This course is about literary representations of gender variance in the past. Focusing primarily on texts that predate contemporary trans discourse, we will consider how gender norms have historically been constructed and subverted in poems, plays, novels, short stories, fables, and myths. As a class, we will take on the role of literary historians: rather than simply transposing today’s ideas of gender and sex onto the past, we will take up analytic tools from trans and literary studies alike to think about the cultural contexts in which different ideas of gender have emerged.

Taking our cue and the inspiration for this course’s title from feminist philosopher Linda Alcoff’s influential essay, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” participants in this course will consider some of the concerns that arise when one attempts to speak, write, or create films for or about others and their experiences. We will begin by closely examining various responses to this and related questions by several prominent twentieth-century feminist and postcolonial scholars.

Per its etymology, translation figures as a deft midwife, carrying a text over one language and into another. Pessimists frame translation otherwise: as an ill-fated encounter between powerful and powerless languages; as a form of transmission that necessitates misprision; as the violent uprooting of a source text or language from its autochthonous environment; or as a domesticating art that exploits, and encourages, the loss of meaning in linguistically-specific phrasal idioms, grammatical gender, syntax, and tonality.

Do poems take up truths? Can a novel be a way of thinking about something? What can you learn—about yourself, about others, about the world—from a film? This course considers the ways that literature, art, and film are not only a part of our creative imaginations but also central sources of insight into what is real and actual. How do fictional and imaginative works touch what is worldbound? How do they help us see and understand our world?

Family is at the core of our memory and imagination. From postcolonial politics, religion to language, how do macro forces impact families and their individual and collective psyches?  How do the trials and tribulations of family life define our imagination? Moving through exile, revolutions, poverty, religious crises, and

In the texts we will read in this course, hauntings—the spirits of the deceased invading and inhabiting physical spaces—provide often unwelcome and undesired opportunities for characters (and authors) to reckon with experiences and events thought long buried, but which refuse to be forgotten. Dismissed by modernity as mere superstition or fantasy, the ghosts which haunt our texts demand our attention, forcing us to question whether the present can ever be fully independent from the past.

For this class, we hone the skill of close reading, which examines how a work of literature makes its meaning through its style (e.g., its tone, narrative perspective, figurative language, and so on). In particular, we consider the way works of literature challenge social categories by engaging with the stylistic conventions of their genre (literary category). The works we read in class both set and defy expectations about their literary category and its conventions. In so doing, they also set and defy expectations about the social categories with which they are preoccupied.

Fantasy. It is an exercise in speculation and magic, an exploration of our human mythology and our most otherworldly desires. The genre of fantasy has persisted and evolved through the centuries, from older poems and transcribed tales to contemporary literature and film. So what are fantasies made of, and why do we make them?

This course will explore various depictions of the colonial encounter: Polish, English, Nigerian, Guyanese, Trinidadian, German, Cuban, American...We will ask how different writers understand the origins of empire, when those origins are often very different from them in space and time. How do drastically different cultures reckon with one another, and what kind of power dynamics shape their meetings?

Family is at the core of our memory and imagination. From postcolonial politics, religion to language, how do macro forces impact families and their individual and collective psyches?  How do the trials and tribulations of family life define our imagination? Moving through exile, revolutions, poverty, religious crises, and