a class made just for me

No joke, this is a class I am taking this fall.

CTCS 510: "9/11 America"
Professor Todd Boyd

[excerpted from the syllabus]

This course will use "September 11, 2001" as an opportunity to focus on the relationship between politics, media, and culture in contemporary American society.

The course will draw on a list of political and cultural examples, while surveying cinema, contemporary critical literature, and other forms of discourse on a range of relevant issues; they would include issues of nationalism and national identity, globalization, the rise of neo-conservative politics, neo-liberalism, radical Islam, torture, notions of terrorism, the economic crisis, preemptive war, race, class, and gender, information and technology, and executive power.

Required Texts [highlights from a list of ten]
Resurrecting Empire by Rashid Khalidi
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror by Mark Danner
Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Screening List
8/26: The Fog of War
9/2: W
9/9: The Battle of Algiers (hells yeah I'll watch it again!)
9/16: The Manchurian Candidate
9/23: One Day in September
9/30: Fahrenheit 9/11
10/7: No End in Sight (cheery for my birthday, yay!)
10/14: There Will Be Blood (how does this connect to 9/11? no idea!)
10/21: Syriana
10/28: Paradise Now
11/4: Standard Operating Procedure
11/11: When the Levees Broke
11/18: Three Kings
11/25: In the Valley of Elah
12/2: The Siege

So, yeah...I might have added Rendition to the list, but if the Critical Studies department had said, "Gee, Laura, it seems you need to take another one of our classes in order to graduate. How 'bout we make one JUST FOR YOU?" this is pretty much what would have come out.

For those of you who do not go to USC, Todd Boyd is known as "the notorious PhD," a label which I think he created for himself. He is best known for writing about and teaching a class on hip-hop. I have also been told that he "does not subscribe to The Man's time," which means he is usually twenty minutes late to class. I sincerely hope that is true, since that will be the only way I get to eat lunch on Wednesdays, which, because I've decided to take this class, will now consist of wall-to-wall class time from 10am until 6:20pm. But it seems to me to be a small price to pay to take what is essentially a class on Stuff Inside Laura's Brain.

[Update 8/26: Went to the first class today and it is JUST AS AWESOME as I suspected it would be!]