What makes American history, and why would we want to—need to—remake it? This course explores literary and visual materials produced in the post-Civil Rights U.S. by artists and writers who ponder this question and approach history like a raw material that demands to be refashioned and constantly problematized. What versions of American history have they remade, and what new versions and visions of history do they produce in the process? How has re-making history been used to gain a critical understanding of silences and omissions in the United States’ story?

This course offers an introduction to a broad range of historical and practical approaches to poetry, and gives students access to theater, dance and multimedia performances hosted by Cal Performances. By attending these events together, discussing and writing about them, we interpret poetry beyond "word-craft," in its dialogue with the other arts. Thus, as we discover, and experiment with, poetry’s elements, from “expression” to “image,” we also examine their articulation across artistic forms.

“I’ve seen justice for all genders and classes and sexualities, and it was as alien to me as the extra-terrestrial creatures who practiced it. This image of justice sprang from my own imagination, taking place on another planet, in another time, for a species of people very unlike humans. It took science fiction for me to see a clear picture of what justice could be. And at the end of the day, that’s all it was – fiction.”

The Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility.

Three incommensurable claims form the basis of America’s origin stories: America was found; America was founded; America was self-made.

What is meant when we say someone or something “sounds American”? Can a person sound like a certain gender, social class, sexuality, or race? How would we possibly define that sound? And what might it mean to think of a culture by the ways it sounds and listens, instead of how it looks or sees? This course will explore these questions and others by studying podcasts, poems, songs, novels, and the changing forms of sonic technologies like microphones, radios, mp3s, turntables, and more.

From “fake news” to “semi-fictional” memoirs and the resurgence of “true crime” narratives, the stylistic presentation of facts has renewed its relevance across politics and culture in the 21st century.

And to the thinking soul the *phantasms are like sensations (aesthemata)..This is why the soul never thinks without phantasm (Aristotle, De Anima, 3, 7) In the English translation of Aristotle's text, the word “phantasma” is frequently rendered as “image” but in fact these phantasms (phantasmata) are connections of the individual mind with the sensory object and the sensory experience, that is, after the sensory object is gone and it is no longer there.

For decades, a significant number of far-right figures have warned that a group of philosophers, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and aestheticians were fomenting--in a memorable and oft-repeated phrase--a "conspiracy to corrupt" America and "the West."  This corrupting work was said to occur, in many respects, through the medium of art, and through something the conspiracy theorists identified as "cultural marxism." The leftist intellectuals attacked by the conspiracy theorists were associated with what was--and still is--popularly known as the "Frankfu

This course will study sexuality and gender in two very different historical periods--ancient Greece and 19th-century Europe. Sexuality will be defined as including sexual acts (e.g. sodomy, pederasty, masturbation); sexual identities (e.g. erastes and eromenos); and sexual systems (e.g. kinship structures, subcultures, political hierarchies). Readings and lectures will focus on situating queer sexualities relative to dominant organizations of sex and gender.