ENROLL

Adriana Estill

This course engages the borderlands as space (the geographic area that straddles nations) and idea (liminal spaces, identities, communities). We examine texts from writers like Anzaldúa, Butler, Cervantes, Dick, Eugenides, Haraway, and Muñoz first to understand how borders act to constrain our imagi(nation) and then to explore how and to what degree the borderlands offer hybrid identities, queer affects, and speculative world-building. We will engage the excess of the borderlands through a broad chronological and generic range of U.S. literary and visual texts. Come prepared to question what is "American", what is race, what is human.

Kofi Owusu

We will explore developments in African American literature since the 1950s with a focus on literary expression in the Civil Rights Era; on the Black Arts Movement; on the new wave of feminist/womanist writing; and on the experimental and futuristic fictions of the twenty-first century. Authors to be read include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kevin Young, and Tracy Smith.

Constance Walker

What can and should be the role of literature in times of bitter political conflict? Caught in partisan strife, Irish writers have grappled personally and painfully with the question. We will read works by Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney, among others, and watch films (Bloody Sunday, Hunger) that confront the deep and ongoing divisions in Irish political life.

Peter J Balaam

Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises helping students to explore cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text over the last two millenia. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?

Prerequisite: Participation in OCS London Program

For students participating in OCS London Program

Michael J Kowalewski

An intensive study of writing and film that explores California both as a place (or rather, a mosaic of places) and as a continuing metaphor--whether of promise or disintegration--for the rest of the country. Authors read will include John Muir, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion and Octavia Butler. Films will include: Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Zoot Suit, Boys inthe Hood and Lala Land.

OCS Visions of California Program

Susan Jaret McKinstry

"Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories?" asks Hayden White, metahistoriographer. To try to answer that question, we will read contemporary narrative theory by critics from several disciplines and apply their theories to literary texts, films, and cultural objects such as graphic novels, television shows, advertisements, and music videos.

Prerequisite: One 6-credit English foundations course and one additional 6-credit English course or permission of the instructor

Peter J Balaam

Readings in literature, urban studies, and the environmental humanities will ground practical exercises helping students to explore cosmopolitan theories of walking, mapping, paying attention, and reading the city. Honing practices of journeying, observing, curating, and collecting, students will make themselves locally expert on one or more of London’s streets or neighborhoods. Designated film screenings, lectures, exhibits, and the natural and built environment will help us to read London’s ever-changing human text over the last two millenia. What human processes are at work on any street in London; and how might they include you?

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course or permission of instructor

For students pariticipating in OCS London Program