This class will provide an introduction to literary theory by focusing on ideology. We will explore how ideology becomes a name for investigating various social, political, and economic processes underwriting cultural production. Throughout the semester we will read texts that help to establish a genealogy of ideology. At the same time we will examine a number of critical theories—including (post)structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and environmental studies—that offer frameworks for analyzing the complex relationships among language, representation, and power in literature, popular culture, and public discourse. Finally, we will place these theories in conversation with a number of contemporary political debates, including feminist challenges to pornography, legal disputes over hate speech, social arguments about affirmative action, state rhetoric concerning the “war on terror,” and scientific deliberations on climate change.
INSTRUCTOR: DAVID ENG

“Sexuality and Power” is an on-line, sophomore-level course organized as a collaborative seminar. Students from all disciplines are welcome. Students will find it easiest to excel in this class if they have basic skills in deliberative writing (gained, for example, by completing Penn’s writing requirement). There are no other prerequisites.

We’ll focus on the work of the most-read and/or best-remembered female-identified writers who published between 1700 and 1790 in Britain. Occasionally along the way, we’ll pay attention to especially relevant, influential works by male-identified authors.

The course emphasizes primary reading. We’ll read in many genres. Students will develop confidence in “close-reading,” an essential skill for entrance into any profession and into the civic life of our own time. The largest goals of this course are that students 1) develop as close-reading critical thinkers, and 2) practice exercising historical thinking and imaginative empathy.

The eighteenth century in Britain was an exciting time. Literacy's long-policed borders were being relaxed, and publication was allowed to flourish largely free of censorship. Vernacular writing and “low” generic forms were gradually gaining unprecedented (but never uncontested) power. As the set of those allowed to participate in public discourse slowly expanded, new opportunities arose for literate women. For the first time, non-aristocratic women spoke as women in publications concerned with public and political matters. At the same time, women continued to write on the subjects still deemed naturally appropriate for them: personal piety, child-raising, housekeeping. We’ll consider examples of writing by women with a wide variety of concerns and purposes.

Class Structure:
The course will be on-line and synchronous. Meetings will take the form of real-time seminars and will require live participation from everyone. Registered students in time-zones outside United States EST should contact the instructor privately; I will work with you.

Most required texts will be available through the University’s bookstore; some will be available as free links on our Canvas site.

Over the course of a typical working week, students will read assigned material, take notes, and formulate questions and comments. Students will post carefully formulated questions or comments to the Canvas "Discussion" tab by midnight EST before each class. Active engagement in class sessions is required of everyone. In addition to these regular requirements, each student will 1) participate in one collaborative class presentation, 2) write one individual Abstract and workshop it in the seminar, and a 3) write one final essay, an interpretive exercise in close-reading. The essay must be professionally formatted, maturely written, and not more than 8 pages long; secondary research is not required. Careful reading, thoughtful on-time posting, and informed, consistent engagement in class are the main requirements, worth 50% of the final grade. The remaining assignments will account for the other 50% of each student’s grade.
INSTRUCTOR: TONI BOWERS

In this class, we will explore in detail one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century. The Waste Land is undeniably a “war poem,” and it could not have been composed without the poet having witnessed, albeit at a remove, such a traumatic collective event. The trauma experienced by Eliot had also sexual and religious components. What is more, The Waste Land does not come alone, for the poem is also an entire archive as we see from its drafts and accompanying published and unpublished texts. We will study its textual genesis along with the historical contexts of the Waste Land, going back to the initial poem of Eliot’s modernity, “The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock.” Reading these texts, we will attempt to hear the layering of their voices, to capture the nuances of a rich cultural polyphony, while assessing the impact of philosophy on them. We will survey all these critical, literary, sexual and philosophical intertexts. If the Waste Land has remained one of the best examples of modernist classicism, what can this say both about “high modernism” and the future of poetry?
INSTRUCTOR: JEAN-MICHEL RABATE

African Contemporary Music: North, South, East, and West. Come to know contemporary Africa through the sounds of its music: from South African kwela, jazz, marabi, and kwaito to Zimbabwean chimurenga; Central African soukous and pygmy pop; West African fuji, and North African rai and hophop. Through reading and listening to live performance, audio and video recordings, we will examine the music of Africa and its intersections with politics, history, gender, and religion in the colonial and post-colonial era.
INSTRUCTOR: CAROL MULLER

Most people have never read a play from Renaissance England by anyone other than Shakespeare, but the Bard was joined by a host of other great playwrights in one of the most exciting periods of English literary and theatrical history. As numerous theaters suddenly popped up around London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the stages were filled with tragedies, comedies, histories, romances, and tragicomedies. This course will survey some of the plays written by Shakespeare's rivals, influences, followers, and collaborators, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, and the ever-popular author, Anonymous, among others. Our focus will be on the structure and language of the plays, their dramatic form and genres, and their relations to the pressing issues and questions of the time. No previous experience with Shakespeare or Renaissance drama is required.
INSTRUCTOR: ZACHARY LESSER

Watching Chaucer at work, modern poet Lavinia Greenlaw says, is like meeting English "before the paint has dried." Before rules (even of spelling) have hardened. Before live oral performance is subordinated to written record.

Chaucer was fluent in French, the most prestigious lingua franca of Europe. His wife Philippa was French, so his pillow talk was French. He learned Latin, the language of law and the Church, as a boy. He first learned Italian from merchants working along the Thames, where he grew up; he later travelled to Italy (and Spain) on royal missions. Out of all his he fashioned his mash up Middle English. This wonderfully flexible language captures the nuances of medieval London life while projecting itself imaginatively into ancient Athens, Tartary, and realms of romance.

Chaucer's poetry comes fully alive when read aloud. Each of you will gradually come to read and perform Middle English fluently and well. And this will give you a good idea of where modern English comes from: Middle English is the floor upon which, word by word, modern English walks; a frequent challenge is "etymologize that!" Our flower the daisy, for example, comes from the Old English dayes eye, "the eye of day"; the dandelion is from the French dent de lion ("the lion's tooth": such is the shape of its petals). Why do so many poets, especially women poets, and minority women poets, find Chaucer so imaginatively liberating? What is so special about Alisoun, the Wife of Bath? How does a return to English origins open the way to new English expressive futures? Sylvia Plath, Lavinia Greenlaw, Marilyn Nelson, Patience Agbabi, Jean Binta Breeze, Pattie McCarthy, Zadie Smith all have things to say here. Caroline Bergvall, author of wonderful Chaucerian poems in her Meddle English, has recently published a chapbook called "Alisoun Sings"; we'll invite her to (virtual) class. You might be similarly inspired into creative response; your final assignment can take the form of a poem, video, screenplay, or you can write a traditional critical essay.

Our course will concentrate upon The Canterbury Tales, an amazingly varied framed collection of stories, juxtaposing knightly deeds of chivalry with low deeds of sexual opportunism; philosophical musing and tales of talking chickens; tales of liberty and tyranny; oriental exoticism and gritty, close-to-home realism; enlightened views of Islam and tales of wicked mothers-in-law; alchemy and magic; ecology and astronomy; saint's life and undergraduate escapade; freelance eroticism and married love. "Genre" never stabilizes in Chaucer, and there is no stable Chaucerian template: every new tale is a fresh adventure. We will develop a "slow cooking" habit of reading the text: better to go slowly and appreciate what is going on.

Form of Assessment: Assignment 1, translation and commentary, 20%; assignment 2, short essay, 20%; assignment 3, longer essay project brainstorm (pass/fail); assignment 4, longer essay with research component, or creative project with production notes, 50% of grade; preparation and participation, 10%. There will be no midterm or final, and all assignments will be submitted as .doc by e-mail, and will be graded via Track Changes.

Text required:

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (Penguin), paperback.

Text not required:

David Wallace, Chaucer: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2019).
INSTRUCTOR: DAVID WALLACE

This course investigates how people try to understand who they are by writing about their lives. It will cover a broad range of forms, including memoirs, novels, essay films, and even celebrity autobiographies. The course will be international in focus and will ask how the notion of self may shift, not only according to the demands of different genres, but in different literary, linguistic, and social contexts. Questions probed will include the following: How does a writer's language--or languages--shape how they think of themselves? To what extent is a sense of self and identity shaped by exclusion and othering? Is self-writing a form of translation and performance, especially in multilingual contexts? What can memoir teach us about the ways writers navigate global literary institutions that shape our knowledge of World Literature? How do various forms of life-writing enable people on the margins, whether sexual, gendered, or racial, to craft narratives that encapsulate their experience? Can telling one's own story bring joy, affirmation, and greater transcultural or even global understanding? In sum, this course proposes to illuminate the many ways in which writing becomes meaningful for those who take it up. The format of the seminar will require students to offer oral presentations on the readings and invite them to craft their own experiences and memories in inventive narrative forms.
INSTRUCTORS: ANGELINA EIMANNSBERGER, ZAIN MIAN

This course will provide a wide-ranging introduction to the literatures of South Asia from roughly 1500 to the present, as well as an exploration of their histories and impact on South Asian society today. How are literary movements and individual works - along with the attitudes towards religion, society, and culture associated with them - still influential in literature, film, and popular culture? How have writers across time and language engaged with questions of caste, gender, and identity? We will read from the rich archive of South Asian writing in translation - from languages that include Braj, Urdu, Bangla, and Tamil - to consider how these literatures depict their own society while continuing to resonate across time and space. Topics of dicussion will include the Bhakti poetries of personal devotion, the literature of Dalits - formerly referred to as the Untouchables - and the ways in which literature addresses contemporary political and social problems. Students will leave this course with a sense of the contours of the literatures of South Asia as well as ways of exploring the role of these literatures in the larger world. No prior knowledge of South Asia is required. Fulfills Cross Cultural Analysis requirement.
INSTRUCTOR: GREGORY GOULDLING

The reappearance of the concept of Central and Eastern Europe is one of the most fascinating results of the collapse of the Soviet empire. The course will provide an introduction into the study of this region its cultures, histories, and societies from the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire to the enlargement of the European Union. Students are encouraged to delve deeper into particular countries, disciplines, and sub-regions, such as Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, through an individual research paper and class presentations.
INSTRUCTOR: KRISTEN GHODSEE

Artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet of things are rapidly changing every aspect of our lives. The methods and questions of the humanities are critical to understanding these shifts of the digital age. In this course we will consider some of the ways humanists and artists are collaborating with scientists and engineers to solve the big problems facing our planet and our species. We’ll study how data science is changing museums and special collections. We’ll learn how scholars of race and gender are combating algorithmic bias in search engines and how digital archivists are helping climate scientists save their data from politics. Students will gain hands-on experience with a range of approaches and methods of digital humanities research. They will acquire basic facility with key digital tools like GitHub, relational databases, XML/HTML and TEI, basic text analysis and visualization tools, and online publishing platforms. Our collective aim will be to establish a critical, historical framework for understanding the impact of digital technologies on our lives. Absolutely no prior coding experience is required. Unless the campus reopens, we plan to conduct this course remotely, using both synchronous with asynchronous Zoom sessions, frequent breakout rooms and small-group meetings, one-on-one conferences, and shared folders and files on Canvas and Google. Work for the course will include regular in-class exercises, short research findings and response papers, and a mid-sized digital project.
INSTRUCTORS: JAMES ENGLISH, STEWART VARNER