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Introductory course to major themes and trends within Asian American literature. This course will cover plays, novels, and poems, alongside historical documents, newspaper clips, and films to consider how these different genres create parallel, and at times contradictory, narratives about what we have come to call Asian America. We will interrogate various forms of Asian American representation: political, cultural, and literary, and consider how these distinct genres make Asian American fictions not necessarily fantasy, but fantastic in the way they traverse between reality and representation. This class will teach students to identify the implicit arguments of the texts that we read, as well as build their own interpretations and arguments from these texts. In these arguments, we will pursue synthesis of many forms of difference: how political, cultural, linguistic and literary strategies interrelate and complicate each other. The assignments are designed to help students develop their own ideas vis-à-vis the texts on the syllabus and culminate in students exploring a topic of their own choosing through either a research paper or a creative writing assignment with a critical component.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes humanities scholarship, literary texts, popular media, and participant observation, this class will investigate the myriad relations between walking, ideology and ecology. From the Nakba to Ferguson, we will explore walking as resistance, collective punishment, art, psychogeography, somatic ritual, mutual aid, haunting, convivial practice and anti-colonial worldmaking

This course focuses on Asian American literature that adapts traditional Asian myths and folktales into new American contexts. We will examine how Asian myths offer an ambivalent cultural inheritance for Asian Americans: on the one hand, serving as narrative tools for constructing identity amidst racism and assimilationist pressures; on the other, retaining burdensome roots of tradition that require reckoning within intergenerational Asian American communities. Whenever possible, we will examine original versions of an Asian myth first before exploring its English-language adaptations, identifying which narrative differences matter and analyzing why. Above all, students will get a sense of how to engage with myths as a literary genre acting in concert with the needs of specific historical and cultural moments. Familiarity with Asian languages and cultures is not required for this course but will be helpful for specific activities that we do in class.

This course explores the early poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and asks what his works, although written over 400 years ago, can teach us about the craft of literature and the nature of fiction. Our primary focus will be on Troilus and Criseyde: a tragic love story set against the backdrop of the Trojan War, which raises crucial questions about gender and sexuality, the ethics of authorship, and the relationship between history and literature. Through the close reading of Chaucer's writings in the original Middle English, as well as some of their sources and later adaptations by Shakespeare and others, we will discover the poet's radical innovations in literary form, as well as examine his foundational role in English literary history. No prior knowledge of Middle English is required.

The ecological, social, and economic crises of the Anthropocene suggest it is time for us to re-imagine how best to organize our communities, our institutions, and our societies. Despite the clear shortcomings, our society remains stuck in a rut of inaction. During periods of rapid social and economic change, segments of society become gripped by a nostalgia for idealized pasts that never really existed; such nostalgia acts as a powerful force that holds back innovation and contributes to a failure of imagination. How, then, might we imagine alternative social arrangements that could allow us to thrive sustainably in an environment of greater equity? Moshin Hamid reminds us that literature allows us to break from violent nostalgia while imagining better worlds, while Ursula K. Le Guin notes that "imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there are other ways to do things, other ways to be; that there is not just one civilization, and it is good, and it is the way we have to be." There are - there has to be - other and better ways to be. In this multi-disciplinary class, we turn to speculative fiction as a way of imagining future societies that are adaptable, sustainable, and just and can respond to the major challenges of our age. In addition to reading and discussing a range of novels and short stories, we bring to bear perspectives from climate science, social science, and literary criticism. We will also be hosting several of the authors to talk about their work and ideas.

Experimental writers of the early twentieth century are infamous for their polyphonic poems and stream-of-consciousness novels, but they also published lucid, lyrical, and declamatory essays in which they explained the aims of their work. In this class, we'll pair monumental modernist classics with the manifestos that help make sense of them. Starting with the explosion of avant-garde movements in the 1910s and the protest poems of Britain's soldiers, we'll turn to major masterpieces by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Jean Rhys. Along the way, we'll read short essays by these same writers, and by others including Oscar Wilde, Mina Loy, Ford Madox Ford, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Suzanne Cesaire. As we study modernist movements like futurism, imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance, while looking at original publications like Blast, Fire!!, and The Little Review, we'll finish by compiling student writing into our own modernist magazine.

Homer's Odyssey inspired some of the major literary works of the twentieth century, including James Joyce's Ulysses, Derek Walcott's Omeros, Louise Gluck's Meadowlands, and key chapters from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. T.S. Eliot identified this strategy of literary adaptation, which manipulates "a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity," as the "mythical method." In our class, we'll practice this mythical method ourselves, reading Homer's epic alongside these modern retellings to study theories of narrative and craft our own creative projects. In addition to the texts listed above, readings include Junot Diaz's Drown, Madeline Miller's Circe, Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, and Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey. Students will also meet one or two creative professionals working in literature or film.

This course will give students the opportunity to read two popular Victorian novels not usually taught on the quarter system: George Eliot's Middlemarch and Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Both novels foundational to the realist universe of criticism are famously filled with intricate plots involving many, many characters whose lives are all interconnected. The course will give us a chance to survey the poetics of brilliant stylists and the social complexities in Britain of the time: while Eliot situates her novel in the countryside, Dickens situates most of the action of the plot in the heart of London. To work our way through these novels slowly and carefully, we will take inspiration from how the Victorians read them, in their serialized installments published at regular intervals. Focusing on slow reading will also give us time to try out different kinds of reading; this course will function as an introductory survey of critical and theoretical approaches to the novel and will be particularly useful to undergraduate students seeking advanced coursework in literary studies. Critical and theoretical readings could include Mikhail Bakhtin, Gyorgy Lukacs, Edward Said, Sharon Marcus, Leah Price, Raymond Williams, and Alex Woloch among others.

How and why do certain objects, bodily processes, spaces, and persons come to be deemed "waste"? What transformative power, on the other hand, might reside in waste? Drawing from Discard Studies (a new field in the Environmental Humanities), this course will analyze how societal and cultural mechanisms shape definitions of and attitudes toward waste. While critically examining contemporary literature and social thought, we will focus on how waste interacts with broader systems of colonialism, race, gender, and environmental destruction. Anti-colonial and Indigenous perspectives, including scholars like Max Liboiron and Zoe Todd, will be central to our exploration. Students will learn how quotidian hierarchies of matter that we often take for granted can result in infrastructural world-building - and, reorganized, have the capacity for ecological and social renewal.