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.
Women and Comedy
WOMEN AND COMEDY
"What a language it is, the laughter of women,
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom."
-Lisel Mueller
"I’m not funny, what I am is brave." - Lucille Ball
This course focuses on the intersection between comedy and gender, race, class and sexuality. We will explore laughter as a subversive act and how the identity of a "funny woman" can be both dangerous and liberating. As Margo Jefferson writes, "Given the history of social restriction and sexual regulation, how many women have been in a position to -- or been willing to -- take these risks?" We will explore how the tools of comedy can be used to make mischief, to transgress the bounds of genre and form and to contest popular ideas about difference and power. How can humor be illuminating? How can humor be feminist? How can humor be intersectional? How can humor help us tell the hard truths? Can we laugh at oppression without laughing it off?
This is not a course on humor writing or one that exclusively focuses on humorists. Rather than "funny," we focus on "fun," explore playfulness as it occurs in myriad ways across a diverse variety of texts. As we do, we will find models, key writerly moves, to adapt into our own writing.
Readings will include work by Tina Fey, Audre Lorde, Patricia Lockwood, among others. We'll also be viewing performances, from stand up to sketches to sitcoms, that speak to themes we are exploring. You need one book for this class: Tina Fey's
Bossypants
. Course costs will not exceed $30.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Nina Sharma
CULPA: 5
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.
-
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.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Quincy Jones
Info - 3 points
CROSSING BORDERS: THE AMERICAS
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.
- MW 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Linn C Mehta
CULPA: 18
Info
- 3 points
HAUNTED AMERICAS
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.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
- TR 5:40 p.m.-6:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Francesca E Austin Ochoa
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 6:10 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
-
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.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Elizabeth Weybright
Info - 3 points
SPECULATING THE PAST
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.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Sarah Schwartz
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.
-
Instructor:
Benjamin M Breyer
CULPA: 13
Info
- 3 points
TO UPEND A WORLD: ABOLITIONIST POETICS
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).
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Joey de Jesus
Info - 3 points
THE TEENAGE STRANGE
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.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Emily K Austin
Info - 3 points
LETTERS
Dear student: I write to you, who now read these words. Or, perhaps, I don’t: perhaps I never had you in mind at all; perhaps you are just someone passing by, who has taken these words as though meant for yourself. This course examines how writers have made use of the privacy of letters in their public writing. What happens when we address our written words to a particular other? How, on the other hand, do we read words meant for someone else? What intimacies does the letter form make possible, or violate? And what might the special case of the letter have to tell us about writing in general? Objects in the course may include: fiction by Goethe, DeWitt, Diderot, Poe, West; epistolary poems by Ovid, Dickinson, Rankine, Shockley; paintings of letter-reading by Vermeer and Greuze; letter-memoirs by Baldwin and Vuong; criticism and theory by Althusser, Barthes, Benveniste, Fried, Howe, Jackson, Reed.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Andrew L Lynn
CULPA: 17
Info
- 3 points
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, 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 include literary texts by Ovid, Julia Alvarez, Olga Broumas, Charles Perrault, Luisa Valenzuela, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeanette Winterson, Amal El-Mohtar, and Kelly Link. In dialog with these literary texts, we will also engage with various theoretical texts and perspectives; with film (Georges Méliès and Disney’s
Frozen
); with artwork; and with music (Taylor Swift).
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Penelope Usher
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.
-
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 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Alexandra P Watson
CULPA: 16 Info - 3 points
Nature as Text
How do we conceive of nature? What cultural narratives do we bring with us in our understanding of the boundaries between the natural and the human worlds? How do these shape what we view as possible outcomes and solutions to problems like climate change and biodiversity loss? What possibilities open up for how we engage with the environment when we critically examine and engage with nature as a form of cultural narrative?
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Matthew L Rossi
Info - 3 points
Writing the Queer/Trans Self
How do queer and trans authors negotiate the written self amidst a culture which seeks to erase trans and non-binary realities, selves, and identities? In this class we will explore a handful of contemporary American literary texts written by queer and trans authors to explore how language is used, challenged, rejected, and reclaimed to constitute new literary selves and possibilities. For example, we will explore the reclamation of they/them pronouns, and the ways in which non-binary selves write themselves into binary colonial languages. The class will engage fundamental scholarship on race, gender, disability, and culture within the field of Trans studies.
- MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Samuel Davis
Info - 4 points