ENGLIT

This course will use Zadie Smith’s writing as a means of interacting with the city of London. Of all contemporary writers, there is perhaps nobody better for this task than Zadie Smith. All her novels are deeply engaged with London in some way. Her first novel, White Teeth (2000), was set almost entirely in northwestern London and featured concluding scenes in Trafalgar Square. NW (2012) ends with a long walk across North London. Swing Time (2016) begins and ends with walks across the Hungerford Bridge. In our course, we will trace these and other London scenes to understand how they work in Smith’s award-winning fiction, but also as a basis for our own explorations of the city.

We will also use Smith’s essays as guides for interacting with the city. Her essay on the British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, for example, can serve as a lens for viewing Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings in the Tate Modern. Her essay “Fences: A Brexit Diary” can serve as a prompt for exploring the way that London’s built environment divides its population. Smith’s portrait, painted by Nigerian American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery, and will likely be the source of a field trip and/or writing assignment. As with Smith’s fiction, students will not only use these essays and artworks to understand Zadie Smith’s essays, but as a basis for their own explorations and writing assignments while in London.

This course will be a critical reflection on the social history of science, on the ways in which the human imagination has responded to ideas about what it is to be human that have emerged from the sciences. The objects of our study will be literary and artistic. Because of our setting here in Prague, this will be a multimedia course, incorporating written texts, visual images, and a number of relevant films (including the work of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer). In the home of real Franz Kafka and the semi-mythical Johann Faust, in the city where the surrealist playwright Karel Čapek coined the “robot,” we will encounter humans saintly, sinful, and synthetic. Animals, too.

 the Prague course, has a meditation on the religious/sacramental body that evolves into a reflection on the anatomical/surgical body and finally to the “human mechanism” that is specific to where we are. The course focuses on the history of a particular place, a region, a set of political concerns. This course will be a critical reflection on the social history of science, on the ways in which the human imagination has responded to ideas about what it is to be human that have emerged from the sciences. The objects of our study will be literary and artistic. Because of our setting here in Prague, this will be a multimedia course, incorporating written texts, visual images, and a number of relevant films (including the work of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer). In the home of real Franz Kafka and the semi-mythical Johann Faust, in the city where the surrealist playwright Karel Čapek coined the “robot,” we will encounter humans saintly, sinful, and synthetic. Animals, too.

Most definitions of The Gothic begin by describing it as a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and Italy is the locus, and focus, of so much of the anxiety emerging from the  Enlightenment’s discourse of reason against “superstition” as well as (Protestant) England’s simultaneous fear of and fascination with Catholic Europe (Italy and Spain).  Many of the emerging anxieties and repressed desires of Enlightenment England/France are expressed and examined in the subversive “Gothic” texts: anxieties about the place of the imagination in the face of the emphasis on the “rational,” for instance; about the fear of female desire for agency and equality in the Age of Revolution; about the Orientalist suspicion of the lure of the “foreign(er)”/”Eastern(er),” and so on.
 Given the location of the course, I view this iteration of the course as an opportunity to focus on the importance of location, the sense of place, in the way the issues are worked out in the “Gothic Imagination.” Being anchored in Prague, the city in Central Europe looking both ways to the East and the West, the city at the crossroads of of the emergence of secular humanism and religious dispute, we will be able to explore both the myth of “Gothic Italy” as represented in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho, and the more complicated historical reality. Radcliffe’s novel, in particular, is an excellent example of the division between England/France as spaces of the Enlightenment; Italy and places east—Budapest, Transylvania—are, by contrast associated with the mysterious, menacing East represented by Dracula.  Prague Castle will be our representative space for a wide-ranging exploration of the themes. We will investigate the extent to which locus and habitus (as defined by Bourdieu: “a set of dispositions which generate practices and perceptions”) are related in the development of the Gothic Imagination.

This course aims to explore the literary tradition of German women writers, focusing on primary texts by 21st-century / contemporary women writers, while at the same time helping students acquire a broad knowledge of modern German culture, society and the gender politics which create the frame of reference for our understanding of the literary texts. Because many of the contemporary women writers are from Berlin, write or live in Berlin, class discussions will also illuminate the city's role in fictional writing.

This course examines writing for young people, with a focus on children’s books about cities. We will consider how represen-tations of childhood in literature change over time and in response to specific historical and cultural events, with special focus on literary representations of children in urban environments, and the role of the city in the development of children’s literature as a genre. We will explore the relationship between books for children and the historical experiences of children in London. Readings will include classic and contemporary children’s literature by British, American, and African authors, including Peter Pan, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Zarah the Windseeker, including novels and picture books. The class will take field trips to notable sites in London relevant to the history of childhood and children’s literature. Students will write regularly in response to course readings, field trips, and lectures, and they will conduct original research about the relationship between the history of children’s literature and the city of London, and present that research in class.

What lies beyond “The Final Frontier”? Why does it matter if androids dream of electric sheep? What will our future look like and who will be there to enjoy it? What role does technology, ethics and/or politics play in imagining our future? Why has science fiction become such a central metaphor for our daily, lived experiences? Introduction to Science Fiction discusses them all! This course is designed to expose students to broad spectrum of science fiction. We will examine representative texts from each of the modern, roughly defined as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “periods” of the genre. The class will discuss the ongoing debate surrounding the “work” performed by the genre, as well as its themes, and stylistic movements. Whether you are a geek, or are geek-adjacent, this course has something for you!
 

This course covers a wealth of literature from the Australian, Asian and South Pacific region, from Australia’s earliest colonial outback and horsemen stories to the city-focused cosmopolitanism of the 1980s, to the aboriginal literature of the 1990s, and in the 2000s, the contemporary Torres Strait and Polynesian literatures’ reformulations of place that respond to both contemporary and traditional understandings of islands, archipelagoes, and identity. 

In this course, we'll explore some of the many literary forms writers invented to suit modern life in the hemisphere Europeans first called the New World. We will read the works of three poets (Whitman, Stein, Cesaire) and three fiction writers (McKay, Borges, Lispector). All of our writers conceived new styles and rhythms they believed emerged from and responded to a unique set of American conditions. These conditions included great possibilities - democracy, liberty, rights - and terrible abuses - slavery, colonialism, racism. To confront realities of this kind, these writers revitalized language, updated sound and sense, and reconceived literature's relationship to other human activities in original and powerful ways. As we read their sometimes weird, sometimes difficult poems and stories, we will ask how writers respond through formal experimentation to the urgent political and social questions life in the Americas raises. This course will be taught in English.