What’s the opposite of laughter? The tear? The sigh? Or the particularly grave, slightly condescending expression of the person who informs us, reproachfully, that a situation is serious and therefore “no laughing matter?”

This course will examine a long legacy of cultural fascination with domestic space and its iconic caretaker, the housewife.  We will discuss literary texts and films that feature housewives as their protagonists – from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf to the present.

In The Republic, Plato condemps poetry for being too far removed from reality. A feeble imitation of the world (itself an imitation of ideal Ideas), poetry isn’t really “true” and thus distorts our understanding of the world and is a bad influence on young people. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that didactic, or scientific, verse isn’t really poetry. From the Greeks onwards, we have tended to distinguish poetry and science as different modes of thought with different relationships to truth or the real, and different functions in society.

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? Is adventure a gendered enterprise?

This course will focus on the relations between literature, history, and cosmopolitanism. We will read a selection of literary texts produced in the greater Atlantic region – Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Africa – since the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas. The history of conquest, colonialism, plantation slavery, decolonization, and postcolonial migration makes the Atlantic region a zone of cultural exchange and creolization.

We often imagine reading to be a private and personal matter.  We all have our own favorite novels, and when we want time alone, curling up with a book is never a bad option.  Yet this course hopes to explore how reading literature informs our place within groups, within homes and families, cities, nations, and a host of other collective categories.   The works we will read will span Ancient Rome to South America, each one offering a unique perspective on how being part of a community both provides opportunities and sets limitations, how it both requires conformity yet creates the possibili

This course will focus on the literature of two major empires – Russia and Britain – and will examine how these empires use literature to create the “identity” of those living in the empires’ respective colonies. What is an empire, and what is a nation? How is literature used to understand another culture? Is that understanding always (or ever) accurate? How does literature influence, or even create, our views of other nations, or even our views of our own nation? How are stereotypes, misunderstandings, and fabrications used for personal or national gain?

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 class, we will pay close attention to the ways in which illness gets represented in culture.

In this course, we will explore the relationship between how literary empires are forged and how they are challenged. Reading texts regarded as classics of the Western canon* alongside 20th– and 21st-century texts from Africa and the Americas produced in self-conscious relationship to the earlier works, we will consider the ways in which narratives are transformed by authors writing from different historical and cultural locations.

This is a course about people who fall short, plans that go bust, and stories that don’t turn out like you thought they would. Not that you’ll be spending the summer suffering through a series of tragic disappointments. For as we explore the making and unmaking of lofty ambitions, romantic aspirations, prophecies, and personal and collective ideals, we will also be questioning whether they’re all they’re cracked up to be, or even worth pursuing in the first place. Where do these enthralling, often crushing expectations come from?