In this course, we will explore a variety of approaches to description, from Classical examples of ekphrasis (that is, vivid visual description), to modern renewals of the technique.  We will read descriptions of fictional artworks from antiquity (Homer’s Shield of Achilles, Ovid’s Pygmalion) alongside recent fictional re-imaginings of the art world (Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World). 

How do writers, artists, and social scientists construct bodies as archaic, classical, and savage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How is the body a site on which questions of political and social power are negotiated in relation to the archaic and the primitive? How do bodies suffer and inflict violence within these constructions of power? How are bodies racialized and sexualized in relation to the classical and the savage?

“America! I put the word on a page, it is my keyhole,” writes Russian-Jewish- American poet Ilya Kaminsky in a poem that describes his journey from the Soviet Union to America. In this class, we will read travelogues, essays, fiction, non-fiction and poetry by Europeans who have visited, settled in or even “conquered” America. What can these authors tell us about America that the locals do not notice? Can we trust their accounts? How do these authors’ perceptions of their own countries change and what do they discover when they decide to travel back East?

What does it means for a text or an image to be “haunted” – by the dead, by past traumas, or by occluded memories? What do “supernatural” occurrences in literature and cinema tell us about the visible and the invisible, about the material and the spectral, about belief and disbelief, or about reality and the imagination?

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” So begins the most famous and consequential manifesto of history. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto inaugurated a new genre of writing that has influenced countless other manifestos—as well as literary texts, artworks, and political movements of course—since its publication in 1848.  What is a manifesto?

A group of Chicano/a artists spray paint the exterior of an art museum in protest of the museum’s exclusionary practices. An African-born woman writes poetry about the experience of becoming a slave.  The son of a dying woman journeys to a land of the dead hoping to meet his long-lost father and reclaim his inheritance.  A Native American man spends twenty-four hours trying to earn money to buy back a family heirloom. A black woman abandons her home and previous marriages in search of true love.

What is the relationship between literature and revolution? Can works of art and literature address political reality in a way that journalism or nonfiction can’t?  Can political art be more than mere propaganda? What does it mean to call an idea, a work of art, or a scientific theory “revolutionary”? What is the connection between revolutionary aesthetics and revolutionary politics?

Book Learning:

What Can Literature Teach Us?

Course Description

Utopian hope often meets an insistence on some fixed idea of human nature. Demands for greater freedom and equality are countered by “realistic” estimations of how much order and hierarchy we must bear in order to live together in society. This course will explore this drama of revolutionary desire and reactionary response as it is staged in novels by four women: Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Ann Leckie; as well as in the short stories that Alice Sheldon published under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr.