Fall 2026
Fall 2026
350:629 - Reading Matter: 1660-1840
Course No: 350:629
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A3
Mondays - 10:20 am
MU 207
Reading Matter: 1660-1840
Sean Silver
In his 2024 Radium of the Word, Craig Dworkin draws our attention to the double meaning of "reading matter"—on the one hand, the ideas, narratives, characters, or images we experience when we read, and, on the other, the pulp, ink, glue, and thread that makes up an artifact like a book. This class is a historical look at the matter of reading, focusing on the critically transformative years 1660-1840. In the first place, we will read widely in classic and emerging texts related to the sea-change of print culture—from the manuscript and scribal publication of seventeenth-century poetry, including the scurrilous republication of plays and poems which kicked off our modern regime of intellectual property, to the reorganization of labor and the arts under systems of print publication, including the rise of the novel and the emergence of polite systems of republican self-governance that Habermas summarizes as Öffentlichkeit. In the second, we will focus on the modern resurgence of interest in physical media and the material word, in the critical discourses known as book history and material poetics, but also, in a broader sense, the renewed interest in the material word against the wider backdrop of the remediation of print texts in digital formats. We will be working, in other words, at the conceptual gap that in many ways structures our field, between book-as-thing and book-as-thought.
Primary readings will be drawn from the historical period known as the long eighteenth century, from the manuscript culture and scribal publication of the Restoration poets (like the exchanges between the Stuart Libertine Wits), to the thoroughly print-mediated texts of the novel in its rise—like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy or Jane Austen's early novels (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice). Secondary readings will include classics from print and media studies (Eisenstein, Kittler, Habermas, and McLuhan, but also Jordan Stein, Whitney Trettien, Craig Dworkin, and emerging studies in book history). We will examine both what we mean by material when we say "material" in a seminar room—especially including the traditions of historical materialism and the imperfect ecosystems of the "new materialisms"—but also what is meant by "material" when people say it in a publishing house or a chemical manufactory: the stuff that makes up a book. Course requirements will include two presentations on secondary readings, and two longer projects—a midterm essay pitched to a public-facing platform like LARB or The Rambling, and a longer final essay on a topic (and text) of your choice.
This class is taught in partnership with the Scarlet Letterpress. Students will explore manuscript and print technologies including ink-making and quill-cutting, printing, book-making, and bibliographical analysis.
350:511 - The Book in Africa
Course No: 350:511
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: B, C
Mondays - 2:20 pm
MU 207
The Book in Africa
Stéphane Robolin
This course will survey developments in book history and book culture across the African continent, primarily, throughout the 20th century (although we will briefly touch on earlier and later developments). We will take up histories of publishing (metropolitan and local), textuality/orality, circulation, adaptation, translation, censorship, library patronage, and reading publics. The course will begin with a broad geographic scope, including studies set in northern, western, and eastern Africa. By the course’s midpoint, our attention will shift to focus mainly on southern African book history.
Our exploration will be guided by several inquiries into the relationship between the history of the book and the history of Africa: how are we to think about the history of the book in Africa as fundamentally intertwined with the history of colonialism, and how does this entangled history reframe our understanding of books as our routine objects of study? Furthermore, what histories exceed commonsense assumptions about the book in Africa and challenge our understandings about literacy, (social and representational) hegemony, empire, and/or resistance? This survey will primarily involve reading a sequence of critical studies and other secondary sources that have assessed and/or defined the field. We will also take up some primary literature—as both theory in its own right and as means of grounding the scholarship we cover—that reflects on elements of book culture.
Evaluation will be based upon regular participation, in-class presentations, regular posting, one midterm essay, and a final paper.
