In this first-year seminar, students will be introduced to and acquainted with the essay form as it has been endeavored by African American writers throughout the 19th and 20th century. This course emphasizes the essay as a written genre that is meditative, argumentative, and inquisitive; it is a form that open-endedly captures a course of thought, often times raising more questions than proffering secure answers to its inquiries. Students will read works by Frederick Douglass, Ida B.

The screenplay is a unique and ephemeral form that exists as a blueprint for something else: a finished film. How do you convey on the page a story that will take shape within an audio-visual medium? The screenwriter must have an understanding of both the language of narrative film as well as the general shape and mechanics of film stories. This advanced course will cover dialogue, characterization, plot, story arc, genre, and cinematic structure. We will analyze scenes from fictional narrative films -- both short and feature length -- and read the scripts that accompany these films.

"Race is the modality in which class is lived," wrote the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall. This course takes Hall's axiom as a starting point for considering the racial, gendered, and sexualized character of capitalist domination. Throughout the course students will explore both the political economy and the cultural imagery of racial capitalism. One question we will grapple with is the following: if capital itself is as imperceptible and objectively real as gravity, what are the common tropes we use to apprehend its circulation?

William Wordsworth and George Eliot grew up in a revolutionary age: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, wars of independence and of imperial conquest, and, behind it all, the social transformations arising from the industrial revolution. Both Wordsworth and Eliot wrestled with how to adapt their art to these new realities: he introduced dramatically new content into poetry and experimented with a startling variety of poetic forms; she transformed the various prose genres to construct a novelistic form able to represent the totality of British society.

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 Choi, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

This course explores the idea of "the self" and "the subject" by reading autobiographical and memoir writing by Black authors. Through an engagement with some criticism on the role of slavery in staffing the sense of self-possession accorded to the individual subject, we will think together about how autobiographical forms of writing function in the tradition of black thought and letters.

This course will introduce you to the study of literature in English across connected pasts and global circulations. We will focus on works from the former British Empire-mainly Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean-though our inquiry extends to the shared and ongoing conditions of colonialism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through novels, poetry, and cinema, we will explore questions of citizenship and exile, racialization and identity, language and politics, and collective life under globalized capitalism. We will ask: what constitutes the world of literature?

This course examines translation as a mode of cultural transmission, creativity, and theoretical inquiry for Jewish literature and thought. Topics include: translation as a means of mediating access to the sacred; women's roles as readers and creators of translations; enduring debates about what may be "lost" in translation; and whether translation into "Global English" helps or hurts the survival of literatures in Yiddish, Ladino, and other minoritized languages.

This course will examine a variety of English works and genres written in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Our concentration will be principally on the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Langland, Margery Kempe, and Lydgate. Most of our readings are in Middle English.

A study of some of Shakespeare's plays emphasizing the poetic and dramatic aspects of his art, with attention to the historical context and close, careful reading of the language. Eight or nine plays.