Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Billy Shakes with Laughter — LIT2544.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
Fortunately for all of us, the dumb title of this class is the only piece of writing I’m bringing to the course. Instead, once we’re in class together, we’ll leave the heavy lifting of writing and storytelling and merrymaking to Billy. The class will dive deep into reading and discussions of six Shakespeare comedies, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado
Literature

Black Mountain/Beat Poetry — LIT2525.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
The Beats were a mid-20th century group of writers who rebelled against the oppressive societal and cultural norms of 1950s America. These writers celebrated the freedom of the open road, dropping out of school, spoken-word poetry set to jazz, and drug culture. At roughly same time, another community of antiestablishment writers and artists sprung-up at Black Mountain College,
Literature

Black Nature Writing — LIT2278.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
In this class you will investigate the many faces that nature bears in the poetry of writers of African-descent. You will read poems from the Antebellum period through the contemporary period, poems that defy the myth that Black poets solely write about an urban experience in predictable ways. For Black poets, nature serves as a catalyst for contemplating freedom, complicating
Environment Literature

Black Nature Writing — LIT2278.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
In this class you will investigate the many faces that nature bears in the poetry of writers of African-descent. You will read poems from the Antebellum period through the contemporary period, poems that defy the myth that Black poets solely write about an urban experience in predictable ways. For Black poets, nature serves as a catalyst for contemplating freedom, complicating
Literature

Black Playwrights of the Civil Rights Era — LIT2343.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Maya Cantu
Credits: 4
In 1959, the resounding success of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun transformed the “Great White Way,” kicking open Broadway’s doors to the generations of African American playwrights that followed. Yet, as Hansberry herself acknowledged, she was only part of a larger wave of Black playwrights who, responding to the progress and protests of the Civil Rights Movement,
Literature

Black Queer Writing and Theoretical Approaches — LIT2327.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
This class serves an introduction to Black queer writing and the theories that feed into and are inspired from said writing. We will read poetry, fiction, and essays by writers who revolutionized and made possible Black queer expression in the United States. What is the necessary vocabulary for Black writers left out of white academic and creative circles? When white gender and
Literature

Black Queer Writing and Theoretical Approaches — LIT2327.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
This class serves an introduction to Black queer writing and the theories that feed into and are inspired from said writing. We will read poetry, fiction, and essays by writers who revolutionized and made possible Black queer expression in the United States. What is the necessary vocabulary for Black writers left out of white academic and creative circles? When white gender and
Literature

Chance Encounters — LIT4358.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
Do we have a theme? Well, we have many; the relationship between focus and wandering, between the error, the errant, and the errand; between the past, present, and future; chance and the foregone conclusion. These (and more) will be intertwined in four seminal texts and a tome (Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Aqua Viva by Clarice Lispector, Three Poems by John Ashbery, In Fond
Literature

Charles Dickens: Novels and Biography — LIT2284.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Doug Bauer
Credits: 4
Dickens’ novels are works of approachable genius, transmitted through their comedy, pulsing energy and relentless life. They also reflect fictional shapings of Dickens’ life, obsessions in the man that regularly recur in the art. We will be reading three of his major novels, including the two most autobiographical, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. The classroom
Literature

Charles Dickens: Novels and Biography — LIT2284.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Doug Bauer
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Dickens’ novels are works of approachable genius, transmitted through their comedy, pulsing energy and relentless life. They also reflect fictional shapings of Dickens’ life, obsessions in the man that regularly recur in the art. We will be reading a biography of Dickens, three of his major novels, including the two most autobiographical, David Copperfield and Great
Literature

Chekhov and the Russian Short Story — LIT2272.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Alexandar Mihailovic
Credits: 4
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) transformed the genre of the short story into a polished mirror for reflecting the dramatic shifts in Russia life at the cusp of the twentieth century. Chekhov’s short stories reflect the larger stories that culminated in the Revolution of 1917: the emancipation of women, the compensation of families freed from serfdom in 1861, and the struggles
Literature

Chicanx Literature — LIT2329.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Credits: 4
What does it mean to be Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x, Hispanic, Spanish, or Mexican American in the United States? How has the history of Chicanismo shaped this country? This course will investigate the many complex answers to these questions. I will rely on each of you to have an open mind and use critical thinking to engage with the histories, stories, and texts in Chicanx
Literature

Children's Classics — LIT2322.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Credits: 4
We will read a variety of children's classics, largely but not exclusively from the Anglo-American tradition, and consider them both as timeless works of art and as repositories for many of the values and anxieties of their eras. Authors considered will probably include Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Heinrich
Literature

Choice and Consequence: Alternative History — DRA2277.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Sherry Kramer
Credits: 4
The theater is the place where we learn how to be. At its best, it is a rehearsal for the great moments of our life, including our happinesses. Love, death, we see it on stage and it prepares us for our life.” —John Guare A play is a metaphoric and empathic art form that seduces us into imaginatively making choices and suffering consequences along with the characters on stage.
Drama Literature

Chosen Family Style: Queer Asian Pacific American Literature — LIT2529.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 4
To be LGBTQIA and AAPI is to occupy two disparate, marginalized identities that seem constantly to be shifting. What might the literature of this intersection teach us about larger questions of community, belonging, and resistance? This 2000-level class attempts to locate a Queer Asian Pacific America through literature, from the work of early Chinese American lesbian poets
Literature

Classic Film Comedies — LIT2499.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Credits: 2
In this class we will watch some of the greatest film comedies ever made--mostly American, but a few French and British examples as well--and discuss the films' styles, cultural contexts, techniques, political content, and other questions. The films will include classics like Some Like it Hot, To Be Or Not To Be, The Palm Beach Story, Dr. Strangelove, and numerous others.
Literature

Conceptualizing the Environment — LIT4535.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Paul La Farge
Credits: 4
Is there still such a thing as the natural world in 2021, and, if so, how do we conceptualize it? By way of answering this question, we’ll read work by philosophers, anthropologists, biologists, and literary critics, all of whom in one way or another pose the question of how to think about nature in the midst of the Anthropocene. Can we, as humans, de-center the human? Can we
Literature

Conrad and Nabokov — LIT2196.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
Credits: 4
Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian. After the publication of Lolita ‐ his most successful and widely read work ‐ in the English language, he wrote, ʺMy private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybodyʹs concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second‐rate
Literature

Contemporary African Literature — LIT2564.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
This course serves as an introduction to the vital stories and voices of contemporary African literature. We will devote ourselves to closely reading novels, short stories, poems, and plays that explore modern African lives, both as they exist in relation to and imagine futures beyond the cruel legacies of genocide, apartheid, and (neo)colonialism. In the pages we read, you
Black Studies Literature

Contemporary African Writing — LIT2383.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
‘In your text, you treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving.’ —How to Write About Africa, Binyavanga Wainaina This class is an introductory survey of writing from Africa within the last few decades. The history of Africa has been captured in poetry, novels, plays, and
Literature

Contemporary Asian American Literature — LIT2373.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Anna Maria Hong
Credits: 4
This course provides an introduction to literature from 1990 to the present by Asian Pacific Islander American writers. This course does not comprise a historical survey of Asian American literature, which dates from the 19th century; instead, we will focus on recent Asian American writing, which has greatly expanded in both subject matter and modes of expression during the
Literature

Contemporary Native American Literature — LIT4126.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
As Stephen Graham Jones writes in his essay, "Letter to a Just-Starting-Out-Indian-Writer and Maybe to Myself": So many readers and critics and students and professors, they don't engage [Native] writing as art, they engage it as an ethnographic lens they can use to focus attention on peoples and cultures and issues and crimes and travesties and all the 'other' that'll fit in a
Literature

Contemporary Poetry and Song: Taiwan and China — CHI4517.01

Spring 2027
Instructor: Ginger Lin
Days & Time: M/Th 7:00PM-8:50PM
Credits: 4

“Poetry and Song Are Inseparable” is a long-standing tradition in Chinese literature and music, and many modern songs are derived from poetry. This course introduces students to contemporary poets such as Gu Cheng, Feng Tang, Chun Shu, Duo Hai, Li Shasha, and others. The poetry of the contemporary poets studied in this course is written in the vernacular and serves as

Cultural Studies and Languages Chinese Literature Society Culture and Thought Politics History

Contemporary Postcolonial Women Writers and Filmmakers — LIT4121.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Alexandar Mihailovic
Credits: 4
Contemporary women artists, memoirists and essayists are often uniquely positioned to confront the legacies of empire.  Focusing on the United Kingdom, North America, and the former British colonies, we will examine the construction of women’s identity in multicultural contexts over the past quarter century. Through fiction, memoirs, plays, and film, contemporary women
Literature