To find subjects taught in previous semesters, you may also look at the archived Literature Supplements.
| Spring 2023 Literature Supplement | IAP 2023 | Fall 2022 Literature Supplement |
Introductory
| 21L.000[J] |
Writing About Literature
Same subject as 21W.041[J] |
Michael Lutz | MW | 2:30-4:00p | 14N-325 |
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Prereq: none The word ‘monster’ derives from the Latin verb monere, “to show or admonish.” In other words, monsters begin as meaningful creatures–as signs to be read, as warnings. Through intensive weekly reading and writing assignments, this course will look at literature centered on monstrous figures to think about two things; the first: how do monsters like devilish magicians and mad scientists show (or de-monstrate) the fears, anxieties, and problems of specific cultural moments throughout history? The second: what are we to make of the fact that, while monsters are often objects of terror, they are also frequently sympathetic figures, vibrant fictional characters whose complexity seems to protest the fear they are (supposedly) meant to inspire? Indeed, many of the monsters we will cover are, to some readers, the heroes of their stories. By reading literature in genres ranging from 16th century English drama to the 19th century Gothic novel to contemporary American horror fiction, this course will help you to understand literature’s rich, ongoing, and ambivalent tradition of making monsters. |
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| 21L.006 | American Literature | Laura Finch | TR | 1:00-2:30p | 56-154 |
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Prereq: none Climate crisis and COVID-19 are a forceful reminder of the entangled lives of everyone and everything on the planet. This class turns to contemporary literature to think through ways of living together that exceed the imagination of Capitalism, an economic system that will only ever put profit before life. We will think about issues of social justice, such as environmental racism and the use of Indigenous lands for nuclear mining, waste, or weapons testing. We will also think about stories that place non-human characters at their centre (some examples include: mushrooms, a piece of plastic waste at sea, the planet itself). And we will read a range of novels, poems, and short stories that use the imaginative potential of fiction to try and envision mutually sustaining modes of togetherness. |
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| 21L.020[J] |
Globalization: The Good, the Bad and the In-Between
21G.076[J] |
Margery Resnick | TR | 3:00-4:30p | 4-257 |
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Prereq: none This subject examines the cultural, artistic, social, and political impact of globalization across international borders in an historical context. Novels and short stories as well as case studies on global health, human trafficking, and labor migration illuminate the shaping influence of contemporary globalization on gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Guest lecturers visit class as we examine the impact of globalization on cultural identity, the arts, the politics of language, and the media. How has migration changed notions of cultural and racial hybridity? What can we learn from specific examples of global media and expressive culture including popular music and film? In what ways has globalization affected human rights? Students develop sensitivity to other cultures and the ability to read broadly across national boundaries. Furthermore, the emphasis on the historical context gives students a foundation to continue work in literature, history, and the arts from a global perspective. |
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Intermediate
| 21L.435 |
Literature and Film: End of the World: Apocalypse in Film and Literature
CMS.840 |
Caitlyn Doyle | MW | 3:30-5:00p | 56-191 |
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Prereq: One subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies The world is ending, or has it already ended? This course examines films and novels that grapple with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios threatening humankind—scenarios that appear particularly prescient in the wake of a global pandemic and in the midst of an ongoing climate crisis. Comparing the different capacities of film and literature in representing such cataclysms, we will further consider the extent to which artworks can challenge our understanding of our own historical moment and the future it promises. Whether the end of the world takes the form of nuclear disaster, climate crisis, plague, or invasion, these works offer insight into the social, commercial, environmental, and civic structures of society as well as the forces that threaten them. Closely examining films such as Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Melancholia (2011), and Blood Quantum (2019) and novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Parable of the Sower (1993), and The Marrow Thieves (2017), we will examine the apocalypse from different cultural and historical perspectives, focusing on the dystopic and utopic possibilities in a world that is suddenly forced to change dramatically. |
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| 21L.481[J] |
HIV/AIDS in American Culture: Black Lives and Queer Bodies
WGS.250 |
Joaquín Terrones | MW | 9:30-11:00a | 2-147 |
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Prereq: none During the first years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, in the eighties and early nineties, activists protested across major cities demanding government action, some of them still hooked up to IV drips and oxygen tanks; alongside them, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers continued creating, many up until their last breath. This course examines the relationship between different forms of cultural expression—from art to activism—during those first fifteen years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, prior to the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy. In particular, we will analyze the way in which mainstream narratives about the disease associated it with Blackness and queerness. With a focus on the work of Black queer and trans creators and activists, we will also study how literature, film, and visual art were mobilized against these mainstream narratives in order to effect changes in public consciousness and even policy. Finally, we will discuss the legacy of these cultural responses, particularly as it pertains to communities of color. We will do so through close readings across a variety of genres and media: fiction, poetry, film, theater, television, journalism, popular music, painting, sculpture, performance, and installation art. Some of the works we will analyze include: Samuel Delany’s The Tale of Plagues and Carnival; Octavia Butler’s Fledgling; Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother; Sapphire’s Push and its screen adaptation Precious; the films of Marlon Riggs; and the latest season of the television series Pose. |
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Seminars
| 21L.702 | Studies in Fiction: The Neuro-Novel | Lianne Habinek | TR | 9:30-11:00a | 2-103 |
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Prereq: Two subjects in Literature A literary genre has materialized in the past fifteen years that, as Marco Roth (with some notoriety) puts it, is marked by “the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel — the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind.” This category of narrative documents the workings and misfirings of the mind alongside emerging ideas of a new means of accessing and dramatizing interiority. Works marked as neuro-novels include novels by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Haddon, Richard Powers, Rivka Galchen, Haruki Murakami, and John Wray. We will also consider the picture of a currently unmapped but potentially fully knowable brain; what would such a model of the mind do to ideas of agency, selfhood, and even free will? This course will use the aforementioned texts and others alongside films such as Je T’aime, Je T’aime; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and Inside Out, to explore how fiction considers what is problematic about a direct identification between mind and brain. |
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| 21L.704 | Studies in Poetry: Walt Whitman Goes Global | Stephen Tapscott | T | 7:00-10:00p | 14N-112 |
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Prereq: Two subjects in Literature Late in his middle age, unmarried and childless, Walt Whitman was dismayed to hear that rumors were circulating about his sexuality. In response, he encouraged his friends to spread a counter-rumor: the reason he wasn’t interested in women was that he was still grieving for a lost love from decades earlier. She had been mulatto; they had met in New Orleans, where during the 1840s he had lived for six months. During that time they had had six children together before, tragically, they had been forced to separate. He’d never returned to New Orleans… In this seminar we won’t spend a lot of time discussing the plausibility of this story of Whitman’s “children.” [Even though it is an interesting exercise in literary reputation-formation in “influence” and in the limitations of biographical-criticism…] The irony is, though, that Whitman did, ultimately, have a lot of progeny: writers and theorists and artists who define themselves as overtly in the “line of Whitman.” [Some eagerly claim continuity, some consciously act out Oedipal or cultural or poetic resistance.Some ideologically reflect on what it means to be influenced by 19th century America’s most famous poet.] Throughout the term, we’ll read through the major works of Whitman’s own long career, stage by stage [his idealistic poems before the Civil War; his compensatory work while he served as a nurse during the War; his conflicted love poems; his later celebrations of 19th-century American expansionism and industrialization.] At each stage we’ll also read work by writers, across several continents and centuries, who admired [or resisted] his model. Novelists [including Thomas Mann, D H Lawrence, Maxine Hong Kingston]; poets [Ezra Pound, W C Williams, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg]; Gender-theorists and provocateurs [Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Mark Doty] Post colonialist writers and theorists of Negritude [Aimee Cesaire, Langston Hughes]; Epic/lyric writers [Pablo Neruda, J L Borges, Gabriela Mistral, Guo Moruo]; Contemporary writers of collective narratives [Vladimir Mayakovsky, Grace Paley]. |
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| 21L.707 | Problems in Cultural Interpretation: Writing American Nature | Wyn Kelley | MW | 1:00-2:30p | 56-162 |
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Prereq: Two subjects in Literature or permission of instructor The image of early “America” as a pastoral garden in the wilderness has proven durable yet, given developments in environmental science, history, and ecocriticism – complicated and difficult to sustain. This class examines the history and literature of early US attempts at managing, even comprehending, its natural resources. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy frames our study of the long history of Native American and African land use that was labeled witchcraft by authors like Mary Rowlandson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, more obliquely, Frederick Douglass. Ideas growing out of European natural history and based in observation, collecting, and taxonomy pitted Louis Agassiz against Charles Darwin and inspired Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. Scientific methods drawing on botany and herbalism underwrote radical thinking in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Sarah Orne Jewett. As understanding of the deep historical roots of human impact on global environments emerges in the twenty-first century, these authors’ attempts to grapple with environmental challenges for which they were poorly prepared become newly relevant. Readings in a wide range of literary, historical, and scientific texts will allow students to assemble a critical archive of resources for rethinking US nature writing in the Anthropocene. |
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