Globalization: what is it? how does it work? How does it consolidate the present’s imagination of the future? Continue reading
A broad introduction to the history of Asian Americans, with an emphasis on diaspora and post-ethnic theories of movement and culture. Continue reading
Towards a deconstructive history of China. Continue reading
What happens to world poetry when it encounters forms, styles, and modes that emerge from East Asia? Continue reading
On the history of photography and its impact on literary and philosophical modes of thought. Continue reading
On three major trends in Theory: religion, animals, things, and globalization. Continue reading
The only course I’ve ever really taught more than once: how to read poetry and fiction. Continue reading
What exactly “Virginia Woolf” means was one of the subjects of the course. Our method for finding out was to read lots of texts written by Virginia Woolf, and one text titled Virginia Woolf. Continue reading
On the relationship of fantasy to orientalism. Continue reading
A course on narratives, narratology, and narrative theory, including fiction (Proust, Pessoa), film, and new media. Continue reading
On the historical influence in literary criticism and theory of two of the major post-structuralist thinkers of the twentieth century. Continue reading
A graduate course that made its way through modernism’s literary and literary critical greatest hits so as to give a broad introduction to the historical and intellectual shape of the period. Continue reading
I co-taught this class with my friend Charlie; probably the most fun I’ve ever had teaching. Continue reading
Writing in the introduction to her 1990 anthology, The Gender of Modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott recalls that modernism “as we were taught it at mid-century was perhaps halfway to truth. It was unconsciously gendered masculine…. Much of what … men had to say about the crisis in gender identification that underlies much of modernist literature was left out or read from a limited perspective.” If, as Scott argues, a general crisis of gender identification underlies modernist literature, then any discussion on gender and modernism (or women in it) ought to have implications for a broader definition of modernism itself. This course aims to sketch the outlines of such a definition. Continue reading
The first few weeks of the course hinge on the difference between “theory” and “theories” of literature; while on one hand we will be discussing the history of a variety of competing theories of literature or literaryness (and to understand why and when they appeared), on the other we will attempt a broader consideration of “theory” as a whole, as a genre or mode of thought that unites competing ideas (ideas as different as, say, Marxism and psychoanalysis) within a larger framework.
It is that framework that people refer to when they say things like, “I hate theory,” or “I do theory,” and so the question of what it would mean to hate theory, or do it, will reverse, as it were, the opening conundrum of the course. Continue reading
