Diverse Identities & Communities Courses Fall 2024
ENGL 322: American Literature II
Instructor: Randall Fuller
26518 | TuTh 2:30-3:45 PM | Wescoe 4076 – Lawrence
ENGL 340: Early Indigenous & African American Literature
Instructor: Laura L. Mielke
26557 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4076 - LAWRENCE
African American and Indigenous authors prior to the twentieth century produced a wealth of literature, including novels, plays, speeches, life writing, and poetry. The scope and richness of this work—which continues to be recovered—defies racist discourse of the period that associated members of both groups with illiteracy. It also defies conceptions in our own day of Indigenous and African American expression as limited to accounts of trauma. In this course, we will approach the rich and varied legacy of early Indigenous and African American literature through the works of eight writers from the nineteenth century: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, William Apess, Maria Stewart, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Charles Eastman, and Charles Chesnutt. Students will read works closely, be introduced to critical concepts from Black Studies and Indigenous Studies, participate in class discussions, and complete papers and exams.
ENGL 383: Cultural Rhetorics
Instructor: Pritha Prasad
26514 | MW 11:00-12:15 PM | Summerfield 502
“Cultural rhetorics” describes an approach to rhetorical study that critically considers how rhetoric creates and sustains cultures, communities, identities, histories, and institutions of power. Cultural rhetoricians ask questions like: What counts as rhetoric, and who gets to decide what is worthy of rhetorical study? How can rhetorical inquiry be used not only to critique and expose discourses of power, but also resist them? In this section of ENGL 383, we will interrogate these questions at length, focusing specifically on the rhetorical features of empire, imperialism, and coloniality in the Global North (i.e. North America, Europe, Australia, etc.). We will study a range of rhetorical perspectives across critical race and ethnic studies, decolonial studies, and abolitionist studies, and we will analyze historical and contemporary examples in politics, popular culture, educational institutions, human rights rhetoric, and social movements. By the end of the semester, students will leave the course with 1) a working understanding of how cultural rhetorics operates as a subfield of rhetoric and composition studies; 2) the skills to analyze cultural, political, and legal discourses using methods of rhetorical analysis; and 3) practice designing original research/writing projects that both engage and expand the cultural rhetorics approaches discussed and emphasized in the course.
ENGL 508: Contemporary Literary Theory - Animal Studies
Instructor: Phillip Drake
26522 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4037 - LAWRENCE
This course examines animals in literature along with the emergence of animal studies as a field of inquiry. Embodying a complicated set of interdisciplinary tools and perspectives, animal studies scholarship prompts exploration into the lives of animals, focusing particularly on interactions between human and nonhuman animals. These bodies and relationships provoke complicated and often uncomfortable questions that challenge conventional understandings of a host of issues, including kinship, care, embodiment, individuality, power, precarity, death, extinction, and living well. Furthermore, interactions between human and nonhuman animals often intersect with constructions of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sex, inviting consideration of justice and social awareness at various scales, from the body and household to the nation and globe. In addition to covering a diverse range of literature, we will explore various disciplinary (literary, anthropological, biological, ethological, psychological, etc.) and theoretical (queer, postcolonial, feminist, existentialist, poststructural, posthuman, ecocritical, etc.) lineages that animate (and are animated by) multispecies studies.
ENGL 580: Neurorhetorics
Instructor: Sean Kamperman
26526 | TuTh 2:30-3:45 PM | Wescoe 4020 – LAWRENCE
How does the human mind work? What are its powers and limitations? The disciplines that seek scientific answers to these questions—cognitive neuroscience, psychology, neurobiology—have greatly advanced our understanding of human thought, affect, and behavior. But like all science, neuroscience isn’t carried out in a cultural vacuum. The values of the scientists who do this work, the language they use to describe their findings, even the machines they build to access the brain’s circuitry are influenced by the cultures they grow up and live in. In short, the cultural, social, material, and communicative processes whereby we come to know about the brain determine, in part, how we think about brains—and, by extension, how we think about ourselves. Are you neurotypical or neurodivergent? Mentally well or mentally ill? More of a right-brained or a left-brained kind of person? In a society obsessed with science, health, and personal achievement, such questions increasingly define us. In this class, we will explore how public figures from scientists and surgeons to artists and activists make meaning about the brain through a variety of media: memoirs, graphic novels, scientific reports, and films, to name a few. We will engage these texts with particular attention to their rhetoric. How do claims about the brain normalize certain ways of behaving, thinking, and being in the world?
ENGL 598: Rhetorics & Politics of Horror
Instructor: Pritha Prasad
21185 | MW 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4037 – LAWRENCE
In this seminar, we will discuss and interrogate the ways horror has been used in film and television to forward political and cultural commentary, particularly surrounding identity and power (i.e. race, gender, class, nation, and dis/ability). We will cover a range of historical and contemporary examples of horror film and television, focusing specifically on subgenres like racial horror, feminist horror, body horror, and psychological horror. We will supplement and contextualize our analyses of these texts with interdisciplinary readings from film and media studies, rhetorical criticism, critical race theory, feminist and queer studies, and popular culture studies. What makes something “scary,” and how might dominant fears and anxieties be underpinned by gendered, racialized, sexualized, and/or ableist cultural narratives? As a genre that uniquely relies upon the creative, multimodal use of visual, aural, spoken, and textual elements, what kinds of “arguments” does horror make about culture, politics, society, and history? Throughout the semester, students will be required to complete regular reading and viewing assignments, as well as a series of writing assignments, including a final analytical research paper.
