CoursesSenior Seminars

This course examines literary and cinematic representations of the American immigrant experience over the last century. To live between cultures, to experience the confounding processes of racialization and assimilation, to labor to translate one’s deepest interiority into a foreign language––all these aspects of migration make a new imaginative relationship with the world a necessity for the migrant and, as such, are fertile ground for literary exploration and cinematic expression. In this class, we study novels and movies as distinct mediums even as we attend to their affinities, such as an impulse toward narrative storytelling. Among our films, one is from the silent era (Chaplin’s The Immigrant); among our novels, one is a wordless story of sequenced, illustrated panels (Tan’s The Arrival). Other novels include Eugenides’ Middlesex, Ozeki’s A Tale for a Time Being, Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Other movies: Coppola’s The Godfather, Nair’s The Namesake, Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This course considers the intersections of queerness and Indigeneity in the Indigenous literatures of North America. Reading fiction, poetry, performance, and critical theory, we will trace the ways that queer Indigenous literatures craft decolonial conceptions of gender, sexuality, the erotic, kinship, and futurity. We will ask, what roles have queer Indigenous literatures played in histories of Indigenous art and critical thought in North America? We will consider how queer Indigenous literatures represent vital spaces for enacting anticolonial politics, ethics, and relationships with the more-than-human world.

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

In this seminar we try to answer two basic questions that should interest all students of literature: what is a novel, and why does it matter? We will approach these questions from two related areas of study. These include (1) the novel’s historical emergence as a cultural phenomenon over hundreds of years of development, and (2) the novel as a distinct literary genre with its own narrative conventions, techniques, and conceptions of human character. Both areas have been the subject of intense literary criticism and theoretical speculation for the last hundred years or so. Students will read the most provocative and engaging statements about the novel from these important secondary sources, and will use their insights from them to read three classic novels: Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1864), and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920). Requirements include weekly reports, class discussion, two short papers, and a final longer paper.

This course will undertake a detailed study of the four works that make up Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of English history plays: Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.  Along the way, we will acquire some familiarity with Shakespeare’s chronicle sources and dramatic precedents; competing early modern historiographical models and methods; genre theory; performance theory; the political situation and social concerns of England in the late 1590s when the plays are written (i.e., not just the early 1400s, when the plays are set); and the needs of a harried property manager.  We will also sample some of the many filmed treatments of these plays.

This course examines literary and cinematic representations of the American immigrant experience over the last century. To live between cultures, to experience the confounding processes of racialization and assimilation, to labor to translate one’s deepest interiority into a foreign language––all these aspects of migration make a new imaginative relationship with the world a necessity for the migrant and, as such, are fertile ground for literary exploration and cinematic expression. In this class, we study novels and movies as distinct mediums even as we attend to their affinities, such as an impulse toward narrative storytelling. Among our films, one is from the silent era (Chaplin’s The Immigrant); among our novels, one is a wordless story of sequenced, illustrated panels (Tan’s The Arrival). Other novels include Eugenides’ Middlesex, Ozeki’s A Tale for a Time Being, Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Other movies: Coppola’s The Godfather, Nair’s The Namesake, Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre.

 

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.

This seminar will explore Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy wrote in the late nineteenth-century about the dying rural, farming life of England. He captured the tragedy of how modern global capitalism began eviscerating local ways of life and how old ways of making meaning were transformed. (Not surprisingly, others have adapted and imagined his story elsewhere—as the colonization of California, as a story set in Mexico.) We will discuss this novel’s serialization; its intense rendering of sexual and gender relations; its stark account of poverty and work; and the complexities of its narrative structure. The standardization of industrial production will be of special interest to the instructor. Also, however, your own interests will direct this seminar, and the class is specially designed around one novel so as to allow you to engage with critical and theoretical secondary discussions and to write a serious research paper. You will be responsible for reading primary sources and scholarly criticism to an extent not typically required in other courses. Please understand in advance that there is a heavy reading and writing load in this class. Lively class participation is expected.

Dreams, visions and nightmares are constitutive of medieval literature writ large. They are ubiquitous in hagiographical writings, academic commentaries, theological treatises and poetic compositions. They often inaugurate treatises and tales, raise expectations, fulfill or even frustrate audience expectations. Wherever they occur, they offer a space for thinking through the relations between the real and the visionary, between the historical and the fantastic, between the empirically verifiable and the spiritually valuable, between medieval discourses or disciplines including rhetoric, history, law, and theology. In this research-centered course, we will explore dreams, visions and nightmares in texts ranging from the “lives” of premodern holy women and men. Our focus will be on the ways in which writers handle dream experiences not just for their content but also their form. Central to this research-heavy seminar are the resources at the Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room and the library-related services of Lynda Tolly and Hillary Gordon.

This course considers the intersections of queerness and Indigeneity in the Indigenous literatures of North America. Reading fiction, poetry, performance, and critical theory, we will trace the ways that queer Indigenous literatures craft decolonial conceptions of gender, sexuality, the erotic, kinship, and futurity. We will ask, what roles have queer Indigenous literatures played in histories of Indigenous art and critical thought in North America? We will consider how queer Indigenous literatures represent vital spaces for enacting anticolonial politics, ethics, and relationships with the more-than-human world.

Enrollment will be restricted to American Literature & Culture seniors on first pass. English seniors may enroll during second pass, space permitting.