This course will explore the concept of contagion and the fears, real and imagined, that surround
it. What does it mean for a body, a place, a community to be “clean” or “unclean”? What does
life look like in “plague-time”? And finally, what can we learn from these fictional and historical
sites of contamination? We’ll be examining the idea of pollution in a variety of contexts in order
to compare the ways that humans respond to crisis, from the level of the individual to the global.

In this course we are going to explore the world of comics and graphic novels from their origins in the 1930s to the present day. Comics and graphic novels will open us up to a series of broader questions: what happens when divergent media are united (image with text)?  How should we think about the figure of the author and artist (and the attendant legal category of creative copyright) within a context of collaboration (a writer working with an illustrator, or many writers with many illustrators), not mention amid the pressures of a publishing industry?

Let’s say I asked you to tell me what you associated with the color blue. Or yellow. Say I polled the entire class. We might find ourselves to be, to some extent, in agreement on the associations or symbols: blue symbolizes sadness or vastness or loneliness; yellow symbolizes cowardice, or sickness, etc. Color symbolism is in a sense one of the most recognizable devices for communicating

Many of us take eating as merely a fact of life: something bodily, social, but certainly not intellectual. Others, like food bloggers and instagrammers consider it a hobby and marker of individual or cultural identity. Either way, there’s no doubt that eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures. In fact, many of our strongest memories are about certain foods. Whether it’s the ubiquitous turkey dinner at Thanksgiving, or in my case, my grandfather’s spaghetti sauce, food often links us nostalgically to a sense of place, home, and identity.

Explaining his inclination for short fiction, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.” In this course, we’ll consider several short stories and a couple of novellas to try to understand what the generic advantages of short stories might be. We’ll ask, what sets short stories or novellas apart from novels? What kind of characters can be developed in short stories?

In modern and medieval narratives, the presence of dreams often foreshadows future events, whether divining good fortune, apocalyptic ends, or alternate dimensions. Prophecies, dreams, and signs all demand to be interpreted. This course will approach prophetic and dream narratives, especially in their use as literary motifs, as processes of semiosis, or ways of apprehending their literary worlds. This course will also engage with questions of how characters, narrators, and audiences relate to the symbolic component of the imagination.

As an R&C course—which fulfills a university requirement—this course seeks to develop students’ analytic writing and critical thinking skills via an engagement with literary texts that stage themselves as texts being read. Some of the texts we will encounter call attention to their status as material objects. Others dramatize their own consumption by fictional readers. Still others may simply depict the act of reading or writing more generally, offering a commentary on the nature of literature itself.

In the mid-20th century, national liberation movements and indigenous wars of independence reconfigured the world as European colonial regimes crumbled and new nation-states emerged throughout the globe. And yet the racial capitalism that coloniality inaugurated continued unabated. In this course we will focus our attention on the “post-colonial,” a critical term that arose in the wake of these events and that is still used to define our current moment.

Somewhere between the private and the public, the personal and the relational, the imagined and the real, sexuality emerges on the scene. In film, a scene suggests the action that takes place in a single location and a continuous time. In effect, a scene gives coherence to that action. Sexuality is a powerfully disruptive force that challenges continuous, linear time by drawing past, present, and future into unexpected relations. The scene provides the conditions for sexuality to emerge at the same time as it is transformed by sexuality.

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