The island is a territory of the imagination that cuts across linguistic and cultural boundaries: at once a fantasy land of conquest, domination, and punishment, and the site of new beginnings outside all that we know.

In this course, we will explore the connection literary/artistic representations of apocalypse and revolution. We will explore a selection of literary, filmic, and theoretical texts that will help us chart the terrain of the volatile conjunction of eschatological imagination and revolutionary desire. For example: what are the material and historical conditions under which the idea of the total “do-over” become compelling? What are the philosophical and political grounds upon which a total disavowal of the status quo can be argued for?

Many of the literary texts we study today come to us incomplete. Perhaps the author passed away before the work was finished, or perhaps we know the text only through scraps of parchment used in the binding of a different manuscript. Still other texts consciously position themselves as fragments, even if this move is but an artifice on the part of the author.

Our fascination with flight has led to literary representations of heroic feats and tragic transformations. In this course, we will look at humans levitating, devising prosthetic machines, and turning into birds in a wide range of canonical and popular texts. We will consider how these characters are lauded and condemned by other characters as well as the language used to bestow these evaluative claims. We will look at how flight is used as a plot device and how it shifts narrative perspective.

What makes a good conversation? In everyday life, we tend to think of a successful conversation as one that navigates around moments of tension: a primary if implicit aim of most conversations is to avoid conflict, misunderstanding, and awkwardness. This course, by contrast, will explore the possibilities offered by conversations that don’t go so smoothly. In readings from Plato and Shakespeare to Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt, we will consider how adversarial conversations might allow modes of understanding and forms of community that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. 

The frontiers of the Roman Empire, dragon-infested England after the death of King Arthur, the Reconquista Wars between Christians and Moors, and conquistadors in New World America – perhaps these sound like settings you would encounter in a trans-historical survey of world literature, but they’re in fact worlds you will find within the pages of novels written just decades ago.  

“The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear.”

In fiction and theory as in reality, it is impossible to really escape notions of eating. Whether characters gather around a table in a realist text, whether representations of forbidden fruit appear and subvert themselves in symbolic texts, or whether a text turns its eye to the “consumption” of language itself, eating and being eaten are as quietly omnipresent in writing as they are in our own lives.

In this course we will focus on the intersections of voice, movement, music, and lyrics within mediatized popular culture performance. We will examine how film, youtube, mobile phone, animation, and music video re-construct, translate, and transform the bodies, images, sounds, and texts of performers through media techniques. Central to this study is the foregrounding of women performers from different cultures from the 20th and 21st centuries.

In this course we will examine how the interdisciplinarity of animation creates immersive worlds in which viewers participate through mediated multi-sensory stimulation from screens. A special focus of this course is on comparative animation cultures, which reflect the aesthetic, social, spiritual, and technological politics of each case study through the special conditions and techniques used in the animation. We will explore animation from Japan, China, Iran, Israel, and the United States.