Object Lessons in Vicarious Reading
This time of year, I always get the back-to-school blues. Not, mind you, because I have to go back to school, but because other people get to, and I have to keep on being an employed adult, at least for the time being. I know, I know, I’m a nerd. Whatever. Once in a while, I like to poke around the college course catalogs to see what kinds of literature classes colleges are offering these days. This year, I went a little further, finding full syllabi (or even just book lists) where I could, to see what exactly kids are reading this semester at some of the best colleges and universities in America. This did not assuage my school-sickness, but it did give me some good ideas for my own fall reading plans.
Watching: Http://catalog
NB: Though I found hundreds of amazing-sounding classes out there, I limited myself here to courses with syllabi (or at least a book list) publicly available—which were fewer than you’d think, and depended a lot on the school in question’s online system. Below, ten classes being taught this fall that I wish I could take, and the books you’ll need to vicariously read along with them. Click on the course title to see the entire syllabus or description.
Futurities, Stanford UniversityTaught by Professor Michaela Bronstein
Special Topics: Black Science Fiction, UC BerkeleyTaught by Professor Namwali Serpell
Course Description: This course addresses two genres—black fiction and science fiction—at their point of intersection, which is sometimes called Afrofuturism. The umbrella term “black fiction” will include texts that issue out of and speculate about the African-American experience. The category “science fiction” will comprise texts that speculate about alternative, cosmic, dystopian, and future worlds. Overlapping—and mutually transforming—concepts will include: genetics, race, diaspora, miscegenation, double consciousness, technology, ecology, biology, language, history, futurity, space (inner and outer), and, of course, the alien. We will consider stories, novels, graphic novels, comics, films, music, and television clips.
Book list:
Octavia Butler, DawnSamuel R. Delany, Babel-17Damian Duffy, Kindred: A Graphic NovelMat Johnson, PymVictor LaValle, DestroyerKiese Laymon, Long DivisionH.P. Lovecraft, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon PymGeorge Schuyler, Black No More
Wondrous Literatures of the Near East, Cornell UniversityTaught by Professor Deborah A. Starr
Course Description: This course examines Near East’s rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will trace three major threads: myths of creation and destruction; travel narratives; and poetry of love and devotion. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ and ‘The Song of Songs,’ as well as selections from medieval works such as the ‘Travels’ of Ibn Battuta, the ‘Shahnameh’ of Ferdowsi, poetry of Yehuda HaLevi, and The Thousand and One Nights. The modern unit will include work by Egyptian Nobel Laureate, Naguib Mahfouz. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.
Readmore: The Norton Anthology Of African American Literature, Just A Moment
Required texts:
Stephanie Dalley, ed., Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and OthersThe New Oxford Annotated BibleSaint Augustine, ConfessionsThe Qur’an (trans. Abdel Haleem)One Thousand and One Nights (trans. N. J. Dawood)Abdolqasem Ferdowsi, Rostam: Tales of Love and War from the ShahnamehThe Travels of Ibn Battuta (trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith)Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days
Wonder, Williams CollegeTaught by Professor Christopher L. Pye
Course Description: We tend to imagine “wonder” as a naïve, wide-eyed response, something quite distinct from the cold and sophisticated act of critical analysis. In this discussion class, we will consider wonder as an eminently analyzable concept, but one that raises provocative questions about the nature and limits of our own, distinctly modern forms of critical engagement. The course examines three historical incarnations of “wonder,” each involving complex relations among the aesthetic, philosophical, and social domains: the Renaissance tradition on wonder and the marvelous; the eighteenth-century analysis of the sublime; and twentieth-century accounts of the culture of spectacle. We will consider writers such as Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Wordsworth, Borges, and W.G. Sebald (all wonderful); painters such as Leonardo and Vermeer, the photography of Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth; films including Lang’s Metropolis and Scott’s Blade Runner; and critical or philosophical writers, including Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Walter Benjamin.
Required texts:
W.G. Sebald, Rings of SaturnWilliam Shakespeare, The Winter’s TaleRem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for ManhattanNatalie Zemon Davs, The Return of Martin Guerre
Pleasure, Power and Profit: Race and Sexualities in a Global Era, Princeton UniversityTaught by Professor Anne McClintock
Course Description: Pleasure Power and Profit explores the intimate ways that sexualities and race are entwined in contemporary culture, historically, and in our own lives. Why are questions about sexuality and race some of the most controversial, compelling, yet often taboo issues of our time? Exploring films, popular culture, novels, social media, and theory, we engage themes like: race, gender and empire; fetishism, Barbie, vampires and zombies; sex work and pornography; marriage and monogamy; queer sexualities; and strategies for social empowerment such as: Black Lives Matter, the new campus feminism, and global movements against sexual and gender violence.
Readmore: The Cambridge History Of English And American Literature, 1660
Sample reading list:
Thomas Laqueur, Making SexJessica Valenti, Sex ObjectLinda Williams, Porn StudiesFrederique Delacoste, Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex IndustryJean Rhys, Wide Sargasso SeaClaudia Rankine, Citizen
America’s Queer Canon: from Melville to Moonlight, Harvard UniversityTaught by Kathryn Roberts
Course Description: This course examines a range of works from the US canon that engage themes of same-sex desire, homosexual and transgender identity, and other ?queer? relations. Questions around sexual norms have been central to American literature from its beginnings, but the course will focus on texts from the second half of the nineteenth century through the very contemporary. With help from queer theorists and social historians, we?ll pay close attention to how changing legal, medical, and religious discourses shape queer literary expression, and how queer writers have changed culture. Authors include Melville, James, Cather, Larsen, Baldwin, Lorde, Bechdel, and Nelson.
Required texts:
Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of my NameLarry Kramer, The Normal HeartWilla Cather, Death Comes for the ArchbishopJames Baldwin, Another CountryWalt Whitman, Leaves of GrassNella Larsen, PassingDennis Cooper, SlutsHenry David Thoreau, WaldenJames Baldwin, Giovanni’s RoomTony Kushner, Angels in AmericaGertrude Stein, Tender ButtonsHeran Melville, Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other StoriesMaggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Black Women Writers, University of FloridaTaught by Professor Debra Walker King
Course Description: This course examines the subject positions of African American women within the social and political context of the United States, focusing foremost on contemporary representations of the captive female and the body. As an inquiry generated by feminist issues in literary scholarship, it explores the following questions. If some of contemporary feminist praxis and epistemology are grounded in notions of “freedom,” “individuality,” and the freedom of the body to “labor,” deeply implicated in the rise of modern capitalism, then what gaps must be brought to light in order for this discourse to achieve a broader articulation? Where are the points of conversion and foreclosure between Womanism and Feminism? What cultural configurations are (and might be) derived from a widened point-of-view regarding both the culture-work and the cultural apprenticeship of Black women today? What spaces do the bodies of Black women occupy in the symbolic contract? To what degree do the texts under survey articulate a Black feminist / womanist perspective? In what ways do they fall short?
Categories: literature