Posts Tagged ‘school in the summer’
Summer 2016 Course Descriptions for “Comics as Literature” and “Utopia in America”
You’ve admired the posters, now recoil in terror from the course descriptions:
ENGLISH 4717/5717
Thematic Title: Comics as Literature
Description: Beginning with Batman and Superman, passing through R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Maus, and moving into the contemporary era of Fun Home and Jimmy Corrigan, this course will survey the history and reception of comics and graphic narrative since 1945. We will explore the history of the comics form from its origins to the present moment, watching as the medium shifts from a predominantly American, predominantly male fixation on the superhero towards an increasingly popular international art movement crossing gender, class, and ethnic lines. In addition to studying comics as literary scholars, along the way we will also consider alternative modes of comics reception, including the great comic book panic of the 1950s, the underground “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and Internet fandom today.
Readings: Major texts will include Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, and Richard McGuire’s Here, as well as additional selected excerpts.
Assignments: midterm, final project, in-class presentations, class participation and weekly responses
ENGLISH 6700
Thematic Title: Utopia in America
2016 marks the 500th anniversary of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which inaugurated a literary genre of political and social speculation that continues to structure our imagination of what is possible. We will read Utopia, as well as excerpts from some of its early American analogues and descendants like Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America; Bellamy’s Looking Backwards; Thoreau’s Walden and Skinner’s Walden II, as well as consider utopian critical theory from thinkers like Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Buck-Morss, Michel Foucault, and Phillip Wegner. But the major task before us will be exploring the role utopian, quasi-utopian, dystopian, and downright anti-utopian figurations have played in the work of several key canonical writers of the 20th century: Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick.
Readings: Major texts will include More’s Utopia, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Morrison’s Sula, and Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, as well as short stories and critical readings distributed via D2L.
Assignments: class participation; weekly reading journal; two “thinkpieces” / mini-papers; in-class presentations; annotated bibliography; sample course syllabi, lesson plans, and statement of teaching philosophy
Weekend Links!
* New journal: Series: The International Journal of TV Serial Narratives.
* The full syllabus for my upcoming summer science fiction course is finished, if you’re interested. I’ve also updated the “online articles” section of my website with a link to Marquette’s online repository of my articles, which has some stuff people have been asking for (like my Snowpiercer essay).
* So why is TPP the only thing Obama has ever bothered to fight for?
* “The hardest things are the title and the name of the girl.” Oh, so it’s ridiculously easy.
* Judge finds probable cause for murder charge against officer who killed Tamir Rice.
* Judge orders University of Illinois to release Steven Salaita emails.
* The only thing anyone can talk about.
* Every Single Federal Employee’s Social Security Number Was Hacked: Report. Incredible. I almost wonder if this breach could actually be so large that the government has to shift responsibility for fraud away from individual consumers.
* At its worst, however, Left Forum is Comic Con for Marxists—Commie Con, if you will—and an absolute shitshow of nerds and social rejects.
* On the heels of last week’s shocking news that the Transportation Security Administration has a whopping 95 percent failure rate at finding bombs and weapons, we are now learning that the TSA further failed to identify 73 airport workers with links to terrorism.
* ‘Debt-Free College’ Is Democrats’ New Rallying Cry.
* The Milwaukee Bucks bailout and Gov. Scott Walker’s questionable math.
* Why are so many companies spending record sums of money buying back their shares instead of reinvesting more of their profits in their business and their workers? What could possibly explain it?
* I thought homeschooling my kids would be simple. I was wrong.
* “If she disobeyed, they had told her, they’d cut off her hair.”
* Barbasol’s inclusion was mostly a fluke — the movie’s art director, John Bell, said he grabbed it off a prop shelf with little thought; in the book, smugglers used Gillette — but the shaving-cream maker now calls it one of its biggest victories: John Price, a marketing vice president for parent company Perio, called it “one of the most recognized brand integrations of all time.”
* Here’s how much it would cost to build Jurassic Park.
* One phenomenon that has so far flown under the radar in discussions of peer-to-peer production and the sharing economy but that demands recognition on its own is one for which I think an apt name would be crowdforcing. Crowdforcing in the sense I am using it refers to practices in which one or more persons decides for one or more others whether he or she will share his or her resources, without the other person’s consent or even, perhaps more worryingly, knowledge. While this process has analogs and has even itself occurred prior to the digital revolution and the widespread use of computational tools, it has positively exploded thanks to them, and thus in the digital age may well constitute a difference in kind as well as amount.
* I know Reason is the enemy and all, but their report on this mishandled sex assault case at Amherst is genuinely stunning.
* New, large study confirms that approximately 1 in 5 women suffer sexual assault at college.
* A program designed to help female college freshmen resist sexual assault is creating a lot of buzz among victims’ advocates and college educators. Most were encouraged to learn that incidents of rape had been cut in half among participants in a Canadian study of the program, which involved four three-hour sessions in which the women learned to recognize the danger of coercive situations and to fight back, verbally and physically.
* Scenes from the class struggle at god Reddit is awful.
* Counterpoint: Anne Frank’s Diary Should Have Been Burned.
* RT @SaintRPh: Guy lives next to airport. Painted this on roof to confuse passengers as they fly overhead. He lives in Milwaukee.
* Secrets of the Milwaukee Accent.
* Reality is weird: Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron hated each other, but their stunt doubles got married.
* 22 Incredible Facts About The Life and Career Of Sir Christopher Lee.
* Thanks, global warming: Now polar bears are devouring dolphins.
* Nearly Half of Senior Tenured Professors Want to Delay Retirement. Yeah, you’ll never get rid of me.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Future really getting weird now.
* But sometimes the future gets it all right.
