Global Arc

Bollywood generates more films each year than other global film industries, circulating films across Africa, Asia, and beyond. What are the dominant trends and genres of popular South Asian cinema since independence? We will assume a capacious meaning of "Bollywood" as a global phenomenon. Course topics include the recent resurgence of Pakistani film industry as well as "Third Cinema," against which the popular is often defined in studies of postcolonial cinema. Course topics include melodrama, the popular, translation, diaspora, migration, nationalism and affect. Some background in film or media theory will be helpful but not required.

A close examination of fairy tales and fantasies written for children but also addressed to adults. Questions to be considered will be literary, cultural, and psychological: the role of fantasy in an age of repression, didacticism versus amorality, male versus female writers, and the conventions of the Victorian fairy tale. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of experience and our shared lifeworld. The course is based on the insights and methods of phenomenology, though our readings will draw from literature, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, and medical humanities. We will proceed with the conviction that the best way to learn phenomenology is by practicing it, and the semester will be divided between textual study of perception and an experimental practicum in which students observe and record their own habits of perception. Instead of a final paper, students will produce an original phenomenology of an object, a place, or an event.

Food, like books, is the site of our greatest consumption of and most vulnerable encounter with "otherness". This course explores how "taste" informs the ways in which we ingest or dispel racial otherness. Through novels and cinema in American and American multi-ethnic cultural production, we will study how the meeting of food and word inform categories such as race, nationhood, gender, ecology, and family, and class. Topics include: "Transcendental Primitivism," "Modernist Orientalism," "Chocolate Women on the Edge," "Parenting/Consuming," "Ecology and the Humanimal," and more.

This course will explore the works of contemporary authors of the African and Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America in relation to the changing historical and cultural context of migration and globalization. The course will consider how these writers have represented the process of relocation, acculturation, and the transnational moment. What is the role of the imagination in the rethinking of identities lived across boundaries? Why and how do these authors use the term diaspora to describe their experiences? How do the works of a new generation of writers from Africa and the Caribbean transform theories of globalization?

This course introduces the student to manuscripts and early printed books made in the West between the fourth and sixteenth centuries CE. We will study the aesthetic and textual programs, and the production and functions of the book, including hand-written and printed examples. Turning the (intellectual) page from chronological considerations, we will consider simulacra of books -- facsimiles, critical editions, and digital images. How should each of these textual products be used? What is the space of the page itself, and how is it shaped by audience and editorial practice?

Each term course will be offered in special topics of English and American literature. One three-hour seminar.

Each term course will be offered in special topics of English and American literature. One three-hour seminar.

What is magical realism, and why has it come to define a trend in contemporary postcolonial literature? Focusing on the relationship between states and their subjects, this course aims to explore the mysterious process by which nation-states come to represent the people. In modern literature this concern is often explored by postcolonial writers, film-makers, and artists, who turn to magical realism to represent the relation between people and the state. We will assume a global perspective and our texts will be drawn from literature as well as visual culture, literary studies as well as anthropological essays on magic.

In this course, we will both read from various trajectories of queer literature and engage what it means to read queerly. We will consider the historical etymology of the term queer and think through its affiliate terms and acronyms: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans. We will investigate how discourses of power and institutions of normativity have come up against queer bodies, narratives, and politic--and how such encounters are historically situated. As the class reads through texts that range across both region and time, we will pay close attention to the ways in which desire, gender, and sexuality are queerly told.