What makes a home? Is it an apartment? A native country? Or something less tangible—a feeling or a thought? In this course, we’ll devote close attention to a series of texts that address these and related questions. In the first half of the semester we’ll examine stories about building homes, thinking through the way these texts depict physical space, and what those spaces mean to us and to the stories that contain them. In the second half of the semester we’ll hit the road, considering travel accounts and fiction that focus on leaving—or sometimes destroying—homes.

Literary traditions have developed and continually redefined the often complex relations between author, poet, narrator, character, and reader in literature.

At once setting and subject, geopolitical region and aesthetic construct, the Americas have long captivated cultural imaginations across the globe. But what are we talking about when we talk about the Americas in the plural? To say “I’m American” suggests a certain singularity that disregards the double, continental expanse mapped across a hemisphere. What are the implications of understanding North and South separately and together, or instead, considering multiple Americas? What role might textuality, intertextuality, performance, and translation play in acts of border crossing?

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 protagonists – from Euripides to Virginia Woolf to the present.

This course will examine modes of confession, including its immediate catharsis of past transgressions, but also its use in autobiography: where does confession position the confessor within society? What does it reveal or conceal about the self, and how can it serve as a platform for memoir and identity construction? What are the rhetorical effects of a professed sincerity, versus a confession which flaunts its own insincerity? We will explore these questions, among others, across texts from a range of eras and genres, including works from the Archpoet, Augustine, and Nabokov.

What are human rights? How did this concept begin and where? How can literature and media engage with human rights as a discourse and a practice?How do Latina/o/x, Native American and African-American writers and artists engage with human rights discourses in their works? In this course we will be reading/viewing texts that deal with the issue of human rights through a variety of genres and media prevailing in the 20-21 st centuries.

Does every detail or object mentioned in a piece of literature necessarily have a purpose, a meaning? Does it advance the plot, evoke the setting, contribute to characterization, establish a motif? Are some details or objects just thematically purposeless? We will begin the course by considering one literary critic’s famous take on this question: Roland Barthes’s idea of “the reality effect.” When a literary text purports to represent reality, what use does it make of random, seemingly extraneous details and objects?

This course will consider the contemporary and queer fate of scenes of ritual found in Ancient Greek literature and visual culture. How does modern queer literature rewrite scenes of ancient ritual in order to generate alternative ways of thinking about kinship, mourning, and healing? How does queer cinema and performance deviate from and rework key themes of ritual? How does the performance of ritual provide the conditions for us to recognize certain lives as grievable, certain relations as kinship, and certain bodies as human?

“A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein.”

-Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

Course Description: