Mediating the Human Body: A History

This advanced class investigates the history of collection and mediation by studying the fascinating history of visual representations of anatomical specimens. Students will study the visual transmission of human anatomy in the West from the 1540s to the 1940s. In this hands-on class, we will be working with the CU Art Museum and partnering with medical humanities students at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh to learn the history of dissection and surgery along with the technologies that transmitted anatomical knowledge throughout the medical community--things like printmaking, photography and med school "theatre" dissections. Students will have the opportunity to examine rare materials from Anchutz and Norlin’s Special Collections and to conduct labs on the technologies of reproductive printmaking, historical book-making technique, and microscopy. Expect interactions with librarians and curators, as well as partnerships with remote students working on the same material. Limited to ten students.

Studies specialized topics in the history, theory, and practice of media, such as the history of the book, the theory of digital media, and the theory and practice of multimedia forms. Specially designed for English majors. Topics vary year to year.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Advanced Theory, Genre Studies and Popular Culture

Taught by Thora Brylowe.

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Comics are everywhere!

Spanning all media platforms, comics are a global force in twenty-first century culture. This course is an introduction to comics history and a headlong dive into today’s comics scene. We will cover superheroes, underground comix, graphic novels, and movies. Comics help us understand ourselves in the world today, and so we will discuss the value of the humanities and the power of the imagination as a force for change. We’ll work on writing and we’ll make fantastic original comics. Join us!

Studies special topics in genre studies; specially designed for English majors. Topics vary each semester. May be repeated for a total of 6 credit hours for different topics.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Advanced Theory, Genre Studies and Popular Culture

Taught by William Kuskin.

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Studies special topics in popular culture; specially designed for English majors. Topics vary each semester. May be repeated for a total of 6 credit hours for different topics.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Advanced Theory, Genre Studies and Popular Culture

This class will read and think about weird and new weird fiction as well as some of the theoretical and scholarly debates surrounding this topic. Briefly put, weird fiction emerged in the late nineteenth century as a loose genre of texts concerned with inhuman forces, massive timescales, and cosmic indifference. In the works of writers such as MR James, William Hope Hodgson, and HP Lovecraft we find scholars, scientists, and others grapple with the limits of their expertise and the realization that humanity means very little in the face an uncaring universe. More recently, writers such as Clive Barker, China Miéville, Steph Swaintson, Victor LaValle, Carmen Maria Machado, and others have returned to weird fiction to rethink and revise some of its core features—including its racism, classism, and misogyny—and to repurpose some its aesthetic and theoretical insights in order to address climate change, neoliberalism, and the politics of genre and publishing. Alongside such revisions to weird fiction, theoretical and scholarly discussions of the anthropocene, the posthuman, world literature, history, politics, race, gender, and sexuality have raised questions and developed new methodologies that dovetail with the concerns of new weird fiction. This class will spend the majority of its time focused on such fiction, but will supplement that reading with short texts from these related conversations. In short, this class will make use of a popular genre and its history to think about traditional concerns of literary studies as well as some contemporary sociopolitical issues. Evaluation will be based on quizzes, class discussion and participation, and several papers.

Taught by Ben Robertson.

American Film Comedy

"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." (Attributed alternately to Apocryphal [a fourth-century Greek actor, the first to work with mini-malapropisms, called kittycatachreses], and to everybody else.)

This class will read thirteen or fourteen American feature films - along with a number of short films - that best typify distinctly American genres like screwball comedy, or American treatments of standard genres like slapstick comedy, farce, satire, and black comedy.

We will trace several motifs - the romantic couple, the body, the team, the outcast - through several films. Using classical, traditional and contemporary theory and criticism, we will attempt to arrive at general and specific definitions of the comic. We will be more generally concerned with defining the impulse toward comedy: why do we laugh? At what and whom do we laugh, and when? Why is so much comedy offensive or obscene? How does comedy change over time? Is there a national humor? What contributions can gelotology - the study of laughter through neurology, sociology and psychology - make to the study of film humor? What affinities exist between film comedy and literary humor? Why is so much comedy cruel?

We will treat some of the political issues that film humor raises: race, ethnicity, gender, and class, treating their representation from the nineteen-aughts to the present, in films ranging from Buster Keaton's The General (1926) to Spike Lee's BlackKlansman (2018).

The critical reading will range from the straightforward to the advanced, and will be drawn from both film theory and theories of the comic. We will examine several luminaries drawn from both antiquity and the present, including Cary Grant, Laura Mulvey, Katharine Hepburn, Sigmund Freud, Woody Allen, Aristophanes, Rosalind Russell, Henri Bergson, Charles Chaplin, Clark Gable, Plato, Frank Capra, Jacques Lacan, Billy Wilder, Ruth Gordon, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Spike Lee, Robert Downey, Sr., Robert Benchley, Karl Jung, Groucho Marx, Molly Haskell, and Luigi Pirandello.

