Skip to First-Year Seminar site navigationSkip to main content

FYS Courses by Topic and Section ID

HNRS 101-02 - Untrue Crime: American Stories

Tuesdays & Fridays 8:00 – 9:40 a.m.

CRN 40326

Ed Shannon
Professor of Literature

“True Crime” is all over our streaming services, podcasts, and bookshelves. But fiction is truer than truth, so this course considers crime fiction. Detective stories are about logic, justice, and “order.” Crime stories slum in violence, deception, and disorder. Told from the perspective of the criminal, crime stories bluntly challenge our moral vision and ask why we are so attracted to killers and criminals rather than “the good guys.” Our focus will be American prose fiction, but we will veer sharply into other forms, including film, comics, and—mostly—song. Expect readings to question social norms surrounding not just law and justice, but race, class, gender, faith, sexuality, and everything in between. Raymond Chandler said that to write about “murder [you]  . . . also have to write about the authentic flavor of life.” Let’s see if he was right.

Download Full Syllabus

Peer Facilitators

HNRS 101-03 - Once Upon a Time: An Exploration of the Fairy Tale

Tuesdays & Fridays, 1:45 – 3:25 p.m.

CRN 40657

Yvette Kisor
Professor of Literature

This course will take as its focus a genre that is spread across cultures and times: the fairy tale. We will focus on a number of classic fairy tales and examine their cultural variants as well as their modern adaptations. Our approach is diachronic and interdisciplinary, and we will explore fairy tales through a number of critical lenses, including the socio-cultural, structuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist, as well as those of folklore and film studies.

Download Full Syllabus

Peer Facilitators