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 →

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 →

This course started out as a narrowly focused reading of the role that translation as a concept and as a practice played in the literary period circumscribed most strictly by the word “modernism”— roughly the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II in the UK, Ireland, and the United States. Right now it’s more of a course on translation in general—translation both metaphorical and literal—and the manner in which it has been both a literary and epistemological practice. Continue reading →

This course is designed primarily for those of you working in or on literature; specifically it aims to give you a background in the history of the ideas (and the history of “history”) that have shaped the past two centuries in the sciences and social sciences, particularly as they anticipate, relate, or participate in the creation of modernism and modernity (two vitally different things). Continue reading →