Life has existed on Earth for nearly four billion years, shaped by massive extinction events. In the short span of the last 10,000 years, humans have become important agents in shaping global environmental change. The question this course considers is straightforward: Have humans been modifying the environment in ways that will, in the not distant future, cause another worldwide extinction event? There are no simple, much less uncontested, answers to this question. We will have to consider the ways we have altered habitats and ecosystem processes.

This course introduces students to the basic concepts and methods of literary and critical theory, a body of work that explores and critiques modern assumptions about truth, culture, power, language, representation, subject-formation, and identity.  Surveying a wide range of authors and approaches (postcolonial, gender studies and queer theory, critical race theory, psychoanalytic, etc.), we will also draw on the expertise of our own faculty, bringing in weekly guest speakers to help explain particular methodologies and to tell us about how they engage with theory in their own scholars

(Offered as ENGL 491 and BLST 461 [CLA])  What would it mean to write in the language in which we dream?  A language that we can hear, but cannot (yet) see?  Is it possible to conceive a language outside the socio-symbolic order?  And can one language subvert the codes and values of another?  Questions like these have animated the creolité/nation language debate among Caribbean intellectuals since the mid-1970s, producing some of the most significant francophone and anglophone writing of the twentieth century.  This course reads across philosophy, cultur

Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester. The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 478 and FAMS 478)  Documentary’s difference from fiction is frequently understood in terms of its emphasis on the spoken word.  In documentary studies, voice, rather than point of view, is the standard parlance for describing the unique social perspective of a documentary film.  Voice is also the metaphor of documentary’s social mission:  some of the most influential histories of documentary are narrated as a history of giving--and having, or appropriating--the right to speak.

What if the past is not behind us, but spiraling within our present?  How are indigenous conceptions of time expressed in Native American writing?  How do Native novelists enable us to imagine a past, present, and future that are intertwined, embedded in place, and spiraling in constant motion?  How does the creation of a fictional world, so similar to ours, allow us to envision alternative models of gender, sexuality, race, and nationhood?  This seminar will invite in-depth exploration of contemporary Native American fiction, through frameworks drawn from oral tradition

(Offered as ENGL 415 and AMST 365.) This course will focus on the manuscript culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, using manuscripts as a means of thinking about the act of writing, the implications of audience and publication, and the relations between the private and public word.

[before 1800]  Writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England were very self-conscious about how they used language:  they thought deeply and critically about how, when, and why to use certain kinds of rhetorical figures, whether common metaphor or less common pyramis (a poem structured like a pyramid).