Many readers underestimate the complexity, impact, and importance of children's literature. But the narratives one learns as a child have more effect than any others: they echo for a lifetime. In this course, we will explore books written for children and young adults, from wordless picture books to complex speculative fiction. To reflect the vibrancy of the field of children's literature-as well as the diversity of students that the Education majors will soon teach-we will focus on literature that is multicultural, multilingual, and diverse in myriad ways. The course has five units, each focused on a fundamental aspect of children's literature: adventure, coming of age (bildung), community/friendship, play/imagination, and fantasy/science-fiction. Within each unit, we will read one exemplary novel as a class, and the rest of the texts will be presented by students. Students will have considerable agency in their assignments: each student chooses a 'track' (education, literary critical, or creative writing), and each unit has multiple options for the assignment. Past sections of the course have studied Angie Thomas, Jacqueline Woodson, Pam Muñoz Ryan, Leigh Bardugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jessica Love, Vashti Harrison, Grace Lin, Kwame Alexander, Benjamin Sáenz, Matt de la Peña, Soman Chainani, Tomi Adeyemi, JK Rowling, Lewis Carroll, Mo Willems, Jon Klassen, etc.
The Senior Seminar allows English majors in their final year to pursue in depth a subject, genre or author(s) not normally covered in other English courses, or to explore material from a new perspective. All full-time English faculty will teach the course on a rotating basis. Topics will vary from year to year. Examples of past seminars are: Literature of World War I; T. S. Eliot; Melville and Wharton; Hamlet; Shakespeare's Roman Plays.
This course emphasizes the capacity of literature to intervene in matters of urgent concern-social, political, economic and cultural. The focus will be on either English or American literature of the recent past, though older texts may be read for context. Typically the course will be organized around a particular issue - gender equality, the American Border, environmental writing, etc. Students will learn not only to think more nimbly about the issue at hand, but also to appreciate the unique ways literature can attend to the complexities of oppression, intersectionality, historical memory, etc.
This course explores the unfolding relationship between literature and film by examining the specific ways in which literary texts have been translated into cinematic texts. The genres examined are selected from: the short story; verse; the novel; the novella; and drama. Attention is focused on the three essential models of cinematic conversion: literal translation; traditional adaptation; and radical transformation. Primary literature is read and analyzed, followed by the viewing and analysis of the film. Some reading of film criticism and theory is included.
This course raises the question, "what does it mean to be human in a digital world?" Through the examination of multimodal digital production, students will think about what is and can be communicated about society in digital spaces. In addition to defining the interdisciplinary scope of digital humanities, this course will show how the field of digital humanities encourages new ways of thinking. Through critical inquiry, students will analyze how and why content is expressed globally across digital platforms. This course covers theories of digital humanities, including thinking about technology through a postcolonial lens; ethics and technology; methods of digital creation; and digital research. In this course, students will also examine methods of expression and communication through digital tools with consideration of audience. The course includes a culminating project where students will experiment with digital tools and create a digital product based on society and/or artistic expression. This project will involve research, design and communication in a digital space.
This course has a global exposure by covering the works of a variety of women writers all over the world. In its diversity, it examines the works of these writers specifically as "women's work," i.e., discussing their works in light of Feminist criticism. Another objective is to identify the common threads in women's writings, and to explore their work as a unique contribution to literature. The works of these writers will be analyzed in the context of their respective cultures and time periods. The course will focus on writers from antiquity to the Victorian period: Sappho, Sei Shonagon, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, George Sand, and Emily Dickinson, as well as writers from the Modern period: Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Nadine Gordimer, Anna Akhmatova, Toni Morrison, and others. Fiction, poetry, the polemical essay, and autobiographical writings are featured.
This course is about colonial and US American literature from the European conquests to the present day. Texts range across gender, race, class, time and genre. Because of the enormous scope of the course-five hundred years of American literature-it is structured around eight 'inquiries,' which are explored through many (but not exclusively) canonical texts.
What can superheroes teach us about society? In this course, students will closely examine various superheroes and superheroines and reflect on the social messages and values conveyed in popular culture. Students will be asked to think critically about representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and disability through analysis of comics and film. This course asks students to look at comics and films as cultural artifacts that can provide insight to social dynamics and politics in the real world. Considering historical contexts also allows for deeper insight into the evolution and shifts in social and cultural representation. Finally, this course will ask students to think globally about the impact of superheroes and the influences on storytelling in comics and film.