2018-2019

This course introduces models of comparative analysis across national literatures, genres, and media by focusing on poetry in different languages and cultures and in relation to other discursive and artistic forms. We will examine a wide variety of poetic and critical texts in order to explore such topics as the specificity of poetry and of poetic kinds; orality and folk, art, and popular song; poetry's relation to prose (from philosophy to autobiography to journalism); transnational imitation and translation; poetry and globalization; ekphrasis and poetry's relations to visual arts; and poetry and film. Readings will likely include poems by Sappho, Horace, Dante, Li Bai, Du Fu, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Milton, Basho, Goethe, Wordsworth, Robert Browning, and Dylan; and critical writings by Longinus, Plutarch, Montaigne, Li Zhi, Wordsworth, Auerbach, Jakobson, Adorno, Pasolini, Zumthor, Culler, and Damrosch. (Poetry, Theory)

This course takes for its premise that our understanding of psychological study is as fundamentally shaped by popular culture as it is by science. Using a constellation of literary, filmic and televisual, and other popular texts, we will consider how modes of psychological study, manipulation, and repair figure in the American popular imagination. Our eclectic archive will include pamphlets on psychological warfare, psychological thrillers, sitcoms, reality tv, studies on personality tests, and self-help tracts. Students will be encouraged to bring in their own examples as well. We will ask: what conception of human motivation and susceptibility, unconscious phenomena, collective feeling, or the form of “the therapeutic” do these texts carry? What aesthetic, formal, medial conventions or innovations can we track across our transmedial archive? (Fiction, Theory)

The news is a growing part of how we understand ourselves, each other and modern life. This course looks at texts from Walt Whitman to Law & Order in order to consider the kinds of conceptual problems that, while posed in different ways by contemporary news, are not themselves new. How do we locate the boundary between fiction and authenticity? How does medium make a difference to our understanding of current or historical events? How do journalism and fiction represent the relationship between public and private life? How do media ecologies both reflect and produce social collectivity? Are there “events”—for example, climate change—that require a different form in order to be communicated effectively? These are a few of the questions we will cover. We will discuss genres like the “nonfiction novel” and artwork “ripped from the headlines.” Although we will focus on texts from the 20th century, the course will also encourage students to take their own creative approach to contemporary stories.

In this course, we will consider counterfactuality in fiction from the 19th century to the 21st. Following critic Catherine Gallagher, we will ask, what if things had happened otherwise? and wonder, along with a range of authors, about the literary, historical, and ethical stakes of our answers. Readings will focus on counterfactual episodes in novels by Austen, Dickens, Conrad, and Murakami, as well as on alternate history fictions by Philip K. Dick, Kate Atkinson, Michael Chabon, L. Sprague de Camp, Kinglsey Amis, and Hilary Mantel, among others. (Fiction)

The desire for and consumption of luxury is central to the world-building enterprise of capitalist modernity as we understand it, from the elaboration of colonial trade routes to the emergence of the era-defining aesthetic mode known as glamor. As both the object of the primitivizing imaginary of colonial social science and the motor of excitement for the new in the modern Western city, luxury infused some of the complexities of global interconnectedness into the imagination and the arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With readings across the literary, but also the material-cultural and social-scientific archives of Western and non-Western modernisms, this course asks how luxury might open new avenues for the study of modernism’s inherently global character. Course texts will include literary works by Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and MP Shiel; social scientific works by Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille; visual works by Raghubir Singh, Coco Chanel, and Josephine Baker; theoretical readings from the fields of postcolonial, queer, and fashion studies. (1830-1940, Fiction, Theory)

This course reads works of postcolonial literature and theory in order to consider the entanglements of the figures of “women” and “natives” in colonial as well as postcolonial discourse. We will discuss topics such as the persistent feminization of the profane, degraded, and contagious bodies of colonized natives; representations of women as both the keepers and the victims of “authentic” native culture; the status (symbolic and otherwise) of women in anti-colonial resistance and insurgency; and the psychic pathologies (particularly nervous conditions of anxiety, hysteria, and madness) that appear repeatedly in these works as states to which women and/as natives are especially susceptible. Authors may include Ama Ata Aidoo, Hélène Cixous J.M Coetzee, Maryse Condé, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Mahasweta Devi, Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Silvia Federici, Nuruddin Farah, Bessie Head, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, Ousmane Sembène, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (Fiction, Theory)

