The literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, once commented that “the novel as a whole is an utterance just as rejoinders in everyday dialogue or private letters are.”  Of course we often talk in loose ways about literary texts (among others) as being part of a large “conversation.”  In this course we’ll try to treat Bakhtin’s proposition seriously and rigorously.  What would be the larger language on which an author would draw to make a specific novelistic utterance?  How could one such novelistic utterance be taken to be a rejoinder to another.  What training is required in order to be able to l

In this class we will take a close and multi-faceted look at books written primarily for children, a category of literature that remains rather under-examined, despite its popularity, persistence, and influence.  We will read examples of stories for children written in a number of different times (from the 18th to the 21st centuries) and places (Europe, Britain, North America), and our readings will make use of many different kinds of literary analysis:  historical contextualization, analyses that draw on particular literary theories, psychoanalytical approaches, and close readings.  We wil

At the heart of this course is coming to terms with the question: what is an American? This is a fraught question; the answer seems everywhere self-evident, for many, yet what is or makes an American is radically contingent. In this course, we will approach the question of who, what, and/or how one is an American by focusing on three discrete historical time periods (settlement and colonization, the consolidation of the U.S.

In addition to reading a selection of novels that pertain, in a variety of ways, to the subject of human rights, we will closely study the Declarations of 1789 and 1848. As a class, we will also read essays of critical and political theory that engage with the promises and paradoxes of human rights. Finally, this course will aim to familiarize students with foundational studies of the novel as a genre, in order to develop a vocabulary for discussing and writing about them.

In this course we will make use of recent efforts to remap the Caribbean beyond linguistic and insular categories by exploring critical concepts and concerns Hispanic, Anglophone and Francophone authors share in common. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines (literature, history, and anthropology) and genres (fiction, drama and travel writing), we will examine how explorers, writers and scholars have continuously sought to redefine the Caribbean at critical moments in its recorded history.

This seminar’s purpose will be to help us become informed listeners at the Kurt Elling concert sponsored by Cal Performances on Saturday, April 23, 2011. Elling’s latest album, “Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman,” won the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album.  The seminar requires no musical training, and no previous acquaintance with jazz, although we’ll happily make use of any jazz expertise seminar participants may have.  We’ll study how jazz works as music, and how jazz works as a culture.

The novel is a modern genre, imported and adapted to Indian circumstances during the heyday of the British Empire. Over the course of the summer we will be reading British novels set in India, as well as novels written by Indian authors. We will be exploring how British fiction reflected on the “romance” of British Raj, the cultural differences and political hierarchies that arose between the rulers, the ruled, and the middlemen and women who mediated between them.