Graduate Program

Toni Morrison’s essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” and her volume Playing in the Dark revolutionized the study of American literature. By identifying the “Africanist” presence in the work of white writers, Morrison deconstructed oppositional stances in debates about canonicity and generated new interest in—and approaches to—American fiction. Using Morrison’s claims as starting points and her methodology as an example, this course will analyze the fiction of American writers with a sensitivity for the representations and figurations of blackness in their work in order to understand those works as examples and analyses of racial discourse. The course will ask and seek to answer the following questions: How is the tradition of American literature a tradition of racial representation? How is blackness figuratively represented? What roles do such “Africanisms” play in the discursive construction of whiteness, masculinity, citizenship, and an “American” identity? In addition to Morrison’s writings, readings include novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Edgar Allan Poe, and more. Assignments include a research paper and an in-class presentation on a related work of literary criticism, as well as attendance and participation in discussion.

Throughout its history cinema has had a strong relation to the avant-garde, usually in terms of direct influences (films made by members of these movements) or by more ambivalent relations of imitation or influence (going both ways: films which show the influence of various movements and avant-garde work that show the influence of film). This course will explore the manner in which a number of movements have related to the cinema, both in practice and theory. Special attention will be paid to the way in which particular avant-garde strategies seem to reemerge and take on different significances at various moments across the 20th century, as well as the way in which avant-garde filmmaking, unlike its mainstream commercial cousin, created a much-needed space for female and queer participation. Readings will include manifestos, as well as historical studies. Filmmakers will include Man Ray, Jean Epstein, Mary Ellen Bute, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Jack Smith and Janie Geiser. 

This course will focus on the work of four influential filmmaking collectives from across the global African diaspora: the LA Rebellion (US), the Nest Collective (Kenya), the Black Audio Film Collective (Britain), and Sankofa Film and Video (Britain). What does it mean for black filmmakers to create, in sustained collaboration, a body of politically engaged, experimental work? This will be our guiding question as we study the range of these collectives’ representations, as well as the convergences and divergences among them. Topics will include: the afterlives of slavery and empire; police brutality and black uprisings; migration, memory, and belonging; LGBTQ desire and experience; black feminism and black feminist theory; and Afrofuturism and speculative histories. Our archive will be capacious, spanning narrative films, essay films, anthology films, and web series produced from the 1970s to the 2010s, all of which will be contextualized with interviews, production notes, historical essays, theory, and criticism.

This course will focus on 20th and 21st century aesthetic works from throughout the global African diaspora animated by the experience of fugitive escape. How do black artists imagine the space between unfreedom and freedom? How does their work address questions of time, being, intersectional identities, and the production of knowledge? What distinct valences constitute fugitive dreaming in places like Kenya, Jamaica, and the US? Our studies will traverse a range of media, from fiction and poetry to film, multimedia installation, and music by artists like Wanuri Kahiu, John Akomfrah, Sun Ra, Wangechi Mutu, Dionne Brand, and Arthur Jafa. The course will be grounded in an array of readings in black theory by Jayna Brown, Fred Moten, Keguro Macharia, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton, Sylvia Wynter, and others.

In this class, we will explore the role of scale in moving image media, especially in film and television, by turning to the history of the close-up to grapple with its aesthetic and critical genealogy across directors, theorists, genres, periods, and regions. The scale of the close-up is a singular site for exploring much larger questions about what kinds of attention, sensation, and orientation the relative size of an image creates for a spectator; how film and television organize experiences of distance and proximity through scalar perception; how expressivity, subjectivity, and interiority are mediated by scale; what horizons of historical reception—e.g., large screens in the public space of movie theaters, television sets in the living rooms of private homes, mobile phones that we carry between public and private horizons—do to the scale of moving image media; where detail fits into film and television as a form over and against other mediums; and how histories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation are intertwined with close-ups and the scale of moving image media.

As a form that hovers between page and stage, dramatic literature disrupts traditional categories of authorship and reception, mind and body, private and public. As a text that is (usually) intended to be performed, drama is innately political. It also has a unique relationship to time: a play changes with every new performance, performer, and production—and yet it arguably retains some essential quality over the days and years and centuries. This course takes a double focus, joining plays from Britain's Restoration Period—just following a period of civil war—with contemporary works that reflect current social and political upheavals (including MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and late capitalism). We will also look at two of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies—Lear and Hamlet--and trace how they were adapted both by 17th- and 18th-century dramatists, as well as by contemporary American and British writers. Authors include Shakespeare, Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Aphra Behn, and George Lillo, as well as Liz Duffy Adams, Annie Baker, Lynn Nottage, and Jack Thorne. Theorists will include Aristotle, Dryden, Brecht, Artaud, and others.

