English Courses
Fall 2006; Fall 2007: Watching the Detectives
This course explores one of America's most enduring popular art forms, the detective story. From the hard-boiled private eye Sam Spade to the Navajo tribal police detective Jim Chee to the chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the literary detective has been continuously reinvented. Driven by two of America's most distinguishing characteristics, ingenuity and violence, the detective genre variously engages one of our culture's most cherished ideals – individualism. By focusing on the literary and cinematic reinvention of the detective, this course considers how the genre has evolved to represent American culture at home and abroad.
Fall 2004: e-Literacy and Identity
Viewing, gaming, and chatting are just a few of the ways we use computers to interact these days. Besides extending literacy in unexpected ways, computer technologies have profoundly influenced self-representation. On the disembodied Internet, identity is fluid and often falsified or fantasized. This seminar investigates how e-literacy shapes identity in the Internet Age. It begins by considering how the acquisition of reading and writing skills in previous historic eras contributed to a person's social identity. It concludes by exploring how current technologies engage users in new modes of reading and writing that help fashion their public and private identities.
Fall 2003: The Computer, the Book, and BeyondThe hypertexts enabled by the computer age are the latest incarnation of the technology of writing. We could argue, as many literary theorists do, that writing has always already involved technology of one kind or another. Using examples from medieval manuscript culture and from Early Modern print culture, this course interrogates the relation between technology and writing. After exploring the reading and writing practices permitted and promoted by pre-print and print cultures, this course turns its attention to hypermedia. The move from tactile to digital, from material to virtual textuality involves an engagement of the theories of interpretation that are reconfiguring the contemporary field of literary studies.
