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12 courses found.
ENGLISH LITERATURE (L14)  (Dept. Info)Arts & Sciences  (Policies)SP2025

L14 E Lit 5110Topics in Lit: Scissors, Paper, Pixel: Books and Ephemera, from Blake to AI3.0 Units
Description:How can examining the books, ephemera, and paper technologies of the past tell us more about the scraps of paper-the dog-eared books, class notes, receipts, tickets, scribbled shopping lists-that surround us, today? Blending literary scholarship with creative practice, we will study and reproduce book technologies from the 18th century to the present. Besides familiarizing ourselves with the basic anatomy of a book and the pipeline for book-making in the long 19th century, we will replicate various printmaking methods, from established techniques in mainstream publishing to artisanal experiments (William Blake's "infernal method," braille, and cyanotyping). We will also analyze (and craft) the ephemeral shapes bookish material took in the period: silhouettes, pop-up books, toy theaters, and maps. Along the way, we will examine the book making habits of 19th century writers (Emily Dickinson's fascicles, Charlotte Brontë's "little books," and Frederick Douglass learning to write on "fence, brick wall, and pavement"), the debt western printmaking had to Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and digital storytelling. We will have created 2 full books by the end of the semester: one, an 18th century-inspired scrapbook that you will hand-bind, and the second, a final book art project. Other writers/artists will include: Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle, WEB Du Bois, Katsushika Hokusai, James Weldon Johnson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Art Spiegelman, Bram Stoker, & Virginia Woolf. This course satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement, and counts as an elective to the Publishing Concentration or the Children's Studies Minor. **To participate in the course, you will need to purchase several crucial art materials.**
Attributes:A&S IQHUMArchHUMArtHUMENH
Instruction Type:Classroom instruction Grade Options:CPA Fees:
Course Type:IdentSame As:L14 420  L66 5110Frequency:None / History
SecDays       TimeBuilding / RoomInstructorFinal ExamSeatsEnrollWaits
01-T-R---1:00P-2:20PTBAWestonPaper/Project/Take Home1500
Actions:Books

L14 E Lit 5231Seminar: Black Art and the Afterlives of Slavery3.0 Units
Description:In her foundational 2007 book, Lose Your Mother, literary theorist Saidiya Hartman argues that "[i]f slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is . . . because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This," she continues, "is the afterlife of slavery-skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment." As Hartman points out, even in the wake of emancipation, descendants of enslaved Africans have continued to navigate the perils of transatlantic slavery, and to shoulder its lingering effects upon the shape of black being. Motivated by these instructive observations, this course turns to a diverse archive of black artistic and cultural production to critically analyze the structural conditions that animate and enable the afterlives of slavery, whether juridical and legislative maneuvers or environmental and housing policies. At the same time, it also considers the broad range of aesthetic and political strategies that black people have mobilized to pressure and unsettle the vibrant legacies of transatlantic slavery. Moving across the long twentieth century, we will study works by artists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Henry Dumas, Amiri Baraka, Gayle Jones, Essex Hemphill, Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Rankine, and Kiese Laymon. We will pair these with recent scholarship in black studies, literary theory, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, environmental studies, and affect theory, for instance, in order to critically analyze the fabric of slavery's afterlives in the wake of U.S. emancipation.
Attributes:
Instruction Type:Classroom instruction Grade Options:CPA Fees:
Course Type:HomeSame As:L90 5231Frequency:None / History
SecDays       TimeBuilding / RoomInstructorFinal ExamSeatsEnrollWaits
01---R---4:00P-6:50PTBAFleming, Jr.Paper/Project/Take Home1500
Actions:BooksSyllabus
Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use.

