After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, writes Oscar Wilde, even one's own relations. While the domestic sphere is often understood as a refuge from the quarrels and dangers of the perilous outside world, the family home can also be a site of tension, violence, and competition. Literature and cinema show us time and again that some of the most bitter and bloody conflicts unfold in the intimate battleground of hearth and home. This course tracks the seemingly timeless idea of the family in its historical evolution, from patrilineal dynasties to the nuclear family of suburban postwar America. Why do the horrors of home-life shock and fascinate us? What is gained or sacrificed in the name of “family values,” and why is the gothic so closely tied to the domestic? Texts and excerpts include: Medea, The Tempest, Wuthering Heights, The Turn of the Screw, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” The Importance of Being Earnest, The Metamorphosis, Kindred and Psycho, with secondary readings from No Future and Abolish the Family. Students will write three argument-driven essays including a research project on one of our course-texts.

Elective

The Middle Ages were defined by translation, and at the hub of the interlingual and intercultural networks crisscrossing western Eurasia was the Greek-speaking civilization known today as Byzantium. In this class we approach literature of the medieval millennium (roughly the 5th to the 15th century CE) by focusing on the period's truly global best-sellers: works of fiction, mysticism, folktale, romance, and philosophy that were each translated multiple times from one language to another, and that enjoyed massive popularity in each new cultural setting. Instead of being viewed as an incubator of distinct "national" literatures, the medieval period becomes an opportunity to explore literary forms, themes, and universal human concerns that transcended linguistic, religious, and national borders. Texts studied include both works originally written in Greek as well as others that made their way from Persian, Arabic, Syriac, and Georgian into Greek, and then through Greek into other languages of the Near East and Europe. Readings include but are not limited to: Barlaam and Josaphat; The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher ("the Byzantine Sinbad"); the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius; The Alexander Romance; and John Climacus's Ladder of Divine Ascent. Assessments include a short response paper, midterm examination, and a final research paper.

Elective

In this course we will begin to explore the literature emerging out of postcolonial Africa, looking at novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. With over 40 independent countries and a multiplicity of cultures, any course of this nature can only be an overview. However, we will read a number of important writers of the last fifty years, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, as well as lesser known writers including Tayeb Salih and M.G. Vassanji, and explore some of the problems facing independent African countries.

The name Shakespeare conveys a set of assumptions about style and eloquence in the English language, the course of European history, the power of dramatic literature, the protocols of theatrical performance and of Renaissance/Early Modern Culture in general--not to mention incontrovertible truths about the human condition. In this course, we will undertake a creatively critical examination of several plays in the context of 16th- and 17th-century political struggles, major ideological shifts, colonial expansion, literary movements, and the cultural place of the commercial theatre as a new and controversial space of representation that vigorously appropriated traditional narratives. Requirements for the course include regular short writing assignments, a modest research paper, a final examination, and (if possible) attendance at a local theatrical production.

Elective

This course examines twentieth-century Black British writing. We will focus primarily on works written by the 1940s to 1960s Windrush generation-the large, mid-century influx of Caribbean peoples to the United Kingdom (UK)-as well as Asian British authors who are often included under the umbrella of blackness. Reading such authors as Claude McKay, Mulk Raj Anand, Una Marson, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and Shola von Reinhold, we will explore also the colonial forebears and contemporary afterlives of the Windrush moment. There are a wide variety of often conflicting ways that blackness circulates in Britain, then and now. Both racist and reclaimative evocations of blackness demand our attention. Our course will circulate, then, around two core questions: 1) How do Black British writers' refigure blackness as a positive, empowered force and voice integral to British modernity, and 2) How do we contextualize this vital community of Black voices in Britain within the history of extractive imperialism that was and is buoyed by white supremacist conceptions of blackness in the British popular imagination. Across all the authors we will read, Black Britons succeed in reimagining what home means amidst the racialized environments of (un)belonging-rescuing it from exile, diaspora, and displacement and claiming their place at the heart of the British metropolis and within its literary canon.

Elective

This course asks students to travel back to the 1930s and contextualize the various artistic and cultural movements that comprised the Federal Theater Project and the WPA arts projects. The course will revolve around the 1999 film by Tim Robbins, Cradle Will Rock, and the Marc Blitzstein original, as well as supplementary materials researched by the students involving any aspect of the film, from Brechtian and Documentary drama to Mexican muralism to labor issues to race and gender resistance to LGBTQ histories and on. Students will research toward a final artistic project that comprises the requirement for the course.

