Fall 2023

Texts/Images/Worlds: Performance and Performativity Across Media

Ricardo Montez

From performative utterances to semiotic acts of meaning transmission, this class offers an introduction to performance studies methodologies and theories. Students will read foundational texts on performativity, examining how objects, texts, and images produce meaning and continually remake our worlds through their animating capacities. Recent work in literary criticism, history, and visual culture has turned to the performative to better understand how feeling and affect shape our realities and to demonstrate how objects of study actively exceed and resist our attempts to make sense of them. What does it mean to do things with words, and what kinds of things do words do to us? What does visual art perform for those who come in contact with it? What kinds of social relations emerge when we interact with media? These questions will be explored through an interdisciplinary engagement with literature, visual art, performances, and archival matter. Through weekly blog posts, a midterm essay, and a final essay, students will have the opportunity to apply performance studies methodologies to their own research questions. Possible authors include Fiona Anderson, J.L. Austin, Daphne Brooks, Judith Butler, Tina Campt, Ashon Crawley, Elin Diamond, David Getsy, Saidiya Hartman, Amelia Jones, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Peggy Phelan, Ricky Rodriguez, Eve Sedgwick, Christina Sharpe, and Alexandra Vazquez.

George Eliot

Nancy Yousef

This course will center on a close and attentive reading of all the principal novels of George Eliot, along with some of her shorter fiction, and essays. Such an immersion will allow us to address consistency and variation in conceptual and formal concerns across her career, and the evolution of her distinctive novelistic idiom. Central issues explored in the fiction include the complex dynamics of agency, contingency, and material circumstance, the tensions between spiritual striving and worldly ambition, the disruption of integrated selfhood, the convergences and divergences of science and art. We will grapple with the extraordinary engagement with disparate intellectual fields in her writing (art history, philology, biology, physics, economics, religion), and give special attention to the role of philosophical psychology in her work. The ethical implications of Eliot's realism (especially the challenges of attention, sympathy, and recognition) feature in contemporary approaches to aesthetics, affect, and attunement in literary studies. Reading of Eliot will be supplemented by important recent critical work on nineteenth century fiction and culture, (eg. Amanda Anderson, Pearl Brilmyer, Rae Greiner, David Kurnick, and Andrew Miller).

Archives of American Literature

Meredith McGill

Electronic media have changed radically how knowledge is classified, stored, and retrieved, and have helped detach the idea of the archive from its traditional identification with the place in which records are stored. This course will examine theories of the archive with an eye to how changing ideas about classification, storage, documents, and evidence might be brought to bear on Americanist literary studies. What kinds of challenges have the phonograph, radio, film, performance, and electronic media posed to manuscript- and print-based ideas of the archive? What are the implications of curated on-line collections and digital databases such as EEBO, ECCO, and Evans (Early American Imprints) for the study of literature? How has the very notion of the non-archivable – the ephemeral, the unrecordable, the wastefully repetitive, shaped our conception of the archive?

Theoretical texts will include works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Foucault, Michel De Certeau, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Lorraine Daston, Diana Taylor, Antoinette Burton, and Ann Stoler. We will also read recent criticism, including work by Saidiya Hartman, Kelly Wisecup, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, that creatively reimagines what one might do with the traces of subjects and creative practices that have been omitted from or subordinated within knowledge-systems.

As part of our study of new media archives, the class will spend some time engaging with the general theoretical aims of the Black Bibliography Project and exploring BBP data models for describing books, serials, dust jackets, and non-print media. I hope to coordinate this unit with a class being taught concurrently by Jacqueline Goldsby at Yale, including a trip to the Schomburg Library.

Students will complete a few short exercises, including site visits, a sustained engagement with a digital archive, exploration of Black Bibliography Project data, and a longer paper that takes up an archive (broadly defined) that shifts the way we think about a topic in literary and cultural studies.

Students are encouraged to use their work in this class not only to read deeply in theories of the archive but also to explore primary sources that might be of use to them in their dissertations.

Gender, Sex, Self in 18C England

Abigail Zitin

This course explores the emergence of two linked phenomena: the development, in theory, of the liberal subject as a rational, self-governing individual and the literary negotiation of intimate violence in eighteenth-century Britain. How are ideas of bodily autonomy and sexual self-determination linked with the cultural understanding of gender identity and its expression in this period? Central to our investigation will be Samuel Richardson’s monumental novel Clarissa—yes, we will read all of it—which will lay the conceptual groundwork for our investigations. Some topics we will address might include representations of psychology and other “interior” states; consent in political and feminist theory; race, gender, and personhood in the context and aftermath of Atlantic-world slavery; reproductive choice and reproductive justice; sex work; and asexuality and other queer and utopian forms of resistance to a patriarchal sex/gender system. Readings will be drawn from works by the following authors and critics: Aphra Behn, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, Susan Choi, Miriam Toews, Hortense Spillers, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Frances Ferguson, Wendy Brown, Saidiya Hartman, Charles W. Mills, Sandra Macpherson, Wendy Warren, Jennifer L. Morgan, Janet Halley, Amia Srinivasan, Wendy Lee, Lisabeth During, Nancy Yousef, and Greta LaFleur.