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?

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.