Summer 2008 @ literature.sdsu.edu
SECOND SUMMER SESSION
RANMALI RODRIGO | COMPLIT 270B World Literature
This
class will compare literature around the world through the philosophies
of the hip hop movement as it began in the Bronx, New York. In
many places the written and spoken word are used to resist injustices
like dictatorship, genocide, and slavery. This course explores
the way writers and artists use words and images to create social
change throughout the world. You will be asked to explore the
connection of words and images to local and global issues as various
people appropriate the language of hip hop to translate their personal
and political struggles. The course will examine texts from the
U.S., Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Traditional texts,
films and music will guide the class through class discussions and
projects. The required texts are From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas and The Bedford Anthology of World Literature Book 6: The Twentieth Century, 1900 to the Present. This course is designed for English majors and non-majors alike and fulfills a GE requirement.
FIRST SUMMER SESSION
NATHAN LEAMAN | English 220
What is literature?
What purpose do stories serve in our society? How does this purpose
differ in other cultures? What is the relationship between reality and
artistic representation? In order to answer these questions, the
readings for this class will include a brief stop in ancient Greece,
the dawn of Western Civilization, and then blatantly ignore about two
and a half millennia of literary giants to look closely at the
supernatural summer of 1816 in Europe and how it gave birth to the most
famous ghost story in world. With only two exceptions, the readings
will deal with things originally written in English. Specifically and
tentatively but not encompassingly, these readings will include the
novel Frankenstein; short stories by Hemingway, Atwood, Poe, Garcia
Marquez, Hawthorne and Silko; poetry by Angelou, Cummings, Rosetti,
Shakespeare, Marvell, and Springsteen; as well as plays by Ibsen and
Hwang. This class will also view paintings, read comics, listen to
music, recite oral narratives, tell jokes and watch videos in an
attempt to study how different forms of representation affect
stories.This course is designed for English majors and non-majors alike
and fulfills a GE requirement.
FIRST SUMMER SESSION
JOANNA BROOKS | English 250A Literature of the U.S.
Pirates, slaves, visionaries, hopeless romantics, revolutionaries, soldiers of fortune, party animals, liars, and losers!--Early America was a strange, treacherous, and fascinating place. This course introduces students to literature written in the Americas from before the arrival of Columbus through the Civil War. Required texts: Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vols. A & B.
FIRST SUMMER SESSION
QUENTIN BAILEY | English 308W: Writing Criticism
This
course has one main goal: to take your best English paper to date and
turn it into a masterpiece. It’ll also introduce you to the business of
literary scholarship and give you some weird and wonderful ways to talk
about Frankenstein and the monster he creates. We will achieve this in
a couple of ways: In the first part of the class, we’ll explore a
number of critical approaches: new historicism, deconstruction,
psychoanalytic criticism, cultural studies, Marxism, and feminism.
We’ll see how they work in practice by reading and talking about Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the second part, we’ll workshop your essays,
identifying the kind of audience you’re writing for, the type of
criticism that is best suited to develop your paper, and the research
and writing tasks that need to be completed. At the end, you should
have a good feel for the process of writing and publishing works of
criticism and an essay as powerful – but more attractive – than
Frankenstein’s creature. The bulk of the assessment will be on your
final paper, but there will also be short pieces of writing to complete
during the course of the term.
Required Works: Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, 4th Edition, ed. Charles E. Bressler (Pearson)
SECOND SUMMER SESSION
STEPHEN-PAUL MARTIN
ENGL 525 American Literature After 1960
Tired of the past?
Tired of classes which treat literature as something dead people did?
Then English 525 is for you. This class will take you from 1960 to the
present moment, exposing you to the full range of the contemporary
American literary scene. Nobel Prize winning authors like Toni Morrison
and Pulitzer Prize winning authors like John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich,
but also avant-garde poets and fiction writers of every kind, writers
you've heard of but never read and writers you've never heard of and
will want to read again. Jhumpa Lahiri, Percival Everett, Yousef
Komunyakaa, Leslie Marmon Silko, Andrew Joron, Charles Borkhuis, Gloria
Naylor, Nicole Kraus, Jimmy Santiago Baca, David Foster Wallace, John
Edgar Wideman, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Sandra Cisneros, Ha Jin,
Amy Tan, James Tate, Harold Jaffe, Lydia Davis, Rae Armantrout, Gish
Jen, Fanny Howe, Z.Z. Packer, and many others. Classes will be
conducted in an open discussion format, as an ongoing conversation
about the present and future of literature in our country.
English 220 Introduction to Literature
As San Diego is a gorgeous, sunny locale, a vacation is possible right here. However, without leaving sunny SoCal, travel is even possible—through literature. We will traverse Chekhov’s Russia, Munro’s Canada, Lessing and Carter’s Britain, Ibsen’s Scandinavia, and do some time travel through literature across the U.S. and abroad. Mid-semester, we will voyage into Italy for American and British perspectives on vacationing in the boot-shaped country. Our final considerations, a play and a movie highlighting women and space, will take us inside the house. Short stories, poems, 1 novella, 1 play, and 1 movie.
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