Course Catalog Literature, Language + Composition
On the Same Page LLC 351X
Art of the Personal Essay LLC 373W
Literature of Americas LLC 388
This course will allow students to develop the skills and understanding necessary for literacy in our information-saturated times. Facilitated by growth in electronic technologies, more and more types of written texts, in both print and online media, have fused with images and other graphics. Literature producers and consumers of these emerging hybrid texts will need awareness of and competence in the complex communicative strategies that they engage. While this course offers valuable knowledge to any developing artist, it is particularly suitable for students studying in the visual communications majors; i.e., Graphic Design, Illustration, Biomedical Art, Photography/Video, Digital Arts. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.
In this workshop course we will work on developing an understanding of the personal essay as a distinct yet flexible nonfictional genre, one possessing its own characteristics and contours that distinguish it from other literary forms. You will also work in this course on the craft of writing and revising your own personal essays. To these ends, we will be reading a number of works that demonstrate the essay’s protean adaptability. Texts will be drawn from Phillip Lopate’s anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, as well as from other sources, including selected blogs, nonfictional texts by visual artists, as well as the online compilation Quotidiana. (H/CS)(CWC) 3 credits.
Contemporary African + African-American Literature LLC 359
This course will deal with a very select number of contemporary female and male African-American writers who have won outstanding awards from various national literary awards to The Nobel Prize. The selected authors are Toni Morrison, Patricia Raybon, John Edward Wideman and Edward P. Jones. The central drift of this course will be concerned with today’s multifarious significance of the complex black experience. It will therefore look into how all these writers combine a keen historical sense with a discerning aesthetic sensibility to explore afresh in a postmodernist sense the intriguing black experience with deep intellectual reflections. It will also examine how in relation to their individual subject-matters they all artistically problematize the aesthetic and philosophical questions about the thin line between fact and fiction, historical veracity and imaginative truth, and art and artifice. Our class selection will consist of four books published between 1984 and 2003. A number of videos will be shown for visual elucidation of the books’ underlying concerns. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.
This course will survey the concurrent but separate developments of the literary traditions of North and South America. Taking Columbus’ arrival on Hispaniola as our point of anchor, we will work backward to the Pre-Columbian original narrative forms, and forward through the written records of the complex colonial contexts of the literary art in both Americas. We will also trace the divergent results of the influences of European literature, following in each case the developments of such directions as we can identify in the prose and poetry of the colonial and postcolonial periods of each America. Reading widely and also closely, we will consider how best to trace the parallel emergence of these national literatures, seeking in a juxtaposed study what common literary and extra-literary antecedents and shaping forces the texts in both traditions may reveal. We will also inquire into the nature of the distinctions that must be made between these traditions, and into the impact the differences between these literatures may have of the understanding of what we mean by the phrase “American literature.” Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.
Today a good deal of Third-World literature in particular expressed in many vital respects postmodern historical awareness of the paramountcy of the power relations hidden behind political, economic and social institutions and structures both nationally and internationally. With particular emphasis on political economy, this course will examine how this literature recontextualizes such critical sociological questions as: What’s traditionalism? What’s modernization? The African-American texts highlight African-American socio-economic challenges today, dating back to Emancipation/Reconstruction, alongside their efforts at socio-cultural self-definitions. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.
Jazz: Contemporary AfricanAmerican Writers LLC 374X
Children’s Literature LLC 390X Many adults feel they are familiar with the classic children’s books covered in this course, but actually know only sanitized versions, most produced for the movie screen. This class will examine the original texts of several well-known titles as literature and the fascinating and sometimes disturbing stories behind them. Critical reading, thought, research and writing on these texts will be among the key skills covered. Students will read extensively and discuss what they have read in class, create and deliver peer-evaluated presentations, and write a semester research paper related to the topics of the course. They will view several related films during the semester as well. 3 credits.
125