Literature

Where and how did democratic ideals emerge? Throughout the history of the world, hierarchies of power and privilege have predominated. Democracy is not the norm. Democracy is the bizarre exception. But 3,000 years ago, ancient Greek epic poetry began to undermine the moral validity of political hierarchies and tyrannical abuses of power. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, ancient Greek literature cultivated ideals of humanity, equality, and justice vital to sustaining humane, egalitarian values, norms, and institutions. Over centuries, ancient Greeks came to understand—as by now we must—that not only individuals but also groups, both large and small, can wield power tyrannically by using violence and intimidation to subjugate others and silence dissenting opinions. Reading selected works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, and others, we will investigate how and why the Greeks developed democratic ideals, why they themselves failed to attain them, and how we might do better. This course is reading- and writing-intensive. We will also encounter ideas that are uncomfortable and troubling in various predictable and unpredictable ways. The course is designed for anyone who welcomes open-minded critical inquiry and is eager to read and calmly discuss texts that are challenging, both intellectually and emotionally. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

The American conception of Japan is largely based on the pop culture that it exports. This is not a politically neutral process. Many of the things that we think of when we hear “Japan”—like anime and manga, ramen and sushi, Pokémon and Zelda, mecha suits and Godzilla, and kawaii (cute) culture—are products consciously pushed abroad by the Japanese government since the 1980s as part of the “Cool Japan” initiative. Many of these modern-day markers of “Japanese-ness” were also shaped by the US occupation of Japan after World War II and other transnational encounters within the Japanese Empire and its aftermath. In this course—through close examination of a range of Japanese media objects, including but not limited to anime and manga, the modern serial novel, cinema, architecture, food, fashion, and video games—we will consider how pop culture forms and circulates around the globe. In the process, we will think through issues of genre and form in transnational media reception: Why are the samurai film and the Hollywood western the same, actually? What can J-Horror tell us about the concerns of postwar Japanese society? Why are cyberpunk stories always set in Japan, and what is the state of “techno-orientalism” today? Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include transition to college, research sessions, literary and media analysis strategies, and academic writing/editing workshops. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

This course will explore the powerful hold that Paris has exerted on literature since the early 19th century, when the city established itself as a world capital of artistic, intellectual, and political life. Our guiding focus will be on how writers use the geography of Paris—streets, monuments, markets, and slums—to depict the complexities of modern life, posing the urban landscape as a place of revolution and banality, alienation and community, seduction and monstrosity. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which the representation of the city allowed writers to question the form and function of literature itself. We will begin with the 19th-century French novelists and poets who made Paris the site of epic literary struggles, including Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, and Émile Zola. We will see how the city provided fertile ground for the aesthetic experimentations of 20th-century literature in works by Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Colette, and Georges Perec. Our study will explore writers who have recorded the often violent and traumatic history of modern Paris, such as Marguerite Duras, Leïla Sebbar, and Patrick Modiano. Finally, we will analyze how Paris is experienced as a cosmopolitan space in works about expatriates, immigrants, exiles, and travelers from authors as varied as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Alain Mabanckou, Faïza Guène, and Enrique Vila-Matas. Beyond our focus on close readings of literary texts, students will have the opportunity to read some historical and theoretical considerations of Paris and also watch several films where Paris features prominently. Class will entail close readings and discussions of primary texts in English translation and focus on how to offer critical analyses of works in seminar discussions and class essays. Biweekly in fall and spring, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include writing workshops, screenings, and field trips.

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury,” Audre Lorde writes. “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Poetry, Lorde continues, helps to bring about an understanding of what is, as well as to imagine what might be. This understanding of literature as shedding new light on existence and as sketching new possibilities held a profound political importance for the tradition of Black women’s writing. This seminar seeks to study that tradition in the 20th century, from writing on the difficulties of Jim Crow, through mid-century responses to the Cold War and the heyday of Black Feminism, to the responses to neoliberal multiculturalism at the century’s close. We will consider Black women’s prose, poetry, drama, and more by authors such as Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and more. Course work will include short analytic essays and a longer research-based conference project. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Comedy is a startlingly various form that operates with a variety of logics. Comedy can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In this course, we will explore some comic modes—from philosophical comedy to modern film—and examine a few theories of comedy. A tentative reading list for fall will include a Platonic dialogue (the Protagoras), Aristophanes, Plautus, Juvenal, Lucian, Shakespeare, Molière, some Restoration comedy, and Fielding. In spring, students may read Jane Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Kingsley Amis, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard. We will also look at film and cartoons. Both semester reading lists are subject to revision. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

This lecture will focus on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential lyric poetry written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem—a legacy that continues to this day. We will explore ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another. The preeminent goal will be to understand each poet’s unique contributions to the language.

This course will read Romanticism as a precursor to our own era of postmodernism. The starting point will be the French Deconstructionist reading of Friedrich Schlegel and his short-lived journal, Athenaeum (1798-1800). As Maurice Blanchot argues, among the many contradictions “out of which romanticism unfolds—contradictions that contribute to making literature no longer a response but a question,” perhaps most significant is that “romantic art, which concentrates creative truth in the freedom of the subject, also formulates the ambition of a total book, a sort of perpetually growing Bible that will not represent but, rather, replace the real.” We will take Blanchot’s insight as our guide in reading an otherwise disparate collection of texts ranging across Romantic time and space. From Germany, besides Schlegel’s aphorisms, we will read Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816) and The Golden Pot (1814); from Great Britain, Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Byron’s Don Juan (1819), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); from Poland, Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1814); from Russia, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1836) and Eugene Onegin (1833), Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1841), and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842); and from the United States, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Along the way, we will periodically depart from the 19th century to emphasize the ways that Romanticism underpins what we take to be our own postmodernist thought. As a response to Don Juan, we will read Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia. Together with Frankenstein, we will read Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story; and will end on a ship-faring note, as we juxtapose Moby Dick with Maggie Nelson’s gender- and genre-bending The Argonauts (2015).

At the start of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is punished by the Puritans of Boston for having a child out of wedlock. She is forced to stand in the town square wearing a dress with a scarlet A on it. As she endures the stares of the crowd around her, Hester thinks back to her past life in England. It will be seven years before she comes to terms with this moment and still longer before she gains full perspective on her life. In her struggle, Hester is like a series of figures in the classic coming-of-age novel, who go from a period in their lives when their perspectives are limited to a time when their experiences lead them to a much deeper self-awareness of who they are in relation to the world at large. In varying degrees, this struggle is one we all go through. This course will trace the history of coming-of-age literature in 19th-century America, generation by generation, from the pre-Civil War years, through the Civil War, to the prosperous 1880s and 1890s and the turn of the 20th century. The kind of personal education that lies at the heart of these books is captured by the narrator of Moby Dick, when he observes, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” In addition to Hawthorne, the authors we will study include Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. In a country that divided over slavery and had to overcome its Puritan origins, the novels we study reflect the conflicts of American society whether rooted in race, class, or the role of women. What unites these books is that, in the end, the self-awareness of their central figures takes on a life of its own. By the time we last see them, they know who they are.

Julian of Norwich is the earliest known woman to author a text in English. In 1373, at the age of “thirty and a half,” Julian fell severely ill. On the brink of death, she experienced a series of visions, which she recorded as her “short text” or Shewings. Sometime after her recovery, she chose a life of solitude as an anchorite; and for the next 40 years, Julian contemplated and elaborated on her visionary experiences. The result is her “long text,” A Revelation of Divine Love, which has been called “the most important work of Christian reflection in the English language.’ The journey of this course will begin with Julian’s Shewings and end with her Revelation—her writings serving as a lens to various traditions of medieval mysticism. Along the way, we will encounter the “intellectual” and “erotic” threads of mysticism woven throughout Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spirituality—from the philosophy of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), and Augustine of Hippo to the poetry of Ibn Arabi, Dante, and Jewish mystics. Next, we will examine how monks and mendicants such as Richard of St. Victor, William of St. Thierry, and Bonaventure understood the intersection of human and divine love, how the knowledge of self leads to the knowledge of God. We will then pause at the fraught waystation of mysticism and heresy to examine how Meister Eckhart’s and Marguerite Porete’s teachings of the soul’s total union with God were met with institutional hostility and violence. Finally, we will land once again in medieval England. After surveying Julian’s English contemporaries, we will embark on a sustained close reading of her Revelation of Divine Love—now with preparation to see how she understood the purpose of her visionary experiences: “Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherfore showed he it thee? For love.”

Masques are the “forgotten genre” of English Renaissance drama, rarely appearing on syllabi or studied with the same frequency as works for the popular stage. Yet, during the first half of the 17th century, they exerted a political and artistic influence that arguably exceeds that of the plays that Shakespeare and company were staging at the Globe Theatre. Masques were bombastic entertainments performed for and by the Stuart court. They were studies in excess, with lavish sums spent upon well-documented costumes and scenery. They were commentaries on the state of things in England, where playwrights like Ben Jonson could speak directly (and critically) to the royalty themselves. They were avant-garde experiments, where creatives like the architect Inigo Jones could reinvent the visual style of theatre for centuries to come and where women—at least aristocratic women—could break ground by performing in dramatic roles at a time when male actors alone occupied the popular stage. In this course, we will dive into the hidden world of the early modern English masque. We will read and discuss Ben Jonson’s pioneering works that established many masque conventions, including The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Queens, and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. We will discuss how masques offered a vehicle for dramatists to comment on current political affairs, colonial projects, and even salacious “true crimes” while reading George Chapman’s The Memorable Masque and John Milton’s innovative masque about chastity and liberation, Comus. Finally, we will encounter texts that reveal just how far these entertainments influenced literary culture more broadly. This will include Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which shows him trying to “keep up” with masque innovations, as well as Margaret Cavendish’s “The Contract,” a romance that details the complex traditions of attending masques—and the thrilling possibility that audience members might become spectacles themselves.

