One of Freud’s main legacies and one of the reasons that he is accused of sexism and of phallocentrism, the Oedipus complex has a bad rep these days. At the same time, it is the indispensable entry point for any new attempt to reconceptualize gender, sexuality, and kinship as well as the psyche and subjectivity from feminist and queer perspectives.

Marriages in myths and fairy tales are rarely without their trials; folklore is full of lost and monstrous husbands, women’s journeys to retrieve them, and their efforts to flee them. In this course we will read a core set of narratives about supernatural or otherwise strange relationships — such as Cupid and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, and Bluebeard — and think about what these tales do, and what subsequent authors do to them.

In this course we focus on women artists, female roles, female-like creatures, virtual representations, and the disciplinary practices that mediate their rich and extreme performativity. What is it about wild, feral, reckless, irrational, powerful, and fantastic acts by women artists that galvanize our imaginations and drive our responses of deep empathy?

In this course, we will explore works depicting war and its aftermath in literature, film, poetry, and drama. Major texts are likely to include Japan’s medieval war epic The Tale of the Heike, Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and Father Comes Home from The Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks. Through these and a selection of other short works, we will discuss topics including social upheaval, religion, warrior culture, cross-cultural encounters, trauma, memory, and slavery.

This course will explore the construction of gender and the occult, considering the witch from the perspectives of different races and genders, cultures, time periods, and languages.  How does the witch transgress boundaries and norms across different cultures?  Where is she in possession of power, and where is her agency precluded? How do transgressive readings of witches undermine simplistic moral dichotomies of good and evil?

This course explores the historical and theoretical intersections between aesthetic form and the empires of Europe, from the Spanish conquest of the Americas to twentieth-century decolonization. It considers how different genres—history, prose fiction and film—challenge (and sometimes promote) the establishment of empires in Europe, the Americas, and beyond.

In this course we pull out the guts of stories to try and understand how storytellers craft works that grip us. In the process we examine classic attempts to say what makes good storytelling and put to the test the idea that any story has certain “rules” that make it successful. With an emphasis on understanding the structures that underpin the TV drama, we will study shooting scripts of The Wire and Mad Men, learning to interpret screenplay conventions on our way to understanding the complex move from script to screen.

“To speak is to blunder,” confessed the Chinese American writer Yiyun Li. Nabokov put it more melodramatically: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom.”