L14 E Lit 5422American Literature: Reconceiving the Harlem Renaissance3.0 Units
Description:Duke Ellington playing the Cotton Club. Raccoon coats, Stutz Bearcats, and militant Garveyites parading down Lenox Avenue. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston exchanging quips at the Dark Tower salon. These are the some of the best-remembered scenes of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American artists--literary, musical, and visual--who personified the "New Negro" and transformed uptown Manhattan into an international headquarters of Black intellectual life in the 1920s. This class will reexamine Harlem's modernizing rebirth on the centennial of some of its earliest productions, exploring the intricate histories behind the iconic images. We'll study poems, stories, novels, and essays by a varied group of writers (Hughes, Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jesse Fauset, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown) and their debts to a number of pioneering jazz and blues musicians (Ellington, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller) and influential visual artists (Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Bennett). We'll learn about these figures' visions of the Great Migration and the Black Metropolis, racial pride and racial passing, Jazz Age sexuality and respectable secrecy, avant-garde experiments and modernist primitivisms. Finally, we'll sample some of the most important recent chapters in Harlem Renaissance scholarship, from studies of the movement's American cultural nationalism (George Hutchinson), to theories of its international links to Black diasporan travel and translation (Brent Hayes Edwards and Michelle Stephens), to intimate histories of the everyday Afro-modernism of "riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals" (Saidiya Hartman). Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.
Attributes:A&S IQHUMArchHUMArtHUMENH
Instruction Type:Classroom instruction Grade Options:CPA Fees:
Course Type:IdentSame As:L14 422  L90 4224  L98 4220Frequency:None / History
SecDays       TimeBuilding / RoomInstructorFinal ExamSeatsEnrollWaits
01-T-R---11:30A-12:50PTBAMaxwellNo Final1500
Actions:Books

L14 E Lit 549ATopics In Literature: Humanism3.0 Units
Description:The major part of this course is devoted to Renaissance humanism: an educational, historiographic, and philosophical encounter with the texts and perceived values of ancient culture, which in the cases of some humanists could include eastern as well as western texts. We will emphasize the subversive ideas of the humanists, as they revived materialist, atheistic writers such as Lucretius, sought to reconcile different religious faiths (Pico della Mirandola), promoted liberal inquiry on two sides of a question (Erasmus), considered whether the universe might be infinite (Giordano Bruno), celebrated the critical and humane power of laughter (Rabelais), and considered the body and human experience as the central philosophical index (Montaigne). As we read other well known European humanists, such as Petrarch, Ficino, Machiavelli, More, and Castiglione, we will also explore several women writers both enabled by and reacting to humanism: Gaspara Stampa, Vittoria Colonna, Louise Labé, Isabella d'Este, and more. As we explore humanism, we will compare the historical phenomenon with contemporary reactions to it, especially "post-humanism." To some extent, we will consider the recent claims of "humanism" and the "human" in political and legal arenas as well, considering such concepts as "crimes against humanity."
Attributes:A&S IQHUMArchHUMArtHUMENH
Instruction Type:Classroom instruction Grade Options:CPA Fees:
Course Type:IdentSame As:L16 449  L14 449A  L16 549Frequency:Unpredictable / History
SecDays       TimeBuilding / RoomInstructorFinal ExamSeatsEnrollWaits
01-T-R---2:30P-3:50PTBAHenkePaper/Project/Take Home2000
Actions:Books

L14 E Lit 645Introduction to American Culture Studies3.0 Units
SecDays       TimeBuilding / RoomInstructorFinal ExamSeatsEnrollWaits
01-T-----1:00P-4:00PTBAEngPaper/Project/Take Home1500
Actions:Books
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Home/Ident

A course may be either a “Home” course or an “Ident” course.

A “Home” course is a course that is created, maintained and “owned” by one academic department (aka the “Home” department). The “Home” department is primarily responsible for the decision making and logistical support for the course and instructor.

An “Ident” course is the exact same course as the “Home” (i.e. same instructor, same class time, etc), but is simply being offered to students through another department for purposes of registering under a different department and course number.

Students should, whenever possible, register for their courses under the department number toward which they intend to count the course. For example, an AFAS major should register for the course "Africa: Peoples and Cultures" under its Ident number, L90 306B, whereas an Anthropology major should register for the same course under its Home number, L48 306B.

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