Global Arc

The Bible will be read closely in its own right and as an enduring resource for literature and commentary. The course will cover its forms and genres, including historical narrative, uncanny tales, prophecy, lyric, lament, commandment, sacred biography, and apocalypse; its pageant of weird and extraordinary characters; and its brooding intertextuality. Students will become familiar with a wide variety of biblical interpretations, from the Rabbis to Augustine, Kafka and Kierkegaard. Cinematic commentary will be included--Bible films, from the campy to the sublime. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

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.

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.

A focused view of a problem or issue in poetry, changing from year to year. Recent topics have emphasized problems of poetic language, metrics, poetry and social life, poetic influence and canonization, and the relations between poetry and other art forms. 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.