This course reads examples of the Early English Novel while questioning what that category means. Traditional scholarly accounts describe the "rise" of the novel in the eighteenth century, in tandem with domesticity, bourgeois morality, and widespread literacy. We will read such accounts alongside newer ones, while of course adding our own to the mix: how does the novel, as opposed to other genres, approach reality and representation, psychology and character, subjectivity and difference? To what extent do the novel's formal and ideological characteristics owe to the largely commercial, print-oriented literary sphere in which the genre came into being? Syllabus includes works by Behn, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Austen; and by Watt, Hunter, McKeon, Bender, Bakhtin, Gallagher, and others.

This course takes an ecocritical look at what the medieval world considered to be “nature” as it “framed” and was framed by humanity and its artifices. What did the word “forest” really mean, then? How was it put to use for human resources? Does the city encroach on the forest or the forest on the city? What was considered “wilderness? Our concept of nature today is different from theirs, but throughout time, nature has been viewed from an anthropocentric lens. We’ll start with the figure of the Goddess Natura as she developed into a complex idea in the twelfth century. Next, how forests were managed and misused especially in England after the Norman Conquest; then myths of the forest and its magical and dangerous properties; and finally human nature and illness, and how the natural world was used medicinally.
The books you will need to get are these: Alan de Lille, The Complaint of Nature (online at RR); Guilluame Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose (ed. Francis Horgan); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ed. Simon Armitage—facing page original), Hildgard of Bingen’s Physica (ed. Priscilla Throop), Hildegard of Bingen’s De Causae et curae (ed. Margret Berger), and Melusine: or the Noble History of Lusignan (eds. Maddox and Maddox). Additional readings on Blackboard: Selections from the Cosmography of Bernard Sylvestris; Forests: the Shadow of Civilization (Harrison); Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Rudd); and various other critical articles and medieval romances.

Students in this seminar will explore James’s mature work in the context of the history of the novel and the evolution of narrative theory. We will consider the novel as a form for thinking about globalization and world literature as long-standing historical developments, not only as recent ideas. We will analyze the formal aesthetics of James’s novels and consider their relationship to literary, social and cultural history, including the contexts of changing markets for literary work. With the help of major theorists of narrative and the novel, we will investigate the relationship of the novel to social stratification and historical ruptures, cultural heterogeneity and global circulation, and discuss how considering these enriches our understanding of the novel generally and of James’s achievement in particular. We will all, I hope, gain some insight into and a refreshed sense of the complex situation of art and aesthetics in the modern world. In addition to James, readings will include works by Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Lukacs, Kristeva, Bal, Latour, Apter, Butler, Dimock, and Amitav Ghosh.

This course aims to study how to learn what literature teaches that is not available elsewhere. This theme responds to the often-heard critiques of the humanities. The course seeks to show the specific understandings of men yielded by all “stories,” including those told by nonliterary arts. Over the past decade globally, the substantive social issues of androcentrism and woman-hating have become increasingly urgent in family life and in public life. Literature, through its language, shows its history, its ubiquity across cultures, its atrocities, and its sources in society. Writers considered include Cormier, Eliot, Levin, Petry, Ovid, Shakespeare, M. Shelley, Tolstoy, and others. Students are invited to consider their own experiences as part of the history of gender struggle in society and to propose works that reflect these experiences. Critics include Gail Bederman, Susan Brownmiller, Barbara Christian, Andrea Dworkin, bell hooks, Bonnie Mann, Elaine Showalter, Virginia Woolf, and others.

From chivalric quest to supernatural adventure to love-story (tragic, comic, ironic, allegorical), romance was the most popular secular genre of the Middle Ages. Its characters and conventions form the basis of much popular literature and film today, and shape enduring ideals of masculinity and social etiquette. This course will examine some of the most popular works in the English, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and French traditions. Beginning with Arthurian legends in Chrétien de Troyes, Béroul, the Gawain poet, and Malory, it will survey its appearance in the most popular play of the Middle Ages – the Latin Pamphilus de Amore – along with characteristically odd examples in Anglo-Norman (Marie de France) and Middle English – King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Sir Orfeo and others. We will also investigate the social and gendered behaviors it encoded, and the historical problems it responded to through readings both in medieval primary texts and modern criticism.

