Examines the confrontation, assimilation, and transformation of Amerindian, African, and European cultures in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present. Focuses on the processes in which distinctive self-images emerged in the region and how these images have been challenged and changed over time. Uses films, literature, and folk traditions to complement scholarly analysis of the emergence of a New World mentality.

Music and the Irish Novel introduces students to Irish novelists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In these novels music plays a significant role, as a thematic, formal, or aesthetic inspiration. Traditional, opera, ballads, jazz, classical, pop, and contemporary music; all play a role in this literature. What do we mean when we say that a language, or a piece of literature, is "musical"? Why do writers of contemporary historical fiction favor musical references?

Affect theory offers a varied and rich critical language to explore how emotion circulates within and among human bodies-and nonhuman ones as well. If emotions operate through bodily changes and chemical exchanges, then animals and nonhumans might similarly be seen as bodies replete with affective materials in motion and at rest. In this course we will read through an array of affect theory from cognitive science, animal studies, and posthumanist debates on the affect of objects.

This course will examine the work and the centralized black world of the last American Nobel laureate in literature, Toni Morrison. Morrison is the author of eleven novels and multiple other works, including nonfiction and criticism. In a career that has spanned over forty years and has informed countless artists and writers, Morrison's expansive cultural reach can hardly be measured accurately. In this course we will endeavor to critically analyze the arc and the import of many of Morrison's writings.

This course will chart the development of Modernism in poetry and prose by examining the careers of two of the most important writers in the first half of the twentieth-century: the poet, T. S. Eliot and the novelist, Virginia Woolf. We will focus on the way both writers initially seek to wrestle into representation new content within the frame of pre-existing forms and, by so doing, discover that these forms are inadequate or buckle under the strain and need to be revised, renewed, and transformed.

This course will investigate how representations of gender and class serve as a structuring principle in the development of the genre of the Victorian novel in Britain. We will devote significant attention to the construction of Victorian femininity and masculinity in relation to class identity, marriage as a sexual contract, and the gendering of labor. The texts chosen for this course also reveal how gender and class are constructed in relation to other axes of identity in the period, such as race, sexuality, and national character. Novelists will include Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, C.

Known as a storyteller par excellence, Chaucer was also a famous reader of classical epic, romance, and philosophy. This research seminar will give students the opportunity to read the Canterbury Tales in light of the work's cultural, historical, and literary contexts. Throughout the semester, students will engage with Chaucer's tales and his favorite sources to examine and discuss his representations of gender and class, his perspectives on religious authority, his use of the English vernacular, and his commitment to poetry.

This class is designed to immerse students in some of the most extraordinary science writing published today. Drawing from magazines, the web, and longer works such as 'Five Days at Memorial,' 'Tom's River' and 'The Sixth Extinction,' we will closely examine how writers bring complex scientific material to life for the general reader. Students will be coached through a series of writing challenges culminating in the production of one magazine-length work.

This course introduces students to Asian American literature, considering its historical origins and evolution. Throughout the course we explore questions of identity, immigration and citizenship, generational conflict, war and migration, and mixed and cross-racial politics. Readings of primary texts will be supplemented by historical and critical source materials. Authors may include Nina Revoyr, Ruth Ozeki, Nam Le, Chang-rae Lee, Aimee Phan, Susan Choy, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

This course provides an overview of the field of history of American Literature for youth with an emphasis on literature from the 1960s to the current day. Students will read diverse literature from multiple genres and engage in thoughtful analysis of the literature as it reflects the historical, cultural, psychological and sociological nature of American society past, present, or future.