Future Courses :
Summer 2012
ENGL 670 Special Topics: Contemporary and Postmodern Appropriations of the Fairy Tale - Jo Carney - Session A
This course will examine works by contemporary and postmodern authors for whom the fairy tale serves as an aesthetic and ideological point of reference and departure. Authors include Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelme, Aimee Bender, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Kelly Link, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson. In connection with our readings, we will explore issues of intertextuality, genre bending, and cultural boundary crossing.
ENGL 670 Special Topics: "Gay & Lesbian Young Adult Literature" - Emily Meixner - Session B
This course is designed as an introduction to as well as a critical examination of the growing field of LGBTQ young adult literature. In this course, we will read historically, examining significant texts since 1969, the year the first YA LGBTQ text was published (John Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth The Trip). Authors will include M.E. Kerr, Francesca Lia Block, Nancy Garden, Jacqueline Woodson, David Levithan, and Julie Anne Peters among others. Using gender, queer, and postmodern theory, students will also be asked to consider the socio-cultural and political contexts in which these were produced, the ways in which they present and represent LGBTQ youth (their identities, experiences, etc.), and the cultural and political work these texts accomplish. As a graduate seminar, students will be expected to participate actively, read closely, engage with and apply literary theory, and conduct independent and substantive research.
Spring 2013
ENGL 612 Shakespeare: "Global Shakespeares" - Jo Carney
That Shakespeare is a global phenomenon is nothing new, but new technologies—such as the Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive—allow us more access to his vast cross-cultural scope. In this course we will explore Shakespeare’s reach beyond England and the early modern period. We will read Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest alongside adaptations and reworkings from South African, Sudanese, Caribbean and Arab writers; we will also examine Japanese, Russian, and Indian film adaptations of these plays. Rather than viewing Shakespeare’s plays as the source and inspiration for the later texts, we will focus on how the various texts and traditions speak to each other in an intertextual discourse.