Summer Course Offerings

Summer 2012 Course Offerings

ANE 650 Popular American Genre Fiction
05/14/2012 - 08/17/2012
Kent Ryden

This is a blended course meeting 50% or more online.  There will be approximately 4 on-campus meetings, dates/times to be decided by the class.

This course will focus, not on the productions of elite literary culture, but on the sorts of popular genres that millions of Americans read every year: westerns, spy novels, detective fiction, horror novels, science fiction, romance novels, and the like. We will discuss  popular fiction as a vital aspect of twentieth-century American print culture, examining not only the literary aspects of particular well-known works but questions concerning their production and consumption, their readership, their marketing, and their function as 
elements of American popular culture that reflect and shape popular concerns at particular historical moments.

This course will be run as what we might think of as a group independent study class. We will meet as a group four times and interact electronically the rest of the time. The course will consist of three segments:

1) Two meetings at the beginning of the summer session in May, in which we will discuss the logistics of the course, key critical concepts and approaches and interpretive frameworks, and so on.
2) At the beginning of the course, students will be given a reading list of representative examples of works from a variety of popular genres: e.g., Westerns, science fiction, horror fiction, romance novels, spy novels, detective novels (one example of each). They will also be given a writing topic that allows them to tie together the various readings. Papers will be shared with other students electronically, and we will meet once in person, probably in late June, to talk about the papers as a group.
3) For the second paper, students will choose either one genre or one author within a genre. They will put together a reading list of 8-10 books and explain why they have chosen those particular readings. The paper will be based on that reading list. Again, papers will be shared electronically, and we will meet as a group in mid-August to discuss them together.

Group meeting times will be worked out together according to everyone's schedule and other summer plans. A discussion board will be available throughout the summer on the course's Blackboard site for students to freely share questions and ideas. The instructor will also be available electronically throughout the summer, and will make individual in-person appointments with students to discuss ideas and check progress.

ANE 650 Portland Landmarks  
07/09/2012 - 08/15/2012
3 Wednesday 4:00 – 6:40
5 Saturdays
John Bauman

The course explores the history of Portland, Maine through time (from George Cleeve to, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Bundy Brown, James P. Baxter, and to the present).  It focuses on surviving traces of the past and how those traces may serve to keep alive memory or to quote Delores Hayden, celebrate the “Power of Place.”   The course, that will meet on 5 Wednesdays and on three Saturdays between July 11^th and August 15^th, will involve classroom discussions, supervised, “hands-on” archival research, and several, all-day tours of the city featuring Portland as a Victorian City balancing work, reform, and tourism, and Portland as graying Twentieth Century Rediscovered its Romantic Past.

ANE 685 Reading and Research

Open to advanced students with exceptional records in the program, this course offers opportunities for reading and research under the direction of a faculty member. The approval of the ANES Curriculum Committee is required. This course may be taken only once.

ANE 687 Internship

Open to qualified students with exceptional records in the program; required for students in the Public Culture and History track. Internships are by application to the ANES Curriculum Committee. Participating organizations include: Portland Museum of Art, Old York Historical Society, Pejepscot Historical Society, and Maine Historical Society.

ANE 690 Project

Completion of a two-semester project that may be an independent project or that may combine independent study and work in a historical society, a museum, a cultural organization, or other public or private institution. In consultation with an advisor, the student defines and develops the project in relation to his or her particular interest in American and New England Studies.

ANE 695 Thesis

The product of original research, the thesis should embody an interdisciplinary combination of approaches and/or materials.