List of 15 items.

• American Transcendentalism

  In the early-to-mid 19th century, as America expanded its imperial reach, a small but powerful collective of thinkers and artists set themselves apart, rejecting the prevailing forces of capitalism, nation-building, technological progress, and slavery. These Transcendentalists believed in the transformative power of individual intuition and spiritual awakening, convinced that every human being could connect to universal truths. Their legacy has deeply influenced the American imagination, embedding their ideas in the fabric of our culture despite the contradictions of an expanding nation. This course explores Transcendentalism through both written and visual art, examining texts such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance and Nature, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Walking, and works by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass, along with paintings by Thomas Cole, Fanny Palmer, and Winslow Homer. Together, students explore how these ideas gained traction, their lasting impact, and their relevance today, questioning how they resonated then—and still resonate now.

• The Art of the Personal Essay

  “Essay” originates from the Old French essai (to try) and evokes the heroic attempt to capture experience with words. The personal essay is a unique literary form, combining introspection and insight within a framework of brevity and self-awareness. This course explores this deceptively modest genre, learning from master essayists like Joan Didion, George Orwell, and James Baldwin, who excel at capturing fleeting moments of experience with wit and vulnerability. As they dissect essays on nature, identity, and the ethos of writing itself, students will hone their ability to read as writers, examining structure, voice, and the nuances of personal reflection. In addition to reading a variety of essays, students will craft and workshop their own three personal essays, finding their own voices through introspective writing. With each essay, the class confronts the limits of language and the possibilities of the form, reflecting on what it means to communicate something uniquely personal in a way that resonates with others.

• Brilliant Bursts: Short Stories

  Short stories may be brief in length, but they often possess a complexity that leaves a lasting impression, distilling entire worlds into a few short pages. This course explores the anatomy of the short story, from the thunderous impact of a single sentence to the artistry of brevity. Alongside classic authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson, students examine modern masters like George Saunders and Carmen Maria Machado, learning to identify the techniques that make these stories so powerful. Students engage in analytical writing and creative exercises, from pastiche and parody to fan fiction, practicing the art of condensation and craft. Students produce their own short story or piece of microfiction, and celebrate their work in a final reading. Along the way, the course draws inspiration from exceptional visual and cinematic narratives, from Severance to Ex Machina, understanding the strategies that make these small forms so compelling.

• 最致命的陷阱

  Like the sea itself, the literature of seafaring brims with adventure, salt, sublimity, and peril. The journey begins with a work of autobiographical nonfiction that sets the terms for the course, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave and continues to survey its history, from such classics as Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to Spielberg’s iconic summer blockbuster Jaws. Readings include selected sea songs and chanteys, as well as essays, stories, and poems. The centerpiece for the course is that greatest of all fish stories and literature’s deadliest catch, Melville’s epic, Moby-Dick. A probing investigation of whiteness, masculinity, and the leviathan of American slavery, Moby-Dick distills America’s foundational contradictions in a sprawling adventure story that is equal parts buddy novel, political satire, philosophical treatise, and whale encyclopedia. An excerpt from Toni Morrison’s landmark essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” helps situate Moby-Dick in mid-nineteenth-century debates over slavery.

• Good and Evil

  What defines morality, and how do we recognize right from wrong? This course delves into one of humanity’s oldest and most universal struggles—the moral tension between good and evil. Through an exploration of classic texts like Paradise Lost and Crime and Punishment, as well as contemporary works such as There, There and Parable of the Sower, students unpack how literature serves as a mirror to humanity’s deepest ethical dilemmas. The course grapples with the question of how we develop moral understanding in a world full of contradictions, exploring these themes across both time and genre.

• The Hero, the Individual, and the Crowd

  How does one tell oneself apart from others, and what happens when those boundaries dissolve? Through the exploration of three principal figures: the hero, the individual, and the crowd, this course traces how literature allows us to understand the forces that construct group and individual identity through narratives that raise us up, tie us together, pull us apart, or swallow us whole. This seminar examines how narrative structure, cultural context, and genre shape how we understand ourselves. Principal texts include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Calvino’s Cosmicomics.

• Hyphen: Identity and Ancestry in Asian-American Fiction

  Identity is a multifaceted puzzle, and for many in the Asian-American diaspora, it’s one defined by multiple layers: cultural inheritance, generational divides, and the constant negotiation between two worlds. This seminar examines how Asian-American writers navigate these tensions through works that engage with questions of ancestry, colonial history, and the search for self. Key texts include Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, both of which explore the complexities of identity from distinct, personal vantage points. Other readings encompass stories from authors like Kiran Desai and Ocean Vuong, whose work brings the immigrant experience into a literary focus. Students investigate these themes not only through literature, but also by analyzing the ways in which writers construct their own multifaceted identities, telling stories that challenge and celebrate what it means to be “hyphenated.”

