Advanced Seminars

Utopian and Dystopian Writing

Instructor
Rosemary Kegl
CRN
Spring 2023
Days
M/W 2:00-3:15pm

In this course we discuss the literary qualities and social impulses that characterize utopian and dystopian writing. We focus on utopian and dystopian worlds imagined in British and American prose fiction from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century. We consider, among other topics, how this writing draws on Afrofuturism, journalism, naturalism, realism, romance, satire, science fiction, scientific and political treatises, and travel narratives. We read short stories and longer fiction (in entirety and in excerpt). Our authors include Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Francis Godwin, Margaret Cavendish, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, William Dean Howells, E.M. Forster, W.E.B Du Bois, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ken Liu. You have the option, in your essays, to focus on utopian or dystopian works beyond those on our syllabus. 

 


Comedy in Film and Television

Instructor
Joel Burges
CRN
Spring 2023
Days
T/R 3:25-4:40pm

From rom coms, musical comedies, and sitcoms to tragicomedy, satire, and slapstick, many versions of comedy have made us laugh out loud or smile sardonically from the ancients to the moderns. While this history will have a place in our course, we will primarily investigate comedy in film and television of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore critical issues related to comedy, including the function and meaning of laughter and jokes; moments of comic relief; the relationship of comedy to community and crisis; love, sexuality, and romance; the role of the body and whether comedy is a "body genre"; how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class get messily mediated by comedy; the difference of comedy from other modes such as tragedy, horror, and realism; and the varying tones comedy can have from dark to light, serious to fun, and comforting to disturbing. Preference will be given to English, Digital Media Studies, and Film & Media Studies majors fulfilling a requirement.

 


The Horror Film

Instructor
Jason Middleton
CRN
Spring 2023
Days
Wednesday 4:50-7:30pm

This course examines major critical issues surrounding the horror genre, through close study of Classical Hollywood, post-classical, and international horror films, and readings in critical theory. Issues to be explored include boundary transgression and bodily abjection in the construction of the horror monster; gender, pregnancy, and the monstrous-feminine; social Otherness (race, class, sexuality) as monstrosity; the figure of the serial killer and the shift from classic to modern horror; the grotesque and the blending of comedy and horror in the zombie film. As a research seminar, the course will involve the development of a substantial research project.