Global Arc

How does literature embody law, both as a principle of literary construction and as an examination of justice? Can literature represent law persuasively? Can it cure the ills from which law suffers? This precepted course will stress interdisciplinary analysis of literature and law; offer overviews of law and social justice in history and different cultures; examine gender, race, and religion in their relation to law and its depictions; and highlight close reading of rich, complex literary texts. Students pursuing literature-related course study as well as students interested in law school or legal studies will benefit from the course.

Feeling lost? This course links two key forms that shape the spaces we dwell in, cross through, and imagine: medieval maps and travel narratives. Though these constructions are head-shaking artifacts to behold, each episteme also indexes familiar categories of imaginative geography like excluded difference, included identity, and fantasies of power and control. We will query what these forms make: cultural diffusion and exchange, phenomena of wonder and curiosity, collaborations of word and image, and tales of travel, a genre that is definitionally transgressive.

African literature has been a global literature for several millennia. Some of the most important writers and thinkers of the classical era and late antiquity were Africans (Augustine, for instance). We'll start with those early writers, then move on to texts by the medieval inventor of sociology, Ibn Khaldun; the epic of the medieval Mali empire, Sundiata; a medieval Ethiopian saint's life; colonial writing about Africa by Europeans, and colonial-era literature by African writers; the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka and others that confront the legacy of colonialism; and recent Africanfuturist art, film, and literature.

What makes a play political? When and why does producing political theater matter? In this course, we will look at contemporary and canonical plays from across the globe that take on various political crises (e.g., Argentina during the "Dirty War"; South Africa under Apartheid; the Liberian Civil War; Eastern European Communist censorship). Analyzing plays as texts and performances, we will consider what makes theater a useful medium to respond to conflict and social trauma. We will explore how playwrights around the world have aimed to create social change through dramaturgy.

In 1649, the King of England was beheaded. Soon after, Parliament abolished the monarchy altogether. Yet this break with the past would not give way to unanimity: the next decade would give rise to innumerable competing visions of the political future. What's more, the regicide was only one "dissolution" that shaped political life in the C16th & C17th. Established orders collapsed under the pressure of religious, imperial, environmental, and intellectual change. We will turn to Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Harrington, Marvell, Cavendish, and others to see how dissolutions shaped the emergence of a recognizably modern political world.

What is media studies? What's at stake in our ways of reading and engaging media? This seminar will introduce approaches to studying media, pairing theoretical texts with films, videos, and other media objects. Each week we will take up a theme within media studies; attention and ways of looking, the culture industry, simulacra & spectacle, reception theory, the materiality of media, circulation & new media, archives & memory, art & the internet, media infrastructures, AI, and counter-media practices, etc. Throughout the course, we'll experiment with collaborative methods of watching, reading, and critically attending to the media around us.

There's more to medieval love than gallant knights and fair maidens. The literature of "courtly love" also includes complex psychological fictions, radical gender play, ethical meditations on agency and consent, and werewolves. This course surveys all of the above, focusing on works written in twelfth-century France, where the concepts of romantic love and secular literature emerged hand in hand, and fourteenth-century England, where love became subject for satire and philosophical examination. In the process, we will read some exceptionally good poetry. No previous experience with medieval literature is required or expected.

Theater is an embodied art form; it requires bodies performing in a space with other bodies watching. We will read a range of plays from the mid-20th century to the present that explore bodily limitation and possibility, often through characters who are magically transformed or transcend their human bodies, and characters who are sick, dying, confined, or living with disabilities. What do the plays suggest about physically constrained or liberated bodies as a source of dramaturgical invention? And what do these playwrights suggest about our ethical responsibility to other bodies, how value is assigned to different bodies, and why?

Who and what do we marry, really, when we marry? Marriage is never quite the simple union of two people, but always involves a third term: another person, a sum of money, a past or a future, a different world, perhaps the idea of marriage itself. This course explores these third terms of marriage by revisiting the marriage plot, both its defining instances in the nineteenth century and subsequent reverberations. Attending to the transformations of a narrative form, we will explore the unsuspected complications, even moral hazards, and the new social futures awaiting those seeking or avoiding marriage as a life-defining goal and commitment.

What is work? Who works? Why do we work so much? Must we? And why do we resent the grind yet stake our identities on the job? Automation promised freedom from toil, yet people work more, earn less, and feel burned out. This course examines the fiction of work that makes earning a wage seem natural, and the twenty-first-century fictions that think with and against it. Reading stories of care work, temp work, the gig economy, office culture, and finance alongside feminist and sociological critiques, we ask what the modern work ethic values and exacts, what refusal looks like, and what it might mean to imagine life after work.