2022-2023 SPRING – ELECTIVE COURSE CATALOGUE
Yasar University
Department of English Language and Literature
2022-2023 Spring Semester
Elective Course Catalogue
ENGL1014 Literature and Visual Culture II – Graphic Novels
Dr. Jason Ward
This Literature and Visual and Culture course focuses on the literary qualities of the Graphic Novel. No longer just a humble comic book, the graphic novel is taught in literature classes, bought and sold in the same places as canonized works of literature, scrutinized in academic journals, and often contains literary allusions and stories within stories. The graphic novel may feature heightened literary language that makes use of ellipses ambiguity, metaphor, and imagery and frequently deploys unreliable narrators, complex plots and variegated time sequences. Like any literary genre there are specific techniques associated with this form, such as the use of specific iconography, speech bubbles outside the scene to create meaningful overlaps between different times, places, events and characters – similarly with the juxtaposition between panels, the size, shape and positioning of frames, and the thematic limitation of colour. In order to introduce the relatively new literary genre of the graphic novel, this course will consider a broad array of graphic novels spanning from 1980 to 2015, covering a variety of genres including historical fiction, the bildungsroman, literary adaptation, and the superhero. The settings of the featured graphic novels include imagined and very real dystopias, ranging from Mega-City One and Gilead, to Auschwitz and revolutionary Iran. To emphasize the contemporary cultural relevance of the graphic novel the course will conclude with a recent graphic novel set in Izmir.
ENGL 1020 Fictions of Fear and Building Values in the European Union by way of Literature and Art
Dr. Ahmet Süner
This course, which is supported by the European Union as a Jean Monnet module, intends to show students how literary and artistic fictions of fear might be thought of as significant sources of shared value for EU. As students interpret some important literary and cinematic examples of fictions of fear during class discussions, they will be invited to engage with questions of value, especially with a view to some of the most important issues that EU has been facing and is likely to face in the future regarding democracy, equality, immigration and the environment. The students will obtain a “Jean Monnet certificate” upon successful completion of the course.
These are some of the questions that we will investigate throughout the course:
How can we understand the role of literary and artistic fictions of fear in the project of building shared values in EU? How can we contribute to processes that concern ”the becoming of the Union” by way of engaging with literature and art? How can fictions of fear make us wonder about and reflect upon the future of EU, as well as motivate us to work towards finding solutions to its problems?
The fictions of fear selected for class discussion, especially in the first half of the course, are renowned examples from literary history which will include Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Voltaire’s Candide and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We will look at Frankenstein as the quintessential European fiction, where the main question consists in the necessity of, and failure in, building European values. The second half of the course will include three informative lectures by specialists on European issues (democracy-equality by Aylin Güney; immigration by Ayselin Yıldız and environment by Defne Günay) and more discussions on selected literary and cinematic fictions of fear, and especially on acclaimed dystopias such as 1984, Never Let me Go and V for Vendetta. Students will carry out and make presentations on group projects on two fictions of their choice, at least one of which will be literary.
ENGL 1030 Creation Myths in Music and World Literature
Lect. İclal Kardıçalı
Joseph HAYDN wrote The Creation, his celebrated oratorio (1797-98) when he was in his mid-sixties, where he describes musically the creation of the world and its creatures with that unusual capacity for wonder. This course gets its inspiration and aim from this “wonder” of Haydn’s Oratorio whose libretto is based on the biblical Book of Genesis and on Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book VII. We aim to compare and contrast different myths and stories from all over the world, starting with Jewish, Christian and Moslem versions of creation. We turn our attention to Hindu Scriptures, Chinese traditions; Egyptian, Mayan, Mesopotamian and Sumerian, Celtic Myths; scientific approaches and the Big Bang Theory, Pythagoras’ “music of the spheres”. We also read and analyze Nordic Literature; the Norse Myths and Prose Edda, Icelandic Myth of Creation and the Finnish one, where according to Kalevala, creation was music just like in Tolkien’s Silmarillion. This interdisciplinary course aims to offer the students to discover the common thread among different cultures as they connected and tried to give a sense to the “narration” of the “creation” in terms of subject and style, language, symbolism and myth; all accompanied by music of J. S. Bach, Jean F. Rebel, J. Sibelius, R. Wagner and G.F. Handel and world dances to acquire basic competency in the critical analysis, comparison and thinking beyond style and culture.
