Fall 2024

Course No: 350:607
Index #: 15066
Distribution Requirement: A4, B
Monday - 2:00 p.m.
MU 207

Approaches to Philosophy and Literature
(or, Philosophy for Literary Critics)
Nancy Yousef

Any reader of postwar literary theory will unavoidably encounter discussion of "Western metaphysics," "rationalism," "idealism," often in conjunction with passing reference to big names from the philosophical tradition, typically assuming familiarity with those names—and perhaps also sometimes counting on the reader's unfamiliarity. Recognizing that courses in the history of philosophy have become increasingly rare, this seminar offers the opportunity to work through key philosophical texts that have been and are important touchstones in literary and cultural theory. Readings will include Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Our attention throughout will be on methodological approaches to the reading of philosophy, with an emphasis on how—and why—modes of literary analysis are especially well adapted to the interpretation of philosophical texts. We will also ask how works of literature can be understood to modify, and radically re-envision philosophical problems. Accordingly, while our readings in philosophy will be the main task, the semester will be punctuated by case studies of nineteenth century poems and novels that are deeply engaged with questions of subjectivity, perception, cognition, and ethics (eg. Wordsworth, Shelley, Austen, Hardy).

Requirements: 5-page paper, presentation, 15-20 page final essay

Course No: 350:510
Index #: 15061
Distribution Requirement: B
Tuesday - 10:20 a.m.
MU 207

Queer Literary and Cultural Theory
Dana Luciano

This seminar will provide a critical overview of key debates in queer literary and cultural theory, combining foundational and more recent writings. We will begin by historicizing and critically examining the emergence of queer theory, investigating both the fields that influenced it and the conditions of its academic institutionalization. Following this, we will explore some of the kinds of knowledge projects queer theory has underwritten. Areas of focus will include: the relationship of queer theory to feminism; the emergence and flourishing of Black queer theory and queer of color critique; trans theories; queer temporality and historiography; sex and sexuality. Authors to include: Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz, Cathy Cohen, Gayatri Gopinath, Mark Rifkin, Kara Keeling, David Eng, Leo Bersani, Elizabeth Freeman, C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, Marquis Bey, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jasbir K. Puar, Juana Maria Rodriguez, Amber Jamila Musser.

Course No: 350:629
Index #: 15067
Distribution Requirement: A3
Tuesday- 2:00 p.m.
MU 207

Enlightenment Environments (Setting, Landscape, Climate, Atmosphere)
Lynn Festa

The eighteenth century witnessed unprecedented large-scale displacements of populations, driven by colonial conquest, global commerce, urbanization, war, religious and political persecution, migration, transportation, and the slave trade. This course seeks to address the relation of subjects to settings in eighteenth-century literature. What happens when a figure is transported to new ground?  What does the environment do in literary and cultural works in the Age of Enlightenment? How was setting understood to shape human and extra/non-human history, especially in colonial contexts?  What forms of agency and life do the neglected backdrops of eighteenth-century texts possess, and when do living creatures (human and non-human) become assimilated to setting?  What effect does “atmosphere” have on readerly experience? Drawing on recent work in ecocriticism and posthumanist theories about the agency of non-human world, this course will think seriously about the work of “setting” and description, often second-class citizens in narrative theory, poetics, and aesthetics.  Together we will read widely across eighteenth-century genres (fiction, poetry, aesthetics, travel writing, natural history, history, Enlightenment climate theory); novelistic and poetic modes (Gothic, georgic, picaresque, loco-descriptive, sentimental, realist); and media (painting, drama, literary texts, maps, natural historical samples.  Authors may include Daniel Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, James Grainger, William Cowper, Laurence Sterne, Diderot, and Ann Radcliffe, among others.  

Requirements: regular class participation, one oral presentation, short mid-term paper; final seminar paper.

Course No: 350:505
Index #: 15060
Distribution Requirement: A2, A5
Wednesday - 3:50 p.m.
MU 207

Modernism / Early Modern: Literary History, Periodization and Interpretation
Kristin Grogan and Ann Baynes Coiro

What does it mean for a period to be labelled “modern”? What is “early” modern, and is the “modernism” of the twentieth century necessarily late? Why are writers from the early twentieth century so focused on seventeenth-century writers? Why did a period long called “Renaissance” decide to rename itself Early Modern in the late 1980s? How did modernism get its name? Is the “modern” of “modernism” the same as “early modern”? These initial questions have opened up a conversation between us about a graduate class about literary history, the politics of canonicity, and the resonance—and dissonance—between literary periods.

This class aims to put in lively, back-and-forth conversation literary moments that have been in a subterranean conversation for the last hundred years. We will crisscross key texts from the late Renaissance (aka early modern) and modernism. Our focus will include Eliot, Woolf, Pound, Dunbar, McKay, Niedecker, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Cavendish and Milton. The texts we will examine are mainly poetry, but we will also look at key prose works as well (Eliot’s essays; Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own; selections from Margaret Cavendish).

Among the issues we will explore are: images (beginning with metaphysical images) and imagism; the idea of the ‘new’ and ‘experimental’; theories of musical sound; the politics of the English Revolution and the execution of Charles I, and the fertile soil of the revolutionary modernist moment; the idea of literary labor in the moment of capitalism’s emergence and its industrial expansion; empire, colonialism, and nationalism; and contemporary theories in both periods about the value of literature.

This course opens a cross-period conversation that will bring two ‘modern’ moments together. We will interrogate what links the early modern/modernist across time, ask what students of one period can learn from careful study of the other, and interrogate the very question of period divisions within our discipline.