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 antiquity to the present, writers and artists have addressed the question of how to lead a good life, as well as addressing those obstacles—fate, the gods, our own divided psyches--that have made it difficult for us to do so. They have also presented conflicting notions of what the good life is, and what its relationship is to happiness and happenstance. In this course, we will explore a range of ancient and modern takes on these questions.

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.

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.

It is famously not that interesting to listen to someone else describe a dream. But dreams have always recurred in literature, and they continue to inspire poets, artists, and filmmakers, taking a fascinating range of cultural forms. Dreams have been seen as mere illusions, as visitations from the beyond, and as disclosing secret desires. They’ve been “read” for what they reveal about individual wishes, fantasies, and traumas, but they’ve also been understood as scenes of collective struggle and aspiration, as laboratories for the formation of other waking worlds.

What happens when we create a community of readers in a comparative literary dialogue around the works of one author? What happens if we delve deeply together into the intricacies of Virginia Woolf’s inimitable language, the translucency of her images, the development of her modernist literary voice across multiple works?

Recently, efforts have been made by the Greek government to curb femicide in Greece by proposing to institute it in the penal code as a distinct crime. h the words of the press, " Greek prosecutors will not only prosecute for murder but (will also) take aggravating circumstances into account". This proposal is a result of campaigns by various women's groups in an effort to reduce domestic violence. From January to October of 2021, twelve women have found violent death in the hands of their husbands or partners.

This course will consider how modern lyric poetry in the United States is significantly shaped and re-shaped by the work of poets, critics, and philosophers of art and society who ask whether “lyric” poetry, in its very form, can help make special contributions towards the goal of creating a more ethnically and racially robust democracy.  Especially for the poets, but also for the critics and philosophers whom we'll read, that vision of American democracy requires (among other things) emphatic recognition of and decisive attention to the diversity and equality of American cultures.