2017-2018

Modernism is often said to reject traditional sources of value in favor of poetic autonomy. Yet the leading British modernist poets of three successive generations, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Geoffrey Hill, wound up, as Eliot put it, “anglo-catholic in religion.” Perhaps surprisingly, their religious commitments did not lead them to reject poetry’s claim to self-governance; rather, each sought to re-imagine autonomy in theological terms. This course will seek to understand why and how these writers arrived at their ideas of poetry, proceeding through close reading of their poetry and prose. It will also look at adjacent writers, including Hopkins, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Charles Williams, and David Jones, who shared their poetic concerns but not their religious commitments. (C, H)

An intensive study of these two poets, whose work differs radically, but whose friendship nourished some of the most enduring and original poetry of the American 20th century. Close attention to the poems, in the light of recent biographical work and new editions.

Machines, Humans, and the European Novel from Frankenstein to the Futurists In his Scienza Nuova (New Science), Giambattista Vico writes that "the Egyptians reduced all preceding world time to three ages; namely, the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men." What the Egyptians and Vico could not have predicted was that history had yet another age in store: the age of the machine. Carlyle baptized, Marx outlined it, Heidegger warned against it; Deleuze and Guattari proclaimed that "everything is a machine"; and Ted Kaczynski even went as far as to kill in order to free human beings from the "technological slavery" the machine age had purportedly brought about. And yet, as Heidegger wrote, "everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it." So what is technology? What impact did it have on human beings and on the writing of literature as the Industrial Revolution exploded onto the European continent? In this course we will pose anew the question concerning technology within the one field that Heidegger deemed akin to the essence of technology: art, and by deduction, literature. Together, we will trace the ecological, economical, and emotional footprints of various machines and technological devices (automata, trains, phonographs, cameras). We will delve into the topic with Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, continue with a reflection on the human being as a machine (Frankenstein and Pinocchio), transition to accounts on cities, progress, and machines (Dickens, Zola, Eça de Queirós), and end with the Futurists' technological extravaganzas that will include a visit to Chicago's Art Institute. Other readings include texts by Marx, Raymond Williams, Heidegger, Leo Marx, Deleuze & Guattari, etc.                This course will be taught in English. All materials are available in English, but reading in the original languages is encouraged. 

Current political and recent academic debate has 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. Readings will include some of the following literature, Hard Times, Le Pere Goriot, The Jungle, The Time Machine, Native Son, Landscape for a Good Woman, White Tiger, and some of the following economic and political texts Principles of Political Economy, The Acquisitive Society, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Capital (Marx and Piketty), The Price of Inequality and Inequality Re-examined. Undergraduate: (B, G, H), Graduate: (18th/19th)

American fascination with conspiracies – real and imagined – runs through the country’s history from eighteenth-century Illuminati paranoia to the latest intimations of Russian election hacking. Examining a range of fiction from around 1800 to the present, we will explore conspiracy narratives from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Thomas Pynchon. Why does the notion of one’s own manipulation in the hands of shadowy puppet-masters hold such enduring appeal and sway in the American imagination?

This class offers (i) an overview of major European systems of versification, with particular attention to their historical development, and (ii) an introduction to the theory of meter. In addition to analyzing the formal properties of verse, we will inquire into their relevance for the articulation of poetic genres and, more broadly, the history of literary (and sub-literary) systems. There will be some emphasis on Graeco-Roman quantitative metrics, its afterlife, and the evolution of Germanic and Slavic syllabo-tonic verse. No prerequisites, but a working knowledge of one European language besides English is strongly recommended.

For this course, we will read major texts by Freud and Lacan. Freud readings will include “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” “Note on a Mystic Writing Pad,” “The Uncanny,” “Jensen’s Gradiva,” the Dora case, and a selection of texts from other works. Lacan readings: “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” “God and the Jouissance of the Woman: A love letter,” and parts of the Ecrits. We will also read excerpts from a variety of texts that use the writings of Freud and Lacan for theoretical purposes: Derrida, Sarah Kristeva, Irigaray, Zizek and others. (H, G)

This course aims to provide students interested in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka) an overview of key environmental and ecological issues in the subcontinent. We will investigate the ways the environment, ecology and culture of this region have interacted with pre-colonial, colonial and national histories to shape the peculiar nature of environmental issues. Students will be introduced to these issues via the narrative and disciplinary resources that South Asian studies more broadly provide. Given the time constraint of 10 weeks we will consider three major concepts—“extinction”, “disaster” and “dystopia” to see how they can be used to frame issues of environmental and ecological concern. We will approach each concept as a framing device for issues such as conservation and preservation of wildlife, erasure of adivasi (indigenous) ways of life, environmental justice, water scarcity and climate change. The course will aim to develop students’ ability to assess the specificity of these concepts in different disciplines. For example: What methods and sources will an environmental historian use to write about wildlife? How does this differ from the approach an ecologist or literary writer might take? Students will analyze various textual forms: both literary and visual, such as autobiographies of shikaris (hunters), graphic novels, photographs, documentary films, ethnographic accounts and, histories. (H)

This course explores the literary style called realism. How should we understand the relationship between literary representation and the world that it represents? What kinds of aesthetic forms and effects produce an illusion of realness? We will wrestle with these questions through readings that span the nineteenth and twentieth century, including writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, William Wordsworth, Rebecca West and James Joyce.

This course examines the writing—novels, political treatises, letters, travel essays—of two of Romanticism’s most influential women writers. In the concerns that animated their thought, spanning political revolution, sexual freedom, critiques of patriarchy, cosmopolitanism, scientific ethics, monstrosity and apocalypse, Wollstonecraft and Shelley are at once exemplary of the “spirit of the age” and fringe figures marginalized from a society whose mores they transgressed. We will study their major works, attending to historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts, as well as matters of literary concern, such as their pioneering development of modes like gothic and science/speculative fiction, Wollstonecraft’s stylistic theories, and Shelley’s scenes of imaginative sympathy. Course texts will also include several films (Rowing With the Wind, Frankenstein) and selections of the writing of contemporaries: Edmund Burke, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (B, F)