Literary & Visual Arts

Courses in this concentration feature active engagement with a range of literary, visual, musical, and creative arts. These courses challenge students to think and write with increased depth, independence, and creativity about how the arts express and shape individual as well as cultural experiences and identities.

They also explore how the arts inspire joy while educating and enriching us. Students may expect to study formal, aesthetic concerns, as well as the artistic process as a dynamic and strategic series of expressive choices.

Sponsored by: Arts & Humanities

Faculty Contact: Beth Wynstra

Required Courses

Students must choose 16 credits from the following course list; please note that some courses listed below are only two (2) credit courses.

Note: Of the four (4) courses, students must take courses from at least two (2) disciplines out of the three (3) disciplines represented by this list (literature, film, and art). 

• ARB 4640 Cinema & Culture
• ART 4610 Arts of the Renaissance
• CVA 2058 After the Dictator
• ENG 4604 Writing Poetry
• ENG 4605 Writing Fiction
• ENG 4620 Writing Creative Non-Fiction
• ENV 4610 Ecology and the Anthropocene
• FLM 4610 Work, Play, and Adulthood in American Movies
• FLM 4691 Class, Gender, and Romance in American Comic Film
• FRN 4640 Cinema & Culture
• HUM 4611 Issues in Latin American Fiction and Film
• HUM 4615 The City as Text: Mapping Cultural Histories in Barcelona & Madrid
• LIT 4600 Modern Drama
• LIT 4610 Performing Social Class
• LIT 4611 The East and West: Writings of Trespass
• LIT 4661 American Autobiography 
• LIT 4676 Imagining Nature Imagining Ourselves
• LIT 4682 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights
• LIT 4689 Poetic Elegy
• LIT 4693 Play, Performance, Perspective: The London Stage in Winter
• LVA 2003 Dramatizing the American Dream
• LVA 2004 Love, Sex, and Family in Mid-20th Century American Literature
• LVA 2005 Art as a Visual Language
• LVA 2006 Russia in Modernity
• LVA 2009 American Film History
• LVA 2010 African American Literature
• LVA 2013 Global Cinema
• LVA 2022 Speculative Genres
• LVA 2030 Place and Landscape in Literature
• LVA 2031 Business and American Drama
• LVA 2032 Foundations of Western Art
• LVA 2039 Curiosity in Literature
• LVA 2045 Modernism and the Making of the New
• LVA 2049 Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Literature
• LVA 2061 Tales of the City
• LVA 2062 Suburban America in Literature and Culture
• LVA 2067 Film and the City
• LVA 2069 Utopia and Dystopia: Literary and Cultural Expressions
• LVA 2072 Detective Fiction, Noir, and Social Criticism
• LVA 2074 Literature of Witness
• LVA 2075 Design for Living
• LVA 2078 Mad, Bad: Rebels and Anti-Heroes
• LVA 2079 Theories of Love
• LVA 2080 The Literature of Guilt
• LVA 2090 The Short Story
• SPN 4640 Spanish at the Movies: Cinema, Culture, Conversation
• THR 4600 Contemporary Styles of Acting