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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.

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 Thiong¿o, Assia Djebar, Abdulrazak Gurnah (winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature), Leila Lalami, and Sulaiman Addonia, among others."

This course will take a close look at Toni Morrison's oeuvre to explore question of Modernism, Postmodernism, and World Literature. Texts to be looked at will include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Paradise, Beloved, Love, and Playing in the Dark, among others.

Reading and discussion of selected works of contemporary literature (fiction) and philosophy that engage concepts of modern physics grounded in relativity and quantum theory. This is intended as a seminar that mixes students from physical sciences and the arts/humanities, with no specific prerequisites-- we will discuss the physics invoked by works of fiction and philosophy in a conceptually rigorous but non-mathematical way. How do writers of speculative fiction make sense of challenging ontological claims from empirical science, what implications do they explore, and how is the worldview of theoretical physics augmented or contested?

Introduction to media theory by way of some of its key texts and themes, with particular emphasis on how questions of medium, media, and mass media might be useful to literary studies in particular - that is, the study of predominantly textual artifacts. Works by Innis, McLuhan, Derrida, Adorno, Kittler, Hayles, Flusser and others.

Computational approaches to fiction have given us a suite of new methods for understanding the role of space in literature. In this class, we will explore how the "spatial humanities" leverages these developments to aid us in identifying and exploring places within the imagined world of the novel. We will explore how named entity recognition and embedding spaces can be used to identify the places with the goal of extracting all place information, real or imaged, from a corpus of novels. We will also investigate visualization methods for spatial data (Geographic Information Systems/GIS, network theory) and study how a sense of space affords us new perspectives on the objects we study.

An introduction to modernism, focusing on the novel. Modernist studies has been eager to explore various axes of expansion, geographic (beyond Europe), temporal (beyond the early twentieth century), and cultural (across the divide between "high" and "low" realms of culture). The class will focus both on familiar modernist such as James, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner; we'll also look at case studies of potential forms of expansion (temporal: James Baldwin; geographic: Mulk Raj Anand; and others); secondary sources will focus on recent developments that stretch the boundaries of the field of modernist studies.

For Stegner fellows in the writing program. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.