2021-2022 Spring Semester – Undergraduate Elective Course Catalogue

ENGL 1014 Literature and Visual Culture II Dr. Jason Ward	This Literature and Visual and Cultural Studies 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 and the superhero. The settings of the featured graphic novels include imagined and very real dystopias, ranging from Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One, 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 1058 Literary Themes II Dr. Ahmet Süner	In this class, we focus on investigating the representations of fear and the supernatural in mostly the continental European context by way of reading short stories and novellas pertaining to the 19th century. Our main interest is the identification of the various fears and desires in the stories and the question of how these are expressed, which calls for particular attention to characterizations, points of view and symbolisms. We will relate these fears and desires to the questionings of religious belief, the project of the enlightenment, social class and gender. In particular, we will focus on the idea of the Sublime and Freud’s ideas on the uncanny inspired by E.T.A Hoffmann’s “Uncanny.” We will discuss how some of the European representations of the Gothic reflect a modernized idea of the romance influenced by classical, medieval and early modern antiquarianism as well as 19^th century consumer culture. We will also try to find out how the conventions of the Gothic mode interact with those of realism especially in our readings of the Russian stories.

ENGL 1064 American Fiction: From 1950 to the Present Dr. Tuba Geyikler	If the first half of the twentieth century is dominated by debates about the modern, the period since has often been characterized by arguments about the “postmodern,” including the question of whether a clear break between periods can be identified. Certainly, the optimism about the supposed rationality of human existence and the perfectibility of social forms associated with one dominant strand of modern thought since the Enlightenment seems to be missing from the works of postwar writers. On the other hand, with the rise of the feminist and Civil Rights movements a renewed faith seems to be placed in literature as a site of cultural contestation, and the status of a writer such as Toni Morrison becomes emblematic of a shift in the relationship between a supposed cultural “mainstream” and the “minority.” Students will gain familiarity with the concept of and debates around the “postmodern.” They learn to debate the fraught relationship between national identity and multiculturalism. Through exposure to these debates, they should also be able to cast a more critical eye back over the works of American literature read in earlier courses.

ENGL 1072 Culture and Society II Dr. Jeffrey Hibbert	Eros, Oikonomos, Eccentricity in 21^st Century American Cinema At the most general level, in this class, we will watch, critique and study American films of the 21^st century. We will be examining the ways in which films over the past 2 decades present and critique love, the home, and the weird in cinema. The films I have selected from this class range from the melodramatic, the weird, horror, and the comic. Throughout our course work, we will endeavor to answer a series of questions regarding domestic spaces (the home), and internal spaces (including but not limited to fantasy) and the ways in which each define or betray the other. We will primarily examine narrative in this course, though we will also—out of necessity—discuss the grammar of cinema (though this will not be our primary). Students will be asked to write 2 essays and take 2 quizzes. Currently, the syllabus includes Queen of Earth, Uncut Gems, Mulholland Drive, Under the Silver Lake, There Will Be Blood, Moonrise Kingdom, The Neon Demon, Sorry to Bother You, Middle of Nowhere, Mainstream, Palm Springs, and Babadook. Most of these films include adult content (violence, sex, horror). Students who prefer not to watch these kinds of films may prefer to take another elective. I recommend you watch the trailers for these films before deciding to take course. Note: Jeff hoca will be teaching this class and the medium of instruction will be face-to-face. Students will be required to watch any film longer than 2 hours before class.

ENGL 1078 Comparative Literature II Dr. Evren Akaltun	This course will focus on certain common features in literature across national frontiers of languages and cultures. The theme of this specific class is “Time”. We will be reading novels and short stories by leading authors from Turkey and several other geographies to see how the authors in their selected works tackled the issue of time. We will also watch films and analyse them in relation to the texts that we will be reading and develop a global and interdisciplinary perspective on a variety of national literatures.

ENGL 1082 Turcophone Literature in a Comparative Perspective II Dr. Esen Kara	This course offers a study of Contemporary Turkish Literature from a comparative perspective. Readings and discussions will focus on the representations of migration, dislocation, collective trauma, and community-building in selected literary texts produced in Turkish and English. Yaşar Kemal, Sema Kaygusuz, Latife Tekin, Toni Morrison, and Mohsin Hamid are among the writers we will read. Assessment will include a midterm exam, two quizzes, two written assignments, and a final paper.

ENGL 1086 Fairy Tales and Their Retellings in Music and Literature II Lect. İclal Kardıçalı	How did literary fairy tales originate and spread? How was their great tradition formed and how did it serve as inspiration for various art forms like opera, ballet, musical, film and others? This interdisciplinary course aims to offer the students an opportunity to supplement their studies through the historical evolution of the fairy tale from the stories of the oral tradition, through the fairy tales’ accumulation and adaptation in different cultures and their cross-fertilization and cross-connections. In this course the students will acquire skills in reading and comparing not only the texts of the fairy tales from different cultures, but also musical and visual “texts” such as operas, ballets, films and animated films, concerts and musicals inspired by those tales; thus enabling them to reconsider the significance of literature within a larger interdisciplinary field of cultural and more specifically musical studies. Attention will be given to elements of fiction including language, style, theme, structure, plot and character and to elements of music including musical language, style, thematic shape, musical form, plot and artistic expression of character and to the ways these elements interact in the functioning of the “text”. Through Tales from Panchatantra, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Russian Tales, Beowulf; Straparola, Basile, Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Andersen, Yaşar Kemal, Aesop, La Fontaine’s tales; Finnish and Icelandic Sagas, related animated films and Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, Hacıbeyov’s music, the students will acquire basic competency in the critical analysis and comparison of “texts”, gain insight into interdisciplinary approaches to literature and music, enrich their understanding and interpretation of reality, improve language skills, be “reading” beyond style and remember how fairy tales contributed to our childhood imagination and beyond.

	Click here to download the elective course catalogue.

No items found.