Upcoming Courses - Summer 2020

2310.001: Introduction to Creative Writing

Online
Julie Shigekuni, jshig@unm.edu

This month-long intensive course in creative writing will cover creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. You will spend one week in each genre reading and writing with the aim of increasing your understanding of craft. The final week will be spent revising and developing a work of your choosing into a final project. In terms of assignments, you will begin by writing about life as you know it based on experience. You will then re-imagine your remembered past into fiction, and then go on to play with what Janet Burroway calls “Concrete Significant Details” in a series of poems. 

This introductory course, designed for students who have little or no experience writing personal essays, stories, and poems, will provide a range of methods by which to posit questions and search for answers creatively. Every reading discussion and writing experiment is designed to emphasize the various elements of craft involved in creative writing. Online classwork will consist of work done individually, small and large group discussions, and structured workshops.

388.001: The Space-Age Epic, 1955-1980

Online
M.R. Hofer, mrh@unm.edu

The dates for this interdisciplinary analysis of the fantasy and reality of space travel — 1955 to 1980 — effectively span the period from the planning of the satellite Sputnik I to the first successful flight of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia. Grounded in literature, film, music, history, and philosophy, the course is based on widespread notions of science “fiction” (which is, of course, not limited to prose) becoming thinkable possibility, even “fact.”

Beginning after the so-called Golden Age of science fiction and stopping before the rise of Cyberpunk, The Space-Age Epic adopts the New Wave focus on the person holding the “gizmo” rather than the oddness of the “gizmo” itself. In terms of critical thinking, its overarching objective is to address in critical, historical, and conceptual contexts the extension of modernist aesthetic innovation into a multi-generic proto-postmodernism that asks meaningful questions about forms of human discovery. Our key themes turn on ideas of normativity and difference, including representation, reality, freedom, authority, and, especially, the self & the other.

There are no prerequisites for this course, and no formal knowledge of literary criticism, history, or theory is required in order to be successful in it.

388.002: The Gothic Novel

Online
Gail Houston, ghouston@unm.edu

The nineteenth-century British Gothic novel must be read in light of historical events and anxieties. Nineteenteeth-century Britain experienced the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Kantian Revolution, the Woman Question, the Condition of England question, the Crisis of Faith, new understandings about the psyche and science, and debates about slavery and empire. Knowing the history of nineteenth-century British anxieties is crucial to understanding the Gothic. We will read three Gothic novels, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula and do some research to help us understand this disturbing, spectacular phenomenon, while also learning how to analyze fiction and film elements.

488.001: American Literature, Film, and Culture

Online
Jesús Costantino, jcostantino@unm.edu

This course approaches contemporary American film by way of its technological and social histories. Paying careful attention to a variety of cinematic genres, national traditions, venues, and formats, this course teaches the basics of film studies while examining closely the current conditions of filmmaking in the Americas. Over the past decade, new sources of funding have created a new global market for Latin American cinema, while at the same time, Hollywood films from the US have grown increasingly global in their content and production. Through regular film viewings, course readings, and frequent discussions, students will confront these recent transformations in the US and Latin American film industries. Because this course is also interested in the current conditions of filmmaking, students will also be asked to consider the continued relevance of feature-length filmmaking in the digital era, in which binge-watching, fan edits, amateur criticism, and streaming platforms have come to dominate the contemporary cinematic landscape.