Most people easily recognize the standard love plot: girl meets boy, they fall in love, they overcome an obstacle to their love and thereby arrive at their “happily ever after.” By contrast, the majority of stories we will examine in this class deviate from the classic love plot formula to highlight alternative forms of love, such as self-love, contractual love, delusional love, passionate friendship, and even the love shared by monsters. These types of narratives could also be termed “queer” love stories.

One way we can think about an island: a territory of the imagination that cuts across linguistic, cultural, and historical boundaries, a fantasy land of conquest and domination, a place of punishment, and the site of new beginnings beyond the known. How many times have you been asked the classic “what to take to a deserted island” question? And then another way to think about islands: as real places, where real lives have met and continue to meet the opportunities and challenges of this particular geography.

The short story delights in paradox: at once dependent upon brevity and capaciousness, it promises more than it can ever deliver. Deprived of the great spatial expanse that longer works afford, a short story must begin immediately, must attack the reader rather than simply welcome them in. Similarly, it must in its beginning move inexorably and maliciously toward its ending.

In this course we focus on women artists, female roles, female-like creatures, virtual representations, and the disciplinary practices that mediate their rich and extreme performativity. What is it about wild, feral, reckless, irrational, powerful, and fantastic acts by women artists that galvanize our imaginations and drive our responses of deep empathy?

Do poems take up truths? Can a novel be a way of thinking about something? What can you learn—about yourself, about others, about the world—from a film? This course considers the ways that literature, art, and film are not only a part of our creative imaginations but also central sources of insight into what is real and actual. How do fictional and imaginative works touch what is worldbound? How do they help us see, hear, and understand our world?

This will be a class that focuses on the construction of the love story and on the “natural” feelings that serve as its basis; we will examine and analyze the correlations between the forms love may take and the shapes of their narratives by surveying a wide variety of love plots from various historical time periods and national literatures. Beginning with prototypical love stories,we will move on to stories about alternative forms of love and ask what happens to narrative form when love’s appearance becomes unconventional.

If, as some say, history is written by the victors, in this course we will ask what alternative histories literary texts write. How does literature create worlds for the so-called losers of history, for those not included in the fight and those who turned away from either by choice or by necessity and who prefer not to appear in the historical record? In what ways do literary texts contest the official historical record or collude with it or both? How do the resources that are distinctive features of literary genres (fiction, drama, poetry) register the less-than-audible voices of history?

Definitions of modernity are legion and hotly debated. A related, thought distinct, word—modernization—has taken on a life of its own, usually referring to a wider variety of phenomena than those usually associated with modernity. What does it mean to modernize? What is involved in this process, at a local, concrete level (a building can be modernized) or at a global, more abstract level (a country can be modernized)? In this course, we will study literary, aesthetic and critical works that engage these questions.