In this course we will read texts by feminist and queer authors that complicate and subvert mainstream and dominant scripts about gender, sexuality, race, nation, and class. What kinds of narratives do mainstream ideas regarding these categories leave out? How have authors resisted erasure through queering and subverting mainstream categories? How might we, as readers and critical thinkers, queer the script through our scholarly practice? Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship that calls for a radical restructuring of the ways we see and shape our worlds, we will consider how authors push back against dominant ideologies through literary, scholarly and cinematic works.
Texts are subject to change, but will likely include a selection from the following list: works by Nella Larsen, Carmen Maria Machado, Safia Elhillo, Celine Sciamma and Cheryl Dunye, and critical theory by Laura Mulvey, bell hooks, and Judith Butler. Required course texts will not exceed $10; in addition, all course texts are available as links and e-reserves through the library.
In this course, we will study the way culture influences how we make sense of what we see. We will examine how power is exercised by making people feel as though they are always being seen, how this surveillance polices the way gender, race, class, and sexuality are expressed, and how people perform their identities to reinforce or push back against this policing. Literary texts will include
Passing
by Nella Larsen, "The Husband Stitch" by Carmen Maria Machado,
Fantomina
by Eliza Haywood, and the films
Paris is Burning
and
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
. Secondary texts will include John Berger, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, W.E.B Dubois, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Jack Halberstam, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Laura Mulvey.
In this First-Year Writing course, we’ll examine a series of questions centered on bodies and desires. How is the body both constructed and policed through narratives of gender, race, class, and sexuality? How are bodies and desire mediated through and represented in language? We’ll consider how bodies become not just sites of objectification or of power but also of pleasure. We’ll think about the politics of respectability, in questioning who can be a subject, rather than object, of desire. In our analyses, we’ll work to challenge fixed or binary understandings of gender and power. Readings are subject to change but may include: Nella Larsen's
Passing
, Eliza Haywood's
Fantomina
, short stories by Luisa Valenzuela, Carmen Maria Machado and/or ir'ene lara Silva, poems by Sally Wen Mao and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and conversation texts by Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, John Berger, and/or Judith Butler.
"The Future is Female" except in science fiction, where it still looks pretty white and male. What happens when women of color take on such tropes as space exploration, cybernetics, superpowers, and the end of the world? How can women of color change the way we not only think of the future, but think of the present as well? In this class we’ll look at how speculative literature looks at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and environmental concerns. Readings will include work from such authors as Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Sam Chanse, G Willow Wilson, and Tananarive Due with potential critical readings from Lisa Yaszek, Charlotte E Howell, and bell hooks.
"All that is solid melts into air." So wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, registering the astonishing pace with which daily life was being transformed around them. For them, and for many of their contemporaries, the central feature of the modern world was its ceaseless change. Under the pressure of political, scientific, and economic revolutions, traditional ways of living and thinking might disappear almost overnight, to be replaced not by a new order but instead with an unending experience of instability and dislocation.
This course reads a set of writers who both respond to and participate in that process of constant transformation – in what we have learned to call modernity. Should culture try to protect timeless values from the shock effects of modernization? Or should it find, in change, an opportunity for new forms of life and new styles of expression? If – as Marx and Engels did – we imagine modernity as a distinctively European event, how might writers outside of Europe make use of and respond to a modernity that excludes them? Is modernity something that happened, and is over – or are we today still swept up in it?
Readings may include: literature from Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Douglass, Woolf, Kincaid; philosophy and criticism from Montaigne, Kant, Marx, Weber, Du Bois, Kracauer, Chakrabarty.
This course cuts across borders between North, South and Central America and the Caribbean, in a search for the ways in which literature illuminates different aspects of American identity--especially gender, class, ecological, racial and ethnic identities. Since modernity, in the sense of freedom from tradition, first developed in the Americas, the literatures of the Americas involve diversity and innovation from their beginning. After examining the roots of Modernism in North and South America at the end of the 19th century, we will look at the development of modernism, post-modernism and post-colonialism in the 20th and early 21st centuries through the study of key novels, short stories, and poetry from North and South America and the Caribbean, including works by Martí, Lorde, Anzaldúa, DuBois, Hurston, Hughes, Eliot, Neruda, Césaire, García Márquez, Borges, Cortázar, Valenzuela, Kincaid, Danticat, Lahiri and Valeria Luiselli. Considering these works in their historical, political and aesthetic contexts helps us to grapple with the multiple formations of American identities.
