Spring 2026
Spring 2026
350:589 - History of African American Drama
Course No: 350:589
Index #: 19051
Distribution Requirement: A4, A5, C
Tuesdays - 2:00 pm
MU 207
History of African American Drama
Kernan, Ryan
This course offers an overview of African American drama. We will begin our exploration with the inaugural moments of African American performance on the slave ship, plantation, and in the 19th century theater, and then trace the development of African American drama well into the 21st century. In the process, students will gain familiarity with the (often) overlooked theatrical contributions of some of the African American canon’s most important authors and with the histories, the theatrical and aesthetic movements, and the political movements that inform their work. This course does not assume a familiarity with Black studies, theatre or drama and should not be mistaken for a performance studies course. Although we will examine work by some theorists of Black drama like Leroi Jones and Paul Carter Harrison, for the most part (following in the footsteps of Barbara Christian), we will take our theoretical cues from the range and complexity of the texts themselves, allowing us to see how Black playwrights have conceptualized and portrayed Black life over the past 170 years. Some of the authors and plays we will consider include: William Wells Brown’s “The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom,” Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “In Dahomey,” Langston Hughes’s “Mulatto,” several plays by Lorraine Hansberry including “A Raisin in the Sun,” James Baldwin’s “Amen Corner” and “Blues for Mr. Charlie,” Amiri Baraka’s “Dutchman,” Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf,” Charles Gordone’s “No Place to Be Somebody,” Paul Carter Harrison’s “The Great MacDaddy,” Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play,” several plays from August Wilson’s “Century Cycle,” Anna Deveare Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror,” Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog,” and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “An Octoroon.” We will screen several productions of these plays (through the Canvas interface) with an eye to developing our skills as reviewers of theatre and as dramaturges. To that end, in addition to their engaged weekly participation, students will submit one or two theater reviews (5 pages) along with an oral presentation, and develop one conference length paper (and presentation) based on their research about several productions of one (or several) of our plays.
350:617 - Renaissance Drama and Social Justice
Course No: 350:617
Index #: 19053
Distribution Requirement: A2
Mondays - 2:00 pm
MU 207
Renaissance Drama and Social Justice
Fulton, Thomas
Bartels, Emily
Early modern drama evolved in the margins of central London at a moment when categories of privilege and unprivileged “difference” had not yet congealed. An effervescently popular (in all senses) art form, drama contributed significantly to the period’s identification, interrogation, and adjudication of “social justice,” the equitable distribution of rights and privileges. Using a range of early modern plays as a primary window into this evolving discourse, this course will look at how, and at whose hands, assumptions of equity get coded into – or out of – representations of difference. We will focus in particular on loaded constructions and intersections of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and physical ability and fairness. We will consider how these contribute to the period’s changing conceptions of what is legally, morally, religiously, theatrically, or otherwise socially “just” – with an eye not only to the early modern moment but also our own.
The course will center on a range of plays: likely including Marlowe, Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta; Peele, The Battle of Alcazar; Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest; Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling; Jonson, Epicoene; and Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West. We will put this drama in conversation with provocative critical, historical, and fictional texts as we delve into such topics as racial coding and interracial marriage; sexual legislation and common law; national sovereignty and international terrorism; speculation as discrimination; religious violence and “truth”; gendered violence and silence; the “average man” and theatrical privilege; ugliness and alienation.
Writing a handful of shorter 2-page memos, students will work across the term to develop a 14-18 page final paper centered on one or more of the course plays or related texts. We’ll schedule presentations of the work for the final class days.
350:505 Queer Poetry and Poetics
Course No: 350:505
Index #: 19048
Distribution Requirement: A5, C
Tuesdays - 10:20 am
MU 207
Queer Poetry and Poetics
Grogan, Kristin
This course reads queer poetry, focused predominantly but not exclusively on Anglo-American poetry of the twentieth century. Some of the questions we’ll be approaching: what is a queer poetic tradition? What is queer about poetic form—in other words, what is a queer poetics? How is queerness embedded in ideas of the avant-garde or ‘experimental’ literature?
We’ll approach questions of history and queer lineage; relationality, community, coteries, friendship, rivalry; identity and identification; the relationship between the lyric speaker, lyric address and questions of disclosure, secrecy, outness and the closet; the place of poetry in liberationist movements, historical and contemporary; canons and canonicity; queer and intimate poetic archives.
We’ll also tackle some meta-disciplinary questions. How did poetry—as opposed, to, say, the emphasis on character-formation in narrative—figure in the emergence and development of queer theory, and how does it figure today? What interpretive questions does taking poetry as our object of study allow us to open? What methods of reading—close, distant, reparative, surface—does queer poetry invite us to engage?
