2020-2021

Translation is one of the central mechanisms of literary creativity across the world. This course will offer opportunities to think through both the theory and practice of this art form and means of cultural transmission, focusing on the problems of translation of and by poets in a variety of languages: it will emphasize precisely the genre most easily “lost in translation,” as the truism goes. Topics to be discussed will include semantic and grammatical interference, loss and gain, the production of difference, pidgin, translationese, bilingualism, self-translation, code-switching, translation as metaphor, foreignization vs. nativization, and distinct histories of translation. Alongside seminar sessions for discussion of readings, workshop sessions patterned on Creative Writing pedagogy will offer students a chance to try their hands at a range of tactics of translation.

The stories we tell about America’s rapid modernization at the turn to the twentieth century often emphasize men and male experience: Industrialization, the rise of corporate capital, and urbanization all produced new sites of male heroic agency and likewise new anxieties around masculinity. In this seminar, we orient modernity around women, and in particular the turn-of-the-century feminist ideal of the “New Woman.” The literary and theoretical texts on our syllabus not only ask questions about what a woman is and ought to be, but also regard “the woman question” as crucial to resolving the many social, political, and economic tensions that characterized American modernization. Our readings on the New Woman will likewise guide our analysis of the period’s more intimate histories. Finally, our inquiry into the gender of American modernity will lead us into considerations of race and class. The “New Woman” ideal was for the most part available only to white middle class women. Our seminar will pay considerable attention to texts written by and about women of color, immigrants, and working class women in order to guage their relation to this ideal and to locate feminist modernities outside of it. Authors may include: Henry Adams, Djuna Barnes, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Sui Sin Far, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Margaret Sanger, Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, and Anzia Yezierska.

This course examines imaginative works by women that take on the task of representing divine or supernatural being from the medieval era to the present. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler, we will explore what strategies these writers employ to depict an entity understood to be unrepresentable. What kind of authority is required to present a representation of gods or God to readers, and how do women writers, in particular, establish such authority or manage its absence? What theories of embodiment or spirituality do we find presented in these writings? Is it possible or desirable to articulate a distinctively feminine relation to the body or transcendence across such varied texts? Readings may include Julian of Norwich’s fourteenth-century Revelations of Divine Love, the philosophical writings of Anne Conway, the poems of ‘A’ishah al-Ba’uniyyah, and novels by Marilynne Robinson and Leslie Marmon Silko.

In this class, we’ll examine the notions of kinship and care, analyzing them both as conceptual frameworks and as concrete forms of being-together in human and more-than-human relations. Kinship and care are uncertain territories, fluctuating and dynamic; sites of possibility and futurity. Kin-making and care-giving practices reveal existing structures of oppression as well as the utopian possibilities within relation. We’ll spend much of our time engaging with a set of “experiments” or case studies—historical, science fictional, and critical accounts of community—to see how connection appears as a mode of resistance or survival. Throughout, our collective goal will be to think together about living together. Readings may include SF from Octavia Butler, Claire Coleman, Ursula Le Guin, Wu Ming-Yi; theoretical and critical work from Sara Ahmed, Leela Gandhi, Donna Haraway, Laura Harjo, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Audre Lorde, José Esteban Muñoz, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Dean Spade, Kim Tallbear, Anna Tsing.

Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis’s account of “uterine geographies” and Michelle Murphy’s work on chemical latency and “distributed reproduction” stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see ‘biological reproduction’ as far more than simply biological. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key. This kind of investigation has a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone’s call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction.

1970s feminist theory made a significant conceptual move in provisionally bracketing off biological sex from the historical/cultural work of gender. Feminist science fiction (in contrast), in its brief flourishing in the 70s and early 80s, finds its utopian moments in the biological, in genetic manipulation, reproductive technology, ecological forms of being and new bodies of a variety of kinds. This class will read science fiction, feminist theory and current critical work that concerns itself with biopolitics in order to ask questions about the divide between nature and culture, what's entailed in imagining the future, what gender and genre might have to do with each other, and just what science fiction is and does anyway. Authors include: Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Piercy, Haraway, Rubin, Firestone.

The rise of the modern city makes possible new modes of experience, new kinds of people and personality, and new kinds of stories. Texts include Gaskell, North and South; Dickens, Hard Times; Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray; Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.

Capital is frequently described as a generically difficult-to-categorize text: part satire, part history, part theory. Yet for all this hybridity or ambiguity, there is a sense in which the subtitle makes its generic affiliation quite clear: it is a “critique of political economy.” What exactly is “critique” and how, in light of recent debates in literary studies, might reading Capital sharpen our sense of what it can and cannot do? The bulk of our work in this seminar will be on Marx’s text in its entirely, supplemented by essays by Fredric Jameson, Anna Kornbluh, George Caffentzis, David Harvey, Beverly Best, Barbara Johnson, Gayatri Spivak, and Moishe Postone. 

A course on medieval aesthetics, in the sense both of the formal work of literary art and of the forms of sensation and affect produced by that work. We’ll be examining especially the two great medieval discourses of longing, sexual and religious, as they figure relations of desire to impossible objects. Texts will be drawn from theology, courtly love poetry, allegory, romance, and mystical literature. 

This course investigates the intimate dimensions of contemporary transnational experience. We will focus on representations of familial bonds and on transformations of love relations under conditions of diaspora and migration, and we will consider whether migration and other forms of transnational experience might entail rethinking the contours of terms like family and intimacy. Authors may include Gordimer, Gunesekera, Hartman, Ishiguro, Kincaid, Lahiri, Mootoo, Shamsie, with films by Cronenberg, Liem, and key theoretical texts.