LAS Courses
LAS E306-01
THE FUTURE AS HISTORY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The Future as History: From the most daring visions of better worlds to the most apocalyptic depictions of dystopia, this course examines the arts of the future. In studying the formation of human, nonhuman, inhuman, and posthuman relationships to the future, you will read brilliant sci-fi & fantasy authors, consider how art constructs futures in response to the demands of the present, and develop a new understanding of the history of time and the time of history. The workload includes two essays. Authors assigned may include Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, and China Mièville.
Elective
LAS E309-01
TRANSNATIONAL SPY & DETECTIVE FICTION
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course, besides revisiting the traditional narrative elements of spy and detective fiction, considers a selection of the increasing number of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century transnational, diasporic, postcolonial, and minority/ethnic authors from around the world who adapt spy and detective fiction conventions for the purpose of social critique. In focusing on issues related to identity, culture, ethics, human rights, justice, and knowledge construction narrated by these fictions, we will examine carefully, for example, the figure of the spy or detective as outsider to and observer of society as well as, in the works at issue here, frequently an immigrant or cultural or social "other." In the process, we will also engage questions central to reading, interpreting, and comparing fiction in a global context.
Elective
LAS E324-01
CONTEMPORARY ECOPOETRIES: NORTH AMERICAS+
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In this course, Contemporary Ecopoetries: North Americas+, students will examine poems published after 1970 in order to explore how they encounter, diagnose, and respond to environmental topics such as climate change, extinction, extractivism, (in)justice, place, and toxicity, among other concerns. As the course title indicates, one grounding assumption of the course is that there are many, differently-experienced North Americas. Authors may include Sherwin Bitsui, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Natalie Diaz, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, dg nanouk okpik, Craig Santos Perez, Juliana Spahr, and Natasha Trethewey. Course activities will include reading, analyzing, and discussing poems and critical essays, as well as regular writing assignments. These course activities will prepare students to embark on their own ecopoetries research in order to complete the final project. For the final project each student will produce a mini-anthology on a topic of their choosing that gathers, introduces, and critically responds to a set of existing ecopoetic texts.
Elective
LAS E356-01
THEATER THAT BITES THE HAND
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Let's read a selection of plays by playwrights Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Suzi Lori Parks, & Jackie Sibblies Drury--three innovators who dig deep into theater's history & reclaim / reimagine foundational dramatic works. Jacobs-Jenkins engages with Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, Everyman & Euripides' The Bacchae; Parks incorporates the play President Lincoln watched on the last night of his life & rewrites Sophocles' Antigone in a U.S. border state; while Drury looks to 20th Century television. In addition to discussing the plays as works of literature, we'll consider how we might cast, stage, & perform them. Be prepared to read aloud in class!
Elective
LAS E360-01
RADICAL THEATER: BRECHT & AFTER
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Fascism got you down? Tired of endless war? Wondering how art could possibly stand up to--let alone subvert--the predations of big-time capitalism and its police state? Unfortunately, these are not new questions. Fortunately, they have been taken on directly by some modern dramatic innovators, among the first of whom was Bertolt Brecht (Germany, 1898-1956). Playwright, director, theorist and provocateur, Brecht drew on popular, traditional forms, which he deployed in response to the crises of his times in order to rewrite the theatrical rulebook. The course will study Brecht's major works along with some of his theoretical writings before looking at the legacy of Brechtian theater among diverse playwrights such as Dario Fo & Franca Rame, David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Alecky Blythe, Tony Kushner, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Kane, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mark Ravenhill, Jeremy O. Harris.
Elective
LAS E373-01
SPECULATIVE DIGITAL UTOPIAS IN TIME OF PLANETARY CRISIS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In an era defined by climate change, pandemics and live-streamed war, this digital language arts course confronts the stark realities of our time. It compels students to decolonize their imaginations and discover new ways of engaging with reality, literature, technology, and the future. We examine how language and literature mediate our relationship with the world and how digital mediums reshape our perceptions of reality and our expectations of the future. Central to this course is the critical examination and creation of digital artifacts that engage with speculative fiction. Students will confront the power of nightmares in speculative horror and explore the promise of alternate utopian visions. These explorations aim to open gateways to potential futures, using innovative literary and digital forms. Through rigorous analysis and creative experimentation, students will develop sophisticated digital artifacts that not only respond to but also critique and reimagine the pressing global crises of our time
Students will engage deeply with the material through extensive reading and weekly discussions that directly influence their creative output. Students will produce creative and critical writing in dialogue with the readings. The semester will culminate in the creation of a collection of digital and written artifacts, laying the groundwork for a rich final project that synthesizes the insights and creative explorations from the course. This course equips students with the tools to critically fabricate narratives that challenge existing paradigms and inspire forward-thinking, enabling them to contribute meaningfully to the discourse on future realities. Artists, writers, and texts include Sun Ra, Sondra Perry, Hito Steyerl, Tabita Rezaire, Gerald Vizenor, Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, Ian Cheng, Sadiya Hartman, Jason Mohaghegh, Larissa Sansour, and selected short stories from "Palestine +100: Stories From a Century After the Nakba" and "Iraq +100: Stories from Another Iraq.
Elective
LAS E382-01
NONSENSE LITERATURE: PARADOX, PLAY & POSSIBILITY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Making sense of events by giving them order and verbal articulation is considered a primary task of storytelling; and stories, in order to make sense, also require readers to interpret them. However, in this class, we will study stories in prose, verse, and drama that have been designed—as nonsense literature—to disarticulate and disorder. In a post-Enlightenment context, nonsense holds particular interest as an other to modern conceptions of advancing knowledge and logical mastery. Yet, unlike the post-truth nonsense we encounter these days, literary nonsense identifies its parodic, subversive, negating, and complementary relationship to logic and sense, often emphasizes its sight- and sound-based elements, and provokes its readers to read joyfully, with scrutiny, and reflexively. As we read, we will ask: What do works of nonsense say about literature, its function, and materials? How does nonsense literature challenge processes of sense-making used by both writers and readers? What are the relationships between sense and nonsense? How is each variably understood and defined? We will also gain familiarity with common forms of nonsense-making and contextualize instances of its workings in their respective place and time. Texts may include theory by Sigmund Freud, C.S. Pierce, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze; poetry, prose, and drama by authors writing firmly in the “nonsense genre” such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, as well as others whose work carries features of it like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Langston Hughes, Marie Hall Ets, Shake Keane, and Carl Sandberg, as well as translations of Sukumar Ray, August Stramm, Kurt Schwitters, Andre Breton, Christian Morgenstern, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Daniil Kharms. Students will write three 5-page papers and maintain a reading journal.
Elective
LAS E392-01
BOLLYWOOD CALLING: INDIA THROUGH THE LENS OF POPULAR CINEMA
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Commonly associated with the kitsch of song-and-dance routines, heavy melodrama, and elaborate staging, popular Hindi cinema, exoticised as Bollywood the world over, has come to represent a singular appeal among global movie industries. However, this broad-stroke understanding of Hindi cinema ignores the mechanics of its filmmaking style, its ability to cut through class and religion, and its influence in our markets of narrative, taste, ideas, and politics. There is much to learn about how popular Hindi cinema has helped proliferate cultural aesthetics, create and further social and national identities, and bridge the separation between the Indian audience and the desi diaspora. In this class, we will trace the development of Hindi Cinema, from its socialist early beginnings, to the commercial potboilers of the 70s, the slick multiplex films of the new millennium, and the political dramas of the twenty twenties. We will watch Hindi films (with subtitles) and read critical literature to better understand gender, class, and caste in popular cinema, how stardom shapes cultural production, and the legacy of Hindi movies in a politically energized India.In addition to watching films and reading assigned literature, students will also produce mini-reviews, essays, and presentations throughout the class on films watched and discovered. Students will be required to share three short essays, one long-form feature, and a video essay as part of a group project.
