2023-24 Spring Semester
Elective Course Catalogue

GRADUATE ELECTIVES

ENGY 5558 Comparative Literature II
Dr. Evren Akaltun

The Narratives of Time, Gender, and Identity in Modern and Contemporary Literature
This course invites an in-depth exploration and comparison of the representations of time, identity and gender as portrayed in five seminal novels.  Through a lens that spans diverse narrative landscapes, we will examine the distinct narrative techniques employed by each author. Additionally, we will explore the impact of societal changes and political upheavals on characters’ identities. As we navigate these literary journeys, students will cultivate critical thinking skills by engaging with feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical theories. The course expects students to articulate their literary analyses in various forms, including class discussions, essays, and research projects.

ENGY 5564 Literary Criticism and Theory II
Dr. Trevor Hope

This class builds on elements of the theoretical foundations established by Literary Criticism and Theory I, although the latter is not a pre-requisite.  The class traces a set of intersecting topical focusses relating to questions of cultural memory (and forgetting), archival culture, trauma theory and the intersection between all of these and questions of national and cultural identification, with a particular emphasis on colonial, postcolonial and diasporic forms of memory culture.  We shall be looking at a series of literary works as well as films in parallel with theoretical texts with an emphasis on psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches.

UNDERGRADUATE ELECTIVES

ENGL 1014 Literature and Visual Culture 
Dr. Jason Ward 

This Literature and Visual 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, Palestine, 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 1056 Special Topics in Literature II
Doç. Dr. Murat Göç 

Men and Masculinities in Culture and Literature
This class aims to aim introduce the students with the formation and representation of men and masculinities in culture and literature with the examples from British and American culture and literature. The students will be encouraged to discuss various aspects of the textual representations of men and masculinities in literary texts and films as well as a wide array of written and visual material ranging from print advertisements and TV commercials to presidential speeches and historical texts.

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 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 early-modern antiquarianism as well as 19th century consumer culture. We will enrich our aesthetic appreciation of the Gothic aesthetic by analyzing some classical horror films of the silent era including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. 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. Emine Sonal 

As a continuation of “ENGL 1063 AMERICAN FICTION: 1900-1950”, this course aims to explore various concepts within the cultural and literary phenomena associated with postmodern theories, as reflected in American fiction. These concepts include process, intertextuality, irony, play, self-reflectivity, self-consciousness, parody, and pastiche. The focus will be on how themes and issues are expressed by influential American short story writers, novelists, and playwrights from 1950 to the present. 

The course will specifically examine the works of notable figures such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote, Caryl Churchill, and Edward Albee. Its objective is to develop students’ critical and analytical abilities from a theoretical perspective by discussing the role literature plays in postwar American society. 

ENGL 1072 Culture and Society II
Dr. Jeffrey Hibbert 

Film Noir: 50 Shades of Black
“You’re no good and I’m no good.  We were made for each other.” Out of the Past

In the 1960s, many American filmmakers were pleasantly surprised to hear that the crime films they had made 20 years before were given serious consideration among French movie critics who noted not only the purposeful use of dark lighting and shadows in their films but the nihilistic attitudes of their characters. “I never even heard of film noir,” said Billy Wilder famously, the director of noir staples Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. This class will be an investigation of one of the most well-beloved genres of motion picture history that never existed: film noir. Noted for their bleak portrayals of desire and desperation, greed and glamor, beauty and betrayal, the crime films of the 1940s and 1950s continue to be one of the most active and fruitful subjects of academic film studies.

In this class, we will watch, examine, critique, and analyze crime, gangster, and detective films from mid 20^th-century Hollywood and read important works of criticism on the subject. Among the films we will study will be The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Kiss Me Deadly, The Killers, Force of Evil, The Third Man, and others. We will read both American and French critics of the genre and examine the ways in which these films are both historical products and films that have been retroactively given a specific meaning and significance. In some ways, this class will also function as a kind of introduction to the semiotics of film, the grammar of lighting and editing, the ways in which images are brought together to create a visual lexicon. We will read and apply a variety of critical modes to produce analyses of film including the “double bind” of Jacques Lacan, one form of which asks, “How can we lament the absence of something we never had?”

Students will be responsible for a presentation, a midterm and a final exam as well as both in-class and independent film studies. Students should be willing to read deeply both the films and the criticism for this elective.

ENGL 1074 Special Topics in Cultural History II
Dr. Ayşegül Avcı

World War II Literature
The Second World War broke out in 1939 almost two decades after the end of the First World War. It was one of the deadliest wars in world history which revealed the brutal facts of racism, civilian atrocities, economic struggles, and political dilemmas. This course focuses on literary representations of the Second World War in fictional and non-fictional narratives including novels, short stories, plays, poems, movies as well as first-person accounts, and visual aids. The authors/creators are from various countries including but not limited to Britain, the USA, Canada, Germany, France, SSCB, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Turkey. The need to introduce different aspects arises from the complex nature of the war and the deep impact it had on the world. Considered as the continuation of the Great War by many, the Second World War changed politics, nations, technology, literature, nature… This course attempts to examine the war from different perspectives with the main objective of studying the relationship between history (in terms of real events and people) and literature (in terms of artistic production and individual responses).

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.  

ENGL 1082 Turcophone Literature in a Comparative Perspective II
Dr. Emine Sonal 

This course focuses on the study of Turkish Literature from a comparative perspective through the readings and critical interpretations of selected texts from Turkish and world literature. Discussions will focus on the representations of recurring themes and ideas and their ties with each other across historical, social, and cultural contexts. The explored themes will include the individual’s conflict with modern thought and society, women’s liberation, gender issues, as well as social conflicts and upheavals. While comparing and contrasting how each writer addresses these themes in their works, the course will focus on modernity, its crises, and the writers’ dialogues with their times as the common point of departure. 

The course will specifically examine the works of notable figures such as Yaşar Kemal, Sabahattin Ali, Firuzan, Oguz Atay, Orhan Pamuk, Mine Söğüt, and Sema Kaygusuz. Its objective is to develop students’ critical and analytical abilities from a theoretical perspective by discussing the role literature plays in Modern and Postmodern Turkish society.