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We often think of literature as a window onto the past. This class, by contrast, will offer various ways of analyzing the relationship between writing and the future. Writing might represent forecasts of the future, as in some speculative fiction; it can attempt to speak to the readers of the future; it can use apocalyptic visions to make people in the present feel ethical responsibility to the future (as in some literature on climate change). Writing of the past can also hail us today as its own future. Authors may include Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, David Mitchell, William Shakespeare, and more. Themes will include Afrofuturism, ecological futurity, revolutionary futures, literary reception, the future represented by your desire to finish a text, and more.

How do we make sense of catastrophe? Who gets to write or make art about floods, fires, or environmental collapse? How do disaster and its depiction make visible or exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities? Beginning with the Jamestown colony and continuing to the present, this course explores the long history of disaster on the North American continent, and how it has been described by witnesses, writers, and artists. From the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic to Hurricane Katrina, the Dust Bowl to contemporary explorations of climate change, this seminar will put in conversation a wide range of primary and secondary materials. Possible texts include writings by Mike Davis, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca Solnit, Jesmyn Ward, and Richard Wright; films Wildlife (2018), First Reformed (2017), When the Levees Broke (2006), and Free Willy II (1995); and art by Dorothea Lange, Winslow Homer, and Richard Misrach. For the final paper, students will write a critical essay on a disaster novel, film, or other work or object of their choice, or develop their own creative piece or oral history.

What makes you the individual you are? Should you plan your life, or make it up as you go along? Is it always good to remember your past? Is it always good to know the truth? When does a machine become a person? What do we owe to other people? Is there always a right way to act? How can we live in a highly imperfect world? And what can film do that other media can't? We'll think about all of these great questions with the help of films that are philosophically stimulating, stylistically intriguing, and, for the most part, gripping to watch: Do The Right Thing (Lee), The Dark Knight (Nolan), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Kaufman), Arrival (Villeneuve), My Dinner with Andre (Malle), Blade Runner (Scott), La Jet'e (Marker), Fight Club (Fincher), No Country for Old Men (Coen), The Seventh Seal (Bergman), and Memento (Nolan). Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory; and fun. We will not be using the waitlist on Axess - if you would like to enroll and the course is full/closed please email us to get on the waitlist!

How authors and filmmakers represent the process of border-making as a social experience? How do the genres in which they work shape our understandings of the issues themselves? We will explore several different genres of visual and textual representation from around the world that bear witness to border conflict - including writing by China Miéville, Carmen Boullosa, Joe Sacco, and Agha Shahid Ali - many of which also trouble the borders according to which genres are typically separated and defined.

By looking at writers like Mary Shelly who turned her marital rage into Frankenstein, this course will trace the different ways in which women's anger emerges in literature. As we examine the relationship anger has to the production of literature, we will also observe how women's rage has been rendered in major literary works since the 19th century. Contemporary novels written by women about women such as Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh, Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, and Luster by Raven Leilani will be placed within a longer lineage of literature depicting "women in rage," which includes Persuasion, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and the eponymous novels Anna Keranina, and Madam Bovary. We will consider Virginia Woolf's provocation in A Room of One's Own as she trains our attention onto the conditions of women's production of literature, and how scarcity translates onto the page. Thinking about rage opens lines of inquiry not only into emotional worlds but into the socio-economic inequalities and differences that undergird artistic production. Relying upon theories of anger and rage offered by feminist thinkers such as Audre Lorde and Sarah Ahmed, we will chart our path through major novels and plays of the 19th and 20th centuries, and find our way to the furious literature of the contemporary moment.

It is widely held that the term 'cyberspace' first appeared not in the giddy reports of business consultants or futurologists, but in a short story by science fiction author William Gibson. Literature has long functioned as a kind of incubator for some of the most important concepts and metaphors that we use to understand the massive transformations that digital technologies have effected within modern life. In this class, we will read novels, short stories, and poetry from the last fifty years that try to capture the new forms of experience that these technologies' considered broadly under the rubric of 'the internet' have brought into being. We will work together to develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing the two-way traffic between digital media and literary forms, from cyberpunk fiction to Instagram poetry.

We are living in a time of expedient environmental change caused by human influence. How has the American literary imagination metabolized the science and psychology of the moment? How do recently published works of poetry and fiction reflect our evolving relationship to animals, natural resources, weather and the very concept of 'nature' itself? How can stories and poems as cultural products help raise or sustain an ecological awareness, individually and collectively? Can a story introduce research or present a future that might otherwise seem inaccessible? Can a poem advance our understanding of the link between social justice and climate justice? These are some of the questions we'll ask as we engage texts by aesthetically, experientially, and culturally diverse writers. This small, discussion-based seminar aims to foster interdisciplinary exchange - students from across campus disciplines are encouraged to enroll.

Black, gay and gifted, Baldwin was hailed as a "spokesman for the race", although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. This course examines his classic novels and essays as well his exciting work across many lesser-examined domains - poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children's literature, public media, comedy and artistic collaboration. Placing his work in context with other writers of the 20C (Faulkner, Wright, Morrison) and capitalizing on a resurgence of interest in the writer (NYC just dedicated a year of celebration of Baldwin and there are 2 new journals dedicated to study of Baldwin), the course seeks to capture the power and influence of Baldwin's work during the Civil Rights era as well as his relevance in the "post-race" transnational 21st century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership and country assume new urgency.

Introduction to the reading of poetry, with emphasis on how the sense of poems is shaped through diction, imagery, and technical elements of verse. English majors must take this class for 5 units.