List of 14 items.

• The Art of the Personal Essay

  This creative writing course invites students to be an essayist of their own experience. Students uncover past, present, and future versions of themselves and seek the other self located in the reader. This course helps students find who they might be writing to and why. To inspire their writing, the class reads a diverse body of classic and contemporary essays, using a writer’s lens, layered on top of a literary critical one, that focuses on emotional and conceptual arcs and techniques of voice, narrative, imagery, and style. Books include a course reader and The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate. Inspiration is taken from a selection of essays and poems by Zadie Smith, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Naomi Shihab Nye, Angela Davis, Pablo Neruda, Lyla June, N. Scott Momaday, and more.

• The Body Electric

  From the printing press, radio, and film to the internet, robotics, and artificial intelligence, the inescapable comingling of humans and machines defines the current era. This course asks what it means to be human in the “Machine Age.” Students consider the ways that writers “sing the body electric,” in poems and novels that question what it means to be human and probe the ethics of artificial intelligence, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These readings are grounded in the historical understanding of the rise of modern self-hood alongside our mechanical inventions. Students encounter the first literary cyborgs in nineteenth- century industrial texts, and screen films that reflect on their own mechanical production including Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon—described as the first “science fiction” film, Bladerunner, and other recent visions of cyborgs. More than simply thinking about how anxieties and longings shape society’s visions of humans and machines, the course considers whether literature is the essence of human creativity or itself a beautiful machine, an ingenious device.

• Counternarratives: The Weight of History

  Through postmodern American literature, this course examines the lasting effects of the past and the weight of historical family narratives on how individuals construct their identities in the present. Students consider the pressures of “big” histories (social, racial, political, gendered, religious) upon individual lives and explore individuals’ varied attempts to transcend these histories through stories that run counter to norms and conventions of storytelling. Texts include David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Luis Alberto Urrea’s House of Broken Angels, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, and John Sayles’s film,
  Lone Star.

• Deadliest Catches

  Like the sea itself, the literature of seafaring brims with adventure, salt, sublimity, and peril. The journey begins with a work of autobiographical nonfiction that sets the terms for the course, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave and continues to survey its history, from such classics as Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to Spielberg’s iconic summer blockbuster Jaws. Readings include selected sea songs and chanteys, as well as essays, stories, and poems. The centerpiece for the course is that greatest of all fish stories and literature’s deadliest catch, Melville’s epic, Moby-Dick. A probing investigation of whiteness, masculinity, and the leviathan of American slavery, Moby-Dick distills America’s foundational contradictions in a sprawling adventure story that is equal parts buddy novel, political satire, philosophical treatise, and whale encyclopedia. An excerpt from Toni Morrison’s landmark essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” helps situate Moby-Dick in mid-nineteenth-century debates over slavery.

• Harlem Renaissance

  “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” –Zora Neale Hurston

  In the aftermath of World War I and the great migration of African-Americans north of the Mason-Dixon line, the Harlem Renaissance began. Part of the Jazz Age and a flowering of all art forms, the Harlem Renaissance gave birth to many pivotal African-American cultural figures who still loom large today, such as Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and more. This seminar surveys many of the pivotal writers and thinkers who shaped this illustrious moment through works including Jean Toomer’s Cane, Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth, and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun; poetry by Langston Hughes, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Countee Cullen; short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Charles Johnson; and sections from influential sociologists, such as Marcus Garvey, Charles S. Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

• Jane Austen

  Why are we culturally obsessed with Jane Austen? From reimagined Jane Austen “action figures” to Bollywood adaptations, from memes to merchandise to musicals, Austen’s popularity remains remarkably high. This course explores Austen’s continued relevance today alongside her historical and political context. The class focuses on three of her novels paired with their contemporary adaptations: Emma and the film Clueless; Sense and Sensibility and Ang Lee’s films; Northanger Abbey and film, television, and graphic novel adaptations. These works underscore Austen’s artistic innovations and development as a writer and invite students to consider her legacy and reception. Students examine how writers and artists from a wide array of nationalities, cultures, and backgrounds have taken her writing as a model for social commentary—from Ta Nehisi-Coates who dubbed her “Jane Awesome” and to poet W.H. Auden who
  praised her “shocking” exposure of the “economic basis of society.”

• Kindred Spirits: Friendship in Literature

  Aristotle says that a good friend is “a second self” and that friendships are essential to happiness. Friends can offer care, solidarity, and paths towards undermining structures that alienate and marginalize; friends can build community, upend hierarchies, and produce change; and friendship “holds a mirror up to us,” continues Aristotle, giving us a truer picture of ourselves. But friends can also be rivals, competitors, and sources of envy. In this course, students explore the complex, rewarding, occasionally bewildering nature of friendship. Readings include Toni Morrison’s Sula, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

• Latinx Literary Crossings

  —Gloria Anzaldúa 

  Drawing on works by Latinx writers, the class explores stories about borders: sites where land, people, and languages converge. In Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek, which tells of the struggles of a woman ensnared by the conventions of a patriarchal culture, the border is not only physical, but metaphorical—it represents a dividing line between cultures and families, between past and future, between community and isolation, between safety and danger. Central to the course is Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, which uses artful yet uncomplicated prose to tell the tragic story of twenty-six immigrants, many of whom perished while crossing the US-Mexico border through Arizona. This course examines works of short fiction by Ana Castillo, Junot Diaz, Manuel Muñoz, Josie Méndez-Negrete, Juan Rulfo, Tomás Rivera, Piri Thomas, Helena María Viramontes, and Miguel de Cervantes, and concludes with examination of the economy of language employed by authors of flash fiction, ultra short stories, such as Ana María Shua, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Frederick Aldama, and more.

