CoursesSenior Seminars

This course examines literary and cinematic representations of the American immigrant experience over the last century. To live between cultures, to experience the confounding processes of racialization and assimilation, to labor to translate one’s deepest interiority into a foreign language––all these aspects of migration make a new imaginative relationship with the world a necessity for the migrant and, as such, are fertile ground for literary exploration and cinematic expression. In this class, we study novels and movies as distinct mediums even as we attend to their affinities, such as an impulse toward narrative storytelling. Among our films, one is from the silent era (Chaplin’s The Immigrant); among our novels, one is a wordless story of sequenced, illustrated panels (Tan’s The Arrival). Other novels include Eugenides’ Middlesex, Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Ozeki’s A Tale for a Time Being, Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Other movies: Coppola’s The Godfather, Nair’s The Namesake, Sayles’ Lone Star, Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This Senior Capstone seminar delineates and interrogates the idea of a homogeneous “Asian American Experience” by way of texts that challenge, subvert, or simply chuck that model minority myth out the window. Readings will focus on contemporary Asian American voices publishing within the last five years, writers who are introducing new perspectives, styles and subject matters to the English language literary canon. We will analyze and discuss notions of “bad” and “bad kids” in the works of Asian American writers who portray themes that include but are not limited to: race, ethnicity, boredom, sexuality, mental health, religious marginalization and rebellion. We will also look at issues of class, family, love, and friendship as portrayed by second-generation, first-generation, and one-point-five generation immigrant writers. How do their voices differ and what stylistic and thematic similarities are shared?  The course covers work by Charles Yu, Ling Ma, Rachel Khong, Ed Park, Cathy Park Hong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This capstone seminar includes a creative project option for students meeting the capstone requirement for the Creative Writing minor.

 

Grounded in performance studies, this seminar focuses on aesthetic practices of endurance, surrender, failure, woundedness, and vulnerability in contemporary queer art and performance. What can we learn from the body pushed to its limits, on the line and laid bare for another? What happens when confronted with capacity that veers into debility? Through scholarship on queer form, disability and illness, trans studies, mad studies, kink and BDSM, and psychoanalysis, we will discuss what enduring queer performance teaches us about the openness of the self and the body, putting pressure on how we understand desire, survival, and repair, or, as Lauren Berlant writes, “how best to live on, considering.”

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

 

 

This seminar explores the relation between literature and colonialism. How do writers from across the world represent key questions of relations to land, language, and freedom? How do debates about English as a colonial language inflect the narrative choices of writers from the postcolony? What is the role of liberation movements in forming new conceptions of literature and the human? Reading fiction, plays, essays, and films by Ghassan Kanafani, Mahasweta Devi, Adania Shibli, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, Johan Grimonprez, and Raoul Peck, we examine what it means to decolonize the mind.

Too often our curriculum, like so many others, separates the study of Shakespeare from that of his early modern peers, effectively intellectually and culturally rendering Shakespeare sui generis. There is, however, much we can learn about Shakespeare and other playwrights when we consider them together, as belonging to the same early modern English theatrical world; in fact, there’s much we do miss when we don’t. One hopefully not overly schematic way to exemplify what we’re after here is for us to look at plays (one Shakespeare and one non-Shakespeare) that, arguably, are in conversation with each other. Our seminar will examine some of these pairings: for example, George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Philip Massinger’s The Renegado and Shakespeare’s Othello. The course will be structured around discussions, presentations, and writing assignments.

In this seminar we will read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and representative sections of Finnegans Wake. As Ulysses is the pivotal novel of the twentieth-century, the greater portion of the class will be given over to its discussion.   Our conversations will range from Joyce’s vision of the role of the artist in society, to considerations of the ways in which his work advances textual, gender, postcolonial, ecological, historical, and philosophical scholarship.  Discussion will be based upon close reading of the works, as well as materials generated by members of the class. At the end of the quarter we will introduce Finnegans Wake, with an eye to strategies for interpretation of Joyce’s most obscure text.  Please note: because of the reading load in this course, I ask that you begin reading Dubliners prior to our first session.  We will begin at our first session with a conversation about “The Sisters” and “Araby.”

This course examines literary and cinematic representations of the American immigrant experience over the last century. To live between cultures, to experience the confounding processes of racialization and assimilation, to labor to translate one’s deepest interiority into a foreign language––all these aspects of migration make a new imaginative relationship with the world a necessity for the migrant and, as such, are fertile ground for literary exploration and cinematic expression. In this class, we study novels and movies as distinct mediums even as we attend to their affinities, such as an impulse toward narrative storytelling. Among our films, one is from the silent era (Chaplin’s The Immigrant); among our novels, one is a wordless story of sequenced, illustrated panels (Tan’s The Arrival). Other novels include Eugenides’ Middlesex, Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Ozeki’s A Tale for a Time Being, Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Other movies: Coppola’s The Godfather, Nair’s The Namesake, Sayles’ Lone Star, Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

 

This Senior Capstone seminar delineates and interrogates the idea of a homogeneous “Asian American Experience” by way of texts that challenge, subvert, or simply chuck that model minority myth out the window. Readings will focus on contemporary Asian American voices publishing within the last five years, writers who are introducing new perspectives, styles and subject matters to the English language literary canon. We will analyze and discuss notions of “bad” and “bad kids” in the works of Asian American writers who portray themes that include but are not limited to: race, ethnicity, boredom, sexuality, mental health, religious marginalization and rebellion. We will also look at issues of class, family, love, and friendship as portrayed by second-generation, first-generation, and one-point-five generation immigrant writers. How do their voices differ and what stylistic and thematic similarities are shared?  The course covers work by Charles Yu, Ling Ma, Rachel Khong, Ed Park, Cathy Park Hong, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This capstone seminar includes a creative project option for students meeting the capstone requirement for the Creative Writing minor.

Shakespeare wrote his plays primarily to be performed, rather than read on a page. This seminar will study a variety of those plays though discussion of filmed versions, as well as some film adaptations and spinoffs. Likeliest to be studied are Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, and The Tempest. Students will be submitting short weekly response papers, and building toward a Capstone project, but their most essential assignment is to come to every session fully prepared (by reading the plays and watching some assigned films) to participate in a lively, respectful, well-informed analysis of the plays and performances.

Grounded in performance studies, this seminar focuses on aesthetic practices of endurance, surrender, failure, woundedness, and vulnerability in contemporary queer art and performance. What can we learn from the body pushed to its limits, on the line and laid bare for another? What happens when confronted with capacity that veers into debility? Through scholarship on queer form, disability and illness, trans studies, mad studies, kink and BDSM, and psychoanalysis, we will discuss what enduring queer performance teaches us about the openness of the self and the body, putting pressure on how we understand desire, survival, and repair, or, as Lauren Berlant writes, “how best to live on, considering.”

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.