DRUGS, SEX, & ROCK ‘N’ ROLL: COUNTERCULTURES IN THE MOVIES, 1930-1960
ENGL 199: Undergraduate Open Seminar

This course will study cinematic representations of alternative ideologies and behaviors, emphasizing practices that were suppressed by established authorities in the United States and Europe from the 1930s through the 1960s. While the organization of the course is chronological, it is not genetic; that is, there is no assertion of causal relationships among these periods. Postcards from the edge, if you will. In reading these postcards, we will also explore why and how these stories of “outsiders” became integrated into the mainstream of commercial cinema. Evaluated work will include short response papers and 3-4 medium-length essays.

GENRES OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
ENGL 461: Topics in Literature

What is the frontier? And where, and when? As we read and view and listen this semester, we’ll think broadly about the “frontier” as a space of time that’s in flux, poised between changing orders of law, economy, and culture-from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, from the Dred Scott case to Django Unchained!, and from paintings of the American West to field recordings of the American South. We’ll also figure out how new forms and categories-new “genres”-try to re-order that space and time. Westerns are surely concerned with frontiers, but so are folk songs and zombie apocalypse narratives. As we think critically about the frontier, we will also explore its history of violence and domination, especially with regard to the indigenous and the enslaved.

New course!
REALISMS
ENGL 461: Topics in Literature

This course examines the literary tradition of realism, primarily through close analyses of several of its most celebrated nineteenth-century exemplars.  We will then follow that portion of the course with a briefer view of twentieth- and the twenty first-century versions of realism to observe how this literary form changes, how it adapts to vigorous remappings of US culture and new perspectives on the real, while focusing on what remains constant for writers who embrace the realist aesthetic.  Our course will be predominantly interested in realism in the American imagination, but wherever appropriate, we will also try to explore other varieties of realism.

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