“The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across.’  Having been borne across the world, we are translated men.” –Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”

Our course takes up its task of developing critical reading and writing skills through an exploration of literature in terms of two interrelated categories: the actual and the possible. That means we will investigate what set of facts is available and operative in the world of a story or a work of literature—e.g., who the characters are, what happens, where, when, and why things take place—and thus ask how it is we come to know (or think we know) these things through language.

This is a course about changing one’s mind: about revolutions, conversions, voltas, and plot twists, and about what happens when we sit and stare.

Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her,

the lover turned his eyes.

                                                —Ovid, Metamorphosis

Pish! Noses, ears, and lips? Is’t possible?

—Othello

In this course we will explore literary and cinematic utopias and dystopias in a handful of Euro-American, Middle Eastern, and African texts. How have writers in different times and places articulated their hopes and fears regarding inequality and the possibility of justice? How did the texts’ historical context and aesthetic form influence the theories of society that they present?

For this course, we will examine texts in a range of styles and genres that deal with representations of the family and that challenge normative expectations of what a family might be. What role does society play in shaping family structures? How might literature expand our notion of kinship? How do literary forms create space to consider the kinds of loss that families experience? How might we reconsider transgression, and even taboo, through the lens of fiction? At what point do family secrets go too far?

What does it mean to be human? What differentiates humans from non-human animals? As long as homo sapiens have told stories, we have told them about, through, and with animals. This course serves as an introduction to the emerging fields of animal studies and posthumanist theory. We will explore questions raised by literary animals from multiple perspectives, including from the point of view of (fictional) animals themselves. The texts we read will encourage us to reexamine our anthropocentric assumptions and to push back against narratives of human exceptionalism.

In this course we will examine the development of the “dream vision” across a considerable span of literary history — from ancient Rome to medieval Europe to Victorian England and into the twentieth century — and consider what unites and divides various representations of dreams.  Some purposes underlying dream visions may appear remarkably stable (articulations of desire, encounters with the unknown, etc.), while others may shift considerably; for example, we might compare and contrast the allegorical dream model of the Middle Ages and Lewis Carroll’s more nonsensical dreamscapes.  Because

This is a class about womxn. This is a class about between. This is a class about what happens between womxn. This is a class about what happens between languages between womxn. This is a class about the problems with the language used to represent womxn. This is a class about what happens between womxn and the page. This is a class about what happens between womxn and the social stage. This is a class about between: between texts; between affects; between tongues; between bodies; between womxn. And this class will be taught by two of them.

This course centers on three science fiction novels that take seriously the possibility of revolution. Reading novels by Ann Leckie, Ursula K.

In this course, we will read and analyze a wide range of literature that can be called “unfaithful” in a double sense. The texts on our reading list contain stories about romantic infidelity, but also narratives that are untrustworthy because their narrators are unreliable – whether maliciously deceptive, intentionally enigmatic, unaware/un-self-aware, or simply incapable of translating their subject matter into words. What is the connection between depicting someone’s unfaithfulness, and depicting something unfaithfully? How do we recognize unfaithful narratives?