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A poem can not only transport us through time but transform our perspective about and relationship to our current time as well. In this course, we will read a diverse range of writers and examine the formal mechanics of the 'the time travel poem.' Sharon Olds, PatriciaSmith, Frank O'Hara, Aracelis Girmay, and Franny Choi, are some of the authors students will read. We will discuss how such poems take the speaker and reader to different moments in histories both private and public, and we will discover how they conscript the reader as an active participant in the 'lyric vehicle.' Students should expect to write both analytical and creative responses.

This course offers an investigation into queer poetry and poetics within a contemporary and historical framework. Undergirded by recent works from LGBTQIA poets alongside foundational scholarship, it will explore what queerness as an identity, politic, and theoretical framework might teach us about poetry and what the formal, voice-driven, and experimental elements of poetry might teach us about queerness. Works may include offerings from Eve Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz, Audre Lorde and new books of poems by Franny Choi, Charif Shanihan, Paul Tran as well as others. Students are invited to respond to the provocations of this class in a variety of ways including both creatively and critically.

Animals have always appealed to the human imagination. This course provides basic a rubric for analyzing a variety of animal poems in order (1) to make you better readers of poetry and (2) to examine some of the most pressing philosophical questions that have been raised in the growing field of animal studies. The animals that concern us here are not allegorical - the serpent as evil, the fox as cunning, the dove as a figure for love. Rather, they are creatures that, in their stubborn animality, provoke the imagination of the poet.

What does it mean to be "a nation of immigrants," a "melting pot" of cultures, peoples, and histories from elsewhere? Who are the "huddled masses yearning to be free" that the words on the Statue of Liberty ("Mother of Exiles") claim to welcome? How have different immigrant communities conceptualized the American Dream? With a view to the notion of the artist as an outsider, as a figure who draws his or her authority not from proximity to but, paradoxically, remoteness from centers of power, we will explore these questions through a survey of modern and contemporary poetry in the United States, from Robert Hayden and Agha Shahid Ali to Solmaz Sharif and Monica Youn. We will tackle issues of assimilation and alienation, naturalization and foreignness, linguistic code-switching and exophony. We will study how migrant poets have adapted one of the most ancient narrative tropes - that of the nostos or homecoming - to represent the discovery, founding, or rejection of a home away from home. And we will learn about how these poets have drawn upon their increasingly marginalized art-form's association with outsiderhood to establish their own poetic authority.

What happens when a written narrative is transformed into a visual one? And what makes these adaptations succeed or fail? We might ponder such questions as we watch today's barrage of popular films and television shows which began life as novels or short stories. As readers, we are frequently poised to judge these adaptations based on fidelity to the text - but most viewers can also attest that adhering too closely to the source material can result in narratives falling flat on film. This course will explore the practice of literary adaptation, including adapting texts across time, the challenges of adapting unfinished works, and the political dimensions of casting, deviations from the text, and other changes.

Appearing on a bestseller list is a transformative event in the life of a book and its author, a fast-track to new audiences and opportunities. But how did bestsellers come to dominate literary culture, and why do they continue to fascinate us? In this course, we'll consider bestsellers both as literary objects and as forces which shape the bookselling and publishing industries. Beginning with the emergence of bestseller lists at the end of the nineteenth century and ending with contemporary blockbusters, we'll read bestselling novels for what they can tell us about the intersections of popular taste and literary form.

What makes a family? This seminar explores how American writers, filmmakers, and artists have described and deconstructed families from the nineteenth century to the present. How can stories about family help us read everyday life? To see structures of power and control? To imagine new possibilities for care? From classic sitcoms to Project 2025, we will also consider the social and political stakes of how family is defined, and by whom. Possible texts and topics include: reality TV, Stanford family archives, immigration, Bambi, Lost Children Archive, family therapy, and One Battle After Another. For their final project, students will make creative-critical albums describing a (real or fictional) family of their choice.

tba

Examination of the explosion of African American artistic expression during 1920s and 30s New York known as the Harlem Renaissance. Amiri Baraka once referred to the Renaissance as a kind of "vicious Modernism", as a "BangClash", that impacted and was impacted by political, cultural and aesthetic changes not only in the U.S. but Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Focus on the literature, graphic arts, and the music of the era in this global context.