This course will examine literature and the visual arts alongside and through the rapidly growing field of virtual technologies, emphasizing their medial relationships to literary artwork. It will draw widely from theory ranging from art history, to linguistics, computer science, anthropology, cognitive studies, and literary criticism in order to evaluate the virtual nature of literary space.

This course will examine the history of found documents as a literary device, i.e., stories that are told through an accumulation of texts, often “found” and assembled by the author or narrator. We will delve into the history of epistolary literature (from the Heroides to Dracula) as well as experimental tales conveyed through pieces of poetry, critical reviews, and footnotes (e.g., Pale Fire, City of Saints and Madmen).

“Fallor ergo sum.” (“I err, therefore I am.”)
—St. Augustine, 5 th century
“C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute.” (“It’s more than a crime, it’s a mistake.”)
— Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, 1804

In this class, we will read literature that explores the multifaceted perspectives immigrants have on America. How do immigrant writers see, learn about, stumble upon the particulars of American life— personally, culturally, socially, politically? What happens to these writers’ memories and perceptions of their origin countries over time? How does their writing intersect with their immigrant identity, shaping and revealing it—do they have a writerly “accent”? Can we use their individual vantage points to understand the whole?

Have the sights, sounds, or smells expressed in a written passage seemed to affect your own eyes, ears, and nose? Has certain written material managed to make you feel hungry, queasy, or warm? How can words on paper succeed in rendering (or fail to render) the sensory perceptions of a reader? If there is a hierarchy of the senses in literature, what are the contributing factors? This course will consider texts that explore specific sensory perceptions and their various effects upon the imagination and social constructs.

In this class, we’ll talk about girls—mean girls, weird girls, sad girls, material girls, girls that run the world, girls that just want to have fun. We’ll ask what it means to call someone a girl, what it means to call something girly. We’ll think about the aesthetics of girlhood from past to present—about lace and ruffles, the color pink and glitter, about combat boots and eyeliner—and the ways these can be and have been used for feminism and for marketing. We’ll consider relationships between girls and between girls and the people around them.

How to fathom the separation line between humans and their nonhuman contexts, when the two seem, at this present juncture of protracted and irrecoverable ecological catastrophe, irrevocably, perhaps tragically, imbricated?

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.