In this course we will begin to explore the literature emerging out of postcolonial Africa, looking at novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. With over 40 independent countries and a multiplicity of cultures, any course of this nature can only be an overview. However, we will read a number of important writers of the last fifty years, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, as well as lesser known writers including Tayeb Salih and M.G. Vassanji, and explore some of the problems facing independent African countries.

The name Shakespeare conveys a set of assumptions about style and eloquence in the English language, the course of European history, the power of dramatic literature, the protocols of theatrical performance and of Renaissance/Early Modern Culture in general--not to mention incontrovertible truths about the human condition. In this course, we will undertake a creatively critical examination of several plays in the context of 16th- and 17th-century political struggles, major ideological shifts, colonial expansion, literary movements, and the cultural place of the commercial theatre as a new and controversial space of representation that vigorously appropriated traditional narratives. Requirements for the course include regular short writing assignments, a modest research paper, a final examination, and (if possible) attendance at a local theatrical production.

Elective

This course examines twentieth-century Black British writing. We will focus primarily on works written by the 1940s to 1960s Windrush generation-the large, mid-century influx of Caribbean peoples to the United Kingdom (UK)-as well as Asian British authors who are often included under the umbrella of blackness. Reading such authors as Claude McKay, Mulk Raj Anand, Una Marson, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and Shola von Reinhold, we will explore also the colonial forebears and contemporary afterlives of the Windrush moment. There are a wide variety of often conflicting ways that blackness circulates in Britain, then and now. Both racist and reclaimative evocations of blackness demand our attention. Our course will circulate, then, around two core questions: 1) How do Black British writers' refigure blackness as a positive, empowered force and voice integral to British modernity, and 2) How do we contextualize this vital community of Black voices in Britain within the history of extractive imperialism that was and is buoyed by white supremacist conceptions of blackness in the British popular imagination. Across all the authors we will read, Black Britons succeed in reimagining what home means amidst the racialized environments of (un)belonging-rescuing it from exile, diaspora, and displacement and claiming their place at the heart of the British metropolis and within its literary canon.

Elective

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

This course asks students to travel back to the 1930s and contextualize the various artistic and cultural movements that comprised the Federal Theater Project and the WPA arts projects. The course will revolve around the 1999 film by Tim Robbins, Cradle Will Rock, and the Marc Blitzstein original, as well as supplementary materials researched by the students involving any aspect of the film, from Brechtian and Documentary drama to Mexican muralism to labor issues to race and gender resistance to LGBTQ histories and on. Students will research toward a final artistic project that comprises the requirement for the course.

Elective

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

Late nineteenth-century designer, poet, scholar, ethical entrepreneur, architectural preservationist, aesthetic innovator and socialist revolutionary William Morris found much to use in the otherwise sorely abused Middle Ages.  If the Victorian era in Britain (at the peak of its colonial empire and the explosion of industrial capitalism) cloaked itself in the nostalgia of the Gothic Revival, Morris might be considered a counter-revivalist for the way he mined the same medieval past - particularly “the calamitous fourteenth century” - to imagine a very different future than the one we eventually came to inhabit.  This course will undertake a survey of the life and work of William Morris with particular attention given to his fusion of history and fantasy in the service of a radical political vision.  Among the texts studied will be The Earthly Paradise, A Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere along with historical and political treatises from Commonweal and critical studies of Morris and his circle. The course will include regular writing exercises and exams, culminating in an independently researched final project.

This past August, extensive fragments of two lost plays by the Ancient Greek tragedian Euripides were published for the first time. You will be among the first students—ever—to read and explore them in this class on Ancient Greek Tragedy. In addition to those newly discovered fragments, we read select complete plays of Euripides and his fellow Athenian poet-playwrights, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and devote special attention to key themes including: their literary structure and stagecraft; their original performative context in fifth-century BCE Athens; the history of their transmission and survival; and their reception—that is, how Prometheus Bound for example went from being a script for a play put on one spring day in Athens almost 2500 years ago, to a source of inspiration behind a black comedy series that dropped on a major streaming service this summer. Assessments include one short response paper, a midterm, and a final project. All readings in English translation.

Elective

In this innovative course we aim to recognize and appreciate video games as a profound medium for storytelling, comparable to traditional forms of literary art. This course examines the narrative complexities, character development, and the capacity for emotional engagement within video games, offering students a fresh perspective on interactive media as a significant cultural and artistic expression. Throughout this course, we will engage with the works of scholars and artists including Nick Montfort, Ian Cheng, and Laurie Anderson. These figures have made pivotal contributions to our understanding of how narrative functions in the digital age, and their insights will guide our exploration of video games' narrative potential. A central focus of our study will be on the narrative and storytelling techniques unique to video games, emphasizing the role of interactive storytelling and player choice in crafting engaging and multifaceted narratives. Through this lens, we'll explore how video games not only tell stories but also allow players to experience and influence these narratives, creating a dynamic form of storytelling that is both immersive and participatory. Additionally, the course will delve into themes of identity and empathy, considering how video games can serve as a medium for exploring various identities and fostering empathy among players. By participating in interactive narratives, players have the opportunity to experience the world from different perspectives, enhancing their understanding of others and themselves. For the final project, students will have the option to compose an analytical or research paper that delves into a specific aspect of video game literature, or to create a creative project. This could involve designing a detailed game narrative, proposing innovative approaches to interactive storytelling, or even developing a prototype to demonstrate the narrative capabilities of video games. Through a combination of lectures, discussions, and hands-on projects, this course encourages students to critically engage with video games as a narrative medium, expanding their understanding of what constitutes literature in the digital era.

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

Since the early Hollywood years, films have played a major role in the way American mainstream culture inscribes queerness: the many and diverse queer communities, identities, and experiences. This course begins with an examination of earlier representations of queerness in Hollywood films, tracing queer cinematic images throughout the early 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We will screen queer films such as Nazimova's Salome (1922) and The Killing of Sister George (1968) to analyze their representations of queer identity and examine what they signify to us today. Our examination of queer film will address the following questions: What is gay or lesbian film? What is a queer film? What are the ways in which the discourses of race, gender, and sexuality are interrelated and deployed? The latter half of the course also will examine selected films and documentaries from the new emerging queer cinema and a selection of film shorts that are currently running in queer film festivals.

Elective

Taking its cue from Clint Eastwood who proclaimed, As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't have any original art except Western movies and jazz, this course will analyze the Western film as an art form in and of itself. We will discuss Westerns in terms of their specific aesthetic and technological influence on the medium, their cultural expression of a national political unconscious, and their global function as the meta-narrative of space. This course will tackle these discussions through a chronological unfolding of the genre starting with the Edison Company's 1898 Westerns and Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the Golden Age of John Ford and Howard Hawks' films and the reciprocal translation of Akira Kurosawa's epics, and finally, to the variants of the Spaghetti, Revisionist, and genre-bending contemporary and postmodern Westerns of Dennis Hopper, Sam Peckinpah, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, and Wim Wenders. There will be required readings in critical film theory, weekly screenings, analytical essays, and oral presentations.

Elective

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

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

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

In this beginning writing course, we will look at contemporary texts that push against the boundaries of traditional literary genres (fiction, poetry, theatre, creative non-fiction, graphic fiction, etc) and blur the lines between those genres as well. Together we will read some of the most exciting contemporary writers who resist our attempts to categorize them. By examining these texts and trying our own creative writing experiments, we will gain a better understanding of what traditional genres are, the techniques they employ, and ways they can be manipulated to create something new.

Elective

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

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

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

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