This course explores the social and cultural work that literary texts perform. Seminars will illuminate such categories as gender, sexuality, nation, race, ethnicity, and class; particular ways in which they are written into a limited number of literary works; and some of the critical debates surrounding our interpretations of those processes. This section will focus on American films and literature from the 1980s.  Students will discuss cyborgs, cyberpunk aesthetics, street dancing (b-boying, breakdancing and voguing), the AIDS crisis, and Reaganomics. This is a writing- and presentation-intensive course