"Literature and Musical Genre" is designed as a five-week Summer Session Course. It is a lower-division literature course that satisfies several general education and departmental major & minor requirements.

Course Description

​Critical Approaches: Media (M), Power and Subjectivities (P)
G.E. Requirements: Race and Ethnicity (ER), Interpreting Arts and Media (IM), Textual Analysis (TA)

Our love of musical genres shapes our language, communities, tastes, identities, and aesthetics. We can learn about popular musical genres, thus learn about ourselves and others, through reading and listening carefully. This course provides deeper insight into the nature of some popular musical genres and challenges assumptions about them through an engagement with literature and creative expressions. It traces the relationship between textuality and music through experimental compositions, explores the queerness of the blues, identifies hip hop with Asian American masculinity, exposes the indigeneity of rock and roll, and encounters the feminism / Chicanisma of punk.

Many (most) of our authors / artists and our thinking about musical genres will draw from U.S. American identities and perspectives. We’ll explore some quintessential nonfiction forms for thinking about music and genre (rock documentaries and autobiographies) while also affirming that fictional literary genres (poetry, novels, short stories) are vital parts of the tradition of thinking about music. Though we will prioritize literary texts, we will also use literary study techniques to analyze media, listen to playlists for each genre, make observations and analyze our listening and multisensory experiences of music, and relate our conclusions to the texts we read.

This course primarily asks participants to consider

• What are some qualities of experimental music, blues, hip hop, rock, and punk?
• How do musical genres express identity or challenge stereotypes?
• How have genres of music been written about or crafted into narratives?
• How does reading, viewing, or listening offer different ways of thinking?
• What is the relationship between literature and the textuality of music?