Writing about Literature

This course will look at literature centered on monstrous figures to think about two things. The first: how do monsters (like devilish magicians, mad scientists, and any number of nameless creatures) show or de-monstrate the fears, anxieties, and problems of specific...

Problems in Cultural Interpretation

The image of early “America” as a pastoral garden in the wilderness has proven durable yet, given developments in environmental science, history, and ecocriticism – complicated and difficult to sustain. This class examines the history and literature of early US...

Studies in Film

This course explores the internationally popular musicals, Westerns, police procedurals, horror and comedy films being produced by a new generation of Indigenous filmmakers. These directors have shifted away from the activist-based documentaries and politically...

Studies in Fiction

A literary genre has materialized in the past fifteen years that, as Marco Roth (with some notoriety) puts it, is marked by “the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel — the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind.” This category of...

The Wilds of Literature

For most North Americans, “Nature” is a place. And a system, a dynamic of interlocking systems in a space. And a “trace”: we need a historical sense in order address what is “natural” to us. Nature is a grounding material reality and a field of questioning. It is what...