Literatures and Cultures
Courses in this cluster understand storytelling as an important form of cultural production and a way to shape cultures across the world. Courses in this cluster will think comparatively across geographic locations and historical time periods, engage with literary traditions and forms, and consider how storytelling brings cultures together.
Associated Course Pairings:
Course Descriptions
CC101: Afro-Latin American & Caribbean Culture and Literature
Instructor: Angela Castro
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
CRN# 18266
Block: 1
This course will study Afro-Latin American & Caribbean Culture through different disciplinary fields and cultural productions. This includes the study of literature, art, history, and music (from a non-canonical viewpoint). We will read contemporary poetry, fiction and watch Afro-Latin American films. The students will appreciate how these literary and cultural productions intersect with colonial Latin American & Caribbean history and legacy. This course will analyze issues of power, race, gender, and resistance and touch on culture, ethnicity, and economic dependency. We will examine who writes and defines Latin America & the Caribbean, its population, literature, art, and politics.
We maytravel to Denver during week 3 or 4 (full-day), depending on the exhibition they plan to hold.
CC120: Intertexts: Who Tells the Story?
Instructor: Corinne Scheiner
CRN# 18312
Block: 2
Instructor: Marcia Dobson
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
CRN# 18280
Block: 1
We will consider individual myths Ovid’s Metamorphoses with an eye to close readings of the Ovid renditions of Greek myth, comparisons with creation and flood myths across cultures (Greek and Mesopotamian), major mythemes surrounding women and patriarchies, and connections with ritual and art. Students will notice that while there are overarching themes that appear in most of the texts we read, they also have distinct cultural differences. We will try to understand, what we can glean from the texts themselves about peoples’ relation to god(s), nature, culture, and gender, what these relations show about social, cultural and political values as well as archetypal, seemingly universal themes that suggest a possible understanding and development of our own human psyches. These texts, of course, have authors, so we must always read through the lens of individual and collective authors’ styles. Meaning is always embodied in the shape and style of the text, and cannot be excerpted. THEMES IN OVID, HESIOD, BABYLONIAN ENUMA ELISH, BIBLE We will be reading text selections each day that contain more than one of the themes below. We will focus, however, on one category at a time. 1. Creation of the World, Floods, (Five Ages – Thakur, Block 2) 2. Myths of Original Sin: Prometheus, Pandora, Adam and Eve: Expulsion from Garden of Eden 3. Redemption: Noah, Deucalion and Pyrrha (Baucis and Philemon) 4. Battles of the Gods – Creation of World Orders
CC120: Six Memos for the New Millennium - Italo Calvino's Creative Process
Instructor: Ken Scriboni
CRN# 18319
Block: 2
Before his death in 1985, Italo Calvino was preparing to present at the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. The unfinished and undelivered lectures were published as "Six Memos for the Next Millennium." These were the literary values that Calvino felt would be important for the coming millennium. These values reflect Calvino’s conviction that literature serves a vital function, both as a reflection of our world but also as a way for us to intervene in it. In this course, we will use these six values as an organizing principle to explore Calvino’s own body of fiction and essays. How did Calvino practice these values in his literary output? What were the political and philosophical concerns that drove Calvino to write? What problems did he identify in the modern world and how do these values help in resolving them? This course will also be experimental and practical, meeting the General Education requirements for Creative Process. Students will apply the literary values of Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity and Consistency to their own creative processes, using a variety of techniques that Calvino himself used. Some of these techniques include combination and automation; reading Tarot cards and other visual imagery; blending the divides between realism, fantasy, and fable; and narrativizing scientific facts. Students will read extensive selections from Calvino’s corpus including novels, short stories, and essays. We will collide Calvino’s corpus with various other traditions (Marxist, Feminist, Queer, Decolonial, Ecocritical) to consider what contemporary relevance and valence Calvino might have for political, ethical, and philosophical concerns today.
3-4 day trip to BACA in third week, and one additional day-long field trip.
CC104: Narnia, Middle Earth and the Real Middle Ages: Fantasy and History in the Works of Lewis and Tolkien
Instructor: Carol Neel
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Creative Process
CRN# 18251
Block: 1
This course will consider two eminent medievalists of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, as both novelists and professional scholars. It will bring the Narnia Chronicles and *The Lord of the Rings* into conversation with primary sources in medieval cultural history such as Chretien be Troyes's *Yvain: The Knight of the Lion* and the anonymous *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.*. As well, participants will consider scholarly works by Lewis (*The Allegory of Love*) and Tolkien ("Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"), along with recent biographical and cinematic studies of these authors, to explore their experience of the First World War. This course will take its central question to be how Lewis, Tolkien, and we ourselves use historical sources to construct worlds of contemporary imagination. Field Trip Information: On Wednesday afternoons throughout the block, students will have regular outside-the-classroom activities--two films and a trip to the Fine Arts Center to consider medieval themes in art of the American Southwest.
On Wednesday afternoons throughout the block, students will have regular outside-the-classroom activities--two films and a trip to the Fine Arts Center to consider medieval themes in art of the American Southwest.
CC120: Yōkai: Monsters in Japanese Fiction and Popular Culture
Instructor: Francesca Pizarro
CRN# 18314
Block: 2
Delve into the captivating world of yōkai, the enigmatic monsters that populate the worlds of Japanese folklore, literature, and popular culture! The course introduces students to the study of Japanese literature and culture through an examination of the way yōkai are depicted in fiction and various forms of popular media including but not limited to manga, anime, film, and video games. Through a focus on yōkai, students will gain a broad understanding of Japanese history and society through its various modes of cultural production. Students will also learn about the field of Japan studies and how to be participants in the production of knowledge within Japan studies. In this process of knowledge production, they will learn to read literary, visual, and critical texts actively and present analytical arguments about the course materials in both written assignments and class discussions. As a CC120 Writing Seminar, students will hone their writing skills for college, learning how to engage in scholarly inquiry, argumentation, and research. Engaging with primary texts, scholarly articles, and multimedia materials related to yōkai in particular and Japan studies in general, students will navigate diverse perspectives, cultivating their ability to craft compelling and well-written pieces of academic writing.
Some film screenings from 1 - 2:30 p.m.
CC106: Introduction to West Africa through its Literatures and Cinema
Instructor: Ibrahima Wade
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Societies & Human Behaviors
CRN# 18278
Block: 1
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the ways in which Sub-Saharan Africans and issues concerning them and their cultures are viewed and represented/depicted and discussed through film and literature by African filmmakers and authors. To this end, we will screen films, documentaries and read texts that reference the period of active European colonization as well as the post-colonial/contemporary era in Africa. Our objective, amongst other, will be to engage issues/realities related to traditional and contemporary African cultures.
There may be a field trip to the Denver Art Museum.
Instructor: George Butte
CRN# 18331
Block: 3
This class looks at the narrative genre, comedy, across representative examples from ancient Greece to the postmodern work of Beckett. Comedy begins with the archaic KOMOS (a fertility ritual), develops through Shakespeare (the green world) to comedy of manners (Austen), and romantic film comedy. We will use Freud to conceptualize humor as anxiety, and end with "Raising Arizona" and Richard Pryor. The course will focus on writing protocols, conventions, and practices, and require extensive writing and revision.