Inferno: Damnation and Transformation in Irish and Italian Literature (Scibilia) (ENG426)
of nature v. nurture, we must ask: what are our identities anchored in? Students interrogate issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality with the following dramas: Jeff Stetson’s The Meeting, Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Charles Fuller, Jr.’s A Soldier’s Play, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, and film adaptations of August Wilson’s Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Dante’s Inferno is a text that spirals into Hell then helixes up. Students will ascend, too, from purgatorio and paradiso, studying how writers—both Italian and Irish—navigate states of damnation and transformation. Texts include Dante’s Inferno, Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees and other stories, Joyce’s Dubliners, McCann’s Everything In This Country Must, and poetry by Heaney, Yeats, and Boland, among others. Films may include The Godfather and In the Name of the Father.
Dreamscapes and Borderlands: Alternate Realities in Literature (ENG419) Often authors present us with realms of magic and/or madness that border our own ordinary universe. In each of these other worlds, we may recognize some of the elements of “reality,” but they are oddly distorted or out of place. Other elements are alien to our experience, even nightmarish or monstrous from our point of view, but the characters accept them as “normal.” In this course, we will explore these dream worlds to see how they reflect or distort our own, and in doing so, what they may suggest to us about the way we define time, reality, normality, and identity. Texts may include Sir Orfeo, selections from The Mabinogion, Alice in Wonderland, Neverwhere, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, and Kindred.
Intersection: Where Nonfiction Crosses Paths with History (ENG439) According to the British author Penelope Lively, “If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered.” Join us in this course to fasten yourself to history and the figures that built our American story. The construction of that narrative will be explored through nonfiction, rhetoric, biography, and graphic novels. Student choice regarding texts will be a central element of this course in order to diversify the threads of the past that we will weave together into a full look at history. Required texts may include: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix and A Woman of No Importance. Student choice will be employed to select a biography, such as, but not limited to, John Adams, Barracoon, and Notorious RBG and a graphic novel, such as, but not limited to, March, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, They Call Us Enemy, and Drowned City. Films and shows include Hamilton and Band of Brothers.
Flash Points: Literature of Contemporary Issues (ENG431) Will humanity ever reach the end of its quest for social justice? Realistically, perhaps not, but the end isn’t where victory lies; it’s in the number of feet walking the path. The first step in the quest is developing greater consciousness, by looking at contemporary issues where they flare in conflict— at flash points. This course uses both fiction and nonfiction to consider ways of negotiating today’s most challenging problems. Units include environmental justice, terrorism and surveillance, migration, and human rights. Texts in this course may include Pat Barker’s Regeneration, Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and/or Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.
Representing Africa: Literature of the African Continent (ENG438) “Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes,” wrote Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her novel Purple Hibiscus. How have African people seen themselves in relation to the larger world? This course tackles the diversity and heterogeneity of African writing (and writing about Africa), numerous important issues outwardly applicable to the world at large: colonization and its aftermath, persistent tensions between tradition and modernity, the complexities of gender roles,
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