In this course we will learn of the many ways to read a cultural text by surveying the history of literary theory. We will address questions such as: What is literature? How do texts generate meaning? How do we determine the meanings of a cultural text? What are the relationships among an author, a text, a reader, and a context? What role does a text play in representing or even producing ideas of race, class, nation, sexuality, and gender? We will learn to read cultural texts closely and carefully: that is, to read for a text’s figures, themes, meanings, contexts, and structures. In addition, we will learn to ask and write about a text’s social, political, and material aspects.<br />

Women were disenfranchised in many ways in eighteenth-century Britain. Women were seldom permitted to own property outright, to earn money, to exercise primary custody over their children, or to live or travel alone; they were denied legal representation, educational attainment, bodily self-determination, and other rights which we now consider to be basic indices of adulthood and citizenship. Being a woman was, for most, a state of dependency and enclosure. <br />
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In this course, we shall carefully consider how eighteenth-century British women made their voices heard. We’ll consider works produced by (and occasionally, about) British women during the century that followed the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, taking in examples from several genres, including prose fiction, poetry, and expository writing. We shall consider relations between women's imaginative writing and the many worlds from which women were largely excluded — the worlds of inherited literary tradition, commerce, religious debate, and contemporary politics, to name a few — as well as women’s writing about the subjects they were assumed to know best: child-raising, courtship, housekeeping, and personal piety.<br />
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The most important requirement in this course will be thorough reading of each assigned selection before class. Please take notes and be prepared to discuss particular language and rhetorical strategies, not merely plots and characterizations. The course will combine lectures and group discussions, class presentations, occasional quizzes, library research, and writing projects. Primary authors are likely to include Behn, Rochester, Philips, Haywood, Pope, Manley, Barker, and Richardson.<br />

This course introduces students to the extraordinary quality of literary production during the past four millennia of South Asian civilization. We will read texts in translation from all parts of South Asia up to the sixteenth century. We will read selections from hymns, lyric poems, epics, wisdom literature, plays, political works, and religious texts.

This course will introduce students to an exciting topic at the intersection of literature and cultural representation, taught by a young scholar at the cutting edge of the field. Requirements will include a number of oral presentations, and students will learn how to communicate clearly, thoughtfully and effectively on complex material.

This course will introduce students to an exciting topic at the intersection of literature and cultural representation taught by young scholars at the cutting edge of the field. Requirements will include a number of oral presentations, and students will learn how to communicate clearly, thoughtfully and effectively on complex material.

What images come to mind when we hear the words Sicily and Sicilians? Often our thoughts range from scenic vacation spots, delicious seafood and cannoli, and sweet grandmothers dressed in black, to mafia violence, vendettas, and the deep-rooted code of silence, omerta. But, how did these ideas get to us? Is there truth in them? Is there more to this island and its people? Through careful analysis of literary and cinematic representations of this Italian region, and those that do and have inhabited it, we will trace and analyze how Sicilians have represented themselves, how mainland Italians have interpreted Sicilian culture, how outsiders have understood these symbols, how our own perceptions shaped what we thought we knew about this place and, finally, how our own observations will have evolved throughout our studies. We will watch films such as Tornatore's Cinema paradiso and Coppola's The Godfather II, and read texts such as Lampedusa's The Leopard and Maraini's Bagheria. This course aims to increase students' understanding and knowledge of the Sicilian socio-cultural system. It will help students develop their ability to understand and interpret Sicilian culture through close analysis of its history, values, attitudes, and experiences, thereby allowing them to better recognize and examine the values and practices that define their own, as well as others', cultural frameworks.

How do we think 'the world' as such? Globalizing economic paradigms encourage one model that, while it connects distant regions with the ease of a finger-tap, also homogenizes the world, manufacturing patterns of sameness behind simulations of diversity. Our current world-political situation encourages another model, in which fundamental differences are held to warrant the consolidation of borders between Us and Them, &quot;our world&quot; and &quot;theirs.&quot; This course begins with the proposal that there are other ways to encounter the world, that are politically compelling, ethically important, and personally enriching--and that the study of literature can help tease out these new paths. Through the idea of World Literature, this course introduces students to the appreciation and critical analysis of literary texts, with the aim of navigating calls for universality or particularity (and perhaps both) in fiction and film. &quot;World literature&quot; here refers not merely to the usual definition of &quot;books written in places other than the US and Europe, &quot;but any form of cultural production that explores and pushes at the limits of a particular world, that steps between and beyond worlds, or that heralds the coming of new worlds still within us, waiting to be born. And though, as we read and discuss our texts, we will glide about in space and time from the inner landscape of a private mind to the reaches of the farthest galaxies, knowledge of languages other than English will not be required, and neither will any prior familiary with the literary humanities. In the company of drunken kings, botanical witches, ambisexual alien lifeforms, and storytellers who've lost their voice, we will reflect on, and collectively navigate, our encounters with the faraway and the familiar--and thus train to think through the challenges of concepts such as translation, narrative, and ideology. Texts include Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. LeGuin, Salman Rushdie, Werner Herzog, Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Hoban, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Arundhathi Roy, and Abbas Kiarostami.

The object of this course is to analyze representations of adultery, cheating, and &quot;perverted&quot; or non-normative sexualities in literature and film. We will study how sex and sexual desire is represented, and think critically about the narrative conventions used for describing taboo desires and behaviors, and the social values that inform them. The themes of desire, transgression, suspicion and discovery lie at the heart of many classic narratives in drama, literature and film, from antiquity to the present. Is there anything special, we will ask, about representing sex, especially &quot;wrong&quot; kinds of sex? What might these stories teach us about the way we read in general? Along the way, the course will also provide an introduction to the study of sexuality and queer studies, as well as training in critical reading and cultural analysis. By supplementing classic literary accounts by authors such as Shakespeare, Pushkin, Flaubert, Chekhov, Bataille, de Sade, Proust with films by such figures as Fellini and Pasolini, we will analyze the possibilities and limitations of the different genres and forms under discussion, including novels, films, short stories, and drama. What can these forms show us (or not show us) about desire, gender, family and social obligation? We will apply a range of critical approaches to place these narratives of &quot;bad&quot; or &quot;kinky&quot; or &quot;sinful&quot; sexuality in a social and literary context, including formal analyses of narrative and style, feminist criticism, Marxist and sociological analyses of the family, and psychoanalytic understandings of desire and family life.

The purpose of this course is to present a variety of narrative genres and to discuss and illustrate the modes whereby they can be analyzed. We will be looking at shorter types of narrative: short stories, novellas, and fables, and also some extracts from longer works such as autobiographies. While some works will come from the Anglo-American tradition, a larger number will be selected from European and non-Western cultural traditions and from earlier time-periods. The course will thus offer ample opportunity for the exploration of the translation of cultural values in a comparative perspective.