Joon Lee
Joon Oluchi Lee is the author of three books of fiction: Neotenica (Nightboat, 2020), 94 (Publication Studio Portland, 2015) and Lace Sick Bag (Publication Studio Portland, 2013). His essays, including The Joy of the Castrated Boy (Social Text, F/W 2005), have appeared in various academic and alternative publications.
Academic areas of interest
Lee lives and writes in femininity and feminism. He teaches courses in gender studies, feminism and creative writing that explore the meeting points of theory, fiction, performance and self-making.
Courses
Fall 2023 Courses
LAS E101-21
FIRST-YEAR LITERATURE SEMINAR
SECTION DESCRIPTION
An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.
First-year Students are pre-registered for this course by the department.
Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Transfer Students register into the designated section(s).
Major Requirement | BFA
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 Rather than reading these novels as historical document, sociological artifact, or even personal testaments, we will digest them as performance, wish-fulfillment, blueprint for a world in which love and sex between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 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
Spring 2024 Courses
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 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