A glimpse, a whiff, a graze, a chill. This course explores how literature, and its critics, both approach and retreat from an account of sense experience. When and how does description invoke the body? Why do certain senses—sight and sound—so often mediate representations of the other, “lower” senses—smell, touch, and taste? Alongside excerpts from discussions of the senses in Aristotle, Plato, and Merleau-Ponty, we’ll begin the semester by reading poems—from the early modern period to German modernism—which call up and call upon sense understanding.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.
You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet,
there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
—Bilbo Baggins

Cash rules everything around me
CREAM
Get the money
Dollar, dollar bill y’all
—Wu-Tang Clan, “C.R.E.A.M.” (1993)

In this course, we will investigate the question of narrative reliability and whether an objective, “reliable” representation of reality is really possible. We will look at the complexities of narration in fiction and film by first asking how we define the nature of truth and reality. Is truth an objective viewpoint on our world or a set of subjective interpretations? What role does lying play in society, and how would the perspective of a biased or deceptive narrator problematize our interpretation of a text or film? How do issues of perspective affect our perception of truth and reality?

Found poems, quilts, and sculptures made out of trash. Narratives preoccupied with how to recover and retell a lost story.  Museum installations that assemble and remake remnants of a past. Anthropologists obsessed with documenting threatened cultures before they presumably disappear. What do these imply about questions of rescue, recovery, and reuse? What happens when we ‘salvage’ something—an object, a history, a culture—and what does this practice imply?

Can a work of the imagination teach us anything about real life? Can literature make us better people or thinkers, and if so, how does it convey its moral or intellectual lessons? Or does it instead provide dangerous temptations and immoral models, leading readers astray? What distinguishes a good reader from a bad reader, and how do literary texts ask us to relate to their stories? How does the form of a literary text act on its readers?

“The power of debt is described as if it were exercised neither through repression nor through ideology. The debtor is “free,” but his actions, his behavior, are confined to the limits defined by the debt he has entered into.”

– Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man

A survey of “fantasy literature” and some of the literary, philosophical, and psychological issues attached to it. Beginning with Near Eastern and Hellenistic creation myths, we will then move on to the Byzantine and Roman novels. The course will cover fairy tales, medieval allegory and chivalric tales, Renaissance romance, and culminate in more recent syntheses of these traditions. We will consider how these tales comment on morality, the family, cultural history, and ideology.

In Anna Karenina Tolstoy’s speaker humorously initiates with: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps the most riddling element is what sorts of bonds keep unhappy families in close proximity, and how might we create a taxonomy of their conflicts? This course will examine family stories written in narrative and dramatic form, and will uncover the distinct challenges (or particular suitability) each of these forms experiences on the page as it tries to give voice to a complex network of family members.