LIT 2932 Course Descriptions for Summer 2008

Laura Caton-David
LIT 2932-50088             A          MW      9:00 – 12:30      12/2116

Banned Books of the Past and Present

In this class we will explore some of the books that have been challenged over the last century and are still being challenged today.  We will explore common themes found within the books and discuss, within the historical context, why these books made or still make people uncomfortable.  The class will examine in detail the issues of censorship and the practice of book banning and how it stands up against first amendment rights.  This class is reading and writing intensive.  Attendance is a must.

Books may include but are not limited to:
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Color Purple
Heart of Darkness
The Catcher in the Rye
Slaughterhouse Five
Selected Harry Potter
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Dr. Fred Herx
LIT 2932-50488             B          TR        2:30 – 6:00        10/2419

Delusion and the Mental Landscape

This course involves an analytical delving into the human psyches of some of literature’s most intriguing minds.  If authorial creations are to accurately portray life, those creations must depict the broad range of human experience, including the internal, mental setting, from the typical to the deviant.  Authors from William Shakespeare to Joseph Conrad to Toni Morrison investigate the very foundations of the mental landscape allowing us to scrutinize the jungle of the mind through critical analysis of their timeless characters.

Todd Kincaid
LIT 2932-50553             B          TR        12:40 – 4:10      12/2116

Mythology in American Cinema

All cultures attempt to explain the world (and the universe) through myths, and in this course we will examine the practice of myth making through film.  Although films are often mocked as being culturally and historically shallow, our best films have traditionally framed a rich argument about our culture, our people, our institutions, our values, and even our metaphysical questions and answers (or lack, thereof).  We will use the time in this class to view, discuss, and write about films.  What do they mean?  What are they for?  What do they hope to teach us?  As the class progresses, I hope we will discover the rich messages of the best films (and maybe some of the worst). 

Dr. Tru Leverette
LIT 2932-50086             A          TR        9:00 – 12:30      2/2061
LIT 2932-50087             A          TR        12:40 – 4:10      12/2117

Writing with Contemporary African-American Literature

This course fulfills the final requirement for the General Education Writing Program sequence. As such, it is a literature-based writing course that uses literary works as the medium through which we sharpen writing skills. Our literary focus will be on contemporary African-American texts, and our writing focus will be on the honing of skills necessary for clarity and effectiveness, including technical control, reasoned argument, unity and coherence.  

Brenda Maxey-Billings
LIT 2932-50090             A          MW      12:40 – 4:10      2/2064

The Uncanny: Writing and Weirdness

This course explores the uncanny across a wide range of texts and contexts. Although the uncanny resists definition, it provokes exquisitely familiar yet eerily unfamiliar sensations, and it carries persistent import. The uncanny, by its nature, disrupts intellectual certainty and thus offers extensive possibilities for exploration of issues of identity, boundaries, the status-quo, the strange, the ordinary, and the extra-ordinary. As a general-education writing course, this course asks students to engage the uncanny through reading and critical analysis skills, intensive reflection on uncanny literature and experiences, and development of organized and reasoned arguments.

Marcus Pactor
LIT 2932-50552             B          MW      9:00 – 12:30      2/2063

Big Mistakes

We all want stuff – love, acceptance, money, etc. – and we spend a lot of our lives pursuing those desires.  Unfortunately, we often make hard mistakes in the course of those pursuits.  Those are mistakes we’d prefer never to mention again.  However, OTHER people’s hard mistakes can be very interesting to read about and discuss.  This is why people often like to second-guess their football coaches and read celebrity tabloids.  In this course, we’ll read about characters who are not as famous as Urban Meyer, Bobby Bowden, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Aniston.  They are people who are just a little older than we are and they make mistakes much worse than running the ball on 4th and 7 or begging for Brad Pitt to love them again.  They plot against their own friends, sabotage their relationships, fall in love with their teachers, and eat mushrooms as big as your fist.  Oops.  The books this semester will likely include Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. 

Amy Wainwright
LIT 2932-50089             A          MW      12:40 – 4:10      12/2116

Loss, Recovery, and Redemption: Journeys of the Spirit

It seems that most of us—whether we are 18 or 89—have somehow dealt with losing people, objects, or situations that are every dear to us. More than 2/3 of my former students have lost families to divorce and/or death; homes, parts of homes, beloved pets, even loved ones in hurricanes and other disasters; friends and acquaintances to unexpected tragedies such as cancer, automobile accidents, or drug use.

Few of us arrive at the age of 18 or so and have not suffered some kind of profound loss. Some-one or some-thing we have depended upon is, for often inexplicable reasons, lost to us forever.

Some losses are tremendous (such as we might find in the novel “Life of Pi” or “The Lovely Bones”); others, such as we find in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” may be more temporary—although they might not seem so at the moment.

But, whatever the loss, we feel real sadness and grief—we feel vulnerable, directionless. And we need to tread a hobbled path through life for awhile so that we may regain our sense of self. That path is, most often, not easy—at all. But it is worth the trip. And perhaps, if we look long and hard enough, we will even become something beyond what we were before that loss. Ultimately, our lives will become more loving, more accepting and much richer because of that which we have suffered.

This is our focus for the semester. I will ask you to keep track, in journals, of how you are progressing on your own “journeys.” And I will ask you to help others on their journeys—there will be a community service component to this course in which you will be asked to devote some of your free time to those who have “lost” perhaps even more immediately than you have And, I hope, your own life will be enhanced by such contact.

We will read five novels and view sequences from several films in support of our study.