This course will examine a long legacy of cultural fascination with domestic space and its iconic caretaker, the housewife.  We will discuss literary texts and films that feature housewives as protagonists – from Euripides to Virginia Woolf to the present.

This course will examine modes of confession, including its immediate catharsis of past transgressions, but also its use in autobiography: where does confession position the confessor within society? What does it reveal or conceal about the self, and how can it serve as a platform for memoir and identity construction? What are the rhetorical effects of a professed sincerity, versus a confession which flaunts its own insincerity? We will explore these questions, among others, across texts from a range of eras and genres, including works from the Archpoet, Augustine, and Nabokov.

What are human rights? How did this concept begin and where? How can literature and media engage with human rights as a discourse and a practice?How do Latina/o/x, Native American and African-American writers and artists engage with human rights discourses in their works? In this course we will be reading/viewing texts that deal with the issue of human rights through a variety of genres and media prevailing in the 20-21 st centuries.

Does every detail or object mentioned in a piece of literature necessarily have a purpose, a meaning? Does it advance the plot, evoke the setting, contribute to characterization, establish a motif? Are some details or objects just thematically purposeless? We will begin the course by considering one literary critic’s famous take on this question: Roland Barthes’s idea of “the reality effect.” When a literary text purports to represent reality, what use does it make of random, seemingly extraneous details and objects?

This course will consider the contemporary and queer fate of scenes of ritual found in Ancient Greek literature and visual culture. How does modern queer literature rewrite scenes of ancient ritual in order to generate alternative ways of thinking about kinship, mourning, and healing? How does queer cinema and performance deviate from and rework key themes of ritual? How does the performance of ritual provide the conditions for us to recognize certain lives as grievable, certain relations as kinship, and certain bodies as human?

“A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein.”

-Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

Course Description:

“The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across.’  Having been borne across the world, we are translated men.” –Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”

Our course takes up its task of developing critical reading and writing skills through an exploration of literature in terms of two interrelated categories: the actual and the possible. That means we will investigate what set of facts is available and operative in the world of a story or a work of literature—e.g., who the characters are, what happens, where, when, and why things take place—and thus ask how it is we come to know (or think we know) these things through language.

This is a course about changing one’s mind: about revolutions, conversions, voltas, and plot twists, and about what happens when we sit and stare.

Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her,

the lover turned his eyes.

                                                —Ovid, Metamorphosis

Pish! Noses, ears, and lips? Is’t possible?

—Othello

In this course we will explore literary and cinematic utopias and dystopias in a handful of Euro-American, Middle Eastern, and African texts. How have writers in different times and places articulated their hopes and fears regarding inequality and the possibility of justice? How did the texts’ historical context and aesthetic form influence the theories of society that they present?