What’s in a word? Be it in daily communication, lawful jurisdiction, or the figurative worlds of the literary, whether instructing or indoctrinating, exalting or exacting, how do words play on worlds? As often as words bewitch us, conjuring by artifice, so too do words fail us, distorting by approximation. How does language ring true, and how does language lie? And what of words across languages, when words cross borders? What shrinks or swells, what is lost or found in translation? These are but a few of the questions this course will address—you can take my word for it.

We are seldom conscious of how mediated our relationship to the world is as we make our way through it. This mediation occurs not just on the level of conceptual cognition, but also on the level of embodiment and sensual perception. In this course we will analyze the ways in which different genres of literature engage with and interrogate the status of the physical body and its senses. For example, what roles can the body play in contributing to the narrative form of a novel or short story?

Google Street transports us to Machu Picchu, and virtual reality allows us to stroll through Versailles… Enchanted by this experience of proximity, do we still have a sense of direction(s)? In this course, literature will be our compass as we think about how the two cardinal axes—North South, East West—have at various moments in history provided understandings, and perhaps misunderstandings, of the way countries, continents, and the whole world function.

A recent book of literary criticism on nature poetry by John Felstiner bears the title Can Poetry Save the Earth? Without taking a positon on Felstiner’s urgent question, this course will be structured around a series of questions implicit within it: What effects does reading about nature, or looking at visual representations of the natural world, have on our experience of our physical surroundings and our encounters with nonhuman forms of life?

Disease attacks the interior and exterior of the human body, presenting psychological and emotional bifurcations of self. Contagious diseases (especially if little understood) can pose a radical challenge to families, caretakers, and governing structures. Pandemics have often been perceived as a moral condemnation of human depravity, yet they have in turn engendered some of the brightest examples of human virtue. This course will explore various works concerning plagues that have visited us in recent history, and those qualities in ourselves that threaten to plague a healthy society.

In this course we will explore various word-and-image partnerships (and rivalries). We will consider early artists’ books such as William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, ekphrasis (that is, vivid visual description) in Classical poetry, and contemporary comic books and graphic novels. Homer will show us how well words can paint a picture, while editorial cartoonists will illustrate how images alone can convey a story. In order to understand these texts better, both as verbal and visual narratives, we will read pertinent theoretical work (W.J.T.

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”

― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ …”

-Shakespeare, Othello

Philip Sidney called his canonical Defense of Poesy an “ink-wasting toy”; Shakespeare felled a hero with a handkerchief; Melville sent a ship on a wild whale chase. In this course, we’ll ask what trifles, toys, trash, and other distractions are doing in some otherwise serious (and some not-so-serious) novels, poems, plays, and treatises.

In this course, we will read a variety of fictional texts in order to explore the ways in which stories can be told. Our starting point will be the whys and hows of writing and reading: why would an author decide to withhold information? How does a reader perceive a first-person narrator vs. a third-person one? How does an author imagine and invoke an audience? How does an author show what is going on in a character’s mind?

Pessimism: from pessimus: the worst. But free from bad to worse, let alone good, better, best, is it possible to think of this category non-relationally, as its own always already bad ontology? In this course, we will read texts of pessimism, such as cynicism, cultural & racial pessimism, & bleak ecologies. Optimism, however, will be dedicated to the writing component of this R1A as we work progressively on both critical thinking and & how to structure and express such thinking in writing.