A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works. The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored.

This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

Text:  A Manual of Modern Greek by Anne Farmakides,Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-30003019-8

In this course, we will analyze and compare a series of plays and films titled after objects: Plautus’s Pot of Gold and Rope, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Yukio Mishima’s The Magic Pillow (1950), Eugene Ionesco’s Les Chaises (1952), Melvonna Ballenger’s Rain (1978), August Wilson’s Fences (1983; 2016), Lynn Nottage’s Mud, River, Stone (1999) and Poof (2004), Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Wig Out (2008), and Raul Castillo’s Knives and Other Sharp Objects (200

The Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility.

How does anime make meaning? What’s the relation between manga (comics) and anime? How can we “read” an anime closely, and how do the forces of distribution make a difference, globally and locally? What are the powers of a plastic line? What would it mean to follow a meme, or a piece of software/technology for generating color, or a voice actor, or a character across media outside of the bounds of a single work?

Play is everywhere. In an increasingly gamified world, this claim might seem even truer than before. How do we interact with gamelike systems in our everyday lives? How can play-based thinking be a part of the way we think about novels, banking systems, race, democracy, queerness, poetry, gender, ability? Finally, how do we talk about games themselves, and what does games criticism entail?

Imagine that you are reading a book and, at some point in the story, you learn that what you are reading is actually the translation of a work written in an ancient language by an author from a faraway land. How would this affect your relation to the text? Would you now consider the story more interesting and valuable? Or would you start suspecting that the translator may have made changes and additions to the story? Would you be worried—or perhaps excited—about the possibility that there may be different versions of the text?