A Dominican-American writer who shuttles between New York and Santo Domingo while trying to piece together a story that haunts him. A poet who imagines the possibilities of a booming metropolis while riding an overcrowded ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn. A nineteenth-century intellectual for whom the rise of urban centers in Argentina represents hope for civility, social order, and national prosperity.

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. We will analyze films, screenplays, novels and drama. One segment of the course will examine episodic story structure in the forms of epic and a season of television.

We tend to think about illness in biological and epidemiological terms; much of our knowledge about health is communicated through the language of medicine and science—we look to doctors, pharmacists, nutritionists, and a range of other experts when seeking advice on how to lead a healthy life. But can science fully convey what it means to be ill?

In this course, we will look at the relationship between architecture and literature primarily through two different prepositions: first, in literature, as in the presence of the built environment, such as houses, buildings, roads, etc., in many different texts; second, of literature, as in the different structural forms of a variety of genres. What is the shape or space of the novel? How is a poem built—and how does it construct meaning?

This class will be devoted to investigating the intersection between literature and history, especially as both relate to documenting global and local events. Empathy, or the ability to feel another, is a focal point for understanding the importance of literature and art as means of documenting pain, subjectivity, and individual stories.This course will revolve around the following questions:

Tales of travelers questing across the globe have been a cornerstone of popular culture from Homer’s Odyssey to Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet, while these adventure narratives continue to seduce large audiences, we must also consider the political and social ramifications of such texts. What ethical problems might authors face in trying to represent foreignness and “the exotic”? How does the notion of “adventure” become part of imperialist and nationalist projects from the eighteenth century to now?

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”

—Émile Zola

What does it mean to make sense of literature? Aren’t literary texts precisely those that don’t make immediate sense? Or are they perhaps those that can be made sense of in too many ways? To what degree must we draw on common sense and our shared senses when we read? And to what extent do our particular sensibilities and sensitivities shape our experience of literature?

When we say that a work of literature is a “classic,” we mean that it has a special status in a culture: it is widely recognized as excellent or important, and its power to interest and delight is proven and expected to endure. In this course we will read and discuss classic works of literature of different periods, cultures, and genres (short stories, novellas, plays, and poems) with an eye toward explaining why they have this status.

What would you do if you fell madly and deeply in love with an iguana? How about if you started vomiting bunnies? How would you react if you turned into an axolotl after staring at it too much at the zoo? And if everyone around you started turning into rhinoceroses, would you yearn to do the same?