• Kindred Spirits: Friendship in Literature

  Friendship is one of life’s most complex and contradictory bonds. Friends can offer care, solidarity, and paths towards the resistance of structures that alienate and marginalize; friends can build community, upend hierarchies, and produce change; according to Aristotle, friendship “holds a mirror up to us,” giving us a truer picture of ourselves. Friends can also be rivals, competitors, and sources of envy. In this course, students explore literary depictions of the complex and rewarding nature of friendships of all kinds, with texts including Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend; alongside poems by W.H. Auden, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Robert Burns, and John Ashbery. By the end of the course, students will have a richer understanding of not just the ways we connect with others, but also how those connections reflect and define us.

• Latinx Literary Crossings

  —Gloria Anzaldúa 

  Drawing on works by Latinx writers, the class explores stories about borders: sites where land, people, and languages converge. In Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek, which tells of the struggles of a woman ensnared by the conventions of a patriarchal culture, the border is not only physical, but metaphorical—it represents a dividing line between cultures and families, between past and future, between community and isolation, between safety and danger. Central to the course is Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, which uses artful yet uncomplicated prose to tell the tragic story of twenty-six immigrants, many of whom perished while crossing the US-Mexico border through Arizona. This course examines works of short fiction by Ana Castillo, Junot Diaz, Manuel Muñoz, Josie Méndez-Negrete, Juan Rulfo, Tomás Rivera, Piri Thomas, Helena María Viramontes, and Miguel de Cervantes, and concludes with examination of the economy of language employed by authors of flash fiction, ultra short stories, such as Ana María Shua, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Frederick Aldama, and more.

• On the Road: Literary Journeys

  Throughout literature, journeys are often more than mere travel—they are transformations of the self. From mythical tales, like Homer’s Odyssey or Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, to American cross-continental peregrinations, like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Krakauer’s Into the Wild, to global diasporic narratives, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah or Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, this seminar looks at both the ways in which travel changes the characters in these texts and the ways in which the characters bring all their biases and problems with them, affecting the places they visit. For wherever you go, there you are!

• Poetry

  “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives." —Audre Lorde

  This seminar explores the power of poetry to capture the ineffable. From structured sonnets to free verse, poetry has been a key form of expression across cultures and centuries. Through careful reading and analysis, students develop an understanding of poetic form, language, and style, while also learning to craft their own poems. The class explores a wide range of poets and poetic traditions, delving into the ways that poetry can articulate the complex emotions, hopes, and fears that shape the human experience. Throughout the semester, students write their own poetry, practicing the techniques discussed in class and receiving constructive feedback from peers and the instructor.

• Psyche in Chains: Freedom and Captivity

  This seminar considers textual analysis in new and unorthodox ways: scrutinizing the themes of freedom and captivity through the lenses of film, image, sound, visual art, auditory media, and writing, thinking both about the ways that these varied forms address concepts of freedom and captivity and how they, in themselves, serve as vehicles of both entrapment and liberation. With a philosophical slant, the course ultimately examines entrapment and escape by looking into possible solutions to mental, spiritual, physical, social, and philosophical confinement. Texts include Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Kafka’s works, and “Eloisa and Abelard.” Films include The Truman Show, The Turn of the Screw, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Severance, Inception, Psycho, The Matrix, and Get Out.

• Shakespeare’s Comedies

  People have long looked to comedy to reveal truths about human experience, to provide political satire, and to poke at authoritative figures and structures from a position of relative safety. Shakespeare’s clowns are some of the most wonderful: from philosophical Jacques to absurd Dogberry, Shakespeare’s fools expose and question the characters’—and the audience’s—sense of reality, all while making us laugh. This course considers some of the most enduring comedy storylines in the English language, plays that remain part of our collective consciousness hundreds of years after their premieres and continue to be adapted into a diverse array of plays, movies, books, and shows. Students delight in the language, explore the cultural and political significance of the plays—both historical and contemporary—and consider how to perform and stage our own productions. Readings include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and a modern adaptation.

• Transatlantic Modernism: Harlem Renaissance

  The Harlem Renaissance posed, contested, and responded to the questions raised by two incredibly influential events: the aftermath of the First World War and the Great Migration of Black Americans moving north to urban centers like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Harlem. It was a cultural explosion that challenged established norms and redefined the role of Black artists in America. This course explores the literature, music, and visual art of this transformative period, with an emphasis on the complex questions surrounding citizenship, sexuality, Blackness, Americanness, and womanhood. Through novels by writers like Jean Toomer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Rudolph Fisher, and a wealth of short stories and poetry by such illustrious writers as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Gwendolyn Bennett, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, students engage with the ongoing legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and its impact on modern American culture.

• Unsettled: A Survey of the Gothic

  What unsettles us lingers in our minds. The gothic unearths questions of perception and knowledge, pushing against Empiricism and Enlightenment doctrines. This course explores the gothic’s evolution from its early roots in the 18th century to its resurgence in contemporary literature, and how it evolved from a male-centered form to a genre empowering women. In this survey of the genre, students consider its relationship to other genres like detective fiction and mystery, and investigate its contemporary manifestations in the highly influential works of Argentinian authors Mariana Enríquez and Samantha Schweblin. Texts include “The Man in the Crowd” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, creator of detective fiction famous for his gothic tales; nineteenth-century works by E.T.A. Hoffman; Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Sigmund Freud’s study of “The Uncanny/Unheimlich”; Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in a Castle; and a smattering of contemporary short stories.