In this course, we will encounter ghosts and hauntings in literature from the Americas, primarily from Latin American and Caribbean writers. These ghosts expose something hidden in the past and pull dark secrets into the light. We will think about haunting not just as a supernatural experience, but as a mechanism that reveals layers of history and unearths long buried injustices. A few of the characters we will meet are: A Cuban exile living in Miami who is haunted by the life he left behind; a teenager in Argentina who explores her queer identity and confronts the ghosts of the state violence; a General accused of genocide who defends his innocence, though the ghosts in his home say otherwise. The ghosts in these stories force the characters to reckon with, or fall prey to, legacies of colonialism, war, and migration. Readings include literary works by Mariana Enriquez, Edwidge Danticat, Carlos Fuentes, Jean Rhys, Ana Menéndez, and others.
In this class, we will explore—to quote Roxane Gay—"what it means to live in an unruly body in a world that is always trying to control, discipline, and punish women’s bodies." Thinking and theorizing the ways in which the body figures as a site of power, we will discuss the rules that are imposed upon women’s bodies and the ways in which women’s bodies, in turn, defy those rules. Turning our attention to bodies that are deemed too fat, too sick, too dark, too loose, too queer, and more, we will read and think about bodies that resist: bodies that resist binaries, bodies that resist understanding, and bodies that resist and rebel against the rules imposed upon them. Readings will include literary texts by Ovid, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Carmen Maria Machado, and Akwaeke Emezi. All required texts will be distributed by the instructor. Note: readings for this class include references to and representations of identity-based violence. We'll talk as a class about how to work through these challenging texts and topics in thoughtful and generative ways.
How do we think about the future? Why do we develop the hopes and fears that we do? How do present conditions and discourses inform, influence, or limit our senses of personal and political possibility? In this section of First-Year Writing, we will explore conceptions of the future in 19th through 21st-century literary fiction. We will begin by close reading 20th-century short stories that evoke hopes and fears for the future on individual, social, and global scales. We will then turn to H.G. Wells’ classic novella
The Time Machine
and place its portrayal of the future in the context of late Victorian science and socioeconomics. Finally, we will consider how contemporary literature reflects and responds to the accelerating climate crisis, and explore fiction’s role in helping us apprehend the potential for radical environmental disruption.
How and to what ends does literature represent musical form or the feeling of musical encounter? In this course, we will discuss narratives in which music plays a significant role, whether through musical allusion or its sustained thematic presence, or through principles of musical composition and gesture that play in the background, informing a text’s structural flow. We will consider complex resonances between literary narratives and histories of music culture and aesthetics, asking how writers use music to world-build, to characterize, and to situate a text culturally and politically. Throughout the semester, we will pay particular attention to narratives that showcase the musical lives of characters belonging to historically marginalized groups. In doing so, we will question how race, gender, and sexuality intersect with musical histories of aesthetic power. Literary readings may include works by Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and James Joyce. Secondary readings in performance studies and musical aesthetics may include selections by Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Judith Butler, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Maria Edgeworth, and others.
Recent works as diverse as The New York Times’s
Overlooked Project
and Netflix’s
Bridgerton
raise questions about what records we keep, how we narrate history, and the factors that determine what stories we can tell. In this class, we will probe these questions by reading literary works that turn to a speculative mode to make sense of history, past and present. As we enter the critical conversation about the historical record, we will explore how authority and value are assigned to different texts and accounts. In so doing, we will also develop our ability to read texts' and documents' own theorizations of truth and fact. Readings may include work by Virginia Woolf, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Carmen Maria Machado, Adrienne Rich, and N.K. Jemisin alongside critical texts by Saidiya Hartman, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and others. Course costs will not exceed $15.
