CR Dean
Teaching
LIT2110
Survey of World Literature: Ancient to the Renaissance
Course Description
This course will be an adventure in literature exploring narratives, cultures, and literary traditions from around the world: such as The Odyssey, Beowulf, Inferno, Rumi’s Poetry, and Indigenous creation stories, during a period in world history that has shaped many of our modern ideas and ideals. The texts that we will read in this course will range from the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods in a variety of genres which will include epics, drama, poetry, and prose. You will travel the high seas, face the monsters of the deep, engage with the early celebrities aka toxic gods and goddesses, and meet legendary heroes and heroines as we explore the birth of the world, the intricacies of life, and themes of love, lust, peace, betrayal, and redemption. When this course reaches the end of the road, you will have strengthened your knowledge and understanding of world literature having learned about the cultural and historical contexts surrounding these texts. Students will analytically and creatively explore texts through close reading, critical responses, literary research, argument development and presentation, and participate in class discussions.
Course Objectives
Through genuine and persistent engagement with course materials, activities, and discussions, you will:
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gain knowledge of history, literature, and cultures of societies from the ancient to the renaissance
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gain knowledge of classic and contemporary texts and critical issues in the field of literary studies from the ancient to the renaissance
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develop skills in reading, analyzing, discussing, and writing about complex literary texts
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develop skills in using contextual cultural, historical, and other information in literary analysis
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apply knowledge of the issues and contexts of different bodies of literature from the ancient to the renaissance in written analysis of literary works
AML2070
Survey of American Literature: American Inheritances
Course Description
As citizens of the United States, as part of our core educational experiences, we have been taught about our country in every avenue including literature, about its inception, about the founding fathers, westward expansion, as a ‘melting pot,’ as land of opportunity, or the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” country in the New World. We will track evolutions of authorial response to their contemporary environments and seek to answer questions of how the promise of America is inherited, lived, and received. Those ideas within and without of literature make up the loudest voice of what Americana and American Literature may be, and so this course will peer into the American literary forest to look at the trees. This course will be an adventure centered on hearing a fuller range of American literature – it will explore a litany of voices sharing narratives, cultures, and literary traditions outside of the standard canon of American literature, including visual media.
To guide and aid in our conduction of these analyses, we will refer to American literature beginning with 1733 up until the present day, and we will work with prose, auto-narrative (auto-biography), fiction, visual memoir, comics, and short stories. Questions such as: What is an American? What is American identity or is there such a thing? How do these contributions engage the reader with notions of identity, class, gender, race, hierarchy, geography, etc.? How or do their contributions shift perceptions and understandings of American literature? We will seek to consider how other factors in our pursuit of analyzing American Inheritances, such as race, class, ethnicity, etc., might add to our understanding about American literature.
Course Objectives
Through genuine and persistent engagement with course materials, activities, and discussions, you will:
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Identify characteristic of American literary traditions, genre, and themes across time
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Understand and apply the political, sociocultural, or historical contexts of American literature and critically engage with primary and secondary material
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Successfully engage, respond, analyze, and evaluate both literary texts and secondary research in discussion and formal writing with proper citations