Summer 2022 Undergraduate English Courses

H1    04036  7/11-8/17    BY ARRANGEMENT      DEAN, E. The Cultural History of Now:  Sex, Drugs, and Human Souls: Inventing American Gender from the Enlightenment to Today Where does gender come from, and how do we make meaning of it? How is it intertwined with other forms of categorization (or control) like race, nationality, class, religion, and sexuality? How have beliefs about manliness, femininity, and gender nonconformity shaped American culture--and where do we go from here?  In this accessible class, students will explore widely across literature, historical records, zines, medical texts, films, and more. While we will emphasize the role of art in shaping ideas we still live with today, this class will take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of gender from the Revolutionary era forward. This class is asynchronous-remote and will focus on informal assignments and self-reflection over formal essays and exams. Students will leave this unconventionally-structured course with new skills in setting and reaching self-directed goals. Students can expect to gain fluency in American history and competence with basic concepts from trans studies.  Readings may include short stories by Jack London, Sui Sin Far, and Zitkála-Šá; drama by Susanna Rowson, nonfiction by Charles Brockden Brown, Barbara Smith, and Anna Julia Cooper; and films like Wild Nights with Emily and Yentl. Students will also be guided through encounters with cutting-edge scholarship from C. Riley Snorton, Jules Gill-Peterson, Jen Manion, and more.

B1  5/31-7/8       04041   BY ARRANGEMENT      IANNINI   ONLINE B2   5/31/7/8   04042     MTWTH  10:30-12:25     SHIROMA      ONLINE E6   6/28-8/5   04043   TTH 6:00-9:40 PM     DELORME   MU-211 H6  7/11-8/17   05069  MW 6:00-9:40 PM    LEONARD   MU-212 This course provides an introduction to principal methods and materials in contemporary literary studies. We will learn to define, identify, and make arguments about key literary terms and issues.  Our primary texts will be united by the themes of the spiritual and the modern. Expect to read some prose (at least one novel and short story), a range of plays, and short poems from approximately 1850 to the current day. Assignments will include short close reading papers, Sakai posts, a virtual pre-recorded presentation, and a longer argumentative paper. This course is required of all English majors, but it is open to all students who have fulfilled the first-year writing requirement or its equivalent. Attendance is expected and required at weekly synchronous sessions and on asynchronous virtual platforms.

H6  7/11-8/17   CAC   05067   ONLINE   T 600-10:00 PM   MOLINA, D.                                                    Black Feminist Literary Experiments This course will examine the creative and critical writings of Black women across the African diaspora. We will focus on the experimental force of Black feminist thought in its diverse expressions and forms: fiction, poetry, theory, and other creative nonfiction. Our primary goal is to expand our critical-creative reading, writing, and thinking skills as we consider the ways in which the diversity of Black women’s aesthetic and critical experiments make and unmake worlds. How do Black women’s writings build epistemologies that critique operations of power in the real world? How do these beautiful experiments with language imaginatively re-theorize the past and the present, as well as our relationships and responsibilities to them? What kinds of futures are thus made possible? 

B6   5/31-7/8  MW 6:00-10:00 PM  01100    CHAMBERS, A.   MEETS ONLINE In this course, Introduction to Multimedia Composition, students will explore what it means to be “media literate” through the analysis and creation of digital media. The focus of this course is twofold: (1) to develop critical thinking skills around narrative within a digital context and (2) to create original multimedia projects, integrating fiction, non-fiction, poetry, documentary, personal narrative, and self-portraiture.  Multimedia projects in this course will emphasize digital media literacy by way of student generated Tweets, comments, scripts, voiceovers, sound art, songs, podcasts, images, memes, short films, and any other digital ephemera worth dreaming up. Students will further study how authors, sound artists, filmmakers, and content creators harness the power of digital media and creative writing to produce relevant narratives. Finally, students will analyze and engage with trends in digital media—like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Soundcloud, and Snapchat—as well as apply ideas presented by course texts to gain further insight on the impact digital communication and storytelling have on our lives.

B6   5/31-7/8   MW 6:00-10:25   01341   REHILL, E.   MEETS ONLINE E1   6/28-8/6   BY ARRANGEMENT  02835     SUSKEWICZ

B6    5/31-7/8     01268   CAC     MW  6:00-10:25 PM   NIGRIN    VH-105  A course focusing on the relationship between cinema and aesthetic movements in the arts, such as Expressionism, Romanticism, Surrealism, Pop Art, Post-Modernism and others. Films to be screened include David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Jean Cocteau's Blood of A Poet, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, William Friedkin's The Exorcist, Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera, Films by Andy Warhol, Films by Bruce Conner and others.

E6   6/27-8/5  CAC  05066  TTH  6:00-10:00 PM   AYALA CAMARILLO, S.    MEETS  ONLINE Our aim in this course is to explore the commonalities and contrasts between various writers from the United States and Latin America. We will be focusing on novels, short stories, and literary criticism ranging from the 1930s to the present. Throughout the course, we will pay specific attention to key debates in inter-American studies. These explorations include but are not limited to the following: literary influence and the degree to which it is mutual or asymmetrical, regional and national borders, hegemony and cultural or political exchanges, and the evolution of genres. We will read works by the following U.S. authors: Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Sandra Cisneros. Our Latin American selections will include texts by María Luisa Bombal, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Cristina Rivera Garza. This list is subject to change. English translations will be provided for all texts originally published in Spanish.  

