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Teaching

Current Courses

Courses I Teach

• English 2600 online - Critical Introduction to Literary Forms.
  This course is an online introduction to literary forms and terminology that English majors—-and students with an interest in literature more generally-—will use in subsequent literary study. By examining four major literary forms—-short fiction, poetry, drama, and the novel—- you should be able to develop critical skills in reading and writing (we will devote particular attention to “close reading” of literary texts).
• English 3080 - Studies in Environmental Literature.
  The course’s primary objective is to familiarize students with the diversity of genres or modes of writing which can be gathered together under the rubric of “environmental literature” (e.g., essay, poetry, cultural criticism, creative nonfiction, memoir, short story, novel, etc.). Other objectives include introducing students to a range of rhetorical, literary, or philosophical problems encountered by environmental writers (e.g., debates on the relationship between “nature” and “culture”; the problem of anthropomorphism; rival conceptions of space, place and the body; the relationship of human beings to other animals; language and its connection to landscape; dwelling; spirituality). The course will also introduce basic definitions, debates, and theories associated with the encompassing label “ecology” (e.g., ecocentrism; bioregionalism; ecofeminism; and more broadly, ecophilosophy and ecocriticism).
• English 3600 - Introduction to Critical Theory.
  What is literature? What is the relationship between literature and “reality”? What strategies contribute to textual meaning? What kinds of relationships are possible between a literary text and a reader? What kinds of political and cultural work does literature do and how does it do it? This course will introduce you to major issues and debates in critical theory and offer a variety of approaches to reading and studying literature. It aims to make you more conscious of your interpretive strategies and to raise questions about what is at stake in reading and interpreting literature and other cultural texts.
• English 5050, Studies in Genre - Nature and Virtuality in Film and Fiction.
  Virtual reality—--a simulation, appearance or effect that “seems real” but which is usually judged to lack “authenticity” or “actuality”--today is typically associated with cyberspace, digital media, and video games. But the virtual has always been with us in art, memory, dream, fantasy, and in representation generally speaking. Theorist Slavoj Zizek insists that the virtual is so potent that we make a mistake when we consider it any less real than actuality. For Zizek, much more interesting than virtual reality is what he calls “the reality of the virtual.” In this class we will use an ecocritical lens to explore various films, short stories, novels, and critical readings that wrestle with the problem of the virtual, its relationship with nature, and its own “reality.”