Willimantic, Conn. – Eastern Connecticut State University’s English Department is offering new courses for the upcoming spring 2015 semester. The courses, which are taught by Jordan Youngblood, Allison Speicher and Lauren Rosenberg, include ENG 365-02: Digital Game Studies, ENG 365-01: The Golden Age of the American Tomboy and ENG 373-01: Rhetoric of the Graphic Novel.
Digital Game Studies is a course focused on the prominent and continuously growing role that video games play in our national culture. The course is “intended to introduce you to the critical study of video games as a steadily emerging scholarly field, one that bridges traditional forms of textual and cultural analysis with an examination of how games actually work as digital objects.” It will be offered Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 1-1:50 p.m.
The Golden Age of the American Tomboy is based on a recent rise in the number of women who claim to have grown up as tomboys. This course will explore the various interpretations of what it means to be a tomboy. The course description says that “Studying the tomboy in her various literary contexts — sensation novels, children’s literature and regionalist fiction — will help us to understand the figure’s roots not only in shifting conceptions of gender, but also in postbellum views of race, class and sexuality.” This course will take place Wednesdays from 4-6:45 p.m.
Rhetoric of the Graphic Novel raises a series of questions about what category the graphic novel falls — Literature? Art? Fiction? The course objective is “to explore the graphic novel as a rhetorical form that crosses the boundaries of traditional novels, memoirs and narrative art to create a hybrid genre.” This class will meet Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 10-10:50 a.m.