SOME COURSES I TEACH OR PLAN TO TEACH
Undergraduate Courses:
This course guides students slowly and carefully through one extraordinary long book that is well worth the time and effort. Texts vary year to year. Required text: one inexpensive book that you will never want to sell back. Possible Texts include Bleak House, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Mill on the Floss, Iliad, Divine Comedy, War and Peace, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Canterbury Tales, Les Misérables, Dream of the Red Chamber, Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, The Count of Monte Cristo, Decameron, A Little Life, 1001 Nights, Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, 2666, Gravity’s Rainbow, In Search of Lost Time, Moby Dick, Min Kamp, Infinite Jest, Vanity Fair, etc.
"‘Tragic Flaws’: Cripping Western Drama”
In light of recent critiques of the practice of “crip drag,” able-bodied actors portraying disabled characters on stage, theater would seem to exclude non-normative bodies from the stage in practice. Why, then, has western drama so often taken physical and mental disability as its subject? Moreover, why does one of the founding and most influential texts of western dramatic theory, Aristotle’s Poetics, define the function of tragic drama by recourse to a medical term (catharsis) that connotes the healing of wounded or disabled bodies? Does participating in theater—as recent practices such as “drama therapy,” suggest—have a palliative effect? What, on the other hand, do theories of drama that reject the idea of catharsis have to say about non-normative bodies and their relationship to society? We will read, write about, and perform landmarks of western drama with special attention to representations of disability. We will also learn to describe how historical theories of performance have inflected ideas about disability and vice versa. In the process, we will investigate how theater scholars, practitioners, and audiences might respond to questions about the intersection of disability studies with theater.
Early British literature is filled with paradoxes---impossible worlds, holy blasphemy, rebellious authority, a desire to both destroy and preserve the past. How did early writers try to negotiate conflicting impulses, pressures, and precedents? This course surveys chronologically major landmarks of early British literature from Beowulf to the 18th century with reference to the social, political, theological, and personal conflicts that shaped their formation and reception.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is an extraordinarily wide-ranging poem; with the turn of a page, the reader finds herself on a medieval pilgrimage, in the aftermath of an ancient Mediterranean war, in the court of Genghis Khan, or in a barnyard squabble between a rooster and a fox. One moment a serial-monogamous seamstress is professing her theories about marriage, and the next a man of the cloth is puzzling over how to divide a fart. We will read each of Chaucer's tales in the original Middle English---with help from interlinear translations available here---and find out how all of these different adventures and characters live together in one poem.
“How to Be Good, How to Be Bad: Vices and Virtues in the Middle Ages”
Can reading fiction make you a better person? Do plays depicting scandalous acts corrupt or instruct their audiences? Can a person be too good? In light of revived critical interest in moral questions, including the “New Ethics” and the “New Modesty,” this course explores these questions and the close--but often tense--relationship between ethics and representation. We will focus on didactic writing from the Middle Ages with an eye towards the strange echoes of medieval moral instruction in later periods. The centerpiece of the course is the second book of The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio. With Dante and Virgil as our guides, we will explore one of the most enduring ethical and literary topoi: the seven “deadly” sins and their corresponding “heavenly” virtues.
Graduate Courses:
“Reading Chaucer”
How do you read Chaucer like a Marxist? What would Freud say about the little clergeon’s love for the Virgin Mary in The Prioress’ Tale? What would Sedgwick say about Pandarus’ matchmaking in Troilus and Criseyde? Can Barthes’ account of the author, scriptor, and reader help us to describe the relationship between Chaucer, the person, and the texts we attribute to him? Can we use Deleuze’s theory of assemblage help us to understand the social dynamics at work in TheCanterbury Tales? How would Said read the depiction of Ghengis Khan’s court in The Squire’s Tale? Is The Wife of Bath’s Tale a feminist text? We will consider these and other questions as welearn to read Chaucer using the key concepts and vocabulary of major theoretical approaches to literary study. Primary readings will include some of Chaucer’s major works—The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, the dream visions and shorter poems. Secondary readings will include works by influential thinkers—such as Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Said, Ngai, Berlant, Lacan, Barthes, Sedgwick, Felksi, Greenblatt, Butler, Benjamin, and others—as well as representative examples of Chaucer criticism that engage with one or more of the theoretical approaches we will consider—Patterson, Dinshaw, Ingham, Chaganti, Cooper, Justice, Burger, Prendergast, Aers, Crane, Orlemanski, and others.
“Survey of Middle English Literature”
This course surveys major Middle English authors and texts, such as Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, Kempe, the Pearl Poet, drama, lyrics, and sermons, as well as their historical and literary historical contexts.
“Drama, Pageantry and Spectacle in Medieval Europe”
This course surveys early European drama and a selection of its theological, liturgical, and dramatic precursors.
This course introduces students to the field of literary studies in English and comparative literature. Students will survey a range of approaches, methods, and controversies that have emerged from the field. The focus on critical and institutional histories will provide a foundation for graduate work and for developing professional objectives. Students will produce a paper abstract, a conference paper, and a seminar paper.