Teaching

Iconotexts, or works combining complementary words and images, saturate our contemporary moment; illustrated novels, comics, graphic novels, and manga from across the world continue to flood the American market. The “comics boom” at the beginning of the mid-twentieth century especially attracted young adult readers. This audience found themselves well represented in various protagonists who work to articulate the murky sense of being a “young adult”: not yet a child and not yet an adult. Adolescence occupies this in-between, and iconotexts as dually verbal and visual are especially well-suited to navigate this difficult territory.

This course will focus on major themes and trends in American “young adult” (or “YA”) iconotexts. We will closely read the image of the adolescent in novels, illustrated editions, comics, manga, and related paratexts directed towards teenage audiences. We will delve into quotidian and familiar experiences, while also addressing why we often find stories about teens intertwined with magical institutions, ghosts and vampires, and epic myth. We will consider the yet very real social commentaries on national identity, race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and consumerism implicit in these texts. What culturally-constructed notions of adolescence shapes the characters within these texts? What new ways of imagining and understanding adolescence does the language of iconotexts provide us?

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva describes fear as “a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess.” The horror genre aims to scare its audience. It seeks to entertain us by evoking fear of the unknown and the uncanny. Paradoxically, we are delighted when we’re frightened!

This course takes horror video games as its primary texts. Video games necessitate participation. We can’t experience a game unless we play through it. Horror video games resultingly put us, the player, into close interaction with fear and delight. We will study horror video game rules, levels, worlds, narratives, music, gameplay, and communities to analyze the powers of horror. Where we find fear, disgust, and play interwoven in horror video games, we also find opportunities to engage with questions of humanity, morality, and identity. What scares us? What do our fears reveal about what we desire?

The course is into five units as follows:
Unit 1 The World of Horror: An Introduction to Horror Games
Unit 2 Just a Rookie Cop: Surviving Survival Horror
Unit 3 Horror for Kids: The Vulnerable Player (Character)
Unit 4 LFM: Cooperative Horror
Unit 5 Crafting a Spectacle: Content Creation & Livestreaming

Literary and video game theorists including Jesper Juul, Julia Kristeva, Jack Halberstam, Janet H. Murray, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen will aid our studies as we delve into these digital worlds of monsters and mayhem that ceaselessly rise from their graves to terrify and challenge us.

From Where The Wild Things Are to The Giving Tree, picture books feature non-human creatures teaching and nurturing children’s bodies and minds. Whether as rambunctious beasts or sentient, selfless trees, the monstrous plays a crucial role in acting as conduits for our development from childhood to adulthood. Framed differently, we have a history of being raised by monsters. What do our contemporary monstrous parents look like, and what might they reveal about us, who they raise?

In our course, we consider imagetexts including comics, graphic novels, animation, manga, and video games to address how the monstrous creates spaces for self-expression, agency, and emotional upheaval. We will explore monsters as mentors, family, and conduits respectively, honing in on what we can learn from them and challenging the stereotypical idea that these stigmatized bodies function solely as tools of horror. The field of monster studies argues monsters rise and resurrect again to represent political upheaval, matters of race and religion, social injustices, environmental threats, and ideological shifts. Through our interrogations, we will aim to determine how our relationships with the monstrous fundamentally teach us what it means to be human.

Myths and fairy tales of wandering warriors, rare creatures, and automaton futures saturate the literary imagination; from Homer’s Odysseus to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman to Netflix’s Lucifer, heroic figures and the landscapes they venture through have received poetic, comic, and visual renderings. But what differentiates video games from other written or visual forms of media? How does the act of play participate in the creation of contemporary mythologies? This course will read video games as engaging in creations of new cultural fables that address aspects of the human condition—including but not limited to morality, suffering, and the meaning of life and death.

The course is divided into five units: “Every Story Needs a Hero,” “Journeys from the Dark Side,” “At the Borders of Our Minds,” “Beyond the Body’s Limits,” and “Building Pixel Mythos.” Although separate, each unit develops a language of game studies and literary theory that will aid in our critical interrogations into these pixel mythologies, putting video games into conversation with contemporary theoretical frameworks of the hero, the monstrous, and the ludic to uncover the way they engage in discourses of borders, marginality, representation, identity, and agency.

In this course, we will examine, discuss, and analyze poetry, dramas, essays, and epics of English Literature from the medieval period to 1750. We will read this time period as one of call (to adventure) and response (to shifting cultural, political, economic, and social circumstances). We will read works that challenge new forms of writing (autobiographies and literary criticism) and old ways of being (colonialism and patriarchal society) as well as those that conform to their fraught milieus (appealing to monarchs, wealthy sponsors, and public values). As we read these strongly worded replies of the literary past alongside their associated cover matter, dedications, art, and audiences, we will write with an eye towards ways these works remain influential and pertinent to our literary present.

This course examines the unique and changing role literature has played in individuals’ lives and in society. It is centered on three deceptively simple questions: What is literature? Why do we write literature? And why do we read literature? It introduces students to a range of literary genres, from different countries and historical periods. 

Among the primary aims of this course is to help students develop the critical skill of analysis and interpretation. Students will also learn how formal and stylistic elements as well as historical context shape the meaning and significance of literature. By becoming more skillful readers of literature and its contexts, students become better readers of the worlds that literature addresses, develop their ability to decipher meaning from language, and better understand their own interactions with science, technology, media, commerce, and politics.  

ENC 1102 focuses on the essential stylistics of writing clearly and efficiently within the framework of argumentative research writing. You will learn how to formulate a coherent thesis and defend it logically with evidence drawn from research in your various fields. You will also learn how to work through the stages of planning, research, organizing, and revising your writing.

ENC 1102 introduces you to techniques and forms of argument in a broad range of disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, business, and natural sciences. To ground your investigations for the semester, the course will focus on a particular seminal theme. This course encourages students to investigate the relationship between writing and knowledge, and to discover how writing can create, rather than merely transmit, knowledge. Class discussions will reveal the complementary relationship between writing and research and demonstrate how persuasive techniques and genres vary from discipline to discipline. You will learn how writing effectively and correctly in your fields will help to integrate you as professionals into your “knowledge communities.”