Spring 2025

Course No: 350:611
Index #: 17960
Distribution Requirement: A1
Mondays - 2:00 PM
MU 207

Reading Chaucer Now
Scanlon, Larry

Geoffrey Chaucer was the first English poet to be read and edited continuously from his own time to the present.  The Canterbury Tales was the most widely distributed vernacular poem in later medieval Britain, and that by a wide margin.  With the likely exception of Paradise Lost, it is arguably the single most influential poem in the entire Anglophone tradition. 

This course constitutes a reworking of the traditional Chaucer seminar—one of a handful of single-author seminars that long formed the backbone of the graduate curriculum.  Its recent disappearance reflects a number of factors, some of them scholarly, some of them institutional.  Chief among the scholarly factors: Chaucer has become a slightly less dominant presence in Middle English studies in the past two decades, as the field, like most period-fields in literary studies, has undergone a substantial expansion of its canon.  Nevertheless, Chaucer still attracts the largest plurality of scholarly attention in the field.  Remarkably, this slight scholarly waning has roughly coincided with notable upsurge of interest in Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales in contemporary culture at large among both contemporary writers and filmmakers.  That includes writers and filmmakers of color.  I have redesigned the conventional Chaucer seminar to accommodate both of these shifts.

As a traditional seminar would, this seminar will cover the basics of the Canterbury collection’s textual history and social and intellectual context as well recent trends in its scholarly reception.  These include ecocriticism, cosmopolitanism, the New Formalism, affect studies, studies in medievalism, and in visual culture, as well as more established but still influential approaches such as critical historicism, feminism, queer theory, and psychoanalysis.  However, instead of examining the entire collection, we will concentrate on eight of the most canonical tales: the General Prologue, Knight’s Tale, Miller’s Tale, Man of Law’s Tale, Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, Clerk’s Tale, Pardoner’s Tale, and Nun’s Priest’s Tale.  These will be supplemented with two to four tales that attracted less interest from modern scholars.  Four weeks will be devoted entirely to modern and contemporary works: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods along with its 1948 precursor, John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café; Graham Swift’s Last Orders; and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (on the grounds that Swift reads the Canterbury Tales through Faulkner’s novel). Shorter works—Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and selections from Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales—will be read along with the particular tale they draw upon.

Requirements: 15-20 pp. paper and two presentations.

Reading List

Poetry:

Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (ed. Benson).
Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (selections).

Drama:

Caryl Churchill, Top Girls.
Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden.

Novels:

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.
Gloria Naylor, Bailey’s Café.
Graham Swift, Last Orders.

Film:

John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Spike Lee, Da 5 Bloods.

Course No: 350:589
Index #: 17957
Distribution Requirement: A4, A5, C
Tuesdays - 10:20 AM
MU 207

Black Ecological Imagination
Mathes, Carter 

Building on Joshua Bennett’s suggestions that black literature may offer both, “the very mechanism [for] disaggregating human personhood itself,” and a “kinship and commonalty among living and nonliving things alike,” this seminar focuses on the aesthetic and political engagements of black literary artists with(in) their specific ecological contexts, and through their considerations of race and the environment more broadly. 

From Middle Passage and plantation ecologies, to contemporary carceral, urban, and rural black ecologies, our inquiry will be transhistorical and hemispheric, examining writing that imaginatively and critically explores questions of blackness and being, race and the outdoors, built environments, extraction, enslavement, colonialism, reconstruction, industrialization, (un/natural) disaster, weather, animality, and more. 

We’ll consider the centrality of gender and sexuality to various black ecological contexts, and we will engage with the recent proliferation of critical work on race and the environment.  Our interdisciplinary inquiry will also put literary work into conversation with music, photography, film, and video/sound installations.  One aim of our study across literary genres and artistic forms will be to consider how ideas and practices of aesthetic innovation enrich and expand our ability to conceptualize the many dimensions of the ecological within black life.

Primary texts (primarily novels, short stories, and poetry) may include work from Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Aime Cesaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Henry Dumas, Harriet Jacobs, Eric Walrond, Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Jean Toomer, W.E.B. DuBois, Ann Spencer, Chester Himes, Will Alexander, Bessie Head, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Michelle Cliff, Yusef Komunyaaka.

Our critical readings will feature essays, chapters, or monographs from Kim Ruffin, Katherine McKittrick, Clyde Woods, JT Roane, Monique Allewart, Sonya Postmentier, Joshua Bennett, Tiffany Lethabo King, Nathan Hare, Jennifer James, Frantz Fanon, Annisa Janine Wardi, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Carlyn Ferrari.

Assignments/writing will entail a book review, annotated bibliography, blog post, and a short (conference presentation length) essay. 