The disciplines of book history and textual criticism have long been at the heart of literary study, and have continued to shape the field in recent decades. This seminar introduces graduate students to the study of manuscripts and early printed books through readings in paleography and codicology, along with workshops in the Robbins Library and Rare Books; although our collective focus will be on the textual history and modern afterlives of The Canterbury Tales and the Bible in English, students will also be encouraged to apply themselves to archival research relating to their own research interests. We will then consider the ongoing study of book history during our current age of digitization, working within a variety of archives and projects, with particular attention to the University of Rochester's Middle English Text Series and other major digital initiatives.

“Make it New” has generally been accepted as a mantra for literary modernism. But with many of its classics now more than 100 years old, their novelty invites reinvestigation. In recent years, moreover, modernist studies, as a critical field, has itself undergone a significant remaking. With the emergence of “the new modernist studies,” critical attention has shifted to a recognition of multiple and diverse modernisms that stretch the geographic, temporal, and material limits of what once passed for an established canon and that open the field to practitioners not previously recognized as modernists. This turn has brought a profusion of new questions and methodologies and new texts and contexts to consider. This seminar will explore a number of recent challenges to the traditional mapping of the modernist field and to the critical rubrics it has promulgated; we will do so through a reading of some of the key critical interventions in the field that have been published in the last couple of decades, but also through a rereading of iconic texts of British modernism. We will also look at how postmodern and contemporary artists have recast and transformed  some of these modernist icons, sometimes by literally taking them apart and re-piecing them together.

Recent critical work has called into question the saliency of national traditions and the efficacy of conventional periodization in literary studies.  This shift in critical focus from the nation to the globe has implications for the field of American literature and the rationale for literary studies more generally.  In this seminar we will consider reevaluations of the always evolving canon of nineteenth-century American literature in light of our increased awareness of globalization’s long history.  Does rereading writers once considered “pure products of America,” like Cooper, Child, Emerson, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Hawthorne, Douglass, Delaney, Thoreau, Stowe, Dickinson, Twain, James and others, in contexts that traverse the once heavily policed borders of the U. S. A., change the meaning and implications of their work?  What is the purpose of studying any national literature when the concept of the nation itself seems increasingly questionable?  We will read representative works by selected canonical “American” authors as well as recent critical reevaluations of the field by Robert Levine, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Lowe, Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, Paul Giles, John Guillory and others.

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, nineteenth-century British writers are well-known for exploring the cutting-edge sciences of their day in their literary works. As much recent scholarship has shown, these interactions between literature and science did not rest at the level of metaphor or analogy, but profoundly shaped understandings of aesthetic experience, the imagination, and literary experiments in genre. In this course, we will read and discuss a number of canonical Romantic and Victorian writers (e.g. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater) in order to understand how their knowledge of sciences like geology, chemistry, astronomy, and various life sciences shaped their writings, as well as their evolving attitudes on what distinguished the literary arts from the increasingly differentiated domain of the natural sciences. The course will thus simultaneously ground students in canonical literary figures and texts of the nineteenth century and introduce them to an ongoing debate within the university on the particular status of the literary arts vis à vis the natural sciences.

This course will provide an opportunity to sample an exciting body of contemporary literature, some written by authors already widely acclaimed when they received the Nobel Prize and some by writers suddenly catapulted into fame and international recognition. A central focus of the course will be the literature itself, but we will also look at the kinds of controversies that the prize has always generated – including the 2018 sex scandal that led to the prize’s temporary suspension. One lens for the course, then, will be a study of the logic of cultural prize-giving, especially as it operates in the global marketplace. In the US, where less then 5% of literary writing published each year is literature in translation, Nobel prize-winning titles are often the only contemporary fiction or poetry Americans read in translation. This raises the question of translation and the role of the Nobel Prize in creating and promoting a powerful, if not uncontested, idea of “international” literature. Finally, with only 16 of the 114 prizes awarded since 1901 going to women, we will consider the role of gender in the prize’s history. 

“The lyric” has always been an elusive quarry, as is the question of what kinds of critical tools we need to understand lyric poems. The seminar will combine the intense study and “close reading” of the work of particular lyric poets with the exploring of diverse texts by critics and theorists who have written about the lyric. I’m curious about poems as made things and forms of making, about the stories that poems tell about themselves and their makers, different myths of poetic vocation and survival. I’m curious about how we listen to poems, how we feel their ”voice,” also how poems play with what’s unspoken or silent, how they evoke banished or unacknowledged forms of thought. We’ll be thinking hard about the work of metaphor (“the cardinal inward burning source of poetry,” as John Ashbery wrote), the importance of formal elements (meter and rhyme, sound and syntax), also about the fate of the lyric “I,” the nature of linguistic play, changing ideas of poetic difficulty, and the nature of poetic memory—how poetry places itself in time and history. The poets whose work we’ll be reading include William Shakespeare, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. We will also be devoting time to important critical texts by William Empson, John Hollander, R. P. Blackmur, Christopher Ricks, Helen Vendler, Paul de Man, Sharon Cameron, Anne Carson, Jonathan Culler, Allen Grossman, Susan Stewart, Victoria Jackson, and Jahan Ramanzami among others. It’s not irrelevant that a number of these critics are themselves poets.

