This course focuses on the aesthetics of madness and melancholia in literature and film. After situating these twin “pathologies” in medical and psychiatric history, we will begin to ask how empirical perspectives square with their treatment by literary and filmic texts. Throughout the course, we will explore both madness and melancholia as psychic and affective states; as modes of aesthetic production and experience; and as forms of social dissent and disruption– in short, as categories for our analysis as literary critics.

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.

Taking its title from the surreal-science-fiction novella Qui se souvient de la mer (1962, Mohammed Dib), this course will explore questions of loss, memory, and violence.

The questions that we’ll take up in this R1A course are: what do we gain from learning about white privilege and experience from the perspective of both ethnic-minority and white writers and thinkers? What do these different perspectives reveal about racial privilege in the contemporary United States, as simultaneously lived and structural, explicit and implicit? Scholars consider these questions from many different disciplinary perspectives: history, sociology, ethnic studies, and education, to name just a few.

This class aims to reconsider our assumptions about the family home. Contemporary popular culture celebrates the home as a refuge from the world, finding in its separation from public life and association with the nuclear family the promise of a nurturing, comfortable space where we can simply be ourselves. Yet literature and film are replete with another sort of home: isolated but never totally private, familiar but never completely safe.

This class will consider gestures in both their figurative and literal senses: gesture as in to “gesture towards” an idea, practice, or community; and gesture as in a physical gesture, one that comes from the body and speaks when words are not an option, at the limits of words, or alongside them. Taken together, “Feminist Gestures” will consider feminisms as both an embodied practice and a set of ever-continuous processes. In doing so, we will look at issues of re-writing, intertextuality, and translation.

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.

“The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

—Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

“No, no. It’s spelt Raymond Luxury-Yacht but it’s pronounced Throat-Wobbler Mangrove!”

—Monty Python’s Flying Circus

An East LA-based Chicanx art collective spray-paints the exterior of an art museum in protest of the museum’s exclusionary practices. A Peruvian poet writes difficult and estranging poetry about poverty and suffering. A leftist studio releases a film in Germany the year before Hitler’s rise to power about the trials of a working-class family unable to afford rent. A cultural theorist claims that absurdist plays have more political force than those depicting human unfreedom. Where is the political in art and literature?

“It is one of life’s greatest ironies that, no matter how much we want to be different, wherever we go, there we are. There’s just no getting away from ourselves”

-Ed and Deb Shapiro