This seminar engages with experimental scholarship in the wake of the humanities—ex humanitas—and will itself be a kind of experiment. After perusing the work of several “precursors” of experimental conceptual writing (Benjamin, Adorno, Genet, Derrida), we will dedicate the quarter to contemporary thinkers (some of whom will join us via zoom) who seek to disrupt, transgress, or subvert the boundaries of conventional academic genres, disciplines, and institutions. Together, we will read, discuss, listen to, and cogitate over Joanna Brooks’s quilting histories, Denise Ferreira da Silva + Arjuna Neuman’s transsensory philosophical films, Lynne Huffer’s auto-collage, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, Sora Han’s dystranslation, Natalie Loveless’s research-creations, Fred Moten + Stefano Harney’s undercommons, Maggie Nelson’s autotheory, and Michael Sawyer’s lyricism. You might associate some of these proper names with fields or schools of thought—deconstruction, Marxism, political thought, Black study, psychoanalysis, poetics, feminist and queer theory—but it will not be our intention to cover “all” areas of contemporary critical theory. Rather, we will ask how we might allow our own intellectual labor, bound or unbound by disciplinary norms, to be inspired and transformed by our engagement with these thinkers. Our collective and individual experiments will be motivated by a series of What if…? questions: What if we were to consider experimental work as scholarship on par with, or far beyond, what we typically produce in the critical humanities? What if we were to attune ourselves to transsensory and transmedial experience as we write within more conventional academic genres (the conference paper, the article, the dissertation, the book)? What if we were to imagine intellectual work as a wholly creative endeavor?

This course will approach the field of cultural studies through the analysis of the culture of games. A relatively new field, Game Studies explores how games are formally structured, their relationship to other narrative forms, and how they exist in and facilitate cultures of play. This course will take a capacious approach to the field, considering not just video games but other, more longstanding forms and practices (sports, board games, etc). Importantly, we will pair work on these forms with important texts from cultural studies and critical theory in an effort to work through how the study of games can employ the tools of the study of cultural practice more generally.

This seminar explores the complex system of relations between the transatlantic slave trade and the consequent rise and fall of the plantation complex in the extended Americas. Primary source material from the mid-eighteenth to early-nineteenth centuries is complemented by contemporary fictional musings concerning how to "make sense" of events that have left a profound impact on the social, economic and aesthetic landscape of the present. Close attention is paid to questions of genre, particularly natural histories, the novel, poetry, polemical essays and the strident periodical press that polarized both proslavery and anti-slavery agendas. How do these forms explore the nature of freedom and unfreedom, and excise or re-inscribe people of African descent, Native Americans and women into debates about citizenship and equality? Particular emphasis is put on the new “archival turn” in literary scholarship, and influential historical studies and in-class close readings of visual material provide secondary context. The course focuses on the British Atlantic, with attention to Iberian and French imperial contexts as well.

LTEN 258

This graduate seminar will explore formative and recent "turns" in literary studies and theory. Topics might include cross-disciplinary methods of approach in literature and science Anthropocene studies, -cene debates, and problems of periodization animal studies and posthumanisms the supposedly new materialism, its antecedents, and its discontents cultural geology ecopoetics vitalist, more-than-human, prismatic, and other ecologies elemental and spatial shifts in the environmental humanities eco-aesthetics and the representational affordances of particular literary infrastructures (such as figure, form, and genre) in confrontation with climate collapse strategic presentisms and more.

This proseminar, offered each fall by the Director of Doctoral Studies, consists of two components: (1) readings and discussions of selected foundational and critical theoretical works, and (2) eight to ten guest lectures by literature faculty introducing their research and methodologies. The course is required for first-year students in the Department of Literature doctoral program. Enrollment is restricted to major code LT77 or by consent of the instructor and department. Prerequisite: department approval.