COURSES DESIGNED AND TAUGHT

Introduction to Critical Theory
This course serves as an introduction to what’s known, in literary studies, as “theory.” “Theory” can be defined as argumentative and speculative texts “that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong,” as Jonathan Culler puts it. In this course, we will encounter two different—but related—kinds of theory: (1) literary theory, which refers to a variety of approaches to querying the meaning of “literature,” how to interpret literature, and literature’s relationship to politics; and (2) critical theory, which, in its broadest sense, refers to an interdisciplinary set of descriptive social critiques that arise from particular historical conditions and are aimed at nothing less than emancipation and liberation.

Combining an introduction to the methods used in literary criticism and an introduction to the history of ideas, this course focuses on the following question: What is literary and cultural representation’s relationship to “reality”? We will begin the course by asking: What is literature? How is literary language different from ordinary language? What is literature “for”? Does it imitate and perfect nature? Does it “instruct and delight,” as Horace once put it? Is it a vehicle for the author’s creative expression? Does it defamiliarize (or “make strange”) the world as we know it in order to make us see it anew? And, how does literature formally achieve these effects? We will then pivot to broader questions: Should we interpret a literary text as a self-contained object or should we understand it in relation to “external” factors, such as the author’s biography, the unconscious mind, or the historical moment in which the text was produced? What kind of cultural “work” does a literary text perform? How might it shape or contest concepts like race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability? Zooming out even further, we will ask: What is the relationship between language and power? And, how is power exercised in social institutions? Reading across disciplines and historical periods, we will explore a variety of understandings of literature, as well as a diverse array of critical methods and theoretical movements, including New Criticism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ordinary language philosophy, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, ethnicity and race studies, and disability studies. In addition to studying theory on its own terms, we will apply it to specific “case studies,” such as Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in order to arrive at new critical understandings of these texts and test theory’s limits.

Introduction to Literary Studies

This gateway course for English majors introduces students to college-level literary analysis. We will critically interpret poetry, drama, life writing, and the novel, by attending to form, genre, and meaning. Throughout the term, we will grapple with the following questions, which are key to any course in literary studies: What is literature? And, how should we read literature? Over the course of the semester, we will practice different ways of reading, such as close reading and surface reading.

Narrowing our focus, this course will take literature’s vexed relationship to the body as its organizing principle. For centuries, the term “corpus” has denoted both the human body and a complete collection of writings on a particular subject, suggesting a close connection between embodiment and literary form. We will ask: To what extent might we understand the literary text asa body in its own right—one that’s predicated on a sense of formal unity? And, how do bodies in literature produce, evade, or become inscribed with meaning? Reading British and American literature from the Renaissance to the present, we will place literary texts within their historical context, while drawing connections across historical periods. Along the way, we will trace the tension between tradition and innovation, examining the ways in which authors subvert inherited forms and genres—as well as their political reasons for doing so. We will encounter a variety of authors, including Hai-Dang Phan, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Wycherley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Mary Prince, Mary Shelley, Claude McKay, Harryette Mullen, Terrance Hayes, Robert Hayden, Jennifer Chang, Katherine Dunn, Saidiya Hartman, Suzan-Lori Parks, and June Jordan.

Twisted Bodies and Twisted Plots: Reading Physical Disability in Literature
Since antiquity, authors have used physical disability as a character-making trope. Sophocles ironizes Tiresias’s blindness to convey his “special sight” as a seer, whereas Shakespeare exaggerates Richard III’s crooked hunchback to dramatize his vice. Following the injunction of disability studies scholars to reexamine disability’s limited “use” as shorthand in characterization, this course will explore how writers deploy disability for a variety of purposes, from cultural critique to expressing the lived experience of bodily impairment. Tracing physical disability in literature from the eighteenth century to the present, we will place characters—from maimed veterans in the English countryside to a traveling carnival of genetically-engineered “freaks” on the American roadside—within their historical context. Situating disability alongside the atrocities of war, the inhumanity of the Atlantic slave trade, the limb-lopping of factory machinery, and the exploitation of a mutant cult leader, while considering its intersections with class, race, and gender, this course will introduce students to literary studies through a disability-studies framework.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will satisfy one General Education requirement in Literary and Cultural Analysis in the Arts and Humanities Foundation Area. This course’s consistent engagement with literature, close reading, and disability studies provides a basis for the Literary and Cultural Analysis credit. Students will also fulfill the Writing II requirement, as the writing process is an integral component of this course. By reading a variety of genres, from Romantic poetry to the postmodern novel, students will learn how to translate observations about a text’s form into paper-length arguments about its social or artistic content; how to incorporate research into their papers; and how to intervene in scholarly conversations. They will write in a range of modes through ungraded and graded assignments, including an explication paper, a longer research paper, and a reflective essay, producing a total of 17 to 20 pages of revised prose by the end of the quarter. Finally, this course counts toward one elective in the Disability Studies Minor. It will be of particular interest to students who are majoring in English, comparative literature, history, Human Biology and Society, and gender studies, as well as students who are minoring in disability studies.

Critical Reading & Writing: The (Dis)orderly Body in Literature
How do literature and culture shape our notions of “orderly” and “disorderly” bodies? By reading literature from the sixteenth century to the present, we will consider how different texts construct, disrupt, and comment on so-called “normative” and “non-normative” (or “deviant”) embodiment. The premise of our course will draw from disability studies, a multi-disciplinary field that understands disability as a social category, rather than medical in origin. However, we will not focus ​solely​ on disability. We will also ask: How do categories of identity, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship, become inscribed on the “non-normative” body?

Critical Reading & Writing: Literature and Science
Challenging the assumption that literature and science represent incompatible ways of knowing, this course will use the relationship between both disciplines as its organizing principle. We will engage with a wide range of mediums, including poetry, the essay, scientific literature, drama, and the novel, as well as literature from different national contexts, dating from the seventeenth century to the present. Thinking about the past, present, and future, we will explore microscopic worlds, outer space, and science on the human scale in readings that relate to the scientific fields of biology, astronomy, evolutionary theory, anatomy, environmental science, quantum mechanics, and genetics. This course will ask: What sort of epistemological projects do literature and science represent? How do these disciplines complement each other? What do they have in common, and how do they differ? How does the literary genre of science fiction, in particular, allow us to imagine alternative futures? How can disability and illness narratives help us understand the clinical encounter? And, what sorts of ethical stakes do scientific discoveries pose?

Critical Reading & Writing: Illness and Disability Narratives
In “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf lamented that it is “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” However, for the past several decades, scholars in disability studies have made significant strides in centering illness and disability as urgent themes in literary studies. In this course, we will study how literature from the seventeenth century to the present deploys these themes. Engaging with a variety of mediums, including poetry, memoir, fiction, drama, and film, as well as literature from different national contexts, we will ask: How can we think about illness and disability in relation to literary form and genre? How do race, gender, sexuality, and class inflect disability, and how does literature formalize these intersections?