In this course, we will use the complex notion of the archive to analyze and compare a wide range of texts: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and novels by Sebald, Saramago, Murakami, Roth, and Morrison. What is an archive? How does it reflect the relationship between memory and forgetting, preservation and destruction? What does it mean to conceive of the literary tradition as an archive? How does the archive help us understand the relation between literature and politics, literature and psychoanalysis?

What makes American history, and why would we want to—need to—remake it? This course explores literary and visual materials produced in the post-Civil Rights U.S. by artists and writers who ponder this question and approach history like a raw material that demands to be refashioned and constantly problematized.

What happens when catastrophic or traumatic or painful events–war, or exile, or forcefully moving from one country to another—happened to your parents or grandparents, and not to you, but you hear about them over the dinner table, or at odd moments, or sometimes in the silences between their words?

In his “Defense of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In this course, we’ll take Shelley’s claim as a point of departure and proceed to ask how poets have claimed, criticized, contested, and been coopted by power. Our focus will be on poetry from Romanticism to the present, but we will also have occasion to address older poetic forms and practices. What can the persistence of these forms and practices tell us about poetry’s own power, its force?

This course takes up its task of developing critical reading and writing skills via an exploration of texts that stage their own reading and reception within the work. More specifically, we will focus on texts—such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—in which the characters themselves narrate and discuss other stories.

This course will be devoted to investigating storytelling, fantasy, and the imagination. In our readings, we will explore traditional elements of storytelling, including narratorial and authorial perspective, reliability, presence, self-consciousness, and voice. We will pay particular attention to storytelling devices such as allegory, verisimilitude, digressions, and interruptions, as well as symbols of imagination, including mirrors, dreams, monsters, miracles, illusions, and veils.

We tend to think about illness in biological and epidemiological terms. Much of our knowledge about health is communicated through the language of medicine and science; we look to doctors, pharmacists, nutritionists, and a range of other experts when seeking advice on how to lead a healthy life. But can science fully convey what it means to be ill? In this course, which borrows its title from Virginia Woolf’s essay of the same name, we will pay close attention to the ways in which illness gets figured in literature and art.

Revolutions often, if not always, present themselves as radical breaks with the past. Following the French Revolution, the newly formed National Convention declared that “The era of the French is counted from the Republic, which took place September 22, 1792 of the vulgar era…The vulgar era is abolished for civil usage.” The same decree set forth an entirely different calendar—complete with an autumn new year and a ten-day week—to emphasize the extent to which the Revolution began a new era, completely distinct from anything that had come before.

Every family has its secrets. In this class, we’ll look at fiction, film, television, and poetry that reveal what happens when a family’s metaphorical skeletons emerge from the closet. Does the revelation lead to crisis? Chaos? Resolution? With some of our stories, the reader alone learns a character’s secret, while the story’s other characters remain in the dark. What kind of “revelation” is this? How does the possession of this secret knowledge affect a reader’s attitude toward the character and the story’s events? How do these secrets alter or contradict our notions of family?

The Tower of Babel in Genesis is a brief and dramatic story about how human languages and habitats become multiple and scattered. The end of the story is one way of conceptualizing the differences and divisions among peoples in the world. The story is tightly constructed, and its ambiguity yields profuse interpretations, retellings, allusions, and echoes throughout literature. In this course, we examine the way literature returns to and rewrites Babel. A post-Babel world of many languages necessitates translation, so we examine this fact both thematically, and through works in translation.