Undergraduate

The 19th century enslaved scholar Omar Ibn Said opens his autobiography with the words: “I cannot write my life.” This seminar takes this starting point –the thick of chattel slavery, mercantile capitalism, and colonial violence – to investigate literary productions by racialized others dispersed in and by the so-called era of modernity. We will complicate what constitutes the modernity and how Islam, perhaps more than any other tradition, has been configured as its inverse. In doing so, we will read works ranging from poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and memoirs as they relate to encounters and engagements particularly with Islam as a religious tradition, colonialism, industrialization, and nationalism, even as global understandings of tradition, genre, and form are being contested and rapidly changing. In addition to these primary sources, we will theoretically situate these works within larger discussions of racecraft, oral transmission and culture, “folk” vs. “high” literature, Orientalism, politics, gender, sexuality, and identity. We will look at this is articulated in diasporic literary forms written within – and sometimes for - the imperial core. Through in-class discussions, readings, and a final paper, students will strengthen their global literacy, demonstrate knowledge of global historical trends, analyze the shifting and even contradictory interpretations of the role of religion in racial formations, all while identifying, critiquing, and assessing these key course themes within our primary source material.

Arguably the most debated political theorist of all time due to The Prince, Machiavelli genuinely aspired to be remembered for his creative prowess. He explored various literary genres, such as short stories, dialogues, satirical poetry, letter writing, and, notably, theater, where he demonstrated mastery with The Mandrake, an exemplary Renaissance comedy. This course aims to reintegrate these two aspects of Machiavelli: the serious politician and the facetious performer, a Janus-faced figure who serves as a precursor of both Hobbes and Montaigne. We will revive the image of this “Renaissance man,” and, through him, shed light on his era and fellow humanists by restoring their intellectual unity of prescription and laughter. Indeed, we will discover that Machiavelli encourages us not to take things, including him and ourselves, too seriously! Taught in English.

‘The child’ is a complex and fascinating notion that plays a crucial role in the writings of some of the major twentieth-century thinkers. The child is often linked to ‘fairy tale,’ as if one concept couldn’t exist without the other. What constitutes a fairy tale, what is the difference between fairy tale, myth, and allegory, and who is the real narrator and listener of fairy tales are questions that can only be addressed through a second, fundamental query: What is ‘the child’? What does ‘the child’ represent? What role does the imagination play in the formation of ‘the child’? These issues are especially significant in the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben. 

Readings will include: Bachelard, "Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos"; Bachelard, "Air and Dreams. An Essay on the Imagination of Movement"; Bachelard, "The Flame of a Candle"; Benjamin, One-Way Street; Benjamin, “The Fireside Saga”; Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900"; Benjamin “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,”; Benjamin, "The Storyteller"; Agamben, "Infancy and History"; Agamben, "Profanations"; Agamben, "Pulcinella or Entertainment for Children"; Agamben, "Pinocchio". We will also read an ample selection of classic fairy tales from Giambattista Basile ("The Tale of Tales"), the seventeenth-century French conteuses, The Brothers Grimm, Clemens Brentano, and Collodi’s "Pinocchio." Taught in English.

This course explores modern and contemporary feminism through a transatlantic lens. We will consider three major moments and sites of a multi-centered conversation. First, we will explore the modernist desire for cosmopolitanism which drew writers across the Atlantic (Simone de Beauvoir’s adventures in the US; Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein’s lives in Paris). In the central part of the quarter, we will focus on the period between 1960 and 1990 which witnessed intense conversation and contestation between a French paradigm of “écriture féminine” (Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig), and the rivalling practices and theories in America (from Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly to Judith Butler). Finally, we will explore the ways in which feminist thought has endeavored to account for race, class, rurality, and disability (from Maryse Condé to Aurélie Olivier and Roseline Lambert). The course will explore various media (novels, poetry, theater and performance, film), and various ways to engage critically and creatively with this history of transatlantic feminism.

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.