Grade based on the usual bollocks: a couple of exams, an oral presentation or two, and a term paper.

Taught by Mark Winokur.

It’s after the end of the world—don’t you know that yet?”  You’re living a post-apocalyptic fantasy. This course investigates the way contemporary popular culture imagines the future—and it’s not pretty.  It examines the futures depicted in three recent scifi sub-genres: Cyberpunk, the Weird, and Afrofuturism.  What does tomorrow look like from the perspectives of infotech, biohazard, and blackness?  Answering that question will require encounters a wide variety of media, including fiction, film, video, and music.   We’ll read novels (Neuromancer, Zone One, The City and the City, Station Eleven), watch movies (Bladerunner, 28 Days Later, Mad Max: Fury Road, Space is the Place), and listen to the futuristic sounds of Sun Ra, Parliament/Funkadelic, Drexciya, and Janelle Monáe.  Prepare for a semester of post-apocalyptic freak-out.  The future ain’t what it used to be.  Requirements include regular discussions, online posts, and a long final project.

Taught by Paul Youngquist.

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This class will read and think about weird and new weird fiction as well as some of the theoretical and scholarly debates surrounding this topic. Briefly put, weird fiction emerged in the late nineteenth century as a loose genre of texts concerned with inhuman forces, massive timescales, and cosmic indifference. In the works of writers such as MR James, William Hope Hodgson, and HP Lovecraft we find scholars, scientists, and others grapple with the limits of their expertise and the realization that humanity means very little in the face an uncaring universe. More recently, writers such as Clive Barker, China Miéville, Steph Swaintson, Victor LaValle, Carmen Maria Machado, and others have returned to weird fiction to rethink and revise some of its core features—including its racism, classism, and misogyny—and to repurpose some its aesthetic and theoretical insights in order to address climate change, neoliberalism, and the politics of genre and publishing. Alongside such revisions to weird fiction, theoretical and scholarly discussions of the anthropocene, the posthuman, world literature, history, politics, race, gender, and sexuality have raised questions and developed new methodologies that dovetail with the concerns of new weird fiction. This class will spend the majority of its time focused on such fiction, but will supplement that reading with short texts from these related conversations. In short, this class will make use of a popular genre and its history to think about traditional concerns of literary studies as well as some contemporary sociopolitical issues. Evaluation will be based on quizzes, class discussion and participation, and several papers.

Studies special topics in popular culture; specially designed for English majors. Topics vary each semester. May be repeated for a total of 6 credit hours for different topics.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Advanced Theory, Genre Studies and Popular Culture

Taught by Ben Robertson.

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We all know that computers do not have feelings. Yet how might we leverage technology to think about what it is to be human; to identify the emotional state of a speaker; to anticipate the affective response a text aims to produce in a reader or audience member? Or what kinds of questions can you ask about 100 novels that you can’t ask when reading a single book? What insights about human creativity arise from taking advantage of computer programs capable of working with very large data sets? These are just some of the questions that we will take up in Literature and Data Science, an experiment in new methods of literary inquiry.

This course provides an introduction to the use of computational methods in literary criticism. The class begins by exploring recent work in the field. We will consider the theoretical and methodological implications of using computers and statistical algorithms to analyze literature while also developing the necessary coding skills to enter into this conversation. The course will be largely hands-on, involving multiple projects designed to build the fundamental skills required for digital textual analysis.

Students will also be asked to evaluate and think critically about this kind of scholarship. We will work together to learn the basics of text mining and will undertake a range of projects, from tracking word frequency to performing sentiment analysis. Literature and Data Science aims to cross disciplinary boundaries, to nudge us all outside of our comfort zones, and to do work in a collaborative learning environment where we collectively value and cultivate innovation and creativity. People with coding experience are welcome, but no prior programming knowledge is required or expected. Laptops are required.

Taught by Rachael Deagman Simonetta.

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Students hone their writing skills by closely analyzing the language in literary texts. The course will focus on the nuances of sentence structure and grammar, in order to help students become better writers and readers. Students will learn how to perform research in literary criticism and will write and revise a research paper, as well as a number of other short papers for different audiences. Students will learn and use citation methods within the discipline and will discuss the reasoning behind citational practice.

Taught by Thora Brylowe ONLINE during Augmester (August 3 - 20, 2020).

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This course considers a selection of recent American ecofictions in the context of posthuman and postnatural theory. These ecofictions rework the category of “nature” outside of a realist narrative framework but still take their bearings from notions of environmental degradation and sustainability. In the wake of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene (in which the divisions between nature and culture, human and extra-human scales have been destabilized) these fictions depict “postnature”—a category that considers the escalating contamination, homogenization, and mediation of the natural, often through posthumanist and post-anthropocentric lenses. We will begin by asking how historically prior discourses about home and nature—from the Enlightenment and Romanticism through Indigenous discourses—variously imagine nature’s laws and forms of order as well as its mystery, beauty, violence, and vulnerability. Along with the ecofictions themselves we will read selections from the recent “posthuman turn” in the context of the contemporary environmental crisis. Beginning with the premise that posthumanism sees itself as a philosophical corrective to the instrumentalization of nature and human/animal and human/non-human hierarchies, we will ask how persuasively its different versions articulate their utility. We will consider the politics of the Anthropocene and anthropocentrism; how they may variously challenge ideas of place and home; the philosophical roots of instrumentalist conceptions of nature and their alternatives; questions of resources, sustainability, and bio-regionalism; and eco-cosmopolitanism, environmental aesthetics, and environmental justice. 

Taught by Dr. Karen Jacobs.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term. 
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Advanced Theory, Genre Studies and Popular Culture

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Our world is undergoing exponential change. No one knows what is coming ahead, but we all know it is coming fast. We live in what Yuval Noah Harari calls “an age of bewilderment.” Art is one way of understanding our situation. Overwhelmingly, the art of the moment is comics.

Comics are a deeply ambivalent artform. Not that long ago, if you were over six years old, being seen in public with a comic signaled a certain idiocy. Teaching and studying comics, even reading them, were activities best marked by scare quotes. Now, comics occupy a liminal area. They remain a species of pulp fiction on the margins of children’s literature, but they are simultaneously a powerful literary form, one Will Eisner popularized as the Graphic Novel. They are encased in an extensive fan following and an established scholarship. Further, they have left the book format entirely and exploded on all manner of screens. The largest of these, are truly global: Avengers: Endgame is the highest grossing movie of all time, and The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the highest grossing franchise.

Ambivalent or no, comics are a force in the twenty-first century.

This course will serve as both an introduction to reading comics, a basic survey, and a headlong dive into comics today. It proposes that comics’ new global form helps us understand our cultural moment, but as a hybrid form. If comics model for us ways through the age of bewilderment, their solutions are compromised. Still, as much as comics are impure, they also offer the potential of becoming something new.

Art is generative, so there is always hope.

TENTATIVE READING LIST: Bechdel, Alison, Fun Home Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons, Watchman Ferris, Emil. My Favorite Thing is Monsters Patil, Amruta. Kari Millar, Mark and Bryan Hitch. Ultimates 1, Vol 1 & 2 Spiegelman, Art. Maus I & II Miller, Frank. The Dark Knight Returns Sacco, Joe. Palestine Wilson, G. Willow and Adrian Alphona. Ms. Marvel Telgemeier, Raina. Sisters.

Taught by Dr. William Kuskin.

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This class will engage in close readings of thirteen or fourteen American feature films and a number of shorts that best typify distinctly American genres like screwball comedy, or American treatments of standard genres like slapstick comedy, farce, satire, and black comedy.  We will trace several motifs - the romantic couple, acceleration of movement, the team, the outcast - through several films.  Using classical, traditional and contemporary theory and criticism, we will attempt to arrive at general and specific definitions of the comic.  While trying to define comic films, we will be more generally concerned with defining the impulse toward comedy: why do we laugh?  At what and whom do we laugh?  Do we always laugh at the same things?  Is there really a national humor?  What contribution can neurology, sociology and psychology make to the study of film humor?  What affinities exist between film comedy and literary humor?  

The critical reading will range from the straightforward to the advanced, and will be drawn from both film theory and theories of the comic.  We will examine several figures drawn from antiquity, including Cary Grant, Laura Mulvey, Katharine Hepburn, Sigmund Freud, Woody Allen, Rosalind Russell, Henri Bergson, Charles Chaplin, Clark Gable, Plato, Frank Capra, Jacques Lacan, Billy Wilder, Ruth Gordon, Aristotle, Robert Downey, Sr., Robert Benchley, Karl Jung, Groucho Marx, Molly Haskell, and Luigi Pirandello. 

Taught by Dr. Mark Winokur.

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Sections 001 and 002:

Students hone their writing skills in this course by learning how to analyze sentence structure in several literary texts. They will also practice writing about literature for both academic and general audiences, while using their refined knowledge of syntax to craft their own sentences. At the same time, students will build their research skills, learning how to evaluate academic literary criticism. Two shorter writing assignments, a formal analysis of a poem, and a scholarly literature review, will culminate in two final assignments: a final paper that employs the rhetoric of scholarly literary analysis for an audience of specialists in English literature and a blog post written for a general reading audience. Each of these assignments will be revised and workshopped in class. By the end of the course, students will be able to both analyze and use a variety of syntactical structures and strategies. They will gain an advanced understanding of grammatical structures while also learning how to construct a sustained literary argument for specialists as well as a pithy, enticing argument for readers of the general cultural press. This course meets the upper-division writing requirement.

Reading List: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; selected poetry.

Taught by Dr. Emily Harrington.

Recommended: Prerequisite completion of lower-division writing requirement.
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Written Communication-Upper

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