evening redness

Fall 2010 course

ENGL 2036-001: Introduction to Digital Media
This class serves to introduce students to theoretical, critical, and formal concepts of media and textuality. The course investigates the history of media (especially writing and print), the political implications of so-called new media (e.g. computers and network technologies), cultural discussions of media, and specific media objects. The course is designed to give students in the humanities an understanding of 1) their media environment in the 21st century; 2) the origins of that environment; and 3) the evolving position of something called “literature” within it.

Text list

Schedule

Here is one of my Fall 2010 courses, the basic intro-to-literary-studies course required of all English majors at CU.

ENGL 2000-001: Literary Analysis

Official description: Provides a basic skills course designed to equip students to handle the English major. Emphasizes critical writing and the acquisition of basic techniques and vocabulary of literary criticism through close attention to poetic and prose language.

This section: A writing-intensive course focused on developing interpretive and expressive skills. We will write a series of short papers and discuss writing strategies during class in the context of poetry, drama, and prose. Further, we will study a series of terms chosen to assist you in understanding genre, form, historical period, and other broad categories of literary discourse. This course is designed less to be an all-encompassing introduction to the discipline than it is to provide you with tools with which you can enter the discipline on your own.

Text list

Schedule

This was my course last summer.

ENGL 1600: Masterpieces of American Literature

Violence, Movement, Faith, America

Despite contemporary protests that popular media such as film and television (and, more recently, the internet) is too violent, the United States has been grappling with violence and its representation for centuries. This section of Masterpieces of American Literature will discuss how violence has been represented in American literature since the nineteenth century. Often, if not always, violence is coupled in American literature to other themes, including some that are expected (such as the frontier and death), some that are not (such as the innocence of youth), and some that are bound to be controversial (such as religion and faith). We will examine six novels, each of which takes on the issue of violence in one of its many physical or metaphysical forms. Through our readings, we will come to understand that violence is cruel and necessary, tragic and comic, subtle and ubiquitous, literal and figurative. In short, we will learn that the United States is violent. However, our greater task will be to discover what we mean when we say as much and whether such statements should be spoken as a moral lesson.

Reading list:

• James Fennimore Cooper: The Deerslayer
• Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop
• Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
• Flannery O’Connor: The Violent Bear it Away
• Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Here‘s the Text list.

And here is the schedule.