缅北强奸

Description: What is an archive? And what is the place of 鈥渢he archive鈥� in literary studies? Or in literature? In this seminar, we will approach these questions in theory and method. We will trace the historical and institutional formation of archives, examining the power dynamics they reproduce and the issues of provenance that trouble them. We will investigate methods for the keeping and transmission of knowledge that have existed outside of traditional archives, and the possibilities and perils of impermanency. And we will examine where archives appear in, inform, or form contemporary literary works. Throughout our readings, we will ask the question: what are the formal boundaries of an/the archive? What can, and cannot, be housed in an archive? Readings will include works by: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Brent Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, Ann Cvetkovich, Mishuana Goeman, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Arlette Farge, Carolyn Steedman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Robin Coste Lewis, Ocean Vuong, Valeria Luiselli, Namwali Serpell, and Jesmyn Ward.

Selected Texts:

• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995)
• Saidiya Hartman, 鈥淰enus in Two Acts,鈥� (2008)
• Michel Foucault, 鈥淭he Lives of Infamous Men,鈥� (1977)
• Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995)
• Robin Coste Lewis, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (2022)
• Namwali Serpell, The Furrows (2021)
• Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019)

Evaluation: seminar presentation (15%), short essay (30%), research paper (40%), active participation in every class meeting (15%)

Format: Seminar

Description: When Percy Shelley wrote, 鈥淟et a great Assembly be / Of the fearless and the free鈥� he was responding to an 1819 massacre of peaceful protesters. The crowd included many women, some carrying banners and flags, some carrying children, and all hoping for change. At stake was expanding voting rights. Not to include women, mind you, but to allow their working-class brothers, husbands, and fathers to have a voice in parliament. In the aftermath of the violence, perpetrated by what we might now call a volunteer police force, Shelley envisions each woman as akin to moral compass who will 鈥減oint鈥� to the perpetrators to turn them away in shame.

During the Romantic era in Britain, women鈥檚 roles in the political life of their community and country, at home and abroad, were debated, characterized and caricatured, and as often as not ignored. Shelley鈥檚 鈥済reat Assembly鈥� reflects the historical reality of women鈥檚 participation and raises larger questions about what women were understood to be able to contribute, and what they did contribute, to social and political movements in the 鈥渞evolutionary age鈥� of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This is a course about politics and gender in (mostly) British poetry and nonfiction prose. We will read works by a variety of Romantic-era authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, Olympe de Gouges, Charlotte Smith. Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Anne Yearsley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Germaine de Sta毛l, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Liddiard, and others. We will explore women鈥檚 responses to the revolution in France and the Napoleonic wars; questions of migration and dispossession; fights over labour reform; efforts to improve women鈥檚 educations; and activities of abolitionists seeking to end the transatlantic slave trade. Along the way, we will explore historical and contemporary feminism(s) and feminist literary criticism.

Texts:

• The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Poetry, edited by Joseph Black et al., Broadview, 2016, ISBN 9781554811311

Format: seminar

Evaluation: participation (10%); book review (15%); proposal (15%); scholarly literature review (20%); final research essay (40%)

Description: William Langland鈥檚 protean allegory Piers Plowman, written and revised over the last quarter of the fourteenth century, would come to inspire protesting labourers in 1381 and any number of religious reformists who found the plowman 鈥淧iers鈥� to be a fitting mouthpiece for their critiques of institutional ills throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This embryonic allegorical poem begins in a 鈥渇air field full of folk鈥� but quickly explodes into a challenging examination of the causes of injustice, societal division, and a quest to learn鈥攖hrough a process of intense questioning鈥攈ow best to live in an imperfect world. In the process, Langland explores the workings of the English legal and educational systems; the corrupt exercise of authority; ethical treatment of the poor and the disabled; the workings of the mind, the soul, and the natural world; and virtually every branch and level of medieval society. Though the poem does envision the betterment of society, utopian fantasy is fleeting, quickly undermined in an enormously complex and troubling series of visions that refuse to 鈥渁rrive鈥� at a static or prescriptive program for living. Its protagonists witness and experience suffering and injustice, even as they imagine alternatives. The series of dreams and waking moments that make up Piers Plowman thus present visions 鈥渇or,鈥� but not necessarily 鈥渙f,鈥� a just society, all the while drawing on sophisticated traditions of theological, political, philosophical, and scientific learning.

