This course will examine form and theme in the graphic narrative. Focusing on a small group of contemporary memoirs and novels, we will also analyze some antecedents, such as the early twentieth-century 'wordless novel'; relevant works in other media, such as documentary film; and selected secondary criticism. Topics will include: relations between word and image; constructions of time, space, and sequence; representations of gender and sexuality; depictions of memory, archive, and history.

An introduction to African literature in English since 1960. Fiction, drama, autobiography, essays by such writers as Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Adichie, Chris Abani, Sindiwe Magona, and Zoe Wicomb. Particular attention to themes of exile and imprisonment, political struggle before and after independence, the convergence of oral cultures and European languages, and the emergence of postcolonial and feminist discourses in contemporary Africa.

This course will examine the major African American writers of the twentieth century, beginning with the poetry and prose of Paul Laurence Dunbar and ending with the fiction of Toni Morrison, John Wideman, and the poetry of Yusef Koumanyaka, Rita Dove, and others. We will discuss the strategies involved in the creation of a 'black voice' and its relationship to Anglo-American literature.

Throughout America's history, the essay has been a vital literary genre. From personal, religious, and confessional essays to highly political, satirical, and sometimes preposterous ones, American authors have revealed their passions and hatreds both eloquently and roughly. We will read essays from the eighteenth century to the present, concentrating on masters of the form. Authors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Gore Vidal, and E. B. White.

This course will introduce students to the literature of modern Ireland beginning with Swift, moving through the nineteenth century, examining the Irish Literary Revival and Irish modernism, and finally contemporary drama, poetry, and fiction. We will focus on Irish women writers and their literary interventions concerning colonial history, nationalism, and Unionism. We will pay particular attention to representations of Irishness, the relationship between literature and national history, and questions of violence and representation.

This introduction to modern British poetry pays special attention to the emergence, consolidation, and dismantling of modernist poetry and poetics. It will link this literary history with, amongst other things, the loss of faith, the two world wars, and the relationship between monumental aesthetics, utopian poetics, and totalitarian politics. Writers will include Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, H.D., and Auden.

This class will examine the ways Romantic-era writers figured revolution and the reaction against it, in the wake of the French Revolution's spectacular but failed promises of liberty, fraternity, and equality for all. We will pay special attention to how British writers envisioned their own versions of freedom and equality, extending them to women, slaves, and the poor. Likewise we will explore how this project for social change was necessarily related to revolutions in language and aesthetics.

What can Brown do for you? This question captures a central theme of this course: how a word like 'Brown' evolved from a 1970s signifier of antiracist coalition building into a motto of the United Parcel Service (UPS), selling speed, efficiency, and access to networks of the global economy. Using interdisciplinary methods, we will explore the way multicultural imagery, Civil Rights discourse, and state policy have converged in the service of global capitalism. Focusing on fiction (egs. Octavia Butler, Karen Yamashita), film (egs.

A study of ten to twelve plays and their film adaptations. Plays are drawn from a range of periods and genres, and films are chosen to show the scope of adaptive approaches from filmed play to radical re-imagining. The course will include readings on the theory and history of theatre-to-film adaptations. Playwrights will likely include Christopher Marlowe, John Gay, Oscar Wilde, Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, and David Henry Hwang.

While influenced by Augustine's warning that worldly inquiry could endanger the pilgrimage of the soul, medieval literature contains many instances of curious looking. Exploring the medieval desire to know, this course considers how the period's tendencies toward spiritual and metaphysical thought are balanced against its fascinations with the observable world. We will study the ways allegories, travel narratives, romances, and dream visions intersect with natural philosophy, historiography, cartography, and architecture.