the Afro-Gothic as “a cogent frame through which to consider how black creators reckon with—and at times lean into—the ever-presence of death, unalleviated grief, and fear of the dark” (Cooksey and Thomas, 2022). The course problematizes the uses of Blackness/Africanness in gothic literature and explores how black creators invert and revise concepts of darkness, evil and monsters. We will discuss works by W.E.B Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Clarence Majors, Mohale Mashigo and Tananarive Due. We will also study the presence of Afro-Gothic aesthetics in contemporary film and music.

ENGL 670-301 Studies in LIT: Literature of Witness
Professor: Neuman
Meetings: Summer Session III July 21-August 21

Online Synchronous 6-8pm the following days:
Tuesday July 22
Thursday July 24
Tuesday July 29
Thursday July 31
Tuesday August 5
Thursday August 7
Tuesday August 12
Tuesday August 19

The other days are asynchronous.

Literature of Witness:
We’ll be focusing on novels and books of poetry that are constellated around the idea of witness – acts of witness, ethics of witness. One investigation central to our reading is the extent to which acts of witness are crucial to how we understand subjectivity in contemporary lit. Another question has to do with how witness is imagined, a kind of ethics of witness. Another set of questions lies around the uses of language itself in order to witness, and what language must do in order to “hold” collective and historical traumas. In addition to reading the books below and writing some short, informal (but precise!) response papers, you’ll also have the opportunity to develop your own question around witness and investigate it in your final project this summer.  Course texts will include Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Well Then There Now by Juliana Spahr, and others.
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