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Reading changes your life. Sometimes it's a specific book; sometimes it's a way of reading that's new and different. This course will introduce different ways we can read and write about books and media, and their life-changing potential. Designed as an introduction to literary studies, the class hopes to find the cure for how high school and college might have beaten the love of reading out of you, and to help you find a way to love reading again in an environment that (while preparing you for upper-level English classes) stresses pleasure and joy. Emphasis will be on building skills, finding creative ways to respond to your own reading interests, and creating community. This is a course for bookworms and wannabe bookworms who want to know what to do next about how books move them.

Some of the best novels of the last 75 years were written by people who were students or professors at Cornell. Reading a selection of these great Cornell novels, we will also be tracing the history and development of post-WWII American fiction. Readings will include classic works by V. Nabokov, K. Vonnegut, J. Russ, T. Morrison, T. Pynchon, and W. Gass, as well as several more recent (some very recent) works by your fellow Cornellians. Perhaps in a few years your work will be on the list.

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will in some way address the subject of sexual politics. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with an aspect of culture or subculture. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

From literature to literacy, comics to archival work, writing can build bridges between campus and communities. Sections vary in topic, and issues may include healthcare, social justice, environmental studies, and others, but all will enable students to work with community partners. Students will learn skills in critical thinking and reflection, writing for specialized and non-specialized audiences, community engagement, and cultural awareness.Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

What stories should we tell about climate change, and how should we tell them? What forms of communication will convince a broad public to accept scientific consensus, to overcome cynicism or apathy, and to take collective action, beyond simply raising awareness or changing individual behavior? We will examine and practice with the powers (and limits) of selected media and types of data, both textual and visual, qualitative and quantitative, such as: human-interest narratives, photographs, tables and graphs, journalistic and technical writing, social-media posts, public performances. Such strategies can engage our imagination as well as our reason, provoking not only fear or despair but also optimism and hope. Assignments may include syntheses of articles and analyses of media artifacts; public-facing documents or exhibits; and research presentations.

Our human abilities to communicate about nature, the environment, and climate change are challenged by the scale and scope of the topics. This course enables students to read, write, and design forms of communication that engage with the environment, in order to inform, advocate, and to connect with our world. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

What does it mean to be a good reader or a good writer in college? In each section of this course, students receive extensive guidance from their instructors in the discovery and practice of helpful methods for fully exploring and appreciating what they read as well as guidance in planning, drafting, and writing essays about what is read and discussed in class. Each section of the course focuses on a particular topic drawn from a range of fields (e.g., literature, history, film, music). Reading assignments are limited in order to allow ample time for discussion and for personal attention to student writing.

In The Personal Essay, our topics are autobiographical in their origins; we write from personal experience, to think about it and to articulate it, in a style useful in all modes of college-admission and college-work. Our writing practice is both creative and analytical. We discover how writers use drafting and revision as a process of thinking, and in weekly workshops we practice the kind of revision that can make us more independent as writers and more capable of giving helpful suggestions to friends who are also writers. The most important texts for the course are the essays of students enrolled in it; but we also read and discuss personal memoirs. This seminar offers students from diverse backgrounds a forum in which to move beyond accustomed boundaries, finding agency not only through use of the first-person voice but through increased confidence in their abilities as writers.

How do we understand the reality of others? For that matter, how do we know and understand our own experience? One answer is writing: writing can crystalize lived experience for others. We can record our observations, our thoughts, our feelings and insights and hopes and failures, to communicate them, to understand them. In this course, we will read nonfiction narratives that explore and shape the self and reality, including the personal essay, memoir, autobiography, documentary film, and journalism. We will write essays that explore and explain these complex issues of presenting one's self and others.

What does it mean to be healthy? How do we describe our pain? Who becomes a physician? The practice of medicine isn't confined to scientific knowledge: it raises difficult questions about culture, identity, and bodies, and the stories we tell about all of these. This course will focus on works of literature and media to think about how medical care changes across time and place, and to explore images and narratives that shape our expectations about illness and health. Short writing assignments and longer essays will develop your critical thinking, strengthen your writing skills, and build your awareness of the complex cultural landscape of medical care.

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with an aspect of American culture. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, film, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

How does race inform the way we understand the world around us? How do writers explore their experiences of race and colonialism to challenge conventional notions of nation, citizenship, knowledge, and self? In this class, we engage materials that complicate our ideas of race in order to imagine new forms of identity, social life, and political possibility. We engage with creators who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, or from the Global South. The works we study may include podcasts, graphic novels, memoirs, poetry, plays, or films. Writing projects may be critical, creative, or research-based, as we develop our understanding of race and identity and by extension our capacities as writers.

Reading is experiencing a new revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We still read paper books, but we also read by scrolling on screen, through search engines, and in images and memes. What kinds of texts are emerging in this new era, and how do we read them? How do writing-and our ways of reading-connect with the urgent topics before us now: technology and social control, truth and media, climate change and apocalypse, identity, equality, and human rights? This course will examine the past twenty years of writing in a variety of genres, printed and/or online, from fiction to memoir to poetry and beyond. As we read, we will explore and discover the forms that our own writing can take in response.

From TV news to rock lyrics, from ads to political speeches to productions of Shakespeare, the forms of culture surround us at every moment. In addition to entertaining us or enticing us, they carry implied messages about who we are, what world we live in, and what we should value. Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all are built on the assumption that learning to decode these messages is a survival skill in today's media-saturated world and also excellent training for reading literature. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

What can a short story do that no other art form can do? We all consume and produce stories. To write about how narrative works, both within and against tradition, is to touch the core of identity, the quick of what makes us human. Storytelling informs all writing. Engaging diverse authors, we will practice not only reading sensitively and incisively but also making evidence-based arguments with power and grace, learning the habits of writing, revision, and documentation that allow us to join public or scholarly conversation. We will embrace shortness as a compression of meaning to unpack. Our own writing may include close analyses of texts, syntheses that place stories in critical dialogue, and both creative and research-based projects.

What happens when we adapt books into movies, write fan-fiction about video games, or create poetry about paintings? What happens when we write about one genre as though it were another? We have been writing about images and making images about writing for a long time. In addition to conventional types of art and literature like paintings, novels, or poetry, other forms such as film, video games, exhibitions, and virtual reality offer lively areas for analysis. In this class, we will engage with widely varied cultural forms-including, perhaps, experimental poetry, medieval manuscripts, graphic novels, memoirs, plays, films, podcasts, and more-to develop multiple media literacies as we sharpen our own writing about culture, literature, and art.

Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will engage in some way with the subject of British literature. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, or drama, and many include a mix of literary genres. Students will practice close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

Reading lists vary from section to section, but close, attentive, and imaginative reading and writing are central to all. Some sections may deal with fiction, poetry, or drama, or include a mix of literary kinds. By engaging in discussions and working with varied writing assignments, students will explore major modes and genres of English poetry and prose, and may learn about versification techniques, rhetorical strategies, performance as interpretation, and thematic and topical concerns. In the process students will expand the possibilities of their own writing. Sections that invite students to study and write critically about plays or films in a variety of dramatic idioms and cultural traditions may require attendance at screenings or at live productions by the theatre department. All sections are taught by Department of English faculty. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.

English 2010 is an introduction to key works of English and American literature for majors and non-majors. Here's a chance to study some of the greatest hits of the literary tradition in a single semester: Beowulf; Arthurian legends; works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, Ben Franklin, Sageyowatha, Phillis Wheatley. Reading across history and geography allows us to ask big questions about literature and society. How did literature factor in England's transformation from a cultural backwater into a global empire? What role does literature play in disciplining, civilizing, and colonizing subjects? When and how is it used to delight, resist, and rebel? From our reading, we will create a toolkit of literary terms and techniques. And through a series of exercises, students will get hands-on experience with literary experimentation.

Groucho Marx once said, Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. What is the literary significance of comedy? Why do we use it, and why do we enjoy it? What's funny-and who decides what classifies as funny? Does humor bring us together-spanning the gaps between cultures, identities, and time periods-or does it set us further apart? This course will use comedy as a lens through which to explore the development of literatures in English from 1750 to the present. To investigate these questions, we'll be studying texts by celebrated humorists, such as Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ali Wong. We will also explore the uses and effects of humor in works by less traditionally comedic authors, including Dean Mohamed, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Vladimir Nabokov, Shirley Jackson, Carmen Maria Machado, Larissa FastHorse, and Helen Oyeyemi.

Science fiction is not merely a literary genre but a whole way of being, thinking, and acting in the modern world. This course explores classic and contemporary science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hunger Games alongside a rich array of fiction and films from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Our discussions will position these works vis-?is seminal thinkers, ranging from Plato to Descartes and Donna Haraway to Paul Crutzen, who ask the same questions as science fiction does about our selves, our world, and our future.

More than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare remains an inescapable part of world culture. His influence can be traced at every level, from traditional art forms like theater, poetry, and opera to popular genres like Broadway musicals, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romcoms. Contemporary adaptations and bold re-stagings of his plays abound that reflect his deep understanding of sexual and gender fluidity, racial and class antipathy, and the complex workings of political power. In this course, we'll focus on five plays that continue to generate creative responses across many media: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Romances were, essentially, medieval science fiction and fantasy writing. They were how authors in the Middle Ages imagined things beyond rational understanding that, at the same time, greatly extended the possibilities of the world around them. The course will survey some medieval narratives concerned with representative voyages to the otherworld or with the impinging of the otherworld upon ordinary experience. The syllabus will normally include some representative Old Irish otherworld literature: selections from The Mabinogion; selections from the Lays of Marie de France; Chretian de Troye's Erec, Yvain, and Lancelot; and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will finish by looking at a few contemporary otherworld romances, such as selections from J.R.R. Tolkein. All readings will be in modern English. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Why is popular culture so obsessed with the Middle Ages? Why are new fantasy worlds so often medievalesque? Why are we compelled to imitate, reinvent, and even relive aspects of the medieval past? What do these continuities and repetitions reveal about contemporary narratives of progress and identity formation (race, gender)? Examples of popular medieval forms we will examine include: premodern fandom (relics, saints' lives, heroic culture); fantasy series and movies (Game of Thrones; Harry Potter); histories of medieval epochs (e.g. The Saxon Stories; The Vikings); Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; gaming culture (Dungeons and Dragons to Assassin's Creed); medieval-inspired satire (Monty Python, The Knight's Tale); Arthuriana; and children's films (Shrek, Frozen). Assignments will include medieval texts and translations as well as theoretical, analytical, and creative writing. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musical-and how in turn musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent.

In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

Animal companions are signs of our modernity. They can confirm our humanity, or call it into question. This course studies modern pet keeping and the human relation to animals. We will begin with the eighteenth-century pet keeping fad, and turn to a focus on the literature of pets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moving from questions of how literature can represent animals to discussions of the social dimensions of petkeeping and the ethics of animal rights. The course will include a discussion of the modern veterinarian's relationship with the companion animal and its owner, and a class forum on the ethics of the treatment of animals. Readings will include works by William Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Albert Payson Terhune, and Paul Auster.

What makes us laugh? What made people laugh in the past, and how has it changed? This course will take a long view of comedy, juxtaposing its great popularity in early modern England with its appeal in the present day. Beginning with Shakespeare's comedies of mistaken identity, we will grapple along the way with the diverse pleasures offered by clowns, jokes, satire, the Simpsons, and television sitcoms. Readings will explore how and why humor works and consider themes such as the nature of identity, cruelty and physical comedy, the potential of humor for political critique, and what it means to take pleasure (or discomfort) from a literary or artistic object.

This course aims to give students a good historical and critical grounding in Shakespeare's drama and its central and continuing place in Renaissance culture and beyond. We will read poetry and primarily plays representing the shape of Shakespeare's career as it moves through comedies, histories, tragedies, and a romance. Specific plays include The Two Gentleman of Verona, Richard II, Henry IV (Part 1), Henry V, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth and The Tempest. We will focus on dramatic forms (genres), Shakespeare's themes, and social and historical contexts. The course combines lectures and hands-on work in weekly discussions. While we will view some scenes from film adaptations, the main focus is on careful close interaction with the language of the plays. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).

Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them.