Provisional reading list:
- Predecessors: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman; some queer late Victorian/proto-modernist poetry
- Queer Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent; blues recordings and blues poetry
- Lesbian modernism: Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, HD
- The New York School: Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, V.R. "Bunny" Lang, Joe Brainard, Eileen Myles
- Black queer feminist poetry: Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni
- The poetry of AIDS: Tim Dlugos, Essex Hemphill, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn
- + various contemporary poets: Jos Charles; Kay Gabriel; Danez Smith; C.A. Conrad; Trish Salah, Ari Banias; Ching-in Chen;
We’ll read poetry alongside critics and theorists including: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; Lauren Berlant; José Esteban Muñoz; Brian Glavey; Juno Richards; Benjamin Kahan; Chad Bennett; Michael Snediker; Sara Ahmed; Chris Nealon; Melanie Micir; Sarah Schulman; Kadji Amin; Emma Heaney; Sianne Ngai.
Assessment:
- Participation and contribution to class discussions, including preparation and reading.
- A class presentation and leading some of class discussion for one session.
- A longer paper, that will be developed and collaboratively workshopped int eh second half of the semester.
350:595 - Postcolonial Climate Fiction
Course No: 350:595
Index #: 18471
Distribution Requirement: A5, C
Mondays - 10:20 am
MU 207
Postcolonial Climate Fiction
Mangharam, Mukti
How does the study of postcolonial literatures help us understand the impact of capitalist modernity on our planetary climate? The history of that modernity is inseparable from the colonial capitalism that spread certain ideas about the way humans relate to the world, their environments, and to each other. If our planetary climate crisis has its roots in colonialism, how can postcolonial texts that challenge colonialism offer us alternative frameworks through which to relate to our planet? Can they lead us to the models that can critique and dismantle harmful cultural separations between humans, between the human and animal, and between the human and their ecosystems? Can they provide us with a vocabulary that speaks in terms of shared planetary concerns? To examine the relationships between capitalism, colonialism, and the environment, we will turn to writers in English from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands and examine how they represent threats to the planet and theorize ways out of it. We will draw from diverse genres such as short stories, film, and the novel, perusing texts by Amitav Ghosh, Doris Lessing, Helon Habila, Nnedi Okarafor, and Wangari Maathai among others. We will also examine debates around the role that narrative plays in depicting climate change, reading Amitav Ghosh, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rob Nixon, Cajetan Iheka, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey among others.
350:654 - Literary Modernity in the US
Course No: 350:654
Index #: 19055
Distribution Requirement: A5, D
Wednesdays - 12:10 pm
MU 207
Literary Modernity in the US
Andrew Goldstone
This course is a US-focused case study in modernism in the context of the broader transformation of print and literacy in the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time an American-dominated modernism was thought to cover nearly everything of interest in (early) twentieth-century literature, but scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the limitations of this approach, which ignores or devalues a wide range of literary production that does not resemble classic modernism. In order to grasp the effects of the structural transformations that affected reading and writing broadly in the period, this course proposes that modernism and its many non-modernist others are best studied as joint products of an expanding, fragmenting, and polarizing literary field. To give our inquiry some heuristic limits, we accept a US national frame, bearing in mind as we read individual writers that really, universally, literary relations stop nowhere. The course is divided into two parts. The first half of the course gives a selective overview of American modernism up to 1940. The second half of the course is a series of rapid introductions to a few key US literary tendencies contemporary with but distinct from modernism: the Harlem Renaissance, proletarian literature, and several genres of commercial fiction. Needless to say we cannot cover the field in its totality, but our goal is to articulate some of the themes, transformations, and interpretive problems that an expansive literary history of the twentieth century encounters.
Readings include both primary texts and scholarship throughout the semester. The primary texts are to be studied with particular attention to the era’s distinctive print media (little magazines, pulps and slicks, experimental anthologies, and so on). The selection of secondary readings gives rather short shrift to classic modernist scholarship in order to emphasize more recent approaches to the broader field.
The major assignment is a research paper (8000–12000 words). Some work in progress will be due at the end of March. In addition, in every seminar at least one student will present on a secondary reading and lead initial discussion on it.
Works studied may include:
- Crane, "The Open Boat"
- James, The Ambassadors
- Hemingway, In Our Time (selections)
- Porter, Flowering Judas (selections)
- Eliot, The Waste Land
- Stevens, Harmonium (selections)
- Moore, Observations (selections)
- Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
- Barnes, Nightwood
- Locke, ed. The New Negro (selections)
- Hughes, A New Song (selections)
- Le Sueur, "I Was Marching"
- Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Loos, Gentleman Prefer Blondes
- Pulp magazine stories by: Gardner, Hammett, Lovecraft, C.L. Moore