Courses Offered - Spring ACY 2023
Course Description
It has often been said that the Bible is the most important book in Western civilization that
nobody really reads. This course seeks to amend that lapse, by exploring substantial portions of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, with particular focus on selections that demonstrate great literary merit and influence. This course is not a Bible study group, which functions within the bounds of religious community and treats the Bible as a source of moral instruction and understanding of the divine. Rather, this course functions within the bounds of an academic institution, approaching the Bible as a complex work of narrative, poetry, law, history, and philosophy. Our goal is not moral instruction or metaphysical speculation, though you may find your moral and metaphysical insights enriched. Instead, our goal is to read the Bible with fresh eyes, using established scholarly practices to explore rather than resolve the Bible’s rich complexities, and to develop a mature appreciation of its history, meanings, influence, and magnificence.
Accompanying photo
The Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, Dean of the Washington National Cathedral,
introduces Midshipmen from HE222 to the greatest treasure of the National Cathedral’s rare
book library: the 1611 “He” Bible that was bound for King James’s son Henry Frederick, prince
of Wales. Dean Hollerith reads from the final chapter of the Gospel of Mark, explaining the
theological impact of the scholarly consensus that the final eleven verses are not original, but
were added in the second century CE.
Course Description
This course is designed to introduce new majors to tools of professional literary analysis through a set of focused readings.
Course Description
A multi-genre survey of war and its consequences as represented in classic and contemporary literature with an emphasis on such issues as individual responsibility, leadership, societal values, and military culture.
Course Description
This course will analyze the ethical, cultural, and leadership implications of interactions between literature and science, especially as these implications relate to and influence national and naval strategy, research, and policy in our current era of strategic competition. Students’ explorations will examine how literature explores these issues in ways that enrich our understanding and expand our ability to think critically.
A study in the analysis of poetic form and expression.Course Description
A study of the novel and short story with particular emphasis on the conventions, techniques, and innovations in the form.
Course Description
This course explores film as literature—a discussion of filmmaking as part of the longer tradition of storytelling. The course is
designed to push students beyond casual or passive viewing and to answer fundamental questions about the medium: How do movies express meaning? How do viewers understand film? What influences an audience’s reaction to a film? Students will become better acquainted with the adaptation process, studying film adaptations of novels, short stories, and even historical events, culminating in a project in which they will pitch their own adaptation of a novel or short story of their choosing. Ultimately, students will walk away with a deeper understanding and appreciation of this medium.
What do Bridgerton, Harlots, and Belle have in common? They’re all popular TV shows and movies set in eighteenth-century England. This era has fascinated modern viewers, not only because of its elaborate costumes and settings, but also because it is often considered to be the start of modernity. Institutions we now take for granted – like banking, police, and the first daily newspapers – emerged during this time. Ideas about gender and race firmed up, not always for the better. The aim of this course is to introduce you to British literature from 1660 to 1800 and to study that literature alongside historical, cultural, and political contexts. We will ask how literary movements and genres develop and study the ways in which literature has engaged readers with questions of personhood, identity, gender, and cultural belonging and exclusion. We will work together to overcome the barriers that language and form from early periods can pose for today’s readers. Finally, we will critically examine 21st-century depictions of the period to ask how our modern values shape our interpretations of the past.
HE319: Victorian Literature
Professor Allen Emerson
Course Description
The Victorian period was a time, paradoxically, of both great stability and great change. Stability may best be represented by
the figure of Queen Victoria herself who reigned for sixty-three years (1837-1901) over a nation and an empire that achieved unprecedented prosperity and territorial acquisition. But change was equally characteristic of nineteenth-century British life. The steamship, the subway, the sewer system, the telegraph, photography, and cinema—the Victorians were the first to experience these markers of modernity, the first to develop and respond to what we recognize now as modern industrial society. The course seeks to understand this society through the vibrant literature of the period. We will read a selection of novels, poetry, non-fiction prose, and drama as a means to tune in the joys, concerns, and convictions driving Victorian cultural and social life. We will also reflect on what the Victorians and their legacy mean for us, living as we do in a society that has inherited nineteenth-century ideologies of class, race, gender, nation, and empire. Some likely course readings: Dickens, Oliver Twist; E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Collins, The Moonstone.
Course Description
This course offers an introduction to 20th- and 21st-century British literature and culture 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 authors such as W.H. Auden, Caryl Churchill, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Helen Oyeyemi, Jean Rhys, and Zadie Smith.
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 and culture since World War II. Readings may include works by such authors as Ellison, Ginsberg, Lowell, Bishop, Baraka, Heller, Pynchon, Bellow, Plath, Sexton, Rich, Roth, Updike, DeLillo, Mamet, McCarthy, and Morrison.
Course Description
A study of a representative sample of Shakespeare's tragedies, histories, and comedies. Readings may also include works by Shakespeare's contemporaries.