Elective

Late nineteenth-century designer, poet, scholar, ethical entrepreneur, architectural preservationist, aesthetic innovator and socialist revolutionary William Morris found much to use in the otherwise sorely abused Middle Ages.  If the Victorian era in Britain (at the peak of its colonial empire and the explosion of industrial capitalism) cloaked itself in the nostalgia of the Gothic Revival, Morris might be considered a counter-revivalist for the way he mined the same medieval past - particularly “the calamitous fourteenth century” - to imagine a very different future than the one we eventually came to inhabit.  This course will undertake a survey of the life and work of William Morris with particular attention given to his fusion of history and fantasy in the service of a radical political vision.  Among the texts studied will be The Earthly Paradise, A Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere along with historical and political treatises from Commonweal and critical studies of Morris and his circle. The course will include regular writing exercises and exams, culminating in an independently researched final project.

This past August, extensive fragments of two lost plays by the Ancient Greek tragedian Euripides were published for the first time. You will be among the first students—ever—to read and explore them in this class on Ancient Greek Tragedy. In addition to those newly discovered fragments, we read select complete plays of Euripides and his fellow Athenian poet-playwrights, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and devote special attention to key themes including: their literary structure and stagecraft; their original performative context in fifth-century BCE Athens; the history of their transmission and survival; and their reception—that is, how Prometheus Bound for example went from being a script for a play put on one spring day in Athens almost 2500 years ago, to a source of inspiration behind a black comedy series that dropped on a major streaming service this summer. Assessments include one short response paper, a midterm, and a final project. All readings in English translation.

Elective

In this innovative course we aim to recognize and appreciate video games as a profound medium for storytelling, comparable to traditional forms of literary art. This course examines the narrative complexities, character development, and the capacity for emotional engagement within video games, offering students a fresh perspective on interactive media as a significant cultural and artistic expression. Throughout this course, we will engage with the works of scholars and artists including Nick Montfort, Ian Cheng, and Laurie Anderson. These figures have made pivotal contributions to our understanding of how narrative functions in the digital age, and their insights will guide our exploration of video games' narrative potential. A central focus of our study will be on the narrative and storytelling techniques unique to video games, emphasizing the role of interactive storytelling and player choice in crafting engaging and multifaceted narratives. Through this lens, we'll explore how video games not only tell stories but also allow players to experience and influence these narratives, creating a dynamic form of storytelling that is both immersive and participatory. Additionally, the course will delve into themes of identity and empathy, considering how video games can serve as a medium for exploring various identities and fostering empathy among players. By participating in interactive narratives, players have the opportunity to experience the world from different perspectives, enhancing their understanding of others and themselves. For the final project, students will have the option to compose an analytical or research paper that delves into a specific aspect of video game literature, or to create a creative project. This could involve designing a detailed game narrative, proposing innovative approaches to interactive storytelling, or even developing a prototype to demonstrate the narrative capabilities of video games. Through a combination of lectures, discussions, and hands-on projects, this course encourages students to critically engage with video games as a narrative medium, expanding their understanding of what constitutes literature in the digital era.

In an era defined by climate change, pandemics and live-streamed war, this digital language arts course confronts the stark realities of our time. It compels students to decolonize their imaginations and discover new ways of engaging with reality, literature, technology, and the future. We examine how language and literature mediate our relationship with the world and how digital mediums reshape our perceptions of reality and our expectations of the future. Central to this course is the critical examination and creation of digital artifacts that engage with speculative fiction. Students will confront the power of nightmares in speculative horror and explore the promise of alternate utopian visions. These explorations aim to open gateways to potential futures, using innovative literary and digital forms. Through rigorous analysis and creative experimentation, students will develop sophisticated digital artifacts that not only respond to but also critique and reimagine the pressing global crises of our time. Students will engage deeply with the material through extensive reading and weekly discussions that directly influence their creative output. Students will produce creative and critical writing in dialogue with the readings. The semester will culminate in the creation of a collection of digital and written artifacts, laying the groundwork for a rich final project that synthesizes the insights and creative explorations from the course. This course equips students with the tools to critically fabricate narratives that challenge existing paradigms and inspire forward-thinking, enabling them to contribute meaningfully to the discourse on future realities. Artists, writers, and texts include Sun Ra, Sondra Perry, Hito Steyerl, Tabita Rezaire, Gerald Vizenor, Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, Ian Cheng, Sadiya Hartman, Jason Mohaghegh, Larissa Sansour, and selected short stories from "Palestine +100: Stories From a Century After the Nakba" and "Iraq +100: Stories from Another Iraq.

