KHU-ACL AREA ELECTIVES       (For 2nd, 3rd, 4th Years)

KHU-ACL Department every semester will offer at least two courses from the list of area electives. These courses will be announced as electives to the rest of the university at the beginning of the semester.  Classes must have a minimum of seven to be offered.  At the same time, the maximum number of students in each class will be 20.  Priority will be given to ACL students and to international students, and any remaining spaces will be determined on a first come first served basis. ACL  LIST OF ELECTIVES

A. Genres, Periods, Regions

ACL 371 The Lyric Tradition. A cross-cultural survey of lyric poetry in the West.  What is lyric poetry, or the lyric impulse?  We begin with Petrarch and the courtly love tradition, move on to the rise of early modern European vernacular poetry in England, Italy, and France, and end with a brief look at Enlightenment, romantic, and modern poetry.

ACL 373 The Tragic Mode. An advanced course that examines tragedy and the tragic in disparate cultures, genres, and historical periods.  The course begins with a look back at Classical Greek tragedy and Aristotle's influential  discussion in the Poetics.  But how does the concept and practice  of tragedy change in different cultures and different moments in history.  The tragic, of course, is not a notion restricted to theater.  What does it mean to talk about the tragic in other literary forms, or in history itself?

ACL 261 The Comic Mode. A comparative and historical survey of comedy as a cultural notion in the West, from the comedies of Aristophanes to the tales of Mark Twain.

ACL 471 Epic. An advanced course on epic, in theory and practice, after Homer.  How does epic evolve in the post-classical West, above all in the medieval period and during the Renaissance?  Why does epic decline in the seventeenth-century?  Is the epic essentially replaced by the novel?  Is Melville's Moby Dick an epic?  Is Walcott's Omeros?  Is epic something that can survive in the modern world?  This course will be asking, and trying to answer, these and other provocative questions.

ACL 273 The Renaissance: Literature and Culture. A comparative and interdisciplinary examination of the historical period and the cultural phenomenon that came to be known as the Renaissance (and which is now sometimes referred to as the Early Modern Period), with an emphasis on the poetry, drama, and visual culture of Italy, France, and England.

ACL 375 Medieval Culture and Literature. A comparative and interdisciplinary examination of medieval literature, art and architecture, from the rejection of paganism in the late classical world (Augustine, Justinian) to the rehabilitation of classical culture in early modern Italy (Petrarch, Ficino).

ACL 275 Science Fiction. This course examines the genre of science fiction, from its roots in the fantastic and utopian literature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe (for example, Jules Vernes), to its contemporary manifestations in literature and film.

ACL 473 Contemporary American Poetry. The focus of study in this course will be American poetry of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including an examination of the schools and movements that arose in the wake of modernism. Students will read and study the work of contemporary poets such as Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Koch, Marge Piercy, and Robert Bly.

ACL 475 Contemporary American Drama. This course will look at currents--or more accurately, cross-currents-in contemporary American drama.  New voices will be emphasized--Latino, Native American, African and Caribbean American--as well as the influences that have brought them to our attention.  The course will also look at drama freed from the constraints of the scripted play, for example, work rooted in pantomime and ritual, street theatre, and improvisational theater.

ACL 477 Contemporary American Fiction. A course on Contemporary writers in the U.S. and the current generation of writers now writing in English. As mainstream writing, especially in the major urban areas of the U.S., becomes increasingly "ethnicitized,"  the idea of writing from the borderlands, the peripheries, and the spheres of influence becomes more central to the discussion of the nation's artistic production.  Readings may include short stories (Tatiana Tolstoy, Juno Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, Angie Cruz, Aldo Alvarez), longer works (Esmeralda Santiago, Nicolasa Mohr, Julia Alvarez, Terry McMillan, Natasha Tretaway, Zadie Smith) and graphic novels (Eisner).

ACL 277 American Regional Literature:  the South.  The American South produced a remarkable number of major writers in the 20th century.  In this course we will read representative authors such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Penn Warren. We will also ask what is uniquely Southern in their achievement, and inquire into specific historical and social factors behind it.

