FALL-TERM SENIOR TOPICS IN LITERATURE, 2024

While we make an effort to assign students to one of the courses that most interests them, there are many factors in scheduling, so there are no guarantees that you will be placed in one of the courses you indicate on your survey. No changes will be made to course assignments. 


Whodunit?: Mystery/Crime Lit … Aceves

In an interview with the New York Times, author Cormac McCarthy famously said that the only writers he admires are those who “deal with issues of life and death.” This proclamation may sound reductive (and a bit pretentious), but most readers would find it hard to disagree with McCarthy’s core sentiment: the best stories are often those in which the stakes are highest. In this course, we will explore several such works in order to better understand what draws us to tales of crime and mystery and what these kinds of narratives can teach us about “the human condition.” We will study a variety of texts--including classic novels, contemporary bestsellers, and award-winning films--to dissect the popular appeal of mystery/crime fiction and explore the genre’s literary merits and limitations. And we might just find ourselves reading late into the night, eager to see what secrets are lurking on the next page.


“Dazed and Confused”: Philosophy & Literature … Hines (Topic One) 

“You just gotta keep livin’ man, L-I-V-I-N.” -- David Wooderson

“Why So Serious?”  -- the Joker

Whether we subscribe to David Wooderson’s freewheelin’ spontaneity in Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused, to the Joker’s tragicomic absurdity in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight, or to something else entirely, we still live our lives according to particular philosophies -- like it or not… In this class, we will explore what it means when we find ourselves “Dazed and Confused” -- “dazed,” perhaps, by the rapidly changing hyper-tecnhological-globalized-pseudo mayhem we call the 21st century and “confused” by how we fit into it. Delving into literature of various genres, multitudinous modes of media, and essays penned by some of philosophy’s great progenitors, we will probe deeply into the social, political and personal structures that determine our individual and collective identities, and we will lay bare the various philosophies that determine the possibilities of what it means exactly to be human. Is it our bodies? Our minds? Our souls? Or is it everything we experience combined over time? 


Page to Screen … Hines (Topic Two) 

“My method has been to identify a text-based issue that extends across a variety of media, find ways to study it comparatively, and then tease out the theoretical implications from multiple textual examples” 

-- Linda Hutcheon 

The disciplinary conflict between film and literature is no secret. Historically, attempts to transfer the qualities of a great book to the screen have met considerable resistance from fans of the literature who claim either  that “too much is lost” in translation or that “the movie was nothing like the book.” However, what if the point of adaptation was to make work flourish, not merely survive? To shift forms and thrive in ways thought  impossible in its “original form”? 

In this class, we will examine texts and their respective cinematic adaptations to consider the transition from page to screen and its effect on narrative over time and through the space in new media. In addition to performing our usual literary analyses, we will learn theories on visual media, reading film and other video as texts. Moreover, like Hutcheon, we will explore and hopefully overturn our ideas of adherence to textual fidelity or to visual renditions that remain “true to the original.” The goal is to move away from the dichotomy of text and screen and evaluate the relationship between the two in constructing conventional notions of familiar genres such as crime & noir, romance, and the hero or superhero. 


Literature and Revolution: The Postcolonial Novel and Film … Hynes (Topic One)

“If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.” —Chinua Achebe

In this course, to borrow from a famous book of Poco theory, the “Empire writes back.” We will read contemporary novels from Ireland (Roddy Doyle), Nigeria (Chimamanda Adichie), and India (Aravind Adiga) in order to explore how postcolonial writers have responded to ideas of nation, identity (including gender, class, and ethnicity), and “history” in order to write their own stories outside the bounds of what was prescribed by the colonizer. We will begin by investigating the term "postcolonial" itself before moving on to examine narratives of nationhood in the context of resistance, decolonization, and post-imperialism as they are represented through the experiences of specific characters in the texts. Expect scrappy protagonists, war, family dysfunction, and plenty of resilience in the face of what seem like impossible odds. In addition to our primary novels, we hope to watch films by Ken Loach, Genevieve Nnaji, and Danny Boyle. 


Truth and Consequences … Hynes (Topic Two)

"But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth." –William Faulkner

In this class, we will read novels that engage with the idea of truth in literature: what it is, who tells it (or not), and what the consequences are of telling (or not telling) the truth. The novels we read engage with this question on an individual, authorial, familial, and societal level, and we will look at what is at stake when characters confront truth, secrets, and lies of varying degrees. We will also consider how the novel itself is an act of truth-telling as it reflects humanity back to itself. Our texts will include two contemporary novels, Atonement and a second book TBD, and the novella Small Things Like These. We may also consider film and some secondary source materials. 


Caribbean Diaspora Literature … Friend 

“Aquí nací, aquí crié / Aquí viví pero no moriré”

—Daddy Yankee, “Me Quedaría”

The Caribbean has been a region of constant migration—forced, voluntary, and everything in between—since long before it was even known by that name. So what happens when people from a region characterized by movement begin to spread beyond these landscapes? In this course we’ll examine texts from writers of the Caribbean diaspora. Through these texts we’ll consider how diaspora is impacted by issues of empire, politics, and nationalism and how it, in turn, impacts one’s personal relationships to family, culture, memory, and home.


Love … Tschurr

“Love” occupies the strangest place of any feeling we experience; it is perhaps the greatest cause of hurt for many people and yet feels at times to be the telos of one’s entire life. This class will investigate love as a feeling and a structure of feeling across times, beginning with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, moving to Paris for queer love with James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and then jumping forward to a contemporary account of love with the Sally Rooney novel, Normal People. Along the way, we will be reading selected chapters from bell hooks’ All About Love, and Eva Illouz’s Why Love Hurts and The End of Love. Assignments will include a public facing book review or creative assignment, and a critical essay.