Courses

Fall Semester information

255A: Topics:Literature and Living Systems

How should the humanities account for the fact that 39 trillion of the 69 trillion cells in the human body consist of bacteria and other microbial life forms, with the remaining minority comprising the "human" part of us? Or that this teeming human microbiome respires within the gaseous halo of a planet regulated by 3 trillion trees? Or that these trees speak to each other and share resources through subterranean fungal mycelia that join them into a networked intelligence? Or that these "wood wide webs" are merely cells within the respiratory system of Gaia, which cycles gasses between stratosphere and oceanic abyss, and sustains these numberless trees, mycelia, and microbes? Or that Gaia itself, perhaps, is merely the flourishing of a tiny seed that once traveled through space on a piece of rock from Mars or elsewhere, petrified in stasis, before falling to the molten Earth and awakening an ooze of archaic prokaryotes? Science shows us pieces of the living systems that we inhabit, but perhaps only the human imagination, as an emergent function of these systems, can join the pieces together into a fuller understanding of life far above and far below the scale of our perception. This course will explore the ways that writers attempt to conceive our location, status, dependency, vulnerability, and ecstasy within these systems. Our reading will include scientific nonfiction sketching the dimensions of the living world, speculative fiction searching the mysteries of ecology, and ecopoetic meditations on the posthuman condition. Using scientifically informed literature, we will ponder our life and consciousness as part of a living network, in which the human subject is simultaneously cell, organism, and planet. Our writing will explore the paradox of figuring nonhuman scale, experience, and consciousness using the human construct of language.

255B: Topics:Contemporary Black Writers

This course will focus on African American writers whose works in the past decade have been instrumental in our understanding of what it means to live in a world fraught with inequalities, but also one that has the potential for growth and joy. We will read across the genres of fiction, drama, poetry, and memoir in our efforts to feel the present-day urgency of Black voices as informed by the historical past. Since this is a "W" course, students will be expected to engage in writing about these works as well as participating actively in class discussion.

255D: Topics:Black Global Cinemas

This course introduces students to black filmmaking traditions across the globe. By approaching film as a text to be read, analyzed, and discussed, we will explore black cinematic storytelling through aesthetic, historical, and socio-political lenses. Course films include (but are not limited to) Ousmane Sembene's, Black Girl/La Noire de..., Djibril Diop Mambety's Touki Bouki, Rungano Nyoni's I am Not a Witch, and Sara Gomez's One Way or Another.

As a 'W' course, we will spend time on writing composition, with emphasis on how to craft a thesis statement, close read a text, track the argument(s) of scholarly articles, and read/annotate and strategically. Ultimately, students will learn how to effectively communicate observations, syntheses, and analyses in the form of article reading responses, argumentative essays, a final paper, film notes, and class discussions.

Spring Semester information

255A: Topics:Medieval Tabloid

Political intrigue, the Black Death, giants, plagues of the undead, penis trees, human sacrifice, werewolves, magic spells--these are the scandalous, the surprising, the utterly bizarre... and the completely historical. This class will explore a range of real texts from the global Middle Ages (roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE), all of which record weird and fantastical tales. We'll be reading about ancient Irish curses, as well as Italian ghosts, untranslatable Austrian manuscripts, and a French dog that was granted sainthood by the Catholic church. Readings will include selections from the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, M.R. James' collection of European ghost stories, the travel narratives of Arabic diplomat Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, and the Arthurian narratives of the Welsh Mabignogian. ENG 255/WLIT 215 fulfills the Global Learning requirement and counts toward the World Literature Program. It is also a pre-1660/pre-1830 English course.

255B: Topics:Post-Truth Humor

With the viral proliferation of disinformation, deepfakes, alternative facts, and multifarious AI-generated media, we have entered the age of "post-truth," which Oxford Dictionaries named its Word of the Year in 2016. Commentary on post-truth politics, beginning with Hannah Arendt's Lying in Politics, raises alarms about political and epistemological crisis: the erosion of democracy and our collective impairment of reason. Others find the potential for resistance in post-truth, through satire and strategic humor. Within the cultural history of comedy, however, post-truth humor confronts us with a new ambiguity. If we don't know the difference between reality and fabrication, then how can we know what's a joke, and what's not a joke? Who is the teller of the joke? Who is the butt? Who is the audience? What's the difference between laughter and offence, between comic celebrity and cancellation? How can we laugh when these conventional rhetorical categories dissolve into chaos, amid live performance, the anti-reality of social media, or well-intentioned creative experiments gone horribly wrong? To answer these questions, we'll begin with philosophical inquiries into the nature of truth, including Plato, Nietzsche, Arendt, and Shapin. We'll then draw connections between these inquiries and theories of comedy from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Freud. We will also consider more recent approaches to humor emphasizing cognitive dissonance and resistance to power, including Dadaism and Surrealism, which adopt irrationality as an aesthetic principle. This tour through the history of misbegotten, misshapen, and misguided ideas will prepare us to confront the new modes of humor that have emerged from rhetorical confusion of post-truth and befuddle our instinct to laugh, including hoax, meme, trolling, owning, and cringe. Our writing will include reasonable literary and rhetorical analyses of unreasonable objects, language, and performance, as well as creative experiments in fabricating such objects, thereby accelerating the decline of reasonable society. After all, why are you in college?

255C: Topics:Cannibals, Pirates, and Talking Horses: Enlightenment Travelogues

In this course we'll read stories from 18th-century writers about cross-cultural collisions. What do these tales seek to understand and accomplish through such imagined or recounted global travels? To answer this question, our course will examine how these Enlightenment travel narratives from Europe think about human rights and religious toleration; construct conceptions of reason, religion, and race; argue for and against colonialism and slavery; invent the field of economics; and explore the possibility of a cosmopolitan ethos. With a focus on literary form, our work together will be guided by a fundamental question that remains resonant for our time: "What is Enlightenment?"

255D: Topics:The Graphic Novel in World Literature

This course examines the graphic novel as a global literary and visual form, highlighting how artists and writers use the medium to tell stories of identity, history, trauma, and imagination. Moving across national and cultural traditions, we will study graphic novels as works of art, political critique, and narrative innovation. Texts may include Art Spiegelman's Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, and selections from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Students will develop close-reading skills for both text and image, analyze the cultural and historical contexts of these works, and consider theoretical approaches to comics and visual storytelling. By the end of the semester, students will understand how the graphic novel contributes to world literature and expands our definitions of narrative, authorship, and literary canons.