Topics to be explored in this seminar include, but are not limited to, the just treatment of the poor; labour conditions; excess and material possessions; authority and corruption; education and literacy; law and justice; tyranny and revolt; debt and salvation; sin and mercy; the individual in society; and the faculties of the soul. Students in this seminar will read Piers Plowman and a series of poems in the 鈥淧lowman Tradition鈥� in the original Middle English. No prior experience with the language is necessary or assumed; portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English.

Texts (provisional):

• William Langland, Piers Plowman (emphasis on the B-Text, with passages to compare from the A, C, and Z versions)
• Pierce the Ploughman鈥檚 Crede
• The Ploughman鈥檚 Tale
• The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman unto Christe
• Mum and the Sothsegger
• Jack Upland, Friar Daw鈥檚 Reply, and Upland鈥檚 Rejoinder

Evaluation: Short papers (25%); long paper (50%); presentation (10%); participation (15%).

Format: seminar

Maximum enrollment: 12 students

Description: This course provides hands-on training in the use of computers and statistical methods to analyze literature 鈥� an approach also known as 鈥渓iterary text mining.鈥� In the past ten years, computational methods to study culture, particularly literary texts, have increasingly moved out of the margins. We鈥檝e seen the publication of a string of important articles in major literary studies journals, and the release of several new monographs. At the same time, we鈥檝e seen an increase in the number of academic positions advertised in the 鈥渄igital humanities鈥� and 鈥渃ultural analytics鈥� in English and literature departments. As research in this sub-field expands and improves, the digital humanities and cultural analytics will continue to grow, making larger and more significant interventions into the discipline.

This course means to prepare graduate students in English and literature to perform applied research in the digital humanities. In this seminar, students will learn how to write computer code in Python 鈥� a standard computing language used in data science 鈥� and the rudiments of statistical methods useful for a data-driven analysis of literary texts. By the end of the course, students will be able to perform simple to intermediate computational and statistical analysis on literary corpora, such as collocations analysis, most distinctive words analysis, and topic modeling. Most of the core 鈥渟hallow鈥� methods for text analysis, like simple counting, as well as several 鈥渄eeper鈥� methods, like vector semantics, will be introduced in a live context. We will leverage the availability of a number of free online corpora 鈥� for example, a large collection of English-language novels from 1800 to 1923 鈥� to build case studies.

At the same time, the second half of the class will introduce excellent recent examples of digital humanist and cultural analytics research from scholars such as Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, Lauren Klein, Michael Gavin, and several others. The purpose of this is two-fold: first, to allow students to be aware of the 鈥渃utting edge鈥� in this field 鈥� the most interesting work that is currently happening 鈥� and have an opportunity to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, and second, to allow them to replicate existing examples of DH work from the ground-up. With the instructor鈥檚 help, we will often reproduce these arguments to see how they work. Students will thus acquire a useful template to develop their own ideas.

There are no prerequisites for this class. All that is required is a healthy dose of curiosity and open-mindedness. The course is aimed at literature students who do not think of themselves as 鈥済ood at math,鈥� or even imagine themselves as averse to 鈥渟cience.鈥� The class will be challenging to students with no background in quantitative research insofar as it will train them in habits of thought somewhat alien to the humanities, such as mathematical logic and algorithmic thinking. However, the course will entirely be taught through a humanistic lens, meaning that the instructor will introduce all methods and concepts through literary-studies examples and the logic of familiar approaches like close reading. In other words, the course is not a seminar in 鈥渃omputer science鈥�; it is a seminar in humanistic research that ideally will become useful as part of the student鈥檚 literary studies toolkit.

Texts (provisional):

• Andrew Piper, Enumerations
• Sarah Allison, Reductive Reading
• Daniel Shore, Cyberformalism
• Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons
• Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction
• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
• Other texts to be provided on myCourses

Evaluation (provisional): weekly problem sets (50%); final project (25%); attendance and participation (25%).

Format: seminar

Maximum Enrollment: 12 students.

