This course takes up its task of developing critical reading and writing skills via an exploration of texts that stage their own reading and reception within the work. More specifically, we will focus on texts—such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—in which the characters themselves narrate and discuss other stories.

This course will be devoted to investigating storytelling, fantasy, and the imagination. In our readings, we will explore traditional elements of storytelling, including narratorial and authorial perspective, reliability, presence, self-consciousness, and voice. We will pay particular attention to storytelling devices such as allegory, verisimilitude, digressions, and interruptions, as well as symbols of imagination, including mirrors, dreams, monsters, miracles, illusions, and veils.

We tend to think about illness in biological and epidemiological terms. Much of our knowledge about health is communicated through the language of medicine and science; we look to doctors, pharmacists, nutritionists, and a range of other experts when seeking advice on how to lead a healthy life. But can science fully convey what it means to be ill? In this course, which borrows its title from Virginia Woolf’s essay of the same name, we will pay close attention to the ways in which illness gets figured in literature and art.

Revolutions often, if not always, present themselves as radical breaks with the past. Following the French Revolution, the newly formed National Convention declared that “The era of the French is counted from the Republic, which took place September 22, 1792 of the vulgar era…The vulgar era is abolished for civil usage.” The same decree set forth an entirely different calendar—complete with an autumn new year and a ten-day week—to emphasize the extent to which the Revolution began a new era, completely distinct from anything that had come before.

Every family has its secrets. In this class, we’ll look at fiction, film, television, and poetry that reveal what happens when a family’s metaphorical skeletons emerge from the closet. Does the revelation lead to crisis? Chaos? Resolution? With some of our stories, the reader alone learns a character’s secret, while the story’s other characters remain in the dark. What kind of “revelation” is this? How does the possession of this secret knowledge affect a reader’s attitude toward the character and the story’s events? How do these secrets alter or contradict our notions of family?

The Tower of Babel in Genesis is a brief and dramatic story about how human languages and habitats become multiple and scattered. The end of the story is one way of conceptualizing the differences and divisions among peoples in the world. The story is tightly constructed, and its ambiguity yields profuse interpretations, retellings, allusions, and echoes throughout literature. In this course, we examine the way literature returns to and rewrites Babel. A post-Babel world of many languages necessitates translation, so we examine this fact both thematically, and through works in translation.

Consciousness of our own mortality is a key part of what makes us human, giving rise to manifold cultural responses, including practices of commemoration, rituals of mourning, and built monuments. In this class, we will explore a wide range of these responses as expressed in literature, film, and visual art from antiquity to the present day. How do rituals of mourning and commemoration serve the needs of the living?

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.”

In this course, we will think about the relation between art and memory. By what means does art remember the past? How does it re-present past historical or personal events? How can a literary text allow for the resurfacing of the past, letting something that is absent speak to the present of the reader? What are the limits of art and language in this endeavor? Can literature remember a past that was never recorded and written? And how is art not only a site that allows us to turn back in time, but also forward, enabling us to rethink and re-vision our own present and future?

“America! I put the word on a page, it is my keyhole,” writes Russian-Jewish-American poet Ilya Kaminsky in a poem that describes his journey from the Soviet Union to America. In this class, we will read literature that explores the multifaceted perspectives immigrants have on America. How do immigrant writers see, learn about, stumble upon the particulars of American life— personally, culturally, socially, politically? What happens to these writers’ memories and perceptions of their origin countries over time?