Todd S. Hasak-Lowy

This course reads major historical catastrophes as represented in comics (graphic novels or graphic memoirs). Students will explore the ways this medium conducts a dialogue between history and memory, on the one hand, and image and text, on the other.
Course texts include Art Spiegelman's Maus, Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do, Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza, and Nora Krug's Belonging. Students will also read theoretical material on comcis (e.g. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics) as well as standard historiography on the various historical events at the center of each book/comic we read.
Students will write two short essays (2-3 pages), one creative project, and one 7 page final essay.

In our increasingly visual culture, why bother with the novel at all? How can the novel possibly make sense of our fragmented reality, the incredible complexities of our recent history, and the increasingly dynamic nature of identity itself? This course offers students a chance to read a handful of recent ?major? novels by writers like Zadie Smith, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Philip Roth that demonstrate the genre?s impressive range and ability to represent the modern world in all its dizzying richness.

This course departs from a straightforward but far-reaching two-part claim about fiction: 1) Just about all successful works of fiction narrate an external story (actions out in the world) as well as an internal story (the psychological drama of the protagonist). 2) These two parts of the narrative are interwoven and in dialogue with each other. In the first part of the semester, we will combine close readings of (mostly contemporary) short fictions (by Lydia Davis, Leo Tolstoy, Jhumpa Lahiri, George Saunders, Charles Yu, among others) with a series of exercises that seek to isolate various features of this inner-outer story. These readings and exercises will give students a deeper understanding of how this dynamic operates at every level of the text, from a given sentence to the plot as a whole. The rest of the semester will be devoted to workshops, where students will share their attempts to create short fictions that satisfy the demands of this narrative double-helix. In addition to two stories written for workshops, students will submit a scene analysis and overall plot chart for two published works of fiction.

This course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of nonviolence. Students will study nonviolence as a philosophy of social and political change, in large part by reading the writings of important nonviolent theorists and activists, including Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Vaclav Havel. We will also explore the history of specific nonviolent movements, in which this theory has been applied and tested, with special focus on the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In their own project, students will investigate the potential and limits of nonviolent change by researching other nonviolent movements in order to answer questions that arise during our study of this rich, complex topic.