DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Course Description: Following Beyoncé’s iconic call to action, this course takes a look at a number of “single ladies” - and a few who managed to “put a ring on it” - in literature, film and TV from the last two hundred years. Together, we will investigate archetypal figures of femininity, from the spinster to the madwoman to today’s “girlboss.”  How do our literary and popular media construct and deconstruct these categories at different moments in history? Pairing feminist theory with primary texts, we’ll ask: how does marriage function to resolve class tensions? How does it construct and enforce constructions of race and gender? And how, according to these texts, can women find social, emotional and financial independence? Texts may include selections from Jane Eyre, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, A Room of One’s Own, Conversations with Friends, Sex and the City, and The Bachelor.

Teaching Method: Seminar discussion, short lectures

Evaluation Method: Participation, analytical essays and a final project

Texts including ISBNs: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (ISBN 9780141441146), Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole (ISBN 0140439021),  A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf ( ISBN 0156787334), Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (ISBN 0156787334), Bridget Jones's Diary dir. Sharon Maguire (2001), selections from Sex and the City created by Darren Star (1998-2004) and The Bachelor created by Mike Fleiss (2002-2024)

Texts will be available at: Required novels at Norris Bookstore. Other excerpts provided via Canvas.

Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major elements and tools of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. Through exercises and projects, you’ll practice using these tools to produce original, exciting works of literary art. Along the way, you’ll sharpen your ability to track these elements both in published texts and in the work of your classmates, and further develop how you measure aesthetic value. You’ll be encouraged to see yourself as an active member of a community of artists, and to establish a regular discipline as a working writer. Writing and reading will be due in nearly every class, and peer workshop will play an important role in learning to see your work more objectively.

Teaching Methods: Discussion.

Evaluation Methods: Evaluation of a final portfolio.

Texts include: A course reader.

[Prerequisite to English Major in Writing]

Course Description: An introduction to the major forms of poetry in English from the dual perspective of the poet-critic. Creative work will be assigned in the form of poems and revisions; analytic writing will be assigned in the form of critiques of other class members’ poems. A scansion exercise will be given early on. All of these exercises, creative and expository, as well as the required readings from the anthology, are designed to help students increase their understanding of poetry rapidly and profoundly; the more wholehearted students’ participation, the more they will learn from the course.

Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student poems.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ understanding of poetry; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: An anthology, a critical guide, a 206 Reader prepared by the instructor, and the work of other students.

Prerequisites:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major.  Be sure to enroll in 207 or 208 if you have not already done so. 
• No prerequisites.
• No P/N registration.
• Attendance of first class is mandatory.
• Prerequisite for the writing major and sequence-based minor.

Course Description: A reading and writing course in short fiction. Students will read widely in traditional as well as experimental short stories, seeing how writers of different culture and temperament use conventions such as plot, character, and techniques of voice and distance to shape their art. Students will also receive intensive practice in the craft of the short story, writing at least one story, along with revisions, short exercises, and a critical study of at least one work of fiction, concentrating on technique.

Teaching Method: Discussion of readings and principles; workshop of student drafts.

Evaluation Method: Evidence given in written work and class participation of students’ growing understanding of fiction; improvement will count for a great deal in estimating achievement.

Texts include: Selected short stories, essays on craft, and the work of the other students.

Prerequisites:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 208 if you have not already done so.
• No P/N registration.
• Attendance of first class is mandatory.
• Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.

Course Description: An introduction to some of the many possible voices, styles, and structures of the creative essay. Students will read from the full aesthetic breadth of the essay, including memoir, meditation, lyric essay, and literary journalism. Discussions will address how the essay creates an artistic space distinct from the worlds of poetry and fiction, and how truth and fact function within creative nonfiction. Students will be asked to analyze the readings closely, and to write six short essays based on imitations of the style, structure, syntax, and narrative devices found in the readings. Students can also expect to do some brief writing exercises and at least one revision.

Teaching Method: Discussion; one-half to two-thirds of the classes will be devoted to discussion of readings and principles, the other classes to discussion of student work.

