In this course, we will explore literature written about waterways of all sorts--from Melville's Pacific, Carson's tidepools, Walcott's waves to Okorafor's lagoon-- developing ways in which we can critically discuss literary themes, terms and concepts, challenging both our own and conventional understandings of literature. We will engage with a broad range of writing including poetry, nonfiction, novels, and graphic novels and explore texts from different countries and historical periods in order to ask questions such as: How has literature represented or narrated waterways and what can we learn from it as lakes evaporate and oceans rise?

An introduction to literary analysis, close reading, and form across an array of historical periods, genres, and traditions. This specific course will use the framework of childhood to guide our readings and thinking.

Introduces features of what might be called a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer literary and theoretical tradition. Uses classical, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary literature, criticism, and film to examine the complicated status and experience of non-majority sexualities and genders. Considers writers, theorists and activists who have explored the relationships among sexuality, gender, knowledge, and literature, including Alison Bechdel, Plato, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Oscar Wilde, Nella Larsen.

How can literature’s imagined worlds help us better understand climate and climate change? In this course, we’ll consider how literature represents climate and how thinking about climate can help us better understand how literature makes meaning. How are climatological terms like atmosphere and scale helpful for reading literature? What does a genre like climate fiction, or cli-fi, ask us to consider? Does global catastrophic climate change mean humans are now at the whim of a threatening natural world, or is this the ultimate expression of human control over their environment? Topics we’ll consider include the breakdown of the split between nature and culture; environmental justice; toxicity and pollution; and the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch in which the human species can now be considered a geological force.