This course will survey a range of literary works which take the disgusting as their principle aesthetic focus, while also providing students with an introduction to core issues and concepts in the history of aesthetic theory, such as the beautiful and the sublime, disinterested judgment and purposive purposelessness, taste and distaste. At the same time, our readings will allow us to explore the ways in which the disgusting has historically been utilized as a way of producing socially critical literature, by representing that which a culture categorically attempts to marginalize, exclude and expel. Readings will engage with the variety of aesthetic functions that the disgusting has been afforded throughout modern literary history, including the carnivalesque and grotesque in Rabelais and the bawdy and satirical in Swift; Zola’s gruesome naturalism, Sartre’s existential nausea and Clarice Lispector’s narrative of spiritual abjection; as well as Thomas Bernhard’s experiments with contempt and Dennis Cooper’s pseudo‐pornographic genre explorations. We will read widely in literary and cultural theories of disgust, as well as in the psychological and biological literature of the emotion. Prerequisite: Strong stomach. (Pre-1650, 1650-1830, 1830-1940, Fiction, Theory)

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century, but his influence on film theory and practice and on cultural theory generally is also considerable. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht's own theatre, from the anarchic plays of the 1920's to the agitprop Lehrstück and film esp Kühle Wampe) to the classical parable plays, as well as the work of his heirs in German theatre (Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss) and film (RW Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge), in French film (Jean-Luc Godard) and cultural theory (the Situationists and May 68), film and theatre in Britain (such as Caryl Churchill or Mike Leigh), theatre and film in Africa, from South Africa to Senegal, and if possible a film or play from the US that engages with Brechtian theory and/or practice. (Drama)

The United States today is in the midst of an incarceration crisis, one in which millions of Americans are currently warehoused within, or have passed through, carceral institutions. Many scholars locate the emergence of this punitive turn in the 1970s, and with good reason: the landscape of penality and confinement looks much different in earlier historical periods. Turning to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this course will explore literary, philosophical, and pragmatic engagements with the prison across the British Empire and in the postcolonial United States. By tracing the particular fears and fantasies that grouped around institutions of confinement, we will explore the logic by which an institution once marginal to social life has become so central to society that incarceration is now a conventional form of life. This course will involve a robust research component, culminating in a final paper; while this course is rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, students will be welcome to pursue research on contemporary regimes of incarceration. Our theoretical readings will include Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Our archive of literary, philosophical, and practical texts will include the Newgate Calendar, Cesare Beccaria, Oliver Goldsmith, John Gay, Jeremy Bentham, James Williams, Harriet Jacobs, and Austin Reed. (1830-1940) This is Seminar in Research and Criticism intended for English majors.

It is a common misconception that literature can happen only in the alphabet or that such non-alphabetical literatures have long ago ceased to be made. This course corrects such misconceptions by exploring modern and contemporary literatures that have been written with, or in response to, such sign-systems as pictographs, hieroglyphs, totem poles, wampum, and khipu. Focusing especially on the sign-systems of the native Americas, this class gives students a basic introduction to the mechanics of these signs, in order to discuss how these mechanics might be at play in the works of such poets, writers, and artists as Anni Albers, Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, John Borrows, Charles Olson, Bill Reid, Robert Bringhurst, Fred Wah, Clayton Eshleman, Cy Twombly, Joaquín Torres-Garcia, Cecilia Vicuña, and others. Key questions to be asked include: how are these signs an interface for contemporary histories of nation and capital? And: how do those material histories and their identifications in race, gender, kinship, and ecology change when cast in the mechanics, tropes, and figures of these signs? As a “Makers Seminar,” this course will include creative alternatives to the standard analytical college paper. (Fiction, Poetry, Theory) This is a Makers Seminar intended for English majors, but is open to all students.