When we consider some of the “great” works of early modern English poetry—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example—we are often tempted to treat them as the product of unique inspiration and individual craft when they are, in fact, heavily invested in creating and sustaining collaborative relationships. The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost were published with dedicatory poems by Sir Walter Ralegh and Andrew Marvell, respectively, that stand as some of the best interpretive readings of each work to date; Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflect the intimacies of patron-client relationships, which forcefully shaped the early modern literary marketplace. Indeed, framing poetic authorship in the early modern period as the work of aloof geniuses can obscure the poetic forms that honored creative communities: verse letters, epitaphs, country house poems, song settings, and unfinished works “completed” after a poet’s death, to name a few. In this course, we will explore collaborative authorship in early modern English poetry. Besides reading selections from The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Paradise Lost, we will survey poetry that illuminates the community ethics of these major texts: Spenser’s friendly verse epistles to his friends and desperate dedications to his patrons; works circulated through the poetic circles fostered by Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke; and the poems written by royalists and revolutionaries to promote new kinds of community during the English Civil War. Along the way, we will also encounter poems that show the unique characteristics of early modern English literary collaboration: Ben Jonson’s verses for his adopted poetic “sons,” Mary Sidney’s heartbreaking completion of her late brother’s psalm translations, and George Herbert’s partnership with the experimental bookbinders Anna and Mary Collett. Course work will include a collaborative “journal” project that will help us explore what it means to read and write in relationship with one another.

The alternate history, which imagines a different present or future originating in a point of divergence from our actual history—a branching point in the past—is both an increasingly popular form of genre fiction and a decreasingly disreputable form of analysis in history and the social sciences. While fictions of alternate history were, until very recently, only a subgenre of science fiction, celebrated American literary novelists Philip Roth and Michael Chabon published well-regarded novels of alternate history—The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, respectively—earlier in this century. Similarly, while counterfactual historical speculation is at least as old as Livy, academic historians have, until recently, scorned the practice as a vulgar parlor game; but this is beginning to change. In the early 1990s, Cambridge University Press and Princeton University Press both published intellectually rigorous books on alternate history and counterfactual analysis in the social sciences; Cambridge more recently published a volume analyzing alternate histories of World War II; and in 2006, the University of Michigan Press published an interesting collection of counterfactual analyses, Unmaking the West. This course will examine a number of fictions of alternate history, some reputable and some less reputable, and also look at some of the academic work noted above. We shall attempt to understand what it might mean to think seriously about counterfactuals and about why fictions of, and academic works on, alternate history have become significantly more widespread. The course will also grapple with what makes an alternate history aesthetically satisfying and intellectually suggestive rather than ham-fisted, flat, and profoundly unpersuasive.

This course will examine representations of pregnancies—both planned and unplanned—in the history of the anglophone novel. From the origins of the English novel in the 18th century through to today, pregnancies signify inheritance, adherence or deviance from gender norms, and metaphorical links between childbirth and birthing a novel. Over the course of the semester, we will consider why this is so. What can fictional pregnancies reveal about the novel as a literary form and about our changing cultural and medical understanding of sex and reproduction? This course will approach the topic of the pregnancy plot from three different perspectives: narratological, historical, and political. In terms of narrative, we will ask how the pregnancy plot emerged as a defining feature of the English novel and how representations of pregnancy have changed over time with changing ideas of gender and sexuality and new reproductive technologies. How does a pregnancy, especially an unwanted pregnancy, drive forward the plot and illuminate character, especially as it relates to gender? What role does the pregnancy plot play in relation to the more widely discussed marriage plot, and how does one narrative strand influence the other? Novels we will consider include works by Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Maggie Nelson. Focusing on works from the 19th through 21st centuries, we will look at historical changes in how people understood and experienced conception, gestation, termination, and labor and delivery. From a political perspective, we will examine contemporary theories of reproductive justice to consider the past from the vantage of our present moment.

In 1904, poet W. B. Yeats and playwright and translator Lady Gregory launched what would become the first state-subsidized anglophone national theatre, which they called the Abbey Theatre. They did so, in their words, to prove to the world that “Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment…but the home of an ancient idealism.” Aiming to correct centuries of misrepresentation, the Abbey Theatre set out to show the world that Ireland could be a cultural center despite the fact that it was considered, at the time, culturally backwards, a thorn in the side of the British Empire, and a victim of unrelenting years of famine and economic impoverishment. More than a century later, the Irish arts scene now produces acclaimed novelists, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and actors—from Sally Rooney to Martin McDonagh to Saoirse Ronan. In fall, we will track this development: beginning in the 19th century, with the rise of the Anglo-Irish novel written by a settler class of Protestant writers; through the Irish Literary Revival, which championed the Irish language, myths, and arts; and then through revolution, partition, and civil war leading to the founding of the Irish Free State. In spring, we will follow the new independent Ireland through years of repressive Catholic control and censorship of the arts and through the late 20th century and early 21st, which saw an economic boom and bust known as the “Celtic Tiger”—the Good Friday Agreement establishing peace in Northern Ireland, as well as a series of public referendums legalizing divorce, gay marriage, and, eventually, abortion. In Ireland, literature and politics are tightly intertwined, with writers fighting as revolutionaries and works of art directly fueling public events such as the Easter 1916 Rising. The course will include readings of playwrights such as J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, and Marina Carr; novelists such as Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Edna O’Brien; and poets such as Yeats, Eavan Boland, and Seamus Heaney. We will also explore notable films by Irish filmmakers. Some of the themes that will be discussed throughout the year include the relationship between tradition and modernity; competing ways of knowing through folklore, religion, and science; imperialism and anti-imperialism; sectarianism and partition; and changing ideas of gender and sexuality.

The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself—a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage, we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, and costumes alongside scenery and lighting. Offstage, we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we will study these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose lifespan is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare will be our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I will be our starting place. Seeing how those plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries will be our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings, from within Shakespeare’s Wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film, will be our work. 

What if the roots of English literature were not wholly English? How were the origins of Italian literature pollinated with Arabic philosophy? This course will explore these questions and more through two foundational texts—Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Often read in isolation, we will instead study these works together—in historical, intellectual, and comparative context—charting how the high tide of Italian literary culture reached the shores of medieval England, how Dante’s vernacular epic of the afterlife helped shape Chaucer’s vernacular epic of earthly life. In fall, we will focus on Dante, treating his formation as a poet and thinker as a window into the formation of Italian literature itself. We will explore his engagement with the Occitan, Sicilian, and Tuscan lyric traditions; his reading of Aristotle through Arabic and Latin commentators; and his response to the burgeoning—and fraught—political and intellectual climate of medieval Florence. Having immersed ourselves in the life, times, and mind of Dante, we will then turn to the Comedy itself, reading all three canticles—the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—with special attention to Dante’s evolving understanding of love and desire. In spring, we will turn to Chaucer and his role in inaugurating vernacular English literature through a rich, self-conscious dialogue with Dante and the other “corone,” or crowns, of Italian literature—Boccaccio and Petrarch. Chaucer’s travels to Genoa and Florence in 1373 and Milan in 1378 were formative for him as a person and poet. At a time when hardly anyone in England had heard of Dante, Boccaccio, or Petrarch, Chaucer read them in the original and responded to them by creating new literary forms. In doing so, Chaucer fashioned a future English literary audience; in a real sense, he wrote for us. We will read Chaucer’s House of Fame (a direct response to the Comedy) and Canterbury Tales, pairing each tale with its Italian analogues and influences. Throughout the year, we will practice comparative reading and source study, mapping how ideas and literary forms travel across, cultures, languages, and borders. In the process, we will encounter the profoundly interconnected intellectual world of Dante’s and Chaucer’s Middle Ages.

Contemporary poems have many unique virtues; in them, we recognize our moment in time refracted in its own cultural and linguistic idiom. Contemporary poems exist at the near edge of literary tradition, where the past ends, and our poetic inheritance becomes a source of invention, a live wire. For a working poet, contemporary poetry offers the most readily available bridge to the resources of the art. All great works of poetry have, of course, the capacity to inspire fresh imaginings. But the shock of the new is often obscured or dulled by canonization—as if poems, too, could be cordoned off in a museum or placed behind glass by their official greatness. But the reputation of the contemporary is always up for grabs. Contemporary poems await our judgment and interpretation. They also pose a significant challenge to our critical faculties. We are, almost by definition, less equipped to evaluate the new, which seeks to establish the standard by which it will be judged. In this seminar, we will read a sequence of the instructor’s “elective affinities” from contemporary poets Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Geoffrey Hill, Mark Strand, Jay Wright, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson. In conference, students will be encouraged to focus on, or discover, their own elective affinities among contemporary poets and select favorite poems to contribute to our final set of readings for class discussion. 

It is often in the realm of fantasy, speculative fiction, experimental writing, or the humble notebook that writers chart a path of escape out of foreclosed futures. These are stories that directly address the limits of our ability to know, observe, or believe the many claims of so-called reality. When statements of fact become obstacles to social change, or when political exigencies occlude alternative possibilities for the future, or when mere accuracies drain us of our living vitality, there are certain kinds of stories that can take us on a detour into a more vivid sense of truth. The time-knot responds to the dead-end by diagramming new ways of envisioning space, movement, causality, interdependence, mutation, and evolution. Discussions of literature will be supplemented by a selection of theoretical texts that offer useful terms for conceptualizing how literary form might escape closure; for example, the time-knot, mimetic faculty, fugitive pose, indigenous storytelling, undercommons, pedagogies of crossing, nomadic subjectivity, virtual, and finitude. Authors will include Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gerald Vizenor, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Francois Jullien, Naoki Sakai, Patricia Clough, M. Jacqui Alexander, Fred Moten, Eve Tuck, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Discussions of literature will be accompanied by a series of weekly, short-form writing experiments that will invite students to work practically and creatively with the concepts and literary tropes of the course. Primary literature will include: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, Octavia Butler’s Dawn, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum, Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe, Tommy Orange’s There There, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, Can Xue’s Frontier, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, Karen An-hwei Lee’s The Maze of Transparencies, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, David Hinton’s Existence: A Story, Han Kang’s The White Book, Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, Joan Didion’s Notes to John, and Annie Ernaux’s The Years.

“Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had,” Charlotte Brontë’s title character exclaims in the concluding chapter of Jane Eyre. Jane’s wedding may be quiet, but the steps leading up to her marriage with a man who once employed her as a governess are dramatic; and so are the steps leading to marriage in the other classic marriage-plot novels with which this course begins. From Jane Austen’s Emma, to Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, the novels we will read in fall reflect the thinking of the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who observes, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” Nothing, in short, is “conventional” about the 19th century English and American classics of Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and James that we will study. They lead directly to Edith Wharton’s turn-of-the-century novel, The House of Mirth, and the modern fiction we take on in spring, which ranges from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Love and romance are at the heart of the books that will dominate our reading, but so are the laughs and heartaches that are part of any serious relationship.

What kind of work is care work? Is it a form of labor? Love? Is caretaking a social or individual responsibility? And who pays for it? This course will question the role of caretaking in modern societies through a range of literary and sociological texts. We will begin with the premise that caretaking is both fundamental to a functioning society and also grossly devalued. This devaluation is marked by the poor pay associated with caretaking professions, as well as the gendering and racializing of caretaking responsibilities. This course will draw on recent writing in disability studies, gender studies, political theory, and ethnic studies—as well as literary works including novels, poems, comics, and memoirs—to consider the experience of the men and women performing care work and those who require their care. We will discuss terms, such as “self-care,” which have become commonplace but that we often encounter as marketing concepts that have been stripped of their origins. This course will aim to situate the concept of caring into historical, political, and aesthetic contexts. Readings and assignments will encourage students to imagine the future of care work in a changing society. This course will involve community engagement with the Wartburg Adult Care Community in Mount Vernon, New York.

The surrealist movement emerged in France in the early 1920s, when a group of writers questioned the narrative of reason, progress, and tradition that had long defined European culture. In exploring the potential of the unconscious, the surrealists endeavored to create an avant-garde artistic and political revolution motivated by desire, madness, and dreams. The concepts and techniques developed by the French surrealists would go on to have an enormous influence on writers, artists, and filmmakers across the globe. This course will explore some of the key ideas, practices, and figures in the history of surrealism. The first portion of the semester will focus on the group’s origin in France. We will read several of the movement’s foundational texts and study many of the strategies that the surrealists invented for artistic creation. From there, we will examine the legacy of surrealism in a variety of locations—from Latin America and the Caribbean to Egypt, Japan, and the United States—in order to see how the movement’s message of revolution and nonconformity has been adopted and adapted by writers and artists up through the present day. Topics addressed will include automatic writing, dream work, mad love, the marvelous, games and chance, urban flânerie, gender and surrealism, anticapitalist and anticolonial surrealism, and reality itself. Although our first focus will be on the literature of surrealism, this will be a very interdisciplinary course; students will see how surrealists made use of many types of media and expression, including drawing, painting, collage, photography, and film. For conference, students will follow the collective model of the movement and pursue small-group projects that will carry on the creative and critical legacy of surrealism. 

While Dostoevsky is often praised for the universality of his themes, in his own day he was a working journalist deeply engaged with the issues facing his own contemporary Russia. This course will seek to contextualize a few of Dostoevsky’s major works by reading them as they were originally written: as part of an ongoing and often heated debate with his contemporaries. We will begin with the distinction between the 1840s and the 1860s that Dostoevsky made famous first in Notes from Underground (1864), then moving on to read Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1872) in the context of the intense debates that drove the latter decade. Our particular focus will be Russian nihilism, above all as it was defined by Turgenev and Chernyshevsky, and also the “woman question,” especially as developed in the works of two women writers, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya and Sofiia Kovalevskaya. We will finish with Nabokov’s extravagant send-up of Chernyshevsky and Russian nihilism in The Gift (1938).

This course will explore the literary culture of the British Isles during the lifetime of the great Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. In his use of humor, shock, whimsy, and quicksilver irony to convey moral outrage and personal pique, Swift has influenced every major satirist who came after him—from Mark Twain to John Oliver. Swift also lived through remarkable times. Between his birth in 1667 and his death in 1745, Britain grew from a war-torn cultural backwater to a military and colonial powerhouse with a stable, if corrupt, political system, several of the world’s great cities, and a sense of national identity that has remained largely consistent to this day. At the same time, the marketplace of literature and ideas in Britain grew increasingly diverse and fractious, as popular fiction appealed to newly literate readers and as authors from the social and colonial margins—including Ireland, a colony within the British Isles—began to make itself heard in print. Swift exemplified many of these developments in his life and work, at once mocking and immortalizing the crime-ridden squalor of London; attacking the English exploitation of Ireland, even as he formed part of the Anglican establishment in Dublin; and honing a form of ironic invective that enlightened, amused, and offended readers of all backgrounds and orientations. This course will cover each of Swift’s major works, from Gulliver’s Travels—both a classic of science fiction and a devastatingly effective satire—to his outrageous scatological poetry and his scathing writings on Ireland, including the notorious Modest Proposal, as well as introducing students to a host of other distinctive voices from this raucous period in English letters. We will, for example, become acquainted with the undisputed master of the heroic couplet, Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, who made satirical poetry of undying power and beauty out of the most unlikely of subjects—such as landscape design and a purloined lock of hair. Other writers under consideration will include England’s first professional female author, Aphra Behn; the second Earl of Rochester, a wildly transgressive poet of sexual libertinism; satirical playwrights such as William Wycherley; the founders of lifestyle journalism, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera, a musical comedy with a cast of thieves and sex workers; and the visual satirist William Hogarth. We may also consider a few modern landmarks of literary and cinematic satire with an 18th-century heritage by writers and directors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Stanley Kubrick, and Boots Riley.

Before the 18th century was dubbed the Enlightenment, it was widely known as the Age of Criticism—a term that captures the growing cultural influence, not least in the English-speaking world, of largely secular commentary on society, politics, morality, and the arts. Suddenly, everyone was a critic, eager to express their opinions in one of the many sites for conversation and debate that were blossoming across Britain and its colonies. Those sites included institutions with brick-and-mortar locations—coffeehouses, taverns, and private clubs—but also the virtual forums made possible by the increasingly inescapable medium of print; parallels to our own social media-dazed era are easy to draw. With the Age of Criticism came a new kind of celebrity: the public intellectual. No man of letters was more renowned for his powers of criticism, conversation, and what he called “clubbability” than Samuel Johnson (1709-84), the gravitational center of our course. In addition to compiling the first English dictionary of note, Johnson was a gifted and hugely influential literary theorist, poet, political commentator, biographer, and satirist, as well as a legendarily pithy maker of small talk and a master of the English sentence. His overbearing but strangely lovable personality was preserved for posterity by his friend and disciple, James Boswell, who in 1791 published The Life of Johnson, the greatest and most entertaining of all literary biographies, which records, among much else, Johnson’s near-blindness, probable Tourette’s Syndrome, and selfless love of cats. Now, after the tercentenary of his birth, this seminar will reappraise Johnson’s legacy within a broad cultural survey of the British Enlightenment. Along with Johnson, Boswell, and other titans of 18th-century prose, such as Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Adam Smith, we will consider international writing on race and slavery (Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, and the abolitionist poets), the French and American revolutions (Edmund Burke), and women’s rights (the Bluestocking Circle and Mary Wollstonecraft). We will also sample the period’s fiction (Horace Walpole’s lurid Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, and Frances Burney’s coming-of-age saga, Evelina), comic drama (Oliver Goldsmith’s uproarious She Stoops to Conquer), and personal writing (Burney’s diary, Boswell’s shockingly candid London Journal), as well as Celtic literature (James Macpherson), visual art (Joshua Reynolds), and the poetic innovations that laid the groundwork for Romanticism (Thomas Gray). We may also glance at Johnson’s reception and influence over the centuries—for instance, in the work of Virginia Woolf.

What is in a feeling, and what does it do? This course will explore how medieval writers understood the emotions—what they called the passions—as forces that move the soul, affect the mind, transform the body, and raise pressing questions about free will and moral responsibility. Because the passions operate at the threshold of the soul and body, virtually every domain of medieval thought had something to say about them—from poetry and medicine to philosophy and contemplative devotion. For instance, physicians like Peter of Spain diagnosed lovesickness and melancholia as genuine medical conditions. Philosophers like Aquinas compiled catalogues of the passions—from joy and sorrow to fear and courage to despair and hope—and offered phenomenological descriptions of how the passions arise through both embodied sensation and ensouled experience. Occitan troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Italian lyric poets like Cavalcanti and Dante could write of love as the bondage of mind and will or the source of ethical nobility and spiritual freedom. (Dante did both.) Mystics like Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich explored how emotional awareness could be refined into subtler modes of spiritual attention and how, at the same time, the inmost experience of divine love could be expressed as ecstatic, passionate feeling. In addition to the themes and writers above, this course will examine how the passions open onto questions of habitus and disposition—how repeated action shapes how we feel and how the way we repeatedly feel shapes our action. We will also consider how emotion is at the center of vice and virtue—how the quality of our feeling determines the quality of our inner life and our life with others. With the help of contemporary scholarship, we will approach the medieval passions with historical and phenomenological methods of analysis. Through these lenses, we will see how the passions in the Middle Ages serve as a unique site for comparative intellectual history, spanning disciplines and bridging ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. At the same time, studying the medieval passions offers something more personal: the chance to recover forms of feeling and attention from the past that might expand the borders of our own in the present.