This introductory course to the study of the Caribbean will begin with examinations of what constitutes the Caribbean and an understanding of Caribbean space. We will then study its peoples, contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples, African enslavement and resistance, Indian indentureship and other forced migrations. By mid semester we will identify a cross-section of leading thinkers and ideas. We will also pay attention to issues of identity, migration and the creation of the Caribbean diaspora. Constructions of tourist paradise and other stereotypes and the development of critical Caribbean institutions and national development will be discussed as we read and listen to some representative oral and written literature of the Caribbean and view some relevant film on the Caribbean. This inter-disciplinary survey provides students with a foundation for more specialized coursework on the Caribbean offered in our department.

Dragons? Spaceships? Bodies that change gendered characteristics at will? Vampire archivists? Speculative fiction (sci fi, fantasy) imagines the world not as it is but as it should be. It can imagine worlds where trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people thrive without danger or difficulty (and has done so for a long time). What do such worlds look like? How does it feel to read narratives where the gender binary does not work the way it does in our present day? This course surveys very recent trans- and non-binary-authored narratives. Readings may include (Cornell alumna) Ryka Aoki's Light from Uncommon Stars, Isaac Fellman's Dead Collections (the trans vampire archivists), and short stories by authors like Torrey Peters and Daniel Lavery. Visits from authors being planned.

This course will introduce students to Black Queer literatures and media. Since these materials decenter whiteness and patriarchal heterosexism, they often seem illegible to those approaching them from the perspective of the dominant culture. We will start with foundational texts that outline the parameters of our dominant culture. We will then discuss Black Queer contemporary novels, films, essays, and visual art in order to understand the ways that these works move past the limitations of those parameters. By engaging these literatures and media, this course investigates the exciting possibilities that emerge from understanding alternative ways of being and living in our world. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

This class will consider the relationship between literature in its emerging new media formats by looking specifically at the shared and divergent narrative strategies that old and new mediums use to construct worlds and tell stories. Over the course of the semester, we will consider the history of material formats, look at how video game play has transformed novels, and consider some of the larger questions emerging from video game studies. What are games and where do they fit within cultural, literary, racial, social, and gender studies? How do technologies and mediums affect access to and experience of story, aesthetics, and design? What are the cultural and social ideas communicated through games and how do the means of their production function within global economies?

How is the memory of the Holocaust kept alive by means of the literary and visual imagination? Within the historical context of the Holocaust and how and why it occurred, we shall examine major and widely read Holocaust narratives that have shaped the way we understand and respond to the Holocaust. We also study ethical and psychological issues about how and why people behave in dire circumstances. We shall begin with first-person reminiscences-Wiesel's Night , Levi's Survival at Auschwitz, and The Diary of Anne Frank-before turning to realistic fictions such as Kineally's Schindler's List (and Spielberg's film), Kertesz's Fateless, Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Ozick's The Shawl. We shall also read the Kafkaesque parable of Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegelman's Maus books as well as W.G, Sebald's Austerlitz. We shall conclude with several episodes of the acclaimed 2009-2017 French TV series A French Village.

The production of North American Indigenous literatures began long before European colonization, and persists in a variety of printed, sung, carved, painted, written, spoken, and digital media. From oral traditions transmitted through memory and mnemonics to contemporary genres and media, Native North American authors offer Indigenous perspectives on social, political, and environmental experience, through deft artistry and place-specific aesthetics. Our attention will focus on the contexts from which particular Native American literatures emerge, the ethics to consider when entering Indigenous intellectual territory, and close attention to common themes and techniques that frequently appear in contemporary Native American literature. Readings will feature a range of novels, poetry, short fiction, graphic novel/comics, and film.

Each year this seven-week, one-credit course focuses on a different novel by Nobel Laureate and Cornell alumna Toni Morrison. We read and discuss each novel in the context of Morrison's life and career, her place in African American, US, and world literature, and her exploration of crucial questions regarding identity, race, gender, history, oppression, and autonomy. Please see the class roster for the current semester's featured novel. Students will read the novel closely, with attention to its place in Morrison's career and in literary and cultural history.

What do recent calls to decolonize the university mean? This course considers this imperative from a historical perspective by tracing the economic, psychological, and cultural significance of decolonization in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and theory. We will begin by examining resistance to colonialism and imperialism in the early twentieth century, before turning to mid-century independence movements. We will then ask how the failures of these movements precipitated what we now call postcolonial studies, the academic analysis of empires and their aftermaths, with an array of related historical topics addressing nation, class, and gender. We will follow these lines of inquiry into our so-called age of globalization to see how they have prompted a further set of questions about race, diaspora, indigeneity, and the environment.

This course will introduce both a variety of writings and media by Asian North American authors and some critical issues concerning the production and reception of Asian American texts. Working with a variety of genres, we will be asking questions about the relation between literary forms and the socio-historical context within which they take on their meanings, and about the historical formation of Asian American identities.

This course looks at the American Gothic tradition as showing us the fissures in early American political life specifically around the issues of slavery and Native American land rights. While Gothic literature is often relegated to the role of entertainment, it also reveals the ways in which American culture was, as Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, shaped by the presence of the racial other. The Gothic also offers a space through which to offer not just clever observations but scathing critiques by augmenting the sense of the monstrous underlying grand sentiments of American Exceptionalism.

This course will introduce students to African American literary traditions in the space that would become North America. From early freedom narratives and poetry to Hip-Hop and film, we will trace a range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We'll read broadly: poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, newspapers, and the like. We will ask: How do authors create, define, and even exceed a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

MacArthur Genius grant winner Octavia Butler is famously known as a science fiction writer, but her novels, short stories and essays both adhere to and disrupt expectations in the genre. Throughout her writing career, Butler explored themes of space travel, time travel, African indigeneity, gender, race, spirituality, and ecological degradation. This class, will introduce students to Octavia Butler's work and the creative fields she helped spawn. Additionally, we will investigate and contextualize these themes alongside the scholarly fields of Black feminist studies, the environmental humanities, Black speculation fiction, Afrofuturism, disability studies and more!

This class aims to approach the literature and culture of the Cold War as the birth of the present Age of Information, as well as the origin of modern notions of privacy that are now being superseded. We will begin with Hiroshima and the several forms of American anti-communism, and proceed from containment culture to the beginning of the counterculture, and from atomic weapons to the start of the environmental movement. Units of study will include intelligence (espionage), advertising (publicity), civil rights, and the public questioning of gender roles. We will also view a few films and discuss music and painting of the period. Authors include James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Marshall McLuhan, John Okada, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith, and Rachel Carson.

This course introduces students to major American poets from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is designed for anyone wanting to deepen their knowledge of and appreciation for poetry while also addressing its relationship to modern American social and cultural history. It addresses questions about what poetry is for, why it is often difficult, how it is related to language-play as a basic human drive that engages with personal anxieties, bodily rhythms, social and existential tensions, and the riddles of existence. Another through-line of this course is the relationship of poetry to democracy in the United States.

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, Thinking Media offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

Do we have a duty to make strangers feel at home? Should we give others welcome even when they seem alien and threatening? And how does it feel to be homeless, cast out-refused hospitality? These questions have a long history, from ancient Egypt and the Hebrew Bible to debates about immigration in our own time. The first half of the course, ENGL 2705, which can be taken as a separate 2-credit course, will track this idea from ancient times to the modern period, bringing together literary and religious texts and visual art; the second half, ENGL 2706, also offered as a 2-credit unit, will focus on treatments of hospitality in fiction, film, and other media in our own time, including Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Stephen Frear's film, Dirty Pretty Things.

What does it mean to welcome strangers today? How does it feel to be the outsider or the exile? How should we imagine hospitality for the refugee, the business traveler, the homeless person, the guest worker, the asylum seeker, the tourist? As border controls tighten and questions of belonging become increasingly vexed, writers and artists are exploring the hardest questions about hospitality. This half of the course, offered as a 2 credit unit, will focus on treatments of hospitality in fiction, film, and other media in our own time, including Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Stephen Frear's film, Dirty Pretty Things.

Homer and Euclid, Stein and Einstein, manifestos and manifolds, negative capability and imaginary numbers. This seminar exists somewhere in the ampersand between Arts & Sciences and will concern the study of numbers, poetic and otherwise. We will consider poets from a range of global traditions as theorists and makers of numerical patterns, and explore mathematical texts for their ludic and literate foundations. With help from diverse ethno-mathematical traditions and contemporary literary/number theorists, we will study, for example, quirky verse constructed around the Fibonacci sequence but also, and more crucially, we will learn how to count on one another as readers.

What does it mean to put a life story on the page? How does memory shape the present, and vice versa? What stories resonate in memoir, and why is it such a popular genre? This course will address these questions through reading memoir, a genre that became widely popular in the late Twentieth Century but that has deep historical roots. We will explore the questions it raises primarily through reading contemporary memoirs by writers such as Primo Levi, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Ondaatje, Alison Bechdel, and others.

An historical study of children's literature from the 17th century to the present, principally in Europe and America, which will explore changing literary forms in relation to the social history of childhood. Ranging from oral folktale to contemporary novelistic realism (with some glances at film narrative), major figures may include Perrault, Newbery, the Grimms, Andersen, Carroll, Alcott, Stevenson, Burnett, Kipling, the Disney studio, E. B. White, C. S. Lewis, Sendak, Silverstein, Mildred Taylor, and Bette Greene. We'll also encounter a variety of critical models-psychoanalytic, materialist, feminist, structuralist-that scholars have employed to explain the variety and importance of children's literature. Finally, we will consider how the idea of the child has evolved over this period.

Stories are the most popular way we make sense of our lives and the world around us, and this introductory, discussion-based course focuses on stories told in different media - especially literary and cinematic -- to explore ethical issues. We see how, in everyday life, people have experienced moral quandaries and sought to understand and resolve them. We examine short texts and videos about our duties not only to others but also to ourselves - as well as to non-human creatures and our planet. We view films that focus on: acts of conscience and dissent (Official Secrets; Spotlight); organized political resistance (Gandhi; Amazing Grace); gendered self-deception ( TV's Mad Men); and go on to compare representations of major socio-political events (Central Park Five; When They See Us).

This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the The Story of Sinuhe and The Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the Travels of Ibn Battuta, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, and The Arabian Nights. We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

If you love animals but are sad because you can't keep them in your dorm room, poems may well be the perfect substitute. Evoking the bodies and spirits of non-human creatures has always been one of the special domains of poetry. In this course, we'll consider a wide range of poems that take many different approaches to unlocking the mysterious otherness of animals, using all the tricks and techniques of this venerable art: rhythm, form, metaphor, observation and imagination. In discussions and essays we'll explore the ways in which poems about animals raise major questions of ethics and epistemology, while achieving the primal magic of translating life into language. Poets to be studied include Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Lawrence, Moore, Bishop, Hughes, and many others.

Language is a skin, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.

From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present moment, movies - and in particular Hollywood - have profoundly influenced the ways in which people see, think and talk about the world. Focusing mostly on Hollywood film, this course introduces the study of American cinema from multiple perspectives: as an economy and mode of production; as an art form that produces particular aesthetic styles; as a cultural institution that comments on contemporary issues and allows people to socialize. We will consider the rise of Hollywood in the age of mass production; the star system; the introduction of sound and the function of the soundtrack; Hollywood's rivalry with television; censorship; the rise of independent film, etc. Weekly screenings introduce major American genres (e.g. science fiction, film noir, the musical) and directors (e.g. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino).

In Eddie Murphy's Coming to America, Africa is a place of nobility, where even lions are at peace with lambs. In contrast, Leonardo DeCaprio's Blood Diamond is a violent look at the role the demand for diamonds has played in destabilizing mineral-rich African countries. But if Hollywood has long been concerned with depicting Africa in particular ways, African filmmakers are at the same time creating their own stories. Popular and scholarly film critics are also contributing to the battle over who speaks for Africa. In this course we will explore these competing images of Africa, questions of imagination versus reality, and the extent to which artists should, if at all, be responsible to the subject of their art.

POW! ZAP! DOOM! This is a class about how we can draw together, studying a medium that is based in the practice, in all senses, of drawing together. We will read Pulitzer winning memoirs and NSFW gutter rubbish. We will trace the history of sequential art from about 1898 to the present, including caricature, pop art, and meme cultures, Wonder Woman and Wimmin's Comix, Archie and archives. Studying comics requires us to entangle disciplines and to make things: graphic design, marketing, media studies, law, education, and various illuminated cosmologies. What is this medium that teaches us to read the page anew, to speak in bubbles, to witness and play with apocalypse, to enjoy our suspension in the infinite, and to indulge in graphic sensations?

