Vibrant Lives, Vibrant Writing
This course pairs literary biographies with the biographical subject’s best work.
“Great art is really just great personhood in compressed form—a distillation of a human being that thrums with that being’s exact flavor.” –George Saunders
Today a life of writing means a life of solitary work and steady living. But in past generations, there were writers who led vibrant, adventurous, tumultuous lives. French writer Collette stretched the boundaries of what a private life could contain with her varied intimate relationships and provocative writing. So did English poet, preacher, essayist, adventurer John Donne. Zora Neale Huston befriended luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance and did important anthropologic field work. James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon) led a truly remarkable (and secret) life as a child adventurer, later becoming a CIA agent, an experimental psychologist, and an acclaimed 1970’s science fiction writer. We will begin the semester by reading a study of essayist Michel de Montaigne, who obsessed over a single question: How to live? We’ll view much of what we read during the semester through that lens. How to live? How is personhood related to the creation of great literature? What can these highly distinctive writers, via their vibrant lives and vibrant writing, reveal to us about how to live in the 21st century?
The New Normal: Introduction to Disability Studies
Disability is surrounded by stigma and myth, which often leads to many problematic assumptions, ignorance, and invisibility. The COVID-19 pandemic has further circulated these assumptions. Whether it be in the shrugging off of COVID-related deaths or debates about masking, discussions about disabled lives in the COVID-era too often frame them as less worthy, less full, or even as necessary “sacrifices” for the non-disabled to return to “normal.”
This course challenges “normal” and interrogates widespread ableist ideologies and actions. One powerful way to re-think disability is through Disability Studies, an interdisciplinary field and stance in which scholars and activists approach disability as a meaningful, positive, generative identity and an issue of social justice and human rights.
This course offers students an understanding of disability as a complex and crucial part of the world and human experience. You will approach disability as a matter of identity, language, writing, power, education, politics, history, art, and more. More specifically, you will read critical disability studies theory, literary works, personal narratives, and histories; create accessible projects; engage in scholarly and/or community-based research and creative work; and candidly grapple with assumptions about disability. Through this difficult but meaningful study, you will assess the value and effect of different ways of thinking about disability and understand the core concepts of disability studies and its emergence as a field, imagining a future where disability is complexly but proudly named and claimed and increasingly centered in intersectional work toward justice.
Studies in Drama: Unmodern Shakespeare
During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, scholars, critics, and theatergoers – even those who loved Shakespeare – became embarrassed by how ignorant and out-of-date his plays seemed. His language was “scarce intelligible” to modern ears; the humor, when it was not downright crude and indecent, was terribly silly and backward. Even the great tragedies came in for criticism: Macbeth was the product of an unlearned, superstitious age, and Hamlet was deemed “savage...grotesque, and barbaric” by Voltaire (1694-1778). What happened next was possibly the most extraordinary reversal of fortunes in literary history: Shakespeare became Modern. Dubbed “our contemporary” by 20th-century critic Jan Kott, he was now considered to be “ahead of his time.” Most incredibly, his works were “the very beginning” of ourselves and indispensable to understanding modern culture. It was even said that he “invented the human.” It is this “Modern Shakespeare” – the Shakespeare we were all taught in Junior High and High School to admire and relate to, the Bard who is supposed to teach us about ourselves – that this course seeks to demolish. We’ll explore the commonplace modern views of his greatest plays, including Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and Romeo & Juliet, before viewing them afresh in their UN-modern culture and context.
Studies in Gender & Literature: Imagined (Im)Possibilities—Intersectionality in Literature
Intersectionality: Is it an impossible fantasy or a possible future? Does it present a viable path forward for acknowledging and addressing the realities of individuals and societies, or does it merely muddy the waters until everyone is angry at everyone else and nothing gets resolved? This course seeks to investigate (although by no means answer) these and other questions about intersectionality, especially as it pertains to gender and sexuality. Over the course of the semester, we will work to establish a set of frameworks for examining gender and sexuality, then test those frameworks on a range of intersectional modalities present in literary works spanning multiple centuries and genres, from Jane Austen and Zora Neale Hurston to Justin Torres and China Miéville. We will strive to take an unflinching look at the limitations and potential of intersectional approaches to the human condition and consider what literature can offer as both cynical critique and catalyst for change.
Horror and Rhetoric
Horror is a popular but historically marginalized genre, often creating space for writers and artists to explore difficult questions, political agendas, personal struggles, inquiries about race, disability, queer bodies, identity, history, and more. Because of this creative latitude, horror artists often employ the agency to make visible the often mysterious and terrifying parts of what makes us human. While critics of horror are typically too
distracted by blood and gore to notice the radical potential of the genre, scary stories remind us, often bluntly, that the abject is always present, just under the surface of our skin and within the hidden places of our minds. Once these feelings are externalized through the art of horror, making sense of and perhaps even coping with these fears becomes not just possible, but actively pursuable.
The primary goal of this course is to explore a single question: What makes a story scary? On its surface, that might seem like a simple question, but the rhetorical elements of horror, and its construction and production, help us connect and see our own humanity reflected back to us (or, in the case of a monster, a lack thereof). Through a study of various horror subgenres (e.g. slasher, psychological, isolation horror, eco horror, zombie, comedic horror, true crime, giallo, and more), we will examine how writers and filmmakers create their horrific moments, particularly within social, political, and economic contexts. More nuanced explorations within the genre will involve poverty, grief, xenophobia/marginalized populations, relationships, mental and physical health, and more.