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 Two

We Didn't Start the Fire

Each lyric in Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start the Fire stands for something that happened during each year of his life, in chronological order. Write a version of the song (same rhyme scheme / meter) that fits your own life, starting with the year of your birth and ending with 2010.

Next, write a second version, in which you do the same for the last twelve months, one lyric for each month. This second version will probably be only one or two verses long.

Notice that Billy Joel's original doesn't confine itself to one area of human endeavour: he includes political figures, popular figures, brand names, events, philosophers, national and international tragedies, etc.
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