This course will deal with scams, schemes, and conspiracies, from bloody revenges to amorous pursuits to government takeovers. We’ll look at these plots from a number of angles: What, if anything, motivates the masterminds behind them? By what means are they carried out? What are their moral, legal, or personal consequences? We will also consider some of the broader issues plotting raises: Does plotting reflect a fundamental desire to exercise free will? When does an innocent plan become a devious plot? Can a plot ever be deemed necessary or legitimate?

For the Spanish-speaking population of America, in particular those populations intent on staying the rest of their lives, the classroom is a very loaded site for discussions of identity, assimilation, agency and citizenship.  Perhaps this is because many immigrants brought with them a Latin American ideology that puts education at the core of citizenship and the national project.  Or perhaps this conception of the high school as a factory for identities and a battleground to determine which identities can be recognized is as American as apple pie.  Regardless of the origins of these ideas,

What are human rights? How did this concept begin and where? How can literature engage with human rights as a discourse and a practice? In this course we will be reading/viewing texts that deal with the issue of human rights through a variety of genres and media: graphic novels, novels, plays, poems, songs, photographs, and films. We will begin to explore how aesthetics and the manipulation of genre work on us as readers of texts that often deal with traumatic historical events. How do literature, film, and photography manipulate a reader’s empathy?

In this course we’ll consider texts that reflect on and interrogate the act of storytelling in which they and their characters are engaged.  Each of the texts we’ll examine, whether a fairy tale or work of literary theory, Renaissance drama or Romantic poem, graphic novel or novel of ideas, is interested in the act of communication between storyteller and listener, or writer and reader, that characterizes the sharing of a story.  We’ll think about what forms these stories take when they come to us on the page or the stage and consider what’s at stake in the choice to tell a story in a parti

In this course we will explore literature of transformation: texts in which characters, or entire communities, undergo some change of form or change of mind.  Something in these characters, plots, or even narrative structures gets rearranged or reconfigured.  We’ll think, too, about how literature can sometimes ask us to become different as readers, in order to interact with a text at all.  Exploring the topic of metamorphoses, even revolutions (internal ones and external sociopolitical ones too) can help us reconsider our assumptions about reading and interpretation, including how we inter

In everyday life, we seem to know an object when we see it, perhaps less when we hear it, but our senses don’t usually have a tendency to fool us, and far less often do they baffle us. In contrast, it happens quite often in literature that a clear and reliable relationship between sensation and perception does not exist. This course focuses on literary works after 1600 where the senses are not what they seem, where the interpretation of sensation through perception is radically different than what it might be in reality.

“Every time I bat my eyelashes it’s a political statement.”

–Rupaul

Flip through the cable channels and it’s easy to see that we, as a culture, are very interested in other people’s homes. From Hoarders, where we can gawk at other people’s misfortunes, to the home makeover reality shows on HGTV, you could spend a few hours a day peeping into others’ private spaces.

When chastity works, nothing happens. A story centered on the absence of sex might not sound like much of a story at all, but chastity, along with its sister virtues of modesty and moderation, has long been a hot topic for hit plays and best-selling novels.

I love you: Who says this? Who/what is this I, who/what is this you, & what is happening in the loving? In this class, we will look at many possible ways to answer this question, from philosophia to patriotism, from lovesickness to familial love. Along the way, we intend to create new & nurture old love affairs: the love of reading & the love of writing, of course! This course will have several short essay assignments (4 pages) and their resultant revision, culminating in a 5-6 page paper at the semester’s end.

Required Texts:

Phaedrus Plato