Special Courses - Spring 2010

Academics > Special Courses - Spring 2010

Spring 2010

ENG 403
The Work of Georges Perec
In an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro of December 1978, Georges Perec (1936-1982) said of himself and his texts that he never wanted to write “two books the same.” If this statement accounts for the extreme heterogeneity of his work, Perec’s association with OuLiPo, a group of writers and mathematicians working on the integration of numerical structures and literary texts, may account for his work’s experimental character. Things (1965), A Man Asleep (1967), Species of Spaces (1974), W or the Memory of Childhood (1975), Life. A User’s Manual (1978), and Ellis Island (1980) are among Perec’s major texts and display his preoccupation with formal constraints (the list, the letter, the trace) and thematic clusters (the everyday, memory, the text). With special attention to the concept of space, which may be claimed to govern his work, this course is intended as an introduction to Georges Perec, a writer highly acclaimed in Europe yet rarely studied in the U.S.

ENG 315
The Cultural Poetics of Rock and Roll

Over the past fifty years Rock and Roll has emerged from an adolescent craze into a major cultural force in American (and World) culture.Much more than merely a form of popular musical expression, Rock and Roll has become a complex interdisciplinary, multimedia field in itself--involving elements of music, poetry, multicultural social commentary, performance art, fashion, recording technology, film and video technology, and marketing demographics. This course is not a history of Rock and Roll, although we will consider some of that history. Nor is it a musicological study of rock's melodic patterns or rhythms, or a "literary" study of rock lyrics, although these elements will also come into play. Rather, this course will pursue a serious interdisciplinary analysis, seeking to account for the social impact of rock and roll by examining the several cultural "languages" which coalesce to create this highly complex media-art form.

ENG 318
The Novel
This course engages students in a study of the formal structures and literary devices of the novel. In light of Gaudium et Spes, it will also attend to the ways in which the novel is particularly suited to the exploration of significant questions concerning human nature. Specifically, we will explore the fantasy genre and discuss the ways in which it addresses the issue of good versus evil and other anxieties of the human condition.