Rhetorical Focus: this class focuses on the rhetorical negotiation of conflict, emphasizes listening skills, and explores two different approaches to communication in rhetorical situations involving clashing views and values. Thematic Focus: Our readings will be arguments over climate change: How can we overcome fear and despair? What actions can and should we take?
The podcast is an innovative art form that reflects the tastes of its creator and is a vehicle for different forms of content: interviews, journalism, fiction and creative non-fiction, among others. We'll determine how the art of the podcast differs from tradition printed storytelling. We will craft creative prose pieces for audio recording (in singular and serial format) and distinguish the storytelling needs of audio vs the storytelling needs of text. We’ll work individually and in groups to practice the technology behind the art, and in the process, we will be generous with our learning as we teach and motivate each other to create a podcast show.
Spring-boarding from nineteenth century literary works, this course reaches forward in time to pair (and compare) canonical texts with contemporary twentieth and twenty-first century metafiction retellings which probe, promote, and problematize intersectional issues associated with race, class, gender, sexuality/sexual orientation, and more.
In this course we will read poetic memoirs written by queer and minoritarian authors alongside a gentle introduction to contemporary queer theory in order to observe the poetic memoir genre and discover its possibilities. We will create our own poetic memoir projects using creative writing exercises geared at exploring how to listen to and perform the complexity of our own personal narratives. Through encountering a variety of lyric, memoir, interdisciplinary and hybrid modes and experiments, we will articulate, explore and engage the unique possibilities that poetic memoir offers to queer and minoritarian bodies, narratives, experiences and imaginations.
In this course, we’ll explore together contemporary fiction’s urgent treatment of the future at different scales—short-, medium-, and extremely long-term—in the face of environmental collapse, biological and informational viruses, surveillance capitalism, and what one scholar calls “the Americocene … the apocalypse of settler colonialism.” We’ll think together about how the history of race and processes of racialization shape cultural fantasies of the future, and how contemporary literature imagines the future of race and racial discourse itself. We’ll encounter and wrestle with a number of theoretical terms and aesthetic strategies that diagnose the different presents we inhabit and that extrapolate a range of futures on the horizon.
In this course, we will study Indigenous oral and written expressions of North America and examine the literary and cultural complexity of Indigenous literatures. Readings and course materials will include oral literatures, poetry, film, and prose from the past and present. The course will focus on how tribal sovereignty, gender roles, cultural traditions, and Indigenous ideologies are expressed in literature and film, but it will also examine a literary (and film) history that often prioritizes colonial fantasies over Indigenous expressions.