The Tower of Babel in Genesis is a brief and dramatic story about how human languages and                                
habitats become multiple and scattered. The end of the story is one way of conceptualizing the                              
differences and divisions among peoples in the world. The story is tightly constructed, and its                            
ambiguity yields profuse interpretations, retellings, allusions, and echoes throughout literature. In                    

Our reliance on clocks to tell time tends to overshadow other, more porous categories of temporal experience: the cycles of day and night, the turn of the seasons, periods of rain and drought. In this course, we will turn our attention to both the imprecision and the possibilities of nocturnal rhythms. When does nighttime begin and end? What experiences become possible shrouded in darkness? Is nighttime for sleep, for moonlighting, or, perhaps, for partying? Why do we label periods of unrest “dark times” when the night sky makes its way back to us daily?

André Breton defined surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” But to what extent can we begin to comprehend this mode of thinking? Can we actually uncouple reason from thought? And if we could—would it even be fruitful?

With the rise in protests and demonstrations across the Américas against Neoliberalism, Police violence, privatization of public resources, and the like, such as in the case of the BLM protests, Indigenous protests in Guatemala, and NODAPL in the Dakotas, we must ask ourselves: how do we remember violence? What is the State’s role in creating/allowing these various forms of violence to manifest and realize themselves? How do these forms of violence and trauma affect the way we perceive space and place? Our communities? The world around us?

Marriages in myths and fairy tales are rarely without their trials; folklore is full of lost and monstrous husbands, women’s journeys to retrieve them, and their efforts to flee them. In this course we will read a core set of narratives about supernatural or otherwise strange relationships — such as Cupid and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, and Bluebeard — and think about what these tales do, and what subsequent authors do to them.