Whose voices matter in Shakespeare’s plays? In this class, we will draw upon diverse perspectives in the fields of voice and sound studies to explore questions of identity and agency, performance and play, in the works of Shakespeare. We will read and watch stagings of Hamlet, Henry VIII, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth—texts that insist upon understanding voices as powerful, though unpredictable, modes of expression. As we do so, we will learn about the history of early modern dramatic performance. What did voices sound like in the acoustic spaces of 16th/17th-century London’s indoor and outdoor theatres, and how are modern writers and artists responding to the “voice” of Shakespeare today? How did psychology, religion, and stories about witches combine to shape Shakespeare’s theatre music? How might familiar characters and plots become unfamiliar when we approach them through the context of children’s performance? We will also consider the ways that Shakespearean voices challenge our expectations about the performance of gender, race, class, and neurotypicality. “Mad” songs, hyper-drag theatrics, curses, jokes, and choked-up confessions: the variety of speech acts in Shakespeare’s works underscores the wide scope of perspectives that his plays offer. Readings from modern voice theorists like Nina Sun Eidsheim, Amanda Weidman, and Patricia Akhimie will help guide our discussion of the resonant social problems and possibilities that Shakespeare’s voices continue to speak, sing, and shout about.

When the iconoclastic poet John Milton published his masterpiece, Paradise Lost (1667), he had already lost the fight he had spent most of his adult life waging: A king had returned to the throne of England, and the radical energy of the English Civil War seemed to have consumed itself. Why write Paradise Lost—an epic poem about the biblical Creation, the Fall of Man, and the dignity of human freedom—at all? Among other things, Milton’s epic is an act of faith: faith in religious and political imagination; faith in the revolutionary potential of love; and, ultimately, faith in poetry as a means to express his passionate “great argument.” In this course, we will take our time reading all of Paradise Lost, considering its revisionary relationship with the Bible, its complex gender politics, its experimental poetic form, and its bold engagement with scientific advances and philosophical problems. Along the way, we will consider a range of theoretical approaches that literary scholars have taken to comprehend a text that one early reader described as a book that “contains all things.” Finally, we will explore the influence of Paradise Lost on later works, such as William Blake’s mystic poetry, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise.

One group of 19th-century realist novels, also some later novels with apparently comparable ambitions, are sometimes imagined to have been, in part, responses to things that seemed unprecedented; for example, an acceleration of historical velocity, the diffusion of new forms of economic life, the rise of new classes and pressures on older elites, increasing urbanization, and the apparently sudden and disorienting arrival of something denoted by a word that dated from the beginning of the 19th century: modernity. The ambitions of these novels included description and assessment, in the title of one of them, of “the way we live now.” In roughly the same period, a new social science—sociology—appeared, comparably ambitious and also attempting the description and analysis of new forms of social order and social change. Since some of the novelists and sociologists appear to have been engaged in a comparable project, it may be rewarding to read them together—which is what we will accomplish in this course. Our syllabus may include Balzac’s Père Goriot, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Dickens’ Bleak House, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, and Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Whether it proves particularly profitable to read these writers in the same course is to be determined. Nevertheless, we will certainly read some good books.

Whitman famously embraced the internal contradictions in his poetry, asserting, “I contain multitudes.” His statement was also prophetic—and not only with regard to his large and diverse progeny among poets writing in English. Whitman’s impact on Hispanic and Portuguese literary culture began with José Martí’s 1887 essay, “El poeta Walt Whitman,” written by the exiled Cuban poet after hearing Whitman give a public reading. Published in Argentina’s La Nación, Martí’s appreciation incepted a cult of Whitman that spread throughout Latin America, Spain, and Portugal. Whitman became the formative influence on Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (who said of Whitman, “He taught us everything.”), Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz and Peruvian poet César Vallejo. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca included an “Ode to Walt Whitman” in his sequence, “Poet in New York”; and multiple strains in Whitman’s poetry can be found under the various “heteronyms” created by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who not only “contained multitudes” but also provided each of his multiple selves with a name, a biography, and a unique body of literary work. In this seminar, we will begin with Whitman’s major works before turning to the poetry of Pessoa, Lorca, and Neruda, among others. While observing Whitman’s influence on his Luso-Hispanic heirs, we will also strive to appreciate them on their own terms for the imaginative power and originality of their contributions to modern poetry—which have made them national and international figures in their own right. Poems written in Spanish will be read in opposing-page translations, allowing those familiar with the language to make reference to the original.

This aphorism, “We are here because you were there," attributed to British anti-racist activist A. Sivanandan, is the response of contemporary Britons of color to white people who challenge the rights of Britons of color to British residency and citizenship. These resistances come, in part, from the inaccurate belief that Britain was a homogeneously white nation until the mid-20th century and from the ideology that “Black” and “British” are mutually exclusive categories. In fact, there have been people of color resident and participating in British society for hundreds of years; over six centuries, their numbers and their roles expanded steadily in direct relation to the expansion of the British Empire and the colonization of millions of British “subjects” around the world. At its peak in 1922, maps showed the red coloring of Great Britain ruling over of one-quarter of the globe. This course, taught from an anthropological perspective, will explore the ways in which myriad racial categories, including white, have been mutually constituted in Great Britain in the context of shifting cultural, economic, and political circumstances. This will include exploring the differences and conflicts among the four nations that now constitute the nation state that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Hands-on class materials will be multidisciplinary (anthropology, history, geography, literature) and multimedia, with a particular focus on visual images, audio, maps, popular culture, and archival documents. We will look at the nature of British Imperial expansion through trade, settlement, and enslavement; but the main focus will be the resulting racialized landscapes in Great Britain. We will look at the lives of free Black people in Tudor times and the means, both formal and informal, by which enslaved people in Britain freed themselves and blended into Black English communities in the 18th century. We will learn about the merchant sailors who came from West Africa; the Lascars (Muslim sailors) from east of the Cape of Good Hope; and the Chinese seamen from Shanghai and Guangzhou, who established the first China Town in Europe in the London docklands in the 19th century. We will also learn about the Black men and women performing on the stages of theatres in England and Wales. Articulations of race, gender, and sexuality will be central, particularly as they play out in family formations. Intersections with class are critical, too, particularly in the 19th century when the burgeoning white middle class used the same racialized discourses lumping together the English working class, Irish immigrants, and “natives” overseas. We will devote a significant amount of attention to the 20th century, with its two World Wars that depended on the labor of colonized subjects. We will look at discourses about “race relations” in Britain after 1948, which include white nationalist movements, government white papers, and some misguided writings by anthropologists, among other things. Finally, we will explore examples of explosions in popular culture created by second- and third-generation children of Commonwealth immigrants and their allies: music genres, including reggae, ska, and two-tone; films such as Young Soul Rebels, Bend it Like Beckham, and The Stuart Hall Project; and literature, including writings by Fathima Zahra, Aizaz Hussain, Paul Gilroy, and Jackie Kay. Each student will attend the weekly lecture and one weekly seminar meeting. Assignments will include biweekly written reflections, leading seminar discussions, and collaborating in group research projects.

We are told, in one of the earliest accounts of the life and work of the Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569), that his prints and paintings elicited laughter. From pictures of carnival celebrations and children’s games to peasant weddings and riotous hellscapes, the comic artist makes his viewers, both in the late 16th century and today, question whether any of it should be taken seriously. This course will explore the humor element in the work of Bruegel and many others in early modern Europe, examining the possible beginnings of a recognition of the artistic value of comedy and the contributions of these artists to the culture of laughter. Following art historians, as well as cultural historians who have theorized about the emergence of new comic techniques and the impulse to produce pictures in a “comic mode,” we will explore innovative creative practices and the social contexts of humor throughout Europe—from Bruegel in the Netherlands to Annibale Carracci in Italy to Albrecht Dürer in Germany to Jacques Callot in France and beyond. Topics of discussion will include early modern medical perspectives on laughter, shifting notions about humor in relation to civility and decorum, the functions of tragicomedy, the secularization of the image, and the dual roles of entertainment and didacticism in art. This course will involve visits to area museums to study paintings and prints in person.

In 1902, China’s leading intellectual and political theorist, Liang Qichao, observed, “If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.” In the century that followed, reformers, radicals, and regimes repeatedly placed fiction at the center of the national project of modernity. Exploring literature’s contribution to the construction of the Chinese national body, this yearlong seminar uses short stories and novels as windows on a cataclysmic century filled with wars, political revolutions, cultural change, and social upheaval. As writers participated in and commented on these traumatic events, fiction was a key battleground for political, social, and cultural change. In fall, we will encounter short stories and novels that carried forward radical demolitions of the Confucian cultural tradition and political critiques in the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1920s, urban feminists wrote to promote the emancipation of the individual, while a decade later leftist writers exposed the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. How did these works contribute to revolutionary movements? Despite an overall focus on the political dimension, we will take time out to consider some more lyrically inclined writers who explored China’s ethnic margins and the more private dramas of love and despair. In spring, we will delve into the socialist realism of Communist fiction to identify its unique qualities and role in Maoist political life before turning to the literary reassessments of Maoist excesses in the reform era (1980s) and the place of literature in the neoliberal atmosphere of post-Tiananmen (1989) China. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand China’s revolutionary past, its ragged cultural tradition, and a rapidly changing society and economy. What is the relationship between art and politics in these ostensibly (even studiously) apolitical works? And finally, we will also cover Taiwanese literature from the 1960s-1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Readings will include many of the great characters in early 20th-century literature, such as Lu Xun’s cannibalistic madman and hapless Ah Q, Ding Ling’s tubercular Miss Sophie, Shen Congwen’s Hmong villagers, and Zhang Ailing’s college student turned mistress-assassin. We will also meet blood-drenched bandits, long-suffering peasants, and disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for group conferences and biweekly for individual conferences. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

