In 1677, eminent philosopher Baruch Spinoza set out to quash the public's fixation on celebrities once and for all. Celebrities, he explained, are forced to "direct [their] lives in such a way as to please the fancy of men, avoiding what they dislike and seeking what is pleasing to them.” Spinoza's admonition notwithstanding, our fixation has not been quashed. This course will help us understand why. With help from novelists, sociologists, psychologists, and entertainment industry professionals, we will examine the questions: What's it like to be famous? Why do we venerate celebrities and lust after fame? How is celebrity constructed? And how can you write literary works about celebrities without getting into legal trouble? Authors studied will include Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Ernest Becker, and Max Weber.

Shakespeare can fascinate us, excite us, make us scratch our heads. He can also make us laugh. In this course, we will read several comedies by William Shakespeare, learning to appreciate his wit and the acuity with which he observes human nature. We will also, however, trace the profound philosophy that animates these great works, answering the question: how can comedy provide a serious template for navigating human life?

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
-Henry V

Shakespeare is fascinated by how intensely personal are the operations of power: how people manipulate, persuade, dupe and are duped, how loyalty is won and lost, how love of all kinds can shake kingdoms. In this course, we will learn to appreciate how Shakespeare analyzes the political and historical in the sweep of his tragedies, and how he locates the intimacy of individual human experience within real historical events. We will read several tragedies and histories; possible readings include King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Henry  IV. 

This course will be a survey of twentieth-century American literature, focusing on the theme of the wounded body. Our course will cover major genres (the novel, the play, the novella, short stories, and essays) and authors. Works include Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, Denis Johnsons’ Jesus’ Son, and the essays of James Baldwin, Charles D’Ambrosio and Leslie Jamison.

Who are the mysterious and powerful overlords who have the pleasure of reviewing books, movies, and albums for a living? I don't know, but what I do know is how to teach you to do what they do. This course will teach you the basics of cultural criticism. You'll learn how reviews are constructed, how to persuade others that certain cultural artifacts are worth paying attention to, and how to diagnose and describe broader trends in the arts. 

“Slavery and its aftermath remain the disaster coiled at the core of American history,” writes comparative literature scholar Phillip Weinstein. “Faulkner and Morrison are among our greatest writers for understanding this disaster...and how it seethes through the American experience of race relations.” And these two artists–progenitors of exquisitely beautiful and complicated narratives, Nobel laureates, are deeply concerned with the hunger of memory that clings to and shapes private and public life in this country–will be the focus of our work this semester. Above all, we will delve into their respective texts, “breaking the backs of words,” as Morrison puts it at the end of Beloved, coming face-to-face with the nation’s deepest caverns of history and identity, and working together to understand what Faulkner calls the “devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both.” If that last sentence in particular somehow thrills you, then this is your class! In terms of writing, we will spend a good deal of time studying these authors’ respective craft (very similar and yet so distinct!) as we compose and workshop our own creative and analytical pieces. Longer texts will include Morrison’s Sula and Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Shorter texts will include essays and short stories by both authors, including Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Morrison’s “Recitatif.”

Every monster ever born (or hatched, or spawned) shares something in common with all others of its outcast kind: it is a Janus-faced creature, capable of inspiring both fear and fascination, both repulsion and envy. Monsters are, in other words, richly-encoded with human meaning; stare into their fearsome visages and you will find a funhouse mirror of a given culture’s values, fears, and desires…all of which are, through the figure of the monster, packaged as if they were the values, fears, and desires of humanity as a whole (and perhaps they sometimes are). How are monsters imagined in postmodern prose and poetry, and what do their portrayals tell us about being a person in the United States in the period from the early 1970s to the present? Topics covered include cave creatures, mermaids, and three-headed winged beasts for whom no umbrella taxonomy exists … yet.

As any psychologist will tell you, narrative and memory are intertwined. We tend to think of memories as moments the mind stores or events it records. Yet, narrative—the way we tell our stories—reshapes our memories to reflect the tale we want to tell about ourselves and the things we want to preserve over time. We are what we remember. 

This class will examine the representation of memory and its connection to narrative and selfhood. As we read, we will ask: How does the language of memory shape our understanding of it? What memories do we inherit and pass on (and to what effect)? When is memory constructive and when is it destructive? Are some memories better forgotten? When and how is remembering an act of resistance? Our texts will likely include The Drowned and the Saved (Primo Levi), When the Emperor Was Divine (Julie Otsuka), Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (film by Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufmann), The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin) and short fiction by Lori Moore, Cynthia Ozick, William Faulkner, and Jorge Luis Borges. Students will also have an opportunity to look inward and create their own narratives. What memories make you who you are? What do you want to memorialize? What narrative form will capture your memories most honestly and truly? How can you use stories to hold on and let go at the same time? 

Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, writes novels about one of literature's most fascinating subjects: the paradoxical difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, of knowing oneself. And of course that difficulty makes it difficult to know others. Those are Ishiguro's two great themes, and he has found a number of ways, all of them strange, wonderful, and frightening, of putting them into novel form. We will read three of those novels: The Remains of the Day, set in postwar England, Klara and the Sun, set in a dystopian future that resembles our present more every day, and The Buried Giant, whose setting is a fantasy version of sixth century Britain.

Have you ever felt so obsessed with a story that you started living it? Meet Alonso Quijano--a man who reads so many books, he decides to become a character from one of them. With homemade armor, Alonso transforms into Don Quixote, charging into adventure with his loyal squire Sancho Panza. Miguel de Cervantes crafted the unforgettable tales of these two memorable characters, turning madness into truth, and in doing so, revealing life's absurdities. Yet, beneath their adventures is a lingering question: Why do we crave a life apart from the one we live, trading the ordinary for the life of our dreams? We'll dive into the novel to see what it teaches us about desire, dreams, reality, and storytelling, as well as insights found in between. Through close reading and writing students will explore identity, imagination, and the ways we create ourselves - and why this text ranks among the top picks in all major literary lists, alongside Hamlet. There's a reason that Gabriel García Márquez, the fabulist writer, celebrated this amusing and inventive tale as the beginning of modern storytelling. Readings include Don Quixote, Part I, and Lazarillo de Tormes (summer reading).

Literary critics tend to describe Kurt Vonnegut as a social satirist. This is like calling a Swiss Army Knife a parcel hook. It's not wrong, just misleading and incomplete. Vonnegut's novels -- we'll read three this semester: Galapagos, Mother Night, and Bluebeard--aren't long, but they're huge because their subject is what another great comic novelist, Douglas Adams, famously called "life, the universe, and everything". And all of Vonnegut's novels ask the same question, a question that, sadly, seems more relevant now than ever: is there any hope for our little corner of life, the universe, and everything?

Jane Austen is among the best loved and least appreciated English novelists. Appreciation requires understanding, and Austen is overwhelmingly misunderstood as merely a social satirist. She IS a social satirist, of course, but she is also a philosophical novelist of remarkable skill and ambition, one who manages the nearly impossible feat of being both profound and laugh-out-loud funny. In this course, we’ll read three Austen novels that dramatize the problems of knowledge (what philosophers call ‘epistemology’) in Regency England (what historians call the period of English history from 1795 to 1837): Sense and Sensibility (1811), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1817). We’ll also read relevant literary criticism, a tiny bit of it, which is almost always just the right amount.

People tend to think of philosophy and literature as different and even opposed. Many people think that literature tells stories but philosophy seeks the truth. Should we believe these people? (Spoiler alert: we should not.) In this class, we will look at ways that philosophy and literature coexist and converge as well as ways that they come apart and clash. We will read and discuss key figures who defy lazy cliches such as "philosopher who writes well" or "writer who cares a lot about ideas." Our main authors will be Plato, Dostoevsky, and de Beauvoir, but we will also read selections from a wide variety of (so-called?) philosophical and literary texts.

An introduction to the major genres and periods of Chinese, Japanese, and Asian American literature. After a consideration of pre-modern Chinese prose and Japanese drama, we will read a number of Asian and Asian American writers grappling with the conflict between tradition and modernity. Authors include Japanese writers Murasaki Shikibu, Seami Motokiyo, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Fumiko Enchi; Chinese writers Pu Songling, Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, and Mu Xin; and Asian American writers David Henry Hwang, Wesley Yang, and Lan Samantha Chang.