COURSES DESIGNED AND TAUGHT
Austenland: Jane Austen’s Life and Afterlives
During her relatively short lifetime, Jane Austen wrote only six novels, which sold modestly well. Austen died, at the age of forty-one, a rather moderate literary success. In the two hundred or so years since her death, however, Austen has become a literary celebrity, household name, and object of worldwide fan adoration. What is it about Austen’s novels that still captivates readers? How have her handful of novels — set in the early nineteenth century, mostly in small English villages — given rise to so many adaptations, rewritings, sequels, conventions, merchandise, and even action figures? Is it even possible to count how many Pride and Prejudice adaptations exist at this point? These are some of the questions we will ask over the course of “Austenland: Jane Austen’s Life and Afterlives.” In addition to reading two of Austen’s novels (Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice), we will read — and watch — variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Austen adaptations and homages, including Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable, Amma Assante’s Belle, and even an episode of Bridgerton. Along the way, we will ask: what do these adaptations and homages say about their own moment of production and how are they engaged with Austen’s era?
The Literature of Indigestion (Graduate course)
The eighteenth century is often framed as the century of taste, a time fascinated with the development of aesthetic principles that informed cultural production and structured polite society. But, as Simon Gikandi argues in Slavery and the Culture of Taste, the economic growth that enabled this tasteful culture was fueled in large part by wealth derived from chattel slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean. This graduate course will explore long eighteenth-century British cultural production that cannot easily be digested into discourses of taste. In the texts we encounter – covering topics including cannibalism, vegetarianism, agricultural “improvement,” Britain’s expanding consumer culture, and the medical fascination with the digestive process – we will be thinking about (in)digestion both literally and metaphorically.
Exploring Literature
This class introduces students to practices of literary analysis and close reading by focusing on a variety of texts that in different ways could be called “romance.” Today we think of romance as being a genre about romantic love. What might specifically come to mind are love stories between two people that have steamy covers and always result in a happy ending (specifically: a romantic union). In the seventeenth century though, when the writers who open this course—Cervantes and Shakespeare—were alive, romance didn’t have this narrow meaning. In the early history of romance, writers are often thinking about the relation between fiction or fantasy and reality. Don Quixote, one of Western literature’s most famous figures, cannot tell the difference between the romances—or fiction—and the real world. Focusing on the wide-ranging genre of romance will allow us to explore how literary fiction helps us make meaning in our own lives, and to consider the slippage between the ideal and the real that still troubles many cultural consumers, just as it did back in Cervantes’ day
Food and Literature in the Long 18th Century: Taste, Appetite, and the Body
Producing, obtaining, and preparing food is essential for survival. At the same time, cultural and social forces shape and complicate our relationship to the food some of us are fortunate to eat for reasons beyond mere subsistence. Food unsettles the binary of interior and exterior, material and figurative. As Maggie Kilgour puts it, eating “depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears, dissolving the structure it appears to produce.” In this course, we will examine Britain’s long eighteenth century through the lens of the alimentary, connecting the eighteenth-century discourse of taste to literature about cannibalism, vegetarianism, agricultural improvement, and Britain’s expanding consumer culture. We will also discuss how the works we read relate to present-day ideas about food, the natural world, and the body. Students will also have the opportunity to develop and expand a research project in the second half of the semester.
Critical Food Studies: Food Cultures & Food Politics
Troubling the divide between within and without, and between material and figurative, food offers a lens for interrogating the ideologies that shape our tastes, and the often overlooked ways in which we are connected to food systems. In this course, we will study texts that grapple with the complicated issues surrounding food, appetite, hunger, and taste. Readings include The Book of Salt by Monique Truong, Vibration Cooking by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and Feed by Tommy Pico. Films include Gabriel Axel’s “Babette’s Feast” and Agnès Varda’s “The Gleaners and I.” We will also read foundational academic work on topics related to taste, consumption, and foodways by scholars including Sydney Mintz, Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu, Julie Guthman, Vandana Shiva, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins.
Survey of British Literature II: 1800-present
What is British literature? How have writers from across Britain’s shifting empire contributed to - and challenged - what we have come to think of as the British literary canon? To start answering these questions, we will read and analyze a wide array of British literature - including poetry, essays, a play, and novels - from (roughly) 1800 to the present. Some of these texts are now considered canonical in the study of British literature; we will also engage with texts that fall outside this canon, and discuss the process of canon formation and exclusion. By the end of the term, you’ll have a stronger understanding of how British literature changed (in both form and content) over the last two centuries, as well as the sociopolitical contexts that guided these changes and the major literary terms that we use to describe work from this period.
