Although originally coined as a medical condition (literally “homesickness”), nostalgia has come to describe a usually harmless, and deeply sentimental, longing for the past. In this class, we’ll think about the transformation of this concept from the medical to the emotional, as well as its connection to ideas of both home and history. Just how harmless is nostalgia? Does nostalgia keep us grounded and attached to where we come from or does its sentimentality necessarily distort our vision? What is it about an unattainable time or place that seems so appealing?

This is a reading and composition course that will introduce a selection of Vietnamese fiction translated into English. The course will explore the development of Vietnamese literature from the pre-modern period to the present, focusing on works that emerged from the civil and international conflicts that defined 20th century Vietnam.

In this course we will develop writing and argumentative skills through exploring imaginative and theoretical texts that offer us models of alternatives worlds whose social structures attempt to solve some of the perennial problems of modern living. We will think through questions concerning the consequences of industrialization, gender relations, and the conditions needed to bring about a just society, among others.

This course will explore the interplay of drama and tedium in day-to-day life. All of the works we will read eschew a purely heroic or marvelous mode and instead focus on petty concerns or mundane experience. But these texts do so in a way that is far from ordinary or boring; each offers a distinct creative perspective on everyday life. Some of the works we’ll read highlight the intense and dramatic undercurrents of routine existence.

This class is about texts that want to take in entire worlds. It’s about stories, novels, and poems that aspire to the comprehensiveness of encyclopedias. This ambition gives them a strange, hybrid quality: the way that they catalog and communicate vast quantities of information often makes them seem more like non-literary texts than what we traditionally think of as literature.

This course will explore the interplay of drama and tedium in day-to-day life. All of the works we will read eschew a purely heroic or marvelous mode and instead focus on petty concerns or mundane experience. But these texts do so in a way that is far from ordinary or boring; each offers a distinct creative perspective on everyday life. Some of the works we’ll read highlight the intense and dramatic undercurrents of routine existence.

Writing can be considered a heroic task in that the writer navigates a space and experience and serves as guides for the next to come, directing their attention at certain sights and sounds. In fact, writing shares much with space-building and architecture. Many of the texts and films we will read foreground their made-ness by incorporating multiple layers of media and perspective, as well as encouraging flexibility and plasticity in their readers.

“The mouth, tongue, and teeth find their primitive territoriality in food. In giving themselves over to the articulation of sounds, the mouth, tongue, and teeth deterritorialize. Thus, there is a certain disjunction between eating and speaking, and even more, despite all appearances, between eating and writing.” So write Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In this course, we will explore the disjunctions and connections between food, eating, speaking, and writing.

The girl-child, as we find her in literature, embodies far more than sugar, spice, and everything nice. She is simultaneously the gateway of the imagination, inspiring (mostly male) authors to project themselves into her daydreams and create whole new, surreal worlds. She is likewise the object of erotic fascination: corruptible, enigmatic, ripe for the picking. At the same time, she becomes a powerful figure for (mostly female) authors seeking to reinstate her sexual agency; they show us a version of the girl-child who is herself desirous, playful but quick-witted, and self-aware.

Does a text “speak”? How, and to whom, do the words on a page make their unique voices heard? In this course, we will attempt to pinpoint and define some of the different voices that come together to create a work of literature. Our investigation will begin with a few mythical and infernal depictions of haunting songs and sounds that tell their stories in seductive and disturbing ways. In our readings of lyric poetry, we’ll explore how we might characterize the speaking “I” and the different interlocutors he or she engages.