Readings will likely be drawn from among the following texts (in full or in part):
Sarah Brouillette, Underdevelopment and African Literature
Ruth Bush, Translation Imperatives
Tim Couzens, The New African
Caroline Davis, African Literature and the CIA
_______, Creating Postcolonial Literature
Davis et al. (eds), Print Culture and Southern Africa
Davis and Johnson (eds), The Book in Africa
Archie Dick, The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures
_______, Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850s-1920s
Evans & Seeber (eds.), The Politics of Publishing in South Africa
Stefan Helgesson, Transnationalism in Southern African Literature
Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan
_______, Dockside Reading
_______, Gandhi’s Printing Press
Olabode Ibironke, Remapping African Literature
David Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony
Rachel Matteau Matsha, Real & Imagined Readers
Peter McDonald, The Literature Police
Elizabeth le Roux, Publishing Against Apartheid
Corrine Sandwith, World of Letters
Stephanie Bosch Santana, Forms of Mobility
Andrew van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures
_______ (ed), Print, Text, & Print Cultures in South Africa
Primary texts may include:
J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea
Thomas Mofolo, Traveller to the East
Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret History of Men
M.G. Vassanji, The Book of Secrets
Zoë Wicomb, Still Life
350:560 - Writing with Light
Course No: 350:560
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A4, B, D
Tuesdays - 10:20 am
MU 207
Writing with Light: Photography and the 19th Century US
Dana Luciano
This seminar explores the relationship between photography and writing in the nineteenth century, focusing primarily on the U.S. We will consider the interplay of photography and print in evolving understandings of consciousness, affect, history, and time. Our discussion will be divided into three segments. The first, “What is Photography?” considers evolving understandings of the medium, its uses, and its meanings in the decades after its emergence; the second, “Photo/graphic Cases,” looks at a series of topics (race and racialization; romance and realism; landscapes of colonialism; war and commemoration; lyric and photographic time) through the lens of photographic history; and the third, “Dialectical Images,” takes up the question of photographic history itself, assessing the politics of time, method, and memory as photography illuminates them. 19th century writers may include Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dion Boucicault, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, William J. Wilson, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, W.E.B. DuBois, and Jacob Riis; photographers will include William Henry Fox Talbot, Augustus Washington, Matthew Brady, Andrew Gardner, Julia Margaret Cameron, William Mumler, Eadweard Muybridge, Edward S. Curtis, and numerous others, along with 21st century refractions by Carrie Mae Weems, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins. Along the way, we will also encounter criticism and theory by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jasmine Cobb, Shawn Michelle Smith, Maurice O. Wallace, Tina Campt, and Laura Wexler, among others. Students will give one in-class presentation and will write weekly reflection posts, a 4-6 page midsemester essay, and a 15-page final seminar paper or alternate format/public-facing project.
350:589 - Insurgent Choreographies
Course No: 350:589
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A5, C, D
Tuesdays - 2:00 pm
MU 207
Insurgent Choreographies
Imani Owens
Insurgent choreographies charts black movement across several key periods: the long 19th century, the Harlem Renaissance, The Black Arts Movement, and the contemporary period. Working with an understanding of choreography as a “vocabulary of movement” (via Trinidadian dancer/choreographer Boscoe Holder), we will pay close attention to the ways that movement and literary form intersect. From the fugitive travels and speeches of Henry Box Brown, to the asymmetrical gestures of Zora Neale Hurston, to the militant workshops of Baraka’s Black Repertory Theatre, to the meandering and “dancerly” prose of Sylvia Wynter, we will ask how various forms of motion (and its counterpart, stillness) might lead to new epistemologies of blackness. We will read recent works in performance studies alongside poetry, fiction, and drama. We will also engage contemporary criticism, archival sources, and multimedia materials.
This course is appropriate for students with interests in interdisciplinary work, movement (broadly defined as dance, gesture, and embodiment but also travel, transit, and trans identity) as well as black aesthetics writ large. Students are encouraged to develop projects informed by their own areas of specialization.
350:584 - Decadent to Modern
Course No: 350:584
Index #:
Distribution Requirement: A4, B
Wednesdays - 12:10 pm
MU 207
Decadent to Modern
Jonah Siegel
This course will provide a survey of developments in British literary culture from Aestheticism and Decadence to the early days of Modernism, with some attention to related developments abroad. Issues covered will include decadence, degeneration, empire, and the new woman. Authors will include Baudelaire, Pater, Wilde, Kiplin, Hardy, James, Conrad, and Schreiner. We will also address ourselves to important manifestoes of the early twentieth century and some continuities between late nineteenth century verse and early Modernism.
Two 10-15 page papers will be required, as well as frequent very brief writing exercises.