Global Arc

This course will use Modern Greek literature as a case study for formation of nationalizing literary canons. We will explore the historical roots of the Greek nation-state, the homogenization of its linguistic landscape, and the consolidation of a genealogically based, ethnic majoritarian understanding of citizenship and belonging, focusing specifically on the role literature and literary culture play in these processes. Who counts as a Greek writer? Who is excluded? How do writers and works enter the world literary sphere in nationally and ethnically coded ways? Knowledge of Greek is useful but not essential for the course.

Why have so many masters of verbal art relied on the stylistics and epistemologies of jazz musicians for the communication of experience and disruption of conventional concepts? We'll draw on musical recordings, live in-class performances by guest jazz artists, poetry, fiction, and recent debates in jazz studies, critical theory and Black studies. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students of literature and/or music are welcomed, but proficiency in both disciplines is NOT required. We will develop together techniques of close reading and listening. Optional performance component for music instrumentalists and vocalists.

This course explores the question of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to abolition, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

Historicization often proceeds by shorthand, assigning names to periods, movements, styles, even "content," and the points of view these are assumed to represent. No two such ascriptions are more frequently invoked than "romanticism" and "realism," whose conventional opposition defines to a large extent our own view of "modern" literary and aesthetic history across traditions. In this seminar we take a critical look at that opposition as it influences not only our view of literary and intellectual history in general but of literary representation itself. Works by Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Hawthorne, Balzac, Melville, Fitzgerald.

The demand to be yourself permeates many aspects of our culture. Identity has become a contemporary dogma of sorts. In this course, we will question this be-yourself mantra, and focus on what is most deeply human: attention and engagement with everything outside the self. Instead of identity, then, we will focus on impersonality, a concept explored and adopted by many artists, thinkers, and doctors to explain the point of their practice: becoming the other through fiction, observation, or empathy, and aiming towards something beyond the self's limited experience.

This course places issues of migration and legacies of imperialism and settler colonialism in conversation with Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations, appropriations, confrontations, and allusive riffs in the present day. By looking at both early modern and 21st-century texts and cultural products that engage with patterns of mobility and migration (and the securitized nation-state) from the U.S/Mexico borderlands to the Mediterranean, as well as the many afterlives of Shakespeare in the present, we will explore the possibilities and risks of an activist literature of migration that draws from early modern dramatic precedent.