Courses

This course offers close examination of global issues and features in literature, often those at the center of current critical interest. May be repeated for credit with different topics.

Spring Semester information

215A: Tps:No Place Like Home: Identity, Memory, and Exile in World Literature and Film

Whether real or imagined, "home" defines who we were, reflects who we are, and shapes who we aspire to be. In fact, our identities are curated by our ever changing relationship to home. This course explores narratives about home in world literature and cinema. Specifically, we will explore plays, essays, poetry, short stories, and films from across the world to query: What is the definition of "home"? How does memory and the sensual world articulate our connection(s) to home? How can dislocation and exile alter our sense of home and belonging? Can the dislocation caused by exile be both a disabling estrangement and liberating insight? Course texts include works by Aimé Césaire, Kayo Hatta, Carmen Maria Machado, Ousmane Sembene, Dominique Loreau, to name a few.

215B: Tps:World Wide Weird: Global Horror and Surrealism

Beginning with some of the aesthetic and psychological fixations of Edgar Allan Poe, Sigmund Freud, H.P. Lovecraft, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, and Jeff VanderMeer, our course explores some of the stranger detours of modern and contemporary fiction and poetry. We will consider the ways that Poe's "perverse," Freud's "uncanny," Lovecraft's "cosmic horror," Dalí's "paranoid critical method," and VanderMeer's "weird," have manifested and metastasized across a geographical spectrum of literature from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Our reading includes work by some of the world's great literary necromancers of the past century, including Gustav Meyrink, Rabindranath Tagore, Luigi Ugolini, Franz Kafka, Hagiwara Sakutarö, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Mercè Rodoreda, Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Kincaid, Premendra Mitra, Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Haruki Murakami, and Reza Negarestani. You don't know them? That's good. Because once you do, their writing will infect your consciousness and permanently warp your sense of the world, until you remain a hollow shell of your former self, struggling to maintain your sanity under the weight of your newfound and horrific literary knowledge.

Fall Semester information

215A: Tps:Medieval Tabloid

215B: Tps:French Literature as World Literature (Taught in English)

In a manifesto published in Le Monde in 2007, forty-four French-language writers proclaimed the end of the idea of la francophonie and the "birth of a world literature in French" whose only borders were the mind itself. We will study this manifesto and responses to it and will then read recent fiction by several of its signatories. We will consider such issues as claims of universalism versus historical and geographical particularities, the relationship between "world literature" in French and in English (not to mention in other languages), the problem of monolingualism, and the role of the international literary marketplace in shaping conceptions of national and world literatures. We will also consider the perspectives that we bring to these questions as we read French-language works in English-language translations. Students will do lots of informal and formal writing, including reflective, critical, and creative pieces.

215C: Tps:Rage Against the Machine: Radical Thought in Contemporary France

Rage against the machine explores instances of rebelliousness and radicalness in the voices of several contemporary actors in the francophone (French-speaking) world through an interdisciplinary approach that centers questions of citizenship, integration, assimilation, language, and identity. Over the course of the semester, students will engage with authors and activists that question the political, social, cultural, and ethical viability of certain conceptualizations of France; that adopt radical, and in many cases, revolutionary social and ideological stances toward "Frenchness" and "the Western world"; that offer alternative histories, ideologies, and modes of existence to the homogenizing narratives of French universalism. Course material will ask students to negotiate questions of radicality and rebelliousness often at the borders of several contested social, cultural, linguistic, and political positionings. We will consider the diverse frames that make claims of rebelliousness and radicality possible within the francophone world and transnationally, as well as how these frames have been operationalized politically to marginalize, silence, or dismiss certain modes of thought. No knowledge of French required.