"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

​G.E. Requirements: Race and Ethnicity (ER), 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. Each week we discern the qualities, cultures, and stereotypes that define a popular musical genre. Then, we examine how those qualities, cultures and stereotypes are expressed in literary, filmic, and musical texts. 

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 literary and expressive forms often associated with music, like rock documentaries and autobiographies, zines, music journalism, and music videos. The course also affirms that fictional literary genres, like poetry, novels, and short stories, are vital parts of the tradition of thinking and writing 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.The selected texts also raise questions and generate discussions about identity formation and expression. Following the keywords of the class, the musical genres / literature / identity categories are as follows

• experimental music / essays and scores / identifying as a musician
• the blues / poetry and short stories / Blackness and Queer Black identities
• rock and roll / novel and rock doc / Indigenous identity
• hip hop / spoken word and music video / Asian American identity
• punk / autobiography and zine / Chicana Identity

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?