An introductory course in the theory, practice, and reading of fiction, poetry, and allied forms. Both narrative and verse readings are assigned. Students will learn to savor and practice the craft of poetry and narrative writing, developing techniques that inform both. Some class meetings may feature peer review of student work, and instructors may assign writing exercises or prompts.

This course offers guidance and an audience for students who wish to gain skill in expository writing-a common term for critical, reflective, investigative, and creative nonfiction. Each section provides a context for writing defined by a form of exposition, a disciplinary area, a practice, or a topic intimately related to the written medium. Course members will read in relevant published material and write and revise their own work regularly, while reviewing and responding to one another's. Students and instructors will confer individually throughout the term. Topics differ for each section. Please see the Class Roster for more details. This course satisfies requirements for the English minor but not for the English major. Taken with the instructor’s permission, and with the letter grade option, it satisfies First-Year Writing Seminar requirements for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. If counted toward the First-Year Writing Seminar requirement, the course will not count toward ALC-AS.

Punk Culture-comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts-represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary.

This undergraduate course introduces the formal and topical innovations that African cinema has experienced since its inception in the 1960s. Sections will explore, among others, Nollywood, sci-fi, and ideological cinema. Films include: Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako, Mohamed Camara's Dakan, Djibril Diop Mambety's Touki-Bouki, Cheikh Oumar Sissoko's Finzan, Anne-Laure Folly's Women with Open Eyes, Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart.

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Where do we get our images of poets, and of poetry? Along with the images we find in poems themselves, how do poetry and poets figure in fiction and film, in music and popular culture? How do such figures inform both the images we find in poems and poetry's own image? What is poetry's relation to other genres, discourses, and disciplines, to self and language, history and politics? Exploring such issues in verse and prose, in fiction, film, and other media, including among others Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Parra, and Bola?the course will arc toward such impactful contemporaries as Cathy Park Hong, Claudia Rankine, Layla Long Soldier, Kendrick Lamar, Ilya Kaminsky, Jenny Xie, the website-based Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and AI-generated poetry.

This course will explore how in the body of world literature, film and music humans have construed, narrated, imagined the end of time and of the world and sometimes its new beginning. Spanning from ancient epic through colonial narratives to twentieth century works and contemporary science fiction, we will inquire, through our reading: what is a world? How does the labor of the imagination construct a world or the world and deconstruct or undo worlds? Readings will range widely across time and world space and include authors such as St John of Patmos, Messiaen, Columbus, Beckett, Gibson, Marquez, Murakami, Alexievich, Liu.

Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University the first American university, referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where any person can find instruction in any study. The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university.

This course provides an introduction to the theory of trauma, along with literary, artistic and clinical works that engage with traumatic experience. We will explore the enigmatic notion of an experience of catastrophe that is both deferred and repeated, that escapes immediate comprehension but insists on testimonial recognition. How does trauma require us to rethink our notions of history, memory, subjectivity, and language? Who speaks from the site of trauma, and how can we learn to listen its new forms of address? We begin with Freud's foundational studies and their reception across the 20th and 21st centuries, then examine a range of global responses reformulating individual and collective trauma in its social, historical and political contexts. Materials include theoretical, artistic, testimonial expression in various media.

An introduction to Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and the Icelandic family saga-the native heroic literary genre of Icelandic tradition. Texts will vary but will normally include the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, Hrafnkels Saga, Njals Saga, Laxdaela Saga, and Grettirs Saga. All readings will be in translation.

English has a recorded history longer and more variable than any other language, including poetry and prose as skillful as writings in any period. While learning the language (especially in the first half of the course) we will investigate writings that exploit the language's powers and complexities from the earliest pieces into early Middle English, when the language and its literary traditions disintegrated and began being reinvented at the Norman Conquest. We will also sample (in translation) Latin, Old Saxon, and Old Norse materials that fed the multilingual and multicultural world in which early English developed.

Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the darker side of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English.

Traces, fantasies, and nightmares of the Middle Ages filled 19th century American writings and persist today; this course moves between early American and actual medieval literature, seeking new perspectives on both. Southern chivalry? New England feudalism? Anglo-Saxons as models for racialized American identity-or identifications with anti-Norman Scottish warriors as models for abolition (as in the surname Douglass that Frederick Douglass chose from himself)? We'll linger over Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Douglass, and others while, in alternating stretches, we read some troubadours, Middle English romances, Chaucer, Malory, and actual medieval rebels.

Chaucer became known as the father of English poetry before he was entirely cold in his grave. Why is what he wrote more than six hundred years ago still riveting for us today? It's not just because he is the granddaddy of this language and its literature; it's because what he wrote was funny, fierce, thoughtful, political, philosophical and, oh yes, notoriously bawdy. We'll read some of Chaucer's brilliant early work, and then dig into his two greatest achievements: the epic Troilus and Crisyede, and The Canterbury Tales, his oft-censored panorama of medieval English life. Chaucer will be read in Middle English, which will prove surprisingly easy and pleasant.

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of blood in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood? In the course of trying to answer this and other questions of blood, we will read plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calder?e la Barca. Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

This course is designed to explore the relationship between ethics, politics, and aesthetics through careful attention to literary explorations of the complex problem of evil in a range of literary and visual texts including genres from myth through poetry and drama to painting and film. We will read and study excerpts of works from Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, through Shakespeare, Cervantes, Maria de Zayas, Leibniz, Milton, Hieronymous Bosch, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. The recurring questions for us along the way will be about the role of reading and interpretation in relation to the problem of evil and what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the richness of the real.

This course explores the relation between literary and utopian Enlightenment cultures in Western history. For each moment of rapid change, from Plato to the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century and beyond, we will focus on two texts: one which promoted the enlightened and revolutionary utopian social blueprint; and one offering an alternative model of transformation or a dystopian account of the utopian model. You will come away from this course having a chronologically wide and intellectually deep immersion in 2500 years of European philosophical and literary history. Throughout, you are encouraged to think about what resources we use to imagine social transformation and to ask if revolution is in fact the best way to effect social transformation.

The course focuses on Shakespeare's middle to late plays, from the problem comedies, through the great tragedies and romances. While we will pay particular attention to questions of dramatic form (genre) and historical context (including ways in which the plays themselves call context into question), the primary concentration will be on careful close readings of the language of the play-texts, in relation to critical questions of subjectivity, power, and art. On the way, we will encounter problems of sexuality, identity, emotion, the body, family, violence, politics, God, the nation, nature and money (not necessarily in that order).

A knowledge of the Bible's images, stories and themes is crucial to understanding not only the art and literature of many cultures, but also ancient and contemporary world politics. It is the world's most widely read book and a sacred text of three great religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. This course will offer students an introduction to the Bible's major historical, anthropological and literary contexts. Students will learn about the Bible's literary divisions and its main stories and characters as well as its ideas about faith, salvation, history and the end of time. We will use the New Oxford Annotated Bible for all course work.

Was Milton a revolutionary poet? During the English civil war, he wrote radical political pamphlets defending regicide, divorce, unlicensed printing, and religious dissent. Yet he also saw himself as the epic poet of English Protestantism. Modern readers tend to separate these two aspects of his writing but, for Milton, poetry was crucial to proper governance. In this course, we'll focus on how Milton reconciled the dual imperatives to resist illegitimate rule and to obey true authority. We'll learn about the poetic and rhetorical techniques that Milton used to distinguish paradox from contradiction, action from activity, and dissent from rebellion. And we'll consider the importance of this kind of thinking to political action and public life.

Explores major American playwrights from 1900 to 1960, introducing students to American theatre as a significant part of modern American cultural history. We will consider the ways in which theatre has contributed to the construction and deconstruction of a national identity. Similarly, we will examine the influence of the American Theatre on and in film. We will pay special attention to the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of the time period and discuss the shifting popularity of dramatic forms, including melodrama, realism, expressionism, absurdism, and the folk play, in the American theatre canon. Authors include O'Neill, Glaspell, Odets, Rice, Hellman, Hughes, Miller, Williams, and Albee, among others.

How has theatre shaped our notion of America and Americans in the second half of the 20th century and beyond? What role has politics played in the theatre? How has performance been used to examine concepts of identity, community, and nationality? And how and why have certain plays in this era been translated to the screen? In this course we will examine major trends in the American theatre from 1960 to the present. We will focus on theatre that responds directly to moments of social turmoil, including: the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Movements, Women's and Gender Equality Movements, and the AIDS epidemic. We will also explore the tensions between Broadway and alternative theatre production.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that students who have read Jane Austen must be in want of an opportunity to continue that delicious experience, and that those who have not read her novels should. This course explores Austen's characters, culture, and narrative art against the backdrop of films, novels, and poems which resonate with her fiction. We will investigate Austen's importance in literary history as well as her continuing attraction in the twenty-first century. By immersing ourselves in her fictional world we will enrich our experience of her novels and sharpen our awareness of the pleasures of reading.

This course will look at how literature based at sea helps both shape and challenge concepts of freedom and capital. By looking at the relationship between the sea-faring economy and its relationship to American Expansion and the history of enslavement we will explore how literature based at sea provided both a reflection and an alternate reality to land-based politics. While the main focus of the course will be nineteenth-century literature, we will also be exploring maritime literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its analogues in speculative fiction.

This course will begin with some of the earliest theoretical works on personal and historical trauma and pass through several traditions of interpretation (French, American, etc.). Then we will move to more recent attempts to rethink the theory of trauma as it crosses cultural and linguistic borders outside of Europe and the US. Among other questions we will consider the relations among personal, collective, and political trauma and address the imperatives and challenges of thinking trauma in a global context.

The nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary expansion of poetry in both Great Britain and the United States. Traditional forms like the ballad, the ode, and the elegy were given fresh life, as poets increasingly turned to the natural world for inspiration. At the same time the inner realms of mind, memory, and imagination were being explored by poets with unprecedented depth and precision. Nineteenth century poets also grappled with major social and political upheavals, from revolution and war to the struggle to abolish slavery throughout the English-speaking world. We will survey this rich and diverse body of work, focusing on prominent figures like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brownings, Tennyson, Whitman, Poe, and Dickinson, along with lesser-known poets who made significant contributions to its abundance.

Jane Eyre and zombies, A Christmas Carol in 3D, PBS miniseries: why is nineteenth-century fiction so un-dead? The plot of the Victorian novel—sexual betrayal, pathological greed, the sadistic damage wrought on helpless children— reflects wrenching social, scientific, and technological transformations whose global sweep rivals that of our own era’s conflicts. Intertwining domestic and imperial spaces, realistic fiction embodied the most innovative attempt to grasp and contain such seismic shifts in an entertaining idiom for a rising mass readership. These works refract the cultural debates of the age and suggest sources of redemption. We can take pleasure in them even as we critically analyze how the Victorians live now. Likely authors include: Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, Collins, Hardy, and Stoker.

Though it now seems a positive character trait, curiosity was long considered a dangerous vice. What happened to bring about such a dramatic change in how curiosity was valued? What might make this desire to know seem wither dangerous or promising? This class places these questions at the center of its exploration of science and literature. We will explore the lives of historical scientists alongside literature's myriad stories of men and women who knew too much, including spies, mad scientists, and nosy children, from Adam and Eve and Alice in Wonderland to Doctor Faustus and Doctor Frankenstein.

Critical, historical and interdisciplinary study of major works by Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Wilde, Hardy, and Hopkins. The emphasis will be on the joy of close reading of wonderful, powerful, and innovative individual works, all of which I love to teach. We shall place the authors and works within the context of literary, political, cultural, and intellectual history. The course will seek to define the development of literary modernism (mostly but not exclusively in England), and relate literary modernism in England to that in Europe and America as well as to other intellectual developments. We shall be especially interested in the relationship between modern literature and modern painting and sculpture. Within this course, I work closely with students as they select and develop the topics on which they write essays.

This course offers an opportunity to read in depth two major writers of the twentieth century, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Friends and one-time collaborators in the New York City of the 1920s, each had important careers that extended long after the Harlem Renaissance period in which they achieved early renown. This class will survey the myriad genres in which each writer worked (short stories, poetry, novels, drama, critical writing, folklore and anthropology). And it will also consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which both writers achieved early renown and which their work critically contested. The class concludes by examining the reading works of later major authors (Toni Morrison, Harryette Mullen) who drew directly with Hughes' and Hurston's legacy.