Inspired by bell hooks's assertion that “moving from silence to speech is for the oppressed…a gesture of defiance that heals,” we read and write with attention to the power dynamics of speech and silence, of talking and talking back. Our literary and critical texts demand attention to the ways in which power shapes narrative, and narrative shapes power. We will think especially about how the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, speak to and against erasure; and also how the marginalized create community by talking and talking back. The readings include literary works by Nella Larsen, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, and Layli Long Soldier; and critical works by Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, bell hooks, and others. The only book length work you will need is Toni Morrison’s Jazz (around $15 new).
The female domestic servant in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature is characterized by contradiction: she is peripheral yet central to the action, invisible yet always in plain sight, disenfranchised yet intimately dangerous. Indeed, her presumed capacity to injure her employers tells us something about the fears of the well-heeled of the period; for example, Freud’s patient Dora wounds him when she decides to terminate treatment with a "fortnight’s notice," as if she were his employed domestic servant. In this course, we will consider the unusual powers and opaque perspectives of women marginalized as specters in the wealthy houses they serve. How might we develop reading and writing strategies that could express the inexpressible: forbidden vectors of desire, criminality, perversity, sadism, and capital circulating through the vantage points of maids and governesses? What do these perspectives divulge about the norms and anxieties underwriting the maintenance of race, gender, and class-based hierarchies?
What are the best practices for a life well-lived? In what ways can the symbiotic acts of reading and writing support such a life? Furthermore, how can a meaningful engagement with literature help us, if not to find easy answers that we all crave, then to explore these questions in ways that are clarifying, personally and intellectually? In this course we will take a walk through writings from a variety of octaves and disciplines, drawing from the academic, the creative, the therapeutic, the esoteric, and the pop cultural, with blurring between and among such categories. Reading assignments will follow the ebb and flow of our critical conversations, with likely readings--some optional, some required--by Toni Morrison, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tracy K. Smith, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Timothy Aubry, and Morgan Parker, among others. Text books for this course will not exceed $30.
This class examines the ways that a historical event can be remembered and described differently by direct participants, and how personal biases, such as race, gender and class, affect the process of recollection and narration. Some of the texts that will be read and discussed include Sara Collins’
The Confessions of Frannie Langton
, Ian McEwan’s
Atonement
, and Alison Bechdel's
Fun Home
, among others. Our analysis of these texts will be augmented by theoretical works drawn from sociology and literary studies.
In our class we will discuss abolition as a name for a set of imaginings that call for complete and total eradication of systems ("Worlds") that perpetuate collective harms. We will think about how capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy limit our imaginations, and how we can think in ways that remake our world. Students will read essays by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Pheng Cheah, Denise F. DaSilva, Edouard Glissant, and Christina Sharpe, and will trouble received readings of significant literary texts through abolitionist lenses to discern a range of liberatory strategies in the poetry, literary nonfiction, and fiction of writers including Audre Lorde, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, M Nourbese Philip, Robin Coste Lewis, Etheridge Knight, Randall Horton, dg nanouk okpik, and Jackie Wang. As a class, students will discuss and consider these writers’, as well as their own, interventions in the context of literature's world-making power. (*Readings subject to change).
Teenagers inhabit a strange land: in exile from childhood, still immigrating to adulthood. How have different writers mapped the liminal territory of the teenage experience? In this class, we will step away from the rich tradition of realistic Coming-of-Age narratives and explore how genre frameworks—including speculative, horror, fairy tale, gothic, and quest traditions—have been used to illuminate the Teenage Strange. How have writers used the strangeness of genre to render this slice of time? How does genre capture the teenage intersection between public and private inquiry—between larger questions about the world, and more private questions about the self? How does genre construct questions about fear, desire, rage, shame, power, culture, and love? How does it deconstruct reality so it can be seen, investigated, and felt? Readings may include work by Octavia Butler, A.S. King, Angela Carter, Carmen Maria Machado, Shirley Jackson, Joan He, Francesca Lia Block, Kelly Link, Viktor Shklovsky, Ursula K. LeGuin, Akwaeke Emezi, and others.