Summer Session courses
Summer Session 2020
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English 307-0: Advanced Creative Writing: Writing the Novella (Brian Bouldrey, MW 6:30p-9:00p)
Course Description: How might a long story or novella differ in structure and ambition from a shorter work? What is the nature of material that requires the relative expansiveness of a longer form, but not the breadth of a novel? In this class, students will plan and draft a long story or short novella of about 35–50 pages. Throughout the quarter, students will read and discuss published models as points of departure for developing the form and substance of their own long work in installments. Portions of student work in progress will be workshopped—long stories, short novels, standard novellas, story cycles, and tales will be considered. Novella proposals, readings, and drafting will be due in the first class. Be prepared to do a lot of writing, and to turn in work in every class. Objectives: To gain a deeper understand of the structural foundations of a longer fictional work; to become a more discerning reader of fiction with a keener grasp of how elements can be manipulated to produce particular effects; to broaden your sense of what kinds of material can be brought into a work; and to establish a more rigorous discipline for the writing of literary art.
All readings will be provided.
English 332-0: Renaissance Drama: Racial Impersonation on the Renaissance State (Meghan Costa, TTh 6:30p-9:00p)
Course Description: How was racial difference constructed and performed in the early modern theater? As the critic Dympna Callaghan famously reminds us, “Othello was a white man.” That is, because Africans were barred from self-representation on Shakespeare’s stage, white English actors impersonated blackness for seventeenth-century audiences. In this course, we will study the historical contexts and material conditions of racial cross-dressing in Renaissance drama. How were racial prostheses, wigs, cosmetic ointments, artificial extremities, and dyed textiles mobilized by white, male actors to represent Africans, Jews, Muslims, and Native Americans (among other groups) on the Renaissance stage? What is the political import of racial performativity, and how did the theater help consolidate taxonomies of human difference in England? Drawing from a selection of non-literary texts (e.g. travelogues, recipe books, and documents of performance) as well as popular Renaissance plays, we will explore the complex intersections between racial ideology, cultural agency, and audience reception. We will also address more contemporary instantiations of blackface impersonation and racial cross-dressing, such as the recent Rachel Dolezal controversy, digital blackface, and Hollywood casting trends.
English 386-0: Studies in Literature and Film: Ghost Stories in Literature and Film (Casey Caldwell, MW 10:00a-12:30p)
Course Description: Why do we enjoy reading stories about spooky ghosts? The remnants of people who have died but won’t go away, writers have long used these figures to scare their readers and represent larger issues that haunt their society. In this course, we will explore the role of ghosts in major works of literature and film, as both spookily entertaining characters and spectral symbols of larger cultural issues, including the endurance of love, cycles of revenge, the need to be remembered, and the legacy of slavery. As we engage with texts such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo - as well as films such as Poltergeist and A Ghost Story - we will examine the demands for murder, endless love, justice, and emotional healing that the undead place upon other characters and upon us as readers as well. Required Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet; Charlotte Ridell, Weird Stories; Toni Morrisson, Beloved; George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo. Possible Films: The Phantom Carriage (dir. Sjöström, 1922); The Innocents (dir. Clayton, 1961); Poltergeist (dir. Hooper, 1982); A Ghost Story (dir. Lowery, 2017).
English 386-0: Studies in Literature and Film: Baseball in American Narrative (Bill Savage, TTh 1:00p-3:30p)
Course Description: As cultural historian Jacques Barzun wrote, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game..." Baseball functions in American culture as a compendium of narratives, an ongoing conversation about values and identity. From the Doubleday origin myth onwards, Americans have used baseball to grapple with two fundamental questions: what is America and who are Americans? This course will examine the different ways in which fiction writers, poets, essayists, artists, and filmmakers have used baseball as a metaphoric playing field to explore the conflicted construction of American identity. Meets the post-1830 literature requirement for English Writing majors.
This course fulfills the requirements for distribution area VI: Literature and Fine Arts.