Description: From the dense allusiveness of T.S. Eliot鈥檚 The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf鈥檚 multi-perspectival free indirect discourse, E.E. Cummings鈥� typographical antics and Joycean mischief to Gertrude Stein鈥檚 experimental 鈥淪teinese,鈥� modernist poetry and prose challenged received ways of 鈥渉ow to read鈥濃�攖he phrase is Ezra Pound鈥檚. As Laura Riding and Robert Graves observed in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), one of the earliest studies of modernism as a cultural phenomenon, the modernists often occasioned anxiety in the 鈥減lain reader,鈥� obliging readers to reimagine their ordinary procedures and acculturate themselves to new ones better adapted to modernist rhythms and idioms. Poet Mina Loy quipped that 鈥渙ne had to go into training鈥� to 鈥済et鈥� such work as Stein鈥檚; through both the difficulty of their signaling and often elaborate framing through notes, allusion, or schemata, modernist texts teach us how to read.

Bringing early twentieth-century reception of such modernist work together with current work in attentional studies and debates addressing how our culture reads now (e.g. Lucy Alford, Katherine Hayles, John Guillory, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, Rita Felski), this course addressing early twentieth-century experimental work considers how modernist texts demand and repay various modes of 鈥渃lose鈥� reading; what might emerge from engaging them through modes of 鈥渄istant鈥� and 鈥渟urface鈥� reading; and how what Shklovsky called the 鈥渞oughened鈥� language of modernist texts obliges us to enter unfamiliar attentional modes, as well as heightening self-awareness of reading processes. Leading from such work, we also consider how modernist texts feature acts of reading and attention toward their work of observation, critique, and cultural intervention.

Texts (provisional):

• Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
• T.S. Eliot, early poems and The Waste Land
• H.D., HERmione, Asphodel
• James Joyce, excerpts from Ulysses
• Mina Loy, Lost Lunar Baedeker; Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose
• Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
• Ezra Pound, Cathay and The Cantos
• Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
• Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
• Melvin Tolson, Rendezvous with America
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, The Waves

Evaluation: brief essay (25%), weekly responses (10%), oral presentation (20%), final essay (35%), seminar participation (10%)

Description: Twenty-first-century cultural theory is marked by a corporeal turn, reconsidering questions of embodiment, sensation, affect, and materiality in relation to questions of cultural production, identity, and social and political concerns. This class will read broadly across key theories and perspectives on the body of the last decade, including consideration of authors whose work is seen as foundational to these approaches. In parallel we will explore media, performance, and somatics to explore these questions through exceptional and everyday practices. Key areas of inquiry include feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, with a particular emphasis on women-of-colour feminisms, queer theory, and trans studies; affect theory; critical race theory; Indigenous studies; questions of the nonhuman; disability studies; and theories of immaterial and affective labour. Students will develop a semester-long exploration of a practice of embodiment in dialogue with these works.

Texts may include:

• Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now
• Sadiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Edna Bonhomme and Alice Spawls, eds., After Sex
• Jos茅 Munoz, The Sense of Brown
• Mel Chen, Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire
• Alexander Weheliye, Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology
• Paul Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi and Orlando: My Political Biography
• Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
• Jean Ma, The Edges of Sleep
• Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
• Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor
• Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories
• Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble
• Leanne Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance
• Anna Tsing et al, The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
• Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies

Evaluation: practices project 70%; weekly responses 30%

Format: seminar and workshops

Description: This course follows the career of an author who has been called 鈥渢he best fiction writer now working in North America.鈥� It starts by examining Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro鈥檚 first and only novel (really a collection of linked short stories) about a young female narrator coming of age in a small country town. In that work, Munro found the voice that would propel her toward international fame and a long publishing history connected with The New Yorker magazine. We will study a selection of Munro鈥檚 finest stories from a chronological perspective in order to better understand her evolving concerns and the development of her narrative techniques over five decades, culminating in her winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 as 鈥渕aster of the contemporary short story.鈥� This trajectory will introduce us to a range of material about modern life, female experience, family intrigue, sexual deviance, erotic awakening. Munro鈥檚 stories are deceptively accessible, yet they are the product of deft structuring, compressed symbolism, and subtle narrative design. As W.H. New says, they 鈥渆mbed more than announce, reveal more than parade.鈥� In reading Munro鈥檚 short stories we will also consider many of the features that distinguish modern short story writing. Each class will focus on a particular story, but we will also engage in a series of learning exercises designed to broaden the reading experience and to improve interpretive reading methods. We might spend a class looking at how Munro constructs a single paragraph. We might spend another class examining the revisions she made to a particular story and ask what effect those revisions have on our reading of the text. We might have a debate about the credibility of a particular narrator. Is she really who she says she is or is she faking it? The idea is to experience the stories from multiple perspectives and to entertain our reading in the process. Students are expected to read approximately four stories per week. The course will include one film screening (out of scheduled class time), based on an adaptation of one of Munro鈥檚 most celebrated stories. In this seminar-style course, weekly contributions to class discussion are essential.

