What does life look like in “plague-time”?  What does it mean for a body, a place, a community to be “clean” or “unclean”? What can we learn from fictional and historical sites of contamination? This course will explore the concept of contagion and the fears, real and imagined, that surround it. We will examine the transmission and containment of “infected” or “infectious” ideas and bodies in order to compare the ways that humans respond to crisis, from the level of the

This course will examine literature and the visual arts alongside and through the rapidly growing field of virtual technologies, emphasizing their medial relationships to literary artwork. Assigned texts will be read alongside and compared to recent adaptations of texts in their various new mediations. This course will also integrate texts and theory drawing from art history, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, cognitive studies, and literary criticism with innovative technologies where such disparate ideas might generate new critical modes and analytical methods.

This course will examine literature and the visual arts alongside and through the rapidly growing field of virtual technologies, emphasizing their medial relationships to literary artwork. Assigned texts will be read alongside and compared to recent adaptations of texts in their various new mediations. This course will also integrate texts and theory drawing from art history, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, cognitive studies, and literary criticism with innovative technologies where such disparate ideas might generate new critical modes and analytical methods.

What do we do when we dream? Why do we dream, and what are we to do with our dreams in the morning? Dreams are our hopes and ambitions, but also delusions, fears, and hidden desires. They can furnish us with important messages from our gods, or reveal to us premonitions of the future. Inspiration, whether poetic or scientific, is often said to come from dreams, and we might often call a real-world calamity a nightmare— although a terrifying nightmare can certainly feel like the greatest calamity of all.

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. 

Imagine that you are reading a book and, at some point in the story, you learn that what you are reading is actually the translation of a work written in an ancient language by an author from a faraway land. How would this affect your relation to the book? Would you now consider the story more interesting and valuable? Or would you start suspecting that the translator may have made changes and additions to the story? Would you be worried—or perhaps excited—about the possibility that the text may have alternative interpretations?

The recent apparition of bibliotherapists—medical practitioners who prescribe books to their ailing patients—elicits an important question: what if literature as medicine were more than simply a metaphor? In this course, we will look to and beyond the possibility of literature as a “cure” by analyzing how an array of novels, memoirs, short stories, and photographs from widespread historical and linguistic traditions both construct their own knowledge about certain medical diagnoses and destabilize the presumed mastery of empirical scientific knowledge.

“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)

The island is a territory of the imagination that cuts across linguistic and cultural boundaries: a fantasy land of conquest, domination, punishment, and the place of new beginnings outside all that we know. Furthermore, certain islands are defined and expressed, paradoxically enough, through movements, flows, transits, and migrations. In this course we will think together about what makes the island such a rich territory and a site of multiple (and often times contradictory!) expressions. Through a selection (by