In this course, we will read a variety of fictional texts in order to explore the ways in which stories can be told. Our starting point will be the whys and hows of writing and reading: why would an author decide to withhold information? How does a reader perceive a first-person narrator vs. a third-person one? How does an author imagine and invoke an audience? How does an author show what is going on in a character’s mind?

Pessimism: from pessimus: the worst. But free from bad to worse, let alone good, better, best, is it possible to think of this category non-relationally, as its own always already bad ontology? In this course, we will read texts of pessimism, such as cynicism, cultural & racial pessimism, & bleak ecologies. Optimism, however, will be dedicated to the writing component of this R1A as we work progressively on both critical thinking and & how to structure and express such thinking in writing.

The ongoing production of Hollywood films set at sea suggests that even in today’s age of mass air travel and instantaneous global communication, we still hunger for a good tale of ocean adventure. What accounts for the lasting resonance of the age-old association of sea travel with adventure and of seamen (and women) with the telling of tall tales? What is the singular relationship between the openness and remoteness of the sea and the unbridling of imagination and suspension of disbelief that make fiction work?

What do we do with information we’re not intended to receive? In this class, we’ll be exploring the concepts of eavesdropping, surveillance, and interception as both plot devices within works of fiction and as effects produced by the act of reading fiction. By looking at works of literature and criticism that depict scenarios of overhearing and prying, we’ll also be considering the issues of privacy, trust, intimacy, and above all, communication. Why, for example, does the epistolary genre pretend to address someone other than the reader?

In this course we will develop writing and argumentative skills through exploring imaginative and theoretical texts that offer us models of alternatives worlds whose social structures attempt to solve some of the perennial problems of modern living. We will think through questions concerning the consequences of industrialization, gender relations, and the conditions needed to bring about a just society, among others.

Hunger is fundamental: both because it is utterly ordinary, shaping the course of our daily life, and also because it is simultaneously one of the most complex and mysterious of yearnings, shaping the murky landscape of our psyche.  It is as mundane as a craving for a ham sandwich and as abstract and often unconscious as a need to feel loved, a need to feel safe, or a need to feel connected to a community.

Like the time traveler revisiting to a fateful moment in history, literary and sci-fi authors alike return again and again to the theme of time travel. The trope dates back as far as mythology, appearing in early Jewish and Japanese texts. More recently, in the century following H. G.

In this course we’ll study the connections between multilingualism, multiculturalism, and marginalized communities in literature. We’ll look at different ways of storytelling to determine how narratives are structured formally and linguistically. We will read literature as a political tool for the assertion of a marginalized identity, and to this end, question the use of multilingualism in the representation of multicultural communities.

It’s a commonplace to say that one travels to “find oneself.” But what does that mean? How does a self go missing in the first place, and what processes are necessary to “find” it again? In the texts we’ll be studying this semester, characters leave home in order to solve the mystery of their own identities. We will consider how authors across cultures and time use foreign climes or the city right outside their doors as mirrors for their characters.

In this course, we’ll think and write about literature’s fascination with shipwrecks and their aftermath.  We’ll cross a number of seas and several centuries in order to ask what accounts for this fascination and what, if anything, might be left of it today.  How do desert islands, for all their devastation, come to represent alternative worlds and to shelter new forms of social life?  How do stranded sailors, for all their destitution, come to embody rich and strange relational possibilities and political positions, ranging from the individualist to the radically interdependent?