B1   5/31-7/8   CAC   05065   MTWTH  10:30AM-12:25    MARTIN, A.   MU-114 Friendship and Flirtation: Negotiating Intimacy in Nineteenth Century American Fiction This course will explore the emergence of American literature in the nineteenth century, a period defined by new modes of literary production and circulation, racial segregation and civil discord, and immigration and spatial dispersal. How did the languages and practices of interpersonal relationships like friendship and flirtation help writers grapple with these larger concerns? To what extent can we think about writing itself as a fundamentally social act? Class discussion will consider the emergent genres, forms, and rhetorics that attempted to articulate connection across difference, closeness despite distance, and social intimacy while maintaining personal autonomy. Readings will focus on short fiction by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Watkins Harper, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Louisa May Alcott, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. But we will also examine harder-to-categorize writing that appeared in periodicals, diaries, letters, and albums in order to consider the social spaces and material places that made negotiating intimacy possible in the nineteenth century. Grades will be based on class participation, two informal writing assignments, and a final essay on a topic of the student’s choosing. This course will be taught four days a week and meet in-person.

H6   7/11-8/17  MW 6:00-9:40 PM   05068   IORIO, V.   MU-204 Spectacle and Sensation in Victorian Fiction 19th century Britain is often remembered for moralizing self-control, sexual repression, and sober realism. However, the period also continuously produced literature aimed to provoke strong feeling through the shocking, the scandalous, the vulgar, and the macabre. This course will examine spectacle and its resulting emotions across a variety of genres, including the sensation novel, melodrama, and a range of short fiction, especially ghost, horror, and crime stories. We will also spend time learning about the mechanisms surrounding these forms, especially the conventions and technologies of popular theaters, the rise of cheap periodicals, and rapidly changing reading practices. This course will require a combination of formal and informal writing projects and will meet twice a week in person.

B1   5/31-7/8   CAC   05064   MTWTH  10:30 AM- 12:25  SELMER, A.   MU-204 Truth, Lies, and Literature in the English Renaissance Course Description: At a time when anxiety over fake news and misinformation dominates conversations about how we communicate among ourselves, it can be difficult to justify the basic work of literature: that is, of mediating between what is “real” and what is “false” through patterns of representation. What “truths” can dramatic performance, poetic verse, or prose fictions tell? To a surprising extent, these same questions motivate many authors of the English Renaissance (a period that covers about 1550-1670), whose works reflect strong, at times embattled desires to use their creative media to reveal truths about the human experience, or else, the wayward relations that humans have to both truth and fiction. In this course, we will examine the relationship between literature and truth-making in early modern England. This period saw “truth” take radically new forms that resonate to this day: this includes tense debates over traditional gender, sexual, and racial categories; the Protestant Reformation’s challenge to inherited ideas about religious truth; the development of modern scientific methods; and the emergence of new ways to figure the “personal” and “political,” the “individual” and the “nation.” Running parallel to (and intersecting with) these intellectual and social developments, we find lasting literary innovations: the invention of modern drama, the founding of the English sonnet tradition, the very first work of science fiction in English, an ebullient flourishing of religious poetry, and the creation of Paradise Lost, a work whose encyclopedic intellectual scope and deep ambivalence over the value of rational inquiry offers a lasting challenge to its readers: to struggle through the fictions art requires, to the truths art alone can tell. Over this course we will read several plays by William Shakespeare, including Twelfth Night, Othello, Richard III and/or Henry IV, pt. 1. We will consider poetry from Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney, John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, George Herbert, and John Milton. We will also encounter literary prose by John Milton and Margaret Cavendish. Finally, we will augment our consideration of the period’s literature with short contextual readings from writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Francis Bacon, and Queen Elizabeth I.

H6   7/11-8/17  MW 6:00-9:40 PM   05068   IORIO, V.   MU-204 Spectacle and Sensation in Victorian Fiction 19th century Britain is often remembered for moralizing self-control, sexual repression, and sober realism. However, the period also continuously produced literature aimed to provoke strong feeling through the shocking, the scandalous, the vulgar, and the macabre. This course will examine spectacle and its resulting emotions across a variety of genres, including the sensation novel, melodrama, and a range of short fiction, especially ghost, horror, and crime stories. We will also spend time learning about the mechanisms surrounding these forms, especially the conventions and technologies of popular theaters, the rise of cheap periodicals, and rapidly changing reading practices. This course will require a combination of formal and informal writing projects and will meet twice a week in person.

B6  5/31-7/8  TTH 6:00-9:40 PM   CAC   05070    SANCHEZ-ZWEIG    MEETS ONLINE Magic and Art This course will look at the intersections of literary theory and magic. We will discuss how different theoreticians were informed by cultural ideas of magic and ritual. We will balance the theory with primary examples of magic in art across a range of genres, including the contemporary magic show. What can our study of fiction learn from the form of illusion? What is the "magical" impact of literature and performance?