This course focuses on the works of Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul (whom cultural critic Shalini Puri once called a “postcolonial skeptic”), and their interlocutors. We will read fiction and non-fiction alike to investigate history, debt, and violence and the act of writing about the postcolony from the Global North.
This course considers fictional persons, tropes of anthropomorphism and vivification, and personificational allegory as these operate in the theory and practice of medieval imaginative writing. In addition, it places practices of prosopopoeia within ongoing scholarly conversations about lyric voice, literary character, affect, the ontology of fiction, and the relation of speech to writing.
This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts from various centuries whose relation to performance is either partially or fully virtual, including philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, novel chapters in dramatic form, drama on social media, remote online theater on platforms like Zoom, algorithmic theater, mixed reality performance, and transmedia games. One unit of the course attends to experiments in remote theater since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gothic novels are obsessed with what gets left out of rational accounts of experience: fantastic or inexplicable events, feelings of terror, horror, and haunting, scenarios of vulnerability, violence, or pathological desire. In this course, we will ask: when or in what ways does the gothic provide an escape from everyday life? And, when and in what ways does it mirror aspects of psychological, political, or social reality? We will explore these questions by focusing on classic gothic fiction from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Our interests will be literary as well as political and psychological: we will think together about how gothic fiction shapes or challenges what we typically expect from novels, particularly at this nascent moment in the history of both the novel form and the gothic tradition. While we will supplement our readings with a small selection of contextual/critical material throughout the quarter, this course is conceived mainly as an opportunity to engage closely with the novels themselves. (18th/19th)
Current political and recent academic debate have centered on income or wealth inequality. Data suggests a rapidly growing divergence between those earners at the bottom and those at the top. This course seeks to place that current concern in conversation with a range of moments in nineteenth and twentieth century history when literature and economics converged on questions of economic inequality. In keeping with recent political economic scholarship by Thomas Piketty, we will be adopting a long historic view and a somewhat wide geographic scale as we explore how economic inequality is represented, measured, assessed and addressed.
This course will read across “subaltern” autobiographical and literary narratives of exile in order to interrogate the condition of exile in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How is the exile discursively distinguished from the refugee, the migrant, the immigrant? How do the various origins and forms of exile – emergent from colonialism, war, racism, xenophobia, political dissidence, and dispossession – inform our understanding of these broader global machinations? Readings will include works by Edward Said, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Stuart Hall, and Mahmoud Darwish, among others.
This course will explore the structural dynamics of protests through a close examination of giant puppets. We will engage with both practices and theories of protest puppetry. You will learn how to craft insurgent objects out papier maché and other found materials. We will think through this practice alongside theories of the public sphere and ethnographies of protests, uprisings and social movements (on the left and the right) from the 1960s to the present day. Rather than maintain the division between theory and practice, we will investigate the ways in which social movements mobilize theory as liberatory practice and how the practice of “puppetganda” generates theories of publicity from the mechanical and technical demands it makes on its puppeteers, participants and spectators. We will study specific protest events, from pioneers of the artform like Bread and Puppet in the 1960s to the height of protest puppetry during the environmental and global justice movements in the 1980s-2000s. We will ask why protest puppets were especially popular during the rise of neoliberalism and ultimately examine their usefulness in today’s political climate in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and Black uprising as well as the alt-right “rally.”
In recent years, the digitization of texts in libraries has enabled new ways of studying the cultural past with computational methods. This course gives students a beginner-level introduction to these methods, which are sometimes referred to as the “digital humanities.” Computational methods help us ask questions about many hundreds or thousands of texts at the same time, questions that might elude the reach of a single reader. The course itself presumes no technical expertise whatsoever. Rather, we will explore tools designed for beginners and non-specialists. Class projects may include exploring the evolution of taboo language in novels and examining how the themes of science fiction have changed over time. In addition to practicing with text analysis methods, we will discuss some of the ethical and philosophical conundrums of using computers to study texts.
The abuse, misery, squalor and disturbances of the working class gripped the Victorian imagination in an urgent and unprecedented way, permeating all aspects of British social and political life—and no less, its literature. At the same time, “the lower orders” increasingly became not only the subject, but the consumers and even producers of this literature. This course will explore the major historical and political events that shaped the lives of the working class in nineteenth-century Britain through the literature that represented and responded to those lives and events. Following E.P. Thompson’s notion of class as a process, a historical relationship, a lived experience, we will pay attention to the ways in which the working class was present at its own writing. Major topics might include industrialization, Chartism and other working-class movements, Parliamentary Reform, the New Poor Law, emigration, colonialism, slavery, and women’s work. Our survey of literature will cover a range of genres— pamphlets, journalism, political economy and government reports—but we will focus on narrative fiction, contrasting its radical, popular, and bourgeois forms, in order to reflect on how class conflict manifested in the literary marketplace. Major authors will include Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Harriet Martineau. (Fiction, 1830-1940)
In this course, we will read and translate all of the Exeter Book Riddles from Old English, attending closely to issues of language, paleography, textual cruxes, and—of course—interpretation. In an effort to understand these riddles within a broader early medieval tradition of enigmatic poetry, we will also read several Old English charms as well as Anglo-Latin riddles in translation. Emphasis will also be placed on the history of scholarship on early medieval riddles, and over the course of the term, each student will produce a piece original scholarly research that engages with a riddle or set of riddles and the critical tradition.
