Course Listings

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-001 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-002 (section 2)

Instructor: Benjamin Breyer

This class examines the ways that a historical event can be remembered and described differently by direct participants, and how personal biases, such as race, gender and class, affect the process of recollection and narration. Some of the texts that will be read and discussed include Sara Collins’ The Confessions of Frannie Langton, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, among others. Our analysis of these texts will be augmented by theoretical works drawn from sociology and literary studies.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-003

Instructor: Vrinda Condillac

In this course, we will study the way culture influences how we make sense of what we see. We will examine how power is exercised by making people feel as though they are always being seen, how this surveillance polices the way gender, race, class, and sexuality are expressed, and how people perform their identities to reinforce or push back against this policing. Literary texts will include Passing by Nella Larsen, "The Husband Stitch" by Carmen Maria Machado, Fantomina by Eliza Haywood, and the films Paris is Burning and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Secondary texts will include John Berger, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, W.E.B Dubois, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Jack Halberstam, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Laura Mulvey.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-004

Instructor: Alexandra Watson

How can the arts, particularly the literary arts, serve as tools for liberation and social change? How can writing be an act of defiance against forces of oppression? In this class, we will engage with texts that challenge dominant ideologies, resist oppressive structures, and envision new communities. We will attend to subtle and overt subversion in both the form and content of the works we discuss. The literary and theoretical works we read will provide models for creative intervention in public conversations around race, gender, sexuality, and class. Literary works may include works by Layli Long Soldier, Hala Alyan, Solmaz Sharif, Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Octavia Butler, Isabel Allende, and others. Theory may include writings by Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and others.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-005 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-006 (section 2)

Instructor: Duygu Oya Ula

This class focuses on the theme of translation and what happens when texts and people cross national, cultural, linguistic, racial or gendered borders. Through our classroom discussions and essays, we will explore the following questions: Why or how do texts lend themselves to or resist translation? How do encounters with dominant discourses necessitate acts of self-translation or resistance to translation, especially for people of color, immigrants or queer communities? How do literary narratives change when translated across cultures and time periods? What is the role of the translator in these acts of remaking? Drawing on postcolonial, feminist and translation theory, we will consider how writers have pushed back against dominant narratives through texts that cross and complicate linguistic, cultural and national borders. Readings are subject to change but will likely include a selection from following: a novel by Jean Rhys or Virginia Woolf, fiction and poetry by Sappho, Fatimah Asghar, Irena Klepfisz, Marjane Satrapi, as well as various English translations of the 1001 Nights; scholarly texts by Gloria Anzaldúa, Edward Said, bell hooks, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Jorge Luis Borges. Course costs will not exceed $20; access to books can also be made available to students who need them.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-009 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-010 (section 2)

Instructor: Andrew Lynn

Dear student: I write to you, who now read these words. Or, perhaps, I don’t: perhaps I never had you in mind at all; perhaps you are just someone passing by, who has taken these words as though meant for yourself. This course examines how writers have made use of the privacy of letters in their public writing. What happens when we address our written words to a particular other? How, on the other hand, do we read words meant for someone else? What intimacies does the letter form make possible, or violate? And what might the special case of the letter have to tell us about writing in general? Objects in the course may include: fiction by Goethe, DeWitt, Diderot, Poe, West; epistolary poems by Ovid, Dickinson, Rankine, Shockley; paintings of letter-reading by Vermeer and Greuze; letter-memoirs by Baldwin and Vuong; criticism and theory by Althusser, Barthes, Benveniste, Fried, Howe, Jackson, Reed.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-011

Instructor: Linn Mehta

This course cuts across borders between North, South and Central America and the Caribbean, in a search for the ways in which literature illuminates different aspects of American identity—especially gender, class, ecological, racial and ethnic identities. Since modernity, in the sense of freedom from tradition, first developed in the Americas, the literatures of the Americas involve diversity and innovation from their beginning. After examining the roots of Modernism in North and South America at the end of the 19th century, we will look at the development of modernism, post-modernism and post-colonialism in the 20th and early 21st centuries through the study of key novels, short stories, and poetry from North and South America and the Caribbean, including works by Martí, Lorde, Anzaldúa, DuBois, Hurston, Hughes, Eliot, Neruda, Césaire, García Márquez, Borges, Cortázar, Valenzuela, Kincaid, Danticat, Lahiri and Valeria Luiselli. Considering these works in their historical, political and aesthetic contexts helps us to grapple with the multiple formations of American identities.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-012 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-024 (section 2)

Instructor: Michael Shelichach

In his now-classic book ​Capitalist Realism, cultural theorist Mark Fisher writes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” Why is it so difficult for us to envision living under a different system? How deeply has capitalism shaped our assumptions and expectations, our hopes and predictions, our conscious and unconscious minds, our very desires? Is it possible for us to develop and implement another way of organizing society? Do we need to?

In this section of First-Year Writing, we will explore these questions and others related to capitalism’s effects on our subjectivities, politics, culture, and environment. We will begin by close reading short stories that consider the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of consumerism, as well as the tensions produced by inequality and class division. We will then turn to Franz Kafka’s influential novella ​The Metamorphosis and see if we can tease out of its nightmarish plot the contradictions of capitalism identified by its early critics, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Max Weber. Finally, we will use Ling Ma’s recent apocalyptic zombie novel ​Severance to think through whether capitalism is destined to collapse – and perhaps take the rest of the planet down with it – or whether we can transform ourselves and our civilization first.

Other literary texts might include short works by Lydia Davis, Shirley Jackson, Robert Walser, and Haruki Murakami. Critical and theoretical texts will likely include works by Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Samuel R. Delany, Raymond Williams, and Kohei Saito.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-013 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-023 (section 2)

Instructor: Elizabeth Weybright

Clothing is a part of everyone’s daily life, and what one wears is often​ considered to be an​ expression of individuality. Yet, while a wardrobe may involve deeply personal choices, the​ textiles available to us and the styles we gravitate toward can also reflect our historical moment.​ Like other art forms, fashion is political, and its materials—textiles—have historically been at the heart of global trade. In this course, we will ask: what can literature show us​ about cultural​ and political histories of fashion trends and the textile industry? Just as importantly, how can​ understanding historical context for the textiles, needlecrafts, and garments that appear in the​ pages of a story offer insights into character, setting, and theme? As a class, we will consider some of the ways fashion and the global circulation of textile goods have been​ bound up in​ relationships between nations and empires as well as relationships​ between individuals, society,​ and the environment. Readings are subject to change but may include fiction by Virginia Woolf,​ Ntozake Shange, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth​ Inchbald. Other readings will draw upon fashion theory and scholarship on textile history by​ scholars such as Lisa Lowe, Hilary Davidson, Monica Miller, Suchitra Choudhury, Amber Butchart, and others. We will also consider costuming as a part of worldbuilding​ and character​ development in film and television examples such as Bridgerton, and we will put our discussions​ of historical text(ile)s into conversation with recent work in fashion activism.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-014 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-015 (section 2)

Instructor: Andrew Ragni

The "Mad Woman" is an archetype with enduring appeal in storytelling. Inimical forces conspire to curb her agency or prohibit the pursuit of her desires; how does she survive or strike back from such a disadvantaged position? How is her “madness” represented as the effect of her oppression and a consequence of her femininity? How does she weaponize the very terms by which her existence is disqualified? Moreover, under what conditions does she subject others to the same suffering imposed on her, and to what cost? This course considers the ways women of all kinds negotiate life “on the verge,” in states of extreme precarity or with the threat of violence lurking around them. What do their complicities, rebellions, and fantasies reveal about sexual difference materialized within patriarchal societies? To be “on the verge” is to hover in a liminal space between “here” and “there,” perhaps to be even something not quite human. This unique vantage point offered by this eclectic collection of women will orient our critical approach to this seminar. Possible texts include Euripides’s Medea, Aeschylus’s Oresteia cycle, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Andrea Dworkin’s Right-wing Women, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-017

Instructor: Sam Davis

How do queer and trans authors negotiate the written self amidst a culture which seeks to erase trans and non-binary realities, selves, and identities? In this class we will explore a handful of contemporary American literary texts written by queer and trans authors to explore how language is used, challenged, rejected, and reclaimed to constitute new literary selves and possibilities. For example, we will explore the reclamation of they/them pronouns, and the ways in which non-binary selves write themselves into binary colonial languages. The class will engage fundamental scholarship on race, gender, disability, and culture within the field of Trans studies.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-018

Instructor: Quincy Jones

"The Future is Female" except in science fiction, where it still looks pretty white and male.  What happens when women of color take on such tropes as space exploration, cybernetics, superpowers, and the end of the world?  How can women of color change the way we not only think of the future, but think of the present as well?  In this class we’ll look at how speculative literature looks at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and environmental concerns.  Readings will include work from such authors as Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Sam Chanse, G Willow Wilson, and Tananarive Due with potential critical readings from Lisa Yaszek, Charlotte E Howell, and bell hooks.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-019

Instructor: Emily Austin

Teenagers inhabit a strange land: in exile from childhood, still immigrating to adulthood. How have different writers mapped the liminal territory of the teenage experience? In this class, we will step away from the rich tradition of realistic Coming-of-Age narratives and explore how genre frameworks—including speculative, horror, fairy tale, gothic, and quest traditions—have been used to illuminate the Teenage Strange. How have writers used the strangeness of genre to render this slice of time? How does genre capture the teenage intersection between public and private inquiry—between larger questions about the world, and more private questions about the self? How does genre construct questions about fear, desire, rage, shame, power, culture, and love? How does it deconstruct reality so it can be seen, investigated, and felt? Readings may include work by Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Alice Sola Kim, Viktor Shklovsky, Jeffrey Eugenides, Helen Oyeyemi, Jia Tolentino, Parul Sehgal, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Carmen Maria Machado, Ursula K. LeGuin, bell hooks, and others.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-021 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-022 (section 2)

Instructor: Francesca Ochoa

In this course, we will encounter ghosts and hauntings in the fiction of Latin American and Caribbean writers. A Cuban exile is haunted by the life he left behind; a teenager in Argentina explores her queer identity and confronts the ghosts of state violence; a young woman courts colonial power and becomes a ghost herself. We will look to theories of hauntology to investigate the ways in which the characters in these stories reckon with, or fall prey to, legacies of colonialism, war, and migration. Readings may include literary works by Mariana Enriquez, Edwidge Danticat, Daniel Alarcón, Jean Rhys, and Ana Menéndez.

Course #: FYWB-BC1001-025 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-026 (section 2)

Instructor: Madeleine Saraceni

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
 —Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”

In our course, we’ll examine some of the most troublesome and troubling parents in literature. At times tyrannical and at times tender, these fascinating characters prompt us to ask questions like: Who is a parent? What is the duty of a parent? How should they behave and what role do they have in shaping their offspring? Texts may include ​Paradise Lost, King Lear, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice and ​Klara and the Sun.