Global Arc

The Modern movement in English fiction, from Conrad and Joyce to the present. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

A study of major plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Jarry, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, and Beckett. Emphasis will be given to the theatrical revolutions they initiated and to the influence they continue to exert on contemporary drama and theater. Two 90-minute seminars.

A study of modern American writings, from Faulkner to Diaz, that emphasize the interplay between formal experimentation and thematic diversity. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

An exploration of contemporary speculative fiction, with particular attention to the ways specific texts of the past fifty years have transformed science fiction into a richly imaginative literary form that challenges basic assumptions about the possibilities and limitations of human life. Our analysis of texts will focus on both the literary achievement and philosophical underpinnings of recent depictions of imagined futures, racial and gender identity, travels in time and space, and contacts with aliens, robots, and androids.

An exploration of the connections and disconnects of our ever-smaller world, viewed through English-language novels and films of the last 25 years. At stake: translatability of language and ideas, processes of immigration, dynamics of economic development, history and memory, heroism and maturity, and notions of the future itself, in societies of rapid change. Throughout, the intersections between state policy and individual lives will be considered, such that while the course is premised on grand geopolitical questions, attention will focus on localized examples: specific texts, close reading. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

With an emphasis on British, Australian, and American poetry from 1945 to the present, this course covers a range of work. It considers such groups as the Beats, the Confessionals, the Surrealists, and the New York School, but attention will mostly be devoted to major works by MacDiarmid, Bishop, Lowell, Auden, Berryman, Brooks, Jarrell, Thomas, Larkin, Levertov, Ammons, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Ashbery, Merwin, Tomlinson, Walcott, Hill, Plath, Murray, Trantner, Kinsella, and others. Classwork will be supplemented by attending readings on and off campus. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

An examination of some of the best literature written for the stage since the Second World War. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

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.

Frantz Fanon is among the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this course we will concentrate on two of Fanon's major books: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. We will read Fanon's contemporaries like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor as well as responses to Fanon by Jean-Paul Sartre, Hanna Arendt, Judith Butler, Sylvia Wynter, Ng'g wa Thiong'o, and others. Topics we will cover are decolonization, infrastructural critique, systemic racism, existentialist phenomenology, négritude, violence, dialectics, psychiatry (vs. psychoanalysis), national consciousness, revolution, poesis, praxis.