Fall 2025

Anthropology and American Literature

Evans, Brad

A survey in three parts:

1) of the development American literature from the 1860s to 1930s understood alongside disciplinary developments in cultural anthropology, and so, for example, of the coterminous development of cultural pluralism as an idea explored in artistic movements (from nineteenth-century local color fiction to the Harlem Renaissance), academic disciplines (founding decades for the MLA, AAA, and AFS), and political platforms (i.e. pluralism versus the melting pot);

2) of the disciplinary confluence of anthropology and literary studies that emerged in the 1970s around the so-called “critique of anthropology” and a shared sense of the culture concept’s centrality to both literary and anthropological theory (such that when Clifford Geertz encouraged anthropologists to think of culture as text, Stephen Greenblatt could follow with text as culture, and both could be usefully deployed in historical projects of ideology critique);

3) and of contemporary theoretical reconsiderations of that disciplinary confluence—and, in particular of pluralism and the culture concept, that continue to turn back to the formative moment from the late nineteenth century (often by way of William James instead of Franz Boas)—as in Bruno Latour, Eduardo Kohn, Donna Haraway, Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and others.

Students can expect a broad survey of primary and secondary materials and the standard workload for a 600-level seminar, including several class-presentations and a final paper.

Reading Charles Dickens

Siegel, Jonah

Charles Dickens occupies a central place in discussions of the history of the novel, of Realism, of the English nineteenth century, of Victorianism. He is one of that small number of authors who still commands interest from a broader reading public, whose words have become part of our daily speech, and some of whose works are widely familiar. Nevertheless, Dickens’s great novels from the 1840s to the 1860s still present challenges to the modern reader, as well as offering real pleasures and insights into the period in which he wrote. This course will work its way attentively through all three of the major works, Dombey and Son (1846), Bleak House (1852), and Little Dorritt (1855), while also spending time on the social critique of Hard Times (1854), the complex historical sensibility of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and the painful psychological depths of Great Expectations (1860).

Dickens has been well-served by the critics, so the course will also read influential accounts of his achievements by authors ranging from Bakhtin and D.A. Miller to George Orwell and Lionel Trilling, as well as more recent analyses.

This course will not assume any familiarity with the Victorian period or novel theory, but it will be a good way to acquire a sense of what makes the era and its literature interesting and to start thinking about genre.

Requirement: two papers; seminar presentation; active participation.

Poetry and Media

McGill, Meredith

How would our histories of Anglo-American poetry change if we considered the rise of print and other media as formative events in the history of poetry? What would happen if we took the media for the circulation of poetry as seriously as we do questions of form and genre? And how does taking seriously poetry’s engagement with media change how we think about media history? This course will approach these questions through a series of case studies in which we will consider a poet’s works and poetics in dialogue with shifts in media history.

Given my own areas of specialization, our case studies will mostly be drawn from US literary history and from the long nineteenth-century, but students will be encouraged to use our common theoretical readings to develop a final essay on a topic from any time period, so long as it speaks to both the history of poetry and the history of media.

We will divide the semester into four units, taking up clusters of poets under the following headings (likely case studies indicated in parentheses): (1) handwriting and print (Sir Philip Sidney, Anne Bradstreet, George Moses Horton, Emily Dickinson); (2) poetry and print formats (Jonathan Swift, Lydia Sigourney, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman); (3) poetry and oral performance (Edward Taylor, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Langston Hughes); (4) poetry and technological mediation (microscopes, panoramas and photographs, disembodied radio voices, digital poetics).

Students will write two short responses to weekly seminar readings and draft an article-length essay based on a proposal circulated to the class ahead of time. I hope to arrange visits to area libraries to view and handle some of the manuscript and print sources we will study as digital facsimiles.

Black Literary Studies: Foundations & Emergences

Kernan, Ryan

What is Black literature—and Black culture, generally—and why do we study it? This course, while led by Evie Shockley, will be collectively taught by the majority of the department’s field specialists in Black literature and culture (Profs. Extra, Ibironke, Kernan, Mathes, Owens, Robolin, & Shockley). Our goal is to offer students who are interested in Black literature (African American, Caribbean, African, and broadly diasporic/transnational work)—whether as specialists or not—an opportunity to study some significant foundational texts and acquaint themselves with important emergent subfields, methods, and works that the faculty are engaged with presently. During the first five or six weeks of the course, we will survey some of the scholarship (produced roughly from the 1960s through the ‘90s) that helped establish the field of African American literature and situate it in relation to the literatures of Africa and other parts of the diaspora. The remainder of the semester will feature class sessions led in turn by the various faculty noted above, introducing methodologies and lines of inquiry that have developed more recently (circa 21st century) and showing how this emergent scholarship builds upon (even as it may diverge from or rethink altogether) earlier work. Subjects the course will likely take up include: genealogies of Black feminist thought; Black sound/music and Black literary studies; Black ecologies and geographies; the Black Arts Movement; oceanic studies; translation studies as an outgrowth of Black diaspora studies; Black posthumanism and speculative fiction; race and anticolonial thought; and the Black radical tradition. The course will give us the opportunity to reflect on both the kinds of questions Black literature has historically provoked for Black Studies and the kinds of research Black Studies scholars of literary and cultural work are doing now.

Examples of critical/theoretical texts under consideration for the course are: Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory”; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Kaiama Glover and Martin Munro, “Translating the Caribbean”; Isabel Hofmeyr, Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World; Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; Fred Moton, In the Break; Jennifer Nash, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism; Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”; Barbara Smith, “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism”; Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance; Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” and “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.”

Evaluation: regular attendance; two short review essays (4-5 pp.); and a conference-length (8-9 pp.) paper, to be presented at an end-of-semester symposium.