Texts:

• Lives of Girls and Women
• My Best Stories

Evaluation: seminar presentation (20%); discussion questions prepared in advance (10%); short essay (20%); final essay (30%); attendance and participation in every class (20%).

Format: seminar (presentations and discussion)

Description: This course will offer intensive study of short prose fictions and critical essays by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as these foundational authors can be seen to work in dialogue with one another. We will explore aesthetic problems and cultural preoccupations crucial to mid-nineteenth-century America, studying at the same time how these authors break the ground for the emergence of the modern short story 鈥� anticipating the fundamental developments in form and theme that would become the bases for self-conscious, experimental short fiction produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

After a quick introductory review of some key works in contemporary short story theory, along with historical studies marking distinctions among the tale, the sketch, the novella and the emerging short story, we will devote about one month to each of the three authors鈥攃losely reading several of their lesser-known stories and essays while giving special attention to classic writings exploring a variety of fictional modes, such as: 鈥淭he Philosophy of Composition,鈥� 鈥淭he Tell-Tale Heart,鈥� 鈥淭he Black Cat,鈥� 鈥淭he Cask of Amontillado,鈥� 鈥淭he Man of the Crowd,鈥� 鈥淭he Purloined Letter,鈥� 鈥淭he Fall of the House of Usher,鈥� 鈥淭he Oval Portrait,鈥� 鈥淭he Birth-mark,鈥� 鈥淭he Minister鈥檚 Black Veil,鈥� 鈥淩appaccini鈥檚 Daughter,鈥� 鈥淢y Kinsman, Major Molineux,鈥� The Scarlet Letter, 鈥淏artleby, the Scrivener,鈥� 鈥淏enito Cereno,鈥� and Billy Budd, Sailor.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous course work in American Literature before 1900, or in 19th-century British fiction, or permission of instructor.

Texts: (tentative; editions of collected short fiction TBA):

• Poe, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
• Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
• Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Selected Tales or Great Short Works of Herman Melville

Evaluation: (tentative): participation in seminar discussions, 20%; series of one-page textual analyses, 20%; oral presentation, 20%; final research paper, 40%

Format: seminar (discussion)

Description: This course will explore film theory through and against the tradition and current practice of meta-cinema, broadly construed. It is designed to appeal to students of widely ranging film backgrounds鈥攃ertainly it can provide a substantial introduction to film studies for literary specialists; for more experienced cinema students, it can perhaps defamiliarize typical viewing habits and critical moves. Our themes will be loosely divided into three clusters鈥擯art I (visibility), Part II (time and death) and Part III (production and performance)鈥攖hough expect and be prepared to seek out connections throughout the course.

Possible films include: Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924), The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933), Sunset Boulevard(Billy Wilder 1950), Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953), La Jet茅e (Chris Marker, 1962), 8 陆 (Fellini, 1963), Samuel Beckett鈥檚 Film (Alan Schneider, 1965), Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Take One (William Greaves, 1968), Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973), Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, 1980), Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990), After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda 1998), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), The Gleaners and I (Agn猫s Varda, 2000), Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003), 颁补肠丑茅 (Haneke, 2005), Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), The Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012), Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2012), Long Day鈥檚 Journey into Night (Bi Gan, 2017)

Evaluation: viewing journals 55%, participation 30%, presentation 15%

Format: seminar (presentations and discussion)

Description: How do you 鈥渞ead鈥� a graphic novel? Does one 鈥渞ead鈥� pictures, and if so, what does this mean? This course examines the unique formal and aesthetic qualities of the contemporary adult graphic novel, with particular emphasis on visual analysis. Considerable attention will therefore be paid to close reading and to the analysis of stylistic elements that distinguish comics as a unique artistic phenomenon. The course does not provide an historical survey of comics, nor does it examine popular genres such as superhero comics. The emphasis of the course leans towards recent graphic novels by single authors and narratives oriented to the adult reader. The texts will be chosen based not only on historical impact, verifiable influence, or general popularity with readers, but also with an eye to comics that experiment and expand the boundaries of the medium. There will be four thematic groupings: revisionist narratives within the mainstream, memoirs and confessionals, new journalism, and auteur comix.

