Reading & Composition

Florence, Rome, Venice… You may be familiar with Italy’s most famous destinations, but have you ever wondered what it would be like to venture further south and off the traditional tourist track? What is there in Italy’s South other than Cosa Nostra and ridiculously good pizza? Why did Italian Southerners historically face social and economic discrimination, and how does this discrimination continue today?

Reading & Composition

If literature contains forms of language that seem not to fit in everyday speech, how is it that even literary works that minimize the representation of speech remain deeply interested in language as a social phenomenon? This course approaches the question by presenting students with a group of texts that allow them to explore the aspects of language that receive emphasis when literary works place readers at a distance from speech.

Reading & Composition

In this course, we will explore a variety of approaches to description, from Classical examples of ekphrasis (that is, vivid visual description), to modern renewals of the technique.  We will read descriptions of fictional artworks from antiquity (Homer’s Shield of Achilles, Ovid’s Pygmalion) alongside recent fictional re-imaginings of the art world (Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World). 

Reading & Composition

How do writers, artists, and social scientists construct bodies as archaic, classical, and savage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How is the body a site on which questions of political and social power are negotiated in relation to the archaic and the primitive? How do bodies suffer and inflict violence within these constructions of power? How are bodies racialized and sexualized in relation to the classical and the savage?

Reading & Composition

“America! I put the word on a page, it is my keyhole,” writes Russian-Jewish- American poet Ilya Kaminsky in a poem that describes his journey from the Soviet Union to America. In this class, we will read travelogues, essays, fiction, non-fiction and poetry by Europeans who have visited, settled in or even “conquered” America. What can these authors tell us about America that the locals do not notice? Can we trust their accounts? How do these authors’ perceptions of their own countries change and what do they discover when they decide to travel back East?

Reading & Composition

What does it means for a text or an image to be “haunted” – by the dead, by past traumas, or by occluded memories? What do “supernatural” occurrences in literature and cinema tell us about the visible and the invisible, about the material and the spectral, about belief and disbelief, or about reality and the imagination?

Reading & Composition

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” So begins the most famous and consequential manifesto of history. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto inaugurated a new genre of writing that has influenced countless other manifestos—as well as literary texts, artworks, and political movements of course—since its publication in 1848.  What is a manifesto?

Reading & Composition

A group of Chicano/a artists spray paint the exterior of an art museum in protest of the museum’s exclusionary practices. An African-born woman writes poetry about the experience of becoming a slave.  The son of a dying woman journeys to a land of the dead hoping to meet his long-lost father and reclaim his inheritance.  A Native American man spends twenty-four hours trying to earn money to buy back a family heirloom. A black woman abandons her home and previous marriages in search of true love.

Reading & Composition

What is the relationship between literature and revolution? Can works of art and literature address political reality in a way that journalism or nonfiction can’t?  Can political art be more than mere propaganda? What does it mean to call an idea, a work of art, or a scientific theory “revolutionary”? What is the connection between revolutionary aesthetics and revolutionary politics?

Reading & Composition

Book Learning:

What Can Literature Teach Us?

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