One way to think of African American literature is to recognize that certain themes and motifs recur and tell a story that one can study across time from slavery to freedom. Solid literacies in this field not only provide valuable interpretive contexts for analyzing various aspects of African American and diasporan life and culture, but can reinforce work in a range of other fields, from Africana studies to American literature. Additionally, they reinforce skills in reading and analysis of literature, as well as writing, that will pay off now and as time goes on. We will examine selections from authors in African American literary history from the 18th century into the 1930s. Authors who will be examined include Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes. The production of early African American literature was grounded in genres such as poetry, the novel, the short story, the slave narrative, the spiritual narrative, and autobiography, all of which will be explored. It will be especially important for us to recognize the foundational contributions of African Americans to such fiction genres as the short story and the novel by the 1850s, forming a renaissance of sorts. Additionally, we will consider the impact of oral forms on African American writing such as spirituals and folk tales. We will consider the development of African American literature across a range of historical contexts, including the Revolutionary/Enlightenment period, the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Harlem Renaissance/Jazz Age.

In 1940, with the publication of his novel Native Son, Richard Wright helped to launch the protest era in African American literature. This course focuses on the development of key fiction and nonfiction genres that have shaped the development of African American literature from the mid-20th-century to the contemporary era. Genres that we will consider include poetry, fiction, the essay, the speech, autobiography, and the novel. We will explore the main periods in this literature's development such as the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and the black women's literary renaissance of the 1970s, and consider the rise of science fiction writing. Authors who will be considered include Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and August Wilson. We will also incorporate discussion of works in film and art that have been the outgrowth of writing from African American authors. The course will include screenings of scenes from the class film A Raisin in the Sun, along with the films Dutchman and Beloved.

How have Irish playwrights reached out to the world, how do theatrical productions travel internationally, and how do dramatists adapt their work to local audiences in a global marketplace? We will journey with Lady Gregory onto American campuses, see Beckett staged in Sarajevo, and consider how contemporary playwrights reflect on cultural tensions within Ireland: debates about immigration and emigration, the influence of new media, and the social impact of global financial crises. What performance strategies are embedded in the mobility of exiles and emigres? What becomes of a National Theater in a transnational world? How are actors trained in Ireland today, and how does the Irish accent sound as it projects across borders? In addition to canonical and contemporary plays, we will consider dance and film performances.

Our focus in this course will be on the vibrantly varied body of poetry produced in the United States during the 20th century. Encompassing strains of worldly celebration and prophetic rage, visionary ecstasy and minute attention to ordinary life, this poetry breaks new ground in every decade, mixing formal and stylistic innovation with a continuously expanding sense of the national landscape in all its demographic and cultural diversity. Poets to be studied include Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and others.

A modern country and an ancient civilization, India has been imagined through the ages in many different ways. This introductory course focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, drawing on films (Bollywood and Hollywood), TV shows, music, novels, and political thought. Readings from Gandhi, Ambedkar, Tagore, Kipling, Forster, Premchand, Senapati, Manto, Ananthamurthy and Roy as well as such diasporic writers as Rushdie, Lahiri, and Naipaul.

“My existence is a scandal,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of “art for art’s sake” and all that was considered exquisite, ironic, or obscene, the Decadent aesthetes of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of language, beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional moral strictures. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, and especially Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, fashion, and design, including music by Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss and artworks by James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Moreau.

The Western nation-state has failed to solve the two most pressing, indeed catastrophic, global problems: poverty and climate change. This failure is due to the inability of national policy to imagine a world beyond a boundary drawn by the formative capitalist ideas of property, production, and profit. The course will begin by discussing the historical origin and continuing force of these ideas while raising questions about their limits. Then it will look at a range of alternative ideas about how the world should work if we want to keep it socially, economically, and ecologically in balance. The alternatives we will query come from a range of Indigenous writers of fiction, poetry, and theory, who locate themselves in Native American (north and south), Aboriginal, and Maori communities.

Mainstream media would have us believe that driving a new Toyota Prius, recycling, and shopping clean at Whole Foods would make us all food environmentalists, right? Additionally, climate change and environmental degradation are often discussed as if they are phenomena that affect us all equally. Despite these dynamics, research in recent years tells us that while there might be some general ways that we experience our constantly changing physical environments-race, gender, and location very much affect how we experience Nature. In this course we will use literature from across the African diaspora to investigate how looking at race, gender, and location produces very different ideas about environment, environmentalism, and Nature itself.

If the lion would tell its story, it would be vastly different from that told from the hunter's perspective. In this course, we will read texts where European and African authors have been in direct conversation, with the hope of developing a deeper understanding of how both the colonizer and colonized understood colonization and resistance - and the contradictions inherent in each. Looking at pairs of writers, such as Mannoni and Fanon, and Achebe and Conrad, we shall try to paint a picture that engages the voices and vulnerabilities of both lion and hunter.

This is a course on Irish writing of the modern period. In our readings over the semester (which will include some of the twentieth century's greatest literary texts), we will cover the development of Irish writing from the Yeats-led Irish Revival of the century's early years through Joyce's high modernist virtuosity to Bowen's Bloomsbury-inflected fiction to the proto-postmodernisms of O'Brien and Beckett. Along the way we will also examine how Irish modernism raises fundamental questions about such things as: the relation between language and national identity; the nature of modernism's newness; colonial, postcolonial, and semicolonial culture; the political uses of literature; and the contending forces of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the modern period.

How is the figure of the child constructed in popular culture? When and to what degree do children participate in the construction of these representations? This course surveys a variety of contemporary media texts (television, film, and the internet) aimed at children ranging in age from pre-kindergarten to young adults. We explore how these texts seek to construct children as empowered consumers, contesting adult conformity. Our theoretical approach complicates definitions of childhood as a time of innocence and potential victimhood and challenges normative constructions of childhood as a time for establishing proper sexual and gender identities. Taking a cultural studies approach, the class will consider the connections between the cultural texts and the realms of advertising, toys, and gaming.

How can we account for the contemporary popularity of podcasts? In what ways do they build on, and break from, earlier forms of writing for the ear? In this class we will study innovative podcast fictions like Welcome to Night Vale, Forest 404, and Homecoming together with pathbreaking aural works of the 20th century, from The War of the Worlds to John Cage's Roaratorio and albums by the Firesign Theatre. We will consider the new opportunities and challenges of the podcasting medium, making our own recordings along the way. And we will look at well-known authors - from James Joyce and Dylan Thomas to Ursula Le Guin and Amiri Baraka - who experimented with then-new technologies like the gramophone, radio, audiotape, LP, headphones, the Walkman, and more.

Frederick Douglass (1818?-1895) and France Harper's (1825-1911) careers as activists, orators, writers, and suffragists spanned the better part of the nineteenth century, from the age of enslavement through Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow. We might say that the narrative of the life of Douglass is the narrative of the life of democracy and citizenship in the United States, as told by a man who often found himself characterized as an intruder, a fugitive, and an outlaw. Harper was a poet, lecturer, novelist, orator, and suffragist who challenged her white sisters to face their racism and her black brothers to face their misogyny. How do these two writers expand and challenge our understandings of citizenship and democracy?

What is (or was) American empire? This course examines U.S. literature from WWII to the early 21st century. This period has been termed the American century because of the U.S.'s dominant role in shaping global politics and culture, a dominance backed by military interventions abroad and the rise of the police state at home. How do the era's writers negotiate and challenge the police, military, and imperial powers of the U.S. state? We will place fiction, poetry, and essays in conversation with historical documents and policies, asking how literature has imagined an end to the American century.

This course will explore the kaleidoscopic experiences of Latinx writers, musicians, and filmmakers who have made Los Angeles their home and the subject of their artistry. Featuring the work of renowned writers such as Helena Maria Viramontes and film makers such as Luis Valdez, the course will explore how Latinx creative thinkers tangle with the city's history, propel significant resistance movements, and bring new visions of creative possibilities to the world. Students will have the chance to research any aspect of LA artistry that they find compelling as part of this course.

The course asks you to think about the role of fiction in producing a sense of history, politics, and culture in the nineteenth-century United States. In particular, we will think about the relations among stylistic concerns in fiction and the construction of identities formed by national, racial, gendered, and sexual allegiances. Authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Pauline Hopkins, and Fanny Fern.

The term AAPI is often used as a U.S. demographic category for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, but what brings these disparate groups together? This course explores the interrelation between East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas as geographies and ideological imaginaries shaped by power struggles and empire. How have U.S., Japanese, and other empires structured the exchanges, intimacies, transformations, and tensions linking peoples across the Pacific, Asia and the Americas? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of colonial invasions, hot wars, cold war, migrations, and racial formations? How does thinking about and critiquing imperialism inform what we mean when we say AAPI? Drawing on visual media, fiction, poetry, historical documents, speeches, and more, this course will track the relationship between the personal and political and ask what subjects emerge from competing imperial modernities.

Foreign in a domestic sense is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called Insular Cases of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The pleasure of the text, Roland Barthes writes, is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas-for my body does not have the same ideas I do. What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies? Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas? In the context of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st-century, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on erotic desire and cinema? We will focus especially on relatively recent metacinematic work, moviemaking about moviemaking, by such directors as Pedro Almod?, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell.

This course will examine modes of invention that emerge from and engage with trauma. We will focus on inventive explorations of different cultural and intersectional experiences. Students will offer critical and creative responses to film (including Get Out by Jordan Peele, Mother of George by Andrew Dosunmu, Moonlight by Barry Jenkins), poetry collections (including Book of Light by Lucille Clifton, Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, Zong! By NourbeSe Philip, Explanation of America by Robert Pinsky and The Real Horse by Farid Matuk) and a variety of critical and theoretical essays. We will trace the inventive processes and articulations that arise at the site of trauma and ask what it means to listen and to write at the limits of experience.

After Rome's collapse, drama was gradually re-created from many sources: school-room debates, popular festivals, and, especially, religious liturgy. By the 17th century it was one of the most polished literary arts (and one of the sleaziest). This long span allows us to consider what happened in the middle. This course traces the residues of Roman drama and some rebeginnings of European drama, 10th to 13th centuries, then focuses mainly on late medieval drama in English in the 15th century, following that into the drama of the early Renaissance. We'll consider what became modern-and what was utterly unlike anything later. Discussion, lecture, regular writing, some experiments with production. English texts will be read in Middle English with lots of help; no previous knowledge required.

After the violent events in Charlottesville in 2017, and especially the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, most people have become aware of the extreme form of white political identities that are now a visible presence in our society. What can we learn about the history of whiteness from literature and popular culture? What alternative conception of whiteness, including a consciously anti-racist white identity, can we glean from novels and plays, movies and TV shows? This introductory course uses works by prominent writers (James Baldwin, Toni Morrison) as well as movies (including Get Out and Blindspotting) plus TV shows (Mad Men, Sopranos) to explore these questions.

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, NGOs, and nonprofits working on human rights, public health, and environmental and land rights in the US and abroad. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, critical design thinking, and strategic storytelling, students collaborate on projects with the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Health Access Connect (Uganda), NYS 4-H, and SOOFA Ranch (GA). Consulting on partners' ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO's Human-Centered Design Thinking and Stanford's Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as UX, tactical media, and activist organizing developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

When an African and an African American meet, solidarity is presumed, but often friction is the result. In this course, we will consider how Africans and African Americans see each other through literature. What happens when two peoples suffering from double consciousness meet? We will examine the influence of historical forces including slavery, colonialism and pan-Africanism on the way writers explore the meeting between Africans and African Americans. Specifically we will look at how writers and political figures such as Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X have understood the meeting.

Crime fiction simply dominates our screen time: White Lotus, Law and Order, NCIS, Psych, Sherlock, Only Murders in the Building, True Detective, Breaking Bad. But crime fiction is rife with trouble-femme fatales, drug-addled sleuths, random murders concealing menacing conspiracies. And literary culture loves to make trouble for crime fiction as well-to attack, parody, reinvent, complicate, and rejoice in it. This course will explore classic mystery story design in Poe, Doyle, and Wilkie Collins, and later fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Lindsay, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Atwood, China Mieville, Tana French, Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. We'll also analyze films and television episodes directed by Boon Joon-ho, Sally Wainwright, and Spike Lee.