In 1902, China’s leading intellectual and political theorist, Liang Qichao, observed, “If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.” In the century that followed, reformers, radicals, and regimes repeatedly placed fiction at the center of the national project of modernity. Exploring literature’s contribution to the construction of the Chinese national body, this yearlong seminar uses short stories and novels as windows on a cataclysmic century filled with wars, political revolutions, cultural change, and social upheaval. As writers participated in and commented on these traumatic events, fiction was a key battleground for political, social, and cultural change. In fall, we will encounter short stories and novels that carried forward radical demolitions of the Confucian cultural tradition and political critiques in the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1920s, urban feminists wrote to promote the emancipation of the individual, while a decade later leftist writers exposed the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. How did these works contribute to revolutionary movements? Despite an overall focus on the political dimension, we will take time out to consider some more lyrically inclined writers who explored China’s ethnic margins and the more private dramas of love and despair. In spring, we will delve into the socialist realism of communist fiction to identify its unique qualities and role in Maoist political life before turning to the literary reassessments of Maoist excesses in the reform era (1980s) and the place of literature in the neoliberal atmosphere of post-Tiananmen (1989) China. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand China’s revolutionary past, its ragged cultural tradition, and a rapidly changing society and economy. What is the relationship between art and politics in these ostensibly (even studiously) apolitical works? And finally, we will also cover Taiwanese literature from the 1960s to the 1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Our readings include many of the great characters in early 20th-century literature, such as Lu Xun’s cannibalistic madman and hapless Ah Q, Ding Ling’s tubercular Miss Sophie, Shen Congwen’s Hmong villagers, and Zhang Ailing’s college student turned mistress-assassin. We will also meet blood-drenched bandits, long-suffering peasants, and disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required.

This seminar will explore the realm of private life and individual identity and their relationship to the historical events and changes taking place in modern China from late Qing (1644-1911) up into the Reform era (2000s). Investigations will cover an eclectic mix of “personal” writings: diaries, letters, memoirs, oral testimony, autobiographies, third-party anthropological reconstructions of individuals, and (auto)biographical fiction. Among others, we will encounter late imperial Confucian radicals and mystics, petty literati, young urban women and their mothers with bound feet, peasants, radical revolutionaries, intellectuals, Maoist Red Guards, and factory workers. These personal narratives not only open up windows on the lives and times of their writers but also allow us to investigate the intersection between the practice of writing and identity construction in modern China. Primary readings will be contextualized with historical scholarship and supplemented with selections from some important theorists (Benedict Anderson, Anthony Giddens, and René Girard) that provide interdisciplinary analytical tools to explore the construction of personal identity and the self. We will ask how the personal narrative writers present themselves: What are their self-conceptions and self-deceptions? Where does their sense of “self” come from, and how do they construct private selves through writing? We should even dare to ask whether these categories of “private” and “self” are relevant. The rapid, often traumatic, changes of modern China will cause us to consider how these people understood and situated themselves in wider society and the events of their time and, thus, will raise questions about the imaginative constructions of national (or social) communities that are smuggled inside these “personal” stories.

When we encounter dancing, what are we seeing, experiencing, and understanding? How do current representations of dance reflect, perpetuate, and/or disrupt familiar assumptions about personal and social realities? Embedded historical ideas and enforcements based on race, economic class, gender, social/sexual orientation, nationality/regional affiliation, and more are threaded through our daily lives. Performing arts inside and outside of popular culture often reinforce dominant cultural ideas and feelings. Can they also propose or inspire alternatives? In fall, we will view samples of dancing in film, video, digital media, television programs, and commercials, as well as live performance. These viewings—along with reading selected texts from the fields of dance and performance, literary criticism, feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies—will form the basis of class discussions and exercises. In spring, we will shift focus to viewing still images and live action with readings from additional fields, including art criticism and neuroscience, as well as fine-tuning approaches to writing about our subject matter. Students will complete several class assignments each semester, as well as develop one or more substantial lines of inquiry for conference work. Conference projects may draw upon multiple disciplines, including those within humanities and creative arts. The central aim of this course will be to cultivate informed discussion and to produce new knowledge, increasing both individual and collective capabilities. We will use academic research, along with personal experience, to advance our recognition of dance as an elemental art form and as a potentially important orientation in adjacent studies. In both fall and spring, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences.

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? How did typewriters invert the gender of writing? Can patriarchal aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” filmmaking? Should dead stars and inventors be revived as feminist icons? How do we excavate invisible women’s histories? This course offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film and media history. Readings will cover a wide range of feminist film and media scholarship, from psychoanalytic feminist film theory to cyberfeminism and feminist media archaeology. The focus will be primarily on European and US film and media, but conference projects may exceed these bounds. In fall, we will study film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. Weekly screenings will highlight a mix of obscure and canonical narrative, experimental, and documentary films from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. In spring, we will zoom out from film to explore the relatively new field of feminist media studies. Starting in the Enlightenment, we will trace an alternative cultural history of modern gendered media, media machines, and media workers, using formative feminist conceptual frameworks to study spindles, novels, “female thermometers,” fictional androids, telegraphic romances, and computers. In place of a weekly screening, students will examine primary sources across multiple media through a mix of reading, viewing, and listening assignments.

Since the Lumière brothers filmed their female employees leaving the factory in 1895, the “working girl” has become a fixture of global cinema. This lecture approaches this archetypal modern character as a foundational figure for film history and an important vernacular link for national film industries competing with Hollywood. We will begin by asking: What is a working girl? How has the category changed over the course of the 20th century as it has circulated around the globe, despite its fraught ideological construction? And how can we turn the category into a tool for intersectional feminist film history? With these questions in mind, we will launch our investigation in the United States and Europe and then move on to the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and Cameroon. We will read classic film theory, short fiction, and local histories of film culture and gendered labor alongside films about shopgirls, dancing girls, telephone girls, factory girls, office girls, laundresses, and maids. Topics to be discussed will include working girls as moviegoers, cultural imperialism and vernacular modernism, migration and mass reproduction, sex work, workplace romance, and contradictions of capital and care. In this class, students will conduct comparative, multimedia analyses of film texts and read global film history through the globalization of modern gendered labor. 

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. More than other countries, France’s identity was shaped by centuries of what is now perceived by the French as a historically coherent past. In this course, we will explore the complexities of today’s French identity—or, rather, identities—following relevant contemporary controversies that have shaken French society in the past 30 years while simultaneously exploring historical influences and cultural paradigms at play in these débats franco-français. Thus, in addition to newspapers, online resources, recent films, television series, and songs, we will study masterpieces of the past in literature and in the arts. Topics discussed will include, among others, school and separation from faith; cuisine and traditions; immigration and urban ghettos; women and feminism in France; France’s relation to nature and the environment; the heritage of French Enlightenment (les Lumières), duty to remember (devoir de mémoire), and France's relationship with dark episodes of its history (slavery, Régime de Vichy and Nazi occupation, and the Algerian war). Authors studied will include Marie de France, Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Proust, Colette, Duras, Césaire, Djebar, Chamoiseau, and Bouraoui. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant will be required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. This course is specifically designed to help prepare students to study in the Paris global education program.

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also develop their French writing skills, with an emphasis on analytical writing. The events of the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799—what the French call “la Grande Révolution”—were so dramatic and foundational that revolution has become a basic paradigm of French thought in politics and culture. In order to understand this legacy, one must first study the “Grande Révolution” itself. Thus, this course will be divided into two parts. In fall, we will study the original French Revolution, beginning with the forming of the Estates-General and the storming of the Bastille in 1789. We will familiarize ourselves with the Revolution’s unusual characters—from Marie Antoinette to Robespierre—and with major events and debates of the time. Students will study a variety of sources: histories, film, and primary materials such as caricatures and revolutionary posters. We will stage debates and act out scenes to better understand what was at stake in this shift from ancien régime to nouveau régime. In spring, we will focus on the relationship between politics and culture, studying five subsequent episodes of revolution: the Haïtian Revolution, Les Trois Glorieuses (otherwise known as the July Revolution), the Revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, and the events of May 1968. Course materials in spring will include poems, short stories, excerpts of Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, films, and posters. At the end of spring, we will also look at the use of revolutionary rhetoric and tactics in present-day movements in France, such as the environmental movement, riots in the banlieue, and the #MeToo (or #BalanceTonPorc) movement.

This course will explore how French and francophone writers in the postwar era have used literature as a means of writing their identities, memories, and life narratives. We will study how writers made use of both traditional genres of life writing, such as autobiography, diaries, and memoirs, alongside more experimental and hybrid forms of narrative. We will see how authors constructed their identities on the page through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, or history. Theoretical readings on memory, trauma, and testimony will allow us to explore the fraught relationship between fact and fiction when writing the self. Topics will include the representation of childhood and the family, women’s autobiography, confessional narratives, witnessing and testimony, intellectual development, language and learning, authenticity and documentation, and the relationship between self and other. Students will read both excerpts from longer texts and several works in their entirety. Authors studied may include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hervé Guibert, Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Nina Bouraoui, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, and Édouard Louis. Several autobiographical films might also be screened to help understand the relationship between memory and media. In conference, students may undertake a critical or creative autobiographical project of their own or study other aspects of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature and culture. Alongside the study of literary texts, we will review some key lessons in French grammar and composition.

This course will provide an intensive introduction to Ancient Greek grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, with the aim of reading the language as soon as possible. By fall mid-semester, students will be reading authentic excerpts of Ancient Greek poetry and prose. Students will also read and discuss English translations of selected works of Plato, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Pseudo-Xenophon. In spring, while continuing to refine their knowledge of Greek grammar and their reading skills, students will read extended selections of Plato’s Apology in the original Greek. Biweekly individual conferences with the instructor, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

The term “realism” enjoyed an unprecedented vogue in 19th-century Europe. All manner of doctrines and ideologies prided themselves on their “realistic” understanding of the human predicament and the structure of the universe while disdaining rival doctrines as captive to illusions and prejudices. Students in this course will read and discuss texts illustrating influential forms of 19th-century European realism in philosophy, ethics, and politics. They will also consider realism in literature and painting. We will try to identify what exactly realism meant to each of these philosophical and artistic tendencies and to discover why 19th-century Europeans found the concept of realism so irresistible. Since the schools of thought to be investigated often conceived “reality” in diametrically opposed ways, the course will provide an introduction to a number of the most significant intellectual debates of the 19th century. Thinkers to be discussed include Malthus, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud; creative artists studied will include Turgenev, Strindberg, Courbet, Manet, and Degas. 

