Are you looking for a challenging yet fun course? Are you interested in satisfying the Gen Ed Second Semester Composition requirement?
Below are the Expo 1213/1223 courses currently being offered. Please contact the course instructor directly for questions about its material or topic.
Lecturer: Catherine Mintler
Section 003: T/R 12:00-1:15 pm Bizzell Library 102
Section 019: MW 5:00-6:15 (HONORS) Bizzell Library 102
Ever since — and even before — January 1, 2021, when The Great Gatsby entered the public domain, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel has influenced literary, performative, and visual arts, resulting in adaptations, imitations, spin-offs, mashups, and original work by contemporary novelists, filmmakers, musicians, and Gatsby fandom.
In this course, we will focus on the adaptive reimagining of the original novel in contemporary film, plays and musicals, popular music, fandom, and novels. While we will consider the following questions, students will be encouraged to pursue their own lines of inquiry in their research and writing: How do adaptations engage with and reimagine the original novel? Why does the name Gatsby remain a symbolic touchstone in popular culture? Why and how have the story and its characters been reimagined for diverse audiences? Why might the original novel’s sub-focuses (I.e. race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and war trauma) become central focuses in adaptations? What do different themes, plot-lines, genres, and points of view help us realize about American culture in the 1920s and the 2020s?
Among other sources, we will examine the recently published works Beautiful Little Fools, The Chosen and the Beautiful, No One is Coming to Save Us, and The Great Gatsby and the Zombies.
Lecturer: Timothy Bradford
Section 012 MWF 2:00-2:50 Bizzell Library 0102
Section 013 MWF 4:00-4:50 Bizzell Library 0102
Welcome to the Anthropocene, a relatively new term for this geological epoch marked by significant human impact on the Earth beginning, depending on your perspective, anywhere from 15,000 years ago to 1945. Regardless of its start, it’s clear the current human population of 8.1 billion, projected to be 9 billion by 2037, is profoundly changing our environment. For example, roughly a football field’s worth of forest is lost every second around the clock, approximately twenty-four species go extinct per day, and atmospheric carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, is over 420 parts per million, the highest level in 800,000 years. How did we get here, what does this mean, and where are we headed? And what can be done to lessen our impact and achieve a balanced, just sustainability? Using The Climate Book anthology and related digital media to guide us, this course will ask these and related questions that we will attempt to answer while exploring our place in the conundrum of the Anthropocene.
Lecturer: Eric Bosse
Section 005: TR 12:00-1:15 PM Bizzell Library 102
Section 014: TR 3:00-4:15 PM Bizzell Library 102
Section 018: MWF 10:00-10:45 Bizzell Library 102
How does gender shape our lives? How does it intersect with race, class, ability, sexuality, education, and other axes of identity? How does our society define, interpret, manipulate, and regulate gender? What are the impacts of such gender-exclusive organizations as sports teams or fraternities and sororities? Gender confers privilege and power on some and subjects others to subtle and not-so-subtle acts of oppression. This multidisciplinary writing course explores gender roles, feminism, privilege, oppression, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, misogyny, gender-based violence, and the complexities of allyship across intersectional identities. Together, we will explore the complex and nuanced dimensions of gender and intersectional identity through texts drawn from gender studies, queer studies, philosophy, sociology, psychology, journalism, legislation, public policy, literature, social justice advocacy, and popular culture. Through reading, writing, and discussion, we will develop our understanding of the contemporary landscape of gender as well as various modes and strategies for academic and more broadly persuasive forms of writing.
Lecturer: Anna Treviño
Section 015: MWF 11:00-11:50 AM Bizzell Library 102
Section 007: MWF 1:00-1:50 PM Bizzell Library 102
In 2017 Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” (featuring Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber) became massively popular across the USA, hitting number 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart for sixteen weeks. In 2020 Jennifer Lopez and Shakira graced us with the Super Bowl LIV halftime show performance, performing songs in English, Spanish and a combination of the two. In this class, we will explore Latine artists' rising influence in the American music scene and we will consider what it takes to be a music superstar in an increasingly boundaryless world full of global consumption.
With the help of magazines, TV interviews, films, and academic articles, we will deconstruct and celebrate the genre of Latine music and explore the 90’s crossover phenomena with artists such as Selena Quintanilla and question its politics. As a result, we will also explore concepts such as race/ethnicity, colorism, cultural appropriation, linguistic privilege and prejudice, colonialism, sexism and other related topics. With the complexity of those concepts in mind, ultimately, we will seek an answer to whether or not Latine music artists can be considered global superstars. And if so, at what costs?
Lecturer: Catherine Mintler
Section 003: TR 1:30-2:45 PM Bizzell Library 102
Section 004: TR 4:30-5:45 PM Bizzell Library 102
The mysterious, eerie, uncanny doppelgänger, or “double walker,” has haunted Western art, folklore, myth, philosophy, literature, science, and science fiction for more than two centuries, influencing fashion, film, and, most recently, virtual reality, social media, and video gaming culture. In folklore, literature, and film, the doppelgänger often functions as a literary device representing either an internal self-division or the phenomenon of a ghostly double that appears as a twin, shadow, or mirror image—often of evil or misfortune. In fashion and modern consumer culture, human doubling evolves from the automaton, an early robot that replicates human form and function, into an idealized, reproducible, commodifiable, and often sexualized figure of “self as other” found in wax museums, department store mannequins, and fashion models. Technological doubling has raised concerns about cloning and genetic sequencing, as well as replacing human workers with robots or AI, questioning what it means to be human. Computer games continue to provide virtual worlds and multiverses for the virtual selves we call avatars, while social media raises questions about the extent to which our various selves are even real.
We will read, analyze, discuss, research, and write about the doubling produced by the doppelgänger to better understand the meaning and relational function of a figure that haunts, disturbs, and questions the wholeness of identity by dividing, fracturing or mirroring the self. In other words, we will view the doubling function of the doppelgänger not only as a figure, but also as a process in a variety of its doubling guises–i.e. as a divided self, automaton, mannequin, clone, and avatar in artwork, fiction, poetry, science fiction, anthropology/sociology, psychoanalysis, fashion and consumerism, film, social media, and gaming.
Lecturer: V. Nicholas LoLordo
Section 001: T/R 9:00-10:15 AM Bizzell Library 102
Section 002: T/R 10:30-11:45 AM Bizzell Library 102
Technology has been continually reinventing the human practice of writing since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.Now, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence, technology exists that can replace us as writers. From Gutenberg to GPT, a span of almost 600 years—what next?
In this experimental class, we will explore a set of linked questions. Has the age of writing come to an end, or will technology liberate human writers? What can exploring key historical episodes teach us about the relationship between technology and selfhood? And, finally, what sort of things might we still want to write ourselves?