This course explores the creative cross-pollination between mass culture and avant-garde art, addressing key concepts in 20th century aesthetics (the middlebrow, the spectacle, pastiche, kitsch) and the evolution of the category of art itself. The mediating conditions of class, race, gender, and sexuality will be central to our examination of these conceptual histories, as will changes in the means of artistic production and distribution. Interdisciplinary and intermedial in its focus, the course will include texts by Theodor Adorno, Amiri Baraka, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Burger, Guy Debord, Clement Greenberg, Cathy Park Hong, Griselda Pollock, Rosalind Krauss, Dwight MacDonald, Fred Moten, Sianne Ngai, Marjorie Perloff, Susan Sontag, and Hito Steyerl.

How do poems travel in the world? How does the world travel in poems? In this seminar, we'll read global case studies in the ways poems can sanctify or protest territorial and linguistic borders, as well as reading diverse critical accounts of the translation, marketing, and archiving of world literature. We'll study how poetry compares with other communication technologies, enacting its own forms of transit, ecology, and migration. Our readings (across all of time, though focused on the 19th-21st centuries) will investigate how race, class, and gender inflect verse's navigations of local conditions and cosmopolitan scale. Authors may include T.S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, W.B. Yeats, Lorna Goodison, Yi Sang, Derek Walcott, Daphne Marlatt, Christopher Okigbo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Ilya Kaminsky, Ishion Hutchinson, and Valzhyna Mort.

What can lawyers and judges learn from the study of literature? This course explores the relevance of imaginative literature (novels, drama, poetry, and film) to questions of law and social justice from a range of perspectives. We will consider debates about how literature can help to humanize legal decision-making; how storytelling has helped to give voice to oppressed populations over history; how narratives of suffering cultivate popular support for human rights; the role played by storytelling in a trial; and how literature can shed light on the limits of law and public policy.

This course focuses on the study of race, class, gender, sexuality and popular culture through the examination of scholarly works and creative writings by one of the most compelling and legendary voices in black feminism: bell hooks. We will consider her body of work produced in various career stages, beginning with the classic Ain't I a Woman, and explore her writings in various categories, from her art book and autobiographies to her children's book and poetic writings. We will discuss key critical terms and themes in her repertoire and consider her major contributions to both black and feminist intellectual history. We will draw on a range of films throughout the course, including productions such as Paris is Burning, Precious, Four Little Girls, and Beasts of the Southern Wild, as well as videos.

Disinformation, gag laws, de-platforming, violent hate speech, recommendation algorithms, chatbots, image generators. This course will help us make sense of our increasingly volatile public sphere by surveying the history of free speech and censorship from the print revolution to the information age. In democratic societies, freedom of expression is both a cultural value and protected right; yet governments routinely regulate speech through a variety of mechanisms: from direct censorship, to licensing and copyright laws, to high court decisions about what qualifies as speech. We'll track the categories of dangerous speech-blasphemy, pornography, treason, libel-as they've changed over time. And we'll also consider forms censorship that protect freedoms and ensure civil discourse, such as banning racial stereotyping or genocide denial.

Whereas human rights find legal expression in visionary documents like the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the many principles tied to human rights have long been debated by philosophers, artists, theologians, and writers. This course studies the evolution of human rights as cultural artifacts, examining how ideas about rights and humanitarianism were fashioned within literature, philosophy, film, public debate, and various international legal forums over history. Through readings covering large topics like crimes against humanity, immigration, abolitionism, and universal suffrage, we will ask: how did the world assent to a global culture of human rights? What hopes and dreams have human rights embodied? Conversely, what recurring critiques have been raised about the norms informing human rights?

There is a lot of consensus about the science of climate change. But many members of the public remain confused or uninformed about the severity of the situation. Some are paralyzed by fear. Others are blissfully ignorant. What are the best ways of communicating climate change to a variety of audiences? Should we tell stories? Make documentaries? Dramatize the science? This course will ask you to read, write and design many different forms and genres in order to experiment with the problem of communicating climate change, from pie-charts to science fiction and from photography to TED Talks. What can each form tell us about climate change that the others cannot? We will take on a real-world communication project over the course of the semester.

This course offers guidance and practice for students who wish to write in public and professional genres—types of writing intended for a variety of audiences and suited to a range of venues beyond the academy. The course introduces a framework that allows students to analyze the effectiveness of texts and determine how to respond appropriately to different prompts. Students will also learn how to apply this set of tools beyond written genres and to visual and multimodal texts. By reading and experimenting with specific genres, students will strengthen their writing skills and explore topics and issues related to their personal interests. Finally, students will gain the metacognitive skills needed to analyze their writing and prepare for future writing challenges.

This workshop is designed to enrich your literary imagination and exercise your craft through the art of translation. Introduction to translation theory will guide you through the intriguing relationship between author, reader and text. Reading like a translator will challenge your understanding of the nuances of voice, tone and style. The act of translation-close reading accompanied by the mastery of language that measures up to the great writers-will engage with all of your creative resources. Knowledge of other languages is a plus, but not a requirement.

This course focuses upon the writing of fiction or related narrative forms. May include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. Many students will choose to write short stories, but excerpts from longer works will also be accepted.

This course focuses upon the writing of poetry. May include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work.

Consciousness-what it is, where it is, how it is-has been a perennial puzzle for philosophers. What does it mean to be conscious? We all know what it feels like to be conscious, but when asked to describe the state of consciousness, to conjure with words the contours of felt experience that is consciousness, we falter. This semester we will come at the puzzle from a different direction, from literature. We'll start with some classic philosophical statements of the puzzle and then turn our attention to some poems and some stories which engage with the problem of consciousness in a variety of ways. Writing in reaction to the literature and to the puzzle of consciousness will be the central tool of our semester's exploration.

Writers of creative nonfiction plumb the depths of their experience and comment memorably on the passing scene. They write reflectively on themselves and journalistically on the activities and artifacts of others. The voice they seek is at once uniquely personal, objectively persuasive, and accessible to others who want to relish their view of the world and learn from it. This course is for the writer (beyond the first year of college) who wants to experiment with style and voice to find new writerly personae in a workshop environment. During the semester, we'll read models of literary nonfiction, including one another's, and work to develop a portfolio of diverse and polished writing.

With the publication of his Utopia, Thomas More coined the name of a new genre of literature in which the writer posits an ideal society - and sometimes an impossibly ideal society. In this course, we'll explore the sources of More's Utopia in political philosophy and its legacy in speculative, socialist, and science fiction. What do these literary experiments tell us about how society would have to be organized to be free of sexism, racism, inequality, war, and ecological ruination. Authors may include Thomas More, James Harrington, Margaret Cavendish, Daniel Defoe, William Morris, Marge Piercy, Ursula LeGuin, Toni Morrison.

More than thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the distance needed to view the twentieth-century state socialist project from a historical perspective-even as Cold War tropes are revived amid another major confrontation with Russia. In this course, we will analyze memoirs, oral histories, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the Balkans, the UK, and the United States.

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

This course examines how philosophical, architectural, filmic, and literary practices shape our understanding of place and space, engaging with theories of mapping, spatiality, and the built environment. Does dwelling on this earth imply building? Is thinking itself an architectural act? What would it mean to undo this 'will to architecture'? What is the relation of the act to the environment? What does the situation of 'things and locations' mean for the possibilities of politics and thought? We will examine poetic and philosophical dimensions of place and site; modernity, nihilism, and its critique; belonging, the uncanny, and the stranger; utopia, dystopia, and the global built environment through readings, films, and artistic practices from figures and groups including Archigram, Bachelard, Badiou, Massimo Cacciari, Derrida, Heidegger, Isozaki Arata, Jameson, Karatani, Kiarostami, Henri Lefebvre, WG Sebald, Wallace Stevens, Superstudio, Manfredo Tafuri, Tarkovsky, Raymond Williams, and more.

Shortly after the 2016 election, The New Yorker published an article entitled “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming.” This course examines what the Frankfurt School knew by introducing students to Critical Theory, juxtaposing its roots in the 19th century (i.e., Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud) with its most prominent manifestation in the 20th century, the Frankfurt School (e.g., Kracauer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) alongside disparate voices (Arendt) and radical continuations (Davis, Zuboff, Weeks) as they engage with politics, society, culture, and literature (e.g. Brecht and Kafka). Established in 1920s and continued in exile in the US during WWII, the interdisciplinary circle of scholars comprising the Frankfurt School played a pivotal role in the intellectual developments of post-war American and European social, political, and aesthetic theory: from analyses of authoritarianism and democracy to critiques of capitalism, the entertainment industry, commodity fetishism, and mass society. This introduction to Critical Theory explores both the prescience of these diverse thinkers for today’s world (“what they knew”) as well as what they perhaps could not anticipate in the 21st century (e.g., developments in technology, economy, political orders), and thus how to critically address these changes today.

Using a combination of philosophical tracts (Fanon, Cabral, Lenin, Derrida) and literary texts (Soyinka, Ngugi, Coetzee, Mafouz, Gurnah), this course will take up the difficulty of the failure that is the postcolonial state in Africa. What has happened to those states that were founded upon the promise of anti-colonial revolution? What has produced this new wave of African immigrants determined to find a way of life outside of the continent?

This course will explore the traditional dynamic and norms of political press coverage in the United States, and the impact of those patterns on both the government and the nation; some of the ways longstanding norms have recently shifted, and continue to shift; the larger historical forces and long-term trends driving those changes; and the theoretical questions, logistical challenges and ethical dilemmas these changes pose for both political journalists and those they cover. The course will equally cover the practice of political reporting, including weekly analysis and discussion of current press coverage, in-class exercises and simulations, readings from academic and journalistic sources, and visits from leading political reporters and former spokespeople able to offer a firsthand perspective on the topics.

The Beyonce Nation course at Cornell, which has been requested regularly over the past several years, is finally back by popular demand! Beyonce's trajectory from Houston, Texas as a member of the group Destiny's Child to international fame and superstardom and a successful career as a solo singer, actress, clothing designer and entrepreneur holds important implications for critical dialogues on the U.S. South and national femininity. One aspect of this course examines themes related to her intersectional identity as a model of black and Southern womanhood that have recurred in her song lyrics, performances and visual representations, which have also been foundational for her development of more recent productions, including Formation and the larger Lemonade album. In this course, we will examine the related film and its adaptation by black queer and trans women in the Glass Wing Group's Lemonade Served Bitter Sweet. Moreover, we will examine the Homecoming documentary, along with Beyonce's newer projects such as The Lion: King: The Gift, Black Is King and Netflix productions. We will also consider Beyonce's early career in Destiny's Child, including the impact of projects such Independent Women, Part I and popular icons such as Farrah Fawcett in shaping her Southern discourse. We will carefully trace Beyonce's journey to global fame and iconicity and the roles of the music business, social media and technology, fashion, and film in her development. We will consider her impact on politics and contemporary activist movements, as well as her engagement of black liberation discourses from the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName and #TakeAKnee. Furthermore, we will consider Beyonce's impact in shaping feminism, including black feminism, along with her impact on constructions of race, gender, sexuality, marriage, family, and motherhood.

In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre.

In this course, we will read some of the most influential examples of a genre at the intersection of literature and history: the memoir of the revolutionary. Along the way, we will consider some of the fictional works (e.g. by Turgenev, Dostoevsky) that have been important in this nonfictional tradition, as well as poetry produced by the revolutionary currents we discuss. As we study the autobiographies of Russian, American, and German leftist political figures like Piotr Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Ernst Toller, and Angela Davis, we will consider the literary methods these writers use to intertwine their own life stories with political history. How is life-writing a form of revolutionary self-fashioning? How have literary movements intersected with revolutionary writings? With special attention to the questions of gender, ethnicity, and race.

This course provides an introduction to meter and rhyme and to the study of meter and rhyme Verse readings will be short poems written in English, with a particular focus on Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poems of Housman and Dickinson. Critical texts will include writings about prosody from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Non-Anglophone verse systems, particularly Russian, will be considered for a comparative perspective.

What can literary works, especially novels, tell us about moral issues? Should they be seen as suggesting a form of moral inquiry similar to the kind of philosophical discussion we get in, say, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics? Can reading philosophical works in ethics together with novels that deal with similar themes help us understand these themes better? This course is an attempt to answer these questions. We will read selections from Aristotle, Kant, and other thinkers and use these works to help us understand the nature of moral inquiry in novels like Eliot's Middlemarch, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Films will include Barbie (2023) and Official Secrets (2019).

