Courses
"Your Brain on Fiction" |
We will read from research developed in cognitive psychology and the brain sciences to see if it sheds light on our engagement with narrative fiction--story stories and one film. We will read accessible articles that advance our understanding of how the mind/brain works in terms of perception,memory, language, emotions, beliefs, desires, imagination, reason, and sense of self, for instance, to see if such insight might enrich our understanding of how short stories move us cognitively and emotively. As we work our way through the assigned readings, we will keep centrally in mind the question: how can advances made in the science of mind further deepen our understanding of our fiction making and interpreting capacity generally? |
"Narrative and Narrative Theory" English 559 |
In this course we will ask, what are the essential qualities that distinguish everyday narratives (I woke up, stretched, had breakfast, walked the dog, etc.) from literary, filmic, and video game narratives? What is it about the deliberate structuring of accounts that leads to the expression of narrative in the form we identify as the short story, graphic novel, film, or video game--as opposed to, say, that of the nonfiction of a newspaper article or cooking recipe? Is the difference to be located in social practice and convention? Is it to be found in the type of volition the author or director asserts in his or her shaping and structuring of a given narrative account? Is it in the way a narrative cues and triggers a specific cognitive and emotive response? Finally, how might the short story, graphic novel, film and video game use their respective storytelling ingredients to build blueprints that engage and move their audiences in specific ways? |
"Mexico in Cinema" English 578A |
We will explore how contemporary Mexican films (within the last decade) creatively texture racial, sexual, ethnic, and gender identities and experiences. We will explore issues of representation by focusing on how directors use a variety of techniques--genre, point of view, tempo, mood, style, characterization, for instance--to complexly cue, trigger, and even re-direct viewer's cognitive and emotive schemas of Mexican subjects. Copy and paste this link to RealPlayer: rtsp://streaming1.osu.edu/media3/eng578wi09/031109-review.rm |
"Ethnic Literature Thru. a Short Story and Comic Book Lens" |
We will visit the comic book and short story genres to explore how ethnic-identified authors engage readers in their creative texturings of racial and ethnic identity and experience. Our focus will not rest exclusively on questions of whether or not an author represents well a given ethnic experience; nor will the course gravitate around issues of identity politics. Rather, we will focus our energies on understanding how authors use a variety of techniques--point of view, tempo, mood, style, characterization, for instance--to complexly engage readers' ideas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. To this end we will use a critical approach that distinguishes between the goings-on within a given storyworld (event, characterization, theme) and the activity that takes place at the level of the form (play with time, style, point of view, tempo). Given that there is a two-way flow between content and form that unite in the reader's imagination, we will also keep centrally in mind how we as readers are cognitively and emotively drawn into the storyworld; how a given ethnic-identified author shapes a narrative to tug forth emotions and to cue us to imagine whole worlds from fragments. We will thus explore questions of cognition (individual and social memory, for example) and emotion (anger, sorrow, happiness, for example) as well as genre, point of view, style, temporality, and spatialization. |
"Fiction and Emotions" English 597 (Proposed) |
In this course we will ask, what role do emotions play in the making and engaging with narrative fiction? How do emotions work at the level of character, informing their goals, incentives, and motives for action? How do the narrative devices used in any given narrative fiction media work to trigger in the reader or viewer emotion? How might different assemblies of content and form in the narrative fiction create odd tensions in how readers and viewers feel? How is the more durative mood established? |
"Fiction and Ethics" |
We will explore the moral and immoral attitudes, reflections, acts, judgments, contradictions, and conflicts that permeate human life and its representations in the art of the short story, comic book, and film. We will begin to understand why ethics are a constant object of our curiosity and systematic interest and they work as a powerful gravitational pull on us in our reading and viewing of short stories, comic books, and films. To this end, we will complement our narrative fiction readings and viewings with general theoretical readings by philosophers as well as cognitive psychology and neurobiology and their studies that aim to enrich our understanding of how we social experience and biology inform the shaping of moral beliefs in their particulars and also in their generality. We will keep centrally in mind how such advances in our understanding of ethics might provide a deeper, and possibly more satisfying, contact with the short stories, comic books, and films read and viewed. Finally, we will ask, if ethics and narrative fiction almost always go together, can our systematic study of both allow us to better understand how narrative fiction ticks: how we construct typologies, identify genres, and engage with its particular and universal forms and contents. |