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This semester, we will consider the connections among family, gender, and sexuality. How do the families we are born into shape our understandings of gender identity and gender roles? As ideas about gender and sexuality change, how do people adapt family roles and structures in response? We will begin with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a classic British courtship novel, and move on to consider more recent texts by and about trans people and the ways they disrupt and reinvent conventional ideas about family (the novel Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters and the play Hir by Taylor Mac). You may find this reading challenging, whether because of Austen’s early-19th century English or because of the frank depictions of gender fluidity, sex and sexuality in Hir and Detransition, Baby. If you are not comfortable reading about these topics, considering the questions they raise with an open mind, and discussing them respectfully, this is not the right class for you.

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This section of ENGL 1102 can count as a relevant course for the Associate of Arts Specialization in Gender, Sexualities, and Women's Studies. It is open to all students.

Theme: The (Post-)Apocalyptic Imagination

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ENGL 1102 aims to recognize and understand a variety of literary devices and textual elements, and in so doing promotes the development of close reading and analysis skills. As a chosen focus, my sections of the course will explore the (post-)apocalyptic imagination in fiction. Using novels and short stories, we will consider some of the diverse strategies and approaches writers use when depicting societal collapse, including – most importantly – where meaning is to be found for those left behind. Primary readings will include Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003).

GHOST STORIES will be the focus of this section of English 1106. We will study short stories and novels, ranging from Gothic fiction to literary realism. Our texts will explore the subject of ghosts and hauntings from the perspective of various time periods and cultural traditions.

This section of Reading Fiction examines the literary representation of Artificial Intelligence across a range of fictional genres. We will discuss depiction of AI from nineteenth-century automata to twenty-first-century androids and intelligent machines while charting the ways that literary responses have changed over time and how these changes show evolving definitions of humanity. Along with short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, E.M. Forster and others, we will be reading Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.(Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920), Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Louisa Hall’s Speak (2015), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). In conjunction with these literary texts, we will examine the current discourse on this important topic in contemporary media and culture.

In this course, our reading of poetry will range from William Shakespeare to music lyrics (ENGL 1109, Coursepack). We will study two major 20th century plays (Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), one classic detective novel (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles), and one recent novel about the conflict between conformity and individualism (Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman). We will combine an analysis of literary texts with an appreciation of their cultural significance and aesthetic power.