Literature Undergraduate Course Descriptions
Summer Session I 2022 (S122)
LTEA 132 - Later Japanese Literature in Translation
Modern Women in the Making
Instructor: Shannon Welch
The course will explore changes within female subjectivities in Japan from the Meiji era to the present day under the shifting conditions of modernization, imperialism, global capitalism, and postwar nationalism, and how Japanese literature and the media represented these women.
- LTEA 132 will count towards the Region (Asia) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.
LTEN 148 - Genres in English and American Literature (d)
Working-Class Women Writers
Instructor: Heather Paulson
How are working-class women represented in late 19th through 20th-century U.S. literature? Have laboring women in particular been less studied in canonical literature? If so, why does this occur? What can we learn from the resistance of women workers under capitalist exploitation? This course explores how working-class women writers demonstrate the strength and resilience of laboring people under capitalism and crisis through an intersectional feminist lens. We will think through what class means in the context of U.S. culture under the influence of meritocracy as well as how class intersects with gender, race, and sexuality. Possible authors include Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, Cherríe Moraga, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde and Lois-Ann Yamanaka.
LTEN 148 can be petitioned towards the major or minor in Critical Gender Studies.
- LTEN 148 will count towards the Region (The Americas) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.
LTEN 149 - Topics: English-Language Literature
Shaking Up Shakespeare
Instructor: Celine Khoury
How is art implicated in the negative aspects of life, such as racism, sexism, and economic disparity? In this course we will attempt to answer this question through the examination of film, drama, and novel adaptations of Shakespeare plays.
LTEN 159 - Contemporary American Literature (d)
The Politics of Queerness
Instructor: Katherine Murray
How does queer literature critique the political zeitgeist? How can it validate and inspire change? Texts include The City and the Pillar, A Single Man, Rubyfruit Jungle, Zami, Fun Home, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Link to syllabus: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19n1LTKpQo7gsdnfCDPuNK0isJfMh51xfqPN-ZWjipAM/edit#
- LTEN 159 will count towards the Region (The Americas) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.
LTEN 171 - Comparative Issues in Latino/a Immigration in US Literature
Latina/os via memoirs
Instructor: Marisol Cuong
This course will follow Latina/o immigration policies that continue to shape the racialization of brown bodies in the United States. In contrast, to common reproductions of negative stereotypes, this course uses Chicana/o and Latinx literary productions to center Latinx narratives.
- LTEN 171 will count towards the Region (The Americas) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.
LTEN 181 - Asian American Literature (d)
Queer Diasporic Filipinx America
Instructor: Steven Beardsley
A queer diasporic and critical gender analysis of works by Queer Filipino/x writers in the U.S. and wider diaspora. We will read texts from the Martial Law era to contemporary writings by Filipino/x Americans, focusing on second and beyond generations.
- LTEN 181 will count towards the Region (The Americas) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.
LTWL 116 - Adolescent Literature (d)
Girls in Literature
Instructor: Hannah Doermann
This course explores representations of girls in 20th- and 21st-century U.S. American literature for readers of different ages. We will ask, How is girlhood imagined in different contexts? How does girlhood function as a racialized category? How is girlhood tied to the social construction of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood? How can we queer girlhood?Reading Young Adult and adult novels as well as films alongside theoretical texts in Girl Studies and Youth Studies, we will discuss how literature constructs girlhood in relation to age, gender, race, class, and sexuality. Units will include “Girl” Books, Queer Girlhood, Racialized Girlhood, and Apocalyptic Girlhood.
- LTWL 116 will count as an LTEN-equivalent course.
- LTWL 116 will count towards the U.S Lit Post-1860 ("D") requirement for the Literatures in English major.
- LTWL 116 will count towards the Region (The Americas) concentration for the World Literature and Culture major.
LTWR 106 - Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Irrealism Workshop
Instructor: Lucien Spect
Contact instructor for course description.
LTWR 126 - Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Instructor: Aditi Kini
In this course, students will work on one body of work through the term. We will write and read and contend with issues within genre: what is creative nonfiction? How do we extricate it from memoir, and do we need to? How do we involve research and theory in the writing of our lives? What is the CNF version of the “trauma plot”? How do we distance writing about trauma as a therapeutic exercise from the ways one can exploit, extract from and capitalize on trauma? How do we write our identities without reducing them to buzzwords?
Together, we will locate the hearts of your essays, bring in outside readings to build a living, collaborative curriculum, and decide on our collective writing politic.
Materials will be essays, excerpts, and selections from craft books such as Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral Explode, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and bell hooks’ Writing Beyond Race.
RELI 149 - Islam in America
Instructor: Babak Rahimi
This course introduces the students to historical and social developments of Islam in the United States. Tracing Islam back to the African slaves, the course examines various Muslim communities in the United States, with a focus on African American Muslims, especially Malcolm X.