Required Texts: Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (Routledge); Jerry Pinto, The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood (Penguin)
Elective
LAS E395-01
HITCHCOCK FILMS: THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Alfred Hitchcock famously revealed that he looked not for a story to tell but a visual problem to solve. With a career that spanned silent to sound, black-and-white to color and film to television, Hitchcock mastered all time-arts media while consistently focused on representing our manias, monsters, and madness. He was a sly cultural commentator of his milieu, filming the first serial killer movie, the first natural disaster flick, and the first psychological thrillers. As a result, his films provide a basic education in filmmaking as well as critical analyses of popular social context. This course attempts to cover the breath of Hitchcock's oeuvre focusing on both his masterful cinematic techniques and his jaundiced analyses of modern society. In addition to Hitchcock's films and television productions, we will read Hitchcock's own comments on filmmaking, significant popular socio-historical texts and film theory. We will also look to recent international revisions of Hitchcock by Jordan Peele, Pedro Almod≤var, Lou Ye, Yim Ho and others. Regular papers will synthesize all required texts to master the Master.
Elective
LAS E409-01
TEXT AND THE MOVING IMAGE: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Our explorations in this interdisciplinary workshop will center around the interplay of image and text, particularly in film and video. We will tend to the space between words, between images, the movements from one to another, what’s alive in the cracks. How might poetic devices translate to film? How might film theory inspire our writing? What are the myriad ways text, voice and image can layer and entwine?
This workshop is for students interested in practices that live and migrate between moving images and language art. Together we will consider essay films, cinepoetry, video art, installation and live performance. Class time will include screenings, discussions of texts by artists, poets and film theorists, and open-ended prompts for individual and collaborative experiments. No prior experience is necessary, only a desire to engage deeply with films and writing, experiment with new forms and media, and create in thoughtful community.
Elective
LAS E411-01
BEGINNING POETRY WRITING WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The Beginning Poetry Workshop is an elective course introducing students to the art of poetry writing. The course sequentially addresses major commitments of poetry including form/content, sound, line, voice, image, language(s), tradition/convention, experiment, audience, revision, performance, collection, publication, and distribution. Workshop is the heart of the course, animating the practice, discourse, critique, audience, community, and mentorship vital to poets. Every class will also include close reading, discussion of assigned texts, and writing. We will attend public readings, curate and participate in community readings, and welcome poets to our class, when possible. Work can be developed in a range of styles, traditions, and languages. You will leave this class with a collection of workshopped and revised poems, which you will design, self-publish, and distribute in print and/or digital form.
The Beginning Poetry Workshop is a prerequisite for the LAS-E421 Advanced Poetry Workshop in the Spring.
Elective
LAS E412-01
BEGINNING FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
While the writing of fiction involves only the writer and the page, the group workshop affords the writer the opportunity to explore, develop and refine his or her work in a small community focused on a single goal. This environment of craft and creativity is particularly critical to the beginning writer. As with any craft, revision is the key to effective storytelling. The revision process will be emphasized. Short fiction by leading writers will be read and discussed; elements of craft will be explored; students will learn to deliver criticism in a supportive, constructive way; but learning by doing will comprise the majority of the class. Writing will begin in the first class, leading to small, peer-driven workshop groups and culminating in a full class workshop at semester's end. Students will produce three stories throughout the semester, all of which will be workshopped and revised. The student's engagement in the course, participation and attendance, will drive the final grades.
Elective
LAS E413-01
INTRODUCTION TO PLAYWRITING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The playwriting workshop is an introduction to the basic principles of scriptwriting for live performance. Students will examine the form as a storytelling technology, an intervention, an act of embodied vandalism. We will collectively ask: How do you spawn an idea? How do you construct dialogue on the page? Through rhythm, intent, given circumstances? How do we shape that dialogue into character? Narrative? Alongside dramatic action, how do we construct the physical and fictive environments for story to occur? This class intends for the writer to celebrate excess and work from a point of textual abundance. Students will write and write, then take on the roles of sculptor, carpenter, and architect in order to leave the class having developed a single play. Functioning as both a seminar and workshop, the course will introduce students to a variety of play forms by writers including: Aleshea Harris, Reza Abdoh, Guillermo Calderon, Tim Crouch, Sophie Treadwell. We will use these plays to build a toolkit of generative strategies and address writing as a physical task that seeks a three-dimensional home.
