Past Courses

The concept of “race,” born in the late eighteenth century, and its translation into the concept of “culture” over the course of the twentieth, is one of the defining horizons of life in the United States. This course will ask a number of questions, including: What is “race,” and what is its relationship to ideas developed in both anthropology and law?  What is the genealogy of this very idea, and how has it changed over two centuries?  What can literature teach us about racial and/or cultural difference?  In what ways is literature either complicit with or subversive of the history of racial ordering?   

In this course, we will read eight American novels and view five films about these questions, relative to African Americans, Asian Americans, Anglo Americans, Mexican Americans (Chicanos), Native Americans, and Arab Americans.

Reading List: The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Twain); Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe); The Squatter and the Don (de Burton); No-No Boy (Okada); My Life is My Sun-dance (Peltier); The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Greenlee); Kindred (Butler)

This course will consider questions about humanity via the lens of self-representation in literature and the arts. Using several important autobiographies, an autobiographical “comic,” several documentary and Hollywood films, and the long history of self-portraiture, we will investigate how self-representation has focused on problems associated with difference, culture, and confrontations between cultures since Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s famous Confessions (1782 & 1789). Along the way, we will consider the conventions governing self-portraiture and autobiography and we will pay special attention to the role played by our current appetite for self-exposure in defining the postmodern human subject. John Berger’s still important democratization of Western art criticism in Ways of Seeing (1972) will provide us with a starting point for how to talk about self-representation in self-portraiture and autobiography. Skills built regarding self portraiture in the first half of the course, will support the Broad Art Museum project in the course’s second half.

Throughout the course, we will not only focus on the cultural conventions of self-representation, but we will also work to develop our advanced analytical and critical reading and writing skills. Throughout the course, we will consider ideas and techniques aimed at advanced literacy beginning with active reading. Peer evaluations of rough drafts will help to hone our argumentative skills by revealing that the writing/argumentative process really begins after the rough draft has been written.

Reading List: 500 Self-Portraits (Bell); Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (De Quincey); Girl, Interrupted (Kaysen); Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits (Maier); Confessions (Rousseau); Stitches: A Memoir (Small); The Glass Castle (Walls).

United States and the World offers students opportunities to explore both the unities and diversities of the national experience through study of media texts.  A primary purpose of the disciplines in the humanities is to gain a greater understanding of how human beings experience the world in which they live, including encounters with others. The course draws on primary source readings, video texts, musical selections, and student writing to broaden understanding of the processes by which the citizens of the United States establish local, regional, national, and global identities and participate in a global cultural commons. 

A particular focus of this course is on the export and impact of American popular culture around the world.  We will examine how popular culture represents national identity to Americans as well as to people of other nations; how that culture is distributed and consumed globally; and how the culture that Americans take for granted as their own is shaped by these circuits of global exchange. In order to understand how popular culture does its work at home and abroad, we will be developing skills of interpretation, paying attention to reading images, analyzing music, and deciphering film and video.

Reading List: Globalization and American Popular Culture (Crothers)

This course focuses on the Gothic, a mode of writing and seeing that suggests that the rational, logical, ordered world around us is in fact filled with hidden depths, dark secrets, perhaps even terrible, horrible things – monsters, mysteries, lawless desires, death, the irrational. From the origins of Gothic writing in the 18^th century to contemporary examples in fiction and film, we will trace the development and proliferation of the Gothic, focusing on key concepts such as the grotesque, the transgression of boundaries, the uncanny, the repressed past, and the haunted present. We will be especially interested in how the Gothic is adapted in different places and at different times to speak to changing cultural and social needs.

Students should understand that the Gothic is a lens that I am using to focus our attention on literature, literary history, film, and art. We might just as easily be studying modes (like satire or comedy), genres (like poetry or film), themes (like “death in literature”), or approaches (like “philosophy in literature”) in order to encourage you think about the goals and purposes of the arts and humanities. But the Gothic a lens that I trust many of you will find interesting, as well as enlightening.

Reading List: Frankenstein (Shelley); Dracula (Stoker); The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers); Fledgling (Butler); Fun Home (Bechdel); Frankenstein in Baghdad (Saadawi); Rebecca (dir. Hitchcock); The Babadook (dir. Kent)

Goals: In English 1101, students will learn to:

• take responsibility of their own engagement and commit to excellence in their work;
• write papers in and out of class using processes that include discovering ideas and evidence, organizing that material, and revising, editing, and polishing the finished paper; 
• think critically so that they can recognize the difference between opinion and evidence and so that they can support a complex, challenging thesis; 
• address papers to a range of audiences; understand the collaborative and social aspects of the writing process and demonstrate an ability to critique the writing of themselves and others; 
• develop a sense of voice appropriate to the subject, the writer’s purpose, the context, and the reader’s expectations; 
• understand how genres shape reading and writing and produce writing in several genres;
• compose unified, coherent paragraphs that develop topic sentences with detailed support; 
• follow the conventions of standard edited English and MLA documentation;
• use electronic environments for drafting, reviewing, revising, editing, and sharing texts;
• understand and exploit the differences in the rhetorical strategies and in the affordances available for both print and electronic composing processes and texts.

As a first-year college student, I sat in a large hall watching a philosophy professor lecture about Aristotle as he put on pieces of various wacky costumes over his professional clothes: a skirt that was too big, mismatched socks and shoes, a court jester hat with bells, a humorously giant tie, his wife’s cardigan. The resulting costume was ridiculous, but it made a point. “All of our ideas, beliefs, values, and identities come from somewhere,” he said. “All our lives, but especially as young people, we’re watching the world around us, picking and choosing what we’re going to believe and what kind of people we’re going to be. Everyone in this room is a motley collection of things they picked up from someone else. Sometimes they fit well, and sometimes they don’t, but they are the things that make up who we are as humans.”

This class, then, is an exercise in fashion. Throughout the semester, and especially in our three major assignments, you will be asked to pause and consider where you picked up the different pieces of your ideological outfit. Along the way, we’ll specifically consider how our writing identities have been formed, and the contexts in which we perform them. We’ll also begin interrogating the mismatched, borrowed, beautifully hilarious costumes that form our identities, and in the process discover how the rhetoric and writing of our environments can transform us into certain kinds of humans. We’ll be relying especially on the community we create as a class, so this course asks you to be reflective, curious, respectful, and bold. Ideally, you’ll leave this class both with a better sense of your flexible, fluid identity and a greater confidence in your role as a writer.