A technology- and media-focused class, this course combines concerns with small details of execution in the presentation and structure of print and hypertext media with concerns with literary structure and close-reading techniques. The primary literary text during the quarter will be Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which students will read gradually, closely, and carefully throughout the quarter, leading seminar-style discussions of individual selections. Questions about textual encoding and presentation will be focused along two lines: hypertextual theory (readings will include Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media and N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis) and typographic praxis (readings will include Matthew Butterick’s Butterick’s Practical Typography and examinations of experimental modernist typographic works). Recent developments in web technologies that combine both concerns (such as The Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities) will ask students to look at how meaning is created through the interplay of form, content, and technological praxis. Throughout the quarter, student work will build toward a final creative writing project that incorporates at least one of the course’s media concerns; early weeks will involve investigation of available tools (a list of suggested tools will be provided; students will also be welcome to add to the list), and short presentations on those tools to the class as a whole. Students will then write/build/create/upload (as appropriate) works that constitute a theoretically informed piece of creative work.
A re-imagination of a senior-level topics course that I taught as a teaching associate in the Department of English during winter 2013, the course texts include novels (John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids; Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; José Saramago’s Blindness; and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake); movies (George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead; Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later); Judeo-Christian, Norse, and Sumerian religious texts (selections from Genesis and Revelation; selections from Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom; the Völuspá; selections from The Epic of Gilgamesh); historical background readings; and critical/theoretical texts that provide lenses for examination of primary texts via phenomenology, biopolitics, and post-structuralist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic theory. Optional additional reading (which was surprisingly popular in the course’s first iteration, given the already heavy required reading load) included survival manuals and the satiric science fiction of Douglas Adams. The controlling narrative arc of the course begins with the stabilization of post-apocalyptic generic concerns in the early 1950s, discussing the imagination of the end of the world as a way of thinking around the boundaries of what we consider to be thinkable,
then continually subverts the generic boundaries that it has established by inverting those boundaries with each new course text. Though the first iteration of the course was lecture- based, I imagine this version in the format of a small to medium seminar, emphasizing student- led discussion of course texts and theoretical perspectives.
Beginning with an examination of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, this course traces the female body as an area of ideological contention throughout the last hundred years, focusing on questions of identity formation, reproduction, birth control, sexual fidelity, health and hygiene. Literary texts will include Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, José Saramago’s Blindness, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, and poetry by Anne Sexton, Silvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes. This will be a theory-heavy class that, in addition to Foucault, will incorporate, in whole or part, Roberto Esposito’s Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Gender Trouble, Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, and J.-A. Mbembé’s Necropolitics.
Overarching concerns will include the formation of concepts and understandings of sexuality and identity, the interconnection of social roles and power structures with questions about female embodiment and appropriate
behavior, the question of who benefits from existing power/knowledge constructs, and a continuing emphasis on connections between the course’s gender- and sexuality-based concerns and power/knowledge constructs in other domains, especially race and class. Student work throughout the quarter will involve blog entries using the course’s theoretical selections to comment both on literary texts and on contemporary politics.
The Horror, The Horror: Applications of Machine-Reading Technologies to the Horror Genre
This course examines both selected machine-reading technologies (focusing on AntConc, MALLET, and Lexos) and the stereotypically negative reactions of traditionally oriented literary scholars to the potential for machine reading as an aid to literary interpretation. It will do so by providing students a set of tools and a textual corpus drawn from or connected to the traditional horror genre to which students will apply those tools. Texts that will be put under the analytical lens include Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a selection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The emphasis throughout the quarter will be on the use of machine-based tools as supplements and aids to close reading, rather than as substitutes for it. Questions about the expectations and social practices of the literary academy will be focalized through a standard text on literary theory (Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory or Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction) and through a reading of James Hynes’s horrifying, humorous, vicious academic satire The Lecturer’s Tale. The course will also include a set of theoretical texts providing approaches to machine-assisted interpretation, including (in long form) Matthew Jockers’s Macroanalysis and Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality, but also a set of shorter works drawn from the blogs of people working with digital- reading methods describing the successes and failures of their experimental readings. Student work throughout the quarter will involve blog posts describing their own successes and failures at working with the methodologies involved as they build toward a final interpretive paper that leverages machine-reading techniques to assist in the work of literary interpretation.
I dont hate it! I dont hate it!: Faulkner’s Less Popular Works
This course pushes student understandings of the works of one of the most remarkable and innovative American authors of the twentieth century past the boundaries of the commonly read major works.
It builds a fuller and more sophisticated understanding of Faulkner’s larger- scale projects that are often obscured when Faulkner is taught primarily as an author concerned with modernist formal experimentation or with twentieth-century racial politics; though these are also important concerns for Faulkner, an exclusive emphasis on the major
novels that concern themselves primarily with these themes (such as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and As I Lay Dying) ignores Faulkner’s earlier concerns and his later development. Texts chosen for this quarter will supplement these widely recognized concerns by examining closely the fictional world-creation that occurs with Yoknapatawpha County as an imagined social community (Intruder in the Dust); Faulkner’s class politics (The Town, The Mansion); and the uniquely Southern concern with history (Requiem for a Nun; Absalom, Absalom!). Throughout the quarter, the primary novels will be supplemented by Faulkner’s under-read short stories and a continuing return to Faulkner’s fascination with and influence on visual media through an examination of his early play Marionettes and the illustrations accompanying it, as well as through continuing examinations of artistic works influenced by Faulkner (including works by Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and David Davidovich Burliuk).