The Global City often evokes the imperial metropolis: New York, London, Paris. This course examines how the Global City, in the North and South alike, has been largely forged in the crucible of a colonial modernity which continues to shape and constrain the possibilities for contemporary urban experience. Reading some of the foundational theorists of urban space including Saskia Sassen, Mike Davis, and Abdou Malik Simone, our primary focus will be on how various narrative forms - the novel, poetry, film, photography, digital mappings - can illuminate aesthetic itineraries, deviant mobilities, and urban imaginaries as they navigate, confront, or deftly avoid capture in economies of neoliberal development and necropolitical practices of securitization and counterinsurgency. Readings may include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the films of Yasujirō Ozu, as well as the circulations of graffiti, social media, and other insurgent narrative infrastructures on the streets of Cairo and the broader Middle East during the “Arab Spring.” No prerequisites. 1 unit.

Introduction to literary modernism in a global perspective. Study of modernism’s key terms—such as alienation, fracture, art for art’s sake, form, style, opacity—across geographies in the twentieth century. Texts of literature, music, and film will be framed using scholarship on empire, war, race, and gender. How does modernism serve as a case-study in whether or not aesthetic categories operate on a global scale? Emphasis on critical analysis, concepts, and reading methods.

This course studies some of the key Peter Pan stories to ask what is the nature and meaning of this archetype. We look at James Barrie’s original multiple texts, in The Little White Bird (1902) for example, but especially the play Peter Pan (1904-1928) and the novella Peter and Wendy (1911), and we look at several film versions by Disney, P.J. Hogan, and Spielberg. We try to identify some of the contradictions and themes of the myth, focusing on family, identity, sexuality and childhood, and we read selected cultural history and criticism.

This course focuses on marginalized theatrical voices from the United States. Our mission will be to examine the societal circumstances that birthed alternative styles to the mainstream American stage. Selected playwrights will cover a cross section of race, gender and sexuality, from Tony Award® winners to virtual unknowns. Equal parts historical analysis and creative writing workshop, students will create multimedia presentations and original plays based around their research.

In this class, we will read a group of six works by Shakespeare and his 17th-century contemporaries, all plays that feature characters with complex relationships to gender, race, class, dis/ability, and other identity categories. As we consider how, especially in the theatrical context, identity—and related ideas like personhood, humanity, selfhood, subjectivity, positionality, and character—takes shape, the plays will take us into the city of London, around the globe, and into imaginary places. Students will engage in comparative analytical writing about how characters claim and negotiate their intersectional identities; we will also have the opportunity to engage in imaginative and reflective writing about our relationships to these texts and to their limitations and possibilities. Plays may include Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Richard III, and The Tempest; the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Middleton & Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, and Fletcher’s The Island Princess. No prerequisites.

This course examines the theme of partition in a body of fiction, film, and photography from geographies such as Northern/Ireland, South Asia, Israel/Palestine, South Africa, and the Balkans. We will explore how literary and cultural texts represent but also redraw historical and political borders into contested narrative and social spaces. While we will familiarize ourselves with the geohistorical contexts of the partitions we examine, our primary focus will be on the narrative and aesthetic dilemmas these works share when it comes to addressing a variety of topics such as: the physical and symbolic borders of political community; nationalism and state-formation; the rights of the individual versus the good of the collective; the differences between official history and cultural memory; statelessness and diasporic consciousness; the divisions between private and public spaces; and, finally, the aesthetics and ethics of representing political violence. We will also pay particular attention to questions of form and genre, assessing how the fiction and films on the syllabus might be considered (sub)national, postcolonial, and/or global forms of literary and cultural production. Readings may include works by Sa’adat Hasan Manto, James Joyce, Anna Burns, and Hala Alyan. No prerequisites.1 unit.

There is virtually no critical dispute that the Russian master dramatist and short story writer, Anton Chekhov, was and is a key figure in the modernist movement in literature. That modernism is marked by a fierce objectivity, strict avoidance of doctrinaire or dogmatic convictions and beliefs, close attention toward people and things, no matter what their status or place in the world might be. Plot should never be imposed upon a story but rather arise from questions of character and close observation, and an absolute democratic attitude toward the simple, often ignored, objects and things in the world. Above all, stories must be as brief as possible, daring and original, written in a style both cryptic and highly suggestive, that which is omitted as rich and powerful (maybe more so) than what is included. No extravagant overblown or romanticized endings, but rather Chekhov believed in a world full of irresolvable mysteries which may be 'represented' but never fully understood, for what they are and not what we wish them to be. James Joyce proclaimed, perhaps speciously, in an interview with critic Herbert Gorman that before writing his very 'Chekhovian' collection of stories, DUBLINERS, he had chosen not to read Chekhov's because he feared the master's extraordinary influence. It was Joyce's purpose to write in a style of 'scrupulous meanness'. not actually unlike Chekhov's dedication to 'scrupulous' objectivity in his writing. The Joycean artist sits, a deus absconditus, in a corner, silently 'paring his fingernails' while his stories came to life, seemingly without any subjective agency. This is of course the very essence of the Chekhovian genius, the sense that these stories emerge from the world they belong to without the breathy presence of the artist looming over them demanding to be heard, to be recognized. Chekhov the realist genius sits like Joyce paring his fingernails, not preening his feathers. This indeed is one of the miracles of the objectivist strain of modernism practiced by Chekhov and Joyce (and later Ernest Hemingway in his early stories). It is the intention of this class to read these two great story writers both individually and in tandem with each other. Joyce may have (fecklessly) resisted Chekhov, but modern critics will have none of it, choosing to place these two geniuses in close proximity to each other, arguing both directly and indirectly for Chekhov's influence over Joyce, and for Joyce's influence over our readings of Chekhov. Few doubt Chekhov's reputation as the greatest of all short story writers, and few doubt as well the remarkable contribution James Joyce has made to the Chekhovian tradition. Close attention will also be paid to the worlds in which Chekhov and Joyce lived, the world of the czars and their repressions of freedom, and the presence of the English crown looming the impoverished captive nation of Ireland. Finally, these are short stories as great and powerful as any novel. Chekhov perhaps best c

Explores major themes and texts in Asian American Literature and provides an overview of the foundations and the possible futures of the field. Introduces the role literature plays in creating and maintaining a pan-Asian political label. Presents the Vietnam War as a watershed moment to discuss the many shifts within the field, such as the emergence of Southeast Asian American writers and the rise of Women and Gender Studies.

Through this study of the myth and literature of the ancient Mediterranean we will examine the centrality of food and dining and how they obtain significance not only as the sustenance of life, but also in the making of meaning in cultural practices. Family relationships, social hierarchies, and religion will be studied by means of attention to the production and consumption of food. Stories from the books of Genesis and Daniel foreground food in the creation of Hebrew identity, while Dionysos, Demeter, and Athena are significant for their associations with the grape, grain, and olives-markers of the Greco-Roman identity. Images of food often serve figurative functions in literature, but we find depictions of historical practices too, dining, feasting, and the centrality of the figure of the chef, as well as sacrificial practices governing vegetarianism and meat-eating. The class will culminate in a Mediterranean feast, with reports on the persistence of ancient foods and cultural practices –cheese-making, viticulture, artisanal breads, and olive oil- in the celebrated Mediterranean Diet and the larger contemporary economy. Emphasis on close reading of literary texts as well as on critical analysis and writing.