Sex and Gender in Medieval Literature

This course will focus on constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality in the later medieval period. We will read scientific, theological, and philosophical texts that illustrate the various ways medieval people understood sex and gender, and assess how premodern literary accounts intersect with, respond to, and make use of such understandings. You can expect to develop some language skills (with readings in middle English, as well as modern English translation), to engage with material and textual objects, and to read across multiple genres and forms.

Technniques of the Novel

The course seeks to examine the creation of modern fiction by studying the various methods and strategies employed by authors to achieve their creative visions. Together, we will examine novels and short stories by looking directly into their crafts, mapping up the various strategies employed by the author, inquiring into the effects and non-effects of those techniques as touching on the various aspects of the fiction including effective characterization, plotting, socio-political commentaries and thematics, structure, etcetera. We will ask of these books the supreme authorial question: how did the author achieve such and such effect? Our fiction texts will include work by Virginia Woolf, Alan Paton, Tayeb Salih, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jhumpa Lahiri and others. We will balance these with discussions from critical work on craft from Morris Beja, James Wood, J. Hillis Miller, Irving Howe, Victor Schlovsky amongst others. The course will involve a great deal of annotations and critical studies of these works from a purely formalist lens as well as imitations and creative writing responses to the texts.

Looking ahead to the Aix conference, which will focus on Lawrence and the Mediterranean, this graduate seminar will read as widely as possible in the Lawrence corpus.  We will begin with the major English novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, and will then turn to the fictional and non-fictional writings of Italy, Australia and Mexico (Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent are all possibilities).  We will also take in generous helpings of Lawrence's poetry (from Birds, Beasts and Flowers especially), travel books (e.g. excerpts from Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, and/or Etruscan Places), and letters.  Reading Lawrence as an international writer, we will consider him in multiple critical contexts, British, American and otherwise. 

Modernism, Fascism, Technology

The historical rise of modernism during the first of the twentieth century cannot be fully separated from the emergence of new media technologies and the rise of often conflicting political mass movements. Over the last few decades, the category of “fascism” has once again reemerged as a frequently used term to describe various political tendencies that have emerged all over the globe in the new millennium. This course is an attempt to test the usefulness of this category in the context of contemporary media technologies. The semester will be divided into two major units. We will start with a brief historical overview of the theoretical responses to fascism during the first half of the 20^th century in the context of modernism. The second half of the semester will be devoted to an examination of the legacies of this modernist constellation. We will examine contemporary reflections on the relationship between technology, art, and politics. We will discuss recent theoretical critiques of social media and other digital networks in order to reflect on the effects of these new technologies on our lives today. In addition, throughout the semester we will also examine a wide range of cultural artifacts that will allow us to interrogate the role of various “aesthetic experiences” in these historical transformations. 

Our readings might include the following texts (either in full or in excerpted format): Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”; Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism; Ernst Bloch, The Heritage of Our Times; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Victor Klemperer: LTI: Language of the Third Reich; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem; Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism”; Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer and Remnants of Auschwitz; Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm; Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media; Wendy Chun, Discriminating Data; Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art and The Wretched of the Screen; Angela Nagel, Kill All Normies; Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Cannot Have Nice Things; David Rudrum, Trolling Before the Internet; Anna Kornbluh Immediacy; Alberto Toscano Late Fascism.