The contemporary understanding of communication and narrative is quickly shifting in a world where media is ubiquitous. The "language of new media" is the thematic used in this course to discuss contemporary and historic forms of non-linear narrative. Students will explore the properties of non-linear, multi-linear, and interactive forms of narratives. This course will survey some of the possibilities, examining both traditional and new media such as oral storytelling, literature, poetry, visual arts, museum exhibits, architecture, hypertext fiction, Net Art, and computer games. Writers on communication culture, gaming, television, digital aesthetics, contemporary art and film, as well as synchronic narrative will be addressed. The focus is to develop critical tools to analyze contemporary media as well as a minimal level of practical implementation. Students will produce a final media project.

We encounter digital texts and codes every time we use a smart phone, turn on an app, read an e-book, or interact online. This course examines the innovative combinations of text and code that underpin emerging textual practices such as electronic literatures, digital games, mobile communication, geospatial mapping, interactive and locative media, augmented reality, and interactive museum design. Drawing on key concepts of text and code in related fields, students will analyze shifting expressive textual practices and develop the literacies necessary to read and understand them. Practicing and reflecting on such new media literacies, the course explores their social, cultural, creative, technological, and legal significance. To encourage multiple perspectives on these pivotal concepts of text and code and their import, the course includes guest lectures by scholars and practitioners in these fields.

This course explores the evolution of an influential literary form (the short story, drama, poetry, autobiographical literature, or the novel). Reading a series of variations on this literary form, likely bridging cultural or historical contexts or themes, the course develops critical perspectives and artistic insights into this genre of writing. Criticism and theory appropriate to the genre will be discussed as a way to understand the form, its social functions, and its cultural and political significance. The course can be taken up to two times, for a total of 6 semester credit hours, as long as the topics are different.