Rutgers students are about to enroll in spring 2025 courses—here are descriptions of mine. (Batteries not included. Images enlarged to show texture. Paid for by the Committee to Read Some Good Books in Class.)
Ursula K. Le Guin: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Literature
English 358:437, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00–3:20 in HC-E128
Syllabus etc.
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Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the most important science-fiction and fantasy writers of the last century, a feminist pioneer and a crucial figure in the transformation of both SF and fantasy in the 1960s and after. This seminar course surveys her career, with an emphasis on her own attempts to make “genre fiction” artistically significant despite ongoing condescension from arbiters of “serious” literature. We will read extensively from her novels, short stories, and non-fiction writings, asking what unites the varying strands of her work and what changes as she moves among genres—and as she engages with the changing contexts of literature and politics since World War II. Readings include two of the best twentieth-century American novels of any genre: the gender-bending adventure The Left Hand of Darkness and the ambiguous anarchist utopia The Dispossessed. We will also read several volumes from the Earthsea cycle of fantasy novels, which upend the conventions of wizards-and-dragons stories, and Le Guin’s English version of the classical Chinese text, the Daodejing. Extra credit will be offered for a report on any of Le Guin’s flying-cat stories for children.
Assignments include one short paper, one presentation, and one long paper. Satisfies AHp and WCr Core Requirements.
Introduction to Crime Fiction
English 358:253, Mondays and Thursdays, 12:10–1:30 pm in MU-210
Co-taught with Anthony Tello
Syllabus etc.
Crime fiction has been the most popular of all fiction genres for the last hundred years. But why does anyone care which made-up person killed which other made-up person? These stories explore the difference between the law and justice, between how things should be and how things are, between deviance and normality. These are serious subjects, but crime fiction is rarely serious literature: our study will also be a study of the boundaries between what is supposedly mere entertainment and what is supposedly literary art. Students will learn how to analyze a genre both in its own terms and in terms of social and historical developments. We will be doggedly serious about pulpy shoot-em-ups. We will study both genre landmarks like a Sherlock Holmes story and a Raymond Chandler novel, and now-forgotten texts like the adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective. We will range across American, British, and postcolonial Anglophone writers. Students are not expected to guess who did it before the end, but in at least one case, the culprit will be capitalism.
Assignments include short writing exercises, a final exam, and two papers. Satisfies AHp Core Requirement.
Edited, January 23, 2025: added links to the course webpages, fresh off the presses.