ENGL 253

Fall 2023 All Classes

All Classes

Topics in Literature and New Media

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Credit: 3 hours.

Introduction to the role technological invention has played in history of print media and how literary aesthetics are changing with the advent of new media, such as software, video games, and graphic novels. We will consider material formats, genres, and modes of production along with the cultural, political, and societal implications of different forms and formats.

May be repeated in separate terms up to 6 hours.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Lit & Arts

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ENGL 253 class schedule data for fall 2023
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	65156	Lecture-Discussion	F	2:00PM -2:50PM	MWF	104 English Building	Gallagher, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/21/23-12/06/23 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: FA23 ENGL 253 Video Games - John Gallagher: How do video games tell stories? What are their unique affordances? This course examines these questions with four units: hardware analysis, world/level design, narrative storytelling, and technical procedures. Each unit consists of reading scholarship and fiction about videogames, while engaging in a hands-on project. For hardware analysis, students will examine the history of videogame controllers and design specifications for an accessible controller. For the world/level design, students will play a videogame and break it down into constitutive wireframing to examine how a videogame world and level can tell a story. For narrative storytelling, we will examine lore in videogames and students will design a speculative videogame level of their choosing. For narrative storytelling, we will read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Zevin) and critically examine how stories are told in videogames. Finally, we will examine and critique more technical procedures of videogames, including graphic production, automation, and sound design. The final will culminate in a multimodal project (standard written paper with visuals, podcast, or long-form video) that reviews videogames and/or related literature of the student’s choosing.
	78424	Lecture-Discussion	T	2:00PM -3:20PM	TR	137 Henry Administration Bldg	McNulty, T	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/21/23-12/06/23 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: FA23 ENGL 253 Topics in Lit and New Media - Tess McNulty - Analyzing Content from Tik Toks to Tweets: The internet is awash with new popular cultural forms, from listicles and lolcats to TED Talks and makeup tutorials. And yet scholars have only just begun to analyze this new digital “content”: what makes it unique, and how it is reshaping our culture. In this course, we’ll look at new forms of popular digital content in detail--reading tweets as closely as if they were poems, or exploring the substance of 100,000 Instagram images. We’ll survey the methods that have been developed, in different disciplines (media theory, art and literary criticism, sociology), for analyzing content in this way, as well as those that have yet to be attempted (questions that haven’t been asked; material that hasn’t been addressed). To put theory into practice, students will develop research projects on popular digital artifacts of their choosing. They will also be introduced to computational methods of analyzing content, and have the opportunity to pursue these methods further (though no prior experience with computation is required).