Global Arc

Family is where we all begin. It is a world, a language, a home, a cast of characters. People write about family to escape it, return to it, remember it, make sense of it, memorialize it. Writing About Family will explore the different places and cultures writers come from, the ways we define and create our own sense of "family", how ideas about what constitutes family have changed over time, and how methods of representing family differ across genres. We will read a range of family writing, including essays, memoirs, and works of fiction.

This course looks at the construction of "Chinatown" -- as historic reality, geographic formation, architectural invention, and cultural fantasy -- in the heart of America. We will study novels, plays, films, and photography that focus on or use Chinatown as a central backdrop -or even as a conspicuous absence -- in ways that highlight the complex relationship between material history and social imagination when it comes to how America incorporates, or fails to digest, its racial or immigrant "others".

This course explores the intimate relationship between literature, fashion, and various modes of self-fashioning and unfashioning. We will study novels, films, and photography that highlight the relationship among material histories, social fabrics, and notions of the corporeal and the human. Along the way, we will unsettle the easy yet stubborn distinction between surface and interiority.

Love is a many splendored thing. Love is dangerous. Love is a drug. Love is carnal ecstasy. Love is supernatural sympathy. Love is a subject of art; loving well is an art in itself. Many experiences, emotions, actions, and ideals travel under the name of romantic love. This course will contrast the wild and wide depictions of romance in drama, fiction, letters, poetry, and other mediums: from medieval courtiers to modern blues musicians, from yearning love letters to ecstatic sonnets. Why do we worship and worry about this singular feeling? What do the different forms and phases of love's passions have to tell us about being human?

Fundamental questions about the nature, function, and value of literary theory. A small number of strategically selected theoretical topics, including exemplary literary works as reference points for discussion. One three-hour seminar.

This new film genre course addresses the cultural heritage of our national cinema. \How has cinema shaped American culture, and how has American culture shaped cinema? We will focus on iconic figures in American film: cowboys, gangsters, detectives, soldiers, aliens, machines, lovers, orphans, monsters, teenagers. Each week will pair an early film with a later one to trace a given genre's evolution; for example, the week on westerns might pair John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956) with Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" (2005). The course studies not art house films but commercial Hollywood films that serve as important barometers of their times.

An intensive introduction to the English language spoken and written in the British Isles approximately 500 to 1100 C.E., leading to a critical survey of the literature. Attention is paid both to linguistic questions and to the cultural context of such poems as Beowulf and the Dream of the Rood. Two 90-minute seminars.

A study of the Middle English texts that span the period from the Norman Conquest to the Tudor Renaissance, with attention paid to Middle English as a language. Readings will be chosen from verse romance, drama, political and religious writings, romance and/or lyric. One three-hour seminar.

This course concentrates on a constitutive problem in OE literature: the theme of "making" and "makers". What powers does a text assume when it makes an inanimate object speak? What temporal and spatial fantasies about English origins and ambitions do OE texts build? What ideas of identity? We'll scrutinize authorship, too, asking how one learned and shaped the poet's role, and how OE texts represented literary composition and understood the tools of singing and writing. Each dramatic, dynamic text we'll encounter asks us to think about how words shape and fabricate the worlds of the OE period.

This course will look to the many narratives and histories that comprise the multiple worlds of Latinx Literatures. How does the term Latinx respond to questions of gender and language? What does the history of naming this pan-ethnic group tell us about U.S. racial-ethnic categories? How do borders become an occasion to rethink space and psyche, as well as entangled crisis? Taking a hemispheric approach, this course will examine how Latinx texts lend imagination and poetic vision to the experience of migration, the movements of diaspora, and the lasting effects of colonization.