Human Rights and World Literature In this course we will explore the idiom of human rights in law, literature, and political culture. We will place literary representations of human rights violations (genocide, torture, detention and forced labor, environmental devastation, police violence) in dialogue with official human rights treaties and declarations in order to historicize and critique the assumptions of human rights discourse. Who qualifies as a “human” deserving of humanitarian intervention? How do human rights rehearse a colonial dynamic based on racial and geo-political privilege? To answer these questions we will turn to some of the most controversial voices in global fiction and poetry.

Afro-Asian Encounters Scholars have recently uncovered a rich history of black and Asian solidarity against racism. Yet the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992 provided a painful reminder of the antagonisms between black and Asian diasporic groups. This course will explore how Asian American and African American identities have historically been constructed in relation to one another. We will foreground key sites in the making and undermining of Afro-Asian intimacies, from the racial formation of coolie laborers to the cross-racial imagination of Kung-Fu and Hip Hop. Authors will include Richard Wright, Chang-Rae Lee, Vijay Prashad, Frank Chin, Das Racist, Mira Nair, and W.E.B. Dubois.

Reading Literature: Border Crossings This course seeks to develop skills for the close reading of literature through discussion of and writing about selected poems, plays, and short stories from a wide range of eras and nations. A basic vocabulary of literary terms and an introductory palette of critical methods will also be covered; the course's ultimate goal will be to enable students to attain the literary-critical sensibility vital to further course work in the major. At the instructor's discretion, the texts employed in this class may share a particular thematic concern or historical kinship.

Indigenous and Settler Colonial Fictions The term “settler colonialism” has gained currency recently as a way of describing the unjust displacement of indigenous peoples, the theft of their lands and resources, and the negation of native epistemologies, cultures, and histories. This course foregrounds indigenous literary voices that challenge and present alternatives to settler colonial narratives. Students will adopt a comparative approach that identifies continuities and disparities between Native American/First Nations, Mexican, Pacific Islander, South African, Palestinian, Maori, and Hawaiian depictions of indigeneity. Authors will include Haunani-Kay Trask, Leslie Marmon Silko, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Craig Santos Perez, Joy Harjo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Rigoberta Menchu, Keri Hulme, Joe Sacco, and J.M Coetzee.

Multi-Ethnic British Literatures "My name is Karim Amir," announces the protagonist of a Hanif Kureishi novel, "and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost." In this course we will investigate the complex subject of ethnic and national identity in the writing of British authors of Asian, African, and Caribbean descent. We will trace the shifting meanings of "black" and "British" as we move from 1950s migrant fictions to more recent reckonings with British multiculturalism. Topics to be considered will include diaspora and the work of memory; race and religion after 9/11; the representation of urban space; and the experience of asylum-seekers and refugees.

Kazuo Ishiguro Winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro is among the most influential and celebrated of contemporary writers. In novels like Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro gives shape to today’s most pressing questions: about work and workers, the difficulties of intimacy and caring, the political consequences of historical perspective, and the ethical dilemmas facing scientists and educators. Moving between Europe and Asia, his novels also address the complex negotiation of cultural difference in a globalized world. We will explore his major works in great depth, supplementing our literary investigation with materials from other disciplines. (Diversity)

Global English in the New Media Environment Far from spelling the end of literature, the rise of new technologies of communication has continually energized Anglophone literary production. Reading literature through the lens of media theory (Stuart Hall, Friedrich Kittler, Gilles Deleuze, Rey Chow) , students in this course will explore how the global circulation of information, media, and images has transformed the literary imagination. While we will sample canonical modernist engagements with earlier transformations in print and visual culture, our main goal will be to bridge the gap between media studies and Anglophone postcolonial literature throughout the world. Readings will be selected from Benyamin, Jasmine Days; Chimamanda Ngozie Adihchie, Americanah; NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names; Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest; Zadie Smith, Swing Time; David Mitchell, Ghostwritten; and the poems of Jean Binta Breeze and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Refugee Stories “Stories are just things we fabricate,” says a character in Viet Nguyen’s The Refugees. “We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.” In this course students will find stories by and about a paradigmatic modern figure: the displaced refugee seeking asylum in unfamiliar lands. Highlighting literary and visual representations, we will also draw from history, sociology, anthropology, environmental studies, and feminist critique. Beginning with the Syrian refugee crisis, we will circle back to the Vietnam War and the lingering questions it poses to today’s social justice movement.

Twentieth-Century English Novel This course will explore the development of the novel in this century, with a primary focus on writers of the modernist period and later attention to more contemporary works. We will examine questions of formal experimentation, the development of character, uses of the narrator, and the problem of history, both personal and political, in a novelistic context. Readings will include novels by Conrad, Joyce, Forster, Woolf, and others.

The Modern Moment This course will explore the development of the modernist novel – and modernism in general-- in the first half of the 20th century. We will examine issues of formal experimentation, new conceptions of character, and an ever-dawning consciousness of the catastrophic as seen in personal, cultural, and political venues.  Readings will include Conrad, Joyce, Forster, Kafka, Woolf, Lawrence, Mansfield, Waugh, and others.

Benjamin Graves

Reviews and ratings for Benjamin Graves at Middlebury College.Benjamin Graves teaches Human Rights &World Literature, Afro-Asian Encounters, Reading Literature and more.  Explore top rated instructors and find the best for you.Is Benjamin Graves good ? Find out on MiddCourses.

Graves is an awesome facilitator of discussions. He clearly cares about his students and his willing to work with students to support them. His prompts for the essays are very interesting and, at the same time, not too difficult. Highly recommend this course. 

I have taken two classes with Professor Graves and have really enjoyed both of them. He is very knowledgable about Ishiguro and I really enjoyed all of the books we read. It was a pretty big class though which would be my only critique.

My issues with the class were more so because people in the class clearly had not read the books and were scrolling on their laptops in class so discussion was not super interesting. Graves is pretty quiet and sometimes awkward but the books he assigns are really good and interesting 