Course Description
An introduction to the writing of prose, poetry, and drama. This course will focus on the practical craft of creative writing. Students will also study the skills of close reading and revision through regular critique workshops
Course Description
A study of advanced methods of presenting information in a wide variety of forms. Assignments may include preparing articles, reports, and military documents. Students may be asked to design and present a persuasive or analytical speech. Back to Top
Course Description
Beyond shifting our national consciousness and transforming global relations, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 had an enduring impact on literature. This course will explore how the events shaped contemporary writing. The selection of readings and class discussions will provide a sense of the wide variety of approaches writers have taken in their interpretation of 9/11. The course will review nonfiction documentation of the attacks and their immediate aftermath, fictionalized accounts of 9/11, and texts from veterans who have written of the Afghanistan War, both in fiction and nonfiction. The first focus in this course will be on the American experience and how our society was transformed. However, just as importantly, it will investigate narratives from a non-American perspective. Back to Top
Course Description
This course will investigate Asian American cultural expressions, including responses to stereotypes, such as the model minority and the yellow peril, by studying works by major authors such as Sui Sin Far, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yone Noguchi, Hisaye Yamamoto, Carlos Bulosan, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Course Description
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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Course Description
Advanced methods of analyzing literature and culture are taught through a set of focused readings of theories, histories, perspectives, and/or major figures in LGBTQ, women's and/or gender studies. Readings may include Audre Lorde, Sarah Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldua, and Kimberle Crenshaw.
Course Description
This class will take students through Christopher Marlowe’s complete works; secondarily, it will study Marlowe’s reputation among his contemporaries and later writers; finally, the course will take the opportunity Marlowe’s texts provide to ask broader questions about practices of reading and interpretation. In our journey through Marlowe’s depictions of heretical, queer, diabolical monomanics bent on their own destruction, we will discuss how rumors of the author’s own
atheism, necromancy, and penchant for sodomy might have influenced the reception of his works. Throughout our readings, we will attempt to take seriously the texts’ challenge to resist the impulse toward redemption. In doing so, the class will consider a broader literary-theoretical question: How might Marlowe’s characters’ struggle to fashion an amoral, unregenerate existence for themselves offer a model of (Faustian?) reading that disrupts the traditional pieties about literature’s redemptive powers--or, as we put it at the Naval Academy, the role of literature in developing Midshipmen morally and mentally and “imbu[ing] them with the highest ideals of duty, honor and loyalty.” At the risk of undermining the claims by which we legitimize our discipline’s existence, we will approach Marlowe’s works with the question that introduces Leo
Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption: “What is the redemptive power of art? More fundamentally, what are the assumptions that make it seem natural to think of art as having such a power?” Readings will include the six plays and the poetic works known to be be Marlowe, as well as pseudo-Marloviana, such as the tragedy Lust’s Dominion, which was attributed to him
when it was first published decades after his death. The semester will also include a unit on Marlovian biography, starting with early accounts of Marlowe’s death published in the late 1590s and moving through nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century reckonings with the legend of Kit Marlowe. We will also look at modern representations of Marlowe, such as the the
ones in Shakespeare in Love and Only Lovers Left Alive. Assignments leading up to the final capstone paper will include short textual-analysis/close-reading essays, a project on a historical document relating to the works, and responses to modern scholarship on Marlowe.
Course Description
This course will task students to consider the importance of science fiction within multiethnic writing in the United States. We’ll spend the semester considering the importance of belonging, identity, and citizenship in science fiction with an eye toward imagined futures. These concepts are central to the construction of identities, particularly for those who have been pushed to the margins, which explored both implicitly and explicitly through many science fictions texts. Throughout the course we will read authors from a variety of ethnic, socioeconomic, and racial positions to consider why the genre of science fiction is a fruitful and essential avenue for critiques of power. Moreover, in reflecting our contemporary cultural and political conditions, science fiction complicates our narratives about the past, ideas of belonging, and the importance of place. We will begin the course by interrogating what science fiction has to offer marginalized
communities and look at the current state of science fiction (primarily through the winners of the Nebula and the Hugo awards). The second section will focus on ideas of belonging and how that is represented with sci-fi, particularly representations of the future that highlight the importance and displacement of marginalized communities. This will lead to our discussion in the next three sections on citizenship, sovereignty, and borders. Students will be tasked to consider the
underlying constructs that are used to maintain each of these concepts – particularly how those ideas are called into question within science fiction. We’ll end by reading works about other or imagined futures that interrogate some of the possibilities offered by science fiction.
Course Description
Shakespeare’s Othello continues to be a touchstone for literature that engages and thinks about race and race relations. As the story of a black man who murders his white wife, it has haunted the English-speaking racial imagination since its earliest performances in the 17th century, a time when race was beginning to have the power that it now possesses. But is Shakespeare’s text a reflection of burgeoning anti-black ideology or does it decry racist attitudes by looking at the central character beyond the color of his skin? This course seeks to engage this critical issue with this singular play by exploring the text in depth, through sources, scholarship, and adaptations. How has the play been received by audiences after Shakespeare’s time and why does it continue to be a central play to Shakespeare’s canon in the 21st century? Our critical work will engage the field of early modern race studies in relation to Shakespeare, while also focusing on the interpretive power of adaptation though looking at the many ways in which 20th and 21st century writers, especially people of color and women, have re-visioned the play.