Prerequisites:

• All students interested in the Creative Writing Major must take two introductory writing courses--poetry (ENG 206), fiction (207), or creative nonfiction (208)--before applying to the major. Be sure to enroll in 206 or 207 if you have not already done so.
• No P/N registration.
• Attendance of first class is mandatory.
• Course especially recommended for prospective Writing Majors.

Course Description: This course will introduce students to a range of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and romances.  During the quarter, we will be considering these plays in their Early Modern context—cultural, political, literary and theatrical.  We will focus centrally on matters of performance and of text.  How is our interpretation of a play shaped by Shakespeare’s various “texts”— his stories and their histories, the works of his contemporaries, the latest literary fashions, and the various versions of his plays that circulated among his audience?   Similarly, how do the details of a given performance, or the presence of a particular audience, alter the experience of the play? To answer these questions, we will consider not only the theaters of Early Modern England, but also recent cinematic versions of the plays, and we will read only our modern edition of Shakespeare but also examining some pages from the plays as they originally circulated. Our readings may include Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, and the Tempest.

Teaching Method(s): Lectures with discussion; required weekly discussion section.

Evaluation Method(s): Section attendance and participation, discussion board posts, a midterm, a scene performance and short papers

Texts will be available at: Norris Center Bookstore. The required textbook is The Norton Shakespeare, 3^rd edition, (two-volume set) ed. Stephen Greenblatt (ISBN 978-0-393-26402-9, approximate cost $90 new; $ 40 used, $39 digital; copies of the 1^st and 2^nd editions, as well as the one-volume 3^rd edition may also be used).

Course Description: This is part one of a two-quarter survey that explores writings produced in North America between the time Native peoples encountered Europeans for the first time and the turn of the twentieth century.  (Students are welcome to take one or both parts of English 270.)

In the first quarter we’ll explore the history of North American literature from its indigenous beginnings—including the migration by Europeans to what they imagined as a “new world”—through the crisis of slavery in the mid-1850’s.  We will be centrally engaged with a set of related questions: What is American literature?  Who counts as an American?  Who shall be allowed to tell their stories, and on whose behalf?  We embark on this literary journey at a moment of questioning the relations between the present and our “literary traditions”: various organizations are debating how to commemorate the four hundredth anniversaries of the years 1619 (the year the first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia) and 1620 (the year of the Plymouth settlers’ landing in what is now Massachusetts); at the same time, people are calling for the removal of monuments to Christopher Columbus and to the Confederacy.  We will be reading authors that canonical literary histories have usually included—Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Frederick Douglass, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—alongside Native American authors who told stories of European encounter and African American accounts that radically contest the meanings of some of the key terms of U.S. literature, history, and culture: discovery, citizenship, representation, nation, freedom.

Teaching Method: Two lectures per week, plus a required discussion section.

Evaluation Method:  Evaluation will be based on two short (3-page) essays, in which students will perform a close reading of a literary passage from one of the texts on the syllabus; a final examination, involving short answers and essays; and active participation in section and lecture. Attendance at all sections is required.

Some of the authors whose works we will read include: Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Christopher Columbus, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Powhatan.

Course Description: What is the right thing to do? This course will examine ideas of justice in western cultural and literary traditions. Biblical ideas of justice, utilitarianism, rights theory, and more justice theories will be explored. We will read literature alongside these theories, following how such ideas of justice shape the public and intimate lives of people. We will ask how religious ideas of justice inform and depart from secular ideas of justice, how retributive and distributive ideas of justice are imagined and critiqued, and how the relation between justice and law has been conceived. Class participation is required.

Texts:

• Bible (can use online)
• Paradise Lost excerpts (online)
• Romeo and Juliet  by Shakespeare (Arden Edition)  ISBN 1903436915
• Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw (Penguin Edition) ISBN 0140437916
• The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates (I will send you the online link)
• Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do by Michael Sandel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) ISBN 0374532508

Course Description: Since H.G. Wells’s unnamed time-traveler first rocketed forward to the distant future, time travel has been a favorite thought exercise for writers, day-dreamers, and artists. What does it mean to fantasize about the future and to reimagine the past? How does time travel undercut or complicate commonplace linear narratives, progress narratives, or coming of age stories? In this course, we’ll investigate the genre as a way into thinking about the fundamentals of literary analysis and methodology. We’ll combine readings of literary classics like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Marghanita Laski’s forgotten The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) with selections by modern sci-fi writers like M. John Harrison and N. K. Jemisin. We’ll also consider mixed-media additions to the canon, including the anime The Girl who Leapt Through Time (2006) and the movies Interstellar (2014) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Together, we will confront questions about cultural difference and blur the boundaries between “past,” “present,” and “future.”

Teaching Methods: Short lectures, seminar discussion, collaborative group exercises.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, discussion posts, short analytical paper, final project.

Texts Include: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Marghanita Laski, The Victorian Chaise-Longue; Virginia Woolf, Orlando (ISBN 0156031515); N.K. Jemisin, “Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows”; the Daniels, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Course Description: This course examines men dancing in diverse genres onstage and onscreen—blackface and Black minstrelsy, ballet and tap, modern and postmodern dance. The inquiry will focus on the intersection between gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality in theatrical performances from the early 19^th through the early 21^st century. Readings will be complemented by visual documentation and by visits from guest artists.

Course Description: What are the Seven Deadly Sins, how did they come into being, and how do can we make sense of the role they continue to play the 21^st century popular imagination?  What is the nature of moral and ethical transgression:  is sin a disposition, a thought, an action, or an external force? And how does one make amends for such transgression? Over the course of the quarter, we will attempt to answer these questions by exploring the shifting representations of sin, secrets and confession that pervade late medieval literature. Analyzing the texts of preachers and poets alike, we will investigate the ways in which medieval writers adapted their depictions of sin to address the major social and political issues of their day, highlighting certain sins while hiding others as the moment required.  Along with sin, we will examine the practice of confession in its historical and literary contexts, discovering how priests, poets, and playwrights exploited and transformed this pastoral tool for narrative and social ends.  While giving students with a background in confessional practice and the discourse of Seven Deadly Sins, this course will also provide an introduction to some of the major works of the late Middle Ages: Dante’s Purgatory, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Everyman. We will also explore how David Fincher’s 1995 film, Se7en reworks these medieval concepts for a contemporary audience.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion and some lecture

Evaluation Method(s):  class attendance and participation are required; discussion board posts; two papers, short assignments and an oral presentation.

Textbooks will be available at: Norris Center Book Store. [Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vol. II:  Purgatory.  ISBN 978-0140444421 (approximate cost: $16); other readings will be available on Canvas]

Course Description: How can we think about the transhistorical nature of queerness in English culture? Moving from the Renaissance to the present, the course follows the literary careers of two influential tragedies --  Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s adaptation and rewriting of it in Richard II -- to think about the representation of queer kingship over time. Together we’ll analyze theatrical revolutionary Bertolt Brecht’s landmark early twentieth-century adaptation of Marlowe’s play and its “alienation effect,” twentieth-century productions and films of Marlowe tied to the early gay-liberation movement (Ian McKellen) and the early AIDS crisis (Derek Jarman’s), and twenty-first century rewritings, including a companion play that incorporates figures in/against queer culture from Gertrude Stein, Harvey Milk, and Julie Andrews to Margaret Thatcher (Tom Stuart’s play After Edward). We’ll conclude with the recent gay rom-com “Red, White, and Royal Blue.” Critical readings will delve into the history of sexuality, queer readership and book history, and theories of dramatic adaptation and performance.

Teaching method: Discussion and mini-lecture.

Course Description: Throughout the twentieth century, the terms “urban” and “black America” became so intimately connected that they are often used as synonyms. By tracing different representations of urban life, this course examines the signification of the metropolis in African American cultural production.  Although our focus will primarily center on cultural texts, we will address a number of the “push and pull” factors that prompted the Great Migration and the social forces that have subsequently kept many African Americans in the city. In focusing on a set of cultural texts, we will consider the ways in which African Americans have imagined both the allure and dangers of life in the city. Literature may include work by Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones; artists may include the photographers Wayne Miller and Camilo José Vergara as well as the painter Jacob Lawrence; film media may include Coolie High and Good Times; music may include hip hop artists from Public Enemy to Common. Critics may include W.E.B. DuBois, St. Clare Drake, Raymond Williams, Mike Davis, and Mary Pattillo.