Many distinguished poets have taught at Cornell. In this course we'll focus on three, all of them widely acclaimed: A. R. Ammons, Alice Fulton, Ishion Hutchinson. A. R. Ammons is best known for charting the interplay of scientific and spiritual phenomena, in poems ranging from brief lyrics to book-length epics written on adding machine tape. Alice Fulton, who was Ammons's student, carries on his interests in science and spirituality while bringing to them a distinctively feminist perspective. Born in Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson writes poems that explore the fraught relations between geography and history in the light of colonial violence. We'll survey each poet's work from earliest to most recent phases, paying special attention to their development of new techniques and original visions. Students may write poems as well as critical essays responding to the poets' work.

This seminar will explore the English language and its literatures in its most diverse centuries, which 19th century philologists saw as the middle span: after the collapse of Old English language, poetic style, and indigenous power-centers at the Norman Conquest (1066), up to printing (1476), the beginnings of standard Modern English, claims to an English literary tradition, and the origins of Atlantic adventurism and imperialism. Between those benchmarks we'll consider multilingualism, English linguistic diversity and changes, social identity, literary forms, and ideas about language and literature, sampling many Middle English works and more fully reading the Katherine Group, Gawain-poet, Piers Plowman, and Julian of Norwich's Showings.

This seminar explores the relation between book history and literary history during the span from medieval English manuscript culture through Renaissance print culture, with invitations to apply these concerns to any period and language. Skills taught are both theoretical and practical, focusing on manuscripts, old handwriting, literacy, printers, and issues linking material and social book-making to literary topics and forms. As a class, we will focus on the pivotal period of English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, but individual final editorial projects can take up any period or language. All students will learn to exploit chance archival discoveries, to write biographies of an early printer, and to use and create an edition.

Examines how collaboration among stage directors, designers, and actors leads to differing interpretations of plays. The course focuses on how the texts themselves are blueprints for productions with particular emphasis on the choices available to the actor inherent in the text. This is a special seminar sponsored by the John S. Knight Institute’s Sophomore Seminars Program. Seminars offer discipline-intensive study within an interdisciplinary context. While not restricted to sophomores, the seminars aim at initiating students into the discipline’s outlook, discourse community, modes of knowledge, and ways of articulating that knowledge. Limited to 15 students. Special emphasis is given to strong thinking and writing and to personalized instruction with tip university professors.

Stories of transformation have been central to literary traditions for thousands of years, but these tales of shape-shifting took on a special life in the English Renaissance, when Ovid's Metamorphoses surged in popularity. This course will explore the fundamental connection between literary creativity and unstable identities - whether these narratives of metamorphosis show humans turning to beasts, trees, or stones, men changing into women, or inanimate objects coming to life and taking human form. Class readings draw on examples from Ovid, Shakespeare, and other Renaissance poets, as well as the re-imagining of these fantasies in modern science fiction and make-over shows. What do these stories of metamorphosis tell us about what it means to be human - or not?

The seminar focuses on Shakespeare's last plays including those known by the generic title of 'romances' - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest - as well as his collaborations - All is True (Henry VIII) and The Two Noble Kinsmen - and finally the currently much discussed 'lost play' Cardenio, which links Shakespeare in intriguing ways to that other great writer of the early modern period, Cervantes. As we study the final works of Shakespeare's career, we will consider the critical-theoretical question of lateness itself. What is a late work? What does that mean specifically in the case of Shakespeare? We will pay particular attention to dramatic form and historical context - including ways in which the plays themselves call the notion of historical context into question.

Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? At a time when reality appears dystopian, many are quick to dismiss utopian visions as naive or irresponsible. In this seminar, we take on the critical and imaginative task of considering what utopias can tell us about our pasts, presents, and possible futures. We encounter two centuries of utopias in which communes have displaced the family, mutual aid has taken the place of capitalist individualism, and sexuality is no longer linked to property rights. While these speculative times and places seek to overcome capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the climate crisis, they remain haunted by these figures. Our treatment of utopias in theory and literature therefore includes a range of ambivalent affects and genres, from critical and ambiguous utopias to philosophical treatises and manifestos.

This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. The Rhetoric of Temporality, Semiology and Rhetoric, The Resistance to Theory, Autobiography as De-Facement, Shelley Disfigured, Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist, Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age, Oscar Wilde once announced in a characteristically immodest, yet accurate, appraisal of his talent. With his legendary wit, his exuberant style of perversity and paradox, and his tendency to scandal, he has come to stand in symbolic relation to our own age as well, and for some of the same reasons he was a delight and a challenge to the Victorians. We will explore his poetry, essays, plays, letters, and fiction, in the context of the Aesthetic, Decadent, and Symbolist movements of the late-nineteenth century and also in the context of current debates in literary criticism and the history of sexuality.

Examines the play as the central, essential source for production decisions made by the actor, the director, the designer, and the dramaturg. Students "present" their conclusions about the performance of studied texts through project work as either an actor, director, designer, or dramaturg, as well as through two to three papers.

How does formal and informal education shape selves and communities in contemporary Africa? What does it mean for writers to be forced to learn the language and literature of conquerors and colonizers? What happens to local traditions and knowledge in the face of colonialism and globalization? Does migrating across borders teach you something about home? We will have time to consider just a small sample of brilliant works, but we will range as broadly across the continent as we can, including novels, short stories, music, and a few films from Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Mozambique. You will be expected to delve deeply into one local context in your semester-long research project.

This seminar explores one of the most consequential movements in African American cultural history, a movement of transnational impact. It was empowered in part by new social and institutional developments, including the Great Migration of African Americans, immigration from the Caribbean, and Pan-African contacts in Paris. It also benefited from new pluralistic theories of American culture and developments in the publishing industry centered in Manhattan. African American cultural vitality surged in the context of modern mobility and the rise of new publishing enterprises and technologies of sound reproduction. While chiefly centered on literature, the seminar will also touch on visual art, music, and performance.

In this course, we will explore the literature and history of Harlem, beginning with an examination of James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts's Harlem is Nowhere. We will go on to explore selected literatures of the Harlem Renaissance by reading authors such as Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Though the dates and even the very notion of the period itself are open to debate, the Harlem Renaissance peaked during the 1920s in the wake of the Great Migration to the urban North, and declined with the onset of the Great Depression. We will consider overlapping literary movements that shaped the Harlem Renaissance profoundly, from modernism to Negritude. This movement established important foundations for the contemporary black art scene in New York City and the development of major institutions such as the Apollo Theater, the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Because it encompassed a range of other art forms and media beyond literature, such as painting, photography, and music, we will explore the work of noted photographers of the period from Carl Van Vechten to James Van Der Zee, artists such as Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, and Palmer Hayden, and musicians such as Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith. We will read selected writings on Harlem from Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes, and study the recent fictions by Mat Johnson, Colson Whitehead, Sapphire, Karla FC Holloway and A'Lelia Bundles. We will draw on a range of media and technology, including resources based at the Library of Congress such as Drop Me Off in Harlem and Guide to Harlem Renaissance Materials, along with contemporary photographic projects such as Gayatri Spivak and Alice Attie's Harlem and Harlem: A Century in Images by Deborah Willis and several co-authors.

In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the love trilogy on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.

The driving dialectic in post-colonial studies has been the colonizer/colonized, or the Third World vs. the West. But slowly the field is letting go of this arrested dialectic and in its place various triangulations are emerging: e.g. transnationalism, world literature, the global novel, and global south literary studies. Starting with a walk through the emerging theoretical concepts of world/global/transnational literature, we will primarily focus on a global south reading of African literature (itself a contested term), and perennial questions around language and translation. Specifically we will look at how writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, V.S. Naipul, NoViolet Bulawayo, and MG Vassanji challenge the post-colonial discourse and how a global south reading provides an uncomfortable conversation with transnational and world literature theories and concepts.

This seminar will investigate the narrative uses of history and memory in US fiction, focusing particularly on the impact of gender on these representations. How do US writers use history in their fiction, and to what ends? What are the effects on drawing on received historical narratives? What challenges does the attempt to represent a historical event pose for a writer of fiction and how might the author negotiate those challenges? Is History a gendered category and, if so, would male and female and trans histories be narrated differently? We will look at the effects of constructing one's own history to fill a void in the received historical narrative, exploring the relationship between history (or History) and memory as well as the fictional representations of that relationship.

This is an indispensable, probing, and pleasurable course focusing on major works of nineteenth, twentieth, and contemporary English and European literature. Readings will include works by Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Proust, Kafka, Mann, Ferrante, Pamuk, Kundera, and W. G. Sebald. The emphasis will be on the joys of close reading of individual texts, but we shall place the authors and works within the context of literary, political, cultural, and intellectual history. We shall also be aware of critical and theoretical approaches. The course will seek to define the development of literary modernism and as well as Post-Modernism. We shall be especially interested in the relationship between modern literature and modern painting and sculpture, but no prior experience in art is required.

Trauma is often conceived as a catastrophic experience that escapes full comprehension. But we may also think of it as a sudden or ongoing experience that fundamentally affects our ability to be heard by, or address, others. What would it mean to rethink the theory of trauma around the collapse of address? We will examine works that engage with individual and collective trauma in its political, cultural, and historical manifestations within and across cultures (and species). We will ask what it means to have one's capacity to address eliminated and how it can be reconstituted through writing and art. The course will include literary, philosophical, literary theoretical, scientific and psychoanalytic texts as well as films from South Africa, Tunisia, Martinique, France, and the US.

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century.

This course will look at how Black women writers negotiated enslavement, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow era segregation while also managing to find avenues of joy, escapism, and a certain kind of freedom through art-making. In addition to reading primary texts by Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Bond, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and others we will also look at critical and theoretical work by Toni Morrison, Saidiyah Hartman, Barbara Fields, and Karen Fields.

We will examine cultural productions by East and Southeast Asians and their diasporas that imagine speculative, science fictional, magical realist, weird realist, or otherwise non-realist worlds. Paying particular attention to the legacies of militarism and empire, we will consider how imaginaries of East Asia are entangled with the U.S.-led Cold War system, the post-Cold War dominance of finance capitalism, and climate change. Tracking connections between diverse regions and peoples, we will explore how Asians and Asian diasporas dovetail in their visions of historical memory, present-day crisis, and future possibilities. These speculative worlds will prompt us to reflect on the world we live in now and the histories we have inherited.

As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to undo borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb desbordar (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.

This course takes up literatures and arts of Black speculation in the broadest terms, from science fiction and fantasy to Afrofuturism and Afropunk to Phillis Wheatley's and Outkast's poetics. We'll give special attention to speculation in African American literature to think through how Black people used art in the midst of anti-blackness to imagine worlds otherwise and for the pleasure of the craft. We'll read Black speculation through multiple forms, including novels, graphic novels, film, and music. Figures for consideration include William J. Wilson (Ethiop), Pauline Hopkins, Frances E. W. Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Octavia Butler, Ryan Coogler, Eve Ewing, N.K. Jemisin, Sun Ra, and Erykah Badu.

H. P. Lovecraft helped to create an American subgenre of horror and speculative fictions. He was also a notorious racist. Writing from New England, he imagined ancient and terrifying landscapes of racial miscegenation and madness that haunt a deeply anti-Black and anti-Indigenous settler colonialism. For Matt Ruff, a graduate of Cornell and author of the novel Lovecraft Country that is the basis for Misha Green's HBO series of the same name, antiblack racial violence provides the deep-seated horror that lurks beneath Lovecraft's stories. Using Lovecraft and the HBO series adaptation as a frame for thinking about the racialized present, we will spend the semester considering how the speculation of settler colonial horrors and fantasies is undone as each of the authors we read reanimate the centrality of race, Blackness, and Indigeneity to just and unjust visions of the past, present, and future.

If you haven't read contemporary U.S. American Indian fiction, then it might be fair to ask how much you know about the United States, its origins and its current condition. Since the 1960s, American Indians have been producing a significant body of award-wining novels and short stories. In 1969, for example, N. Scott Momaday, from the Kiowa nation, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and in 2012 Louise Erdrich, who is Anishinaabe, won the National Book Award for her novel The Round House. In between these two notable moments and since we can list an impressive number of Native storytellers whose work is aesthetically powerful, offering us a narrative of the United States that counters the official history. Centrally the course will focus on the various formal approaches Native writers take from surrealism to realism in representing the (post)colonial situation of Indian country and the ongoing resistance in Indian country to the U.S. legal and political regime.

