“The mouth, tongue, and teeth find their primitive territoriality in food. In giving themselves over to the articulation of sounds, the mouth, tongue, and teeth deterritorialize. Thus, there is a certain disjunction between eating and speaking, and even more, despite all appearances, between eating and writing.” So write Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In this course, we will explore the disjunctions and connections between food, eating, speaking, and writing.

The girl-child, as we find her in literature, embodies far more than sugar, spice, and everything nice. She is simultaneously the gateway of the imagination, inspiring (mostly male) authors to project themselves into her daydreams and create whole new, surreal worlds. She is likewise the object of erotic fascination: corruptible, enigmatic, ripe for the picking. At the same time, she becomes a powerful figure for (mostly female) authors seeking to reinstate her sexual agency; they show us a version of the girl-child who is herself desirous, playful but quick-witted, and self-aware.

Does a text “speak”? How, and to whom, do the words on a page make their unique voices heard? In this course, we will attempt to pinpoint and define some of the different voices that come together to create a work of literature. Our investigation will begin with a few mythical and infernal depictions of haunting songs and sounds that tell their stories in seductive and disturbing ways. In our readings of lyric poetry, we’ll explore how we might characterize the speaking “I” and the different interlocutors he or she engages.

This course will deal with scams, schemes, and conspiracies, from bloody revenges to amorous pursuits to government takeovers. We’ll look at these plots from a number of angles: What, if anything, motivates the masterminds behind them? By what means are they carried out? What are their moral, legal, or personal consequences? We will also consider some of the broader issues plotting raises: Does plotting reflect a fundamental desire to exercise free will? When does an innocent plan become a devious plot? Can a plot ever be deemed necessary or legitimate?

For the Spanish-speaking population of America, in particular those populations intent on staying the rest of their lives, the classroom is a very loaded site for discussions of identity, assimilation, agency and citizenship.  Perhaps this is because many immigrants brought with them a Latin American ideology that puts education at the core of citizenship and the national project.  Or perhaps this conception of the high school as a factory for identities and a battleground to determine which identities can be recognized is as American as apple pie.  Regardless of the origins of these ideas,

What are human rights? How did this concept begin and where? How can literature engage with human rights as a discourse and a practice? In this course we will be reading/viewing texts that deal with the issue of human rights through a variety of genres and media: graphic novels, novels, plays, poems, songs, photographs, and films. We will begin to explore how aesthetics and the manipulation of genre work on us as readers of texts that often deal with traumatic historical events. How do literature, film, and photography manipulate a reader’s empathy?

In this course we’ll consider texts that reflect on and interrogate the act of storytelling in which they and their characters are engaged.  Each of the texts we’ll examine, whether a fairy tale or work of literary theory, Renaissance drama or Romantic poem, graphic novel or novel of ideas, is interested in the act of communication between storyteller and listener, or writer and reader, that characterizes the sharing of a story.  We’ll think about what forms these stories take when they come to us on the page or the stage and consider what’s at stake in the choice to tell a story in a parti

In this course we will explore literature of transformation: texts in which characters, or entire communities, undergo some change of form or change of mind.  Something in these characters, plots, or even narrative structures gets rearranged or reconfigured.  We’ll think, too, about how literature can sometimes ask us to become different as readers, in order to interact with a text at all.  Exploring the topic of metamorphoses, even revolutions (internal ones and external sociopolitical ones too) can help us reconsider our assumptions about reading and interpretation, including how we inter

In everyday life, we seem to know an object when we see it, perhaps less when we hear it, but our senses don’t usually have a tendency to fool us, and far less often do they baffle us. In contrast, it happens quite often in literature that a clear and reliable relationship between sensation and perception does not exist. This course focuses on literary works after 1600 where the senses are not what they seem, where the interpretation of sensation through perception is radically different than what it might be in reality.

“Every time I bat my eyelashes it’s a political statement.”

–Rupaul