Imagine yourself in nineteenth-century New York City, in the midst of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Spanish migrants, mostly all living in exile in the United States. Many of them employed as tobacco workers, these migrants would often work to the sound of the voice of a reader–a person specifically employed by the workers to read texts out loud in Spanish. You might hear them reading novels, newspapers, theatrical pieces - all while the tabaqueros rolled their cigars. After the act of reading, the workers would join in a shared discussion: Had they liked the text?

In this course we will explore how the horror tropes differ between United States and Latin American literature and film and how these tropes are meant to critique the socioeconomic and sociopolitical states of these countries, especially the negative impact of foreign relations and the description of identities in relation to immigration. We will explore questions such as: How do ghostly apparitions speak about the past and the present? How do demonic manifestations in literature and film critique socio political unrest?

In all the literary texts we will read in this course, there is a fictional voice or a character who acts as a translator. We will analyze the means they use for translating words across time, places, and cultures. Some of the fictional translators we will meet end up losing—or gaining—something in the passage between languages. Some simply refuse to translate. Others use more creative strategies, such as generating multiple meanings, asking for collaboration, or producing a fake translation.

Both images of flying or of aerial human ascent and images of falling or of downward movement and descent appear regularly within disparate expressive cultures across time and place. Moreover, despite their ostensible opposition as images or tropes, flight and fall are frequently deployed in curious continuity with one another.

Contemporary philosophy and literature place significant emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge production. We will study this emphasis, as it is taken up in a variety of literary and critical works. But what is the body? Is it my epidermis, my senses, the complicated nexus of impulses called drives, my emotions, the lump of meat known as the brain? Where does my body end and my mind (or my ideas or whatever the not-body is) begin? Is the contemporary emphasis on the body an oblique response to a set of historical and political developments? If so, what are those developments?

We often think of non-fiction as cut-and-dried: there’s the real stuff (that’s non-fiction) and then there’s the made-up stuff (that’s fiction). Non-fiction, to quote the dictionary definition is real; it’s “based on facts, real events, and real people.” Simple as this may seem, this definition actually complicates non-fiction. Non-fiction, according to the dictionary, is not real events or real people but only “based on” them; it is a representation of those events and people documented in prose, comics, or film.

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.

In all the literary texts we will read in this course, there is a fictional voice or a character who acts as a translator. We will analyze the means they use for translating words across time, places, and cultures. Some of the fictional translators we will meet end up losing—or gaining—something in the passage between languages. Some simply refuse to translate. Others use more creative strategies, such as generating multiple meanings, asking for collaboration, or producing a fake translation.

This course will focus on narrative and film regarding both economic and ecological precarity and their relationship to various historical sites of dispossession, displacement, and vulnerability. With an eye on the contemporary disasters of genocide and pandemic under late-stage capitalism, we will develop an understanding of how forms of embodiment are situated in periods of chronic catastrophes through narrative form.

During this course, we will delve into Gertrude Stein's 'The Geographical History of America,' Allan Pred's 'Making Histories and Constructing Human Geographies,' Lao Tzu’s ‘Tao Te Ching,’ and Michel-Jean Jacques's novel 'Kukum.' Our focus will be on exploring these literary works through a geographic lens. By analyzing how individuals are influenced by their surroundings - both man-made and natural - we can gain a deeper understanding of our perceptions and perspectives of the world and the profound impact that nature/geography has on our thinking.