Teaching Methods: Lecture.

Evaluation Methods: 2 essays; in-class Final Examination.

Texts include:

• James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
• Teju Cole, Open City
• Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
• James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
• Nella Larsen, Passing
• Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones

Texts will be available at: TBA

Course Description: The U.S.-Mexico border was first envisioned in writing when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) imagined the course that a new dividing line would run: from the Gulf of Mexico through the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande until the town called “Paso,” west toward the Gila River and onto the Pacific Ocean. This line would mark not only land and water but also racial and ethnic formations. Indigenous nations saw their territories split in half by a border that considered their homelands wilderness. Mexicans who found themselves north of the imagined line had to grapple with a new vocabulary to define themselves as they lost their lands to settlers. Those who ended up south of the border attempted to reconcile their recent independence from Spain with the loss of half of the country as they, too, tried to piece together a narrative for their new identity. This course will walk students through the text and maps of the 1848 treaty and the literary works that continue to process its aftershocks throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Some of the authors we will read include Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, and Mexican writer Yuri Herrera. We will learn about the discourse of Manifest Destiny, the Chicano Movement, and contemporary literature from Latinx, Indigenous and Mexican writers who continue to tell the stories about their ancestral lands, their migration journeys, and their encounters with a line that became both border and borderlands.

Teaching Method(s): Discussion-based.

Evaluation Method(s): Midterm and final paper, creative mapping project, attendance and participation.

Texts include: Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (9781908276421). Short stories, poetry and excerpts from Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ofelia Zepeda, Cristina Henríquez, Tommy Orange, and others. 

Texts will be available at: Signs Preceding the End of the World will be at the Northwestern bookstore and all other materials will be uploaded to Canvas.

Course Description: Race is socially constructed—but how is it medically constructed? This seminar surveys Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous American literary and cultural production to question how “healthy” bodies in the United States are constituted, and in turn, what these racialized processes reveal about the essential role of race in producing a body politic. Concomitantly, we will also read scholarship from ethnic studies that charts racialized comorbidities, pre-existing conditions, and environmental racism, as well as work that expands our understanding of race’s imbrications with medical paradigms such as eugenics, genetics, informed consent, reproductive rights, disability, mental illness, and, of course, pandemics.

In addition to excavating the long histories and present problems surrounding medical racism, another goal of this course is tracking the medicalization of race itself. As such, we will challenge commonly held perceptions of bodies, pain, ability, and the constitution of equitable futures. We will also supplement our reading with guest lectures from medical professionals working at the intersection of race and medicine. Students will take away from the class a deeper grasp of the discourse surrounding race and medicine, as well as how to deploy this knowledge in their critical interpretations of cultural production. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do texts by writers of color challenge normative assessments of what constitutes health and wellness? How do we ethically consider race and medicine without resorting to postracial idealism? And to what extent can creative experiments generated in art and literature re-envision the medicalized terms under which race is understood?

Teaching Method: Seminar-based discussions.

Evaluation Methods: Graded participation; in-class presentation; regular reading responses; two short essays; and one longer essay.

Texts include: Please verify before purchasing. Assigned primary texts will likely include pieces such as Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming, Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, Oscar Cásares’s Brownsville, Rafael Campo’s What the Body Told, Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, I Am Legend, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, Reservoir Dogs, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Texts will be available at: Primary texts will be available at the Norris Bookstore and on reserve in the library. Other texts will be available on Canvas.

Course Description: This course begins not from the premise, necessarily, of an intellectual and political genealogy of black women. Though also not to the exclusion of this. Rather, this course is one that thinks black feminist—not black “women’s”—theory and theorizing; this course chronicles the ways that the political, intellectual, ethical, and social resound radically and progressively and names that resonance—and all its vibrations and textures—black feminist theory. Thus, we will, of course, be reading a variety of black women along the jagged gendered spectrum between and beyond “cis” and “trans,” but more specifically we will be tracing the ways radical politics and ethics arise in such a way as to interrogate the established parameters of race and gender normativity, of our social world.

Course Description: Pocahontas and John Smith are making goofy, animated eyes at each other as British colonials push further into the New England interior. Outlander’s Claire and Jamie steal passionate moments during the fight for Scottish independence. And when he died, David Ochterlony—British Resident to the Mughal Court in the early 1800s—left behind thirteen Indian wives. This course asks: how and why are the tropes of possessive romance so often refigured in the colonial context? What can tracing these affects, fetishes, and motifs allow us to uncover about the emotional resonances of imperialist discourse and resistance? After grounding ourselves in classic tales of romantic obsession, we will map these romantic forms onto larger concepts of empire. Edward Said described the Orientalist impulse as “fatally tend[ing] toward the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories.” To trace these fatal, obsessive drives to possess, we will move from classic novels like Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and George Orwell’s Burmese Days to shorter texts such as Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star and V.S. Naipaul’s “In a Free State.” Films include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. This course will also include readings in postcolonial and affect theory.

Teaching Methods: Seminar discussion, group exercises.

Evaluation Methods: Participation, discussion posts, short analytical paper, final project.

Texts include: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847); Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (1973); Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1977); Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993); Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

Course Description: This course surveys the modern American horror film from Psycho in 1960 to the present. Likely films to be studied include Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Alien, Jennifer's Body, It Follows, Get Out, Midsommar, and others. The course will focus on one major feature-length film per week proceeding chronologically. We will analyze films textually; and we will also focus on acquiring critical vocabularies for discussing horror cinema. Major themes and questions will include not only the question of why it's fun (or not) to be scared but also what social and philosophical themes the genre of horror opens up in surprising and provocative ways (from gender, violence, and technology to childhood, evil, and race). To catalyze discussion we will read a variety of secondary sources by authors from a range of disciplines.

Teaching Methods: Discussion and short lecture.

Evaluation Method: Essays.

Required Texts: None.

Teaching Method: Lectures, discussion, small- and large-peer workshops.

Evaluation Method: This is a portfolio- and participation-based course. Grade based on timely delivery of all assigned work, with equal weight placed on your own stories and revisions and on your peer feedback.

Texts Include: TBA

Note: No P/N registration. Attendance at first class mandatory. Admission by application only.

Course Description: How do Indigenous writers use archives as a site of experimentation with artistic forms and media, from personal narrative to collage to performance to installation art?  Indigenous writers have taken on the power and histories of archives—from national libraries like the Library of Congress to small, local historical societies to anthropological repositories—and made experimental literatures that challenge these institutions of power and memory.  Examples include Pequot William Apess’s 19^th century texts assembled out of extracts from newspapers and testimonies from other Pequots to the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s intervention in legal documents at the level of the page in Whereas to Deborah Miranda’s (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California) assemblage of personal and institutional histories in her memoir Bad Indians.  This seminar pairs Indigenous literatures with archival theory and practice. We will develop our own archival practices by learning how to work with materials in Northwestern’s Special Collections, how to identify and interpret archival materials, how to develop a research question in conversation with archival research and theoretical readings, and how to develop a sustained argument with strong evidence. 

Teaching Method: seminar discussions, hands-on workshops, classes in Special Collections

Required Texts:

• Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians (ISBN 9781597145862)
• LeAnne Howe, Miko Kings (9781879960787)
• Beth Piatote, The Beadworkers (9781640094277)
• Blaire Morseau/ Simon Pokagon, As Sacred to Us (9781611864625)

Course Description: Plot is easy to define and difficult to execute. We know that narratives require some form of animating force, and we know that this force hinges on a series of causally-linked events, sometimes. Not always. In this seminar we’ll work through two disparate novel genres---autofiction and the campus novel---to tease out what makes for compelling story-telling energy: a political or cultural or personal crisis, a disconnect between public and private behavior, subgenres and their expectations (there’s a hilarious epistolary novel in our list, but there are also striking examples of science fiction, horror, the fantastical, and the crime novel), hunger, desire, hypocrisy, satire (academic and otherwise), setting, ticking clocks and timetables, and our direct lived experience. The latter is crucial: we find our most interesting plots in life. We’ll also be sure to connect these elements beyond the novel and into each of our genres: we’ll discover how these same narrative engines animate poetry and creative nonfiction.

Our reading list will include Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Lisa Tuttle's My Death, Amy Gentry’s Bad Habits, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale, and Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk.

We’ll work through a considerable deal of material together, and we’ll help each other find ways to explore the possibilities of that material. But I’ll also ask each of you to bring in a short published piece that you love that we’ll all read; it should be a piece in your primary genre---a short story or a poem or an essay---that you feel best exploits one of the topics discussed.

Every week, we will all (1) read a novel, (2) respond, (3), read the short piece chosen by one of our classmates. In addition, one of us will be responsible for a presentation on the chosen short piece.

Teaching Methods: Discussion, critical and creative responses, presentations.

Evaluation Methods: Discussion, critical and creative responses, presentations.

Texts include: Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Lisa Tuttle's My Death, Amy Gentry’s Bad Habits, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale, and Lucy Ives’s Loudermilk.

Texts will be available at: campus bookstore & library reserves.

Course Description: Frantz Fanon has famously written that the conditions of modernity have rendered blackness increasingly illegible, fraught with contradictions that push it outside the realm of facile comprehension and explicability. Taking Fanon’s polemic as a cue, this graduate seminar will look at a number of late twentieth-century textual and performance sites with radical instances of experimentation where articulations of blackness move into the interstitial space between meaning and non-meaning, coming into being precisely at the moment when the compositional logic of their anticipated forms are ruptured. The course will focus on three primary sites where black artists engage what might be called the poetics of dissolution to examine and critique the processes of racial formation: poetry (where the form of the line or stanza dissolves); music (where sonic interpolations puts additional, if not different, claims on the lyrical content), and visual culture (where the moves toward graphic mimesis are refused delineation). The material under consideration may include work by the poets Nathaniel Mackey, Douglas Kearney, and Harriet Mullen; sound alchemists King Tubby, Alice Coltrane, and MF Doom; and visual artists Glenn Ligon, Hank  Willis Thomas, and Bethany Collins. Theoretical texts may include work by Emily Apter Barthes, Baudrillard, Fred Moten, and Saussure, as well as ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists.

Teaching Methods: Seminar

Evaluation methods: Research essay.

Texts include:

• Darby English, How to Read a Work in Total Darkness
• Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton
• Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement.
• ————. Splay Anthem.
• Fred Moten. In the Break.
• Christina Sharpe. Ordinary Notes.

Texts will be available at: TBA

Course Description: After asserting its “manifest destiny” in the nineteenth century, the United States became an unprecedented global power in the twentieth century, especially after World War II. In 1941, the publisher Henry Luce went so far as to coin the phrase “the American century” to describe the new role of the emerging superpower in world affairs. For some, the US became the “indispensable nation,” “world leader,” and an exceptional international figure. For many others, such as the people of the Philippines or Vietnam or Iraq, it became a cruel and coercive imperial force. This course studies how the historical fact of US empire influenced literature and expressive culture. We will examine how both domestic and international writers most impacted by imperial violence—ranging Filipino migrant laborers, Afghan diaspora in the US, Middle Eastern and North African civilians caught in the dragnet of detention—contest the language of empire that the U.S. uses to ceaselessly redefine itself.  This graduate course asks. how has the geography of United States empire shaped and informed the evolution of US empire studies and postcolonial studies in the contemporary moment?  In what ways might the intersection between postcolonial studies, ethnic American studies, Pacific studies, Middle Eastern and North African studies, and US empire yield new categories of analyses that have been broached by scholars like Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Eqbal Ahmad, and Amy Kaplan in the 1990s? What purchase do they have on contemporary academic as well as aesthetic developments in the post-9/11 era? Throughout the term, students will be introduced to and learn to grapple with theoretical and historical concepts like sovereignty, Cold War liberalism, counterinsurgency, extralegal internment, extraterritoriality, and neoliberal multiculturalism. We will read monographs almost every week by theorists starting with Said, Kaplan, Junaid Rana, Erica Edwards, Stuart Schrader, Anjuli Raza Kolb, and Darryl Li, We will also work through theorists like Eqbal Ahmad, Jasbir Puar, Judith Butler, Joseph Slaughter, Jodi Melamed, Nadia Abu Al-Hadj, and many others to think through complex vocabularies of law, literature, and human rights in understanding the undertheorized intersection between postcolonial studies and US empire.

Course Description: TBA