Course Description

Course Description

Can a highway billboard be counted as literature? Is Bob Dylan a sellout? Who is Lady Gaga? Can Google be used as a poetic constraint? How do internet phenomena like Youtube and Facebook shape our attitudes toward wisdom, knowledge, and information? Are we morally implicated just by watching? Is constructing our own identities a dangerous thing, and is deconstruction possible?

In this course we will try and answer these questions.

We will discuss relatively nascent literary forms, such as children’s literature, graphic novels, genre fiction, fan fiction, and blogging; we will explore the art of adaptation, and talk about the ways in which the narrative techniques used in film and television have shaped our formal understanding of image, character, metaphor, and plot; we will question the mythologizing power of nostalgia and ask whether speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) can offer us a better understanding of our own world.

Come prepared to both read and write generously. This course will be graded on enthusiasm, regular attendance, and a final portfolio of polished work.

Required Reading List:

Alan Moore, From Hell

Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Additional reading materials will be provided in photocopy form.

Assignment Four

Advertisement & Review

Choose one very well-known piece of visual art (The Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel…) and write an advertisement for it. The advertisement can imagine the artwork as an experience, or as a collectible object, or as a TV personality with its own show – you can be as creative as you like.

Then take one real-life advertisement (a billboard, a magazine advertisement, a craigslist posting, a TV ad… anything is fine, but please include a link or a picture so I can see it) and write a glowing literary review of it.

Pay attention to your language and syntax: what makes the language of advertisement compelling? What makes the language of "serious" criticism compelling?
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