The image of early “America” as a pastoral garden in the wilderness has proven durable yet, given developments in environmental science, history, and ecocriticism – complicated and difficult to sustain. This class examines the history and literature of early US...
This course explores the internationally popular musicals, Westerns, police procedurals, horror and comedy films being produced by a new generation of Indigenous filmmakers. These directors have shifted away from the activist-based documentaries and politically...
This class studies three major works by two classic novelists of the English language. It focuses on a critical decade in the history of the novel: 1870-1880. We’ll begin with one of the greatest novels of them all: George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), a masterpiece...
Late in his middle age, unmarried and childless, Walt Whitman was dismayed to hear that rumors were circulating about his sexuality. In response, he encouraged his friends to spread a counter-rumor: the reason he wasn’t interested in women was that he was still...
A literary genre has materialized in the past fifteen years that, as Marco Roth (with some notoriety) puts it, is marked by “the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel — the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind.” This category of...
