LAS Courses
LAS E705-01
SEMINAR: HISTORY, HAUNTING, AND MEMORY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Michel-Rolph Trouillot proclaims, The past-or, more accurately, pastness-is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past. What is the relationship between history and haunting? How does the narration of troubling and troubled memories (or images of the future) draw attention to the gaps, assumptions, and limits of historical representation? Who is granted the power to tell stories and who is worthy of having stories told about them? How might texts, films, and other creative mediums not just represent about the dead, but actually conspire with them? The past has an ever-deepening relevancy to contemporary life, and the intimacies that structure our understanding(s) of the past, present, and future produce powerful terrains for study. This course engages these fraught terrains of historical narration; the absence presence of figures of the past; and the vexed representation of traumatic memory in social life. This course will center a wide range of texts, films, and other modes of cultural production that examine how history, haunting, and memory are contoured by of race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, colonialism, and temporality. Tacking between historiographic theory and literary, poetic, documentary, and ethnographic accounts of relations with the dead and other uncanny forces, we will wrestle with the silences, gaps, and erasures within particular historical sites and problematize representations of the past. We will pay particular attention to texts that highlight the incoherence and instability of the historical record; engage processes of suspension, seep, and spill; and demand nuance, in-betweenness, and queer temporality from our analyses.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E707-01
BUT DO THEY BITE?: THE MONSTROUS FEMININE IN GOTHIC AND VAMPIRE FICTION
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The Gothic tradition in literature has a wide and varied history. It is filled with contradictions that create a kind of uneasy unity; the natural world and the uncanny; patriarchal structures and strong women; and the awful beauty of the sublime. It also goes hand in hand with the vampire tales, that Nina Auerbach says have been our companions for so long that it is hard to imagine ourselves living without them. This course will explore the places vampire and Gothic novels, short fiction, and film intersect and diverge, as well as the way these genres approach representations of the monstrous feminine. We will consider these works of fiction in their cultural contexts using frameworks from gender studies, and feminist and post-colonial theory. Texts will include vampire stories from around the world, the European origins of the Gothic, and contemporary work that challenges the boundaries of both genres. As seminar participants, students will take an active role in class meetings, and produce research and project-based work.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E710-01
ENERGY PASTS/PRESENTS/FUTURES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will take an energy justice approach to fiction, theorizing, artistic production, and activism focused on various energy systems, including (but not limited to) fossil fuels, electricity, renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy, and their respective infrastructure systems. Throughout the semester, we will study the relationship between cultures and energy systems, examining how each energy systems are experienced, theorized, represented, narrated, mediated, resisted, and reimagined. Fundamentally, this course asserts that knowledge and cultural production from BIPOC communities and communities in the Global Souths are central (not auxiliary) to understanding modernity, the future, what it means to live well and sustainably, and how these are entangled with energy systems. This course also seeks to strengthen the commitment of the environmental and energy humanities to social, racial, anticolonial, environmental, energy, participatory, epistemic, and recognition justices. Some of the questions animating this course include: How and why has energy injustice been normalized and perpetuated? What knowledges are produced through scholarly, pedagogical, and creative engagements with energy? How are communities of color, Indigenous, working class, and downriver communities disproportionately impacted by energy regimes, and how are they organizing, resisting, and reimagining them?
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E711-01
NATIVE FEMINIST & TWO SPIRIT LITERATURES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course focuses on Indigenous conceptions of gender and sexuality, centering Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, Indigi-queer, and Two Spirit People. With core focuses on memoir, poetics, and felt theory -- which understands the body to be an important site of knowledge formation -- this class aims to draw attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality. The class will foreground relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as vital methods of knowledge creation and cultural production. We will focus on how Native creators remap and reimagine gender, sexuality, colonial violence, and the relationship between people, kin, communities, temporality, and the land. Authors might include, but are not limited to: Terese Marie Mailhot, Deborah Miranda, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tommy Pico, and Joshua Whitehead.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E712-01
VISIONARY FICTIONS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course takes its title, Visionary Fiction, from the term coined by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Through an exploration of a variety of science/speculative fiction (sf) invested in decolonization, liberation, nonlinear time, the environment, and critiques of dominant narratives of power, students will encounter sf short stories, novels, literary theory, personal essays, comics, films, and songs and music videos. This course, in its commitments to visionary fictions, includes Afrofuturist cultural production, Indigenous Futurities, and works committed to Multispecies Futures, Feminist Futures, and Queer Futurity, among others. As a creative extension of their reading in this course, students will generate their own visionary works of sf. A few of the course's framing questions include: Why and how does science fiction lend itself, as a genre, to a critique of the present? How does encountering science fiction through the lens of visionary fiction change, complicate, expand, and/or subvert sf genre expectations and stereotypes? What are the political stakes of imagining the future, and for whom? As readers, what are the implications and embodied experiences of imagining different futures in our current global moment of lingering pandemic, active protest and revolution, continued colonization, capitalism, extinction, and climate change?
