“Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day.”

—Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound”

The concept of point of view seems familiar enough — after all, everyone seems to have one. But as a key technique of literary experimentation and innovation, point of view becomes something radically unfamiliar. In this course we will draw on Francophone, Anglophone and Persian literary modernisms in order to study — and develop our own arguments about — the different ways author structure point of view. What kinds of possibilities and limitations are associated with the first-person point of view, or the third-person point of view? Is there such a thing as a collective point of view?

Animation captivates us with its extremes: the utter sweetness of animal-like creatures, the morphing shapes of sinister robot machines, the surreal landscapes of abandoned worlds, and the super-charged emotions that arise from impossible acts of heroism. In this writing intensive course, we will explore the medium and contents of a variety animation and analyze how this art form, technologically and aesthetically, produces these compelling narratives and characters with social and political resonance and impact.

Why do oracles deliver their truths in riddles? Why do stories often leave us with more questions than answers? What can we learn from confusion, obscurity, even psychotic derangement? This writing intensive course will proceed from the proposition that literary bewilderment can be a guide, a mentor, and even a means to arrive at different forms of knowledge. We will explore texts that are bewildering in a myriad of ways—texts that have characters in states of bewilderment and texts that bewilder their audiences and readers in order to ask what value is there in being at a loss?

This course will examine the problematic interactions between experience, action, and knowledge. Focusing primarily on the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, we will read mostly narrative literary works that address a problem of knowledge and self-knowledge that seems to hinge, paradoxically, on a moment of error. To the casual observer, these works might be taken to be so many detective stories. Nothing is less certain.

Somewhere between the private and the public, the personal and the relational, the imagined and the real, sexuality emerges on the scene. In film, a scene suggests the action that takes place in a single location and a continuous time. In effect, a scene gives coherence to that action. Sexuality is a powerfully disruptive force that challenges continuous, linear time by drawing past, present, and future into unexpected relations. The scene provides the conditions for sexuality to emerge at the same time as it is transformed by sexuality.

“Nothing, as a matter of fact, is as closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended… The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own. It is at the same time that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me.” – Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

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"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

“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

A group of Chicanx 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. What does it mean to own property? What does it mean to inherit property—to share or withhold it from the ones you love? What does it mean to reclaim property?