In this course we will ask what are political relations and how are these imagined in both political protocols and fictional texts. Central to our exploration of this topic will be distinctions between economic, private, and political relations and how these are understood in different historical moments. We will look at a diverse array of texts, both ancient and modern from different cultural traditions.

It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look.[1]

—Avery Gordon

In this class we will study works of fiction that revolve around rogues, tricksters, and outlaws, whether comic or tragic, sympathetic or monstrous. We will start with folktales, cartoons and picaresque stories, move on to novels, plays, films, and other narrative critiques of social mores, and also examine relevant theory and criticism that raise larger questions about rogue discourses. Particular attention will be paid to the period of economic boom and bust in the first half of the twentieth century and its implications for more current concerns.

In this course we’ll consider texts that dramatize the act of storytelling.  Each of the texts we’ll examine, whether an ancient epic or postcolonial novel, Renaissance drama or Romantic poem, fairy tale or work of literary theory, is interested in the act of communication between storyteller and listener, or writer and reader, that characterizes the sharing of a story.  We’ll think about what forms these stories take when they come to us on the page or the stage and consider what’s at stake in the choice to tell a story in a particular way.  We’ll look at the relationship between stories a

According to at least one influential definition of aesthetic experience, art begins when appetite ends. By this account, artistic and gustatory, or figurative and literal, taste cannot coincide; hunger and even “healthy appetite” must be satisfied before any aesthetic pursuit can take place.

What if the Cold War became hot? What if John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry had succeeded?  What if the bomb under Hitler’s desk hadn’t missed? “What if” is the question that jump starts the imagination of children and scientists, writers and science fiction nerds, oppressed peoples and activists—everyone who thinks about making a different world possible. Science Fiction in general has sometimes been called “the literature of change”: take the world you know, imagine a possibly possible change, and chart the way from here to there.

The Roman poet Horace famously wrote that our stories should aim to instruct and delight. Through the centuries authors have interpreted his advice in many different ways. One important way is by linking the experience of literature to the experience of play.  This connection—between literature and play—will be the focus of our course. Among the questions we will ask: How do our authors play with language? How do they play with their readers?

Democracy—a term used almost daily by the press, governments, law, social movements, and many poets—is not a new word but has a long history and multiple meanings. In particular, poets writing in different languages and epochs have been moved by the possibilities of the word and concept from ancient Athens to contemporary social movements. One of the central theses of the class is that poetry offers a critical reading about the politics of truth at play in everyday life.

It’s one thing to be a minority in terms of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference; but what does it mean to be a bisexual Arab-Jewish boy in Israel?  Or a Mexican-American woman in Texas?  In this course we will look at literature by and about the people who straddle many sides of the borders of identity, and use our readings perfect our skills in close analysis, thesis development and effective academic writing.

Texts will include:

David Grossman, “Her Body Knows”

Sanda Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek”

At a time when technology threatens to render the printed word obsolete, storytelling still permeates our lives as consumers of media. Far from relinquishing literature to the library, this class explores what we can learn when we bring our “old” literary reading skills to newer texts: video games, social media, interactive fiction. Highlighting the “comparative” in Comparative Literature, we pair canonical works — from Ovid to Shakespeare to Alice in Wonderland — with examples of new media.