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E746-01
THE SPARK OF HOPE IN THE PAST: MORRIS' CHAUCER/CRANE'S SPENSER
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Among the greatest monuments of the Arts & Crafts movement is the Kelmscott Chaucer published by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in 1896. Featuring eighty-seven wood-cut illustrations by Burne-Jones, the book is the culmination of Morris’s career as a utopian socialist reformer and a manifestation of his ideals. Habitually looking forward by engaging the late-medieval past, Morris’s edition is not only one of the most beautiful artifacts of the age but also registers a trenchant critique of the industrial, colonial empire that England had become. While work proceeded on the Chaucer, Morris’s colleague Walter Crane—unquestionably the foremost illustrator of children’s literature and himself a strident socialist like Morris—produced a magnificent edition of Edmund Spenser’s Elizabethan romance epic, The Faerie Queene, a work which Karl Marx saw as little more than imperialist propaganda by “Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet.” The plot thickens when, mindful of the mentorship between Morris and Crane, we note that something similar existed in the relationship between Chaucer and Spenser (despite the two hundred years that separated them). Both Chaucer and Spenser are considered “philosophical” poets, just as Morris and Crane are philosophically and politically driven in their visual art work. If we map out the complex interrelationships among these four artists, what can we discern about the ways that literary and visual media interrogate historical consciousness to “negotiate the past,” as one scholar put it? What are the politics of nostalgia, and what potential/perils might ride along with it? Is the idea of a progressive past little more than a grammatical category, or does it carry the sort of weight that the future perfect does as “the utopian tense”? And just how should we understand the relationship between literary and visual representation? What is the critical potential of visual “illumination” of literary narrative? As a seminar, this course will be driven by independent student inquiry into the topic, culminating in a significant project to conclude the semester.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E752-01
CHESTER HIMES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Chester Himes (1909-1984) was the author of seventeen novels – among them a number of important protest novels and a popular series of Harlem detective novels – several volumes of short stories, and a two-volume autobiography. Spanning three decades, from the mid-1940s to the mid 1970s, the evolution of his work, and the enduring controversy it stirred, is representative of the debates and tensions relating to the role of the African-American writer and a developing African-American aesthetic during this period. His work will therefore serve as a platform from which to examine the racial and literary politics of the era, including the politics of protest (and the bringing together of “art” and “propaganda”); the political resonances of the intersection of race and gender; and the politics of genre and style, including the distinction between “high art” versus “escapist pulp.” Even though Himes’s work often defies easy categorization in terms of genre and politics, in this course we will focus on three distinct periods of Himes’s work (and in so doing will critique the very basis for these categorizations): his protest novels, which often hinge on disastrous sexual relationships between black men and white women; his autobiographies; and his popular detective novels, two of which were made into films in the 70s that can be directly linked to the popularity of the blaxploitation films of that era. For each period we will examine the relation Himes’s work to its broader political and literary contexts. Students will be expected to conduct research on a particular aspect of Himes’s work and use it to develop a written project throughout the course of the semester.
Elective
LAS E782-01
JOYCE, SYNGE, YEATS, AND THEIR ANTECEDENTS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Ireland has a long history of literature, stretching from pre-Christian epics through monastic manuscripts right up to the thriving contemporary scene. While there are many important Irish writers before the beginning of the twentieth century, clearly the birth of the Abbey theatre and the poetry of W. B. Yeats and the prose of James Joyce created reverberations still felt in Ireland today. Using Joyce, Synge, and Yeats as a beginning point in this seminar we will look at a series of contemporary Irish writers whose works is building upon the foundation established in the early years of the twentieth century. One of the themes we will return to again and again in this course is the theme of loss - loss of language, loss of sovereignty, loss of loved ones. What does Stephen mean when he says, "History is a Nightmare from which I am trying to awake"? Why is Yeats' left in "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart"?
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS E786-01
EATING THE WAY BACK HOME: FOOD, LITERATURE AND IDENTITY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon writes, "The relations of man with matter, with the world outside, and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food." Fanon recognizes that for the colonized subject existence itself is so threatened that every bit of food one can gain access to is, as he writes, "a victory felt as a triumph for life." The foods people choose to eat and the ways they prepare those foods speak volumes about their relationship to the land and reflect their history. Postcolonial storytellers, writers, and filmmakers use food and foodways as markers of independence, as symbols of cultural colonization, and as signs of continued deprivations. Through foodways one can glimpse famines, invasions, and historical access to trade networks, and food itself can even serve as a vehicle for communication. Since these stories are not constructed in a vacuum, they also can reveal something about what food means in specific historical moments, in specific places, and for specific populations. This course will look at the roles food and foodways play in a series of narratives from formerly colonized spaces. Writers we will read may include Chris Abani, Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
LAS W246-101
GENDER AND THE FAIRYTALE
SECTION DESCRIPTION
We are all familiar with the moral of the story that comes at the end of a fairy tale. Charles Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood cautions unmarried young ladies not to let "wolves" into their beds, while the Grimm's "Little Red Cap" chastises girls for not listening closely to their mothers. Traditional versions of these tales are conduct manuals, cautionary tales, and homemaking primers for young girls, but they also address the underlying uncertainties associated with growing up and entering adulthood. Over the years, the fairy tale has been retold or reimagined to reflect shifting gender norms, and changing cultural anxieties around the transition to adulthood. Most recently, adaptations on the large and small screens have asked us to consider the motivations of the fairy tale's most notorious female villains in the context of traditional gender roles such as wife and mother. This course will examine tellings and retellings of four classic fairy tales: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard. We will read and watch classic versions, contemporary retellings, and film and television adaptations of these texts that both challenge and reinforce ideas of gender normativity, contextualized by readings in feminist theory, gender studies, and psychoanalytic theory. We will also put these western tales in conversation with other similar literary texts and folk tales from around the world, and yes, we will talk about Disney.
Elective
LAS W262-101
PUNK PRODUCTIONS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
A subculture characterized as part youth rebellion, part artistic statement, punk has lingered and transmogrified in popular discourse since its heyday in the 1970s. In this class we'll delve into the history of social, musical, and aesthetic manifestations of punk in the U.S. and UK and investigate the connections between punk's DIY, anti-authoritarian ethos and the politics of the late-twentieth century. We'll embrace a cultural studies framework to examine punk production in its various material and discursive forms-- music, fashion, film, manifestos, revolutions, etc. Throughout, we'll turn a critical eye towards investigating expectations and performances of gender, race, and class in a range of punk communities (i.e. Queercore, Riot Grrl, etc). Our discussions and your writing will be informed by scholarly books and articles, narrative accounts of punk, film screenings, and a lot of loud music.
Elective
LAS W279-101
HORROR STORIES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Horror stories are a literary & artistic expression of anxiety. It's not odd at all that we still write about ghosts when we're busy churning up & examining the crimes of our ancestors, or that we write contagion stories (zombies!) during a pandemic, or apocalyptic horror as we face the effects of climate change. Horror stories can be-as is true of any literature-artful, profound, entertaining, and -as Ezra Pound would say-news. We'll read a selection of stories-fundamental classics, lesser-known but influential stories, and contemporary attempts-to identify genre characteristics and to locate elements that define the genre's power. We'll also read works written about horror by horror authors and test their claims. To deepen our understanding of the genre even further-in addition to essays & exams-students will have the option to try their hand at writing an original horror story.
Elective
LAS W353-101
RACIALIZED ENVIRONMENTS: BLACK BRITAIN IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course examines twentieth-century Black British writing. We will focus primarily on works written by the 1940s to 1960s Windrush generation-the large, mid-century influx of Caribbean peoples to the United Kingdom (UK)-as well as Asian British authors who are often included under the umbrella of blackness. Reading such authors as Claude McKay, Mulk Raj Anand, Una Marson, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and Shola von Reinhold, we will explore also the colonial forebears and contemporary afterlives of the Windrush moment. There are a wide variety of often conflicting ways that blackness circulates in Britain, then and now. Both racist and reclaimative evocations of blackness demand our attention. Our course will circulate, then, around two core questions: 1) How do Black British writers' refigure blackness as a positive, empowered force and voice integral to British modernity, and 2) How do we contextualize this vital community of Black voices in Britain within the history of extractive imperialism that was and is buoyed by white supremacist conceptions of blackness in the British popular imagination. Across all the authors we will read, Black Britons succeed in reimagining what home means amidst the racialized environments of (un)belonging-rescuing it from exile, diaspora, and displacement and claiming their place at the heart of the British metropolis and within its literary canon.
Elective
LAS W379-101
MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS IN QUEER FILM, 1990-2018
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course focuses on the intersectionalities of race and queer subjectivities in queer cinema. We will trace this development from the historical cinematic 1990s of New Queer Cinema (NQC), an era that encompasses an explosion of gay film visibility, to an exploration of present day queer cinema and the ways in which queer representations and queer identities are portrayed. We will study the stylistic developments and controversies of queer film, examining major innovations and changes as compared to films from the NQC era. Such questions as what's at stake in films that contest and re-imagine new queer subjectivities will be addressed during the course.
Elective
LAS W423-101
READING AND WRITING LITERARY NONFICTION
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will give students the chance to read exemplary works of contemporary masters, including John McPhee, Jo Ann Beard, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Ta-Nehisis Coates, Leslie Jameson, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Joan Didion. Reading closely, students will gain broad exposure to a range of styles and concerns, which in turn may inform the nonfiction writing they do in this class. Students will have the option of working on a single long piece of approximately 20 pages or two pieces, 10 pages each. The work will be expected to do more than merely recount lived experience. At the heart of the writing should be an issue the writer is working to fathom.
Elective
LAS W432-101
SHORT STORY WRITING WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In this writing workshop, we will explore the short story, working to put into words what we--as individual readers and writers--hope to find in it. We'll consider what makes a story a story, while acknowledging that it is often something ineffable, indefinable. We'll read a range of contemporary and classic writers and will also read essays on craft. A significant amount of class time will be devoted to in-class writing and peer workshops. At the end of the term, students will be expected to submit a portfolio made up of reflections, rough drafts, and revised stories.
Elective