We may consider the experience of love to be intensely personal and private, but literature, drama, and film frequently portray narratives of courtship, marriage, erotic desire, or romance within a larger social context. Romantic love between individuals in these texts may be situated within and therefore impinged upon by a family entity, a social class, or even a state. Other forms of love (familial love, or love between friends, for instance) may start to take center stage.

How does one narrate the self? For centuries, people have been aiming to record their lives by presenting their struggles and outlining their memories, offering insights along the way. Why—and for whom—are we repeatedly compelled to articulate our own life stories? Is this a vain and selfish project, does it expose a didactic aspiration to teach others, or should we think of such efforts as merely an exercise in nostalgia? Most importantly, what assumptions about memory and language does this endeavor reveal?

This course will consider texts that are engaged in the process of rewriting. Reading across historical periods, language traditions, and literary genres, we’ll interrogate what happens as ideas, forms, identities, and histories are revisited and transformed. How are characters, plots, or genres translated across time and space? Is the act of rewriting one of simple reproduction, or is it one of transformation? What are the political stakes of such acts of revision? How do they trouble our sense of the relationship between the categories of “original” and “copy”?

Monsters, demons, and other similar ghouls often serve as powerful metaphorical manifestations of social, political, or psychic tensions; as such, they play a key role in numerous literary, cinematic, and other artistic works. In this class, we will be looking at various representations of the monstrous and the demonic in an attempt to better understand what it is, precisely, that they give us: what kinds of ideas do these figures bring to light, and how can they help us refine our own critical thinking?

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”

-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

“In the future,” the pop artist Andy Warhol once said, “everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” In an age of social media, when Facebook and Instagram “likes” and followers on Twitter seem to be measures of our celebrity status, Warhol’s prescient observation appears to ring especially true.

Climate change is undeniable, though some continue to try. With its inevitable cyclicality and, increasingly, with the breakdown of predictability, the natural world structures our sensations, thoughts, and intuitions. This course will explore the theme of nature, including the rupture of natural cycles in modern experience such as climate change, through an eco-critical lens and with the help of representations offered in film and poetry. We will ask how these art forms call attention to rhythm, cycles, ritual, repetition, and spontaneity in relation to the man-made world of narrative.

This course examines the ways in which literature and film have depicted travel as a form of study, from the 19th century Grand Tour to the institutionalized concept of “Study Abroad” on US campuses today.  We will focus on depictions of travel, how new senses of self emerge within new linguistic and cultural contexts, and will also consider a few examples of the influence that foreign writers have had on 20th century American literature in translation.

Leaving Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Since antiquity, poets have been representing and reflecting on nonhuman “nature.”  What does nature offer the poet? And how has that changed over the course of history?

The creation of the universe. The mind wandering. Monsters in the dark. Fates foretold. Miraculous happenings. Travels to mysterious lands. These are the fantastic depths and distances of our literary imagination, extending to the ends of our perception and beyond. The imagination relates to our fundamental power as writers and readers to create images both in order to assist in our understanding of the world and to provide us with the power to shape our reality. Fantasy thus becomes an important tool for understanding.