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.

Elective

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

The stuff of myth, lore, literature, and cinema, the tender in parts-fraught in others equation between mothers & daughters has spawned art across centuries. And this writing workshop! Welcome to Mothers & Daughters: It’s a Complicated Narrative, where we will read, analyse, and create writing that dives through the heart of this relationship. We will be reading poems, stories, essays, and graphic narratives, look sideways at cinema and television, and examine scholarly material, to consider how mothers & daughters have committed the relationship to art. We will study how authors explore the sharing of space, gender roles and expectations, body and witnessing, and intergenerational trauma in contemporary literature and undertake writing of parent-child relationships. The class will include analysis by way of reflection essays, writing in poetry, fiction/graphic narrative, nonfiction modeled after our readings, and lively classroom discussion.

Readings may include “Motherhood & Daughterhood” by Adrienne Rich, excerpts from The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Sophocles' Electra, Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, The Carrying by Ada Limon, Ladybird dir. by Greta Gerwig, Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel, and poems by Diane Seuss, Dorothy Chang, Preeti Vangani, Ishle Yi Park, Taylor Byas.

Elective

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

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 and language 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

Below a certain depth in the ocean, a human body cannot remain. Not without imploding like a dying star. And yet oceans, bodies of water—such as the Atlantic—contain countless vital remains. Despite humanity’s vast technological advancements, the sciences continue to grapple with the ocean’s unreachable depths. On another disciplinary shore, critical ocean studies scholar, Steve Mentz, invites students of literature to “read for the salt.” While we may never experience an unmediated encounter with the chasmic depths of the Mariana Trench, the literary arts are saturated in blue matters. “Dark Waters” approaches modern anglophone literatures of the Atlantic—from England to Jamaica, from the U.S. to Nigeria—as a transnational, transhistorical archive whose oceanic histories are polluted equally by the chattel slavery of the middle passage and the oil spills of fossil fuel industries. Wading into the poetry of M. NourbeSe Phillip or Shailja Patel, the novels of Helon Habila, George Lamming, or John Lanchester, or the stories of Saleen Haddad, Virginia Woolf, or Mulk Raj Anand, this course invites students to create inlets and pursue tidal flows between the creative and the critical, and also amongst the entangled scientific and cultural materialities of our hydro-modernity. Sampling the critical-philosophic offerings of others—such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs' “undrowned,” Stacy Alaimo’s “transcorporiality,” Christina Sharpe’s “being in the wake,” and Elizabeth Deloughery’s “Heavy Waters”—students will use writing and other expressive media across two core projects and associated preparatory work to explore and, finally, offer their own ideas on the texts we have plumbed together.

Elective

This course introduces students to ways of thinking comparatively, through interrogating the very terms "global," "arts," and "culture." What constitutes the "global" and what are the implications of such an all-encompassing framework? For instance, what economic, political, and cultural processes can be understood as global? What forms of art are legible as having global stakes or speaking to universal concerns? Who gets to be part of the "universal" and why? This course will specifically examine the "global" acclaim of films such as Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Federico Fellino's 8 1/2 (1963), Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973), Bong Joon Ho's film Parasite (2019), Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), and novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Han Kang's The Vegetarian (2007). Critical Globalisms emphasizes the development of broad theoretical perspectives within which students can analyze their own archive of and interventions in "global arts and culture." The course will run as a seminar with weekly reading assignments, regular writing assignments, and in class discussion.

Elective

 This course will examine cinema as a culture text to be read for its various meanings: formalist through socio-ideological. As such, it will also introduce students to the basics of formalist film analysis, from editing techniques to sound production. We will focus on perhaps the best cultural and cinematic movement for critical inquiry: Surrealist cinema. While cinema was only one of many arts utilized by the 20th century surrealists (in Paris and elsewhere), it was clearly the most fetishized and experimented with of all the various enactments of the movement, becoming the ultimate surrealist “dream” experience as Andre Breton and others commented throughout the movement’s main decades (1920s and 30s). What fascinated the Parisian surrealists was the “otherness” of the cinematic experience, and they approached film as the perfect medium for producing a communion with otherness (alterity) and for subversion of bourgeois European culture that, in their eyes, had left Europe and the World only violence and colonial dominance. Film became, therefore, the link between not only surrealism’s formal experiments but also its decolonial tendencies. Such postcolonial crossroads also intersect with surrealism’s other fascination with otherness: feminism and the subversion of heteropatriarchy. And hence, surrealist film becomes the perfect mode for the critical study of modernisms both in Europe and in the Global South, and for the study of alternative forms of artistic and cultural vision. This course will center its studies upon these frames for a revision of surrealist film: formal experiment, modernisms and decolonial resistance, and radical reworkings of identity. To do so, we will begin with the ending: Afrosurrealism and “Black” surrealism in the Global South, and then work backwards to Parisian Surrealism (and Dada) and its developments particularly in the films of Jean Cocteau and Luis Bunuel. We’ll end the course with a look back “out” at postcolonial surrealisms (Marvelous Realism and Magical Realism) and avant-garde cinema at the crossroads, from American avant-garde to global.

