Courses Offered - Fall ACY 2024

Course Description

This course is designed to introduce new majors to tools of professional literary analysis through a set of focused readings.

Course Description

Why do we go to sea? Since humans have been able to tell stories, the idea of the sea has dominated our imaginations. Elusive and ineffible, people across history and cultures have been trying to express the emotion and relationships we feel towards the sea. This class will explore this question through the consideration of a wide varitety of poetry, novels, and other forms of sea stories; from Micronesian mythology to modern fiction.

Course Description

A study of drama, emphasizing reading, viewing, and analyzing dramatic literature and performance.

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A study in the analysis of poetic form and expression.

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A study of the novel and short story with particular emphasis on the conventions, techniques, and innovations in the form.

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A study of American, European, and world film in conjunction with relevant literary works.

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Literature and thought of the period bracketed by the two great English epics, Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost.

Literature and culture of the Romantic period in Britain from the 1780s to the 1830s. Readings may include works by such writers as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, the Shelleys, Byron, and Keats.

Course Description

This course offers an introduction to late 19 th - and 20 th -century British and Anglophone literatures and cultures in an era of profound political, economic, and social upheaval. Over the course of the semester, we will put pressure on the concept of “Britishness” as a shifting category of identity and explore its relationship to nationalism, colonialism, migration, race, gender, and class. Readings may include works by W.H. Auden, Aimé Césaire, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Samuel Selvon, Virginia Woolf, among others.

Course Description

This course surveys American literature and culture from the early colonial period through the Civil War. To gain a solid grounding in the literary history of this period, we will read both masterpieces long accepted in the American canon and other works whose excellence was too often hidden by popular success. This survey ends in the bloodshed of a nation divided, which is fitting in that the period we will study is marked by the conflict of ideas: between American individualism and communal nation-building, between lofty declarations of freedom and brutal realities of slavery, between nostalgia for republican simplicity and fear of cultural provincialism, between the ideology of domesticity and the mythology of the frontier.

Course Description

A survey of American literature between the wars. Readings may include works by such authors as Stein, Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hughes, Hurston, Larsen, Neill, Steinbeck, West, and Wright.

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A study of a representative sample of Shakespeare's tragedies, histories, and comedies. Readings may also include works by Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Course Description

This course provides an overview of language evolution from Proto-Indo-European to modern English, including phonological shifts, dialectal distinctions, language families, and orthographical and syntactical changes, tracing the language from its earliest origins to its present and its future. Will discuss how historical and cultural forces – invasion, revolution, migration, colonization, and globalization – shaped the language. We will also learn about etymologies, sound shifts, linguistic laws, dictionaries, regional varieties of English, and Englishes in their diverse configurations throughout the globe.

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This course explores the aesthetics, traditions, and concerns of Native American and First Nations peoples through multiple genres of literature from major authors such as Sherman Alexie, Paula Gunn Allen, Marie Clements, Vine Deloria Jr., Pauline Johnson, and Gerald Vizenor.

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Beginning with Michel Foucault’s premise that mental health issues have been the norm in Western society since the 1500 and that they are a phenomenon of civilization, this course examines the circumstances of what has historically been called “madness” in literature. We will begin the course by discussing Freud’s theory of melancholia and repression to better understand the mental health conditions of the protagonists in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Chopin’s The Awakening, and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. We will then try to understand how mental health issues can lead to illegal behavior in texts like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Nabokov’s Lolita, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Edrich’s The Round House. We will move on to study how society contributes to mental illness in Islas’s The Rain God, Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Heller’s Catch-22. Finally, we will examine the different methods of healing from mental illness in the special issue of The Asian American Literary Review, “Open in Emergency,” Plath’s The Bell Jar, Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Faulkner’s Light in August. We will study the diversity of mental health issues depicted in the texts in this course and finally move towards solutions of healing as represented in literature.

Course Description

Jane Austen is an icon. Her image appears on tote bags, teas, and soaps. Her works have been adapted in films from Clueless to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and have inspired hugely-successful fan fictions. Austen is undoubtedly a masterful author, but what is it that has also made her into a modern cult figure? As much as today’s readers are interested in her words, we are also interested in her world. This course will examine Austen’s literary works alongside the material culture of the late eighteenth-century world she inhabited. What was it like to be a woman writing during this time? We will attempt to recreate elements of this lived experience by visiting local eighteenth-century houses (followed by tea at the Reynolds Tavern) to experience the architecture, interior design, and fashion of the era. We will read two of Austen’s novels, weaving in these cultural activities and readings in material culture studies and Austen scholarship. After finishing each novel, we will turn our attention to the modern adaptations, fan fictions, and spin-offs. Students will be invited to investigate additional dimensions of Austen’s world through creative projects. By studying and participating in the material culture of the period as we read Austen’s novels, this course aims to produce a better understanding of Austen’s position, experience, and challenges as a woman writer. It will also make us more attentive consumers of the proliferation of Austen spin-offs and the material culture of Austen in the 21st century.

Course Description

This course will challenge the perception of the American West as a vast and rugged landscape as represented in literature, film, and pop culture. Ideas of the American West and Southwest are critical in perpetuating understandings of national identity that have been formulated through the seizure of lands, resources, and the displacement of peoples. Through an examination of Indigenous, African American, and Mexican-American / Chicanx authors and creators, students will critique the myth of the American West. Central to these discourses is the removal of peoples from the environment and the diminishment of landscapes under the pressures of the state. Considered in this way, this class will task students to think about who is associated with the American West and whose histories are hidden under that perception. Moreover, this class will end with an examination of the ways in which the environment plays a critical role in the maintenance and perpetuation of the nation itself. Essentially, how are the histories of the American West critical to understanding the contemporary environmental and geopolitical realities of that space? What role does land and the environment play within cultural and literary understandings of the American West and its relationships to national identity?