This course explores the history and social implications of our digitized culture(s). Considering information technology in terms of its relationship to the self and society, we will discuss a wide-ranging set of issues related to digital cultures, such as online communities and social networking, internet addiction, and machine learning. We will also investigate the implications of digital cultures in terms of social categories including class, race, and gender.

Fantasies provide escape into strange realms where time and space are not our own. Class reading focuses on fantastic voyages to explore human desires, dreams, and fears, as well as the realities they grow out of. Texts range from early tales from Arthurian literature and A Thousand and One Nights to contemporary stories and films. International and interdisciplinary perspectives on fantasy and the forms it takes. Honors credit available. (Gen.Ed. AL)

Comparative Literature as literary theory and as academic practice. Nineteenth-century background and the rise of "literary studies"; traditional concepts of influence, periods, themes, genres, "extraliterary" relations, translation studies, and their development in modern theory. Questions of textuality, canonicity, cultural identity, the politics of cross-cultural literary images, metatheory, and institutional setting as they affect current practice.

We will attempt to read and interpret historically in ways that move beyond national, and nationalist, readings of U.S. history. Rather than survey all of American social and cultural history in a single speeding semester, we will focus on four particular periods of U.S. history, four moments where events in America received international attention. We'll begin with the colonial encounter, then skip to the Age of Revolutions, followed by Harlem Renaissance, and, finally, end in the Vietnam war.

This course offers a hemispheric and comparative approach to the study of Anglo- and Latin American literature and culture from the late fifteenth until the eighteenth century, from the age of exploration to the late colonial period. We will look at a wide variety of texts produced in the wake of European imperial expansion in the Americas (e.g. letters, journals, natural histories, ethnographies, captivity narratives and travel accounts) that chronicle the creation of the so-called New World.

This course introduces Comic Art in North America, from the beginnings of the newspaper comic strip through comic books graphic novels, and electronic media including the history and aesthetics of the medium, comparison between developments in the United States, Mexico, and French Canada, and the social and cultural contexts in which comic art is created and consumed. (Gen.Ed. AT, DU)

This course introduces Comic Art in North America, from the beginnings of the newspaper comic strip through comic books graphic novels, and electronic media including the history and aesthetics of the medium, comparison between developments in the United States, Mexico, and French Canada, and the social and cultural contexts in which comic art is created and consumed. (Gen.Ed. AT, DU)

This course introduces Comic Art in North America, from the beginnings of the newspaper comic strip through comic books graphic novels, and electronic media including the history and aesthetics of the medium, comparison between developments in the United States, Mexico, and French Canada, and the social and cultural contexts in which comic art is created and consumed. (Gen.Ed. AT, DU)

This course introduces Comic Art in North America, from the beginnings of the newspaper comic strip through comic books graphic novels, and electronic media including the history and aesthetics of the medium, comparison between developments in the United States, Mexico, and French Canada, and the social and cultural contexts in which comic art is created and consumed. (Gen.Ed. AT, DU)

Comedy is ambivalent: it can serve as a tool to challenge the status quo (for instance, in the form of satire) but it can also reinforce existing power structures (for example, by making fun of marginalized groups). In this course, we will reflect precisely on comedy?s socio-political significance, by focusing on categories such as class, gender, and race, as well as on non-Anglophone literary traditions. Course materials may include a wide range of genres and media (plays, short stories, films, and videos). (Gen. Ed. AL)