Reading the Suburbs
Adrienne Brown, Autumn 2012
From midcentury writers like John Cheever, John Updike, and Richard Yates to the more contemporary work of Richard Ford, Tom Perrotta, and the film American Beauty, the suburbs have largely been thought of as a place of homogenous unhappiness. In this class, we will look at how this narrative has been constructed and contested over the last 60 years with help from authors Anne Petry, Chang Rae Lee, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alice Childress. Alongside fiction we will look at history, advertising, and film to contextualize the rise of the suburbs, helping us understand the key role this space played in the accumulation of wealth, racial mobility, second wave feminism, and the rise of the modern Republican Party.
Fashion and Change: The Theory of Fashion
Timothy Campbell, Winter 2013
This course offers a representative view of foundational and recent fashion history (based on a new and very good reader from Routledge) but devotes particular attention to fashion as a discourse preoccupied with cultural change and the surprisingly difficult question of how and why change does and does not happen.
Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography
Hillary Chute and Alison Bechdel, Spring 2013
This course will incorporate attention to the rich and complex procedure of creating books like Fun Home and Are You My Mother? (by Bechdel) with other primary readings and a wealth of secondary works on autobiography and attendant issues concerning narrative theory, historiography, gender, and format and book arts. In this vital and intense course students would learn about how to produce visual stories themselves as well as theorize about them.
Transmedia Games: Theory and Design
Patrick Jagoda and Sha Xin Wei, Autumn 2012
This experimental course explores the emerging game genre of “transmedia” or “alternate reality” gaming. Transmedia games use the real world as their platform while incorporating text, video, audio, social media, websites, and other forms. We will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. Course requirements include weekly blog entry responses to theoretical readings; an analytical midterm paper; and collaborative participation in a single narrative-based transmedia game project. No preexisting technical expertise is required but a background in any of the following areas will help: creative writing, literary or media theory, web design, visual art, computer programming, performance, and game design.
The Animal: Theories of Nonhuman Life
Heather Keenleyside, Spring 2011
In recent years, a host of thinkers from a range of different disciplines have taken up the question of “the animal,” giving rise to what some have labeled an emerging field of animal studies. In this course, we will read some of the major theoretical texts associated with this turn toward the animal, and consider the challenge that thinking about animals has posed to questions about justice, obligation, subjectivity, and community. We will explore these and related questions through the close reading of a selection of texts from a variety of philosophical and theoretical traditions, likely including Peter Singer, Thomas Regan, Cora Diamond, Christine Korsgaard, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Donna Haraway, Temple Grandin, J. M. Coetzee, and others. As we proceed, we will ask what it means to consider these very diverse thinkers together; we will also be alert to the way that questions about animality intersect or depart from what might be related questions of the posthuman or the biopolitical.
Oscar Wilde and His Contexts
Benjamin Morgan, Spring 2013
In this course we read the work of Oscar Wilde in its historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts. Perhaps more than any other author of the period, Wilde speaks to the issues that mattered to late Victorians: gender relations, women’s rights, class, fears of decadence and degeneration, socialism versus individualism, the rise of celebrity culture, sexual identity, and the social value of the arts. Our intensive reading of one author’s work will therefore also be an introduction to the transition from Victorian to modernist culture and aesthetics. In addition to contextualizing Wilde, we will study how and why he has been decontextualized and recontextualized: if Wilde’s writing is so attuned to a national and historical context, then why has he remained internationally popular for well over a century? The self-image that Wilde constructed has outlived him with remarkable longevity: “Wilde” is a persona as well as a person, an idea as well as an author. We will examine how Wilde’s image has been appropriated in various historical moments and national contexts through adaptation, translation, and homage. Readings will include Wilde’s poetry, plays, novel, journalism, and lectures as well as related works by Walter Pater, Gilbert and Sullivan, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, and Richard Strauss.
“Impossible” Theatres
John Muse, Autumn 2011
This course explores a range of texts that adopt dramatic form but resist the possibility of their own performance in order to ask: what happens to theater when there can’t be a theater? Like its texts, the course transgresses disciplinary, generic, and temporal boundaries, bringing together from various centuries philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, exceptionally long or short plays, novel chapters in dramatic form, monologue and dialogue poems, and censored plays, all bound together by their ostensible unperformability. What power does the theater hold as a metaphor? What dangers does it threaten as an embodied event? How do the borders of perceived theatrical possibility change over time? What happens when performers stage drama written for the page? What, if anything, is unstageable, and why?
Transnational Poetics
Srikanth Reddy, Spring 2013
This is not a course about world poetry, but, rather, about the problem of world poetry. More specifically, we will examine a range of theoretical approaches to the study of modern poetry in a transnational context. We will read poets whose work crosses or problematizes national boundaries—Aga Shahid Ali, Kamau Brathwaite, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, for example—in light of recent work on migration, decolonization, and diaspora. We will also consider the relationship between a transnational poetics and various other ways of conceptualizing world literature, from Heidegger’s “worlding” to Spivak’s “planetarity.” Theoretical readings will draw upon the work of Jahan Ramazani, Wai Chee Dimock, Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and others.
