ENROLL

Timothy Raylor

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought”—Audre Lorde.  In this course we will explore how poets use form, tone, sound, imagery, rhythm, and subject matter to create works of astonishing imagination, beauty, and power. In discussions, Moodle posts, and essay assignments we’ll analyze individual works by poets from Sappho to Amanda Gorman (and beyond); there will also be daily recitations of poems, since the musicality is so intrinsic to the meaning.

Pierre Hecker

1st 5 weeks

Pierre Hecker

Shakespeare’s plays have been reimagined and repurposed all over the world, performed on seven continents, and translated into over 100 languages. The course explores how issues of globalization, nationalism, translation (both cultural and linguistic), and (de)colonization inform our understanding of these wonderfully varied adaptations and appropriations. We will examine the social, political, and aesthetic implications of a range of international stage, film, and literary versions as we consider how other cultures respond to the hegemonic original. No prior experience with Shakespeare is necessary.

Second 5 weeks

Adriana Estill

This course engages the borderlands as space (the geographic area that straddles nations) and idea (liminal spaces, identities, communities). We examine texts from writers like Anzaldúa, Butler, Cervantes, Dick, Eugenides, Haraway, and Muñoz first to understand how borders act to constrain our imagi(nation) and then to explore how and to what degree the borderlands offer hybrid identities, queer affects, and speculative world-building. We will engage the excess of the borderlands through a broad chronological and generic range of U.S. literary and visual texts. Come prepared to question what is "American", what is race, what is human.

Kofi Owusu

We will explore developments in African American literature since the 1950s with a focus on literary expression in the Civil Rights Era; on the Black Arts Movement; on the new wave of feminist/womanist writing; and on the experimental and futuristic fictions of the twenty-first century. Authors to be read include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kevin Young, and Tracy Smith.

Laurence D Cooper

Liberalism has been the dominant political philosophy of our age, and we who live in a liberal polity have been shaped by it. But liberalism has been, and continues to be, the target of sharp critique. What is liberalism, and what can be said both for and against it? In this course we will examine liberalism’s philosophic roots and engage with some of its most forceful advocates and most profound critics. Readings will be drawn from authors such as Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, Mill, and Tocqueville.