We will focus on works by two authors who are credited with inventing the modernist short story: Anton Chekhov, the prolific Russian short-story writer and dramatist, and the Irish novelist, short-story writer, and critic, James Joyce. Through close readings of a selection of Chekhov’s short stories and Joyce’s sole collection of stories, Dubliners (1914), we will gain an understanding of these influential writers’ ground-breaking craft, their contributions to foundational questions and themes of literary modernisms, as well as a glimpse into a historical era marked by radical change.

This course is an immersion into the literary record (the experience, remembering, and reimagining) of the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII. We will spend time with work (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film, music) produced entirely by survivors and descendants of the concentration camps. We will contemplate the ways these works address/inhabit memory and memorialization, transgenerational trauma (anti-Asian racism, white supremacy, immigration, assimilation, citizenship), and transgenerational healing and redemption.

What is “Europe”? What does it mean to be “European”? Who gets to define the boundaries of Europeanness, and what groups have been included or excluded, centered or marginalized as a result? This course seeks to answer such epistemological questions by unraveling and deconstructing some of the central, naturalized, imposed, and often monolithic narratives that have been projected onto and out from Europe. Examining these mechanisms from a critical perspective, students will look at the diverse cultural, linguistic, national, religious, ethnic, racial, and other factors that have continued to shape Europe throughout its history. They will consider debates around issues of identity and ideology, including the histories and legacies of colonialism, imperialism, fascism, and racism, and learn to view Europe as a place of multiplicity and difference, changing institutions, and ever-shifting borders. Taking a transdisciplinary approach that includes literary studies, art history, race and ethnic studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, history, and geography, among other fields and theoretical frameworks, “Unraveling Europe” unsettles the common assumption that Europe is and always has been fundamentally European. Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement.

In this course, we explore how Shakespeare’s plays, and adaptations of them, represent systems of power, resultant inequities, and sites of resistance. We also examine the systems of power that have produced Shakespeare’s plays and their cultural status. “To study Shakespeare is to study power” (Kim F. Hall)—not only the operations of power within the plays, but the power at work in institutions (the theatre, the university) that produce Shakespeare as an authority on “universal” human experience. This course will equip you to challenge the idea of Shakespeare as a universal genius and to explore “Shakespeares” as multiple, contested, contingent, and evolving, including through the study of contemporary, resistant appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays.

This course will serve both students thinking about a medical career, and students who might be patients in the health-care system. Our premise is this: narrative skills are essential for the delivery of and receiving excellent medical care. The core skill: how to read and interpret well the stories of patients, their bodies, and their cultural contexts. Close reading and listening means understanding codes, subtexts, narrative form, and institutions; it means tolerating ambiguity, and listening for complex relationships. There will be a major focus on health equity and health disparities in this course. As a result the class will fulfill the Equity and Power (US) general education requirement. Stories work in two ways to channel power and access to health care: one, narratives told by less privileged people get mis-heard and interpreted through certain cultural filters; two, health care providers and institutions tell their own stories about class and “race” and gender that continue implicit and explicit biases. All our skills in close reading and understanding narrative will come to bear on this project to decode and interpret these complex stories. Texts include Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” two hospital movies, “The Hospital” and “Magnificent Obsession,” and “Wit” (Emma Thompson).

This course will attempt to change the image of poetry and poets that comes to the mind of individuals trained in a traditional Western education system the moment they think of poetry. Depending on the students’ collective experiences/inexperiences with poetry, we will start the course with a discussion of how the tradition of “lyric poetry” is a modern construct of the U.S. classroom. Then we will move on to exploring poetry of color/nontraditional poetry within the U.S.A. and poetry in englishes (written in/translated to English) from around the world. The course’s emphasis will be on anti-oppressive, decolonial and postcolonial ways of engaging with poetry and poetics. From Audre Lorde to Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo to Gabriela Mistral, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim to Bhanu Kapil, Rabindranath Tagore to Jalal-Ad-Din Rumi, we will take an enamoring tour of the world of poetry and poetics through this course.

This class will focus on the memoir as a literary genre. We will study examples of different kinds of memoir (from St. Augustine, Wordsworth, and Kafka to Mary Karr, Richard Wright, and Jeanette Winterson). Our examples will cover a range of approaches to identity, gender, ethnicity, and narrative form. We will also read excerpts from the rich field of narratological theory about self-writing. Finally, students will write their own memoirs, using different kinds of approaches and topics. Then they will use their reading in literary examples and narrative theory to analyze their own narrative choices.