In 1902, China’s leading intellectual and political theorist, Liang Qichao, observed, “If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction.” In the century that followed, reformers, radicals, and regimes repeatedly placed fiction at the center of the national project of modernity. Exploring literature’s contribution to the construction of the Chinese national body, this yearlong seminar uses short stories and novels as windows on a cataclysmic century filled with wars, political revolutions, cultural change, and social upheaval. As writers participated in and commented on these traumatic events, fiction was a key battleground for political, social, and cultural change. In fall, we will encounter short stories and novels that carried forward radical demolitions of the Confucian cultural tradition and political critiques in the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1920s, urban feminists wrote to promote the emancipation of the individual, while a decade later leftist writers exposed the evils of Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. How did these works contribute to revolutionary movements? Despite an overall focus on the political dimension, we will take time out to consider some more lyrically inclined writers who explored China’s ethnic margins and the more private dramas of love and despair. In spring, we will delve into the socialist realism of communist fiction to identify its unique qualities and role in Maoist political life before turning to the literary reassessments of Maoist excesses in the reform era (1980s) and the place of literature in the neoliberal atmosphere of post-Tiananmen (1989) China. We will interrogate fictional works in postrevolutionary China for how they deal with and understand China’s revolutionary past, its ragged cultural tradition, and a rapidly changing society and economy. What is the relationship between art and politics in these ostensibly (even studiously) apolitical works? And finally, we will also cover Taiwanese literature from the 1960s to the 1990s, as it, too, grappled with economic development, its political basis, and social effects. Our readings include many of the great characters in early 20th-century literature, such as Lu Xun’s cannibalistic madman and hapless Ah Q, Ding Ling’s tubercular Miss Sophie, Shen Congwen’s Hmong villagers, and Zhang Ailing’s college student turned mistress-assassin. We will also meet blood-drenched bandits, long-suffering peasants, and disaffected urban youths in an age of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. No prior knowledge of China (history or literature) is required.

A friend put her arms around Edna Pontellier, feeling her shoulder blades, in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, The Awakening. Why? To see if her wings were strong. “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings,” she told Edna. “It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.” In this course, we will read the work of US women writers who soar “above the level plain of tradition and prejudice” and study women artists, workers, and activists of all kinds over two centuries. Historians will help us understand the worlds in which these women lived and, hence, the strength they must have used to offer their voices. We will focus on women both inside and outside the worlds of privilege in which Edna lived. In fall, the focus will include the life of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife; the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, an early African American poet; the cultural criticism of abolitionist activists like Harriet Jacobs and Lydia Maria Child; the essays of early critics of gender convention like Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller; and resistance among women workers and the women who wrote about their “mighty hunger and thwarted dreams.” We will also read Julia Ward Howe’s unfinished mid-century novel, The Hermaphrodite, in which she explores the constraints of the gender binary, and consider the lives and resistance of Native American women. In spring, we will look at the work and life of recent immigrants like Jewish American Anzia Yezierska, Harlem Renaissance writers like Nella Larsen, struggling white Midwestern radicals like Meridel Le Sueur, early environmentalist activists like Josephine Johnson, closeted radical women in lesbian pulps like that of Patricia Highsmith, early Civil Rights activists like Ann Petry, and powerful cultural critics like Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, among others. We will analyze political cartoons and manifestas from the women’s liberation movement and watch a few notable films directed by women. Taught mainly through primary sources, this course will bracket those novels and stories with scholarship to provide a sense of historical context. Themes will include race, class, ethnicity, immigration and migration, sexuality, and, of course, gender. This is not a classic survey but, rather, readings in the cultural history of the nation framed with political and social history. Assessments will be oral as well as written, with an emphasis on developing analytic and historical arguments. There will be opportunities to explore individuals and groups, based on student interest, through historical research.

In the 16th century, Europe entered upon a religious crisis that was to permanently alter the character of Western Christianity. Between 1520 and 1580, the religious unity of Catholic Christendom was destroyed, as believers throughout Central and Northern Europe severed their ties with the papacy to form new “Protestant” communities. But the impact of the religious crisis was by no means confined to the emergence of the churches of the Reformation. Luther’s revolt against the Roman church ushered in an era of soaring religious creativity and savage religious conflict that lasted for nearly two centuries and revolutionized thought, art, music...and politics. The modern state is ultimately a product of the Reformation crisis, as is the system of international law that still governs the relations among sovereign states. Students in this course will examine multiple aspects of the religious, intellectual, and political history of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Readings will focus attention on the diversity of religious thinking and religious experience in this era. Besides tracing the rise of the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican churches and the complex history of the “Radical Reformation,” we will consider forms of belief independent of any church and new varieties of skepticism and doubt. We will also devote considerable attention to the reform movements that transformed Roman Catholicism during those two centuries and the upsurge of missionary energy and mystical spirituality that accompanied them. We will investigate the effects of the Reformation crisis on politics and the state and on the social order that Europe inherited from the Middle Ages. As part of this investigation, we will examine the most important political struggles waged in the name of religion between 1524 and 1689: the Peasants’ Revolt and Thirty Years’ War in Germany, the Dutch revolt against Spain, the French Wars of Religion, and the English Revolution. Texts will include works by Luther, Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, Queen Marguerite of Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Pascal. 

By the 20th century, African Americans produced a distinctive ethos and aesthetic of pleasure not only in music and dance but also in sports and other creative arts. Artists like Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane were paradigmatic in that cultural production. In turn, the blues ethos and jazz aesthetics influenced the African American imagination in social, political, economic, and cultural life, as well as in architecture and science.

This course will examine aspects of European culture in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. This was the era of the Decadent and Symbolist movements; of Secessionist art and architecture; of the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and William James; and of early psychoanalysis. Though in the eyes of some Europeans, looking back at the period nostalgically across the smoking battlefields of World War I, these decades were la belle époque—the “beautiful time” of peace and security—others remembered them as “the gay apocalypse,” a hectic burst of cultural experiment against a background of political paralysis which together heralded the end of the old Europe. While the primary focus of this course will be on creative figures active in Vienna and other parts of the Habsburg monarchy, we will also consider writers, artists, and thinkers from Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and the English-speaking world. These figures will include August Strindberg, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Andrei Bely, Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch. We will also look at the Nietzsche cult, “life-philosophy,” and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

This course, for students with no previous knowledge of Italian, will aim to provide a complete foundation in the Italian language with particular attention to oral and written communication and all aspects of Italian culture. The course will be conducted in Italian after the first month and will involve the study of all basic structures of the language—phonological, grammatical, and syntactical—with practice in conversation, reading, composition, and translation. In addition to material covering basic Italian grammar, students will be exposed to fiction, poetry, songs, articles, recipe books, and films. Held once a week, group conferences will aim to enrich the students’ knowledge of Italian culture and develop their ability to communicate; this goal will be achieved by readings that deal with current events and topics relative to today’s Italian culture. Activities in pairs or groups, along with short written assignments, will be part of the group conference. In addition to class and the group conferences, the course has a conversation component in regular workshops with the language assistant. In small groups, conversation classes will be held twice a week and will center on the concept of Viaggio in Italia: a journey through the regions of Italy through cuisine, cinema, art, opera, and dialects. The Italian program will organize trips to the Metropolitan Opera and relevant exhibits in New York City, as well as the possibility of experiencing Italian cuisine firsthand as a group. By the end of this course, students will attain a basic competence in all aspects of the language. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, regular individual meetings with an Italian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

This course will aim to improve and perfect the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works studied will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. Biweekly conference topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. In small groups, conversation classes will be held twice a week with the language assistant; students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture. 

In this course, students will develop their comprehension of Latin grammar, vocabulary, word inflection patterns, and syntax by close reading of selected works of Catullus and Cicero in fall and Ovid and Livy in spring. The ancient Roman Republic lasted 450 years before imploding into a military dictatorship. The democratic republic in the United States, modeled on the ancient Roman Republic, has lasted just 237 years and now confronts forces threatening to replace it with dictatorship or some form of authoritarian populism. Examining works of poetry and prose, both accompanying and following the advent of autocracy in ancient Rome, we will consider the value and limits of literature for exposing, challenging, or affirming hierarchical and tyrannical ideals, institutions, and norms.

“On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf observed, “human character changed.... All human relations shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” In her novels, essays, reviews, biographies, and polemics, as well as in her diaries, letters, and memoirs, Woolf charted and fostered the cultural and political forces behind those changes as they developed across the century. Over the course of that century, Woolf’s image also changed from that of the “invalid lady of Bloomsbury,” a modern, a madwoman, and, perhaps, a genius to that of a monster, a feminist, a socialist, a lesbian, and an icon. While focusing on the development of her writing, we will also consider her life and its interpretation, her politics and their implications, and the use of her art and image by others as points of reference for new work of their own. Her family, friends, lovers, and critics will all appear. We will also be reading her precursors, her peers, and those who—in fiction, theatre, and film—took up her work and image in the decades after her death. This course will serve as an introduction to 20th-century fiction, feminist literary study, lesbian/gay/queer studies, the study of sexuality, and the study of politics in literature. Conference projects might focus on one other writer, a range of other writers, one of these approaches to literary analysis, or another aspect of feminist or LGBT studies.

The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself—a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage, we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, and costumes alongside scenery and lighting. Offstage, we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we will study these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose lifespan is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare will be our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I will be our starting place. Seeing how those plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries will be our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings, from within Shakespeare’s Wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film, will be our work. 

Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, addressing fundamental questions about being and time, about the human condition, and about ethics and politics, science and religion. Despite the universal nature of these questions, for most of these 2,500 years philosophy was practiced (at least publicly) mostly by men. It was not until the 20th century that this convention began to be significantly challenged, both practically (by the fact that more and more women entered the forefront of philosophical work) and theoretically (by questioning the historical contents of this male-dominant tradition). This yearlong course will be a survey of continental philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries that, countering the aforementioned tradition, focuses exclusively on the work of women in philosophy. Among the authors we may read are Sarah Ahmed, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Karen Barad, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Melany Klein, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Simone Weil, Sylvia Wynter, and Virginia Woolf. Some of these philosophers are feminist or consider sexual difference as philosophically pertinent, and some are not. One way or another, surveying their thought will be our means for acquiring a comprehensive view of key developments in continental philosophy in the last and present centuries, including phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, feminism, Black feminism, decolonial, and queer theories. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course (readings will not normally exceed 30 pages per week, but philosophical texts can be extraordinarily demanding). Students will be evaluated based on weekly reading assignments, participation in group work and group discussions during class, and timely submission of three short papers each semester, as well as demonstrable investment in conference work throughout the year. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences that may include academic skill development such as time management and effective communication, as well as research, reading, writing, and editing. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

What is being? What is time? What is justice? What is truth? What is the best way to live, and should we fear death? More than 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece, a tradition of asking this sort of question developed under the name “philosophy,” which is Greek for “love of wisdom.” Veering away from the mythological and religious traditions dominant at the time, the first writers we now recognize as “philosophers” broke radically new ground for self-understanding and set the stage for modern scientific, political, and theological ideas. In this course, we will read the earliest surviving texts of this tradition by a group of authors who are now known collectively as the “Pre-Socratics.” These include Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Ancient Atomists, to name a few. These texts are fragmentary, since the full works are lost. The ideas that we find in them are creative, inspiring, and often funny. Studying them is an opportunity to reflect on what “philosophy” means and an invitation to philosophize, perhaps becoming philosophers ourselves. This survey course on the origins of philosophy is designed both for beginners, for whom it would serve as an introduction, and for those more experienced in philosophy who wish to enrich their knowledge of its roots. We will accompany our readings of the first philosophers with commentaries by later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, and with occasional reference to non-Greek or non-philosophical sources.

At a time of great crisis in Russia and in Ukraine, the study of Russian remains essential to the understanding of Russian politics, history, and culture. It is also an easy move from Russian to the study of other Slavic languages, including not just Ukrainian but also Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, etc. To learn a new language is to open yourself to another worldview, both as you gain entry into another culture and as your own sense of self is transformed. In another language, you are still you; but the tools that you use to create and express that identity change. As English speakers find themselves in Russian, they first need to come to terms with an often complicated grammar. We will tackle that aspect of our work through a degree of analytical thought, a great deal of memorization, and the timely completion of often lengthy, biweekly homework assignments. As students reflect on the very different means of expression that Russian offers, they will engage in basic, but fully functional, conversational Russian at every point along the way. Our four hours of class each week will be devoted to actively using what we know in both pair and group activities, role play, dialogues, skits, songs, etc. As a final project at the end of each semester, students will create their own video skits. Weekly individual meetings with a Russian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences. 

At a time of great crisis in Russia and in Ukraine, the study of Russian remains essential to the understanding of Russian politics, history, and culture. It is also an easy move from Russian to the study of other Slavic languages, including not just Ukrainian but also Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, etc. To learn a new language is to open yourself to another worldview, both as you gain entry into another culture and as your own sense of self is transformed. In another language, you are still you; but the tools that you use to create and express that identity change. As English speakers find themselves in Russian, they first need to come to terms with an often complicated grammar. We will tackle that aspect of our work through a degree of analytical thought, a great deal of memorization, and the timely completion of often lengthy, biweekly homework assignments. Even as I encourage students to reflect on the very different means of expression that Russian offers, I also ask that they engage in basic, but fully-functional, conversational Russian at every point along the way. Our four hours of class each week will be devoted to actively using what we know in both pair and group activities, role play, dialogues, skits, songs, etc. As a final project at the end of each semester, students will create their own video skits. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a Russian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged. 

Ahead of intermediate study, students already know the basics of Russian grammar; thus, this course will emphasize grammar review, ever more vocabulary, and more speaking of what is already known. We will turn to more reading, starting with a variety of texts with a strong oral orientation. Past studied texts have included: Daniil Kharms’ absurdist play, The Circus Shardam; the Soviet children’s classic, Mister Twister; and the famous Russian translation of Winnie the Pooh. At the end of this course, students should feel that they have a fairly sophisticated grasp of the language. Students will also participate in individual conference work with the instructor. While students may incorporate films and/or music into their conference projects, the hope of this one-on-one time is to prioritize additional reading, including song lyrics and/or screenplays, as well as poetry and short stories. As cultural opportunities in Russia remain limited, students will also be encouraged to use conference to explore the more broadly postcolonial but russophone world. As the crisis in Russia and Ukraine continues, that is where the interesting questions are being asked. Regular written homework will be required, along with weekly conversation sessions with the Russian assistant. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged.

This introductory course will offer a comprehensive foundation in spoken and written language, focusing on pronunciation, speaking, listening comprehension, reading, and writing. Intended for students with no prior knowledge of Spanish, the course will integrate classroom learning with language-lab exercises to reinforce and supplement material. Through a variety of activities, students will develop the skills necessary to engage in basic conversations, comprehend short texts, and express simple ideas in writing. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand basic spoken phrases, introduce themselves and talk about family and friends, express their needs in everyday situations, and write short personal essays. Additionally, the course will explore the rich diversity of Hispanic cultures through music, films, and poetry, strengthening students’ cultural knowledge and appreciation. Through the study of women poets like Angelamaría Dávila, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Cristina Peri Rossi, as well as urban and punk music movements, students will explore themes of resistance, identity, and cultural change. Group conferences will provide an opportunity to expand upon what we have learned in the classroom and provide a space to address any additional questions or concerns regarding the materials presented thus far. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a Spanish language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

Hidden in plain sight, conveniently co-opted for political and ideological reasons, or erased from historical and national literary textbooks, Afro-Latin American and Caribbean women have long endured a battle against an imposing silence. As an undeniable trace of their existence and agency, their writings reveal a creative intellect employed to partake in the conversations that their compatriots insisted on having without them. Aware of this dynamic, these women turned to literature to circulate their ideas and, in so doing, granted us a hemispheric conversation that complicates our understanding of women’s epistemology and positionality in Latin America and the Caribbean. This discussion-based seminar will delve into that dialogue. Throughout the semester, we will read and analyze enriching narratives originally written in Spanish by Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Some of these writers will include Salomé Ureña Díaz, Virginia Brindis de Salas, Luz Argentina Chiriboga, María Teresa Ramírez, Mayra Santos-Febres, and Mariángel Gasca Posadas. Through these case studies, students will learn about “artivisim” and come up with adequate creative and scholarly responses. To advance their critical-thinking skills in this target language, students will further hone their communication and comprehension skills through advanced grammar review and weekly conversation sessions in small groups with the language assistant. This seminar will contain an individual conference project.

The growing recognition of Latin American comics as a subject of academic study in the 21st century has further diversified the medium in the region. This course will explore the representation of Indigenous identities and cultural narratives in contemporary Chilean comics, focusing on works published during the 2000s boom. This moment was driven by various factors, such as collaborative projects, the strengthening of distribution circuits, efforts by independent publishers, access to global comic industries, and state funding opportunities. Students will engage with frameworks from comics studies and critical theory to analyze how these graphic sources challenge hegemonic representations and contribute to broader discussions on Indigenous representation, cultural resistance, and transnational dialogues on race and ethnicity. Students will analyze comic genres ranging from historical fiction and fantasy to superheroes and horror. The course will examine how Indigenous cultures are represented within the framework of post-indigenism, as studied through Alemani’s research. Rather than merely recalling pre-Hispanic myths or questioning identity in response to colonial wounds, contemporary Chilean comics position Indigenous narratives within a globalized world through complex sequential narratives and hybrid aesthetics. Among other references, Chajnantor draws on Japanese manga to depict cultural aspects of the high plateau and the Atacama desert, while the Varua saga examines historical milestones and oral traditions to reconstruct Rapa Nui cultural memory. Adventure comics shape Mapuche superhero resistance in Guardianes del Sur, and manga-inspired robots depict a Selk’nam futurist society after settler colonialism in Mecha Selk’nam. The collaborative project Mitoverso creates a universe of superheroes inspired by folk stories, while Los fantasmas del viento articulates the intersection of Indigenous groups and European descendants in the Patagonian region. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research visit to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Society of Illustrators, Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase, and The Drawing Center. All primary sources, class discussions, and assignments will be in Spanish.

What role does speculation play in subverting the past, rethinking the present, and building different futures within the Americas? The field of speculative fiction uses multiple forms of arts and media to craft fictional imaginaries that have become a vehicle to narrate historical horror by studying Merla-Watson and Olguín and to criticize versions of modernity imposed across the Americas by studying Colanzi. While these speculative imaginaries use the codes of fiction—such as space-time travel, horror, robots, alternative realities, zombies, and genetics—they also expand upon them to address struggles of the Americas’ history of colonialism, dispossession, and mestizaje. In this advanced seminar, we will engage in a cross-cultural trajectory of contemporary speculative fiction in multiple forms, such as literature, comics, film, and performance within the US-Mexico border, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone. Topics studied may range from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands to her theory on Queer Futurities and from critical race theory to movies such as La Llorona, Juan de los muertos, and Sleep Dealer. This trajectory will also range from mainstream franchises, such as Marvel and Star Wars, to superheroes depiction in El Alto and Tierra del Fuego. We will focus on transdisciplinary works by Rita Indiana and Luis Carlos Barragán and artwork by Marion Matínez, Amalia Ortiz, and Edgar Clement. We will also reflect on Futurisms made by mestizos, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbeans while assessing the scopes of climate change and environmental crisis within these communities. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research trip to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Center for Fiction, Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York, and Museum of the Moving Image. Sources will be in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, while class discussions and assignments will be conducted entirely in Spanish.

