Liberal Arts

Intro African & African-American Literature & Culture

Course No. LLC411.1  Credits: 3

This course will focus on traditional Africa up to the threshold of the European colonization of the continent. The African texts as a whole offer a brief introduction to traditional African thoughts and ways of life and also to the growing incursion of colonialism. The course highlights the paramountcy of kinship care, communal life, and individual fulfillment in harmony with society. It also stresses a social thinking underlain by a collective unconscious of the inseparableness of the living and the dead, the physical and the metaphysical. The African-American texts taken all together highlight, notably from Harlem Renaissance, significant stages of the African-American cultural-literary expressions of their socio-historical experience and an attendant sense of religion manifested particularly through the Black Church. The subtext of this course is to see if traditional life, an example of which is traditional Africa, still has any value for the technological world of today. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.

Jazz: Contemporary African-American Writers

Course No. LLC374X.1  Credits: 3

This course will deal with a very select number of contemporary female and male African-American writers who have won outstanding awards from various national literary awards to The Nobel Prize. The selected authors are Toni Morrison, Patricia Raybon, John Edward Wideman and Edward P. Jones. The central drift of this course will be concerned with todayÕs multifarious significance of the complex black experience. It will therefore look into how all these writers combine a keen historical sense with a discerning aesthetic sensibility to explore afresh in a postmodernist sense the intriguing black experience with deep intellectual reflections. It will also examine how in relation to their individual subject-matters they all artistically problematize the aesthetic and philosophical questions about the thin line between fact and fiction, historical veracity and imaginative truth, and art and artifice. Our class selection will consist of four books published between 1984 and 2003. A number of videos will be shown for visual elucidation of the booksÕ underlying concerns. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.

Jung & Creativity

Course No. SNS484  Credits: 3
Faculty Adina Davidson

This course will combine a theoretical introduction to Jung with experiential participation in a dream workshop/small group. The theoretical component of the course will provide an overview of Jung's understanding of the human psyche with an emphasis on use of symbols and dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious." Work from the dream workshops is intended to inform the artist's work. Students will be expected (in addition to the usual preparatory reading) to bring dreams weekly and to be willing to apply material from those dreams to their own creative process. 3 credits.

Lit/Lang/Comp Independent Study

Course No. LLC498.1  Credits: 3

Literature of the Americas

Course No. LLC388.1  Credits: 3

This course will survey the concurrent but separate developments of the literary traditions of North and South America. Taking Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola as our point of anchor, we will work backward to the Pre-Columbian original narrative forms, and forward through the written records of the complex colonial contexts of the literary art in both Americas. We will also trace the divergent results of the influences of European literature, following in each case the developments of such directions as we can identify in the prose and poetry of the colonial and postcolonial periods of each America. Reading widely and also closely, we will consider how best to trace the parallel emergence of these national literatures, seeking in a juxtaposed study what common literary and extra-literary antecedents and shaping forces the texts in both traditions may reveal. We will also inquire into the nature of the distinctions that must be made between these traditions, and into the impact the differences between these literatures may have of the understanding of what we mean by the phrase "American literature." Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course.

LLC 101 - Writing and Inquiry I: Basic Composition and Contemporary Ideas

Course No. LLC101.2  Credits: 3
Faculty Joyce Kessler | Katherine Clark | Mark Bassett | Olatubosun Ogunsanwo

A composition-intensive course that emphasizes basic composition skills, while introducing basic research and documentation skills. Along with cultivating the concomitant skills in critical reading and thinking, this course also introduces an explicitly theoretical approach to contemporary culture. Twenty pages of student expository writing will be required. Offered fall. 3 credits.

Narrative Art & Mythic Patterns in African & African American Literature

Course No. LLC471.1  Credits: 3

This course will focus on the various artistic ways African and African-American imaginative writers create a narrative interlock of mythic and contemporary materials to formulate in postcolonial and postmodernist terms an essentialist condition of their people's experience, while a number of them explore the interface of classical and African myths for an informed global vision. Their works are largely structured with images and symbols endowed with dynamic moral and spiritual significance. They problematize the African thinking underlain by the inseparableness of the natural world and the supernatural realm, the human and the divine, the animate and the inanimate, just as this inseparableness also aesthetically underlies the relationship between the naturalistic and the abstract in both African visual art and Harlem Renaissance. There is in postcolonial African literature, and in many 'Third World' countries, a new narrative art-form which can be called 'animist realism.' It is critically regarded as contesting the dominant protocol of conventional (Western) realist narrative which is predicated on knowability and linearity. We will also look at how the interface between oral art (free text) and written art (fixed text) mediates between fiction and history in this new form of narrative realism. And there will be an ample number of videos for visual elucidation. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.

On the Same Page: Rhetoric, Design, & Writing in the Digital Age

Course No. LLC351X

This course will allow students to develop the skills and understanding necessary for literacy in our information-saturated times. Facilitated by growth in electRonic technologies, more and more types of written texts, in both print and online media, have fused with images and other graphics. Literature producers and consumers of these emerging hybrid texts will need awareness of and competence in the complex communicative strategies that they engage. While this course offers valuable knowledge to any developing artist, it is particularly suitable for students studying in the visual communications majors; i.e., Communication Design, Illustration, Biomedical Art, Film, Video and Photographic Arts, Digital Arts. Fulfills Humanities/Cultural Studies distribution requirement. Creative Writing Concentration course. 3 credits.