Students enrolled in the Campus Book Club attend regular meetings throughout the term and discuss a selection of books. The books (three or more, depending on their length and format) will each follow a particular theme, genre, and/or issue chosen for that term, with a new theme introduced each term by the discussion leader/s in consultation with a faculty advisor.
Under faculty supervision, students create academic and community programming to strengthen the English major.
This course examines the origins, rise, and prevalence of true crime narratives. Emerging from execution sermons, sensational journalism, and hard-boiled detective fiction, true crime is legitimated by Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood, which sets in motion a wave of serious and even literary works dealing with criminality and violence. Recent decades have seen the rapid expansion of the genre via multiple media including weekly television "newsmagazines," documentary films and series, and, of course, podcasts.
This course considers how imaginative writing can intervene in the most existential of neoliberalism's myriad catastrophes: the climate crisis. Through the reading of contemporary novels, poetry, nonfiction, and ecocritical theory, course participants will explore literature's ability to illuminate the environmental injustices of the present perilous moment and to help realize a just and sustainable future for all.
The discursive negotiation between illness (its politics, histories, and personalities) and language is at the heart of this course. Through a close examination of a variety of texts (novels, plays, comics, film, etc.) that take illness as their central subject matter, students explore a series of questions including: What influence does illness (epidemic or personal) have on narrative? What is the relationship between social and political attitudes toward disease and the way texts characterize healthy and sick? What are the recuperative or reformative functions of narrative?
This course is an introduction to some of the variety and complexity of fiction from India. It focuses primarily on novels and short stories written in English and considers the role they played in colonial, anti-colonial, and nationalist struggles and in definitions of who constitutes an "Indian." It also engages post-colonial theorists of the last two decades, including G. Viswanathan, P. Chatterjee, B. Ashcroft, A. Loomba, H. Bhaba, and H. Trevedi.
This course focuses on "Bollywood" cinema from the 1950s (immediately following India's independence) to the present. It asks why Indian popular cinema has a wider global audience and appeal than Hollywood and who is watching Bollywood films. In tracing the development of Indian cinema, the class addresses the ways films articulate the new nation's dreams and desires, fears and follies, anxieties and growing pains.
This course explores important works of Asian American literature, including poetry, novels, nonfiction, and drama. This course considers Asian American literature's historical emergence and relationship to canonical American Literature, attending to the way that literary form mediates authors' responses to socio-historical circumstances like migrant labor, exclusion, immigration, forced internment, assimilation, and racialization.
This course considers African American literature in its aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political contexts. Focusing on both the history of African American literary production and representations of African Americans in literature, this course addresses literary genres such as slave narratives and pivotal cultural movements as the Civil Rights Movement. The course examines the relationship among literary aesthetics, race/racialization, and social context selecting from a broad range of historical periods as the Antebellum era to the contemporary "post-racial" moment.
This course examines the theoretical foundations and aesthetics of Afrofuturism. The term Afrofuturism was developed in 1993 by scholar Mark Dery and is an all-encompassing term used to describe science fiction work (literature, music, art, etc.) that focuses on Afro-diasporic ways of being and knowing. We will examine the contours of the field of Afrofuturism and decenter traditional science fiction perspectives that erase the existence of people of color in their visions of future worlds.