Modern Topics courses are designed for Writing and Literature Majors and Minors and are focused on the critical investigation of a specific modern topic, movement, style, or tradition of literary and performative production, typically after the year 1900. Students will read and write critically on these topics, including multi-modal responses, and will position the texts within a socio-historical context.Every time an author writes a new work they create a new world. As authors, and therefore world builders, how do we see visions of the ideal? How do fictional other worlds reflect back on our lived reality? In this class we will explore the radical world building techniques of world-building masters, and investigate how the conceit of their projects reveals the reality of the author’s lived experience in significant and magnified ways. Special emphasis will be placed on exploring the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building. Students will engage with the work of these world-building masters through discussion, in-class writing prompts, short essays, group critique, and a final project in which the student will author a new world of their own invention. this course is ideal for animators, comic artists, illustrators, filmmakers, etc who are interested in developing narrative, interdisciplinary work.

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