Elective

 This course will examine cinema as a culture text to be read for its various meanings: formalist through socio-ideological. As such, it will also introduce students to the basics of formalist film analysis, from editing techniques to sound production. We will focus on perhaps the best cultural and cinematic movement for critical inquiry: Surrealist cinema. While cinema was only one of many arts utilized by the 20th century surrealists (in Paris and elsewhere), it was clearly the most fetishized and experimented with of all the various enactments of the movement, becoming the ultimate surrealist “dream” experience as Andre Breton and others commented throughout the movement’s main decades (1920s and 30s). What fascinated the Parisian surrealists was the “otherness” of the cinematic experience, and they approached film as the perfect medium for producing a communion with otherness (alterity) and for subversion of bourgeois European culture that, in their eyes, had left Europe and the World only violence and colonial dominance. Film became, therefore, the link between not only surrealism’s formal experiments but also its decolonial tendencies. Such postcolonial crossroads also intersect with surrealism’s other fascination with otherness: feminism and the subversion of heteropatriarchy. And hence, surrealist film becomes the perfect mode for the critical study of modernisms both in Europe and in the Global South, and for the study of alternative forms of artistic and cultural vision. This course will center its studies upon these frames for a revision of surrealist film: formal experiment, modernisms and decolonial resistance, and radical reworkings of identity. To do so, we will begin with the ending: Afrosurrealism and “Black” surrealism in the Global South, and then work backwards to Parisian Surrealism (and Dada) and its developments particularly in the films of Jean Cocteau and Luis Bunuel. We’ll end the course with a look back “out” at postcolonial surrealisms (Marvelous Realism and Magical Realism) and avant-garde cinema at the crossroads, from American avant-garde to global.

Elective

Ireland has a long history of literature, stretching from pre-Christian epics through monastic manuscripts right up to the thriving contemporary scene. While there are many important Irish writers before the beginning of the twentieth century, clearly the birth of the Abbey theatre and the poetry of W. B. Yeats and the prose of James Joyce created reverberations still felt in Ireland today. Using Joyce, Synge, and Yeats as a beginning point in this seminar we will look at a series of contemporary Irish writers whose works is building upon the foundation established in the early years of the twentieth century. One of the themes we will return to again and again in this course is the theme of loss - loss of language, loss of sovereignty, loss of loved ones.  What does Stephen mean when he says, "History is a Nightmare from which I am trying to awake"?  Why is Yeats' left in "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart"?

Elective

In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon writes, "The relations of man with matter, with the world outside, and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food." Fanon recognizes that for the colonized subject existence itself is so threatened that every bit of food one can gain access to is, as he writes, "a victory felt as a triumph for life." The foods people choose to eat and the ways they prepare those foods speak volumes about their relationship to the land and reflect their history. Postcolonial storytellers, writers, and filmmakers use food and foodways as markers of independence, as symbols of cultural colonization, and as signs of continued deprivations. Through foodways one can glimpse famines, invasions, and historical access to trade networks, and food itself can even serve as a vehicle for communication. Since these stories are not constructed in a vacuum, they also can reveal something about what food means in specific historical moments, in specific places, and for specific populations. This course will look at the roles food and foodways play in a series of narratives from formerly colonized spaces. Writers we will read may include Chris Abani, Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Elective

The LAS Open Seminar is devoted to the development of undergraduate and graduate degree projects that engage the discipline of literary arts and studies, and involves the writing of a longer, research-based project (thesis, artist's statement, creative work, etc). This engagement may take a variety of different forms, including a direct referencing or interaction with literary texts or issues; a focus on textuality and/or narrativity; a concern with research and the mechanics of writing a longer project. Therefore, as the course title indicates, the seminar has an open structure to accommodate our ability to address and foster each student's interests and concerns. As the semester progresses, we will move from a discussion of texts that introduce key concepts in the framing of interdisciplinary projects to group analyses and the workshopping of each student's project. In the first part of the semester, we will discuss a number of conceptual tenets that will ground our theorization of the artistic process, including issues of intentionality and audience; issues of translation and interdisciplinarity; and the relation of form to content. The second part of the semester will be organized and driven by group analyses of the degree and related written project of each class member.

