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COURSE DESCRIPTION

“An investigation of women’s writings in English after 1800, through poetry, (auto)biography, fiction, drama, film, and theory written by women.”

This course tracks a chronological path of women’s writing through a cross-section of genres and an eclectic selection of pivotal works and authors. The intent is to examine how women writers’ voices emerged from the histories that buried them. How can we become attuned to the writers’ political and artistic motivations to appreciate how they represent and reimagine “woman” in literary works? As we follow this path, can we deepen our understanding of the notions and representations of gender in literature? Class discussions will also focus on how we might better appreciate the work of pre-21st-century women writers as we become increasingly distanced from the social contexts of their pasts and removed from their styles of literary expression.

The Oriental Tale and Orientalism in English literature of the later eighteenth-century. The course focuses on literary innovations resulting from adaptations and combinations of the oriental tale, travel literature, familiar letters, and "terrorist" or gothic fiction to explore disparities of power and wealth between religions, genders, races, generations, and classes of subjects and citizens.

The course culminates online in the reading of literature by indigenous writers who challenge readers to envision a decolonized future.

If President Barack Obama failed to fully achieve our “hope” for a post-racial future, President Donald Trump’s “blame on both sides” dog-whistling has revealed the dangers of this color-blindness. Since the Black Power movement declined in the 1980s, the United States has been living in what Michelle Alexander calls an "Age of Colorblindness." Passage of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988 marked a major event in our own unique history of racial colorblindness. In this course, we will collect, compare, and analyze examples of North American visual culture across this thirty-year history to ask: What does racial representation look like in an era that claimed to be “color blind”? What forms of media have driven or expressed these post-racial desires and erasures? What kinds of analytical postures and methodologies enable us to see, as Christina Sharpe writes, “in excess of what is caught in the frame”? Primary sources will include translated excerpts of Pierre Vallières’s Nègres blancs d’Amérique; speeches by Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau denying Canada’s history of colonialism; advertisements from Nancy Reagan's “Just Say No” campaign; James Cameron's film Avatar (2009); music videos by Michael Jackson, Eminem, and Childish Gambino; art by Shepard Fairy, Kehinde Wiley, Mike Kelley, Adrian Piper, and Parker Bright, along with other textual and visual media. Secondary sources will include theory and history from Rinaldo Walcott, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Mary Dudziak, and Elizabeth Povinelli, among others.

  This is an introduction to the study of English Literature.

This course is intended to introduce you to the language, major works and authors of  late Medieval England.  In the process, we will learn a great deal about life and ideas in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries generally.
This course has two major elements: language and literature.  Both, however, rely on the historical, social, theological events of the late Middle Ages.  Please note: The linguistic focus of this course is on the sound, not the structure of Middle English. 

An introduction to the major examples of Medieval English Drama: Liturgical drama, Cycle drama, Morality plays, and secular drama. We also study Medieval stagecraft, and perform selections from cycle dramas. (Pre-1800.)