Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: The Thing Around Your Neck; Adiga, Aravind: White Tiger; Danticat, Edwidge: The Dew Breakers; Fun, Lu: Call to Arms; Kawabata, Yasunari: The Old Capital; Lispector, Clarice: The Complete Stories
Irving, Washington: "Rip Van Winkle"
This course investigates how books (and book selection) allow us to form individual conceptions of what is “global.” We will read texts that represent an array of perspectives on identity, national allegiance, and global travel, maintaining an eye toward how literary form allows—and perhaps sometimes even forecloses—readerly “empathy.” To guide our course, we will explore the ideas of thinkers who believe in Anthony Kwame Appiah’s conception of cosmopolitanism—the idea that we can live as “citizens of the world” and engage one another with a mindset of “universality plus difference.” Much of our thinking and writing will consider the possibilities and limitations of this school of thought.
Alongside our reading and discussions, we will be developing your expository and argumentative writing skills. Assignments will include weekly written responses, two short essays (2, 5 pages), and a longer, 9-paged argumentative research essay. There will also be a peer review and in-class workshops.
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; Sheridan Le Fanu, Joseph : Carmilla; Stoker, Bram: Dracula
Supplemental films and readings TBA
The 19th century saw the publication of several landmark monster novels, birthing a genre that would achieve a similarly widespread popularity in the films of the 1980s and 1990s. This course will examine three monsters of Victorian literature—Frankenstein, Dracula ,and Carmilla—and compare the original texts to contemporary film versions, asking the questions: what makes a monster monstrous? Where does the feeling of horror really come from? And why might this genre have reemerged when it did in American culture? In attempting to answer these questions, students will also work to develop analytic and rhetorical skills and learn to write powerfully and persuasively.
This course will evaluate the role that 'Humanism' has played across a transhistorical spectrum and a diverse generic range (we will read prose, drama, poetry across roughly five centuries). While the first half of the course will solidify a working definition of 'Humanist' and 'Humanism,' the second half will work to produce an equally sophisticated vision of what 'Antihumanism' might be, and how it orients contemporary practices. Beginning with the Early Modern notion of Humanism as rooted in a divinely bestowed capacity for dramatic self-creation, we will read the foundational works of the Renaissance 'Humanist' ideal. Pico della Mirandola's 'Oration on the Dignity of Man,' for example, and Desiderius Erasmus' In Praise of Folly will help to solidify a definition of what Humanism may have meant at its origin—was it a philosophy or an academic pursuit of what we now call 'The Humanities' (the studia humanitatis)? When we move on to studying 'Antihumanism,' the ideal will be to develop a capacious concept of the necessity of the anti-human in the contemporary world. At stake throughout will be a problematization of any easy binary opposition between 'the human' and the 'anti-human.' Is humanism in some way about 'the individual'? Does 'antihumanism' rule out 'the individual' as a nexus of subjectivity? The course will be aimed at the development of analytic thinking and close reading skills in tandem. Our goal will be to sharpen our writing skills by further developing the interface between thought and writing. This course will involve the writing of a number of essays throughout the term.
Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland; Delanty, Greg and Michael Matto, eds.: The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation; Donoghue, Emma: Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins; Gaiman, Neil: The Sleeper and the Spindle; Snyder, Scott: Batman: Zero Year, Secret City and Dark City
Selections from other texts will be provided online and in class.
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
"Nor I," said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."
Well, then, why IS a raven like a writing desk? In Alice, no one seems to know, but the pen and the bookchest in the Old English riddles might have an opinion! In the texts for this course, bells and onions speak, happy endings fail to end, and nothing is quite as it seems—but that, of course, is the fun of it all.
Our goal in this course is to "get messy." Like solving a riddle, academic writing is a process of discovery: we walk new roads, we test our ideas, and when we lose the way we back up and try again. And whatever Alice may think, it is the riddles without answers—the wrong turns, revisions, and unexpected detours—that demand our greatest insights and innovations. The course readings combine Old English medieval riddles with graphic novels, fairy tales, and Alice's classic adventures to consider how these texts form a response to the genres, styles, and stories that came before them. Each has, at one point or another, been dismissed by literary critics, and yet each has unique strengths and experimental possibilities that deserve our attention.
