Capturing a moment—pinning it down while it struggles to live, and then holding it hostage, immobile, apparently subdued—sounds a little like hunting a butterfly: a fragile art.  It must require a balance of invention and preservation, and a steady hand, because outside of the frame of the picture, things are always changing.  The people in a silver-tinted photograph from Paris, a century ago, are all gone now, and the streets and buildings you see behind them have been demolished or renovated beyond recognition.  The historical present never stays still:  what happened to that sailor kissi

One of the earliest articulations of the concept for the body politic appears in the work of the Ancient Greek philosophers, who establish the body as an analogy for the political apparatus, describing political malaise in terms of bodily disease and state fragmentation in terms of amputation.  Historical and contemporary discussions of the relationship between body and state draw on a common language—of illness, of conquest and penetration, of love and desire—that highlights a metaphorical and literal dialogue between the human body and structures/technologies of power.

Producing the name Odysseus, or Dante or Gilgamesh, poses no problem for one asked to recall a literary hero and/or a great journey. Some of these characters define for us the very meaning of a hero.  However, there are other places where this archetype of the hero on a journey can be found. Not only this, but upon close inspection, we may find that these unexpected places may even form the basis of the archetypal heroic journeys we know and love.  In this class we will ask questions that seek to broaden our perspective and conception of the hero and his or her journey.

In his Keywords, Raymond Williams explains, “community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships.” What we define as a community, our community, is often difficult to pin-down specifically (though we’d like to think we know it when we see it). Still, it is this idea of community that can both defines us and do us in. In this course we will consider texts from varied cultural and geographical locations where the question of community (How we define it?

Literary figures and conceits of style have often been perceived as threatening to language’s “proper uses,” e.g. its capacities to name, to mean, and to communicate. But how do we decide which aspects of a text are ornamental, and which parts functional? What separates the ornamental and instrumental uses of language? This course will pose the question by stretching the metaphor of the written ornament to match its use in each of our texts.

From the Tower of Babel through contemporary narratives of immigration, exile, and displacement, linguistic confusion is a venerable and evocative motif. So what can we make of a story that “stops making sense” because we can no longer understand the language in which it speaks? In this course we will read and discuss many varieties of linguistic confusion. These will include multilingual texts that address multiple audiences, as well as works that mix sacred, profane, and even dead languages. Some of our readings will baffle with secret codes or tantalize with open secrets.

With the exception of Goethe and Shakespeare, who are known as universal literary geniuses, all of the writers we will be reading this semester are known primarily as poets. While genre is not always defining of a writer (that is, writers can create successfully across genre), the qualities that make a great poet do not necessarily make a great dramatist or prose artist. In an attempt to get closer to the peculiarities of genre, we will be reading the poetry, prose and plays of several poets through the ages.

Books Required (with ISBN-10 in parenthesis):

Traveling poets, bodies electric, migrant laborers, road-trippers, tripmaster monkeys… “wandering figures” appear throughout many American literatures. Are these figures akin to each other? Is it possible to talk about them as belonging to a family of related texts?

This course will explore the lineaments of 20th and early 21st century Western thought and literature – not only its fragmentation, dislocation, and disjointedness – but the fracturing of the concept of forgiveness.  The possibility, and promise, of ultimately being able to forgive, or be forgiven, becomes elusive in this period.  What renders forgiveness so difficult to give?  What does forgiveness come to signify?

With the exception of Goethe and Shakespeare, who are known as universal literary geniuses, all of the writers we will be reading this semester are known primarily as poets. While genre is not always defining of a writer (that is, writers can create successfully across genre), the qualities that make a great poet do not necessarily make a great dramatist or prose artist. In an attempt to get closer to the peculiarities of genre, we will be reading the poetry, prose and plays of several poets through the ages.

Books Required (with ISBN-10 in parenthesis):