The Many Faces of Love in American Women's Novels
Elizabeth Brown-Guillory

Grammy award winning singer Mary J. Blige sums up our need for affection in "Love Is All We Need": "To make everything complete/All we need is l-o-v-e/Cause to love you would mean everything." Our seminar will explore various types of love--including platonic, erotic, familial--and the ways in which society supports or inhibits the public and private expression of certain types of affection. We will attempt to answer two important questions: What choices do we make when love is at stake, and what are the social ramifications?

Texts may include:

Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Denise Chavez, Loving Pedro Infante
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

The Price of Freedom
Romanus Muoneke

Life is more meaningful and fulfilling when it is lived out in freedom. Denial of freedom generates so many conflicts in individuals and society and must be addressed. Freedom is a subject that has received much attention in modern literature. My seminar group will explore themes concerned with quests for freedom, the abuse of freedom, and the price to pay for freedom.

Texts may include:

Henry James, Daisy Miller: A Study
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems
Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy
John Fowles, The Collector

Family Functions and Disfunctions
William Monroe

"Families" comes in all shapes and sizes, and perhaps the term family has become a site of contestation in debates political, social, moral, and religious. Conventional wisdom holds that families are good, that they sustain us as individuals and as a nation, and that they should be preserved almost at any cost. Our Common Ground seminar will read stories, poems, and a play that will push us to reexamine the role of families in our individual formation and communal lives.

Texts may include: