In this class, we’ll talk about girls—mean girls, weird girls, sad girls, material girls, girls that run the world, girls that just want to have fun. We’ll ask what it means to call someone a girl, what it means to call something girly. We’ll think about the aesthetics of girlhood from past to present—about lace and ruffles, the color pink and glitter, about combat boots and eyeliner—and the ways these can be and have been used for feminism and for marketing. We’ll consider relationships between girls and between girls and the people around them.

How to fathom the separation line between humans and their nonhuman contexts, when the two seem, at this present juncture of protracted and irrecoverable ecological catastrophe, irrevocably, perhaps tragically, imbricated?

This course takes up its task of developing critical reading and writing skills via an exploration of texts that stage their own reading and reception within the work. More specifically, we will focus on texts—such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—in which the characters themselves narrate and discuss other stories.

The meaning of the terms “east” and “west” might seem self-evident at first, but on closer examination they raise many questions: Do they refer to specific regions of the globe, and if so, which ones? Are they, instead, descriptions of distinct types of culture? What do “eastern” and “western” cultures consist of? Where did our notions about the meanings of these terms originate? And what can literature and film tell us about the west, the east, and the relations between these two ideas?

In this class we will study cases of people living in the margins of mainstream rationality or commonsense--people whose rejection of this world takes the form of a flight to fantasy, utopianism or outright madness. We will investigate what about their respective societies makes such flight compelling or necessary. 
 

In a 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin offers the idea of “the charmed circle” to reimagine how sexualities are stratified within societies in terms of power and visibility. This course takes up Rubin’s concept as the starting point for practicing fundamental critical skills of inquiry, writing, and research.

Under the regime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills
us second by second, there will be shows and theatrical
performances always and always. 
—Paul Lafargue, “The Right to Be Lazy” (1883)
Was ever idleness like this?
—Emily Dickinson
Nothing to be done.
—Estragon, Waiting for Godot

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and
katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding
darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.”

- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)