Reading & Composition

This class will consider gestures in both their figurative and literal senses: gesture as in to “gesture towards” an idea, practice, or community; and gesture as in a physical gesture, one that comes from the body and speaks when words are not an option, at the limits of words, or alongside them. Taken together, “Feminist Gestures” will consider feminisms as both an embodied practice and a set of continuous processes. In doing so, we will look at issues of re-writing, intertextuality, and translation.

Reading & Composition

This course will explore the concept of contagion and the fears, real and imagined, that surround it. What does it mean for a body, a place, a community to be “clean” or “unclean”? What does life look like in “plague-time”? And finally, what can we learn from these fictional and historical sites of contamination? We’ll be examining the idea of pollution in a variety of contexts in order to compare the ways that humans respond to crisis, from the level of the individual to the global.

Reading & Composition

How do we define “nature”? While some might assign the status of nature to the non-human and the non-man-made (animals, plants, etc.), a problem emerges when we consider that humans, too, are animals (mammals). Would not genetic clones, indistinguishable from their originals, also complicate this perspective?

Reading & Composition

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love,” writes Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Implicit within this quote is the connection (or conflict) between friendship and romance. Tellingly, in several of Austen’s novels a significant shift takes place when a woman gets married; her best-friendship loses its relevance and her marriage takes centerstage. What does this say, Austen’s novels ask, about the (de)value of female friendships in a patriarchal world? Why does the marriage plot take precedence over friendship?

Reading & Composition

Across time, geographies, and cultures, artists have been driven to reflect on militarization and war. What does war do? How do soldiers, civilians, children, and "nations" become militarized? What role do artists play in militarized cultures? In this course we will examine how the arts are deployed in times of war, in militarized zones, in postwar memorializations, and in future fantasy wars. We will analyze "performance" in diverse militarized cultures through the technologies of animation, film, new media, and theatre.

Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

Joy, grief, anxiety, shame, desire, jealousy, fear, hope: emotions are a familiar part of ordinary life. We tend to think of feelings as private and individual, but emotions are also public, social, and political, at the same time that publics and politics are very much emotional.

Genre: Lyric Poetry

This comparative seminar in lyric poetry borrows its title from Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), to ask about the relation between poetry and sensory deprivation (and/or plenitude) and prosthesis.  It’s been said that poetry is what is untranslatable, yet one poem often translates another, and many of us only read one another’s languages in translation. As a catch-all concept for whatever “out there” can’t quite be captured in human terms, “Nature” can also be thought of as a language only ever encountered in translation.

Proseminar

Studies in Contemporary Literature

This seminar seeks to explore the relationship between Soviet culture and the broader phenomenon of socialist internationalism in the 20th century. Readings will include Soviet writers who wrote about the wider world through an internationalist lens (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov, Isaac Babel, Boris Pil’niak, Sergei Tret’iakov), as well as non-Soviet writers who responded in various ways to the Soviet project and its international implications (including Walter Benjamin, Claude McKay, Hu Yuzhi, and Langston Hughes).

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