Natural Narratives: Environmental Literature and Culture
What is nature? What does it mean to be natural or unnatural? How do literary and cultural works shape how we think about nature, and how have our ideas about nature and its value changed over the last two centuries? To answer these questions, we will read, watch, and discuss a wide array of primary materials – including novels, a play, poetry, animated and documentary films, and life writing – and study foundational environmental humanities scholarship, as well as recent public writing related to some of our primary texts. Although we will read works now considered canonical in the study of literature and the environment, we will also engage with texts that fall outside this canon, and discuss the process of canon formation and exclusion. Throughout the course, we will explore the many different environmental discourses that emerge in the texts we study, and consider the role literature and culture play in shaping how we think – and tell stories – about environmental issues, both old and new. Readings include The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Through the Arc of the Rainforest by Karen Tei Yamashita, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith, Nature Poem by Tommy Pico, and “Heroes and Saints” by Cherrié Moraga; films include Wall-E (dir. Andrew Stanton), The Garden (dir. Scott Kennedy), and When the Levees Broke (dir. Spike Lee).
Quixotic Consumers: Reading the Historical Romance
Romance publishing brings in over $1 billion annually. Yet romance novels are derided far beyond other genre fiction, in large part because of their association with women readers. Over the course of the quarter, we will explore this most stigmatized of genres. We will begin by reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in order to consider the eighteenth-century creation of the “female Quixote,” whose rise mirrors the increase in women’s literacy, and whose legacy can be seen in present-day stereotypes of romance readers. Austen also remains an important influence on the sub-genre of historical romance. We will spend the rest of the quarter exploring the history of the historical romance, beginning with a classic of the genre: Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase. Then, we will read more recent novels and novellas – by authors including Beverly Jenkins, Courtney Milan, Alyssa Cole, Rose Lerner, and Jeannie Lin – committed to expanding the historical romance canon beyond stories centering the experience of white, heterosexual protagonists. Throughout the course, we will engage with academic writing on popular culture, fandom, race, and gender and sexuality. Students will also have the opportunity to work on an independent project about the romance genre.
English Composition, Rhetoric and Language
This course will help you develop college-level essay writing and critical reading skills. Since a successful essay arises from hard work and careful revision, we will focus on the brainstorming, drafting, and revising that comprises the writing process. Because committed writers are also avid readers, we will complement our own writing process with reading and analyzing non-fiction writing, with a couple detours into short fiction and poetry. The skills you learn and develop in this class will serve you well in college, regardless of your eventual major.
Our textbook, Rereading America, will introduce us to works by writers grappling with the promises, disappointments, and future of the so-called American Dream, and the myths that have sprung up around this dream. As James Baldwin so beautifully put it: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” In this class, we will take seriously Baldwin’s implication that criticizing America is an act of patriotism and of love.
Critical Reading and Writing: Food and Filth
This course is an introduction to literary analysis and is designed to help you learn to read literature closely and to write about it critically. We will develop the analytical and argumentative tools you need to understand, enjoy, and critique different forms of literature. The theme of our class – food and filth – is a starting point for thinking about how we develop labels and categories. Some of the questions we’ll be asking include: What makes something good to eat? What makes something unhealthy or unclean? What elicits appetite? What provokes disgust? And why/how have these categories come to seem so self-evident? Is it possible to think about food and filth in less binary terms? To begin answering these questions, we will read Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes, My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki, and poetry by writers including from Jonathan Swift, Christina Rosetti, Elizabeth Alexander, and Rita Wong. Secondary texts will include work by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White on transgression, Julia Kristeva on abjection, and Carol Adams on feminism and food. While I have chosen the secondary readings to help us better understand our primary readings in the context of our class theme, there are numerous other ways to approach the texts. I hope that you will introduce your own questions and interests during our discussions.
Critical Reading and Writing: Authors, Fans, Adaptation, and Appropriation
This course is an introduction to literary analysis and is designed to help you learn to read literature closely and to write about it critically. We will develop the analytical and argumentative tools you need to understand, enjoy, and critique different forms of literature. Decades after Henry Jenkins coined the term “aca-fan,” confessing that one enjoys literature and other forms of cultural production still sits uneasily with many academics. This course derives its loose but unifying theme from my own interest in both fan cultures and in authors who are themselves fans of other writers. In this class, we’ll start to understand how authors are indebted to those who came before them, and study a few intriguing examples of these connections, including Milton’s Satan, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and the lives and afterlives of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
COURSES TAUGHT AS TEACHING ASSISTANT
Environmental Literature & Culture (Spring 2019)
Literatures in English, 1700-1850 (Fall 2018, Winter 2013)
Romanticism and the Age of Revolution (Summer 2014)
Introduction to Visual Culture (Spring 2014)
London: Tales of Two Cities (Winter 2014)
Jane Austen and Her Peers (Spring 2013)
Literatures in English, 1700-1850 (Winter 2013)
Literatures in English, 1850-Present (Fall 2012)