“I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

This course will focus on narratives (in fiction, film, and lyric form) of both economic and ecological precarity and their relationship to historical sites of dispossession, displacement, and vulnerability. With eye on the contemporary disasters of genocide, climate disaster, and pandemic (situated directly as part of the wider disaster of capitalism), we will develop an understanding of how notions of resistance and embodiment take shape in relation to literary and cinematic form.

“The essay does not play by the rules of organized science and theory,” writes Theodor W. Adorno in his great study, “The Essay as Form.” For Adorno, the essay “suspends the traditional concept of method,” preferring instead to operate obliquely, through association, “conjointly and in freedom.” It avoids the idealist obsession with primordial phenomena or grounds for experience, working instead in the realm of mediations and artefacts, exploring the cultural garbage inherited from the past.

Minor characters are having their moment. In this course, we will read selections from the spate of recent critical texts regarding minor character, asking how minorness is being constituted one hundred years after E.M. Forster’s 1927 Aspects of the Novel, which left us with the enduring division of characters into “round” and “flat.” We will question this simple dyad, as well as a host of critical practices based in the study of modernist fiction, such as the valuation of the technical means by which authors represent consciousness.

This is not a course about “the prison film,” “prison literature,” or the writing of imprisoned intellectuals more generally. Although we’ll briefly discuss these traditions and critical constructions, our focus will be on efforts to counter what Michelle Brown calls “penal spectatorship”: the ways of seeing (and unseeing) that uphold the carceral state.

This class will examine Arabic poetic production from the classical to the modern period, focusing on the historical development of Arabic poetic form (including the qasida, elegy, and the wine ode) as well as the intersections between poetry, Islamic mysticism, philosophy, and political discourse. For the pre-modern component, the class traces the developments of the qasida form and its functions in Sufism and Islamic philosophy.

Expository writing based on analysis of selected masterpieces of ancient and modern literature. R1A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement, and R1B satisfies the second half.

Hebrew literature is a hybrid creature with no stable home. Historically developed in exile by people navigating between languages and cultures, it emerged from a “living-dead” language that experienced both death and resurrection. To this day, Hebrew literature exists in a constant state of in-betweenness, carrying the weight of historical trauma and an intensely contentious present.

Primarily for students engaged in preliminary exploration of a restricted field, involving the writing of a report. May not be substituted for available seminars.

“The essay does not play by the rules of organized science and theory,” writes Theodor W. Adorno in his great study, “The Essay as Form.” For Adorno, the essay “suspends the traditional concept of method,” preferring instead to operate obliquely, through association, “conjointly and in freedom.” It avoids the idealist obsession with primordial phenomena or grounds for experience, working instead in the realm of mediations and artefacts, exploring the cultural garbage inherited from the past.