LAS Courses
LAS E211-01
MEDIEVAL TO EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This discussion-based course surveys major and minor works of British literature, mostly poetry, from the late Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, with emphasis on the way these works relate to broad cultural phenomena in other areas, including philosophy, theology, and visual arts. Regular homework emphasizes independent critical and investigative reading of complex texts and images; formal writing assignments develop your ability to combine your own insights with those gained from casual and scholarly research, open-book midterm and final exams allow you to demonstrate your ability to analyze unfamiliar works and place them in context with those we have studied. Readings include (mostly short) works by Chaucer (3 Canterbury Tales), Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare (Sonnets and The Tempest), Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Herrick, Milton, Bunyan, Butler, Behn, Rochester, Locke, Dryden, Pope, Hogarth, Gray, Boswell and Johnson.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E212-01
ROMANTIC TO EDWARDIAN BRITISH LITERATURE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Although it dovetails with LAS E211, usually offered in the fall, this discussion-based course can be taken by itself. It surveys major and minor works of British literature, mostly poetry and prose fiction, from the late 1700s to the early 20th century, with consideration of the way these works relate to broad social and cultural phenomena including philosophy, gender politics, aesthetics and visual arts. Regular homework exercises emphasize independent critical and investigative reading of complex texts and images; formal writing assignments develop your ability to combine your insights with those gained from research, open-book midterm and final exams allow you to demonstrate your ability to analyze unfamiliar works and place them in context with those we have studied. Readings include (mostly short) works by Charlotte Smith, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley ("Transformation"), Tennyson, Elizabeth B. and Robert Browning, Hopkins, Housman, Yeats, Stevenson ("Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"), Conrad ("The Secret Sharer"), and Lawrence.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E215-01
INTRO TO CULTURE CRITICISM
SECTION DESCRIPTION
A review - nay, a good review, the kind you are sure to find in the art, entertainment, and culture sections of reputed newspapers and magazines, certainly engages with the study & makeup of the art work it is reviewing, but is also able to consider it as a palpable cultural production existing in the same universe as TikTok videos and endless Twitter discourse. It revels in and pokes fun at fandom, appreciates influence and also legacy, and is able to transition easily from critical theory to breathless pop culture breakdown. In this class, we will understand what makes for a good review, while also learning to fashion a parallel writing project as critics of the craft that we're developing. This is a class designed to develop the artist as a serious discerner of craft and a writer having fun with wordplay.
Elective
LAS E220-01
READINGS IN BLACK LIFE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Black life is lived in the context of all that attempts to stamp it out. Black life defies the norms of gender and sexuality. Black being is a creative enactment-it redefines space and time while building otherwise worlds. The course provides an engaging introduction to questions of Blackness and being through critical theory, literature, poetry, criticism, art, and performance. We will think Black life from the overlapping theoretical trajectories of Black Studies, Black Feminist Theory, Queer Studies, and Performance Studies. We will attend to how these fields have produced knowledge about Blackness and being and speculate about what forms of black life might still escape their grasp. We will re-evaluate existing understandings of Blackness; build theoretical frameworks for anti-blackness, diaspora, haunting, and decolonization; and trace what remains in the afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and genocide. All course conversations will be contextualized within contemporary movements for Black liberation and connected to experimental forms of Black cultural production.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E236-01
THE FUTURE OF LITERATURE OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In this class, we will explore the future of literature and language art made with and about computers. We investigate the real danger and the revolutionary power of data, software, social media, memes, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence and we will cultivate new ways of relating to digital technology. We will examine the genealogy of writing as a technology in order to gain a better understanding of current and future possibilities. What is the role of the artist in computer-generated artwork? How will the co-evolution of human and machine affect the future of language art? In this course, we will discuss the ethical, aesthetic, and critical dimensions of artificial intelligence and machine learning in relation to the production of new forms of language art. In this class, we examine how artists can use computers as a tool or a collaborator to create the language art of the future. Students will learn to think analytically critically about computer mediated language art and and learn to articulate their process and goals for their work. Students should expect weekly readings, writing and creative assignments that will nourish a final project.
