Audre Lorde famously stated, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”In She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, the poet Marlene NourbeSe Philip observed, “I want to write about the beauty of kinky hair and flat noses—maybe I should be writing about the language that kinked the hair and flattened noses…” NourbeSe Philip might have added that she also should be writing about the language that engendered woman. Taking these statements as a point of departure for the seminar, we will examine the ways a selection of authors and filmmakers engage language for social change. Included on the syllabus will be works by Harriet Jacobs, Ida B Wells, Lucy Parsons, June Jordan, Sarah Moldoror, Léonora Miano, Marilene Felinto, Maaza Mengiste, Akwaeke Emezi, and Elizabeth Acevedo. The course will feature class visits by several contemporary writers. In consultation with the instructor, students will complete a semester-long project.

Humor in ethnic societies has two dimensions: internal and external. The inside humor of an ethnic group is accessible to its members; it draws upon their respective social structures, historical and social experiences, languages, cultural symbols, and social and economic circumstances and aspirations. The external humor of an ethnic group targets members of other ethnic groups, and draws upon their stereotypes, and attributed characteristics by other ethnic groups. The external ethnic humor flourishes in immigrant and ethnically heterogenic societies. In both cases jokes and humor are an integral part of social interaction, and in their performance relate to the social, economic, and political dynamics of traditional and modern societies.

While we may think of Israel as monolithic, its culture represents a multiplicity of voices. What began in Israel’s early decades as an attempt to create a single canonic, Zionist narrative exploded into many voices in the 1980s with the pluralistic climate inspired by Postmodernism. This is when poets like Yona Wallach, a precursor of modern LGBTQ+ writers, came to prominence. In the 21st century, with online publication becoming easier, the multitude of Israeli literary expression is overflowing. Beginning with contemporary works, this course will examine voices that have been less heard in Israeli poetry, prose, and film, such as women, Arab or Mizrachi writers, Holocaust survivors, and LGBTQ+ artists.

Through the study of a wide variety of poems from the Renaissance to the present, students in this seminar will expand their familiarity with the sweep of modern English-language poetry and will develop a thorough understanding of fundamental poetic concepts—especially those concepts related to the question of “the person in the poem”: “author,” “voice,” “persona,” “address,” “personification,” “representation,” and “referentiality.” These are all concepts essential to the advanced study of poetry and of literature more comprehensively. We’ll sharpen our understanding of these concepts in our close readings and discussions of major poems by authors including W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Alexander Pope, Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and William Wordsworth. These poetic works will be complemented by our study of some essential works of modern poetic theory. Course requirements will include several short essays and a variety of in-class exercises, including recitation, memorization, and imitation as well as active participation in seminar discussion. (No mid-term or final exams.)

Is the land of good food, beautiful landscapes, and la bella vita really how it looks in the movies? Where do our ideas about Italy come from and how do they compare to the realities of its cultural production and its contemporary day-to-day life? This cultural survey course on contemporary Italy will investigate the similarities and divergences of these perceptions by researching current social, political, and media trends and putting them face to face with our preconceived notions. The course will cover major cultural trends from fashion and food trends, to eco-Italy, criminality and the Anthropocene, to immigration, to Black and LGBTQ Italia, to contemporary transfeminism, to Berlusconismo and Populism, to Netflix Italia and Social media culture. Through written assignments both in and outside the classroom, oral presentations, and multimedia projects we will critically reflect on these contemporary issues and gain a stronger understanding of the socio-cultural specificity of the Italian cultural landscape and its relationship to contemporary global socio-political trends and identities.

What makes Jewish American literature Jewish? What makes it American? This course will address these questions about ethnic literature through fiction, poetry, drama, and other writings by Jews in America, from their arrival in 1654 to the present. We will discuss how Jewish identity and ethnicity shape literature and will consider how form and language develop as Jewish writers "immigrate" from Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages to American English. Our readings, from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, will include a variety of stellar authors, both famous and less-known, including Isaac Mayer Wise, Emma Lazarus, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Celia Dropkin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Allegra Goodman. Students will come away from this course having explored the ways that Jewish culture intertwines with American culture in literature. All readings and lecturese in English.

In the United States, the years of the Cold War (roughly 1946-1989) were marked by existential anxiety over global annihilation, panic about the threat of communism abroad and at home, demands for racial justice and redefinition of gender norms. Alongside national and foreign policy, literature played a powerful role both in defining and resisting “containment” of Communist ideology around the world and of liberatory forces in the United States. This course will consider the power literature had during this period and the ways in which that power drove authors to rethink their own approach to production as well as the ways in which literature came to serve as propaganda. We will consider how ideas about freedom in the West shaped literary production as the state coopted literature as a form of competition between the two superpowers.

Beginning with texts and films that represented American’s anxieties and fears about Communism and the atomic bomb, this course will show the ways in which the sense of crisis and anxiety drove literary experimentation and increasingly personal forms of poetry and prose. This course will examine works like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Okada’s No No Boy and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to begin to see how freedom of expression reflected and resisted social and state efforts to contain demands for freedom from women and racial minorities. Finally, the course will end by looking at a range of experimental novels which worked to defy assumptions about cultural superiority and freedom of expression including Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.

Students in this class will read literary texts, watch movies and television shows alongside reading scholarly texts to put the course material into context. Class time will be spent in discussion and students will be expected to come to class ready to talk about both the text at hand and what they are finding in their own research. Each week students will shape discussion by bringing artifacts from the period into conversation with the text in short written connection papers (500-1000 words). Throughout the semester, students will work on expanding those artifact papers into a multi-media Cold War cultural topic of their choice.

"Languages are not strangers to one another," writes the great critic and translator Walter Benjamin. Yet two people who speak different languages have a difficult time talking to one another, unless they both know a third, common language or can find someone who knows both their languages to translate what they want to say. Without translation, most of us would not be able to read the Bible or Homer, the foundations of Western culture. Americans wouldn't know much about the cultures of Europe, China, Africa, South America, and the Middle East. And people who live in or come from these places would not know much about American culture. Without translation, Americans would not know much about the diversity of cultures within America. The very fabric of our world depend upon translation between people, between cultures, between texts.

Through close readings of primary sources, students will explore products of Jewish culture written in both Christian and Muslim lands between the 10th and 16th centuries, within their historical and cross-cultural contexts. Works will include selections from poetry, philosophy, Bible exegesis, polemic, ethical wills, historiography, pietism, mysticism and legal writings. Students with appropriate language skills will read Hebrew sources in the original. Graduate students will have additional assignments and meetings.

This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from 1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan s war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with Japanese classics, confrontation with the state, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality. We will explore these and other questions by analyzing texts of various genres, including film and film scripts, novels, short stories, manga, and academic essays. Class sessions will combine lectures, discussion, audio-visual materials, and creative as well as analytical writing exercises. The course is taught in English, although Japanese materials will be made available upon request. No prior coursework in Japanese literature, culture, or film is required or expected; additional secondary materials will be available for students taking the course at the 600 level. Writers and film directors examined may include: Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, Imamura Shohei, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Beat Takeshi.