CoursesCourses for the American Literature & Culture Major

Introduction to literary analysis, with close reading and carefully written exposition of selections from principal modes of literature: poetry, prose fiction, and drama. Minimum of 15 to 20 pages of revised writing.

 

Fulfills a preparatory requirement for the American Literature & Culture major and a lower-division requirement for the Creative Writing minor.

 

Fulfills Writing II requirement.

 

Additional sections of English 4W may open if the waitlist fills.

This course will focus on American horror stories across media, from early Gothic literature to contemporary film and television. Exploring ghost stories, tales of transfiguration, and strange, “monstrous” forms, we will ask: How is American fiction haunted? What does the horror genre reveal about distinctly American fears and anxieties? Together, we will analyze how horror narratives evolved alongside major historical events and social movements and consider the social, political, and cultural implications of representations of race, gender, sexuality, science, and religion in U.S. horror fiction. As we do so, we will also interrogate our long-standing fascination with (even delight in!) feeling scared.

Some possible texts: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Edith Wharton’s The Eyes & Afterward (1910), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Excerpts from Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2019)

This course will take as its primary materials the pornographic texts and romance novels of the 20th and 21^st century US. We will trace representations of sex and sexuality from the pulp fiction of the early century to the rise of the popular romance novel, and into texts that are still popular today. Our study will culminate with the international bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey (2012) and we will consider its effects on contemporary American discourse around sex. Some of the questions we may consider over the course of the quarter include: Who decides what “sex” is, and what it isn’t? Why do some materials get classified as “obscene” and others make their way into the mainstream? What different kinds of sex, sexuality, and sexual people are portrayed in our source materials, and how? What is the aesthetics of sex in popular literature, and how might it reflect and/or inform U.S. culture and politics?

This course is motivated by two realities: the enormous popularity of true crime stories and police procedurals in contemporary media and the simultaneous fact of the U.S.’s status as the world’s largest jailor. Prison abolitionists working today emphasize the importance of understanding that the prison itself has a history: it is a product of human design, rather than a natural part of society. In this course, we’ll focus on the prison system’s inception in eighteenth-century Europe, when incarceration was first theorized as a more humane form of punishment than alternatives such as execution or transportation. In doing so, we’ll follow the lead of prison abolitionists to highlight incarceration’s non-inevitability. Our readings will be guided by some key questions: Why has criminality been such a popular subject for mass culture, both today and in the past? What role have cultural objects played in the transformation of institutions like the modern prison? And, finally, how might writing—and the arts broadly—help us to both imagine and build a more just world?

 

Not open to students who completed ENGL 169 with Prof. Turner in Fall 2023.

This course will focus on American horror stories across media, from early Gothic literature to contemporary film and television. Exploring ghost stories, tales of transfiguration, and strange, “monstrous” forms, we will ask: How is American fiction haunted? What does the horror genre reveal about distinctly American fears and anxieties? Together, we will analyze how horror narratives evolved alongside major historical events and social movements and consider the social, political, and cultural implications of representations of race, gender, sexuality, science, and religion in U.S. horror fiction. As we do so, we will also interrogate our long-standing fascination with (even delight in!) feeling scared.

Some possible texts: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Edith Wharton’s The Eyes & Afterward (1910), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Excerpts from Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2019)

Extractivism, often defined as an economic model predicated on industrial-scale natural resource extraction, has been studied and analyzed through disciplinary lenses such as economics, policy, history, and environmental studies. But in recent years the environmental humanities and ecocriticism have also joined the fray, analyzing how literary texts and cultural objects grapple with this concept and its impacts on environment and society. While attending to the actual, material impacts of natural resource extraction, students will employ an ecocritical analysis of texts to interrogate the ways in which extractivism modulates our views of social relations and attitudes toward nonhuman nature. Study will explore literature (primarily American texts from the past fifty years) that representationally highlights and critiques extractive logics. Through analyzing such texts, we will consider how extractivism becomes discursively interwoven with other historical forces like imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism, while also considering the extent to which extractivism is a disparate phenomenon.

 

This course is eligible for credit on the Literature & Environment minor.