B. Thematic Courses

ACL 377 Literary Odysseys, or On the Road: Home and the Journey in Western Literature. Homer's Odyssey, and the parable of the prodigal son, are only some of the earliest examples in a long tradition of literary works in the West that explore, and contest, the notion of home.  What role do the themes of journey and exile play in Western literature?  This course will explore how those themes change (and remain the same, to some extent),   from classical Roman epic (Virgil's Aeneid) to modern American fiction (Kerouac's On the Road) and film (The Wizard of Oz).  This course will also examine the way the road is conceptualized and what it promises.  We will also look at the image of America that emerges from these travel writings and why Americans seem to be always  on the move.
ACL 481 Town and Country: Pastoral Literature from Theocritus to Thoreau. When Odyssey ventures into the cave of the Cyclops in book 13 of the Odyssey, one might argue that pastoral literature has already begun: for what follows is an examination, and a problematization, of the difference between the civilized and the barbarian.  Pastoral literature is always, on some level, an effort to defend or deflect the virtues and vices of culture.  This course will be an introduction to the history of pastoral literature, from the Theocritus' Idylls to Thoreau's Walden (by way of Spenser's The Faerie Queene).  Along the way, we will discuss the differences and intersections between pastoral and romance.

ACL 279 Realism and Naturalism from Europe to America. A course that will trace the rise of realism and naturalism in European fiction (with an emphasis on Dickens and Zola), and its influence on American culture and literature.

ACL 483 Approaches to American Studies. A survey of major themes and controversies in the history of the USA since Reconstruction.  Also an introduction to intellectual movements, methodologies and approaches that have helped constitute the area of "American Studies" and the study of American culture and society in the second half of the 20th century.  Readings are drawn from the fields of social history, sociology, literary and cultural history, and cultural studies.

ACL 381 Empire for Liberty: The USA in the 19th-century. This course investigates how the social and cultural tendencies and tensions of the first half of the 19th century were channeled into a war between the North and the South.  By seeking to place the central event of the century in a history of diplomacy and warfare that also included the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s, and the Spanish-American War, it attempts to illuminate the imperial causes and consequences of this domestic conflict.  By embedding the conflict over slavery in the histories of the Haitian Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, Indian removal, the Atlantic cotton economy, and the hemispheric history of antislavery, it seeks to call into question the nationalist and regionalist framing of the event which has dominated most mainstream accounts.

ACL 281 The Cowboy Myth and the American West. A course on that singularly American genre the Western, in literature, art, and film.  Why is the cowboy such an enduring American hero?  What role does the idea of the West play in the American imagination?  How does the notion of the frontier shift as American culture changes?  How does the genre of the Western allow for or exclude ethnic diversity? 

C. Specialized Topics

ACL 383 Single-Author Seminar: (Plato, Melville, Morrison, etc.). An advanced course that will focus on the work of a single author, and the way the work of that author has been critically received.

ACL 485  Magical Realism. While "magical realism," is largely assumed to be exclusively Latin American, a more serious analysis of the term and its application to literature in English has often been lacking.  At the same time, as the work of such giants as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Miguel Asturias have been translated into English, they have created a "ripple effect" reflected in the work and thinking of some North American writers.  Especially in the Caribbean the notion of "MR" has been linked to collective trauma, postcoloniality, and postmodernism. Among the fictional work considered will also be William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Wilson Harris, Chicano writer Arturo Islas, Edwidge Danticat, Erna Brodber, Philippe Chamoiseau, Bessie Head, and the work of performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña.

ACL 385 Caribbean Literature. This course explores literature written largely by Anglophone Caribbean writers and writers of Caribbean descent, living and/or working in the United States.  This course will touch upon the experiences of immigration and  dispersion, and the history of European and Euro-American intrusions in the Antilles; it will also touch upon the themes of race, ethnicity, gender, class and the legacy of plantation slavery and indentured servitude. The delicate relations between these recent immigrants and their perceived naturalized relatives-for example, the relationship between the Afro-Caribbean and the African American-has not always been easy. This, too, will enter into the discussion.  Themes of identity, memory, alienation, assimilation, resistance, and postcoloniality all figure prominently in this literature.  Writers touched upon and read will include Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Edwidge Danticat, Fred D'Aguiar, Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaica Kinkaid. Readings-in English-from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean may also be included (for example, Julia Alvarez' middle class Dominican novel-written in English, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents)
ACL 379 The Harlem Renaissance. This course covers the period between The  Great Migration of African Americans from the U.S. south to Harlem in New York City and the onset of the Great Depression in America. Works of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Dorothy West and others documented this remarkable period of the flowering of African American culture, its discovery of African roots and of the folk culture and art of African Americans. Jazz, the Cotton Club, THE NEW NEGRO journal and other cultural phenomena will also be discussed.

ACL 283 American Travel Writing on Turkey. This course examines the shifting perceptions of Turkey and Istanbul in travel accounts by American writers such as Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Baldwin, Roditi, and others.

ACL 387 Wit, Satire, and Humor from Mark Twain to R. Crumb.  This course explores the rich vein of anti-establishment wit and satire that is essential to American culture.  We begin in the late 19th century with Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, and move on to 20th-century satirists such as H.L. Mencken, Ring Lardner, Terry Southern, Hunter Thompson, and Robert Crumb.

ACL 389 The Beats. This course traces the development of the Beat (popularly known as "Beatnik") movement from its origins in the 1940s through its decline in the 1960s. Study will include the lives, work and thought of major figures in the movement such as Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso and Neal Cassidy.

D. Interdisciplinary

ACL 231 Creative Writing. A seminar for writers of fiction, poetry, and articles.  Creativity, criticism, and revision are emphasized.
ACL 233 Popular Culture and the Media.  The course will introduce students to the critical study of popular culture and media.  We will explore the ways that the media and popular forms produce culture and are products of culture.  Discussions will also examine the ways in which individuals both use and are used by popular culture and the media.  Texts for the class will include advertising, film, television, magazines and internet websites.

ACL 235 The City on Your Doorstep. This course will mainly comprise walking tours of the old city of Stamboul, along with lectures pertaining to the history and culture of the city, from Byzantine to Ottoman times. The lecturer and guide will be John Ash, one of Britain's most acclaimed poets and author of A Byzantine Journey and Turkey, The Other Guide. Mr. Ash has also written many articles about Istanbul and Turkey for The New York Times, Cornucopia and various other international publications.

ACL 237 The History of Comics in the USA.  This course will trace the history of the comic strip in the USA from its first appearance in the Hearst newspapers of the 1890s to its apogee in the work of contemporary artists such as Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb.  We will follow the development of the comic strip not only as art but as the illumination of political, social, and historical changes in American society.

ACL 239 Philosophy: From Kant to Sartre:  What is reality?  How do I know when I know what I know? How to live a good life - a life that is good both for me and for others? These are the kinds of questions philosophers ask. They are not only difficult questions, they are dangerous ones - because asking them already represents a threat to the powers that be, to authority itself - to those, in other words, who believe they have a monopoly on answers. These questions represent the three classic branches of philosophical inquiry - metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.  This course will follow those three branches, from eighteenth-century empiricism (above all, Hume) to twentieth-century existentialism (above all, Sartre), with stops along the way at Leibniz, Locke, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Heidegger.  A major portion of the course will be devoted to German idealism and the work of Immanuel Kant.

ACL 251 Translation: Theory and Practice:  This course is mainly an introduction to the basic principles, methods and theory of literary translation. The emphasis is on the act of translation as a means to help students develop their linguistic skills as well as their writing skills in order to be able to express their thoughts in an organized way and thus be prepared for translating literary texts.
ACL 285 The Culture of the "Sixties." The 1960's and the early '70's have become the stuff of myth and legend in American culture. This course will focus on literature and cultural production during this period.  Readings will include Alice Walker's early Civil Rights novel, Meridian, the work of Rose Ellen Brown, the music of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and the (mis)adventures of his Merry Pranksters, the later Hunter S. Thompson, and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg.

ACL 287 America in Jazz, Blues, and Folk Music 1920-1965. This course will trace the outlines of American society as reflected by the vernacular music of the early 20th century.  While listening to and discussing examples of jazz, blues, and folk music we will ask, among other questions:  What do the themes of this music tell us about an America that has largely ceased to exist, but which has given the world the dominant pop music of today?

ACL 289 American Drama and Film: Shakespeare in America. What happens when the Bard moves to America?  A course on cross-cultural relations and the adaptation of European motifs and traditions in the USA.  We will examine how the work of Shakespeare is transformed in American drama (both as script and performance), poetry, and film.

ACL 487 Law and Literature. This class will examine the way the literature portrays the law as well as the law as a kind of literature.  We will explore such themes as the stories the law tells us about the U.S. and what kind of a society it is.  We will also examine literary texts for the stories that they tell about the law.  This class will use a variety of theoretical, literary and legal texts.

ACL 489 From the Outside Looking In: America from Abroad. As the world becomes a more global place it becomes important to see America not just from the inside but how others view her.  This course will examine how others view the United States and how the idea of America is constructed outside of America.  We will also look at the impact of America internationally.  This will include a look at foreign policy and politics but also the export of American culture and cultural products and ideas such as democracy and capitalism.  In this class we will also have an opportunity to examine the relationship between the United States and Turkey.