Fall 2024 Seminars
ENGLIT 1900: Project Seminar, “Black Archive: From the Plantation to the Planetary”
Shaun Myers, We 6:00 – 8:30
This course will examine archives in their multiple contexts and forms, including brick-and-mortar repositories, landscapes, performance, storytelling, memory, museums, literature, visual art, and, importantly, historical silences.
Our questions to start: What is an archive? What is history? What do archives reveal or obscure about history? We will also explore why and how archives are made, who they are made for, and how we might read them. We will immerse ourselves over the semester in Black, feminist, and queer poetry, fiction, memoirs, histories, multimedia art, and creative-critical projects, in order to understand archives of Black life across different scales, from the plantation to the planetary. Students will develop an archivally based research project in the form of a paper, short film, podcast, exhibition, or multimedia essay.
ENGLIT 1900: Project Seminar, “Inanimate Reason”
Jeff Aziz, TuTh 4 – 5:15
This project seminar will examine the current moment in the complicated interplay between human intelligence, with its strange emergent qualities of consciousness and conscience, and the mechanical imitations that humans have created of their thinking, notably the contemporary boom in “generative-AI.” We will look at some of the classic "artificial intelligence" texts of the past with a sensibility very much in the present moment. The course will explore the curious practical and philosophical “prehistory” of Artificial Intelligence. Are you aware that the most exquisite “mechanical people” ever made were produced in the era of the French and American Revolutions?. Did you know that the roots of “Large-Language Model” artificial intelligence can be found in 18th-century Bible scholarship? The course will examine the critical- and philosophical discussion of artificial intelligence from Alan Turing’s “imitation game” to contemporary debates over the nature and role of machine “thinking.” Students should expect to do some practical work with generative and diffusion artificial intelligence. We will take our developing understanding of artificial intelligence to some of the most important texts that have engaged with this topic: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Westworld.
ENGLIT 1910: Senior Seminar, “Global Children’s Literature”
Lidong Xiang, We 6 – 8:30 p.m.
This course focuses on global children’s literature and trends and sociopolitical issues that surround childhood(s). We will explore the global literature that is available in the United States as well as the international literature published in different parts of the world for children and adolescents. We will discuss ways to integrate global literature to build intercultural understandings and global perspectives. To develop a critical understanding of representations of children’s experiences that are not only contemporary phenomena but have occurred historically, we will attend to conceptual complexities of what is “global” and why “childhoods” and how they are interconnected. Examining literature covering the lives of children across regions and contexts, we will reflect on historical and contemporary practices affecting children and their response toward these interventions.
Within this course, our goal is to form a community of readers in which diverse, even opposing, readings of books are welcomed. Our focus is on our response to books through inquiring into our differing understandings including perspectives of children and childhood that are socially and culturally constructed. Your participation in discussions and engagements is crucial to the success of the course.
ENGLIT 1910: Senior Seminar, “Discovering the English Country House”
John Twyning, TuTh 2:30- 3:45
The English Country House is a complex artifact of English culture including literature, architecture, and landscape. It is unique and ever changing and has had an extraordinary impact on the construction of English ideology. From its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present, from Wordsworth’s poem on Tintern Abbey to Downtown Abbey, it has shaped English consciousness, politics, and what it means to be English. This course will examine various examples of the country house in literature in the context of cultural, architectural, religious, and secular histories to develop an understanding of the plasticity and the durability of this real and imaginary edifice of English culture. We will ask questions about the way the idea of the country house organizes life, divisions of labor, social hierarchies, and what kinds of identities do and do not get included in this vision of England. We will look at texts from a long span of history, including 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century poetry; 19th- and 20th-century fiction; landscape painting and architecture; and some films and TV series that revive interest in the country house.