And to the thinking soul the *phantasms are like sensations (aesthemata)..This is why the soul never thinks without phantasm (Aristotle, De Anima, 3, 7) In the English translation of Aristotle's text, the word “phantasma” is frequently rendered as “image” but in fact these phantasms (phantasmata) are connections of the individual mind with the sensory object and the sensory experience, that is, after the sensory object is gone and it is no longer there.

For decades, a significant number of far-right figures have warned that a group of philosophers, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and aestheticians were fomenting--in a memorable and oft-repeated phrase--a "conspiracy to corrupt" America and "the West."  This corrupting work was said to occur, in many respects, through the medium of art, and through something the conspiracy theorists identified as "cultural marxism." The leftist intellectuals attacked by the conspiracy theorists were associated with what was--and still is--popularly known as the "Frankfu

This course will study sexuality and gender in two very different historical periods--ancient Greece and 19th-century Europe. Sexuality will be defined as including sexual acts (e.g. sodomy, pederasty, masturbation); sexual identities (e.g. erastes and eromenos); and sexual systems (e.g. kinship structures, subcultures, political hierarchies). Readings and lectures will focus on situating queer sexualities relative to dominant organizations of sex and gender.

This is a course in beginning Modern Greek, involving speaking, reading and writing.

Modern Greek is unique among languages in that it is the only modern language directly descended from Ancient Greek. In this course, the student studies reading, writing, pronunciation and use of contemporary spoken idiom, all within the historical and cultural context of the language. By the end of the course, the student should have a grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today.  In this course, there is also an emphasis and practice of oral language skills.

In this course we will consider a variety of written and cinematic texts, all of which foreground the movement of individuals or communities across national borders. Over the course of the semester, we will discuss a number of interrelated questions: how do contemporary writers attempt to come to terms with the profound historical ruptures and geographic displacements brought about by the experience of transnational movement?

Novels can tell us stories in which the sexuality of various characters is a prominent feature, or even the central problem of the novel. Novels can be built in many different ways. They can tell their stories in many different ways. By doing so, they can help us think about what kind of a phenomenon sexuality is. In other words, novels can help us think about issues like sexuality by the way they tell their stories, by the way they give them form. We know people experience sexuality differently. We know people experience different sexualities.

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.