This fiction workshop will seek to draw inspiration from the way that American writers have grappled with the experience of race and racial inequality. How do race and racism act not only as social forces but also as imaginative ones? How do they become narrative resources for writers? How do writers engage with these historical and imaginative legacies? What lessons might aspiring writers draw from their efforts? In other words, how might we fruitfully think about what Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap have called—in their anthology of the same name—“the racial imaginary”? Over the course of this creative-writing workshop, students will be asked to explore the American racial imaginary by examining writing in a variety of genres and disciplines—from short stories to personal essays and poetry, as well as academic criticism and historical scholarship—in the interest of producing and workshopping their own original fiction. For final conference projects, students will be expected to produce a portfolio of fiction. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Radial, bilateral, transverse: symmetries that change over a life; radical asymmetries. Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none. —Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations

This course will be part workshop and part an exploration of reading and writing in established, evolving, and invented forms. Featuring essays on form by contemporary poets, we will use An Exaltation of Forms, edited by Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes, alongside books by a wide array of poets and visual artists to facilitate and further these discussions. Students will direct language through the sieves and sleeves of the haiku, sonnet, prose poem, ghazal, haibun, and more. Expect to move fluidly between iambic pentameter, erasures, comic poems, and the lipogram (in which students will not be allowed to use a particular letter of the alphabet in their poem). Students should expect to complicate their notion of what “a poem in form” is. We will utilize in-class writing exercises and prompts. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Many authors will say that the best way to embark on the apprenticeship of fiction writing is to write relentlessly and read extensively. This, especially the latter, is as close to self-evident truth as there is in this business. Even when a story seems magically virtuosic, its inner cranks can be taken apart and analyzed. In this practice, we will discover what is working and replicate those techniques uniquely in our own work. In this course, we will take an in-depth look at our own writing and the work of the “greats." When we do look at pieces by Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, and others, we will not be worshippers but, rather, critical agnostics who need to thoroughly break down their craft in order to believe. As for the writing, in addition to weekly prompts, students will be counted on to produce one full-length short story to be revisited throughout the course. This is meant to introduce students to the painstaking literary art of revision. During workshop and individual conferences, students will receive advice on how to improve their piece, which will guide them in producing a final, more realized version at the end of the semester. Ultimately, this course will be about what we write and what inspires us to write, what coaxes the words onto paper. So, get ready for breakthroughs and agony but, hopefully, more of the former.

Stories are immensely complex mechanisms. When talking about how they work, we often confine our discussion to their most straightforward elements: the relationship between conflict and suspense, for example, or between verisimilitude and believability. But stories also derive a substantial proportion of their meaning and force from elements not so easily pinned down: from the potency of their images, from their surprising and suggestive juxtapositions, or from other qualities more easily apprehended by the unconscious than by the conscious mind. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss dreamlike narratives with the goal of understanding how the patently impossible can be made to feel as if it is actually happening, what sort of truths are rendered through unreality, and how authors can open themselves to the promptings of the unconscious and become alert to the complex interactions of images and narrative gestures. As part of the process, students will write two- to three-page imitations of the works discussed in class. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories.  

In this generative creative-writing course, we will study the way child narrators and child protagonists are made real on the page through a close reading of authors such as Jesmyn Ward, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Williams, Ha Jin, Mariana Enríquez, Sandra Cisneros, Truman Capote, and others. Through experimentation and play, we will write short fiction pieces featuring different child narrators and protagonists. Intended output will consist of a portfolio of exercises, including at least one completed story. This course is suitable for students curious about creative writing and fiction but who do not know where to begin, as well as for committed creative writers looking for a lab to try something new and outside the box of a traditional workshop. 

The novella, at its best, combines the urgency of the short story with the cumulative power of the novel. The novella is a form that may be of particular interest to young writers who are thinking about how to transition from the writing of stories to the writing of longer narratives. In this course, we will read novellas (or long stories or short novels—there is no precise definition of the form) by writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Carson McCullers, Jean Rhys, Sandra Cisneros, and Philip Roth. We will endeavor to read as writers, thinking closely about how these works can inform our own fiction. Though formally a small lecture, this will be a discussion-based course in which every student will be expected to participate in our conversations about the readings. In weekly group conferences, students will share their own writing in a spirit of mutual appreciation and support.

After reading a story by an older writer, the young James Joyce wrote, “Is this as near as [he] can get to life, I wonder?” One could say that Joyce was describing an aspiration held by many fiction writers: the aspiration to bring one’s unique way of apprehending life to the page rather than relying on formula and convention. Something similar to this striving lay behind Chekhov’s revolt against traditional plot, Woolf’s search for new ways to render the subtleties of consciousness, Stein’s playful forays into poetic abstraction, and Kafka’s experiments with dreamlike narratives. In this course, we will read short stories, old and new, investigating how different writers have tried to take their readers “near to life.” Writers likely to be read include Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Percival Everett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Gaitskill, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, Grace Paley, George Saunders, and Virginia Woolf. Though formally a small lecture, this will be a discussion-based course in which every student will be expected to participate in our conversations about the readings. In weekly group conferences, students will share their own writing in a spirit of mutual appreciation and support.

This course is for students who want to break free from the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts will include: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; all other readings will be accessible in a photocopied handout. 

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this course, we will discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. Students will be asked to read excerpts from six texts: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War; Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism; and two long poems, Peter Dale Scott’s “Coming to Jakarta” and Dionne Brand's “Inventory.” Group conferences will function as writing workshops to offer students feedback on their letters in progress in addition to various writing exercises. The lens of this course will be that of a writer—using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. 

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. In the first unit, People You Know, students will write personal narratives involving people in their lives. Students will also read, as models, published examples of such works; for example, Phillip Lopate’s portrait of his family in the essay “Willy.” In the second unit, Place, we will read and write essays about authors’ relationships to particular places—less travelogues than investigations of the dynamic between the person and the place; examples of published essays studied in this unit will include “Stranger in the Village,” by James Baldwin, and Annie Dillard’s essay, “Aces and Eights.” For the third unit, The Personal in the Critical/Journalistic, studied works will combine personal reflection with consideration of an outside subject, such as a favorite movie or an event like 9/11—the interaction of the personal and the outside subject yields a third element, an insight that would not be possible without the first two elements; for example, Jonathan Lethem’s personal essay about the movie The Searchers.

This course will use the family, broadly defined, as the prism through which we analyze and write memoir. Open to writers and non-writers alike, students will learn the craft and tools to write their own 15-page memoir narrative.

As central to the historical development of the modern essay as its concern with personal experience is the essay’s usefulness in politics and the representation of political experience. The essay can be polemical, informative, argumentative, lyrical, intimate, condemnatory. It can narrate and describe, or it can persuade or cajole, or it can satirize. As an open, improvisational form, the essay is particularly suited to giving depth to individual experience by placing that experience in social and political contexts and among allegiances and identities—and also suited to imparting drama to collective experience by locating the individual within his, her, or their social conditions and conflicts. We will follow this give and take in our readings, which will be across the reasonable political spectrum. Some examples: Samuel Taylor Coleridge on William Pitt the Younger, George Orwell on his education, H. L. Mencken on The Presidency, James Baldwin in Switzerland, Joan Didion on the counterculture, Adrienne Rich and Anne Carson on patriarchy, Mike Davis on class and the politics of firefighting in contemporary Los Angeles, and a series of recent editorials and op-eds about our ever-present political crises. These various pieces will be used as models for our own writing, which will range from the small to the medium to the large and will be presented to the class for critique of both their rhetorical realizations and their plausibility or implausibility.

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. The first unit, Demons, will focus on writers’ personal challenges, from mental illness (as in Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted) to migraines (the subject of Joan Didion’s essay, “In Bed”). The second unit focuses on braided essays; students will read essays whose authors juxtapose seemingly disparate topics in forming coherent works. Melissa Febos’ essay, “All of Me,” for example, reveals how writing, singing, tattoos, and heroin addiction all relate to the need to deal with pain. For the final unit, Critical Survey, we will read and write critical takes on works or figures in particular fields; for example, B. R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto, his take on the novelists of the day, and James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, about the movies of his youth. 

This course will examine and produce a range of work—from the journalistic to the critical, from the practical to the mystical, from the factual to the fictional—in the vast landscape of arts writing. We will write short pieces along the lines of liner notes, catalogue copy for gallery shows, and short reviews. We will approach long reviews, critical essays, and deep and subjective interior meditations on our experience of artists and their work by reading broadly across time. Topics may include, but are not limited to: Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on themselves; Friedrich Nietzsche on Richard Wagner; Theodor W. Adorno via Thomas Mann on Beethoven’s Opus 111; V. S. Naipaul on Gustave Flaubert; Amiri Baraka on Billie Holiday; Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy; Glenn Gould on Barbra Streisand; Mark Strand on Edward Hopper; Rosalind Krauss on photography; Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl; Jean-Luc Godard on Nicholas Ray; Pauline Kael on Sam Peckinpah; the art criticism of Donald Judd; and contemporary phenomena such as fan fiction, crossovers, and alternate universes made up of familiar literary characters. Students should feel confident in their familiarity with one or two art forms, broadly understood, and should expect, along with the reading, to write several small and two larger (7-12 pages) pieces to be presented to the entire class. Conference work will comprise research projects on those artists or works of art, or both, that students, in consultation with the instructor, decide on as their special province.