Field Too Large: War, City, System
TOO LARGE: WAR, CITY, SYS
How does one represent things that seem too large, or too complex, to understand? What rhetorical strategies of compression, exemplification, typification, or visualization do we need to make such events or objects comprehensible? And what sorts of risks – aesthetic, ethical, political – do we run in trying to do so? In this course, we’ll move through a number of writers who have grappled with these basic problems of representation, focusing our attention on three particular kinds of excessively large objects: wars, cities, and economic systems.
Objects in this course may include: literature from Caryl Churchill, Teju Cole, Arthur Conan Doyle, Amitav Ghosh, Patricia Highsmith, Homer, Jamaica Kincaid, Edgar Allan Poe, and Virginia Woolf; maps from Charles Joseph Minard and John Snow; criticism and theory from Jane Jacobs, Immanuel Kant, Georg Lukács, Franco Moretti, Georg Simmel, Susan Sontag, and Raymond Williams. Course costs will not exceed $30.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Andrew L Lynn
CULPA: 17
Info
- 3 points
SUBVERTING THE SCRIPT
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.
Seeing, Surveilling, and Performing
SEEING/SURVEILLING/PERFOR
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.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Vrinda Condillac
CULPA: 28
Info
- 3 points
The Body as Border
THE BODY AS BORDER
In our course, we'll examine the legacy of the body as a boundary that defines and separates categories like self and other, sanctioned and forbidden, and male and female. How and why has the body become the site of difference and distinction? What happens when a body crosses boundaries and collapses categories -- what is threatened, what made possible? Readings will likely include John Milton's
Paradise Lost,
Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein,
Nella Larsen's
Passing,
Akwaeke Emezi's "Who is Like God?", and essays and articles by scholars including Susan Stryker, bell hooks, Judith Butler, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Wendy C Schor-Haim
CULPA: 11
Info
- 3 points
BODIES AND DESIRES
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.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Meredith A Benjamin
CULPA: 5 Info - 3 points
WOMEN OF COLOR IN SPECULATIVE LITERATURE
WOMEN OF COLOR&SCIENCE FI
"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.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Quincy Jones
Info - 3 points
READING THE FUTURE
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.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
- MW 6:10 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Michael Shelichach
Info - 3 points
MUSIC IN NARRATIVE
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.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Elizabeth Weybright
Info - 3 points
ATTENTION!
Attention is the foundation of investigation, action, and intention. It means concentration and deliberation. It can also mean distraction and confusion. Quietly reading a difficult work of literature, puzzling over a math problem, revising a paper for class, or cooking an elaborate meal are forms of attention. So is endlessly scrolling through social media, binge-watching a television series, or strolling aimlessly through the city. Where and how we use our attention is the foundation, the bedrock, of nearly everything we think and do. It is therefore unsurprising that gathering and directing our attention is also an enormous, lucrative industry. In this course we will study the science and philosophy of attention alongside the history of the "attention economy" and evolving techniques and technologies of attention harvesting. We will explore these subjects while reflecting upon and writing about our own habits of paying attention. By paying attention to attention, we will nurture a brighter awareness of the many interests vying for our time, mental engagement, money, our very lives, and of our abilities to scrutinize, critically examine, or resist our entrapment within the modern attention industry.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Nathan Gorelick
Info - 3 points
CONTESTED TRUTHS: MEMORY, AUTHORITY AND
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.
- MW 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Benjamin M Breyer
CULPA: 13
Info
- 3 points
A HISTORY OF SEXUALITY
From where do our ideas and firmly held convictions about sexuality come? This course will improvise a genealogy of the term "sexuality" to underscore its construction by a vast network of academic, literary, philosophical, and medical institutions. Our critical investigation will begin in the nineteenth century with the invention of sexology as a scientific subfield, and we will arrive at the deployment of sexuality in contemporary political antagonisms. We will consider how sexuality delineates the field of the normal from the pathological (Ellis, Freud); how it functions as a "dense transfer point for relations of power" (Foucault, Mbembe); how it undergirds racism and colonial ideologies (Fanon, Puar); how it encrypts the inexpressible in important works of literature and film. Importantly, we will ask how "queerness" both affirms and disrupts the designs that this elusive concept has for us all.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Andrew Ragni
Info - 3 points
ARTS OF RESISTANCE
How can the arts, particularly the literary arts, serve as tools for liberation and social change? How can writing be an act of defiance against forces of oppression? In this class, we will engage with texts that challenge dominant ideologies, resist oppressive structures, and envision new communities. We will attend to subtle and overt subversion in both the form and content of the works we discuss. The literary and theoretical works we read will provide models for creative intervention in public conversations around race, gender, sexuality, and class. Literary works may include works by Layli Long Soldier, Hala Alyan, Solmaz Sharif, Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Octavia Butler, Isabel Allende, and others. Theory may include writings by Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and others.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Alexandra P Watson
CULPA: 16 Info - 3 points
(WORKSHOP) READING THE BODY
In this course, we’ll think of the body as a text we can read—one that both represents and creates intersections between the body, science, and identity. We’ll read literary texts that reveal how scientific authority gets mapped onto the body and embedded in ideas of race, gender, class, sexuality, family, and nation; we’ll also analyze how writers in turn investigate and play with these scientific scripts. How do literary depictions of the body both represent and resist scientific authority? What do they teach us about the "factness" and fluidity of identity and belonging? Readings are subject to change, but will likely include literature by Ovid, Octavia Butler, Amy Bonnaffons, Isabel Allende, and Nella Larsen, as well as select texts from feminist science studies, critical race studies, and queer theory.
- TRF 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Cecelia B Lie-Spahn
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
(WORKSHOP) HAUNTED AMERICAS
In this course, we will encounter ghosts and hauntings in the fiction of Latin American and Caribbean writers. A Cuban exile is haunted by the life he left behind; a teenager in Argentina explores her queer identity and confronts the ghosts of state violence; a young woman courts colonial power and becomes a ghost herself. We will look to theories of hauntology to investigate the ways in which the characters in these stories reckon with, or fall prey to, legacies of colonialism, war, and migration. Readings may include literary works by Mariana Enriquez, Edwidge Danticat, Daniel Alarcón, Jean Rhys, and Ana Menéndez.
- TRF 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- TRF 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Francesca E Austin Ochoa
Info - 4 points
(WORKSHOP) FEMINIST FAIRYTALES
In this class we will read and discuss feminist fairy tales: adaptations of classic tales and newly-imagined stories which—rather than promising a simple and tidy “happily ever after”—privilege female agency and offer up critiques of patriarchal structures. In dialog with texts that center women and other intersecting identities, we will talk about colorism, colonialism, sexuality, desire, misogyny, motherhood, and more. Analyzing how these texts unmask and challenge various forms of oppression, we will explore how and why the magical and often didactic nature of the fairy tale genre lends itself to thinking critically about our current world and to envisioning more equitable futures. Readings, subject to change, include texts by Nalo Hopkinson, Carmen Maria Machado, Luisa Valenzuela, Suniti Namjoshi, Helen Oyeyemi, and Kelly Link.
- MWF 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Penelope Usher
Info - 4 points