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Exploration of various post45 literary phenomena with special attention to broader conceptual models in and by which they might be interpreted.

What are we to make of the fact that individual literary texts always come to us as instances of larger generic forms? Why have some texts been thought more "generic" than others? Reading some key texts in the history of genre theory, this class will ponder these questions with specific reference to the modern novel.

This graduate seminar examines the field-defining scholarship and fiction of creative and cultural critic, Sylvia Wynter, a former director of Africa & African American Studies at Stanford, Wynter's influential essays on literature, on social justice, on the place of technology, and on the nature of humanity all have special relevance for contemporary debates about the relation of the critic to the world.

After its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether the law and literature movement would retain vitality. Within the last few decades there has, however, been an explosion of energy in the field, which has expanded beyond the boundaries of the literary text narrowly conceived and incorporated a range of other genres and humanistic approaches. While the U.S. origins of the movement had tied it more closely to a liberal tradition and the role of the judge, recent engagements with law and literature have looked to work from the Global South, questioned the centrality of cases and judicial decisions, and asked what law and literature might look like outside of liberalism. This course will begin with the classic account of law and literature as framed by twentieth-century jurist Benjamin Cardozo and scholars Robert Cover and Martha Nussbaum, then examine alternatives. Primary texts to be considered include, among others, Bertolt Brecht's The Exception and the Rule, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, The Murder Case of Xu Qiuying, and the Constitution of the White Earth Nation. Nearly every session will pair recent scholarship in the field with a literary or artistic work. This class is limited to 22 students, with an effort made to have students from SLS (16 students will be selected by lottery) and six non-law students by consent of instructor. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. Cross-listed with English ( ENGLISH 350) and LAW (3517).

(Same as LAW 7014.) The guiding question of this course will be how we should think about the role of the U.S. Constitution in American law and American life. In considering this issue, we will address debates about constitutional interpretation (including both originalism and living constitutionalism), the nature and features of constitutional change within the American context, the role of federalism and the separation of powers in the constitutional scheme, and the nature of American constitutionalism as opposed to English and continental European models. We will tackle these debates in the context of some specific contemporary controversies about the Constitution, including: How do the civil rights movement and other social movements impact our understanding of the Constitution?; Does the Constitution reject a European-style inquisitorial process in favor of an Anglo-American vision of due process?; How important is consensus within the Supreme Court to establishing the legitimacy of constitutional meanings?; Why do we have nine Supreme Court justices, and; What is the Constitution, and how much does it include outside of the written document? Throughout we will be contemplating the extent to which our interpretation of the constitution depends on our vision of American democracy and the good society.

Why are the thoughts, feelings, and actions of English poets a millennium ago still so important in modern and contemporary poetry? Early English literature has long had an extraordinary influence on later writers from John Milton to Elizabeth Elstob, William Morris, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Evan Boland, Denise Levertov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Maria Dahvana Headley. This course will ask what is so special about these creative connections across time. We'll closely examine English lyrical, devotional, heroic, and fantastic poetry from the tenth to the twelfth centuries to consider the themes, ideas, and emotion that motivated later poets to adopt, adapt, and echo their age-old predecessors. Students will learn?through hard work?how to translate and evaluate Early English (getting an excellent knowledge of English grammar, lexis, and form into the bargain) in order to produce their own inventive poetry in the vein of inspired Old English shapers of verse.

The course considers representative works by ten poets from the Renaissance to the present. Each set of poems is framed by a problem in poetics discussed in recent theory, such as artifice and sound, the making of voice, the meaning of lyric, and the nature of historicist and biographical interpretation. Conversation in the seminar will move from particular poems to general problems and back again, according to the priorities of the members.

Can the novel, as genre, be conceptualized or critically synthesized? This course will approach such a daunting question from its two necessary starting-points: fiction and theory. On the one hand, we'll take up several of those major novels that have so often been viewed as aesthetically foundational: most likely Don Quixote, Emma, Madame Bovary and The Brothers Karamazov. On the other hand, we'll read the major theoretical statements of Lukacs (Theory of the Novel, Studies in European Realism, The Historical Novel) and Bakhtin (The Dialogical Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics), as well as text-specific criticism. This small group of texts might be seen as both necessary and insufficient to the largest questions of the genre. Our focus will be on closely reading and engaging each text in its inviting and demanding singularity and in building an open, imaginative and wide-ranging dialogue between fictions and theories. (This course might be followed by a class the next year on History and Theory of the Novel: Experiments, extending these questions in a number of further formal, geographic and chronological directions).

This seminar considers the tremendous linguistic diversity of the African continent and the cultural, political, and socioeconomic dilemmas that define the question of language policy in Africa since decolonization. In the modern world, some languages die, and others are killed. In this course, we will ask how the slow or rapid death of a language - the phenomenon known as linguicide - is a crucial but underexplored dimension of colonialism and slavery in the Atlantic, Saharan, and Indian Ocean worlds. In my usage, the search for a mother tongue denotes an array of literary and linguistic efforts to unify disparate peoples and to heal the divisions of colonialism in Africa and its diaspora. This phrase names an aspiration for individual and collective restoration of selfhood through language. But this effort has come at the cost of intense internal conflict in the African world. The quest for linguistic restoration is a key determinant of internecine strife and civil war in Africa. In Sudan, for example, British colonial authorities employed indirect rule to elevate the Arabic-speaking Muslim populations in the northern regions at the expense of the linguistically and religiously diverse populations of southern Sudan. Over time, the south became politically subordinate to - and economically exploited by - the north, and this process of disenfranchisement fomented a protracted civil war of the late twentieth century that resulted in the secession, in 2011, of South Sudan from Sudan. How have creative writers, theorists, and policy makers sought to reconstitute the colonized self via language and linguistic practices such as state-imposed language rationalization policies or the collective recovery of lost languages? And how do these thinkers strive to resolve or reimagine ongoing antagonisms in literary form? This course ponders these questions via readings of key authors such as Ngugi wa Thiongo, Assia Djebar, Abdulrazak Gurnah (winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature), Leila Lalami, and Sulaiman Addonia, among others."