Reading & Composition

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.

Reading & Composition

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.

Reading & Composition

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.

Reading & Composition

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

Reading & Composition

This course will explore the construction of gender, domestic spaces, and the occult, considering figures from healers and mystics to spinsters and the village witch. To what extent does the control of space create the witch, whether she self-identifies as such, or whether others label and persecute her? More generally, what spaces—physical, social, or intellectual—may a woman freely shape and inhabit? Where is she in possession of power, and where is her agency precluded?

Reading & Composition

“Landscapes are culture before they are nature…” Simon Schama

Reading & Composition

What could be more boring than bureaucracies? The very word seems to connote malaise itself: long lines, endless forms, frustration, paperwork, and cubicles. And yet bureaucracies form the massive, silent foundation of the modern world: from multinational corporations to modern nation-states, to DMVs and universities, no institution can operate without a corresponding bureaucracy. Our lives are circumscribed by forms, figures, and numbers that hold an almost divine power over our fate: from credit scores to tax documents, to academic records, to social security numbers.

Reading & Composition

Why do we write about witches? What is it about the occult that both thrills and terrifies us? Many are familiar with the 1692 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, but fears about witchcraft have existed for centuries earlier. Witches often served as figures of social anxiety, villains to unite a culture in crisis. In this class, we’ll read texts and watch films that focus on a variety of cultural constructions of the witch from Classical Antiquity to the 21st century.

Reading & Composition

What does it mean to “grow up”? What does it mean to undergo adolescence, to transition from childhood to adulthood? What do these categories mean, and have they always meant the same things? The answers to these questions are not as obvious as one might imagine. As the conceptualization of childhood evolved alongside historically changing ideas of the human, so too did the ways artists, philosophers, politicians, and writers engaged with the transitory state of adolescence.

Reading & Composition

A plague-ridden Thebes, an Indian reservation, a Rio slum, a U.S.-Mexico border town, the LA hood, a California women’s prison. These are the settings for our examination of characters who run up against obstacles—from within themselves, their families and tribes, the economic and legal systems they live in—that lead them to make criminal choices. These choices, and the risks they provoke, taint the characters even as they dare us to care for them. How do fiction writers, dramatists, journalists and filmmakers get us to invest our feelings in morally compromised characters?

Pages