What does it mean to “make sense” of a literary text? Does meaning lie beneath the surface of the text, waiting to be discovered? Or does each reading produce meaning differently?  This course will introduce students to methods of close reading, critical thinking and argumentative writing through attention to texts that present an unusual relation to language itself.

In this course we will consider some of the more pointed, or critical, forms of humor in literature, including invective, farce, satire, and irony. Focusing mainly on the genres of comic drama and picaresque fiction, we will examine how different authors make use of such humors.  For each work that we study, we will ask: is its humor used to produce purely comical effects, or are there other, more serious effects intended as well? And if the work uses humor to to accomplish more serious aims, then what are those aims and how effectively are they accomplished?

This is a course about the archive, and, in particular, about the archive in Latin America.  We’ll take as our critical departure point Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria’s Myth and Archive, a work that explores the relationships between archival fictions and the questions of authority and knowledge that have shaped Latin American literary historiography since the colonial period.  Chronologically, however, our exploration begins earlier, with Don Quijote, and Cervantes’ metafictional staging of the relationship between fiction and document, art and fact.  The fiction of Cervantes/Cide Hamete Bene

In this course, we will study French theater ranging from a seventeenth century comedy to an eighteenth century mock epic, to plays representative of some major trends in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on surrealist/absurdist and existentialist theater.  To gain insight into Modern French Theater, we will study the impact of Cubism and Futurism on a play by Apollinaire, as well as the impact of Existentialism on plays by Sartre and Camus.   We will then move on to study the emergence of the “Théâtre de l’Absurde” as it was developed by Ionesco, Beckett and Genet in the 50s.  While

The oldest story in the world, Gilgamesh, concerns “growing up” and coming to terms with the ultimate consequence of life: death. There exists no shortage of this topic in Literature and Film as it continues to intrigue us. The rebellious youth remains a heroic symbol that dominates the ‘coming of age’ stories of today.

“With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then.  Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?”  (Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” – 1936)

The list of banned books is long and venerable.  In this research and composition course we will consider a few of them, from ancient Greece to contemporary America.   Why are some books forbidden?  What are the motives for censorship?  What is “obscene” and who gets to define it?  What are just restraints upon expression in a free society?  How do writers write against a ban?  How do they write within it?  Readings in Plato, the Bible, Rabelais, Nabokov, Rushdie, with additional material by Paul Blanshard, Holbrook Jackson, Stanley Fish, Nat Hentoff, and Azar Nafisi.  Class time will also

“Ivy in the Boston Gardens, 1973” is a black and white photograph by Nan Goldin; a shot of Ivy walking along the broad gravel path in a tailored suit, hat set at a jaunty tilt, with a fur stole flung over one shoulder.  Ivy’s appearance—right down to the short, elegant veil and the nicely heeled pumps—is exacting in its adherence to feminine details.  And although Ivy is not, biologically speaking, a woman, she is certainly participating in the creation and redefinition of gender codes that are applied to women.  In this class, we will take Ivy’s position as our starting point: visual and c

In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes everybody but the child is duped by the trappings of convention: only the child can see that the emperor is naked. In the Romantic period, poets and artists aligned the child’s naiveté and innocence with genius. Nietzsche claimed there was a playful child in every man.  Freud debunked notions of childhood innocence and made the case that infant sexuality determines much of an adult’s psychological makeup.

In this class we will explore the literatures of borderlands.  From Palestine to El Paso, Livorno to London, we will ask what it means to write “in between” political entities, but also between identities,cultures, wars, genders, and sexualities

Book List:

Robert Alter, Genesis

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Umberto Saba, Songbook

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Giuseppe Ungaretti, L’allegria

Luci Tapahanso, A Breeze Swept Through

Patricia Preciado Martin, Days of Plenty Days of Want