We will begin the term with an extended exploration of what it means to enter a critical academic conversation. Who else has written about the works we are reading? What do they have to say, and how does that change our own interpretation of the text? In addition to working with library databases and resources, you will also be learning to think of yourselves and your classmates as producers of academic writing. Throughout the course, you will receive feedback not only from me, but from one another, as you learn to integrate published books, articles, reviews, and other forms of academic writing into your own research papers.
While some riddles may remain unsolved, you will gain experience in "getting lost" as you develop your skills as an academic writer and literary critic—and these, of course, will help you find your way.
Ghosh, Amitav: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; Liu , Cixin: The Wandering Earth; Muslim, Kristine Ong: The Age of Blight: Stories; Robinson, Kim Stanley: New York 2140; Wagner, Phoebe and Bronte Christopher Wieland, eds.: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation
This course explores literary, scientific, and postcolonial perspectives on ecological crisis on a global scale from early-19th-century ecological writing to contemporary climate fiction. Tracing the emergence of a planetary ecological consciousness, we will investigate how literature and science grapple with the global implications of climate change. What formal and figurative resources can climate fiction and contemporary earth sciences afford on ecological catastrophe? To what extent does climate change render the figure of the globe visible and compel thinking on a planetary scale? How is climate change experienced differently around the globe, and its effects unevenly distributed across across periphery and metropole? We'll consider whether literature is capable of critically intervening in the problems and questions surrounding climate change in a form distinct from scientific and technological means, and how the literature of climate change might afford its own mode of purchase on questions of scale, ecology, deep time, and empire that augments or extends scientific forms of inquiry. Along the way, we'll pay particular attention to the postcolonial, transnational literature of climate change, and trace the conjoined histories of climate and empire. Readings include Amitav Ghosh, Kristine Ong Muslim, Cixin Liu, and Kim Stanley Robinson, along with critical readings spanning Anthropocene studies and contemporary climate science. Over the course of the term, you'll compose several papers of increasing length culminating in a final research paper designed to develop your ability to conduct your own innovative writing and research.
"But there were unspoken conditions to our acceptance, and that was the secret we were meant to glean on our own: we had to be grateful," writes Dina Nayeri of her family's experience seeking asylum in the United States in "The Ungrateful Refugee" (The Guardian, 2017). Neither success nor failure are available narratives for the refugee—"You're not enough until you're too much. You're lazy until you're a greedy interloper"—only postures of gratitude. Against this representational straight-jacketing, Nayeri asks: "Is the life of the happy mediocrity a privilege reserved for those who never stray from home?" This course takes its cue from Nayeri's incisive critique to explore how the wide range of refugee experience is represented in contemporary fiction. You can expect to encounter writing by Mohsin Hamid, Samuel Selvon, Shaun Tan, Dave Eggers, Philippe Claudel, NoViolet Bulawayo, Lisa Ko, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Warson Shire, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, and W.H. Auden. In addition to works of fiction by these writers, we will engage historical, philosophical, and political writings by Hannah Arendt on the nation state, Giorgio Agamben on the refugee camp, Edward Said on exile, and Jacques Derrida on hospitality. Through these works, and moving across genres, geographies, and mediums, we will interrogate the terms of citizenship and belonging, suffering and spectacle, cultural difference and universalism; the distinction between the internally displaced, the migrant, and the exile; and the meanings of habitation, refuge, home, dwelling, place, and shelter. And we will ask: What narrative forms or mediums do displaced writers deploy to render their experience or appeal to hearts and minds? And if 'the refugee' tells the lie to the nation state's capacity to account for the world's people, what other forms of political and social organization does the refugee live, inspire, create, or warn against?
Over the course of the semester, formal written assignments and informal classroom exercises will work to target and improve skills of textual analysis, critical thought, argumentative writing, and research proficiency. We will develop strategies for analyzing and synthesizing complex arguments across disciplines, styles, and academic contexts, while constructing and supporting original argumentative claims through the use of research and properly cited textual evidence.