Liberal Arts

Contemporary African & African American Literature

Course No. LLC359.1  Credits: 3

Today a good deal of Third-World literature in particular expressed in many vital respects postmodern historical awareness of the parmountcy of the power relations hidden behind political, economic and social institutions and structures both nationally and internationally. With particular emphasis on political economy, this course will examine how this literature re-contextualizes such critical sociological questions as: What's traditionalism? What's modernization? The African-American texts highlight African-American socio-economic challenges today, dating back to Emancipation/Reconstruction, alongside their efforts at socio-cultural self-definitions. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.

Creative Writing

Course No. LLC393.1  Credits: 3
Faculty Shelley Bloomfield

This course will give students the opportunity to explore the three essential genres of creative writing in a practicum setting. Study and practice will center on basic analytic methods for reading and basic inventive methods for writing short fiction, poetry, and dramatic narratives. Course assignments will include exercises in writing the short story, including the short graphic narrative; various poetic forms such as the sonnet, the villanelle, and the free verse poem; and variants of the short dramatic narrative such as the screen treatment, the story board, and the short film script. Creative Writing can be taken to satisfy either required Junior/Senior Writing-Intensive credit or Open Elective Liberal Arts credit. It will allow students who are planning visual arts careers involving writing (i.e., illustration, film, and video) to develop the basic critical and writing performance skills necessary for their professional advancement. Students who may be considering the Creative Writing Concentration program are strongly urged to take this course during their Sophomore year. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.

Creative Writing Workshop: Dialogue & Story

Course No. LLC391.1  Credits: 3

In this course, we concentrate first on writing dialogues, looking at the ways in which conversation establishes character, creates and resolves conflict, and advances plot. We'll see how these dialogues "play" first when we stage them, and then we put them back on the page and wrap stories around them. In-class, team-writing exercises are designed to jump start your ideas and provide our working material. We'll also take a look at excerpts from narratives by master storytellers, experiment with re-telling the story just through dialogue, and see how these artistic choices inevitably shape the content itself. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.

Culture/Conflict/Syncretism in African & African-American Literature

Course No. LLC441.1  Credits: 3
Faculty Olatubosun Ogunsanwo

This course is primarily concerned with the dialectic of multiculturality and multidimensionality. Africans under colonialism, like most of the Third World at one time or the other, were confronted with the overwhelming encroachment of European/Western/Christian ways of life and thought alien to them. Yet Africa still struggles up till today to preserve its integrity, its intrinsic identity, notably in the form of neotraditionalism. This vortex of cultural interplay in Africa has led to socio-cultural phenomenon described as deracination or "the crisis in the soul" (Achebe) or "triple heritage/cultural accommodation" (Ali Mazrui). In postmodernist terms, it has led to syncretism. The course will also explore analogies from the multidimensional art, mainly from the interchange between visual and literary arts. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.

Fiction Writing

Course No. LLC392.1  Credits: 3
Faculty Shelley Bloomfield

Fiction is the sustained application of the literary artist's imagination to the observation of life, and writing it well requires a vision of what's true in the story before it ever reaches the page. Fiction Writing provides the student with the opportunity to write short fiction, discuss technique, study master storytellers, and critique one another's work. Some weekly topics in writing technique take up the issues of narrative structure, clear meaning, turning story into plot, scene content and scene break, dialogue, conflict and tension, the power of point of view, the revelation of character, and rewriting. Over the course of the term, students work on three pieces of fiction. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.

Graphic Narratives

Course No. LLC419.1  Credits: 3

Are you fascinated by the graphic novel (or nonfiction)? In this class, we will investigate a variety of ways that texts and images (specifically illustrations and photographs) interact to tell stories: how the visual and the verbal engage and catalyze each other, how they can reflect and inflect, reinforce, strengthen and gesture to each other in compelling, powerful and meaningful ways. To this end, the class will examine and practice different methods used in telling both personal and fictional stories. The course will also involve working at understanding different ways that graphic narratives have been, and may be, theorized. Assignments will include critical responses to our readings and a creative project involving an integration of writing and visual media. Primary readings are likely to include, but are not limited to, work by: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Alan Moore, Craig Thompson, and others. Films we watch may include Spirited Away, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, and Rashomon. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course or Visual Culture Emphasis course. 3 credits.

History of Photography Survey

Course No. ACD348.1  Credits: 3
Faculty Nancy McEntee

This is a photo historical survey course. Lectures present leading photographers and the history of photography from its earliest beginnings through the present within a context of cultural, art historical, social and political trends. Students develop skills in critical thinking, writing and research through lectures, group discussions, reading and writing assignments along with the production of a comprehensive research paper. Visual Culture Emphasis course. Offered fall. 3 credits.

Hybrid Writing

Course No. LLC206WX.1  Credits: 3
Faculty Joyce Kessler

Sophomore level writing seminar focusing on intergenre hybrid writing, with an emphasis on the New Narrative movement, open to all students, of special interest to students interested in writing adventurously and creatively about their chosen art and design forms. The method of instruction for this class will combine short lectures with class discussion, workshops, and in-class writing experiments. The class will be structured around the idea of creative research, and will potentially involve research days utilizing the museum or the library. Peer feedback sessions and a final short critical paper are designed to assist students in developing a constructive, original vocabulary to critically assess both their own creative work and that of others. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.