Texts: writers and artists may include: Kate Beaton, Ebony Flowers, Thi Bui, Nick Drnaso, Ben Passmore, Sarah Glidden, Nora Krug, Adrian Tomine, Guy Delisle, David Mazzuchelli, Debbie Dreschler, James Sturm, Lynda Barry, Ivan Brunetti, Howard Cruse, Eddie Campbell, Art Spiegelman, Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Alison Bechdel, David Collier, Ben Katchor, Marjane Satrapi, Rutu Modan, Jason Lutes, Jeff Smith, Joe Sacco, Carla Speed McNeil, David B., Chris Ware, Los Bros. Hernandez, Nick Abadzis, Rick Veitch, Phoebe Gloeckner, Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, Jack Jackson, Craig Thompson, James Kochalka, Tom Gauld, Ed Piskor, Jeff Lemire, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, Gene Luen Yang, Faryl Dalrymple, Matt Kindt, Stephen Collins, Will Eisner, Alex Robinson, Scott McCloud

Format: seminar and discussion

Evaluation: seminar presentation with accompanying written component (20%); two 10-page essays (30% each); class participation (20%)

Bad Mathematics

Description: This seminar explores how the language, concepts, and iconography of mathematics and physics operate in contemporary Black Studies. We will begin with Katherine McKittrick鈥檚 seminal essay, 鈥淢athematics Black Life,鈥� which articulates the ways in which Blackness was written into modernity, by way of colonialism and transoceanic chattel slavery, through numerical representation and quantification: weight, price, quantity, age, etc. We will rely heavily on the theoretical guidance of Sylvia Wynter, who explicates precisely how this 鈥渒nowledge system that mathematizes the dysselected鈥� came to be solidified through interlocking economic and juridical systems. Together we will consider how this 鈥渕athematization鈥� continues to operate today through surveillance systems, digital data collection, and other capitalist strategies of documentation. Our first task is to understand how this same knowledge system produces both common understandings of our shared material world and also hierarchical social systems that justify dehumanization and violence. Contemporary Black artists, writers, and thinkers, however, are increasingly mis-using these disciplinary tools against their deadly tendencies. The second half of the course will turn our attention to contemporary Black cultural workers who differently deploy the language and symbols of mathematics and physics in their own work toward radical ends. Our theoretical guides for the second half of the course will include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Michelle M. Wright, all of whom exemplify how core assumptions in math and physics discourses have been critically analyzed and repurposed by Black feminist thinkers. Together we will query how these artists and writers are pushing, stretching, and reformulating the language and operations of math and physics in their creative work in order to redefine Blackness and humanness. We will consider how these cultural producers provide different entry points to consider concepts including space, time, measurement, (e)valuation, and entanglement. The course will draw from a range of genres including poetry, film, visual art, live performance, novels, theory, and criticism. Examples include visual artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed鈥檚 2021 exhibition, 鈥淓veryone Will be Saved Through Algebra (A Casual Mathematics),鈥� Camonghne Felix鈥檚 experimental memoir Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscaluculation, and Kevin Jerome Everson鈥檚 short film, Partial Differential Equations (2020). Students will have the option of producing either a final paper or a creative project with an accompanying critical reflection.

Texts: (Tentative)

• Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick
• Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix
• Physics of Blackness: Beyond Middle Passage Epistemology by Michelle M. Wright
• Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva
• Long Division by Kiese Laymon
• Visual and performance art by artists including Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Fields Harrington, Kevin Jerome Everson, and others
• Other essays and materials made available from MyCourses and/or 缅北强奸 Library

Evaluation: seminar presentation (15%), midterm essay (25%), final paper or creative project with critical reflection (30%), active participation / weekly blog (30%)

Format: seminar (presentations and discussion)