The wife is invariably found in the wilderness: Melusine is doomed to be half-snake every Saturday unless her loyal husband won’t reveal her secret. The origins of the flying, shape-shifting fairy wife stretch back to antiquity, but the motif finds a local domain in 12th-century Poitou and its Celtic substrata: it attached to Eleanor of Aquitaine, tempestuous Queen consort to Henry II, who kept a salon of poets during the early stages of Arthuriana. But the famous story is by Jean d’Arras and Coudrette in the 14th-century: a supernatural matriarch who merges with the history of the Lusignan family. Over time it was translated or modified in England and Germany. We’ll look at writings by Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, medieval romances including Libeaux desconnu, Paracelsus, Spenser, Keats, de la Motte-Fouque, A.S. Byatt in the light of category crisis, political upheaval, and the polysemous female body.

We’ll be looking closely in this seminar at Shakespeare’s last four plays, Pericles Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. In these works, often called “tragicomedies” or “romances,” the playwright revisits and re-invents his styles of dramatic representation, character, and language. He invests more strongly in preternatural plots and stories of magic. There are more grotesque and fantastic stage effects, more idealized forms of pleasure and pain. He places himself in a different relation to history, real and imagined. Some of these plays, indeed, offer a kind of recapitulation and critique of his whole career as author of works for the stage, history plays, romantic comedies, and tragedies. We’ll also be looking at Shakespeare’s late collaboration with John Fletcher, Henry VIII, and the court masques of his friend and fellow-playwright, Ben Jonson.

The horror genre has consistently put on spectacular, fantastic display a range of historically and culturally specific fears and anxieties. These anxieties have been rooted in moments of societal change or conflict, and have included responses to: technological development; social and political movements; economic change and job loss; environmental toxicity and destruction; state and geopolitical violence. The genre has been especially generative for theorists seeking to understand the somatic and affective capacities of the cinematic medium, and scholars have explored the complex and contradictory politics imbricated with the genre’s visceral effects. This seminar examines the work of scholars of horror film and those whose writing has been influential on the study of horror. Readings may include work by: Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Carol Clover, Noël Carroll, Barbara Creed, Eugenie Brinkema, Adam Lowenstein, Jack Halberstam, Linda Williams, and Sianne Ngai.

The uncanny is an experience or quality that by definition remains difficult to grasp; something that is mysterious and enigmatic, yet also seems oddly familiar.  It is an atmosphere, mood or perhaps a theme that movies have explored since nearly the beginning of cinema. Some theorists have felt that film as a medium could be best approached via the uncanny. In this class, we will read a series of the key texts and try to survey the terrain of the concept of the uncanny. To explore this term this class will draw largely on a tradition of commentary on the German word Das Unheimliche, usually translated as uncanny, that can be traced among Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger and its relevance to film studies. We will screen films that evoke the experience through their narrative and stylistics, and we will discuss the usefulness of the term for theorizing both film and electronic media, both new and old. This seminar will also explore the nature of film's relation to animation, the "bringing to life" through moving images. It will delve into cinema's relation to other traditions of life-like illusions (from automatons to panoramas), its exploration of the thresholds between animate and inanimate in horror films, fairy tales and comedies, and all of these in relation to what is technically referred to as film animation, both animated films which bring things to life (Brothers Quay, Svankmajer, Cohl) as well as abstract animation which aspires to trace patterns of animation (Fischinger, Ruttmann, Breer).

“Utopia” commonly refers to an ideal society; this course presents “utopia” as a (para-)literary genre, an occasion of societal modeling, and as a cognitive mode, attitude, and process. The course addresses literary representations of utopias throughout the tradition of literature in English. Topics for discussion include the relationship between utopia and dystopia (including “critical” utopias and dystopias), utopian literature’s influence on and representation in modern science fiction, the politics of utopias, and intersections with the history of intentional communities. Readings include primary texts by Thomas More, Edward Bellamy, George Orwell, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, and more; featured criticism and scholarly essays include work by Lyman Tower Sargent, Tom Moylan, Fredric Jameson, Hannah Arendt, and more.

