Flip through the cable channels and it’s easy to see that we, as a culture, are very interested in other people’s homes. From Hoarders, where we can gawk at other people’s misfortunes, to the home makeover reality shows on HGTV, you could spend a few hours a day peeping into others’ private spaces.

When chastity works, nothing happens. A story centered on the absence of sex might not sound like much of a story at all, but chastity, along with its sister virtues of modesty and moderation, has long been a hot topic for hit plays and best-selling novels.

I love you: Who says this? Who/what is this I, who/what is this you, & what is happening in the loving? In this class, we will look at many possible ways to answer this question, from philosophia to patriotism, from lovesickness to familial love. Along the way, we intend to create new & nurture old love affairs: the love of reading & the love of writing, of course! This course will have several short essay assignments (4 pages) and their resultant revision, culminating in a 5-6 page paper at the semester’s end.

Required Texts:

Phaedrus Plato

Where does literature take place? We usually think of setting as a mundane element that we briefly acknowledge before moving on to the more compelling features of plot and character. This course will move setting from the background to the foreground.

Our class takes place in Nowheresville or, as the narrator of Don Quixote declares, “a place whose name I do not wish to remember.”

In the opening section of his work Poetics, Aristotle moves from a brief discussion of means of representation to a focus on objects of representation that persists throughout his text. Although Aristotle’s theory of mimesis would be considered by many as a blueprint for fashioning narrative fiction through this focus on the objects and human actions that language allegedly refers to, this course examines how many 20th-century modernist literary projects appear at odds with Aristotle’s theory, while seeking to build narrative art on the basis of altogether new aesthetic premises.

Violence is often seen as the opposite of speech. It is what happens when words fail, and communication can only occur through non-linguistic means.  In this course, I would like us to look more closely at this opposition by reading several violent works of literature. What is a violent word, and what is its relationship with physical violence? What is the word’s violence, and who is its target?

This course will explore the interplay of drama and tedium in day-to-day life. All of the works we will read eschew a purely heroic or marvelous mode and instead focus on petty concerns or mundane experience. But these texts do so in a way that is far from ordinary or boring; each offers a distinct creative perspective on everyday life. Some of the works we’ll read highlight the intense and dramatic undercurrents of routine existence.

This course will consider a number of literary texts with an eye to how they explore themes of pathology at both the individual and collective levels. Literature frequently involves critical reflections on both characters within texts and the social contexts that shape them: Plays and novels often imagine personal crises, as well as responses to disruptions within familiar or established public orders; lyric poetry can express conflicts between self and society.

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Spoken by Claudius, III, iii, 100-103)

In this course, we will spend time reading plays, novels, and poems that either constitute or contain one (or both) of two speech acts: the curse and the supplication. We will think about the recurring trope of invoking “the gods” or “a higher power,” which runs through literary traditions from antiquity to modernity. We will consider the particular aesthetic qualities of tragedy, incantation, and benediction.

This course will explore the interplay of drama and tedium in day-to-day life. All of the works we will read eschew a purely heroic or marvelous mode and instead focus on petty concerns or mundane experience. But these texts do so in a way that is far from ordinary or boring; each offers a distinct creative perspective on everyday life. Some of the works we’ll read highlight the intense and dramatic undercurrents of routine existence.