Elective

The ancient Greeks imagined a tribe of warrior women at the edge of civilization, and Western culture has never forgotten them. This course will explore ancient and modern ideas of masculinity and femininity through the lens of stories, art, and film from antiquity to the present about the Amazons and their reimagined sisters in fantasy, science-fiction, and pop culture.  But what is an “Amazon,” anyway? Do they have any basis in reality? Why have “women warriors” been so fascinating in myth, legend, and history? What can stories about Amazons teach us about gender and culture? How do ancient ideas about femininity affect contemporary society and pop culture? Readings may include ancient Greek texts like Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Euripides’ Medea  (all in English translation), DC Comics' Wonder Woman as well as its TV and film adaptations, and secondary material from Adrienne Mayor’s Amazons, Keira Williams’ Amazons in America, Jill Lepore’s Secret History of Wonder Woman et al. Assignments will include weekly reading/viewing responses (discussion posts or low-stakes papers), a short project or presentation on “Visualizing Amazons,” and a larger 8-10 page research paper.

Elective

Since the early Hollywood years, films have played a major role in the way American mainstream culture inscribes queerness: the many and diverse queer communities, identities, and experiences. This course begins with an examination of earlier representations of queerness in Hollywood films, tracing queer cinematic images throughout the early 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We will screen queer films such as Nazimova's Salome (1922) and The Killing of Sister George (1968) to analyze their representations of queer identity and examine what they signify to us today. Our examination of queer film will address the following questions: What is gay or lesbian film? What is a queer film? What are the ways in which the discourses of race, gender, and sexuality are interrelated and deployed? The latter half of the course also will examine selected films and documentaries from the new emerging queer cinema and a selection of film shorts that are currently running in queer film festivals.

Elective

Taking its cue from Clint Eastwood who proclaimed, As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't have any original art except Western movies and jazz, this course will analyze the Western film as an art form in and of itself. We will discuss Westerns in terms of their specific aesthetic and technological influence on the medium, their cultural expression of a national political unconscious, and their global function as the meta-narrative of space. This course will tackle these discussions through a chronological unfolding of the genre starting with the Edison Company's 1898 Westerns and Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the Golden Age of John Ford and Howard Hawks' films and the reciprocal translation of Akira Kurosawa's epics, and finally, to the variants of the Spaghetti, Revisionist, and genre-bending contemporary and postmodern Westerns of Dennis Hopper, Sam Peckinpah, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, and Wim Wenders. There will be required readings in critical film theory, weekly screenings, analytical essays, and oral presentations.

Elective

This course serves as an invigorating exploration of gender, and introduction to the field of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. This course explores how gender—as an ever-shifting, political, material, and discursive register and category of identity—embodies fluidity as it produces, disrupts, and re-frames power in everyday life. We will think from the site of the body—as both an individual and collective assemblage of power and history. This course will explore the praxis, politics, and poetics of feminist knowledge production about gender with an explicit commitment to centering questions of anti-coloniality and sociopolitical, ecological, and epistemic justice. Throughout the semester we will pay particular attention to the work of scholars who are interested in, and committed to, a politics of refusal which rejects dominant understandings of gender, race, time, and labor towards a more, queer, connected, and decolonial social life. We’ll be reading the work of Maria lugones, Sara Ahmed, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Imani Perry, M. Jacqui Alexander, Hortense Spillers, Legacy Russell, and many more. Workload will consist of weekly readings, short writing assignments, site visits to archives, and guest lectures. Students will get to undertake their own creative projects throughout the course and we'll end the semester with fun gathering!

Elective

Making sense of events by giving them order and verbal articulation is considered a primary task of storytelling; and stories, in order to make sense, also require readers to interpret them. However, in this class, we will study stories in prose, verse, and drama that have been designed—as nonsense literature—to disarticulate and disorder. In a post-Enlightenment context, nonsense holds particular interest as an other to modern conceptions of advancing knowledge and logical mastery. Yet, unlike the post-truth nonsense we encounter these days, literary nonsense identifies its parodic, subversive, negating, and complementary relationship to logic and sense, often emphasizes its sight- and sound-based elements, and provokes its readers to read joyfully, with scrutiny, and reflexively. As we read, we will ask: What do works of nonsense say about literature, its function, and materials? How does nonsense literature challenge processes of sense-making used by both writers and readers? What are the relationships between sense and nonsense? How is each variably understood and defined? We will also gain familiarity with common forms of nonsense-making and contextualize instances of its workings in their respective place and time. Texts may include theory by Sigmund Freud, C.S. Pierce, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze; poetry, prose, and drama by authors writing firmly in the “nonsense genre” such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, as well as others whose work carries features of it like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Langston Hughes, Marie Hall Ets, Shake Keane, and Carl Sandberg, as well as translations of Sukumar Ray, August Stramm, Kurt Schwitters, Andre Breton, Christian Morgenstern, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Daniil Kharms. Students will write three 5-page papers and maintain a reading journal.

