“Maybe one day…I’ll write a love story…where the characters will be insects. I have a bad tendency to overspecialize. I envy you your broad scope, Jim.” –Jules et Jim

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.

“Style is the thing that’s always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.” (Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart). This course operates on the premise that style is more than a “phony” necessity; in fact, it can also be a means of self-discovery, self-invention, and a fair amount of fun-having. It’s all too easy not to pay attention to what characterizes one’s writing, to passively reproduce assembly-line structures and nutritionally worthless truisms. This course aspires to help us break free of that.

This is a reading and composition course that will introduce a broad selection of texts on war and its aftermath. The readings will explore premodern Vietnamese civil war, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam wars, and the Algerian civil war. The wide selection is based on the assumption that there is something universally comprehensible about the experience of war. And yet, by reading these texts closely, we will try to tease out the social and cultural specificities that mark these different articulations.

This course will encourage critical reading, thinking and writing skills around the topic of the manipulation of space in literature, photography and film. We will read literary works and theoretical essays, and watch films that are particularly interested in how real and imaginative spaces can serve to frame stories, histories and ideologies and/or themselves become the protagonist. What laws govern real and imagined spaces? How do characters navigate them and according to what principles?

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.

Describing, performing, and creating ecstatic experiences has been one of the great stumbling blocks in literature.  Whether it is a physical or a spiritual elevation beyond the norm, the ability to articulate the transcendent has challenged writers in terms of the forms that can be used to express the ecstatic; this obstacle has also, debatably, given rise to a huge release of creativity and the rise of new forms.  We will explore the very limits of human experience in theatre, fiction, scripture, opera, and lyric poetry.  Euripides describes what will be the ongoing tension between freedo

“To look at a thing is not the same as seeing a thing.” – Oscar Wilde

Contemporary debates about cultural matters often appeal to nature to decide them. Parties debating a cultural issue will attempt a familiar gesture: each will claim that its position is natural and therefore true. What relationship between society and nature does this appeal assume?  Why is nature seen as factually accurate or true?  Why would an appeal to nature decide a cultural issue?

Course Description: 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 “true,” distorting human understanding of the world influence on young people to behave badly. 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.