This course considers the critical perspectives on our world offered by the imagined worlds of English-language science fiction in a variety of media. We will explore three case studies of adaptation and influence across media: from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds to Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation, and from Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.  In addition, we’ll discuss a range of science fiction that explicitly focuses on media, technology, and communication, including episodes of The Twilight Zone, short stories by Ted Chiang and Octavia Butler, Jordan Peele’s Nope, and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s co-authored novel This Is How You Lose the Time War. Evaluation will be based on attendance and participation, weekly discussion questions, four exercises in close reading/viewing (2 pages each), and two formal essays (5-6 pages each).

IUB GenEd A&H credit

COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Meets with CMLT-C 200

What is happiness? How should we define a good life? The question of how one should live is at the center of a long tradition of practical philosophy. In the West, the principal approaches were sketched out by the ancient Greeks, who first distinguished between such concepts as “pleasure,” “happiness,” and “goodness,” and charted the possible relations between them. Less systematic but more nuanced than philosophy, literary texts often revolve around the same questions, but they tend to focus more on personal choices and the particular circumstances under which they are made. Starting with the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who defined true happiness as freedom from anxiety and pain, and the biblical book of Ecclesiastes (“eat, drink, and be merry”), this course will take up three imaginative writers whose reflections on how to live were inseparable from their reflections on writing itself: Montaigne, who responded to the civil wars of sixteenth-century France by inventing the literary “essay”; Thoreau, who withdrew to the isolation of Walden Pond in an effort to live “authentically”; and Henry James, who represented the conflict between new-world virtue and old-world pleasures through the eyes of a fictional alter ego in his late novel The Ambassadors. All three, in their different ways, espoused an ideal of personal integrity–of fidelity to one’s own nature—which they defended against the pressures of conformity and self-interest.

PREREQUISITE:  COMPLETION OF THE ENGLISH COMPOSITION REQUIREMENT

This fall we will focus on the qualities that make a person a hero(ine), in the eyes of ancient authors, and compare those qualities with ones we admire today.  Beginning with Gilgamesh’s heroic struggle to overcome death, and ending with Satan’s struggle to undermine God’s (according to Milton) plan for mankind, we will read, discuss, and write about ten of the ancient and early modern world’s greatest accounts of heroism.  In the final week and a half, we will discuss first-person accounts of heroes written by each of the members of the class.

Written work for the course will consist of daily written discussion questions, three critical discussions of 3-5 pages, and a final 6-10 page creative paper.

Course texts:  Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey, Virgil’s Aenead
 Njal’s Saga
Sophocles’s Antigone & Oedipus Rex
Seneca’s Trojan Women
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus & Hamlet
Milton’s Paradise Lost

PREREQUISITE:  COMPLETION OF THE ENGLISH COMPOSITION REQUIREMENT

This fall we will focus on the qualities that make a person a hero(ine), in the eyes of ancient authors, and compare those qualities with ones we admire today.  Beginning with Gilgamesh’s heroic struggle to overcome death, and ending with Satan’s struggle to undermine God’s (according to Milton) plan for mankind, we will read, discuss, and write about ten of the ancient and early modern world’s greatest accounts of heroism.  In the final week and a half, we will discuss first-person accounts of heroes written by each of the members of the class.

Written work for the course will consist of daily written discussion questions, three critical discussions of 3-5 pages, and a final 6-10 page creative paper.

Course texts:  Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey, Virgil’s Aenead
 Njal’s Saga
Sophocles’s Antigone & Oedipus Rex
Seneca’s Trojan Women
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus & Hamlet
Milton’s Paradise Lost

The course examines the diverse and historically varying relationships forged between biological sex, culturally formulated discourses of masculinity and femininity, and the sexed body. Specifically, this course deepens student engagement with the field of gender studies by teaching them how to do research and think in interdisciplinary ways to better understand the complexities of our social world, the racialized gendered body, digital and artificial intelligence-based technologies, and our relationships/responsibilities to others (including nonhumans) locally and globally. In the first part of the course students will learn how society has historically constructed what it means to be human through notions of reason, rationality, objectivity, and property and through histories of colonialism, slavery, and eugenics in ways that have privileged humans as masters over nature and have devalued women, people of color, and Indigenous peoples as closer to nature and thus less than human. In the second part of the course, students will develop an integrative, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the racialized gendered body and its relationship to nature and technology. Placing an emphasis on how digital and artificial intelligence-based technologies shape and are shaped by gender and race, students will be asked to develop critical understandings of social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter), digital personal assistants (e.g. Amazon Alexa), personal tracking devices (e.g. Apple Watch, Fitbit), policing and surveillance, personalized health care, and precision agriculture.

