Violence is often seen as the opposite of speech. It is what happens when words fail, and communication can only occur through non-linguistic means.  In this course, I would like us to look more closely at this opposition by reading several violent works of literature. What is a violent word, and what is its relationship with physical violence? What is the word’s violence, and who is its target?

This course will explore the interplay of drama and tedium in day-to-day life. All of the works we will read eschew a purely heroic or marvelous mode and instead focus on petty concerns or mundane experience. But these texts do so in a way that is far from ordinary or boring; each offers a distinct creative perspective on everyday life. Some of the works we’ll read highlight the intense and dramatic undercurrents of routine existence.

This course will consider a number of literary texts with an eye to how they explore themes of pathology at both the individual and collective levels. Literature frequently involves critical reflections on both characters within texts and the social contexts that shape them: Plays and novels often imagine personal crises, as well as responses to disruptions within familiar or established public orders; lyric poetry can express conflicts between self and society.

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Spoken by Claudius, III, iii, 100-103)

In this course, we will spend time reading plays, novels, and poems that either constitute or contain one (or both) of two speech acts: the curse and the supplication. We will think about the recurring trope of invoking “the gods” or “a higher power,” which runs through literary traditions from antiquity to modernity. We will consider the particular aesthetic qualities of tragedy, incantation, and benediction.

This course will explore the interplay of drama and tedium in day-to-day life. All of the works we will read eschew a purely heroic or marvelous mode and instead focus on petty concerns or mundane experience. But these texts do so in a way that is far from ordinary or boring; each offers a distinct creative perspective on everyday life. Some of the works we’ll read highlight the intense and dramatic undercurrents of routine existence.

“Maybe one day…I’ll write a love story…where the characters will be insects. I have a bad tendency to overspecialize. I envy you your broad scope, Jim.” –Jules et Jim

In this course we will develop writing and argumentative skills through exploring imaginative and theoretical texts that offer us models of alternatives worlds whose social structures attempt to solve some of the perennial problems of modern living. We will think through questions concerning the consequences of industrialization, gender relations, and the conditions needed to bring about a just society, among others.

“Style is the thing that’s always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.” (Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart). This course operates on the premise that style is more than a “phony” necessity; in fact, it can also be a means of self-discovery, self-invention, and a fair amount of fun-having. It’s all too easy not to pay attention to what characterizes one’s writing, to passively reproduce assembly-line structures and nutritionally worthless truisms. This course aspires to help us break free of that.

This is a reading and composition course that will introduce a broad selection of texts on war and its aftermath. The readings will explore premodern Vietnamese civil war, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam wars, and the Algerian civil war. The wide selection is based on the assumption that there is something universally comprehensible about the experience of war. And yet, by reading these texts closely, we will try to tease out the social and cultural specificities that mark these different articulations.

This course will encourage critical reading, thinking and writing skills around the topic of the manipulation of space in literature, photography and film. We will read literary works and theoretical essays, and watch films that are particularly interested in how real and imaginative spaces can serve to frame stories, histories and ideologies and/or themselves become the protagonist. What laws govern real and imagined spaces? How do characters navigate them and according to what principles?