Elective

This course explores design principles central to landscape architecture. Three interrelated aspects of design are pursued:

1) the elements of composition and their formal, spatial, and tectonic manipulation

2) meanings conveyed by formal choices and transformations

3) interactions of cultural and ecological forces in the landscape.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

What do these words mean and what is their relationship to each other in the architectural design disciplines? Each word is packed with complex and evolving meanings that reflect the state of human knowledge about the environments in which we live and in which we intervene. Each word reflects our understanding of systems, physical, cultural and social, biotic and abiotic, as well as our aspirations to conserve, restore, or reshape those systems. Each word is ubiquitous in the contemporary quest to construct a sustainable, resilient future. But do we really understand what they mean? Are they critically interdependent or can they be considered separately? This studio will examine these questions with the twin objectives of establishing an evolving and dynamic understanding of the terms and generating working methods that respond to the complexities of scale encountered in the landscape.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

What do these words mean and what is their relationship to each other in the architectural design disciplines? Each word is packed with complex and evolving meanings that reflect the state of human knowledge about the environments in which we live and in which we intervene. Each word reflects our understanding of systems, physical, cultural and social, biotic and abiotic, as well as our aspirations to conserve, restore, or reshape those systems. Each word is ubiquitous in the contemporary quest to construct a sustainable, resilient future. But do we really understand what they mean? Are they critically interdependent or can they be considered separately? This studio will examine these questions with the twin objectives of establishing an evolving and dynamic understanding of the terms and generating working methods that respond to the complexities of scale encountered in the landscape.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

This core studio stresses middle scale landscape architectural design. A series of studio problems will explore urban public spaces. Students will endeavor to represent contemporary cultural and ecological ideas in land form. There will be an emphasis on constructive strategies, the use of plants in design and methods of representation.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

This final core studio stresses large-scale and planning issues, complex sites, and urban conditions. The city is a living organism which evolves in a particular locale with a particular form due to a combination of environmental and cultural factors. These factors, the forces they represent and the material results of their interaction form, in their interrelated state, what can be called urban systems. The many forces at play within cities-social, cultural, economic, ideological, ecological, infra structural, morphological and visual-combine in various ways to created both an identifiable urban realm and the many sub zones within this. Yet, none of these factors is static and unchanging; and, as a result, urban systems, urban dynamics, and urban identity are likewise in a continuous state of flux. This studio will explore these systems and the complex issues at play in our urban areas and the potential for positive change. Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

As the scope and objectives of the design disciplines expand and diversify, the ability to implement effective research methodologies has become increasingly critical to position designers to generate and validate new knowledge. This course will survey research methods relevant to the design disciplines that have emerged from the sciences, the social sciences and the arts with special focus on those utilized by landscape architects. Methods we will examine include case studies, descriptive strategies, classification schemes, interpretive strategies, evaluation and diagnosis, engaged action research, projective design and arts-based practices. Students will work individually and in teams to analyze and compare different research strategies, understand their procedures and sequences, the types of data required, projected outcomes, and value by examining a set of projects of diverse scales. Visiting lecturers will present research based design projects. The goal of the course is to provide students with a framework of research methodologies with which they can begin to build their own research based practices.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

This course introduces students to the material properties of wood, metal, stone, concrete and soil. Through material experiments, hand drafted material details, 1:1 construction and material case studies, students will gain experience working with the materials to understand the inherent constraints and opportunities of each material. In addition, a series of field trips will help students understand the geographies of material extraction and the processes of assembly and installation.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I Landscape Architecture

This class will explore the botanical, horticultural and ecological aspects of plants and plant communities. Through lectures and field trips, students will become familiar with the form, physical qualities, identifying characteristics, seasonal aspect, preferred growing conditions, native habitats and ecological function of common plants of New England. In addition, lectures will focus on contemporary ecological theories around disturbance ecology and ecological succession to gain an understanding of how designers can work with these forces to shape landscapes over time.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I Landscape Architecture