Course No: 350:645
Index #: 17962
Distribution Requirement: A3, A4, D
Tuesdays - 2:00 PM
MU 207

Natural Histories
Iannini, Christopher

This courses traces the development of natural history as a new scientific method, intellectual obsession, and literary practice during the long eighteenth century. Defined in its broadest sense as the study of organic life and its environment, and encompassing emerging Enlightenment disciplines including botany, geography, ornithology, entomology, climate theory and anthropology (among many others) natural history quickly attained new prestige and influence in the period. By the early 1700s, as historian Richard Drayton describes it, natural history had “captured the attention of the upper and middle classes of imperial Britain” and its colonies (Nature’s Government). By the end of the century, it served as lingua franca of letters, art, and politics in Europe and the Americas.

Beginning with the founding of the Royal Society in London and its efforts to reform empiricist method and prose, we will read some newly canonical natural histories of the early Americas by writers such as Hans Sloane and Richard Ligon. We will consider how the formal and stylistic requirements of natural history writing—specifically the specimen description and the manners and customs sketch— as well as its underlying environmentalist logic, influenced the development of the early novel (Oroonoko, Crusoe). We will pay particular attention to the importance of natural history for the development of early modern conceptions of race (Wheeler, The Complexion of Race; Parrish, American Curiosity) and sexuality (Lafleur, The Natural History of Sexuality), and to the literary representation of both within a range of popular genres (travel narrative, captivity narrative, criminal narrative, early slave narrative etc.) From there we turn to the rise of Creole natural history in the age of revolutions, examining how white colonial writers from throughout the Americas drew on natural history as they attempted to challenge their subordinate place within a transatlantic republic of letters, and asking how the demand for eyewitness reports of New World nature provided openings (however tenuous) for black and indigenous participation in the public sphere (Johnson, Encyclopédie Noire). We conclude with two weeks on Moby-Dick; or the Whale, considering how natural history shapes the aesthetics and politics of Melville’s sprawling, encyclopedic novel, composed during the period when professionalized science first emerges, demoting the natural historian to curious amateur, and when literary and scientific epistemologies diverge decisively. One guide for this unit will be Brit Rusert’s concept of “fugitive science.” Faced with the rise of racial science in the antebellum United States, how did writers such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delaney transform the stage and page into “laboratories of knowledge and experimentation,” and how can recovering this history shed new light on Melville’s own ambivalent representations of race.

Primary readings will include works by most of the following: Aphra Behn, Hans Sloane, Richard Ligon, Daniel Defoe, Comte de Buffon, Carl Linneaus, Mary Rowlandson, St. John Crévecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Leonora Sansay, Fredrick Douglass, and Herman Melville.  Requirements will consist of one class presentation and a final seminar paper (based on independent research and composed in stages during the second half of the semester).

Course No: 350:514
Index #: 17955
Distribution Requirement: A4, A5, D
Wednesdays - 12:10 PM
MU 207

Politics in the Novel
Kurnick, David / Lawrence, Jeffrey

Critics and scholars have developed sophisticated ways to assess the politics of a novel—to examine what political projects the text supports or promotes (avowedly or surreptitiously or unconsciously). This is a crucial feature of contemporary critical discourse, in which this course will give students a footing. But we will also be exploring the less often considered question of how politics is represented in the novel, especially as such representation interacts with the question of what politics the novel understands itself to promote.

Central questions will be: how do novels represent the awakening to political consciousness? How are projects of collective action—organizing, consciousness raising, dissent, solidarity—depicted and given form? What difference does the existence of social movements make to fiction? What identifiable narrative and characterological patterns help us make sense of the political in the novel? How is political language absorbed into the novel’s discursive texture (if it is)? How has the form’s much-bruited intimacy with the project of bourgeois individualism been confronted or managed by overtly political writers? Does the question of the political challenge or reinforce our literary-historical categories? What aesthetic protocols enable or limit the narration of a political act?

The course will not assume that the political is equivalent to the progressive, and we will work to consider the degree to which patterns of politicization do or do not conform to left-right or liberal-radical divisions. Among the political programs and movements we’ll consider are Chartism, labor organizing and work stoppages, feminism, abolitionism, the Civil Rights movement, Black radicalism, socialist, communist and nationalist agitation and revolution, and trans, queer, and AIDS activism. Authors studied may include Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elizabeth Gaskell, Émile Zola, Henry James, Nelly Campobello, Mariano Azuela, Tess Gallagher, Ralph Ellison, John Williams, Alice Walker, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Sarah Schulman, and Georgi Gospodinov. Critics and theorists may include Amanda Anderson, Mikhail Bakhtin, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Lauren Berlant, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Michaela Bronstein, Michael Denning, Erica Edwards, Barbara Foley, Jean Franco, Carlos Fuentes, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Irving Howe, Fredric Jameson, Gyorgy Lukács, Walter Benn Michaels, Seth Moglen, Ángel Rama, Jacques Rancière, Adolph Reed, Bruce Robbins, Raymond Williams. 

Students will be expected to write a 5-7-page midterm essay and a 10-12-page final essay. We will also ask each student to present on the assigned material once during the semester.