18th-Century Literature:The Commerce of the World (Pre-1800) British society, politics, and culture shifted dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century in response to the ascendance of an empowered mercantile bourgeoisie, an expanding empire, and the intensification of its investments in the transatlantic slave trade. In this course we will explore how writers and thinkers grappled with these economic, social, and political transformations at the levels of narrative, form, and genre by reading novels, plays, poems, and essays by Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Susanna Centlivre, Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, and others.

Abolitionism(s): Then and Now In this course, we will explore the intersections between historical campaigns to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery throughout the British empire and contemporary American movements to abolish policing and prisons. We’ll pay particular attention to the roles that literary and artistic representations, political speech, and activist organizing play in these processes, and consider how they complement or clash with on-the-ground resistance. We’ll ask: what does the history of abolitionism tell us about the horizons of an abolitionist future? Our guides will range from Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince to Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Olúf?mi Táíwò.

Creative Derivation: Rewriting, Remaking, and Unmaking Literature The American experimental poet Robert Duncan famously described his work as “derivative.” His  contemporary, Ronald Johnson, once remarked: “I read to steal.” In this course we will take these  articulations of reading-focused poetics as a premise for surveying seventeenth- through twenty-first-century  literature that enacts the reading of other texts; repurposes the narratives and terms of canonical or hegemonic writing; or uses critique as a means of generative engagement. Along the way, we will consider the stakes of  rewriting or reworking texts across cultural, historical, generic, and formal distances. Students will be invited  to pursue creative final projects.

Revolt and Rebellion in Long Eighteenth Century Literature The long eighteenth century is replete with uprisings, rebellions, and revolutions. In this course we will think  about why the event of the revolt, especially in colonial contexts, proved intriguing for British writers and  thinkers throughout the period. How did representing historical and imagined uprisings alike enable Britons  to diagnose social and political problems? When and why does it become permissible to revolt? What makes  a revolutionary subject? Authors include: John Milton, John Locke, Aphra Behn, Ottobah Cugoano, Helen  Maria Williams, and Mary Shelley. Critical/theoretical interlocutors might include Laura Brown, Susan  Buck-Morss, C.L.R. James, and Anthony Paul Farley. Pre-1800.

Reading Literature 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.”