Elective
LAS E249-01
HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS: WRITING WAR IN THE LONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course traces the ways a war experience is both imagined and remembered in short fiction and films of the long twentieth-century amidst a marked acceleration of both mass warfare and ecological change. In Authoring War, Kate McLoughlin notes that the challenge for war writing is to convey this charged space, to communicate this complex situation-part psycho-physiological, part geographical-that is conflict. In a ground war, knowledge of the terrain can mean the difference between life and death for a soldier. The earth, in this sense can be both refuge of safety, or, harbinger of death. For civilians, home-place is often transformed from a familiar site of sanctuary into a foreign-seeming environment of hostility. We will read works by both soldier and civilian authors-such as Tim O'Brien, Brian Turner, J.D. Salinger, Tadeusz Borowski, Tamiki Hara, Elizabeth Bowen, and Arthur Machen-and watch films depicting World War I, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts-such as 1917 and Apocalypse Now. As we do so, we will ask: How does the setting of war function as more than mere backdrop? Why does natural imagery become a standard trope for representing some of the most traumatic aspects of the war experience? As we contextualize our readings and viewings by looking to scholars of trauma as well as to environmental historians of war, we will consider some of the ways that the environmental aesthetics of war may be linked to our own hostilities towards the environment in a time of climate crisis.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E274-01
POST-WAR AMERICAN LITERATURE: NARRATING COUNTERCULTURE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will focus on the literary expression of American counterculture during the 1950s and 60s the so-called 'Beat' and 'Hippie' generations. The writers, artists, musicians, and bohemians who gave voice to counterculture during these two decades impacted not only literature and art, but also revolutionized social and political ideologies. Their emphasis on individual freedom, spiritual liberation, and subcultural hipness, called on all Americans to define their "authentic" selves, to seek higher consciousnesses, and to resist the establishment's repressive mandate that we remain passive consumers rather than active creators. With literature as our guide, we'll begin by examining the Beat movement with its emphasis on spontaneity and the search for IT. We'll then look at how Beat aesthetics and ideologies were adopted and politicized during the heyday of the Hippie movement. Finally, we'll look at the influence of these earlier generations on later countercultural movements such as the Punks of the 70s and early 80s. In the course of our reading, we'll consider the impact of cultural contexts and political motivations on the literature: the Cold War; McCarthyism; the rise of mass consumer culture and mass media; the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements; and shifting politics around gender and sexuality. We'll also investigate how members of those groups already on the margins of dominant socio-political discourse-women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities relate to the notion of counterculture. Expect readings from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Aaron Cometbus, and Hunter S. Thompson.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E289-01
THINGAMAJIGIRL: OBJECTS, HUMANS, FEMININITY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
What does it mean to be a "thing"? What does it feel like to be a "thing"? We all feel that we know how it feels to be "human": we are not "things," or "inanimate objects." But what we don't often question is the emotional and social valuations put upon the relationship between humans and things. For most of us, to be treated "as a thing" is to be de-humanized, de-valued, the nadir of existence. This course will question that binaristic tradition of conceptualizing objects through the lens of femininity. Cross-culturally but especially within the Western-European world, women have been treated as "things": toys, trophies, dolls, ornaments, are all metonyms for "female." By studying literary and cultural texts as well as art produced by women and women-identified authors, we will rigorously and critically examine the multiple functions, oppressive and subversive, of the linkages between "woman" and "thing," and in turn, re-think the idea of the object.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E289-02
THINGAMAJIGIRL: OBJECTS, HUMANS, FEMININITY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
What does it mean to be a "thing"? What does it feel like to be a "thing"? We all feel that we know how it feels to be "human": we are not "things," or "inanimate objects." But what we don't often question is the emotional and social valuations put upon the relationship between humans and things. For most of us, to be treated "as a thing" is to be de-humanized, de-valued, the nadir of existence. This course will question that binaristic tradition of conceptualizing objects through the lens of femininity. Cross-culturally but especially within the Western-European world, women have been treated as "things": toys, trophies, dolls, ornaments, are all metonyms for "female." By studying literary and cultural texts as well as art produced by women and women-identified authors, we will rigorously and critically examine the multiple functions, oppressive and subversive, of the linkages between "woman" and "thing," and in turn, re-think the idea of the object.
Elective
LAS E299-01
THE LESBIAN NOVEL
SECTION DESCRIPTION
To be a lesbian, according to Monique Wittig, seems the simplest and most complex mode of desiring: she who was interested in 'only' half of the population and had a violent desire for that half. In a world overcrowded by the voices and bodies of men, how does a lesbian carve out physical and imaginative space to let her desires free? This course will explore how this question has been addressed by daring, renegade lesbian writers who have used the medium of textual narrative to produce both history and future. Rather than reading these novels as historical document, sociological artifact, or even personal testaments, we will digest them as performance, wish-fulfillment, blueprint for a world in which love and sex between women reign.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E302-01
POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES II: IRELAND, OCEANIA, AND THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Postcolonial literature is the writing produced by people in or from regions that have escaped the yoke of colonialism. Of course, such a definition raises a number of questions, and during the semester we will grapple with the definition. Our readings will open with several theoretical discussions of postcoloniality, then we will continue with novels and poetry from Australia, India, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand, Samoa, and Sri Lanka. This history of trading empires and settler colonies will be a major focus in this course. Through individual projects and a final paper that works with at least one of the theoretical texts and a novel or book of poetry, students can begin to focus on the area in the field that specifically interests them. Writers may include Ciaran Carson, Lionel Fogarty, Keri Hulme, R.K. Narayan, Michael Ondaatje, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Albert Wendt.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E303-01
INTRODUCTION TO ASIAN AMERICAN AND DIASPORIC LITERATURE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This class examines Asian American and diasporic literature to understand key social issues and historical events that have affected immigrant and diasporic communities in the US. These events include but are not limited to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, the civil rights and women's rights movements, the Vietnam War, and the LA uprising. Students will engage with scholarly, literary, and visual responses to these historical developments, which articulate the field of Asian American and diasporic studies around the following challenges:
1) how to secure the civil rights of Asian Americans as a racial minority group
2) how to mediate ethnic, sexual, and socioeconomic differences among Asian Americans and between other racialized groups
3) how to know and respond to the racial injuries of being Asian in America.