• On the Road: Literary Journeys

  From the hero’s journey to the spiritual pilgrimage, these literary characters are really going places! This seminar explores the literature of travel and migration. From mythical tales, like Homer’s Odyssey or Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, to American cross-continental peregrinations, like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Krakauer’s Into the Wild, to global diasporic narratives, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, this seminar will look at both the ways in which travel changes the characters in these texts and the ways in which the characters bring all their biases and problems with them, affecting the places they visit: for wherever you go, there you are!

• Poetry

  “I recall that one time he told the people to read the poems out loud because the spoken word was the seed of love in the darkness”—Tomás Rivera
  
  

  Through a study of the formal elements of poetry—line, speech, syntax, diction, and voice—and close examination of a wide variety of poetic forms and styles across literary traditions, students in this course are able to hone their own poetic sensibilities. In its examination of poetic forms, the course pays particular attention to the influences and intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. Students work towards reading poetry with both an intuitive eye and a mastery of technical terminology, offering their own poetic perspectives in a set of revised poems.

• Something Wicked

  From the weird sisters of Macbeth to the Wicked Witch of the West, witches have been an object of hate, fear, and fascination. In our modern understanding, “witches,” like those of the Salem trials, were women who suffered brutal punishment for defying religious, patriarchal, or colonial power. This course will examine Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the context of King James’ obsessive fear of “black magic,” before reading archival material Joseph Glanvill and Cotton Mather on the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692-93. Students will then turn to Arthur Miller’s dramatization of the trials in The Crucible, and Maryse Condé’s fictionalized account of the trials from the perspective of the Black woman of Native and Caribbean ancestry who was the first to be accused in the actual trials in I, Tituba. Other readings include Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch, Sylvia Townsend Warners’ Lolly Willowes, and Victor LaValle’s The Changeling.

• Toni Morrison

  Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has written some of the most deeply human, complex, and inspiring storytelling in American literature. This course considers her whole career, covering at least three of her novels and some of her shorter fiction and non-fiction work. Students track Morrison’s criticism of what she called “the master narrative” and the development of her philosophy of “rememory” to describe the Black American experience (and consequently the American experience) and map a path forward. The course starts with her first novel, The Bluest Eye—a powerful and traumatic work situated in the middle of the Black power era and second- wave feminism—and works toward her fifth and most acclaimed novel, Beloved, in which she puts forward ideas about how to move past America’s racialized and gendered trauma and into a more joyful, transcendent future. Through a deep dive into her inspiring oeuvre, Morrison teaches not only how to read her books but a new way of reading literature itself.

• ¡Viva la Revolución!

  Why does the 1910 Revolution continue to loom so large on both sides of la frontera? Why does everyone know the names of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata? (“Es mejor morir de pie que continuar viviendo de rodillas/ Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”)

  This seminar delves into the history, literature, and art central to the fall of the Porfiriato and the promise it offered to land reform and citizenship rights for women and Mexico’s indigenous population. The course examines the gendered elements and the significant role women played in the Revolution. Readings include Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho, Sandra Cisneros “Eyes of Zapata,” Andrea Saenz’s “Everyone’s Abuelo Can’t Have Ridden with Pancho Villa,” Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s The Rebel (a spy during the Revolution and the co-founder of La Cruz Blanca, the White Cross), and some short fiction by María Cristina Mena and Katherine Anne Porter. Corridos are studied through the works of famed ethnomusicologist Américo Paredes (With His Pistol in His Hand). The course culminates with the art of Kahlo, Orozco, Rivera, and Siquieros and includes a trip to San Francisco to visit some of Rivera’s murals.

• What the River Knew

  Why are rivers so deeply bound with storytelling, and why is flowing water such an enduring metaphor for human experience? What did Heraclitus mean when he said: “you cannot step into the same river twice”?

  Or William James when he coined the phrase “stream of consciousness”? This course seeks to know rivers in their physical immediacy and cultural complexity, focusing on writings in which rivers are not merely background setting for human drama but essential characters and contested spaces in the drama itself. In the texts, the river is more than a medium of recreation and meditative self-reflection. It is also, and more importantly, the site of agonizing conflict between indigenous peoples and their colonizers; between the enslaved and their enslavers; between the natural and the technological; between what poet Robert Hass calls “an elder imagination of the earth” and an impoverished vision of the planet as mere material for human exploitation. The readings include Solar Storms by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and activist Linda Hogan, Crossing the River by British novelist Caryl Phillips, and River Notes by nature writer Barry Lopez—river works that raise probing questions about the development of Euro-American empire, the history of the African diaspora, and the relationship between human beings, nature, and the more-than-human world.