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This course explores the ways we talk and think about how systems work, using nonfiction and science fiction to understand software, hardware, and wetware. A theoretical grounding in the tools used to analyze such systems from a humanistic perspective, including tools from cyber/data feminism, anti-orientalism, and queer theory, as well as practical experience in systems analysis. Students will produce soft/hard/wetware criticism of their own in addition to literary-critical argument. No coding experience required.

This course will synthesize activist practice, humanities scholarship, ecological literature and public policy to evaluate alternatives to ongoing ecocide. With an emphasis on Indigenous thought and contemporary voices from the (so-called) Global South we will investigate what an environmentalism by and for the people might look like. Following Tuck and Yang's 2012 declaration that decolonization is not a metaphor, this class will evaluate practical, anti-colonial and imaginative solutions to the quagmire of intersecting crises that define our present.

This course will bring together the disciplines of history and literary studies by looking closely at the work of one major twentieth-century author: the British writer and political polemicist George Orwell. In 1946, Orwell writes, "What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art." In these years, Orwell writes about-- and often participates in or witnesses first-hand--a series of major events and crises. These include British imperialism in Burma, urban poverty in Europe, class inequality in England, the conflict between Socialism and Fascism in Spain, and the rise of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. In engaging all of these events, Orwell experiments with different literary forms, moving between fiction and non-fiction, novel and autobiography, essay and memoir, manifesto and fable, literature and journalism. Few writers demand such sustained and equal attention to text and context: in this course we will move back-and-forth between Orwell's varied writing and the urgent social and political contexts it addresses.

The course will focus on the paradigms of gender theory and intersectional theory in dialogue with selected premodern literary texts. The construction of gender roles and identities, the potential for social discrimination, and the negotiation of power relations are key aspects of pre-modern literature. On the one hand, these texts are highly heteronormative and ideologically centered on a certain form of heroic masculinity; on the other hand, they are replete with remarkable 'deviations' from this model. There are, for example, supernaturally gifted and powerful women, Amazons, figures with fluid sexuality and non-normative body images. These figures challenge the supposedly fixed social norms and stereotypes, but are often sanctioned though exclusion, violence and/or the deconstruction of their power and agency. Drawing on relevant theoretical texts (e.g. Judith Butler, Kimberle Crenshaw, Kathy Davis, Katharina Walgenbach), we will discuss central positions of gender and intersectional theory. These paradigms, which were developed for the analysis of gender conceptions and social injustices in modernity, will then inform our close readings of various literary texts/text excerpts (e.g. Parzival, Nibelungenlied, Eneasroman). All texts available in English.

From the renaissance antiquarian to the contemporary book historian, the relation of facts to fictions has occupied and troubled literary scholars. Does historicism necessarily confine us to period specialty, or might a reexamination of the theoretical and material grounds of literary-historical method provide sound alternatives for experimentation? We will read key theoretical texts from Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Burkhardt, Foucault, Jameson, Hartman, Dinshaw, and others alongside works from Shakespeare, Holinshed, Browne, Camden.

The legal censorship of literature is on the rise again. But current efforts have their roots in a range of statutes from the last hundred and fifty years. In this course, we read politically significant literature that was subject to censorship alongside the various legal instruments used to censor them. These include more familiar statues like obscenity and sedition, as well as less likely suspects like libel law, customs agencies, and even blasphemy! If you enjoy fiction and are considering law school, this course is for you!

What is at stake when we identify ancient, medieval, or early modern works as proto-novelistic, especially when such texts encompass the wondrous, the mystical, the factual, and/or didactic? What do the "prosaic" dimensions of prose fiction disclose about our conceptions or history, truth, or reality? Readings for this course may include (in English translation where applicable) Lucian, A True History; Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe; Cervantes, Don Quixote; Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller; Hooke, Micrographia; Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year; Austen, Persuasion.

This course introduces students to the major features of Gothic narrative, a form that emerges at the same time as the Enlightenment, and that retains its power into our present. Surveying Gothic novels, as well as novellas and short stories with Gothic elements, we will learn about the defining features of the form and investigate its meaning in the cultural imagination. Gothic narratives, the course will suggest, examine the power of irrational forces in a secular age: forces that range from barbaric human practices, to supernatural activity, to the re-enchantment of modern existence. We will also consider the importance for Gothic authors and readers of the relation among narrative. spectacle and the visual arts. Primary works may include Ann Radcliffe's <e>The Italian, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey</e>, Victor Hugo's <e>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</e>, E.T.A. Hoffman's <e>The Sandman</e>, Mary Shelly's <e>Frankenstein</e>, and Edgar Allen Poe's <e>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym</e>. We may also do a section on vampires, including Bram Stoker's <e>Dracula</e>, and its remake in film by F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog. Critical selections by Edmund Burke, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Terry Castle, among others.

In this course, we will read select works from the mature phase of Henry James's fiction. This body of work is among the greatest and most profound fictional art in English. Its style is also sometimes found boring or unreadable. Unquestionably, the prose is difficult, with sentences so complex, wandering, and ambiguous, that the sense may be hard to construe. While little overt action occurs, topics illuminated include love, money, sex-gender-sexuality, evil, and other major themes of modern life. We will do our best to plumb these works' beauty, strangeness, artistry, and their subtlest meanings. Recommended for very advanced and searching students and readers. Please enroll if you find difficult prose manageable and rewarding, and you are prepared to have fiction confront you with some of the deepest questions of life without offering clear or certain answers.