ENGL 1054 Introduction to Visual And Cultural Studies II
Dr. Jeffrey Hibbert
Horror Films in the 21st Century
In the early 21st century, reappraisals of the 1970s American horror film exposed the political import of films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead and many others. This was, in part, an extension of the academic reappraisals of the horror genre in 1990s film criticism. Now 2 decades into the 21st century, we have the tools to read horror films as amazingly rich metaphorical comments on social and political fears as well as demonstrations of the “imaginary resolutions” (to borrow Fredric Jameson’s term) of real, lived, but unconscious social problems. One of the tropes we will examine in this course is the fear and doubt over the legitimacy of national, personal, and emotional safety. What does it mean to be in a “safe space”? How are our safe spaces threatened, and by whom? At the present moment, the films for this class include: Pyewacket, The Babadook, Case 39, Hereditary, Goodnight Mommy, Pearl, Relic, Jennifer’s Body, and Resurrection. Each of these films evoke the home, the family, the immediate and intimate as sources of horror. This list may change slightly before the first day of classes. Students will be responsible for 2 quizzes, a midterm, and a final.
Warning: this is a course in horror films and each film we watch this semester will dramatize subjects and display images that may be upsetting to some students. If you don’t think this course is for you, then it may not be. If you do think this course is for you: welcome.
ENGL1056 Special Topics in Literature II
Dr. Tuba Geyikler
Biopunk and Technoculture in Literature
The novels Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, The Windup Girlby Paolo Bacigalupi, The Two Faces of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan, and Neuromancer by William Gibson will be the focus of this elective course. The course will investigate how these books depict the use and misuse of biotechnology, as well as the sociological and ethical ramifications of such breakthroughs and the impact of technology on identity and subjectivity. Throughout the course, students will be exposed to the underlying principles of technoculture and will apply these concepts to the texts under study. The course will examine the depiction of technology in novels, its implications and potential, and how it influences characters, society, and culture. Additionally, the impact of technology on identity and subjectivity, as well as the language used to describe technology, will be investigated. The course will also provide historical and cultural context for the works by examining the time period during which they were written and their cultural influences.
In addition to performing a close reading of the books, students will be required to conduct a critical analysis of the texts using technocultural concepts and theories. The course will include discussions, in-class writing assignments and group presentations.
ENGL 1060 Technology-Enhanced Language Teaching
Dr. Çağrı Özköse-Bıyık
This elective course is specifically designed for undergraduate students in the language-related departments who are planning to become language teachers when they complete their degrees. The course introduces prospective teachers of English to the cutting-edge interactive instructional technologies used in language learning/teaching settings including Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) tools (i.e., the Internet and Web 2.0), and the critical evaluation of these technologies for the use of language teaching and learning. While discussing the implications of technology use in language classrooms, the course will provide students with hands-on experience, and they will also develop their own technology-enhanced materials (e.g. podcasts, wikis, blogs, a website, etc.) after evaluating current research in instructional technologies used in language teaching and learning. The purpose of this course is not only to teach how to use selected tools, but to help students gain important skills in using technology to create an effective language teaching and learning setting including the evaluation, selection, design and use of appropriate technological tools. I am looking forward to learning with and from you. I hope that the materials and tasks I selected will help you learn from me, from the field at large, and from your peers. Let’s learn together!
ENGL 1064 American Fiction: From 1950 to the Present
Dr. Emine Sonal
As a continuation of “ENGL 1063 AMERICAN FICTION: 1900-1950”, this course attempts to explore many concepts of the cultural and literary phenomenon related to postmodern theories as reflected in postmodern American fiction such as process, intertextuality, irony, play, self-reflectivity, self-consciousness, parody and pastiche, intertextuality, etc. There will be a focus on how the themes and issues are expressed by some of the influential American short story writers, novelists, poets, and playwrights during the period from 1950 to the present. Focusing on such figures as Hemingway, Albee, Vonnegut, Olsen, Morrison, Plath, Capote, O’Brien, and Ginsberg, this course aims to develop students’ critical and analytical abilities from a theoretical perspective by discussing the role literature plays in postwar American society.
ENGL 1078 Comparative Literature I
Dr. Evren Akaltun
This course will focus on certain common features in literature across national frontiers of languages and cultures. Along with ENGL 1077, it permits students to broaden their study of literature through a comparative approach to literary texts. We will be reading novels and short stories by leading authors from diverse geographies. We will also watch films and analyze them in relation to the texts that we will be reading and develop a global and interdisciplinary perspective on a variety of national literatures.
Specifically, most of the material in this class deal with the themes of childhood, coming of age, and growing up. We start off the semester with The Little Prince and then read works by Henry James, J.D.Salinger, Kafka, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, Juan Carlos Onetti, Ülkü Tamer and Oktay Akbal. The 400 Blows, Cinema Paradiso and Everything is Illuminated are the films that we will be watching in class.