What are the limits and possibilities for Asian American longing and belonging? Asian Americans have been variously understood as immigrants, refugees, forever foreigners, and model minorities. These ideas emerge from and shape US understandings of nation, empire, rights, and citizenship. Native and Indigenous studies scholars have asked how and whether immigrants-including exploited workers-are complicit with settlement and occupation. In this course we will read Asian American literary texts from the Americas through Asian American and Indigenous cultural critique to consider the overlapping dimensions of militarism, carcerality, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and dispossession in order to learn what comparative and relational approaches can teach us.

This course focuses on works that exemplify environmental consciousness-a sense that humans are not the center of the world and that to think they are may have catastrophic consequences for humans themselves. Environmental literature is not just a major strand of American literature but one of its most distinctive contributions to the literature of the world. We will be reading works mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, both poetry and fiction, confronting the challenges of thinking and writing with an ecological consciousness in the 21st. Cornell being a rich environment in which to pursue such investigations, creative projects will be encouraged. Inspiration is assured.

This seminar will read key texts in critical video game studies to consider how race, gender, indigeneity, and sexuality shape the code and the machines that we play. In addition to critical readings by scholars in Indigenous studies, Black feminism, and video game studies including Joanne Barker, Christine Sharpe, Bo Ruberg, and, we will also read creative works by Mark Danielewski, Gabrielle Zevin, and Elissa Washuta among others to consider how books, narratives, and non-fiction essays transform in relation to video games.

A thorough episode-by-episode study of the art and meaning of the most influential book of the twentieth century, James Joyce's Ulysses. The emphasis is on the joy and fun of reading this wonderful and often playful masterwork. We shall place Ulysses in the context of Joyce's writing career, Irish culture, and literary modernism. We shall explore the relationship between Ulysses and other experiments in modernism—including painting and sculpture—and show how Ulysses redefines the concepts of epic, hero, and reader. We shall examine Ulysses as a political novel, including Joyce's response to Yeats and the Celtic Renaissance; Joyce's role in the debate about the direction of Irish politics after Parnell; and Joyce's response to British colonial occupation of Ireland. We shall also consider Ulysses as an urban novel in which Bloom, the marginalized Jew and outsider, is symptomatic of the kind of alienation created by nativist xenophobia. No previous experience with Joyce is required.

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, NGOs, and nonprofits working on human rights, public health, and environmental and land rights in the US and abroad. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, critical design thinking, and strategic storytelling, students collaborate on projects with the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Health Access Connect (Uganda), NYS 4-H, and SOOFA Ranch (GA). Consulting on partners' ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO's Human-Centered Design Thinking and Stanford's Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as UX, tactical media, and activist organizing developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

For nearly a century before the first settlers arrived in the Americas, English writers created fictions of the so-called New World. We'll begin the course by looking at these fantasies about the new world. What were their sources? How did these fictions prepare for and attempt to legitimate the colonization of the Americas? To what extent were English writers critical of colonization? Then we will consider America's own fictions: the poetry, narratives, and oral traditions that were produced by or circulated among settlers, indentured and enslaved laborers, and indigenous Americans for the hundred years or so after the first English settlements. Readings include Toni Morrison's A Mercy, More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Tempest, selections from Hakluyt, Donne, Marvell, Milton, Sagoyewatha, Canassetego, Winthrop, Williams, Bradstreet, Occam, and Wheatley.

What innovations in form, style, genre, and subject matter have characterized the novel in the 21st century? What is the status of the novel in the wake of postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, post-humanism, and the other posts of literary theory? Are we witnessing a blurring of theory and fiction? This course will explore a number of key developments and trends in the 21st century novel, such as the rise of genre fiction (fantasy, science fiction, the Western, the rock novel), speculative fiction, new historical realisms, comic/graphic novels, philosophical fiction, among others trends. Our writers may include Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Ali Smith, Sally Rooney, Tom McCarthy, David Mitchell, and Jennifer Egan.

This seminar investigates the role of social media in contemporary literary production and reception. We will understand both social media and literature broadly, examining literature about and written for social media, online communities focused on book reviewing such as BookTube and Goodreads, platforms for social reading and writing like Wattpad and AO3, and the use of social media by publishers and authors in promoting literature. We will read scholarship in media studies, reception studies, and publishing studies to understand how social media shapes the contemporary literary field and how literature shapes social media. Throughout, we will ask what it means to consider literature as a social phenomenon, foregrounding questions about its conditions of production and the people who read and respond to it online.

This course focuses on questions both timely-How can news be fake?-and timeless-What counts as the truth? Each of our four course units will present scenes in the history of technology that complicate the answers to these questions. How, for example, has Big Data revived the idea of theological omniscience that Nietzsche pronounced dead in 1882? How did atlases and encyclopedias inform the notion of scientific objectivity in the 19th century? How has photography and film complicated the truism, I'll believe it when I see it? Focusing on these and other moments of historical certainty and doubt, we will return to contemporary debates about the role of communication technology in presenting facts (alternative or otherwise) to an informed public. We will end our course by questioning what type of hope, confidence or resistance we can find in a world without a solid epistemological foundation for truth.

Students will build on coursework in Communicating Climate Change to design, create and launch climate communications projects focused on reducing Cornell's emissions. This will involve research into Cornell's operations, creativity in developing effective communications, a focus on climate justice, and engagement with Cornell students, faculty, and staff. Projects may include reducing air travel, fume hood energy waste, and meat consumption, and addressing misconceptions about tap water, lighting, and food waste.

This course is intended for creative writers who have completed ENGL 3840 and wish to refine their poetry writing. It may include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. In addition to the instructor's assigned writing requirements, students may work on longer-form verse writing projects.

This course is intended for narrative writing students who have completed ENGL 3820 and wish to refine their writing. It may include significant reading and discussion, explorations of form and technique, completion of writing assignments and prompts, and workshop peer review of student work. In addition to the instructor's assigned writing requirements, students may work on longer-form narrative writing projects.

Judith Butler is one of today’s foremost theorists and cultural critics. Even though they are known, above all, for their work in gender studies and queer theory, their theoretical thought ranges widely. It also draws on a wide range of theoretical traditions, literary and filmic works, and political events. In this course, we will read widely from Butler’s work (from Gender Trouble to Who’s Afraid of Gender), as well as reading some of the key texts that Butler draws on. We will develop a critical understanding of Butler’s strategies for reading and writing to hone our own critical and theoretical skills.

The most studied and written about work in Western Literature outside the Bible, Hamlet according to Harold Bloom, is our secular savior and our ambassador to death. This course centers on a close reading of the play. Through research and assigned readings the course tests theoretical viewpoints about the play against the text itself by reading the theory in relationship to the production history.

Reading for Writers examines literary works through the eyes of a writer, focusing on the craft of literature. Topics vary with each section and semester and may focus on fiction, poetry, or both. Please see the class roster for a description.

Black women first began to shape the genre of autobiography during antebellum era slavery. They were prolific in developing the genre of autobiography throughout the twentieth century, to the point of emerging as serial autobiographers in the case of Maya Angelou. Significantly, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings(1970), the first autobiography of six by Angelou, along with autobiographies by a range of other black women writers, helped to launch the renaissance in black women's literature and criticism in African American literature during the 1970s. In this course, we will focus on how black women have continued to write and share their personal stories in the new millennium by examining autobiographies that they have produced in the first years of the twenty-first century. More broadly, we will consider the impact of this writing on twenty-first century African American literature, as well as African diasporan writing in Africa and the Caribbean. In the process, we will draw on a range of critical and theoretical perspectives. We will read memoirs and autobiographies by a range of figures, including Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lewis, Monica Coleman, Serena Williams, Gabrielle Union, and Tiffany Haddish, among others.

Students should secure a thesis advisor by the end of the junior year and should enroll in that faculty member's section of ENGL 4930. Students enrolling in the fall will automatically be enrolled in a discussion section, which will meet a few times throughout the semester and will give students a chance to get together with other honors students to discuss issues pertinent to writing a thesis. Topics will include compiling a critical bibliography and writing a prospectus. The Honors Director in English will contact students to set up the first meeting time.

This course is the second of a two-part series of courses required for students pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English. The first course in the series is ENGL 4930 Honors Essay Tutorial I.

The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry's textual environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How does contemporary poetry resist, engage, respond to, sound out that noise? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal cultural, economic, historical, philosophical, political developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a wide range of works that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions of personal and collective identity and language in contexts at once local and global. Poets include Armantrout, Bernstein, Collins, Espada, Gander, Fitterman, Goldsmith, Hong, Osman, Place, Rich, Smith, and Waldrop.

What is a university, what does it do, and how does it do it? Moving out from these more general questions, this seminar will focus on a more specific set of questions concerning the place of race within the university. What kinds of knowledge are produced in the 20th- century U.S. university? Why is it, and how is it, that certain knowledge formations and disciplines come to be naturalized or privileged within the academy? How has the emergence of fields of inquiry such as Ethnic Studies (with an epistemological platform built on the articulations of race, class and gender) brought to the fore (if not brought to crisis) some of the more vexing questions that strike at the core of the idea of the university as the pre-eminent site of disinterested knowledge? This seminar will give students the opportunity to examine American higher education's (particularly its major research institutions) historical instantiation of the relations amongst knowledge, power, equality and democracy.

This Graduate Creative Writing Special Seminar allows writing students to learn about craft from a visiting creative writer. Exact content will vary depending on the instructor, but all seminars will take an in-depth look at the craft of writing. For topic description, please consult the Class Roster.

An introduction to practical and theoretical aspects of graduate English studies, conducted with the help of weekly visitors from the Literatures in English department. There will be regular short readings and brief presentations, but no formal papers. The colloquium is required for all entering PhD students; MFA students are welcome to attend any sessions that interest them.

This course explores the theory and practice of composition pedagogy, from the field's early responses to current-traditional rhetoric (CTR) - including process theory, critical pedagogy, and expressivism - to contemporary feminist, queer, working-class, black, brown, and disabled approaches to composition and anti-oppressive writing pedagogy. We will seek to engage as much as test such approaches in our own practice, considering how we are allowed to (and how we might alternatively) compose and teach composition as scholars within the academy today. Integral to such exploration will be projects that ask students to engage with their own experience in the classroom in addition to helping them develop their own rationales in conversation with course readings, projects such as: writing critical reflections, drafting a teaching philosophy statement, designing possible composition activities, and more. As with other composition-focused courses, mutual and intensive feedback will be emphasized.

This course provides graduate students an opportunity to consider how a survey course in early English literature c. 700 to c. 1700 might be created, taught, scrutinized, and critiqued. The class will use the ENGL 2010 undergraduate survey as a basis for graduate students' further weekly discussions of the principles and challenges of literary history across this long and much-ruptured span. Students will write papers, offer presentations, and discuss readings focusing on questions of this span's literary history and of teaching it.

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

Taught by curators and archivists in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, this seminar provides an introduction to the analysis of books and unique archival documents as physical objects. Students will work hands-on with rare materials in the Carl A. Kroch Library to learn the skills necessary to pursue original research dependent upon locating and studying primary sources such as rare books, archival collections, photographs, and other unique artifacts. Topics covered will include descriptive bibliography and the analysis of books (their manufacture, distribution, and audiences), an introduction to archival arrangement and description, and how to navigate institutional repositories of rare materials. Students will also have the opportunity to discuss strategies and methods for locating materials related to their own projects or areas of study.

English has a recorded history longer and more variable than any other language, including poetry and prose as skillful as writings in any period. While learning the language (especially in the first half of the course) we will investigate writings that exploit the language's powers and complexities from the earliest pieces into early Middle English, when the language and its literary traditions disintegrated and began being reinvented at the Norman Conquest. We will also sample (in translation) Latin, Old Saxon, and Old Norse materials that fed the multilingual and multicultural world in which early English developed.

This seminar treats allegorical poetry spanning the Middle Ages but aimed at later medieval England, interlarded with modern and medieval theory. The modes of medieval allegory, entailing religious, historical, moral, economic, and political interpretation, merge with ideas of signification and figural language in general, but also with the practice of distinctive medieval genres such as debate, visions, homily, and morality drama. Selections, in Latin and French followed by medieval English works, include Augustine, Macrobius, Boethius, Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille, the Owl and the Nightingale, Roman de la rose, Nicholas Bozon, the Ovide moralise, and Piers Plowman, plus debates, lyrics, drama, and political allegories. Translations of Latin and French and some of the Middle English works will be available. Informal writings, two essays, take-home final.

Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the darker side of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English.

