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English 103: Workshop in Advanced Writing
Professor Donald McCrary
This course will examine the rhetorical strategies and ideological
content within creative and critical texts that represent provocative
and insightful meditations on varied aspects of the human condition.
For example, students will study critical and creative texts appropriated
and generated by womanist theology, a radical hermeneutics that
interrogates and resists multiple oppressions, including sexism,
racism, and classism. By reading and analyzing challenging and thoughtful
texts, students will explore not only how rhetoric is under-girded
by specific ideologies, but also how writers construct and present
rhetoric in ways that influence and persuade their readers. Some
of the writers students will read include Alice Walker, Barbara
Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delores Williams, Gloria Anzaldua, Richard
Wright, Jane Tompkins, Gary Soto, Stephen Jay Gould, and Michiko
Kakutani. Students will write several formal essays that ask them
to reflect critically on fiction and non-fiction texts, as well
as their own experience.
English 225: Science Fiction
Professor Wayne Berninger
see course website
Alien invasions and rocket ships! Runaway robots and malevolent
computer programs! Clones and cyborgs! Virtual reality and mind
control! Time travel
and ecological disaster!
For at least a century, fiction writers
have detitle with subjects such as these as they attempt to answer
the question of whether technology and scientific progress will
save us or destroy us. These writers have sought to complicate
our understanding of the modern world by creating fiction in which
human beings struggle to cope with the psychological, social, political,
environmental, and spiritual implications of scientific advancement.
Often dismissed as merely a frivolous sub-genre
of “serious literature,” science fiction has become
one of our culture’s most popular forms of literature (not
to mention film).
It has become a popular pastime among science fiction fans
to catalogue examples of science fiction's predictive impact on
society, from the naming of the first NASA space shuttle after Star
Trek's U. S. S. Enterprise, to cyberpunk's anticipation of the advent
of artificial intelligence and the Internet.
Why
is science fiction so popular?
What is its value? Why do so many readers think science
fiction is so important to an understanding of modern culture?
Given science fiction's increasing popularity and its sometimes
eerie, recursive influence on the culture at large, these are important
questions for literary scholars and cultural critics, not to mention
the general public, and it seems important for English majors to
have at least a working knowledge of this strange branch of modern
literature.
In this course, we will examine the historical
and theoretical development of the genre of science fiction, from
its early precursors in the late nineteenth century to the "space
opera" of the 1920s and 1930s and the “Golden Age”
of the late 1940s and 1950s, and from the “New Wave”
of the 1960s and 1970s to the “cyberpunk” of the modern
day. Through class
discussion of key terms and concepts used in the critical discussion
of science fiction, we will develop an understanding of how
it fits into the overall literary and intellectual tradition of
the West. We will investigate how science fiction evolved
in response to rapid technological and scientific advancement (in
both the hard and soft sciences) in Western culture, and how science
fiction therefore provides us with a unique lens through which to
critique that culture and to understand our lives in the modern
world.
Readings will include:
E. E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space, Isaac
Asimov's Foundation, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep? and William Gibson's Neuromancer.
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