This section will explore literature about the legalization of peoples into races through language or through discursive constructions. The class will look at how language functions rhetorically to legally create, reinforce, and maintain racializations.
This section will focus on a variety of theatrical, socio-historical, political, philosophical, religious, and literary issues in relation to how and why Shakespeare is adapted to film.
This course examines Donne's prose and poetry, including early satiric work, secular and sacred lyrics, and sermons. Through close reading of Donne's literary corpus in context of the political and religious upheavals of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, we will explore the ways in which cultural controversies of the day ramify into Donne's own negotiations of literary conventions. Further, we will consider the ways in which Donne's work performs (and identifies as its highest value) a thoroughgoing skepticism , laying the groundwork for the re-negotiation of tradition that will come to characterize the intellectual life of the seventeenth century.
This section will trace the development of the modern notion of love, showing how its roots can be found in spirituality, magic, mysticism, and heresy. We will explore courtly love, Petrarchanism, neoplatonism, companionate marriage, and sonnet cycles, drama, and epic poetry from late medieval romance through the renaissance. For contrast (and laughs) and "perspective by incongruity," everyone will also select a Harlequin/Silhouette/etc. romance and discuss the formulas driving such fiction.
This section will discuss different rhetorical concepts that have become "centers of gravity" in late twentieth-century American literature and which appear to continue in the present: relationships between history and narrative; the interactions between the past, nostalgia, collective memory, and identity formation; and the degree to which traumatic experience affects narrative and art.