Reading & Composition

Most people easily recognize the standard love plot: girl meets boy, they fall in love, they overcome an obstacle to their love and thereby arrive at their “happily ever after.” By contrast, the majority of stories we will examine in this class deviate from the classic love plot formula to highlight alternative forms of love, such as self-love, contractual love, delusional love, passionate friendship, and even the love shared by monsters. These types of narratives could also be termed “queer” love stories.

Reading & Composition

One way we can think about an island: a territory of the imagination that cuts across linguistic, cultural, and historical boundaries, a fantasy land of conquest and domination, a place of punishment, and the site of new beginnings beyond the known. How many times have you been asked the classic “what to take to a deserted island” question? And then another way to think about islands: as real places, where real lives have met and continue to meet the opportunities and challenges of this particular geography.

Reading & Composition

The short story delights in paradox: at once dependent upon brevity and capaciousness, it promises more than it can ever deliver. Deprived of the great spatial expanse that longer works afford, a short story must begin immediately, must attack the reader rather than simply welcome them in. Similarly, it must in its beginning move inexorably and maliciously toward its ending.

Reading & Composition

In this course we focus on women artists, female roles, female-like creatures, virtual representations, and the disciplinary practices that mediate their rich and extreme performativity. What is it about wild, feral, reckless, irrational, powerful, and fantastic acts by women artists that galvanize our imaginations and drive our responses of deep empathy?

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