English

This course explores how the human-animal question is approached in contemporary literature. How do contemporary literary texts portray distinctions between humans and other animals? What are the philosophical, ideological, and political implications of such portrayals? If humans are distinguished from other animals on the basis of their possession of certain qualities such as speech, then what does this mean for groups of people who are deprived of their capacity to speak? Week-by-week, students approach such questions by concentrating on literature that introduces us to rational beasts, poor beasts, migratory or colonized beasts, and of course to edible ones. In doing so, students unearth connections between animal studies and feminism, post/colonialism, scientific innovations and environmental concerns, as well as consumerism and profit-driven economic systems.

How does constrained writing paradoxically open up language? What overt and covert strategies have authors used to create work that is highly formal but also highly playful? The Paris-based literary movement OuLiPo has been the headquarters of constrained writing since its inception in the middle of the last century. The group is well-known for writers like Georges Perec and Italo Calvino but has also had a considerable presence in English, from members like Harry Matthews and Ian Monk to the Feminist OuLiPo collective, Foulipo. In this seminar we will focus on OuLiPo and OuLiPo-adjacent output in English; readings include Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature edited by Warren F. Motte.

The serialization of Wilkie Collins’s mystery novel The Woman in White in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860 is often regarded as the birth of a new type of fiction in Victorian England that came to dominate the literary market in the 1860s: the sensation novel. Even though recent criticism has widened the remit of the genre to include examples from earlier decades, Collins’s novel of mystery, deception and murder exerted an unprecedented cultural influence: readers (like the seasoned novelist W. M. Thackeray) are reported to have sat up all night ploughing through the pages of Collins’s doorstopper in a frenzy to find out what happened next. The novel became a singular object of consumption in other respects as well: ladies with money to spare could treat themselves to Woman-in-White fashion and Woman-in-White perfume, and music lovers could dance to Woman-in-White waltzes. Other novelists followed Collins and created ever more exciting ‘novels with a secret’, and the 1860s alone saw two further genre-shaping examples with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861). This overwhelming popular success prompted conservative critics to rail against these titillating productions: the novelist Margaret Oliphant was appalled by the representation of sensation fiction’s heroines as “fleshly and unlovely”, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Henry L. Mansel, condemned sensation authors like Collins, Braddon and Charles Reade for offering cheap literary fare and – more dangerously – for “preaching to the nerves” of their readers. In this seminar, students will read two long sensation novels (The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret) and one shorter example taken from the genre of detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) – a form that can be fruitfully traced to the sensation novels of the 1860s. We will place these novels in their rich historical and cultural contexts and engage with the immediate responses to the genre. We will study sensation fiction’s generic predecessors (such as the Gothic romance and the silver-fork-novel) and weigh its significance for modern forms like the crime novel and the psychological thriller.

Who has felt authorized to narrate their life history and what has compelled them to tell explanatory stories that make sense of their lives? How accurate is it to call autobiography the history of the self? Do we encounter other histories or selves in autobiography? What is the history of autobiography and how do we read it? Historians reading autobiography for documentary evidence of the past and endeavoring to write about it objectively will find that their task is complicated by the autobiographer’s subjective and often highly creative engagement with memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency. This course is intended for students who wish to explore the interdisciplinary links between autobiography, history, literature, and personal narrative, and to acquire strategic theories and cultural understanding for reading these texts.

This course provides a study of literature produced in the United States during the 19th century. It examines cultural diversity throughout history, as it is represented in literature. Its contents cover the following topics: The first literature of the United States, The American Renaissance, Slave narrative and Post-Civil War literature.

Short stories are sometimes revised into longer texts. This can happen for various reasons, ranging from aesthetic refinements to commercial considerations (for instance, the 1950s trend to rework multiple science fiction short stories published in genre magazines into “fix-ups” so as to capitalize on an expanding book market). This seminar will address a selection of American short stories from the second half of the 20th century and their subsequent adaptation, expansion, or incorporation into novel or novel-like formats. Analyzing the individual texts and the changes they undergo from one version to the next will enable us to consider issues of form, genre, narrative, and intertextuality. Texts will include The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, 1950); Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin, 1953); Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1966); Tracks (Louise Erdrich, 1988), and Four/Five Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1995/2017).

This course examines the nexus between literature and intercultural communication and analyzes fundamental concepts and principles in the academic field of intercultural communication. The course features excerpts from various books, short stories, and social science articles that treat themes most broadly addressed in intercultural communication research such as identity; the benefits and pitfalls of intercultural contact; personal transformation; discrimination, and cultural change. 

This course traces the premodern histories of contemporary constructions of race and gender, exploring the figuration of these concepts in (mainly) non-dramatic texts from Old English to the 17th-century. Students read works including Old English texts scrutinizing the practices of slavery, early modern women’s conduct books, the diplomatic correspondence between Elizabeth I and the Ottoman “Sultana” Safiye, travel writings by Leo Africanus and Al-Hasan al-Wazzan, and Zadie Smith’s reimagining of Chaucer, THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN. Students draw upon important recent scholarship in Premodern Critical Race Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Gender Studies, Trans Studies and Queer Temporalities to trace how premodern texts helped to construct, perpetuate, challenge, critique, or explore ideas of race and gender, and how this has shaped our field and our world today. 

This course explores the relationship between literary texts and their precursors. The course moves from the ancient world of classical Greece, Rome, and the Middle East to the present day. Students focus on the transhistorical, however, not chronological. The course introduces some of the ways in which writers speak to one another across and through time, considering what it means for a writer to invoke other literary texts in their work. Students explore different theoretical models for thinking about this relationship, moving beyond ideas of influence to instead consider more creative ways in which texts have existed in relation to one another. 

In this course, students read, view, and analyze a selection of plays, performances, and other texts that pose gender as a central problem. In conjunction with these performance texts, students also read a variety of theoretical texts that offer methods both for interpreting gender in performance and for understanding gender as performance. The course focuses on theatre and performance works produced from the 1950s to the present and covers a range of performance forms, including dramatic realism, experimental theatre, performance art, and drag performance.