This senior seminar will offer students an introductory overview of, as well as in-depth engagement with, the work in aesthetics, literary theory, and criticism developed by the Frankfurt School. The emphasis will be on Frankfurt School texts of philosophy, critical-theory, aesthetics, and criticism; but we’ll also read a fair number of literary artworks (or excerpts from literary artworks), putting them into dialogue with the seminar's assigned critical-theoretical or philosophical texts.

In this course we will address the interaction between history and literature on the level of trauma. The course will present fiction written in response to, or contextualized by, traumatic historical events, over a period ranging from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, events that affected deeply the state and society of Greece.

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works. The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored.

This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

Text:  A Manual of Modern Greek by Anne Farmakides,Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-30003019-8

In this course, we will analyze and compare a series of plays and films titled after objects: Plautus’s Pot of Gold and Rope, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Yukio Mishima’s The Magic Pillow (1950), Eugene Ionesco’s Les Chaises (1952), Melvonna Ballenger’s Rain (1978), August Wilson’s Fences (1983; 2016), Lynn Nottage’s Mud, River, Stone (1999) and Poof (2004), Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Wig Out (2008), and Raul Castillo’s Knives and Other Sharp Objects (200

The Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility.

How does anime make meaning? What’s the relation between manga (comics) and anime? How can we “read” an anime closely, and how do the forces of distribution make a difference, globally and locally? What are the powers of a plastic line? What would it mean to follow a meme, or a piece of software/technology for generating color, or a voice actor, or a character across media outside of the bounds of a single work?

This course asks students to consider how modern lyric poetry in the United States is significantly shaped and re-shaped by the work of poets, critics, and philosophers of color pursuing vital questions about the relations of art and society. In particular, they ask whether “lyric” structures and modalities can make special contributions towards the goal of creating—both formally and substantively—a more ethnically and racially robust democracy.