Spring

This course explores portrayals of human difference in literature, travel writing, painting, and autobiography from Spain, England, and the Americas. Students will become versed in debates surrounding the emergence of human distinctions based on religion, race, and ethnicity in the early modern era. Understanding these debates and the history surrounding them is crucial to participating in informed discussion, research, and activism regarding issues of race, empire, and colonialism across time and space.

“History” is skewed and incomplete. It leaves out as much as it reveals. As they relegate past suffering to oblivion, historical omissions perpetuate the violence that they seek to hide. And this violence is often felt on multiple levels by women of color who find themselves imbricated within (neo)colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative, classist and ableist societal structures. In this course, we will situate ourselves at the intersection of literature, history and gender studies. We will explore the following questions together: Faced with the blind spots of history, how can literature function as an alternative archive that draws attention to the invisibilized stories of women of color? Simultaneously, how does literature sensitize us to the impossibility of fully knowing the past, no matter how hard we try? Course material may include theoretical texts, fiction, poetry, songs, podcasts, film, graphic novels and social media material. Potential examples include Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King (2022), Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013), Nathacha Appanah’s La Mémoire Délavée (2023), Lia Brozgal’s Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 (2022), Marie Clements’ Bones of Crows (2022), and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s poetry. 

Taught in English. All course material will be available in English, though students are encouraged to engage with original materials. Work may be submitted in English, French or Spanish.

According to Fijian-Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa, “There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’” In this course, we will delve into the “world of difference” that exists between viewing islands as remote and insignificant, and considering them as crucial nodes in an ever-expanding planetary network. Simultaneously, we will consider the stakes of moving away from traditional representations of the ocean as a blank canvas for human movement, to instead consider it as a vibrant material and multispecies space. This course will encourage students to formulate their own approaches to cutting-edge debates in archipelagic theory and critical ocean studies, and to situate those debates within the broader fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. Readings will be drawn from the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean (including the Caribbean Sea), and the Indian Ocean.

Does constraint foster creativity? Can wordplay carry political meaning? Is formal innovation divorced from lyrical expression? How do experimental literary movements respond to their sociopolitical moments and local contexts, and how do they transform when they travel across geographical and linguistic borders? We will consider these questions via the work of the longest-lived French literary group, the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature), examining its origins as a quasi-secret society in 1960 and its expansion into an internationally visible and multilingual collective (with members from Italy, Spain, Argentina, and the US). We will investigate debates about inspiration and authorship, copying and plagiarism, collective creation, multilingualism, constraint and translation, and the viability of the lyric subject. While considering antecedents (Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Roussel), our readings will explore several generations of Oulipians (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Michèle Métail, Anne Garréta, Frédéric Forte), and conclude with some very contemporary Oulipo-inspired writing from around the world (Christian Bök, Urayoán Noel, Mónica de la Torre, K. Silem Mohammed). Alongside critical essays, students will carry out short experiments with constraint and procedure, as well as translation exercises; and they will have the opportunity for dialogue with acclaimed writers and scholars who will visit our seminar.

This course offers space to consider in-depth one of the most fundamental, yet tricky aspects of stories: the imagined person, or fictional character. Some of the questions we will ask and try to answer together include: how do characters “work”—what makes successful characterization? How do authors depict characters changing over time yet remaining recognizably who they are? How are characters shaped not only by events in a plot but by the other characters that they interact with? We will investigate these questions across a range of textual genres and media, with a few major themes as our focus: the stability of characters across time or multiple texts (from figures in legend to Sherlock Holmes); character as moral progression or formation; and character relationality. We’ll consider the question of “relatability” and why it might (or might not!) matter and examine characters’ hierarchical relationships within the plot (e.g., major vs. minor characters, protagonist and sidekick, etc.) and how these intersect with the social hierarchies of these character’ worlds. By taking one key aspect of narrative and thinking about it together in sustained, serious, and playful ways, our goal will be to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of how stories meditate on personhood in all its complexity.

This course provides students with an opportunity to think race both within a psychoanalytic framework and alongside rituals of loss, grief, and mourning. In particular, we will interrogate how psychoanalytic formulations of mourning and melancholia have shaped theories of racial melancholia that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. Turning to Asian American, African American, and Latinx theoretical and literary archives, we will interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality and ask: How do literatures of loss enable us to understand the relationship between histories of racial trauma, injury, and grief, on the one hand, and the formation of racial identity, on the other? What might it mean to imagine literary histories of race as grounded fundamentally in the experience of loss? What forms of reparations, redress, and resistance are called for by such literatures of racial grief, mourning, and melancholia? And, finally, how, if understood as themselves rituals of grief, might psychoanalysis and the writing of literature assume the role of religious devotion in the face of loss and trauma?

This course explores the history of comics through the lens of its Jewish creators and Jewish themes, and the history of Jewish culture and society through the lens of graphic storytelling. We learn to interpret this complex art form that combines words and hand-drawn images, translating temporal progression into a spatial form. Reading American, European, and Israeli narratives, our discussions will focus on autobiographical and journalistic accounts of uprooting, immigration, conflict, and loss. We will ask: how do Jewish graphic novelists use the conventions and the grammar of this medium? How do they grapple with the proximity between caricature and comics, and with the legacy of racist caricatures? And what is the relationship between graphic narrative and memory culture? A central concept or figure we will keep returning to is the face, which is a central element in the aesthetics of comics and graphic narrative, and a key to its meaning-making.

South Indian author Arundhati Roy’s fascinating Booker-prize winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) catapulted her to unexpected world fame, leading to the book’s inclusion in many liberal arts curricula centered around postcolonial writing or so-called “world lit”. Written in English, the novel appears to be easily accessible to a global audience, but in fact the narrative contains dense layers of micro-regional, specific nuances that can easily escape readers and that warrant closer examination. In this course, we will read the novel closely with fresh eyes, pairing the fictional text with select secondary sources on gender, caste, class, history, communism, regionalism, vernacularity, migration, diaspora and trauma. No prior knowledge of India/South Asia is required. Students who wish to take this class need to be present from week 1 of the quarter.

This course examines the literature, history, and theory of global anarchist movements, as well as “proto-anarchist” writers and stateless movements with anarchist resonances. Theorists and historians will include Mohamed Abdou, Paul Avrich, Luisa Capetillo, Emma Goldman, Maia Ramnath, and Dean Spade. Particular attention will be given to decolonial thought, religious anarchism, fugitivity and migration, and gender and race in anarchist literature. The course will include field trips on Chicago anarchist history. 

This course introduces students to ancient, medieval, and early modern literary theory and to modern engagements with these theoretical interventions. We will explore how communities in the past imagined their practices of reading, writing, and interpretation—with especial emphasis on scriptural exegesis—but also what constituted a text, in the first place. How, indeed, were these practices foundational to the formation of communities and, in turn, to alterity? And what role do these literary theories and practices play in longer histories of "theory" and "critique." Staging dialogues between the past and the present, this course will ask what the political implications of designating an archive as "ancient," "archaic," "medieval," or "premodern" are in order to understand how and why the past is continually made and remade.