Modernist Writing and the Invention of the Metropolis
Jennifer Scappettone, Spring 2012
This “geographical history” of modernism and modernity will survey the intertwining and clashing forces defining the historical avant-garde through written and built projects surrounding emerging (or sinking) metropolitan spaces. We will examine literary representations of the city summoned in documentary or preservative modes in tandem with competing urbanist schemes for the metropolis writ large. Occupying the objectives of both outsiders and insiders, we will consider texts not only as representations of urban space, but as co-producers of it. We will try to detect the dynamics of public and private interests, work and leisure, uplift and destruction, boom and exploitation within the several precincts of our concentration as we ask what new languages and forms were enabled by an urban compression of variegated ethnic and linguistic traditions. Our primary sites of focus will be Paris, Venice, New York, and Chicago, but we will necessarily (and according to class interests) digress “elsewhere.” Works to be studied will include Edgar Allen Poe, “The Man of the Crowd;” Henry James, The Aspern Papers; Thomas Mann, Death in Venice; Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen; Guillaume Apollinaire, Waves; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project; Gertrude Stein, Paris France; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Lola Ridge, “The Ghetto,” Djuna Barnes, The Book of Repulsive Women; Mina Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker; John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville; various key examples of urban planning and modernization from Haussmann to Burnham to Mussolini, and essays by Georg Simmel, Henri Lefebvre, John Ruskin, F. T. Marinetti, David Harvey, Robert Park, and Rem Koolhaas. We will be studying a range of plans and literary works surrounding Paris, Venice, New York, and Chicago.
Renaissance Distortions: Lit and Science at Dawn of Modernity
David Simon, Autumn 2012
François Rabelais, William Shakespeare, and John Milton exploited the power of literary form to distort, refract, and magnify the world—rendering it strange and revealing its hidden properties. This course explores major works by these authors alongside excerpts from Renaissance scientists, who conducted similar experiments with the aid of the newly invented microscope and other optical technologies. Though our reading schedule will permit the careful perusal of a small cluster of pivotal texts, our discussion will range over English and continental Renaissance cultures; the history of science, magic, and alchemy; and modern accounts of the impact of form in literature, from Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “de-familiarization” to Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect” and beyond.
America’s Asia
Richard So, Autumn 2010
This course explores the long and often antagonistic history of cultural encounter between the United States and East Asia. Key contexts and frameworks to be examined include: US Orientalism, American empire in the Philippines and Hawaii, US-China cultural exchange, US military interventions in Korea and Vietnam, East Asian immigration, and most recently, globalization across the Pacific. We first examine a group of writers including Jack London, John Steinbeck, Tim O’Brien, Pearl Buck, and HD and Ezra Pound, who were influential in producing a vision of “America’s Asia.” At the same time, we will also look at Asian diasporic and Asian American writers such as Hu Shi, Carlos Bulosan, Ha Jin, Richard Kim, Sen Katayama, Nieh Hua-Ling, and Susan Choi, who worked to critique US constructions of the Pacific. Finally, we will cover relevant critical works by Edward Said, Amy Kaplan, Colleen Lye, Lisa Lowe, Pheng Cheah, and Adam McKeown, to ground our readings of the primary literary texts.
Southern Routes to Freedom
Chris Taylor, Winter 2013
This course seeks to reverse the conventional understanding that black routes to freedom in the eras of slavery and emancipation ran north-north of the Mason-Dixon line, north of the US itself. We will explore how blacks throughout the Atlantic world situated their freedom dreams in the southern, mostly non-Anglophone Americas, and how they frequently did so in explicit contrast to the kinds of freedom available in the Anglophone states of the northern Americas. In the first part of the course, we will read recent social histories to come to terms with the comparative and pragmatic origins of black political thought. In the second part of the course, we will bring these concepts to bear on a multi-generic and multi-sited archive of black political thought. Throughout, we will ask a series of questions: What particular aspects of the southern Americas appealed to Atlantic blacks? How can we rethink contemporary efforts to compare regimes of slavery and freedom from the perspective of the comparisons that historical actors themselves made? How does a southernly reorientation of spatial imaginaries of freedom alter the very meaning of freedom in the Americas? Why have these alternative cartographies—and conceptualizations—of freedom been elided in popular and scholarly understandings of black life in the Americas? Literary readings will include Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the anonymously-written Trinidadian romance Adolphus, Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, and Martin Delaney’s Blake.
From Postcolonial to Global
Sonali Thakkar, Autumn 2012
This course introduces students to some seminal works of postcolonial literature, in the context of the key debates that have shaped this subfield of literary studies. We will also consider whether the category of postcolonial literature has a future in the discipline of English literary studies in light of the broad shift away from the term “postcolonial,” in favor of new designations such as “global Anglophone literature” or “world literature.” Authors may include Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott.
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