This course will introduce students to the book arts as complete art objects that integrate visual and verbal content as well as narrative; but will focus primarily on skill building of various bookbinding techniques, tools and related terminology. Demonstrations of each technique (in-person and made available online) will be followed by an in-class study of form and function. Critical thought and discourse will occur during class and through reflective critique.
This course will provide students with an opportunity to explore technical skills and knowledge of book making to develop a work ethic based on time management and comprehension of the materials, participate in safe studio practices, and engage in the creative and critical approach of art making. Students will develop perseverance, exploration and problem-solving strategies.
Additional Course Fees: US$50 per credit materials fee and students will need to purchase a book binding kit for approx. US$30.
By focusing on the work of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Bernadette Mayer—four significant intersectional feminist writers from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—this section of ENGL 247 Four Modern American Poets will investigate the important role that poetry has played in US social justice movements over the past fifty years, particularly with regard to issues of gender, sexuality, and race. Restricting our view to this small group of women poets will allow us to focus our attention: we will read each writer closely and carefully, think about the historical, political, and cultural contexts of each writer’s work, trace the influences these writers have upon each other, and investigate the world in which they lived and to which their poetry responds. We will also focus on poetry and poetics, that is, critical writing about poetry, and treat such writing as worthy of the same kind of critical attention as poetry itself. Beginning with writing emerging from the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s—Adrienne Rich’s political poetry and boundary-breaking essays and Audre Lorde’s foundational essay collection, Sister Outsider (1984)—the course will then delve into Bernadette Mayer’s long poem, Midwinter Day (1982), and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s important essays of feminist poetics collected in The Pink Guitar (1990). Specific topics to be covered include but are not limited to: second- and third-wave feminism, LGBTQ+ writing and activism, African American writing and activism, economic inequality, and the poetics of the everyday. Students will write essays and short papers—one per week—on that week’s or unit’s reading.
This course will examine excerpts of Dante Alighieri’s greatest passages from the Divine Comedy and other works in relation to the space and history of Florence. Textual analyses will be performed, unpacking the dense symbolism and motifs reflective of the intellectual and moral climate during 14th century Florence. Students will visit churches, piazzas, and palaces within the city and will examine these locations in the context of Dante’s life and surrounding controversy, the accusations and denunciations in his writings, the physical descriptions of the city, and the characters and historical figures present in his works.
This course focuses on the literary panorama of Florence, creating significant connections with the fields of linguistics, history, and socio-politics. Students will gain knowledge about the origins of the Italian language, they will learn about war literature and poetry, discover the key venues wherein literature flourished, explore the works of the locals, and also that of illustrious foreign authors who studied and wrote in Florence, and ultimately uncover the new literature developing in the city. The course is held outside, since Florence is the very setting of its academic content. Therefore, students will gain awareness of the significance of walking in the city so as to develop a new gaze that allows them to travel through various epochs and literary movements. This way, students will undertake an insightful journey through language, history, and narratives.
This module examines both the impact of climate change on cultural expression, and of cultural texts on our attitudes towards the environment. To facilitate these two perspectives, the module intersperses weeks on contemporary climate fiction (cli-fi) with weeks on other, broader texts, from ancient to modern: theatre, visual art, music and cinema. The module will equip students with an ecocritical vocabulary and the facility and opportunity to employ that vocabulary across a range of media and forms.
Fears of extra-terrestrial invasion and nuclear apocalypse, of seemingly strange and alien civilizations, and of social, economic, and cultural collapse belie SF’s trash label. This course introduces you to the genre’s deep philosophical dimensions, tracing its progress through the pulp magazine during the late-Nineteenth century fin de siècle and early Twentieth-century inter-war periods in the United Kingdom and the United States respectively, and its later development across the so-called Iron Curtain during the Cold War. This course will also challenge the traditional conventions of Science Fiction – interstellar conflict with alien races – and explore the genre’s diverse progressions: into Ecocriticism, Feminism, sexuality, and the near-future ‘Post-SF’ of the urban and suburban present.
This module has been designed to help students realise their creative potential by producing original and stimulating short fiction. Teaching will consist of specialist workshops conducted by an expert in the field. In addition to engaging with practical aspects of craft and technique, students will learn how to create believable, compelling characters and how to make them live (and die!) on the page. They will also have the opportunity to visit sites of historic importance and natural beauty to inspire their writing.
Excursion(s): The module includes a live ‘reading’ at a leading local arts centre, where you’ll have the chance to share the stage with a prominent Scottish writer.
This module will provide students with an introduction to central medico-literary concepts, and their evolution, surrounding the body between 1400 and 1900 in Britain. After taking this course, students will be familiar with a wide range of literary works that centre the body, as well as key theories in Literature and Medicine Studies: accompanying primary historical and literary materials will be secondary sources which examine conceptual frameworks of both the body and the practice of medicine. This module will critically analyze literary representations of the early modern humoral body, bodily dissection, patient narratives, and Gothic medicine. Primary readings will introduce students to various historic literary genres, such as Renaissance drama, metaphysical poetry, and the Gothic novel. Indicative texts include works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Mary Shelley, Mary Seacole, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
From sparkly vampires to blockbuster monsters, gothic tropes appear to be all-pervasive in contemporary culture. As Catherine Spooner claims in Contemporary Gothic (2006), like ‘a malevolent virus, Gothic narratives have escaped the confines of literature and spread across disciplinary boundaries to infect all kinds of media, from fashion and advertising to the way contemporary events are constructed in mass culture’. What this course aims to do is to introduce students to Gothic’s literary expression in the British nineteenth century, before exploring the many ways in which this dark heritage continues to affect contemporary cultural production.
Focusing on three key texts from the nineteenth century, Frankenstein (1818), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Dracula (1897), this class will discuss their adaptation, appropriation and influence on popular narratives such as those found in fiction, film, tv, fashion and music video. Some of the contemporary texts we will be drawing upon will be Twilight (book & film), True Blood (book & tv), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film & tv), Scream (film), Supernatural (tv), Marilyn Manson (music), Interview with a Vampire (book & film), Blade (film), Blairwitch Project (film) etc.
Excursion(s): A visit to Edinburgh Dungeon and a gothic themed bar are included.
For the past decade, Scotland’s national status has been ‘both dangled before us and tantalizingly withheld’ (poet Don Paterson). With attention focused on the question of independence, recent debates concerning Scottish culture and identity gain a heightened political charge. Literature has not only reflected but actively shaped such debate. In the year the new Scottish Parliament was established (1998), Christopher Whyte argued that ‘in the absence of elected political authority, the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers’. But what influence have writers played in recent political change, and to what extent has Scottish culture escaped its own stereotypes?
This course examines the literary and political currents shaping contemporary Scottish identity, introducing students to key twentieth- and twenty-first century texts. We encounter and explain a range of cultural debates concerning language, class, democracy and nationhood, attending to the urgency as well as the complexity of recent Scottish writing.
Excursion: There will be an excursion to Edinburgh, visiting the Scottish Parliament building and Scottish Writers Museum.