The Honors section will place more emphasis on analyzing course readings, leading small group discussions, and writing a final paper assignment (i.e. IU Redesign) that examines an aspect of inequality on campus and proposes how IU might be re-designed and changed to reflect a more socially just learning environment for multiple expressions of gender, sexuality, race, (dis)ability, and the body.

In a world without translation, would there be literature?

This class is devoted to the art of literary translation. We’ll begin by rolling up our sleeves: every week students will bring their own translations of poems and prose, to be workshopped in a supportive environment. Our goal will be to improve our work, and to develop critical skills as readers and editors. We’ll also spend time reading classic and contemporary translations in order to learn from their choices, the linguistic inventiveness and mental transformations that make them successful. By becoming more aware of language’s inner workings, we can become better readers, and, it is hoped, better writers, too.  Finally, we will explore translation’s role in creating world literature, and discuss the implications of this surprisingly controversial term.

This class is designed for students with a reading knowledge of a foreign language, and is perfect for language learners, heritage speakers, creative writers and international students.

“English-only” students are welcome, but should contact the instructor.

This class meets with CMLT-C 301.

PREREQUISITE:  COMPLETION OF THE ENGLISH COMPOSITION REQUIREMENT

Class subtitle:  Perspectives on Liberty and Equality

All of us face difficult challenges to our usual ways of living and our usual ways of thinking. The hysteria surrounding the upcoming Presidential Election and wars in Gaza and The Ukraine have heightened immediacy of our challenges. The primary aim of this seminar is to use the ideas of liberty and equality to gain a perspective on these challenges as they play out concretely in our lives as individuals, as members of society, as citizens of the United States, and as citizens of the world. We will explore questions such as these: Is it within our liberties as we define them to “flip off” the President and still keep our job? Who should decide basic life questions concerning marriage and abortion? Especially for young people today (that is, for you), is the value of “safety” more important than “free speech”? How might we make these terms concrete? These and related issues have been playing out in American universities, including Indiana University. We will look at some specifics.

There will be a variety of course materials—classic texts, court cases, news articles. Poems. Together they should be broad enough to allow us to engage with complex arguments. They also will be short enough to allow us time to frame and defend our own positions. Core written assignments will center on a series of short essays based on class readings, class discussions, and your own life experiences. There will be an examination toward the end of the semester.

PREREQUISITE:  COMPLETION OF THE ENGLISH COMPOSITION REQUIREMENT

This fall we will focus on the qualities that make a person a hero(ine), in the eyes of ancient authors, and compare those qualities with ones we admire today.  Beginning with Gilgamesh’s heroic struggle to overcome death, and ending with Satan’s struggle to undermine God’s (according to Milton) plan for mankind, we will read, discuss, and write about ten of the ancient and early modern world’s greatest accounts of heroism.  In the final week and a half, we will discuss first-person accounts of heroes written by each of the members of the class.

Written work for the course will consist of daily written discussion questions, three critical discussions of 3-5 pages, and a final 6-10 page creative paper.

Course texts:  Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey, Virgil’s Aenead,
                             Njal’s Saga
Sophocles’s Antigone & Oedipus Rex
Seneca’s Trojan Women
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus & Hamlet
Milton’s Paradise Lost.

PREREQUISITE:  COMPLETION OF THE ENGLISH COMPOSITION REQUIREMENT

This fall we will focus on the qualities that make a person a hero(ine), in the eyes of ancient authors, and compare those qualities with ones we admire today.  Beginning with Gilgamesh’s heroic struggle to overcome death, and ending with Satan’s struggle to undermine God’s (according to Milton) plan for mankind, we will read, discuss, and write about ten of the ancient and early modern world’s greatest accounts of heroism.  In the final week and a half, we will discuss first-person accounts of heroes written by each of the members of the class.

Written work for the course will consist of daily written discussion questions, three critical discussions of 3-5 pages, and a final 6-10 page creative paper.

Course texts:  Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey, Virgil’s Aenead,
                             Njal’s Saga
Sophocles’s Antigone & Oedipus Rex
Seneca’s Trojan Women
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus & Hamlet
Milton’s Paradise Lost.

ARTH-A 102 is a course in cultural literacy that presents the major movements in Western art since the Renaissance, along with its best-known works of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Rather than a book, we use www.smarthistory.org, with text and audio segments contributed by art historians who are experts in their respective fields. With the exception of Quiz Review weeks, discussion sections will be held mainly in the art museum, which has a world-class collection that Herman Wells built in order to offer IU students an encyclopedic collection comparable to that of major urban art museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Art Institute of Chicago. We will also visit the Lilly Library and the IU art museum’s department of Prints and Drawings, where we will examine close-up seldom-displayed works on paper and vellum. Professor Facos has worked in major art museums and auction houses and can offer ‘behind-the-scenes’ insights into the works we study, giving students the visual acuity and vocabulary to understand and discuss works of art in their deeper historical and technical contexts.