3000-Level Course Descriptions
ENGL 3116-002: Topics in Advanced Theory: Reading Postmodern Space
Instructor: Karen Jacobs
This course will explore how postmodern literary texts map and navigate, construct and alter, inhabit and evacuate space; and it will consider how postmodern theoretical texts on space (re)conceptualize these categories. Positioning ourselves at the crossroads of literature, architecture, geography and philosophy, we will investigate literal and imaginative spaces and the ways they inevitably overlap-from the largest in scale to the most minutely mapped geo-political, architectural, and even bodily spaces.
We will ask, for example, how so-called natural spaces differ from or mimic those marked by human design, as we examine representations ranging from the wilderness, "the frontier" and the border, to the nation, the city, and the country; from public and private dwellings and other forms of spatial organization, to notions of "personal space" and the spaces of the body.
We will also take into account the "space of the text" and the ways it shapes, echoes, and contradicts its internal depictions of spatiality. Drawing from a selection of theorists, we will explore such issues as the relations among space, gender, sexuality, and knowledge; spatial concepts of human subjectivity and embodiment; the "frontier" and colonial space; the "architectural uncanny"; the intersection of space with temporality; and so on.
We will read Edwin Abbot, Flatland (1884); Paul Auster, City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (2004); Robert Coover, Pinocchio in Venice (1991); Rikki Ducornet, Phosphor in Dreamland (1995); Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1995); Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (1997); and Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002). There will be two papers plus a comprehensive final exam.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Karen.Jacobs@colorado.edu
English 3217-001:
Feminist Theory and the Film/Media Image
Instructor: Ann Kibbey
In general we will be discussing the semiotic theory of images and how their political content is implicitly as well as explicitly structured. The course focuses on the intersection of leftist, liberal and feminist topics. The course begins with French post-structuralist theories of the image and includes readings such as Roland Barthes’ Mythologies.
The course also considers issues in the application of theory. For example, part of the course is based on Elayne Rapping’s Law and Justice as Seen on TV, a book that analyzes the social and political prejudices in recent series television drama. We will supplement this book with other materials, both earlier and more recent, to study the changing history of gender identities in relation to the intersections of the law and the media, and the ways that gender is structured in relation to race and class. We will also analyze documentaries, including several about Philadelphia and the case of African-American imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu Jamal and other cases of police violence.
While some of the course concerns feminist issues in the traditional sense of social issues of special concern to women, the course is primarily about how the understanding of feminist issues alters perceptions of race, class, and the law.
Please contact the instructor for further information: Kibbey@colorado.edu
ENGL 3856-002: Multimedia Composition
Instructor: Ed Rivers
This course teaches how to integrate language (written, spoken, or sung) with other media such as video, photography, music (instrumental or synthetic), and so on. Each student will create projects that combine language with at least one other medium so that the words enhance that other medium and vice versa. Typically, the projects issue in a CD, a DVD, a web site, or all three. The idea is to learn how to say more through a combination of media than any one medium can say alone.
Visit link for detailed description: Multimedia Composition
Please contact the instructor for further information: Ed.Rivers@colorado.edu