Lee Konstantinou Stuff I write.

Teaching

This is a list of course I've taught recently or will soon teach.

Postmodern Literature (seminar; Fall 2012)

This course examines the development of postmodernism as an artistic style and a cultural epoch across a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, drama, film, and the graphic novel. What is the history of the concept of the postmodern? How is postmodernism related to modernism, realism, science fiction, and magic realism? What are the social determinants -- racial, gendered, economic, and geopolitical -- of postmodernism? What, if anything, comes after postmodernism? Artists we will study might include Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Vladamir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, William S. Burroughs, Ishmael Reed, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, and Alison Bechdel. Grades are based on regular participation, a formal oral presentation, two papers, and a written final.

Twentieth-Century Fiction (seminar; Fall 2012)

This course will study a range of Anglophone novelists who have won the Nobel Prize. We will investigate the dynamic relationship among canonicity, prizes, and the sociology of literature across the twentieth-century. How have our ideas of what constitutes a great writer and great literature changed? What, if anything, unites the authors the Nobel Committee for Literature has chosen? How is canonicity linked to cultural, economic, and political centers of power and prestige? Writers we will study might include Rudyard Kipling, Pearl S. Buck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, and Doris Lessing. Grades are based on regular participation, a formal oral presentation, two papers, and a written final.

Literature and Culture after 9/11 (seminar; Spring 2012)

This course will explore literature and culture after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The term "after" refers both to literature about the attacks as well as literature published during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In addition to novels, we will study a range of television programs, films, government reports, political debates, graphic novels, poetry, and video games that in some way respond to the terrorist attacks or the events that followed.

Science Fiction in Global Perspective (lecture; Spring 2012)

Science fiction has always had global ambitions. On the one hand, science fiction authors have been part of artistic conversations across national traditions and borders. On the other, science fiction as a genre has been obsessed with making sense of how we are connected across space, time, cultures, nations, and species. This course will study innovative science fiction novels, films, and comics from around the world that try to imagine the human (and posthuman) condition from a global perspective. Over the semester, we may study adventure narratives, Utopias and dystopias, cyberpunk, postcolonial and ecological narratives.

Rise of the Graphic Novel (lecture; Fall 2011)

Over the last twenty years, the American graphic novel has garnered literary prizes, media attention, and publishing contracts. Yet the recent "rise" of the graphic novel threatens to conceal the fact that graphic narrative has had a long and vibrant history, from its origin in newspapers through the underground comix movement of the 1960s to its present moment of ascendency. Surveying the 20th century, focusing largely on the U.S., this course will explore the representational possibilities of graphic narrative and the history of its incorporation into high culture.