Offering students a historical grounding in Asian American and diasporic literature and culture, the course additionally asks students to question the relationship between multiple cultural forms (the short story, autobiography, novel, play, epistolary, and graphic novel) and their impact in shaping Asian American and Diasporic studies.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E304-01
ASIAN AMERICAN AFFECTS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Affects describe the palpable manifestations of feeling--the thoughts, senses, expressions, gestures, and actions that both precede and respond to the gravity of emotions. In this course, we will question the affects that emerge within Asian American literature and film, especially those born from feelings of vengefulness, regret, filial love, and duty. To what degree are these affects unique to Asian American contexts? What narrative conventions and histories produce these affects and how might we chart an ever more expansive tapestry of feeling Asian in America?
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E305-01
ENFIGURING ASIAN/AMERICAN WOMEN IN TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In this course, students will engage with transnational narratives about Asian American women, organized around the figures of the self-sacrificial martyr, avenger, betrayer, and loyalist. The course contextualizes these figures within the historical conditions that have affected transnational Aaian American diasporas since the 1940’s. In particular, students will learn how to analyze prominent narratives of sacrifice, vengeance, loyalty, and deceit to illuminate the kinds of desires and actions that have been (un)imaginable for women at specific points in history. In addition to the above goals, students will consider how the categories of “Asian” and “Asian American” women constitute shifting anchors of identification and belonging by virtue of their transnational characteristics. Students can expect to read heavily across historical, theoretical, literary criticism alongside novels, short stories, film, and graphic novels. The course comes with a content warning as it will grapple with some major events of historical trauma and sexual violence.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E308-01
KAZUO ISHIGURO AND/AS WORLD LITERATURE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course considers the fiction of the Japanese British Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro in a world literary context. Based on a selection of his short stories and novels we will discuss, among other things, the different critical perspectives relevant to reading globally in terms of which both the author and his work have often been read, including the manner in which putative signs of Englishness and "Japaneseness" have been attributed especially to his early texts. At the same time, we will consider the intriguing ways in which the author's fiction comments implicitly on its own reading as well as ways of reading world literature. The course also has a film component in that we will view and discuss a film adaptation of one of Ishiguro's novels as well as two other relevant films as a basis for examining how the author's adaptive use of certain narrative techniques has helped shape his style and fictional worlds. In this way, the course engages questions related to ethics, knowledge, cultural translation, narrative and cultural representation, as well as interpretation and critique central to both Ishiguro's fiction and the reading of world literature.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E335-01
LITERATURE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course examines the movement of people and the creation of new foods and foodways around the Indian Ocean world. Edward A. Alpers points out in The Indian Ocean in World History, the region is rich in “the uneven distribution of both natural and manufactured products,” and those uneven distributions led to a flourishing trade in spices, dates, pearls, wood, ivory, cotton, and silk. Both Perth and Mogadishu are parts of the Indian Ocean World, and it contains cultures as disparate as Bedouin and Tamil. Perhaps no region in the world has as long a history of transoceanic trade, and as people moved along those trade routes, they brought cultural beliefs and practices with them. Those trade routes are responsible for the Farsis in India and for the Gujaratis in Kenya. They are also responsible for bunny chow in Durban and pad Thai in Bangkok. Writers we will look at may include Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Lindsay Collen, Amitav Ghosh, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Bruce Pascoe, and M.J. Vassanji.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E338-01
MAGICAL REALISM AND THE SOUTH
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The contradiction and excess, the blurring of the real and the imaginary of magical realism have been associated with particular geographical and cultural environments. We will examine this territorialization of magical realism by comparing the ways in which novels from the South -- South America, the Caribbean, Southern U.S. -- formulate the relation of land to individual, familial, and cultural identity. We will also examine how these "counterrealist" regions reflect on the supposed "rationalism" of the North. Works to be considered include novels and essays by: Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, William Goyen.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E338-02
MAGICAL REALISM AND THE SOUTH
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The contradiction and excess, the blurring of the real and the imaginary of magical realism have been associated with particular geographical and cultural environments. We will examine this territorialization of magical realism by comparing the ways in which novels from the South -- South America, the Caribbean, Southern U.S. -- formulate the relation of land to individual, familial, and cultural identity. We will also examine how these "counterrealist" regions reflect on the supposed "rationalism" of the North. Works to be considered include novels and essays by: Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, William Goyen.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E341-01
AUSTRALIAN POETRY AND PROSE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
While the first literature written in Australia is probably “On Reading the Controversy Between Lord Byron and Mr Bowles” by Barron Field, Australian narratives precede that poem by at least 30,000 years. The different indigenous groups of Australia were composing stories, singing songs, and illustrating stories for millennia before the first English colonists arrived. It is with these stories we will begin the course, then proceed to colonial writing, and postcolonial writing both in poetry and prose.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective