Posts Tagged ‘syllabi’
Thanksgiving Links!

* It’s been a time: Health experts monitor ‘tri-demic’ as respiratory viruses spread around US. Colorado River conditions are worsening quicker than expected. Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter. Children’s hospitals call on Biden to declare emergency in response to ‘unprecedented’ RSV surge. How long COVID ruined my life, from crushing fatigue to brain fog. About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October. Parents are buying fewer baby clothes, a sign of deep financial distress. The world’s baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years, major employment firms predict. Chris Hemsworth ‘Taking Time Off,’ Discovered Genetic Predisposition for Alzheimer’s Disease: ‘I’m Going to Just Simplify.’ Et tu, Coca-Cola? Massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight in China. The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything. Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate. A Quarter of Americans at Risk of Winter Power Blackouts, Grid Emergencies. Stock up on bottled water and canned food, official tells Germans. What if We Cancel the Apocalypse? this comic is almost 14 years old and could have been made yesterday
* A truly obscene trend in higher ed: How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life.
* ‘A Culture of Disposability’: New School Part-Time Faculty Go On Strike. Never Cross a Picket Line: A Primer for Solidarity in the Academic Workplace. The Academic Wheel of Privilege. The Cruelty of Faculty Churn. The Deadline Dilemma. The gutting of the liberal arts continues.
* Vulture had a nice Octavia Butler cluster this week: The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler. Misreading Octavia Butler. How to Write Like Octavia E. Butler. The Butler Journal Entry I Always Return To. This one at the Times was beautiful, too, in more ways than one: The Visions of Octavia Butler. And just a few weeks away: ‘Kindred’ Trailer: Octavia Butler’s Time Travel Novel Comes to Terrifying Life.
* The new Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on steampunk, cryonics, domestic violence in Tau and Upstream Color, and Marvel’s Agent Carter. I can’t tell for sure, but from where I am access to all issues of SFFTV is free right now. And so is the fall issue of SFRA Review! And Uneven Futures is almost here!
* Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide.
* One of last year’s student papers is already out in Games and Culture: “Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II.
* Marvel got trolled into losing one of its best assets to DC permanently. You hate to see it.
* I Don’t Worry About My Oeuvre: A Conversation with John Carpenter.
* I want Picardo back as the Doctor and I don’t really care how they do it. Just don’t let the Picard showrunners anywhere near it and we’re good to go.
* Online Speed Chess as Self-Soothing, Tetris, or Collaborative Troll Art.
* Middle schoolers tackle climate change in a new alternate reality game.
* The Incredibly Stupid Catastrophe Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Tumblr Blog Linked to Ex-Alameda CEO Explored Race Science, ‘Imperial Chinese Harem’ Polyamory. Queen Caroline. Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed. Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it’s facing a moral reckoning. Crypto Bro Sam Bankman-Fried Was the Perfect Liberal Hero. Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself.
* Larry David, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Other Celebs Sued Over FTX Crypto Exchange Collapse. Larry David was telling you not to buy, you just didn’t listen…
* Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’ Jeff Bezos pledges to donate majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.
* In the end, Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, just couldn’t run fast enough.
* Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s in Dispute.
* If you’re keeping score, a guy made a homemade shotgun out of plumbing parts and iced a former PM with it in broad daylight and the Japanese govt is giving him everything he demanded because they realize he had a point. Utterly wild story.
* Federal judge strikes down Biden student debt relief program. What Went Wrong With Biden’s Student Loan Cancellation Plan— And How He Can Make It Right. Joe Biden Is Finally Moving Toward Allowing Bankruptcy to Eliminate Student Debt. Biden Administration Caves To Pressure On Student Debt Bankruptcy.
* Thousands were released from prison during covid. The results are shocking.
* The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont.
* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: The Landlord & the Tenant.
* The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever.
* It’s that time of year. How to avoid gender bias when writing recommendation letters.
* How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? I Can’t Fucking Believe How Good ‘Andor’ Is.
* Multiculturalism in Middle-earth: On Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”
* Yes, but: the comic.
* ‘Doing Nothing’ course helps students build skills to unplug, think deeply.
* Indy’s going to the Moon folks.
* ‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’
* Words Added to the Scrabble Dictionary.
* Might not make my traditional Thanksgiving post this year, so here it is a few days early.
* From the archives: “Utopia, LOL?”
* And in honor of the end of Twitter: one last Twitter roundup.
Fall Break Links? In This Economy?

I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...
- A few of the academic publications I’m associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I’ve written a couple short things online too: “Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years”; “Disney Will Not Save You”; “Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power“; “Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton’s Mickey7.” I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
- I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
- A fun project at Marquette I’m marginally associated with: “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript.”
- Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
- CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls’ Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
- The CoFutures Prizes.
- Building a New Framework of Values for the University.
Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.
- Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
- Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
- How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
- Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City’s Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
- From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
- Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
- Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
- Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
- Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
- Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
- The humanities’ scholarly infrastructure isn’t in disarray — it’s disappearing.
- Love’s Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, “Quit Lit,” and the Great Resignation.
- Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
- Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
- The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It’s a Sham.
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
- To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
- ‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college.
- What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
- U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word ‘The’.
- All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
- Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
- Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi’s Portrait of Octavia Butler.
- Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.
- Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
- The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore’s Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
- Legally defining Peter Parker.
- Marvel adjective chart.
- Art Is Not Therapy.
- The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
- Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
- The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
- A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
- Asimov’s Empire. Asimov’s Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele’s Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
- Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” and Mark Bould’s Climate Criticism.
- Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
- At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
- This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
- Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
- Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
- If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
- Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
- Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a ‘different’ time in Middle-earth.
- Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on ‘Rings of Power.’ I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
- The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
- The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
- Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
- Video games can help boost children’s intelligence. My plan all along…
- “Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe.”
- Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
- Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
- Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
- What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
- Equal population mapper.
- The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
- Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
- Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: “As much as we try, we might be stuck.”
- A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
- The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
- War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
- When Chess Gets Weird.
- Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
- America’s slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
- From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile “Zone of Death” where you can get away with murder.
- The United States of Abandoned Places.
- A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
- An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don’t suppose they would, no.
- An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
- The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
- Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
- Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.
- New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says. I’ve been saying this!
- The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
- In a Parallel Universe, Another You.
- How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
- Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
- We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
- By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
- Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
- Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
- Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
- The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
- Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
- An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
- As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes.” A Strategy for Ruination.
- As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
- Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
- Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
- Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: “Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now.” Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
- Tomorrow Isn’t Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
- The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
- ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
- The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
- More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
- Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
- Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
- Anthropocene Gothic.
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything.
- Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that’s true, I’m against it.
- Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe.
- It can always get worse.
- They say time is the fire in which we burn.
- How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
- And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won’t be dismantled for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.

Summer Online Course: Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism!
I don’t think I’ve ever put up the syllabus for my asynchronous online course on Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, which was filmed and designed before COVID and is just really well put-together (if I do say so myself). In the first half we study US Afrofuturist texts like Get Out, “Dirty Computer,” Bloodchild and Other Stories, and Black Panther (film and comics); in the second half we study Africanfuturist texts like District 9, “Pumzi,” Lagoon, and In the United States of Africa. Check out the syllabus! I’m really excited to get back to this one when it starts next month.
new fall course: “Histories of Anti-Capitalism”!
I’ve got a great schedule lined up for Fall: a special version of my Tolkien course partnering with UWM and linking up with the Haggerty’s “Art of the Manuscript” exhibit, and a grad special topics course called “Histories of Anti-Capitalism.” Here’s a course description — suggestions very welcome!
Other English Fall course descriptions are trickling in here…
Course Title: Histories of Anti-Capitalism
Coure Description: “We live in capitalism,” Ursula K. Le Guin once said. “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” This course will take a long view of anti-capitalist thought, from the Luddite revolt of the early nineteenth century to the ongoing climate strikes of Greta Thunberg—investigating where resistance to capitalism has flourished and where it has failed, as well as where it has intersected with important trends in feminist, antiracist, anticolonial, LGBTQ+, ecological, and disability activism. We will also explore the speculative literary genre of utopia, and explore how its utopian, quasi-utopian, heterotopian, dystopian, and downright anti-utopian figurations have reflected, inspired, and critiqued the left’s centuries-long struggle against capitalist realism.
Readings: We will consider a wide mix of literary, historical, and critical-theoretical documents of anti-capitalist and counter-hegemonic thought from the last two-hundred-plus years. A final reading list is still being constructed (and very open to suggestions!), but major literary authors could include such figures as Edward Bellamy, Samuel Butler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Chinua Achebe, Gene Roddenberry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and major theorists could include Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Vandana Shiva, Enrique Dussel, Donna Haraway, David Graeber, and José Esteban Muñoz, among many others.
Assignments: Final critical paper or creative project; symposium presentation; weekly sandbox posts on D2L; enthusiastic and informed class participation
Brand New Semester, Same Old Pandemic
I’ve finally beaten my syllabi into shape for the semester:
ENGLISH 3241: “Crafting the Short Story” (my summer/J-term lit/creative writing hybrid, now in person!)
ENGLISH 4716/5716: “Classics of Science Fiction” (featuring Slaughterhouse-Five, The Female Man, Kindred, Ted Chiang, The Fifth Season, and a NCAA-style tournament to determine which 1980s SF movie we’re going to watch instead of reading Neuromancer)
Comments and suggestions welcome, as always!
A Hypercontemporary Literature Syllabus! And More!
The first week is already over and I realized I never got around to putting up my syllabi. I’m teaching two classes this semester, an all-Zoom revision of my Tolkien class and an all-Zoom survey of 21st Century Literature that I decided to focus on texts from more or less the last two years. (I also have an independent study on Gender and Sexuality in New Wave SF that’s been terrific; no formal syllabus for that one but we’re reading Le Guin, Russ, Delany, Tiptree, Lem, the Tarkovskys, all your faves.)
Thanks so much to everyone on Facebook and Twitter who flooded me with suggestions for the 21st Century course. In the end I was so overwhelmed by the possibilities I solicited suggestions directly from the students, which allowed me to craft a syllabus that was both inside and outside my usual wheelhouse, hopefully in ways that will be fun for both my students and myself. And we still get to be surely the first class in the world to study Ishiguro’s new book.
The syllabus doesn’t list the films they picked, but our class vote landed on Parasite and Soul for the last two weeks of class, an intriguing dialectic arraying the full possibilities of the human experience…
synch | M | 1/25 | FIRST DAY OF CLASS |
synch | W | 1/27 | Among Us game and thinkpieces [D2L] |
asynch | F | 1/29 | Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” [D2L] |
synch | M | 2/1 | PLAY/MOVIE: Heidi Schreck, What the Constitution Means to Me (including bonus material) [Amazon Prime] |
synch | W | 2/3 | What the Constitution Means to Me discussion continues |
asynch | F | 2/5 | POEM: Andrea Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” [D2L] and online reactions |
synch | M | 2/8 | SHORT STORY: N.K. Jemisin, “Emergency Skin” [Amazon Kindle] |
synch | W | 2/10 | SHORT STORY: Ted Chiang, “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” [online] |
asynch | F | 2/12 | Jemisin and Chiang sandbox assignment |
synch | M | 2/15 | COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part one |
synch | W | 2/17 | COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part two |
asynch | F | 2/19 | COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part three sandbox assignment |
synch | M | 2/22 | COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part three discussion |
synch | W | 2/24 | COMIC: Chris Ware, Rusty Brown, Vol. 1, part four |
asynch | F | 2/26 | Haruki Murakami, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” [D2L]optional: Haruki Murakami, “A Shinagawa Monkey” [D2L] |
synch | M | 3/1 | Haruki Murakami, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” discussion |
synch | W | 3/3 | Hades [Steam or Nintendo Switch] |
asynch | F | 3/5 | Hades sandbox assignment |
synch | M | 3/8 | Hades discussion continues |
W | 3/10 | UNIVERSITY MENTAL HEALTH DAY—NO CLASS | |
asynch | F | 3/12 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 1-16 CLOSE READING DUE |
synch | M | 3/15 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 17-30 |
synch | W | 3/17 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 31-45 |
asynch | F | 3/19 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 46-60 |
synch | M | 3/22 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 61-74 |
synch | W | 3/24 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 75-90 |
asynch | F | 3/26 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, whole book |
synch | M | 3/29 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future and responses |
synch | W | 3/31 | Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future and responses |
F | 4/2 | GOOD FRIDAY—NO CLASS | |
synch | M | 4/5 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD) |
synch | W | 4/7 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD) |
asynch | F | 4/9 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD) |
synch | M | 4/12 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD) |
synch | W | 4/14 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD) |
asynch | F | 4/16 | Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (page range TBD) MINISTRY RESPONSE DUE |
synch | M | 4/19 | CREATIVE NONFICTION: Zadie Smith, Intimations (first half) |
synch | W | 4/21 | CREATIVE NONFICTION: Zadie Smith, Intimations (second half) |
asynch | F | 4/23 | MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD |
synch | M | 4/26 | MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD |
synch | W | 4/28 | MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD |
asynch | F | 4/30 | MOVIE or TV SHOW TDB |
synch | M | 5/3 | MOVIE or TV SHOW TBD |
W | 5/5 | UNIVERSITY MENTAL HEALTH DAY—NO CLASS | |
synch | F | 5/7 | LAST DAY OF CLASS INTIMATION DUE |
The Syllabus as Apology
My full Fall 2020 syllabi are done, so I thought I’d post them as an example of one way to talk about format and special circumstances this semester. The key language is below as a screenshot. My thanks for my colleagues for their help in thinking through this stuff, especially to Angela Sorby, who gave me the original “special circumstances” language that I modified below.
Fall Syllabus #2: ENGLISH 3000: Utopia in America!
And here’s the other course for this fall, “ENGLISH 3000: Utopia in America.” Like the Watchmen class, it will be using a mix of synchronous and asynchronous instruction to muddle through this weird semester…
101 MWF 11:00-11:50 Professor Gerry Canavan
Course Title: Utopia in America
Course Description: 2020 marks the 505th anniversary of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which inaugurated a genre of political and social speculation that continues to structure our imagination of what is possible. This course serves as an entry point for advanced study in the English discipline, using depictions of political utopias from antiquity to the present as a way to explore how both literature and literary criticism do their work. We will study utopia in canonical historical literature, in contemporary pop culture, and in the presidential election, as well as utopian critical theory from major thinkers like Fredric Jameson, China Miéville, Derrick Bell, Toni Morrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, and N.K. Jemisin — 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 major authors of the 20th century, among them Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, and Octavia E. Butler.
Assignments: Class participation, including individual and group presentations; discussion posts. Students will also construct their own utopian manifesto.
W | Aug 26 | S | FIRST DAY OF CLASS
Introduction to the Course What Is Utopia? |
F | Aug 28 | A | New Criticism
How to Interpret Literature: “New Criticism” Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” [D2L] |
M | Aug 31 | S | Sir Thomas More, Utopia, “Concerning” and Book One |
W | Sep 2 | S | Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Book Two |
F | Sep 4 | A | China Miéville, Introduction to Utopia (2017): “Close to the
Shore” and “The Limits of Utopia” |
M | Sep 7 | LABOR DAY—NO CLASS | |
W | Sep 9 | S | Structuralism
How to Interpret Literature: “Structuralism” Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” [D2L] |
F | Sep 11 | A | Intertextuality
N.K. Jemisin, reply to Le Guin [Web] |
M | Sep 14 | S | Marxism
How to Interpret Literature: “Marxism” Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” [Web] Mark Bould, “The Futures Market: American Utopias” [D2L] |
W | Sep 16 | S | Utopia
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (first half; second half optional) [D2L] Black Mirror: “San Junipero” [Netflix] |
F | Sep 18 | A | Sandbox: Fredric Jameson, “Utopia as Replication” [D2L] |
M | Sep 21 | S | Postcoloniality and Race Studies
How to Interpret Literature: “Postcolonial and Race Studies” Derrick Bell, “The Space Traders” [D2L] |
W | Sep 23 | S | Toni Morrison, “Recitatif” [D2L]
Toni Morrison, excerpt from Playing in the Dark [D2L] |
F | Sep 25 | A | Sandbox: #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus [Web] |
M | Sep 28 | S | Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapter 1 |
W | Sep 30 | S | One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 2-3 |
F | Oct 2 | A | Sandbox: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 4-6 |
M | Oct 5 | S | One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 7-9 |
W | Oct 7 | S | One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 10-12 |
F | Oct 9 | A | Sandbox: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 13-15 |
M | Oct 12 | S | One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chapters 16-18 |
W | Oct 14 | S | One Hundred Years of Solitude, whole book
Gabriel García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America” [Web] Gregory Lawrence, “Marx in Macondo” [D2L] |
F | Oct 16 | FALL BREAK—NO CLASS | |
M | Oct 19 | S | Feminism
How to Interpret Literature: “Feminism” Karen Joy Fowler, “Game Night at the Fox and Goose” [D2L] |
W | Oct 21 | S | Sexuality
How to Interpret Literature: “Queer Studies” Alice Sheldon as James Tiptree, Jr., “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” [D2L] |
F | Oct 23 | A | Sandbox: Octavia E. Butler, “Bloodchild” |
M | Oct 26 | S | Environmental Studies
How to Interpret Literature: “Environmental Criticism” Ramin Bahrani, “Plastic Bag” [YouTube] |
W | Oct 28 | S | Disability Studies
How to Interpret Literature: “Disability Studies” Octavia E. Butler, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” Octavia E. Butler, “Speech Sounds” |
F | Oct 30 | A | Sandbox: Octavia E. Butler, “The Book of Martha” |
M | Nov 2 | S | Historicism and Cultural Studies
How to Interpret Literature: “Historicism and Cultural Studies” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, “Foreword” and “Pale Fire” |
W | Nov 4 | S | Pale Fire, “Foreword and “Pale Fire” continued |
F | Nov 6 | A | Sandbox |
M | Nov 9 | S | Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto I |
W | Nov 11 | S | Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto II |
F | Nov 13 | A | Sandbox |
M | Nov 16 | S | Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto III |
W | Nov 18 | S | Pale Fire, Commentary, Canto IV (including index) |
F | Nov 20 | A | Reader Response
How to Interpret Literature: “Reader Response” Pale Fire, whole book and interpretations |
M | Nov 23 | S | FINAL PROJECT WORKSHOP |
F | Dec 4
5:30 PM |
FINAL PROJECT DUE IN D2L DROPBOX |
Submitted for Your Approval: Syllabus for ENGLISH 4717/5717: WATCHMEN!
Since a lot of people have been interested in it, and I’m still trying to figure it all out, here’s the preliminary schedule for my Watchmen class this fall. This one will be an all-online class, as that’s the modality I’m in this semester; I’m using an S/S/A schedule where we do MW class sessions synchronously and F class sessions asynchronously. Most of the Friday classes are in the “sandbox” mode described here, some with suggested prompts and some completely open. The class has 30 people in it, so those synchronous sessions may need to break up to 15 and 15; I want to give it a try with the whole group for a week or two before I switch. Final assignment is a long paper or creative/curational project with at least some connection to Watchmen, comics, or American cultural studies, very, very broadly conceived…
Any and all suggestions welcome! I missed the first COVID semester due to my sabbatical so this is all still a bit new to me. I’m excited though: this class started in my mind as a lark and now I think it’s going to be one of the best syllabi I’ve ever planned.
101 MWF 12:00-12:50 Professor Gerry Canavan
Course Title: Watchmen
Fulfills English Major Requirement: Post-1900, American Literature
Course Description: This course surveys the history, reception, and artistic form of comics and graphic narrative in the United States, with primary exploration of a single comic miniseries that has had a massive influence on the comics industry and on the way we think about superheroes: Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986-1987). This semester ENGLISH 4717 will function almost like a single-novel “Text in Context” course; after grounding ourselves in the pre-1980s history of American superhero comics over the first few weeks of the course, we will focusing almost exclusively on Watchmen and its long afterlife in prequel comics, sequel comics, parody comics, homages, critiques, film adaptations, and, most recently, the critically acclaimed HBO sequel series (2019-2020). What has made Watchmen so beloved, so controversial, and so very influential on the larger superhero-industrial-entertainment complex? Why has DC Comics returned to Watchmen again and again, even as one of its original creators has distanced himself further and further from the work? What have different creators done, or tried to do, with the complex but self-contained narrative framework originally constructed by Moore and Gibbons? With superheroes and superhero media more globally hegemonic than ever before, what might Watchmen still have to say to us today?
Assignments: Class participation, including individual and group presentations; weekly reading journal; discussion posts; several out-of-class film screenings; one long seminar paper or creative/curational project
W | Aug 26 | S | FIRST DAY OF CLASS
Introduction to the Course A Brief Prehistory of Comics |
F | Aug 28 | A | Sandbox: Jim Henley, “Gaudy Nights” [Web] |
M | Aug 31 | S | The Golden Age of Comics
Action Comics #1 Selections from Wonder Woman |
W | Sep 2 | S | The Silver Age
Superboy #1 [D2L] Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman” [D2L] excerpts from David Hadju’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic- Book Scare and How It Changed America and Qiana Q. Whitted, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest [D2L] |
F | Sep 4 | A | Sandbox: The Marvel Explosion
Fantastic Four #1, Tales of Suspense #39, X-Men #1, and Hulk #1 |
M | Sep 7 | LABOR DAY—NO CLASS | |
W | Sep 9 | S | The Bronze Age
Saul Braun, “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant” [D2L] Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76, Amazing Spider-Man #121 and Iron Man #128 [D2L] Spencer Ackerman, “Iron Man vs. the Imperialists” [D2L] Gail Simone, “Women in Refrigerators” [web] |
F | Sep 11 | A | Sandbox: Marc Singer, “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race” [D2L] |
M | Sep 14 | S | The Dark Age
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #1-3 |
W | Sep 16 | S | Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #4-6 |
F | Sep 18 | A | Sandbox |
M | Sep 21 | S | Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #7-9
Anna C. Marshall, “Not So Revisionary: The Regressive Treatment of Gender in Alan Moore’s Watchmen” [D2L] |
W | Sep 23 | S | Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986-1987), #10-12
Matthew Wolf-Meyer, “Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference” [D2L] |
F | Sep 25 | A | Sandbox: Watchmen sequel pitch session |
M | Sep 28 | S | Watchmen (dir. Zack Snyder, 2009)
Graham J. Murphy, “‘On a More Meaningful Scale’: Marketing Utopia in Watchmen” [D2L] Jacob Brogan, “Stop/Watch: Repressing History, Adapting Watchmen” [D2L] |
W | Sep 30 | S | Andrew Hoberek, Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics (excerpts) [D2L]
Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijingaard, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt Alan Moore interviews (excerpts) [D2L] |
F | Oct 2 | A | Sandbox: Watchmen criticism survey |
M | Oct 5 | S | The Nostalgia Age?
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman (first half) |
W | Oct 7 | S | Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman (second half) |
F | Oct 9 | A | Sandbox: Watchmen vs. the MCU |
M | Oct 12 | S | Natacha Bustos, Amy Reeder, and Brandon Montclare, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: The Beginning (first half) |
W | Oct 14 | S | Natacha Bustos, Amy Reeder, and Brandon Montclare, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: The Beginning (second half) |
F | Oct 16 | FALL BREAK—NO CLASS
PROJECT PROPOSAL DUE FRIDAY NIGHT 5 PM |
|
M | Oct 19 | S | Before Watchmen (2012-2013): Minutemen and Silk Spectre |
W | Oct 21 | S | Before Watchmen (2012-2013): Dr. Manhattan |
F | Oct 23 | A | Sandbox |
M | Oct 26 | S | Doomsday Clock (2017-2019), Book One |
W | Oct 28 | S | Doomsday Clock (2017-2019), Book Two |
F | Oct 30 | A | Sandbox |
M | Nov 2 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 1 |
W | Nov 4 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 2-3
interview with Damon Lindelof [Web] |
F | Nov 6 | A | Sandbox |
M | Nov 9 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 4-5
interview with Lila Byock [Web] |
W | Nov 11 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 6
interview with Cord Jefferson [Web] thinkpieces by Emily Nussbaum, Jamelle Bouie, Jorge Cotte, Jaime Omar Yassin, and others [Web] |
F | Nov 13 | A | Sandbox |
M | Nov 16 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episodes 7-8 |
W | Nov 18 | S | Watchmen (HBO 2019-2020), episode 9
Aaron Bady, “Dr. Manhattan Is a Cop: Watchmen and Frantz Fanon” [Web] Leslie Lee, “Whitewashing Watchmen” [Web] Alyssa Rosenberg, “If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen…” [Web] |
F | Nov 20 | A | Sandbox: Watchmen season two pitch session |
M | Nov 23 | S | Rorschach #1 (2020)
LAST DAY OF CLASS |
Th | Dec 3
12:30 PM |
FINAL PAPER/PROJECT DUE IN D2L DROPBOX
FINAL REFLECTION DUE IN THE D2L FORUMS |