2020-2021

This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald.

This course investigates a battle of genres—primarily of poem versus prose—that twists and turns through much eighteenth- and early nineteenth century writing. Around 1700, the traditional poetic forms such as verse satire and the ode reigned; there were no novels per se, only genre-defying prose fictions by the likes of Eliza Haywood and Aphra Behn. Yet by 1800, not only was the novel a household name but poetry was undergoing an identity crisis of its own, also known as Romanticism: the expressive "I" of the lyric developed in tension with the narrative of epic, not to mention the narrative form of prose. Together, we will ask: How did the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century contend with the classical authority of poetry? How did poems and their reception change in relation to the novel's development and standardization? How did various literary genres differently revive old forms, like the gothic? We'll read works by authors including Dryden, Pope, Haywood, and Behn, as well as Richardson, Macpherson, Radcliffe, Cowper, Smith, Blake, Coleridge, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth. We'll draw critical readings from Aristotle's Poetics, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gérard Genette, Jacques Derrida, and Gabrielle Starr, among others.

This course will study some of the greatest religious poems in our language, focusing on major poets in the 17th century (Donne & Herbert), in the 19th century (Dickinson & Hopkins), and in the 20th century, where we will study T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets in its entirety. Mid-term exercise and final paper required.

This course offers an extended investigation of the origins, meanings, and legacies of one of the most consequential documents in world history: the Declaration of Independence. Primary and secondary readings provide a series of philosophical, political, economic, social, religious, literary, and legal perspectives on the text’s sources and meanings; its drafting, circulation, and early reception in the age of the American Revolution; and its changing place in American culture and world politics over nearly 250 years. 

This course explores the unique challenges of experiencing performance through the page. Students will read plays and performances closely, taking into account not only form, character, plot, and genre, but also theatrical considerations like staging, acting, spectatorship, and historical conventions. We will also consider how various agents—playwrights, readers, directors, actors, and audiences—generate plays and give them meaning. While the course is not intended as a survey of dramatic literature or theater history, students will be introduced to a variety of plays from across the dramatic tradition. 

This course, through attention to critical theory and expressive cultures, surveys gender and sexuality across time and place. Students will learn about theories of sex, gender, and sexuality; colonialisms and nationalisms; social movements; and war, migration, and technology. 

This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We’ll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science.

An introduction to the practice of literary and cultural criticism over the centuries, with a particular emphasis on theoretical debates about meaning and interpretation in the late 20th century and present. Critics and theorists will include Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Barbara Johnson, Raymond Williams, Saidya Hartman, Eve Sedgwick, René Girard, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Lauren Berlant, Catherine Gallagher and others. (Genre Fundamentals, Theory)

From prophetic texts of the ancient world to today's fascination with zombie plagues, environmental disaster, and nuclear winter, the genre of apocalypse has given extraordinarily fertile expression to religious, moral, political, and economic beliefs and anxieties. In this course we will explore what is both fearful and alluring about catastrophe on an unimaginable scale, as we read and view apocalyptic works across a wide historical range. (Fiction)

An exploration of some of Shakespeare's major plays from the first half of his professional career when the genres in which he primarily worked were comedies and (English) histories. Plays to be studied include The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. A shorter and a longer paper will be required. (Pre-1650, Drama)