LAS Courses
LAS E343-01
SHAKESPEARE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
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!
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E384-01
COLORIZING FILM/EMBODYING CINEMA: TRADITION OF BLACK WOMEN FILMMAKERS IN THE USA: 1970 FF
SECTION DESCRIPTION
"In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender, or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race. So this is in continuity with that." --Kimberle Crenshaw
"I really didn't let gender and race issues bother me. I knew I would have trouble with both. I was determined to do what I was going to do at any cost. I kept plugging away. Whatever I had to do, I did it." --Madeline Anderson, from Reel Black Talk.
This course will be an intense and focused examination of Black Women's film-making in the USA beginning with the 1970's LA Rebellion/UCLA Rebellion of Black Filmmakers through contemporary work. The critical journey will include Black feminist & womanist political theories, Black Feminist manifestos, histories of black women filmmakers and traditional film theory & Black film aesthetic theories. We will consider Black women's documentary tradition, their relation to and gendered representation of African-American to African heritage; and intersectional POV of race, gender, sexuality, and class. We will analyze form, content and theoretical interventions in order to sketch, if not fill in, an artistic, cultural, and political practice that remains in the literal shadows of Hollywood and White film hegemony. You MUST be prepared to screen many films, read critical and theoretical essays, and write thoughtful, cogent papers that will help us center a space that is too often decentered.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E409-101
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior or Senior Graduate Students.
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior or Senior Undergraduate Students.
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
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.
Open to Senior Illustration Students.
Elective
LAS E421-01
ADVANCED POETRY WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The Advanced Poetry Workshop is an intensive project-based poetry workshop for students with previous workshop experience and a portfolio of revised work on which to build. The course centers on workshop: peer critique by students with previous practice in poetry writing, and the shared goal of completing a semester-long publication/performance project. Students are expected to have a strong commitment to active participation in contemporary poetry as readers, writers, curators, performers, and audience. Teaching and learning methodologies include close reading of exemplary texts, experimentation with forms, revision, online/print publication, and performance. Texts will include poetry collections published in 2019 and 2020, as selected by students and instructor. The workshop welcomes work in any language and from any tradition of poetry. To the greatest extent possible, the work should speak for itself. But mediation, translation, contextualization also play a vital role.
Please contact the instructor for permission to register.
Elective
LAS E422-01
ADVANCED FICTION WRITING WKSHP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The advanced workshop assumes that students have some experience with writing fiction and are ready for an environment that will challenge them to hone, revise, and distill their craft. A writer begins inspired by dreams, language, a face in a crowd. But inspiration is only the beginning of a writer's work. In this course we'll study form, theme, voice, language, character, and plot. We'll also read and talk about stories by masters of the craft. The aim of the workshop is to help you discover what your stories want to be and fulfill the promise of your original vision.
Prerequisite: LAS-E412
Please contact the instructor for permission to register.
Elective
LAS E426-01
GRAPHIC NARRATIVE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will deal with graphic narrative in many of its forms: fiction, memoir, historical (auto)biography, journalistic investigation. We will be reading graphic narratives that helped create the genre of Comics Studies, as well as more contemporary narratives that are re-imagining and re-shaping the possibilities within the genre. We will also be reading scholarship that deepens our understanding of some of the ways these texts can be understood within a larger critical context. Students will have the opportunity to frame their responses to the readings in both traditional and visual modes. We will be reading such authors as: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Jean Yuen Yang, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, Ron Wimberly.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E445-01
THE LYRIC, THE HYBRID, THE ESSAY: EXPERIMENTS IN NONFICTION WRITING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The essay form is broad and, at its core, investigative, as it seeks to examine and disrupt, twist and turn, move and shake. This course will be an exploration of nonfiction writing through some of the various forms that the essay takes. Students will be writing both critical analyses of the texts as well as writing their own nonfiction essays that use the readings as models. We will begin by reading several classic examples and move from there towards more contemporary forms. Some of the writers we will study may include: Hilton Als, James Baldwin, Jo Ann Beard, Eula Biss, Jenny Boully, Mary Cappello, Anne Carson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, William Gass, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Rebecca Solnit, Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E446-01
ARTISTS ON THE NEWS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
As journalism continues its radical metamorphosis, a growing number of legacy and small-scale publications express interest or seek to incorporate work made by artists. As thought leaders in society, artists are distinctively adept at instigating and encouraging a more engaged and informed public, whether they are addressing disinformation or climate degradation, harmful technologies or immigration, surveillance or politically motivated violence. ‘Artists Report’ will teach artists seeking to make work that reaches out from beyond museums and galleries, the tools and tactics of an investigative practice, as well as help students familiarize themselves with the language and codes of the journalism field. Through case studies, and lectures from artists, journalists and editors currently facilitating artist-led storytelling, students will understand what it takes to foster true collaborations with publications, editors and journalists and create new contexts for artistic investigative work. The class will focus on daily news readings and longer-form investigative pieces, as well as writings from artists such as Molly Crabapple, Naeem Moahaiemen, Mel Chin, Joe Sacco, Errol Morris, Ruddy Roye, James Bridle, Surya Mattu, Paul Chan, and Tania Bruguera. Additionally, we will read texts from Jean Baudrillard, Teju Cole, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, and Alfredo Cramerotti that focus on the history, philosophy, and theory of visual culture, artists, and the news.
Students will be expected to produce short journalistic and investigative texts initially. Final projects can take the shape of either a long-format investigation, an audio news story, or a visual story. Everything produced will be required to take the form of a work that can be found in a major newspaper.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
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.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
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
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E520-01
SPECTACLES OF THE HUMAN BODY: FREAK SHOWS, ETHNOGRAPHIC DISPLAYS, AND HISTORIES OF DIFFERENCE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will investigate the era of freak shows and ethnographic displays in the parallel realms of science and show business in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From World's Fair Exhibits, to the streets of London, to the displays in PT Barnum's Museum, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows, human beings were placed on display for the purported amusement and instruction of the public. Through the artifacts of these exhibitions, we will examine the ways that human bodily display enacted ideas about race, ethnicity, gender and the body, and explore the extent to which these ideas still shadow our present moment.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E593-01
QUEER LITERATURE AND THEORY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In this course we will examine the ways in which queer culture becomes presented and inscribed from post-Stonewall (1969) until the present. We will examine various queer literatures from different ethnic, class, and cultural and national backgrounds such as Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon’s Gender Failure, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits and Justin Torrres’s We the Animals. We will also read selected writings from queer theorists, including Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and J. Halberstam to interpret the ways in which literature represents resistance to social and cultural repression, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination. We will attempt to address such important questions about the politics and social dynamics of queer sexualities and gender, closeting and homophobia and the ways in which queer writers explore such questions in their work.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective