Survey of World Literature, 17th Century to Present
As the world around us shrinks to the size of our palm, the distance between us threatens to become insurmountable. Not only are we distanced from each other on account of an increasingly virtual lifestyle but also because of the novel and unforeseen health risks of in-person interactions. Why should we know about the world even as we try to keep it out? There is a need now—more urgent than ever—to learn, empathize, and, where possible, understand lives, cultures, and experiences that are not our own.
This course is designed with the aim to educate its participants about the broader "world" that we inhabit by charting desire, in all its messiness, outside of the dominant West. We follow the material desires of an unremarkable clerk through the snowy streets of St. Petersburg to the forbidden desires of a Mexican nun who was a feminist even before the coining of the word feminism. We see how the desire for manhood is informed by the desires created by colonialism and how decolonizing desire must speak to the ways in which it has been historically weaponized by the powerful. Who is allowed to desire? Whose desires are given voice? Which voices speaking (of/in) desire are acceptable? The course focuses broadly on issues of gender, race, and colonialism.
Texts covered here include: Selected Poems by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, "The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol, "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Xala by Ousmane Sembène, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, Persepolis, The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, "Douloti the Bountiful" by Mahashweta Devi, poems by Phyllis Wheatley, poems and speeches by Audre Lorde, Oronooko by Aphra Behn, “Lois, the Witch” by Elizabeth Gaskell, and "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell.
This course won the Graduate Student Teaching Excellence Award from the Dept. of English at UF. The syllabus for this course is available here: World Literature (17th century to Present).
Image Details: The Dream (1910) by Henri Rosseau. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Survey of English Literature, 1750 to Present
This course surveys a wide swathe of British literary history—from the Romantic Period, through the Victorian Age, Modernism, the post-War period of Reconstruction, to the current decade. The one thing that unites these vastly disparate time periods is the continued colonial and imperial endeavors, successes, and failures of Great Britain. As will become evident in our readings, it is impossible to read British literature without contending with British colonialism. To this end, this course seeks to reimagine these time periods as follows: the Romantic period with its latent-but-ubiquitous colonial themes, the Victorian “high noon of Empire,” the imperial nostalgia of Modernism, the writing/biting back of Empire post-World War II, and the decolonial endeavors of the twenty-first century.
We will interpret “British” and “English” expansively and messily—whereas, these terms have historically functioned to exclude, we will use them to accommodate peoples, places, cultures, and texts. Thus, our readings will show how the established canon of English literature stands on the shoulders of working-class people, enslaved people, and colonized people. We will take seriously Wordsworth’s mandate that a poet is “a man speaking to men” to ask: who qualifies as a “man”? who can “speak”? who are the “men” spoken to? what is acceptable speech? when can this speech occur? why must only “man” speak to “men”? The course focuses on various aspects of colonialism as they construct “Englishness”: race, gender, property, and labor.
Texts covered include: Poems by Felicia Hemans, Fidelia Hill, Anne Yearsley, Joanna Baillie, Henry Meredith Parker, Alfred Tennyson, and Rudyard Kipling; selections from John Robert Seeley’s The Expansion of England; William Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads; selections from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women; The Woman of Color: A Tale by Anonymous; selections from Yesterday and Today in India by Sidney Laman Blanchard; The Persecuted by Krishna Mohana Banerjea; Sheridan Le Fanu’s Green Tea; Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell; short stories by Rudyard Kipling, and Katherine Mansfield; Mark Twain’s “To the Person Sitting in Darkness;” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe’s essays and Things Fall Apart; Sally Rooney’s Normal People; opinion pieces by Akwugo Emejulu and David Olusoga; selections from Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museums.
Image Details: The Plumb-pudding in danger; - or - State Epicures taking un Petit Souper (1805) by James Gillray. Source: Wikimedia Commons.