Elective
LAS E416-01
PICTURE AND WORD
SECTION DESCRIPTION
A workshop-style course which combines English with a studio project for students with an interest in children's picture books. Students will learn to develop storytelling skills (imagination, language, plot, character, and voice) and illustration techniques (characterization, setting, page, layout) by studying picture books and completing writing and illustration assignments. For their final projects, students will be expected to produce an original text, sketch dummy, and two to four finished pieces of art. The class will also include an overview of publishing procedures and published writers/illustrators will be invited to share their experiences and critique students' work.
This is a co-requisite course. Students must register for LAS-E416 and ILLUS-3612.
Elective
LAS E430-01
LIARY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The word liary references the seven volumes of Anais Nin's diaries, which, upon their publication, were denounced by Nin's friends as utter fiction, as the "liary." This course will treat this insult as the basis for a literary genre: the fiction of life itself. We will focus on the production of liaries: fiction using real life - your own. But rather than thinking about lived experience as the raw material of fiction which finds expression through words, we will think about words themselves as the medium through which the fiction of life can be constructed. In this course, we will be fully invested in the materiality of words and the functionality of fiction. We will collide with words as if they were a particularly willful batch of clay, to find different ways in which fictionality is created when a word is imagined to give contour to the slippery moments of living.
Elective
LAS E501-01
FROM LITERARY TO CULTURAL STUDIES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Cultural studies has made its mark in the humanities as a structured discipline since the 1960s. It emerged from a dissatisfaction with traditional literary criticism and sought to widen the latter's focus on aesthetic masterpieces of high culture by incorporating "low," popular, and mass culture in an interdisciplinary analysis of "texts," their production, distribution and consumption. Varied "texts" from the world of art, film, TV, advertising, detective novels, music, folklore, etc., as well as everyday objects, discourses, and institutions have since been discussed in their social, historical, ideological and political contexts. This course will provide an introduction to the field and its concerns. It will also encourage students to practice some of its modes of analysis.
Elective
LAS E511-01
BEYOND HUMAN: GPT-4 & THE EXTENSION OF LITERARY CONSCIOUSNESS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In this forward-thinking course, we will explore the potential of GPT-4 as a catalyst for extending and enhancing literary consciousness. As artificial intelligence reshapes the landscape of language and literature, we will consider how GPT-4, with its advanced generative capabilities, can serve as a creative collaborator in the writing process, pushing the boundaries of human imagination and storytelling.
Students will engage with a range of texts and theories to better understand the implications of AI in the realm of literary art. We will examine the ethical, aesthetic, and critical considerations of collaborating with AI, while also assessing how GPT-4 can help writers tap into new perspectives, styles, and techniques. Throughout the course, students will work on a series of creative assignments that involve both human and AI-generated content, learning to strike a balance between their own instincts and the generative power of the machine.
By the end of the course, students will not only develop a deeper understanding of the potential for human-AI collaboration in literature but also gain valuable insights into their own creative processes. They will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to navigate and contribute to the ongoing conversation surrounding the role of AI in language art. The course will culminate in a final project, which may be a creative work, critical analysis, or research paper, showcasing the student's engagement with the literary possibilities and implications of the GPT-4 era. Topics to be covered in this course include:
- The history of writing technologies and their impact on human consciousness
- The history and development of GPT-4 and the implications for literature andlanguage art
- Strategies for effectively guiding and refining GPT-4-generated content
- Exploring different genres and forms of writing with AI assistance
- Ethical considerations in human-AI collaboration and authorship
- The future of collaborative writing with advanced AI systems
Elective