Elective

Commonly associated with the kitsch of song-and-dance routines, heavy melodrama, and elaborate staging, popular Hindi cinema, exoticised as Bollywood the world over, has come to represent a singular appeal among global movie industries. However, this broad-stroke understanding of Hindi cinema ignores the mechanics of its filmmaking style, its ability to cut through class and religion, and its influence in our markets of narrative, taste, ideas, and politics. There is much to learn about how popular Hindi cinema has helped proliferate cultural aesthetics, create and further social and national identities, and bridge the separation between the Indian audience and the desi diaspora. In this class, we will trace the development of Hindi Cinema, from its socialist early beginnings, to the commercial potboilers of the 70s, the slick multiplex films of the new millennium, and the political dramas of the twenty twenties. We will watch Hindi films (with subtitles) and read critical literature to better understand gender, class, and caste in popular cinema, how stardom shapes cultural production, and the legacy of Hindi movies in a politically energized India.In addition to watching films and reading assigned literature, students will also produce mini-reviews, essays, and presentations throughout the class on films watched and discovered. Students will be required to share three short essays, one long-form feature, and a video essay as part of a group project. 

Required Texts: Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (Routledge); Jerry Pinto, The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood (Penguin)

Elective

In this beginning writing course, we will look at contemporary texts that push against the boundaries of traditional literary genres (fiction, poetry, theatre, creative non-fiction, graphic fiction, etc) and blur the lines between those genres as well. Together we will read some of the most exciting contemporary writers who resist our attempts to categorize them. By examining these texts and trying our own creative writing experiments, we will gain a better understanding of what traditional genres are, the techniques they employ, and ways they can be manipulated to create something new.

Elective

Our explorations in this interdisciplinary workshop will center around the interplay of image and text, particularly in film and video. We will tend to the space between words, between images, the movements from one to another, what’s alive in the cracks. How might poetic devices translate to film? How might film theory inspire our writing? What are the myriad ways text, voice and image can layer and entwine?

This workshop is for students interested in practices that live and migrate between moving images and language art. Together we will consider essay films, cinepoetry, video art, installation and live performance. Class time will include screenings, discussions of texts by artists, poets and film theorists, and open-ended prompts for individual and collaborative experiments. No prior experience is necessary, only a desire to engage deeply with films and writing, experiment with new forms and media, and create in thoughtful community.

Elective

The Beginning Poetry Workshop is an elective course introducing students to the art of poetry writing. The course sequentially addresses major commitments of poetry including form/content, sound, line, voice, image, language(s), tradition/convention, experiment, audience, revision, performance, collection, publication, and distribution. Workshop is the heart of the course, animating the practice, discourse, critique, audience, community, and mentorship vital to poets. Every class will also include close reading, discussion of assigned texts, and writing. We will attend public readings, curate and participate in community readings, and welcome poets to our class, when possible. Work can be developed in a range of styles, traditions, and languages. You will leave this class with a collection of workshopped and revised poems, which you will design, self-publish, and distribute in print and/or digital form.

This course is a prerequisite for LAS E421 - Advanced Poetry Workshop in the Spring.

Elective

While the writing of fiction involves only the writer and the page, the group workshop affords the writer the opportunity to explore, develop and refine his or her work in a small community focused on a single goal. This environment of craft and creativity is particularly critical to the beginning writer. As with any craft, revision is the key to effective storytelling. The revision process will be emphasized. Short fiction by leading writers will be read and discussed; elements of craft will be explored; students will learn to deliver criticism in a supportive, constructive way; but learning by doing will comprise the majority of the class. Writing will begin in the first class, leading to small, peer-driven workshop groups and culminating in a full class workshop at semester's end. Students will produce three stories throughout the semester, all of which will be workshopped and revised. The student's engagement in the course, participation and attendance, will drive the final grades.

Elective