According to the philosopher Gottfried Liebniz, we live in “the best of all possible worlds.”  Whether or not that’s true, it hasn’t prevented us from ceaselessly imagining – or even creating – alternate realities: shiny fantasy worlds where our most cherished dreams come true or, when we’re feeling less optimistic, nightmarish dystopias where they are mercilessly crushed.  What constitutes a possible world or parallel universe?

Is there such a thing as the perfect crime?  Can murder be considered beautiful or artistic?  What exactly is the relationship between art and murder?  In this class, we will be exploring the gruesome interplay between violence and beauty in literature and film.

Some texts rebel against a literary tradition, some against a political regime, and some against society as a whole. In this course we will consider works of fiction, film, music and photography, focusing particularly on their connections to rebellion and revolution. We will explore texts that explicitly deal with revolution and texts which deal with it on a metaphoric level. Together we will witness how literature and art work not only to provide awareness, but also as active agents with the power to incite national and global change.

While the act of narration in general might fairly be called a kind of manipulation, this class will examine literary and filmic texts that explicitly play calculating and, more often than not, cruel games with their characters and/or readers. Whether these games are played out between characters, or between the text and reader, we will examine the dynamics of narrative manipulations ranging from plot arcs to conspiracy theories, storytelling to retelling, literary puzzles to thwarted expectations.

In this course we will be exploring texts which use the forms of autobiography in various ways.  Through readings and discussion, we will think about representations of self in fiction, poetry, memoir, and film; the relationships between memory and identity; and the ways in which autobiography and narrative are related.  Over the semester, we will consider interpretive approaches to different forms and styles of written prose.  Course requirements will include midterm and final papers, as well as regular writing assignments.  Texts on syllabus include Kafka, Rhys, Kincaid, Duras, Rousseau,

It’s almost impossible to encounter a new cultural object or experience without unconsciously slipping it into some category or another. We take it to be a work of art or an occasion for entertainment, an expression of elite or popular taste, something real and refined or crass and commercial. In this class we’ll take a look at how these judgments of taste fit together and what’s at stake when we make them.

The notion that racial identity is socially constructed is by now a widely familiar one. Yet race continues to exert a powerful influence over how society is structured and how we view ourselves and others. If race cannot be meaningfully described as having a “real” biological or objective existence, why and how does it persist in shaping our social, cultural, and political practices?

Rather than focusing on a specific theme or genre, this course focuses on a wide range of writing styles, operating on the premise that you can’t write with style unless you know how to read it. Like many of the selected readings and films, the course’s goal is straightforward yet challenging: to consider how style and form convey substance and character in a text, and thereby learn to convey our own arguments stylishly. With that goal in mind, we will discuss works that all have highly self-conscious, unique, and lively written voices.

This course is dedicated to three figures that lurk at the fringes of capitalism and seem to represent at once the epitome, the inverse, and even the undoing of its logics. Our aim will be to shed light on the contemporary obsession with hoarding by studying the hoarder in relation to two precursors of 19th and 20th century narrative and theory: the fetishist and the collector. We will examine the material practices and psychic mechanisms that define these identities and authorize distinctions between them, as well as the diverse historical contexts from which they emerge.

This course is a writing course first and a crash course in comparative and historical literary study second.  We will be focusing on process writing (as set out in Writing Analytically, our course’s textbook) and dividing the course in halves for both reading and writing purposes.