The literature on parvenus, charmers and swindlers is vastly popular, betraying the secret or not so secret admiration our culture reserves for these characters, who are often among the keenest observers of the social world. In this course, we’ll read accounts of characters that, through great cunning and skill, manage to rise through the social ladder, accumulating all manner of goods and favors.

Laurence Sterne’s memoirs famously took three volumes to arrive at the account of his own birth; Robert Walser wrote nearly 100 pages about walking; Sigmund Freud divined innumerable secrets from the “rubbish-heap” of his observations. In this course, we’ll ask what trifles, trash, tangents and other distractions are doing in some otherwise serious (and some not-so-serious) novels, poems, plays, films, and treatises. How do we come to judge objects as undeserving of our attention in the first place? One of

Can a work of art teach us how to read itself?

Are all disguises deceitful? If you wear one disguise your whole life, is it a lie? This course will investigate various accounts of individuals who live their lives incognito. Drawn from literature, history, film, and television, our case studies will carry us from the annals of Sherlock Holmes to Harry Houdini’s biography, from ancient identity theft to modern Ponzi schemes, from medieval quacks to call-in psychics and televangelists. Which disguises are more convincing, available, or advantageous to some than others?

From divine creatures in ancient Egypt, to evildoers in the Middle Ages; from witches’ counterparts in Puritanical New England, to meme subjects and Instagram influencers in the Digital Age, cats have substantiated their ever-evolving place in humans’ lives throughout history and across the world. In this course, we will read a selection of literary texts that feature cats: cats who observe, cats who harbor secrets, cats who speak, cats whose enigmatic natures inspire anxiety and paranoia within humans and lead them into unchartered territories.

Politicians, smartphone advertisers, and your university instructors all claim to want the same thing: to help you make your voice heard. To examine these various interests in the voice, this course unpacks a long and diverse cultural heritage of the voice as an ethical, political, and literary concept. Divided roughly into three units, it begins with the daemonic voice of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues and with the concepts of synegoria (according to which a legal representative speaks in the voice of his client) and advocacy in legal rhetoric.

“In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” - Judith Butler

“We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” - RuPaul

While just 2-3% of books published in English in the US are translated from other languages, around just 30% of that small percentage are works by women. In “Translating Women,” we will examine this under-examined literature. Our course title refers to: translating women writers and women who translate. We’ll use a feminist framework and think about “women” as an inclusive, non-essentialized group.

Writing strategies and expectations vary among cultures. Spanish speakers, for instance, may discover that their thoughtful attempts at emphasizing an idea are sometimes seen by English readers as unnecessary repetitions. They may find themselves wondering why a general reflection, intended to highlight the argument’s complexity, can be perceived, instead, as a digression. Also, why do sentences in English need to be so short and paragraphs so long? And when did using the passive voice become an unforgivable sin?

Reading speculative fiction has long been stereotyped as a fundamentally unserious, childish, or even irresponsible pursuit: an effort to escape existing realities instead of engaging critically with them. Yet in the age of The Hunger Games and The Handmaid’s Tale, it seems obvious that stories of distant futures, alternative histories, and faraway planets do not always appeal to readers on the basis of pure escapism: they offer