We consider how the utopian figures a selection of plays, poetry, and fictional and non-fictional prose from England’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We discuss the literary and social impulses that animate writing typically categorized as utopian like Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, James Harrington’s Oceana, and Thomas More’s Utopia.  And we identify and analyze utopian tendencies within English Renaissance writing, more generally, including plays by Richard Brome and William Shakespeare; poetry by Ben Jonson, Amelia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, and Isabella Whitney; short prose fiction by Francis Godwin, Robert Greene, and Margaret Cavendish; and non-fiction prose focused on economics, politics, religion, a universal language, and vegetarianism by Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes , John Milton, James Naylor, Thomas Tryon, John Wilkins, Gerrard Winstanley, and Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers. Our class discussions also consider the interpretive power of the utopian in English Renaissance literary criticism and in the theories of literary and social analysis to which English Renaissance scholars are indebted.  We sort through the applied criticism and theoretical arguments of scholars including Ernst Bloch, Line Cottegnies, William Empson, Friedrich Engels, Northrop Frye, Richard Halpern, Chloe Houston, Fredric Jameson, Christopher Kendrick, Marina Leslie, Georg Lukács, Louis Marin, Karl Marx, Franco Moretti, Lyman Tower Sargent, Valerie Traub, and Raymond Williams. Our focus on the utopian allows us to discuss a number of interpretive issues not restricted to English Renaissance studies.  What defines the utopian? How might we distinguish among the utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian?  What literary and social circumstances allow authors and their readers to imagine the utopian?  What kinds of literary analysis are most persuasive? How have scholars argued for the relationships among literature, other forms of culture, politics, and economics?

This course considers the emergence in the last decade or so of an interdisciplinary approach which sometimes calls itself “weird studies.” It applies this approach to an amenable period for hunters after weirdness: the Renaissance or early modern era. The following questions will lay the groundwork for our conversations. How is the term “weird” used in this field of research? How does one “weird” a text? In what ways is this approach related to and different from established approaches like affect theory, queer theory, secularity studies, and new materialisms? How might this approach build upon or challenge the academic study of literature as currently practiced? How does this weird turn follow from or comment upon the weird times we are experiencing in the 21st century? Alongside texts written by advocates and critics of this approach, we will focus on a range of case studies, including works by William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish, David Hume, and Ottobah Cugoano.

This seminar focuses on the aesthetic in literary and cultural theory. How has our understanding of the aesthetic shaped our definitions of literature and of art? the effects of literature and visual media on us as readers and viewers? our interpretive emphases? How might we discuss the aesthetic in other forms of culture, including everyday life? We consider, among other topics, the aesthetic as object, judgment, attitude, and experience; aesthetics and politics; aesthetics and formalism; aesthetic categories like beauty, taste, disinterestedness and the sublime; and aesthetic categories central to the work of scholarship in African-American studies, feminism, Marxism, and queer studies. Our focus on the aesthetic also allows us to discuss a number of more general interpretive issues, including how best to assess the persuasiveness of literary and cultural analysis, and how to move between theoretical arguments and applied criticism. We sort through the writing of, among others, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Monroe Beardsley, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Edmund Burke, Noel Carroll, Arthur Danto, Jennifer Doyle, William Empson, Northrop Frye, John Guillory, Stuart Hall, Phillip Harper, David Hume, C.L.R. James, Fredric Jameson, Immanuel Kant, Georg Lukacs, Sianne Ngai, Plato, Yuriko Saito, W.K. Wimsatt, Raymond Williams, and Janet Wolff. Each week, we also consider examples (typically short excerpts or small collections of images) of British and American literature and other forms of art and culture to provide some common ground for our conversations about applied criticism.

WWI, it has been argued, initiated a new form of distinctly modern memory – unsparing, unsentimental, and essentially ironic. It also ushered in an unprecedented era of remembrance that transformed Britain into a culture obsessed with the commemoration of its war dead – in a manner anything but ironic. Recently, scholars have begun to question not only how the war was remembered but whose war has been remembered and whose memories valued, opening the history of the war to other narratives: war as experienced by women, working class men, colonial soldiers and laborers. We will explore some of the many memoirs, poems, and other works of imaginative literature that appeared in the decades immediately following the war, as well as the appropriation and transformation of the war and its memory in late 20th-c. literature, film, and TV. We will also consider the rich body of theoretical and historical scholarship on memory work, trauma, collective memory, and memorialization, not all of it specific to WWI.