Global Arc

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.

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.