This seminar will explore the English language and its literatures in its most diverse centuries, which 19th century philologists saw as the middle span: after the collapse of Old English language, poetic style, and indigenous power-centers at the Norman Conquest (1066), up to printing (1476), the beginnings of standard Modern English, claims to an English literary tradition, and the origins of Atlantic adventurism and imperialism. Between those benchmarks we'll consider multilingualism, English linguistic diversity and changes, social identity, literary forms, and ideas about language and literature, sampling many Middle English works and more fully reading the Katherine Group, Gawain-poet, Piers Plowman, and Julian of Norwich's Showings.

If the past is a foreign country, is it a country full of oppressed women? We can, with some smugness, agree that it may have been dreadful to be a woman or sexual minority in the Middle Ages, but it's nowhere near that simple. Also un-simple are medieval notions of race. Scholars long assumed that the European Middle Ages were entirely white and/or that since race as a concept hadn't been invented yet, it wasn't an issue. But both racial and gender difference matter tremendously, then as now. Together, we will think about race and gender as imagined at a time before the world we now know came into being, asking what the pre-history of difference might have to do with us and our future.

How do narratives work? What kinds of social functions do stories perform? And how can the theory and analysis of narrative help us to grasp and shape power relations? The course will introduce the history of classical narrative theory, from Aristotle and Lessing to Todorov and Genette, but it will focus especially on new trends in queer, critical race, and feminist narrative theory, and on the uses of narrative form across disciplines and social spaces. You will be expected to write a few short responses to the readings, practice giving a formal conference-style oral presentation, and write a final essay based on the conference paper.

This seminar explores the relation between book history and literary history during the span from medieval English manuscript culture through Renaissance print culture, with invitations to apply these concerns to any period and language. Skills taught are both theoretical and practical, focusing on manuscripts, old handwriting, literacy, printers, and issues linking material and social book-making to literary topics and forms. As a class, we will focus on the pivotal period of English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, but individual final editorial projects can take up any period or language. All students will learn to exploit chance archival discoveries, to write biographies of an early printer, and to use and create an edition.

Chaucer became known as the father of English poetry before he was entirely cold in his grave. Why is what he wrote more than six hundred years ago still riveting for us today? It's not only because he was the model for a number of key literary forms and features, or because he opened projects that invited participation and imitation. It's also because what he wrote was funny, fierce, thoughtful, political, philosophical, scientific, and notoriously bawdy. We'll read some of Chaucer's early work against a few of his own models, then dig into his two greatest achievements: Troilus and Crisyede and The Canterbury Tales. We'll learn to read Chaucer's Middle English, which will prove surprisingly easy and rewarding.

Fear of idolatry is a recurrent feature of Western culture. The Christian image threatens to short-circuit the flow of spirituality between humans and God, just as images of the ancient, pagan gods threaten dangerously to preserve the energies of those lascivious and vengeful deities. And images, whether secular or religious, are always potentially threatening to literate culture: they compete with words, and seem to possess a much more immediate power to mesmerize the imagination. The Protestant Reformation in particular targeted images as the enemy to a true religion of the Word. Legislation in England determined the wholesale destruction of religious images (iconoclasm) between 1538 and 1644. On the other hand, many writers and artists, both secular and religious, look to the image for salvation of sorts. Guided by these perceptions, we will be looking to a range of pre- and post-Reformation texts and contexts. The course will be equally divided between late medieval and early modern texts. Students without Middle English should feel entirely at ease to take this course: all texts will be presented in reader-friendly editions.

All decolonization, wrote Frantz Fanon, is successful at the level of description. With a focus on the difference between description and critique and on the uneven relation between the academic project underlying the subfield of postcolonial studies and histories of colonialism and aspirations to decolonization across the twentieth century, this seminar will offer a retrospective survey on the assemblage of texts that has come under the name Postcolonial Theory and inquire into its purchase on this present with particular emphasis on questions of indigeneity and environmental crisis. Authors may include: Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Wynter, David Scott, Leela Gandhi, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Jason Moore, Glenn Coulthard, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rob Nixon.

English Renaissance poetry boasted a classically inspired commitment to pleasure and profit, but a cognate concern with utility and experience permeated both literature the vernacular technologies of everyday life. This course considers the ubiquity of how-to writing in early modern England, as such imperatives shaped both lived experience and cultural production. Readings draw from prose and poetic genres (including essay, dialogue, and pamphlet; and lyric, didactic and devotional verse) and cover practical and impractical advice on conduct, the passions, and technologies of everyday life, including recipes, letters, hygiene, and diet. We will weigh the virtues of a range of historical and theoretical approaches to these questions, including new historicism, psychoanalysis, theories of racialization and embodiment, the sociology of manners, feminist criticism, and biopolitics and governmentality.

At least since Samuel Johnson’s 1778 Preface to Hamlet, if not before, Shakespeare’s drama has been understood to “exhibit various forms of life.” The “weary,” “dear,” “singular,” “peculiar,” and “calamitous” life staged in Hamlet is, in turn, often linked to the play’s own dramatic form of tragedy, or what Shakespeare called “Tragical Historie.” Implicit to this history is the long standing problem of the relationship between “life” and – especially dramatic – form. While the problem of “forms of life” has long been an object of philosophical investigation, from Hamann, Herder, Hegel, and von Humboldt, through, in different ways, Husserl and Wittgenstein, recent work differs from this tradition by turning from epistemological, ontological, or logical considerations, toward the question of “life” understood as a bio-political, theo-political, aesthetic and/or technological production. If, for Wittgenstein, the problem of life forms was a question of language (“to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form” [Philosophical Investigations, para. 19]), for Giorgio Agamben[1] a form-of-life is “a life that can never be separated from its form [and] a life of power.” In response to renewed interest in philosophical criticism on the question of the human or even the “post-human,” the purpose of the seminar is to explore the relationship between conceptualized and un-conceptualized forms of life as these are imagined in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and drama.

The seminar focuses on one of the most complex and pressing problems of our time: political theology. Political theology articulates the link between faith and reason in an attempt to ground political community in a language of legitimacy. First articulated in classical antiquity by Marcus Varro in Rome and later by Augustine, political theology is a way of naming and understanding the complex problem of authority. As distinct from religion, political theology is an (ongoing) social, political and cultural discourse of power over people's real lives. Whether (in modern terms) that governmental power has to do with abortion or gay marriage, political theological arguments always need to harness and synthesize these two sources. Early modern literature plays a crucial rule in this history of articulations.

The term lyric is uncommon before the sixteenth century, but the songs and short, non-narrative poetry that evidently constitute those traditions reach back to the beginnings of written literature. Theory of the lyric is a contested field, with much at stake in how poetry should be assessed and appreciated. Beginning with ancient and early medieval traditions, the seminar will focus on the star-studded period from the early fourteenth through the early seventeenth century, particularly Petrarch, Machaut, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, Sidney, Spencer, and Shakespeare. It will seek to explore their poems within literary exchanges as well as cultural history, from economics to media to colonialism to changes in the English language.

This course juxtaposes core strains of current posthumanist theory-new materialism or thing theory, the affective turn, ecocriticism or environmental humanities, and literary animal studies. Using eighteenth-century literature, culture, and intellectual discourse as a starting point and then sampling related materials in the Anglo-American tradition from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will define these theoretical scenarios, and evaluate the broader impact of approaches to the other-than-human in literary theory and in formal critique. Texts (and selections): Newton, Opticks; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature; Voltaire, Candide; Auster, Timbuktu; Heise, Imagining Extinction; Kohn, How Forests Think; Braidotti, The Posthuman.

This course considers the idea of the vernacular in pre-modern England, early modern Europe, and post-colonial Africa by sampling two long historical trajectories before and after the British empire, converging on Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. One samples medieval and Renaissance writings in English in relation to its institutions up to Bunyan's dissenting work, the other the aesthetic and linguistic journey Bunyan's work later undertook in England and the British colonies in Africa. What happens to vernacularity in both spans? What aesthetics emerge from the clash between standardized and 'vulgar' 'Englishes' and African languages? Around Bunyan we will sample medieval chronicles, lyrics, Piers Plowman, Things Fall Apart, and other narratives and poetry from post-colonial Africa to pursue the relationships between language, identity, aesthetics, and power.

This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. The Rhetoric of Temporality, Semiology and Rhetoric, The Resistance to Theory, Autobiography as De-Facement, Shelley Disfigured, Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist, Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate.

Not quite a survey, this course investigates several terms that its title might obscure. Drawing on theoretical constructions of gender, genre, race, and history, the course considers the historical conditions for women writers as they produce works under conditions of necessity, pleasure, politics, and polemical insistence. We will read poetry, short stories, letters, and novels. Authors will include Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as Emily Dickinson, Alice and Phoebe Cary, Sui Sin Far, Sarah Winnemucca, Maria Ruiz de Burton, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

This seminar will explore the both the intellectual grounding of and the nuts and bolts of feminist pedagogy. In what context did feminist pedagogy emerge and why? How have its practitioners variously defined it? What goals in teaching have they pursued? How might this work be useful to you as a teacher beginning or honing your teaching? Both theoretical and practical questions like these will be our subject.

From rich paradigms of sympathy and sentiment adapted from the eighteenth century to newer theories of unconsciousness and crowd psychology, Victorian literature reflects shifting conceptions of feeling. This course examines how psychological claims ground the forms and experiences of reading in the Victorian period, as well as the recent theoretical turn to affect, which emerged in particular rejoinder to critical trends in Victorian studies. What evidence is there that emotions are experienced, discussed, or represented in historically and culturally specific ways? How does the work of feeling register in literary form? Readings will include novels (Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Schreiner); narrative poems (Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Meredith); contemporary prose; and theoretical engagements with affect (Armstrong, Felski, Deleuze, Sedgwick, Ngai, Berlant, recent debates in Critical Inquiry).

We shall look at early South African and African-language literature of the late 1880s through the early 1940s in relation to the literature of decolonization that spanned the 1950s through the 1980s, and the contemporary generation of established and emerging continental and diaspora African writers of international renown. Some of the questions around the misreading of African literature will include: Why did Chinua Achebe's generation privilege African literature in English despite the early South African example? What are the costs of locating the start of Africa's literary tradition in the wrong literary and historical period? What does it mean for the current generation of writers and scholars of African literature not to have an imaginative consciousness of their literary past?

In this course we shall look at the ways black people across countries and continents developed networks of resistance, the promises and contradictions and what that means for our world today. Using thinkers and writers such as Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Nicolás Guillén, Frantz Fanon, Assata Shakur, Shirley DuBois, Edouard Glissant, we shall map out the ways in which black people (very broadly defined) and their allies (also broadly defined) challenged and changed the meaning of freedom. Key themes will be intersectional versus interconnectedness, creolization versus hybridity, black consciousness vs black power. We shall look at BLM in the US and BLM in South Africa and Nigeria as way to use those networks of resistance to speak to our times.

How has the fiction and art of queers of color transformed the worlds we know? How have their theoretical interventions created new queer freedoms and new understandings of race and sexualities? In this course we will focus on the struggles against subjugation led by Black and Latinx artists and writers including Audre Lorde, Gabby Rivera, Marlon Riggs, Felix, Gonzalez-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldua, James Baldwin, Cherrie Moraga. Building on their work, will turn to queer of color theory, a conceptual field that interrogates the ways race, gender, sexuality, regimes of embodiment, and class reinforce racializing technologies, in order to learn what queer of color thinkers can teach us about globalization, incarceration, immigration as well as joy, pleasure, intoxication, the unruly and the opaque.

In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the love trilogy on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.

What was the position of literary writing among the new media technologies that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century? How did modernist writers respond to a social and political situation in which access to media and information was at once widely distributed, and consolidated by corporations and the state? This class pursues continuities between past and present, against today's claims of heroically disruptive innovation and new crises for literature. Ths course will engage key media theorists in the context of extended analyses of two major 20th-century works - James Joyce's Ulysses and Langston Hughes's Ask Your Mama - among other key intertexts of the period.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote. How do we take pleasure in a text, even when it appears to betray us? How do we speak of the erotics of style beyond the mere thematic interpretation of sexual representation? Has such an erotics even been written yet? To explore a methodology for contemplating this elusive embrace between the aesthetic and the erotic, we will consider influential works of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and queer theory alongside a survey of great modernist novelists whose innovative experiments in prose style have proved most sensual and most challenging, among them Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ronald Firbank, and Djuna Barnes.