Digital Literature
(First-year Academic Inquiry Seminar)
In this class, we read digital works like choose-your-own-adventure-style stories, narrative games, and media-rich interactive documentaries. We discuss and write about how these various works use visual media, interactive features, and digital technology to tell their stories or make their claims in ways that promote readers’ agency, immersion, and/or feelings of enjoyment, understanding, or sympathy. Through seminar discussions, a wide range of reading and playing experiences, and substantial writing and making, we consider how digital literature helps us understand how our networked culture works and how we can exercise creative agency in digital spaces.
Interactive Digital Storytelling
This seminar class focuses on multi-sensory and interactive digital stories, including choose-your-own-adventure/ hypertext narratives, multimedia digital documentaries, visual narratives, world-building, transmedia stories, and narrative video games. We will consider how features like choice, interaction, image, location, touch, and sound contribute to the meaning of a work, to its cultural, artistic, and social relevance, and to the experience of the reader/user. In addition to reading and writing about interactive works, students practice making their own interactive stories.
Mapping Spaces
Representations of Place and Mobility in Literature
In this class, we study literature about travelers, immigrants, local pedestrians, and other mobile people and consider how writers represent places, create connections between people and spaces, tell stories about home and the world, draw mental or real maps, and enforce or cross borders. Part of the course focuses on how local spaces and grounded mobility contributes to our personal and community identity. A second part focuses on global travel and national and international border crossings.
Ways of Walking
This First Seminar class begins with the question: How do everyday practices of walking shape how we understand our world and ourselves?
We consider walks that get us places as well as those that move towards self-discovery, spiritual renewal or social justice, and pedestrians who walk through cities, towns, and rural landscapes, giving shape and structure to the spaces they traverse and allowing their thoughts to take shape along the contours of the path.
Castaways and Cannibals: Stories of Empire
In this seminar, we evaluate the premise that many contemporary geopolitical realities have been shaped by the imaginative work of British imperialists who, by capitalizing on terms like “cannibal” and “castaway,” claimed the land and the resources of colonized territories and dismissed the rights of the indigenous peoples that populated them. Readings include British colonial narratives of travel and settlement and post-colonial responses and revisions to the worldview created by imperialist expansion.
Diversions: Experimental Stories and New Media
In this seminar, we read, view, listen to, and interact with writing that exceeds conventional boundaries of narrative and asks readers to reconsider the relationship between form and content. We read experimental print fictions and technologically innovative stories and multi-modal works to consider how we engage with and are shaped by media.