Current Semester Information

155A: Tps:Science Writing

Topics in Literary Studies: Science Writing

This course will focus on several broadly defined subject areas in the sciences: perception, medicine, the environment, and the cosmos. We will read nonfiction essays and book-length studies about the senses, botany, genetics, environmental degradation, the practice of surgery, the ethics of research, and the beginnings of the universe.

As we study our core readings, you will have a chance to practice two kinds of writing: critical analysis of texts and science writing of your own. Some of your papers will explore how science writers organize their material and how they convey complex ideas so that these ideas can be understood by a wide audience of readers. In other writing projects you will explore issues in science, using our readings as models as you attempt to convey ideas to nonspecialists--to readers fascinated by science but not themselves engaged in laboratory projects, field research, or medical practice. Readings for the course will include books by Alan Lightman, Rebecca Skloot, Atul Gawande, and Michael Pollan, and essays from contemporary scientific journals and popular magazines.

155B: Tps:AmericanLitOfPlace

Topics in Literary Studies: American Literature of Place

"Over time I have come to think of these three qualities--paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place--as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you're intimate with a place, a place with whose history you're familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you're there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned."

--Barry Lopez, "A Literature of Place"

In this course, we will explore the role of place, or environment, in American literature. Narratives don't develop in a vacuum--they expand across time and space, whether real or imagined. This course takes as its core assumption that these places matter, that they perform a specific and unique function in the text. A focus on place doesn't exclude conversations about other important topics, such as race, class, and gender, and, in fact, it can open up new dimensions of these traditional lenses. As Lopez notes, a "specific and particular setting for human experience and endeavor is.... critical to the development of a sense of morality and human identity." As a guiding principle, we will use Barry Lopez's claim that we should "talk about geography as a shaping force, not a subject" as a means for asking questions about how our environment can shape our personal beliefs and experiences as we investigate the power of place in American fiction, poetry, non-fiction and film. Three broad categories of place will structure the course: urban, rural, and wild. While we will examine texts that generally speak to these locations, the course also asks us to consider the ways in which some texts escape such rigid markers of place. The literature will serve as the foundation of the course, but it will also open up opportunities to explore and develop our own relationships to a specific place.

155C: Tps:Hip-Hop&The Numbers

Topics in Literary Studies: Hip Hop and the Numbers

Hip-hop and the Numbers is a quantitative reasoning course which will balance close analysis of hip-hop song lyrics with mainstream news reports and social science studies of various public health crisis in urban communities such as suicide rates among young Black men, the epidemic of crack cocaine, and the economic and social challenges facing hospital emergency rooms in economically depressed inner-cities. Hip-Hop is a tipping or starting point from which we begin our examination of a variety of social and even ecological problems facing urban communities. We will however work on one project that will study hip-hop and consumer purchase trends, marketing, and the public performance of a racial archetype. How did the apparent marketability of the group Niggaz Wit Attitudes and the supposed authenticity of the gangster image vitally change the genre? It is important to enter this course with a clear understanding that this is not course on hip-hop as a genre, its historical development, and different regional influences.

155D: Tps:Med Magic&Mysticism

Topics in Literary Studies: Medieval Magic and Mysticism

"A sound magician is a mighty god," declares Doctor Faustus in his opening soliloquy. Taking Marlowe's 1604 play as a point of departure, this course will explore the philosophical roots of western magic and its influence on medieval and renaissance literature. In the process, we'll consider a range of primary texts--from ancient thinkers like Plato and Ptolemy, to humanists like Ficino and Pico, to magi like Dee and Bruno. We'll also study poetry and drama by Malory, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson and others. Some questions we'll pursue include: How did magic relate to religion, medicine, and science? Did belief in magic impact men and women differently? How did writers from other parts of the world shape European ideas? In what forms does this magical worldview survive today?

155E: Tps:Lit of Holocaust

Topics in Literary Studies: Holocaust

"Among the most compelling literatures of our day is that which records and seeks to interpret the Nazi war of genocide against the Jews" (Alvin Rosenfeld). In this course we will read a selection of literature that will give us glimpses into this horror--particularly the responses to it both at the time and in the aftermath. Our selections are drawn from memoirs (both of survivors and their children), documentaries, letters, diaries, fiction, and poetry.

We will consider questions like the following: how did (and do) victims survive the holocaust experience? What do we mean by "survive?" What does the literature of the Holocaust suggest to us about what it means to be human? About faith? About the possibility of forgiveness? Who is guilty and who is innocent? What is the impact of this experience on Jews, individually and collectively, survivors, children of survivors, escapees, and bystanders? What are the ethical implications of making art out of unspeakable horror? Are there any special conventions or characteristics of literature about the Holocaust?

155F: Tps:Culinary Cinema

Topics in Literary Studies: Culinary Cinema

This course is for enthusiasts of both film and food. We will study several significant feature films, from the U.S. and elsewhere, on topics that will include consumerism, appetite, family, junk food, fine dining, chefs and home cooks, gluttony, starvation, and the relationships between food and gender/race/class/ethnicity. Since the course does not have a built-in "lab" time, you will be expected to purchase or rent the films and view them outside of class as if they were textbooks; there will also be some required reading material and writing assignments to accompany each film. Come to this course with an open mind about what you will see and taste, and a willingness to develop your culinary and cinematic "palate." A partial list of our films: Big Night, Tortilla Soup, Babette's Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, Like Water for Chocolate, Julie and Julia, Soul Food, Fast Food Nation.

155G: Tps:Science/Fiction

Topics in Literary Studies: Science/Fiction

In this course, we will study the relationship between the scientific and literary imagination by reading scientific fantasy in the Western tradition from pre-modern to post-modern times. We will read several works of science- and scientific fiction that engage directly with the philosophical implications of technology and scientific thought for human society, rather than pulp or blockbuster "sci-fi." Texts may include works by Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Octavia Butler, and China Mieville.