ENGL 114 Sections

Spring 2024 Sections

01. Home. TTh 9.00-10.15

Felisa Baynes-Ross

Where do you call home? Is your sense of home fixed to specific places, persons, languages, or memories? Must the idea of home always suggest rootedness ? What does it mean to feel at home?  In this course, we examine the affective responses elicited by various notions of home, from feelings of nostalgia and familiarity to estrangement, and we consider the ways in which generic and particular spaces enable or constrain individual agency and constitute our relation to others. Unsettling the easy boundary between the private and the public, we will seek to understand what various imaginings of home reveal about our collective and individual desires and anxieties, and we will examine the social and political forces at play in the making of home. Drawing from multiple disciplines and different modes of argument including essays, poetry, song, and film, we will study how home overlaps with spirituality, language politics, hierarchies of gender and labor, and educational opportunities, and how climate crises, pandemics, global economies, and immigration policies impact home. As we examine the debates and contests over space, we will think about who has the right to belong where and what it means—for instance—to belong at Yale. Informed by various theories and poetics of home, at the end of the course, we will revisit the places that make us.

02. The Art of Time. TTh 4.00-5.15

Steven Shoemaker

Time is a problem.  Even in common parlance it attracts a rich set of metaphors, all signaling our obsession with the rate at which it moves:  Time “races” when we wish we could “freeze” it, “crawls” when we wish it would “fly.”  Reminding us of the old maxim “time is money,” business gurus want to tell us how to “manage” it, while gurus of the religious sort offer the hope that it can be “transcended.”  Even so, we’re not really quite sure what “it” is.  Physicists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, philosophers like Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, and artists from Shakespeare to Marcel Proust  have all tried to penetrate the enigma.  This course will suggest that the urge to investigate—and intervene in–the dilemma of time is a basic force driving the creation of art, literature, philosophy, and science.  As we explore the human experience of time, we will examine the problem of mortality, the mysteries of memory, the malleable nature of subjective time, and the way our understanding of time is influenced by technological and cultural factors.  As the course concludes, students will reflect on how they navigate the challenge of living in time and consider how our relationship with time shapes who we are and what we do.

03. The Once and Future Campus. MW 11.35-12.50

Ben Card

Once again universities are back in the headlines. Florida is remaking its flagship university system along partisan lines; deans encourage disciplines in the humanities to reduce hiring; and the rise of LLMs forces even once-confident departments such as computer science to rethink outcomes. A raft of small colleges closed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, already rich institutions accept enormous donations from the likes of Stephen Schwarzman and Kenneth Griffin, whose names will adorn buildings and graduate schools presumably forever.

Do universities have values? And is that even the right question to ask? Should universities equip students narrowly for the jobs that already exist, or rather give them well-rounded educations to meet an uncertain future? Can universities promote social justice or must they entrench inequality? None of these questions is settled, and each has a long history. What would our ideal university look like?

This course takes a long view of the global university, especially the American college and with a special emphasis on Yale, to bring the values and goals of higher education into focus. We will read for these themes across a wide range of forms including university reports, scholarly articles, economics and sociology, administrative emails, a documentary film, a recent horror movie, and selections out of novels. Emphasis on non-fiction and college writing in addition to archival skills. Occasional class sessions at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Authors to include John Henry Newman, Owen Johnson, William F. Buckley, R. O. Kwon, and Mariama Diallo.

04. The Work of Art. MW 4.00-5.15

Julian Durkin

A Martian anthropologist visits Earth to survey human culture from its wreckage. Can she get to know literature from ordinary language? Say she makes an exhaustive study of human culture, a complete encyclopedia for her assignment, could she then distinguish an avant-garde poem from a CV? After all, what kind of thing is a poem? Brillo Boxes are thing-ly enough—but what in the anthropologist’s toolkit could sift out Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as art? Or distinguish a recycled urinal from Duchamp’s Fountain?

This course will guess at the identity of the aesthetic object. We will read texts in aesthetics, philosophy, and criticism. We will see how recent criticism considers the problem of aesthetic form. We might take a particular interest in the distinction between ordinary and literary language, the denotative and the poetic, the relation between form and content, and the function of metaphor. We will think about the nature of the object and about our experience of objects natural and aesthetic. We will also consider the possible distinctions, and possible equations, of art and craft. We may take field trips to Yale’s art galleries. Authors include Edmund Burke, Thierry de Duve, Roman Jakobson, William Wimsatt, Abigail Zitin, Sandra Macpherson, and Anahid Nersessian.

This course is about art. Art that shows us how odd it is to think about a thing or to take things for granted. Art that isn’t obviously about anything. Art, in particular, that challenges our understanding of what makes art.

05. What Even Was High School? Time TBA

Seamus Dwyer

We all have encountered high school in many ways: in our own lives, through the eyes and stories of our friends, parents, and siblings, through the media’s broadcasting of secondary ed’s scandals, triumphs, and tragedies, and of course, through popular culture’s enshrinement of what we hear called everywhere “the high school experience.” The Plastics’ burn book? Torrence and Isis’ standoffs?  Cameron Frye’s dad’s Ferrari? Lara Jean Covey’s bundle of envelopes? All are absolutely iconic. They also all, weirdly, might seem like they comprise our own memories of high school, because they are everywhere and archetypal. Through these cultural encounters, we are given a mythic to-do list while in high school: get the varsity jacket, attend the blowout house party, lock down the cinematic high school romance. Pop culture forms the lore of what it means to have modern high school experiences. But movies and television can also obscure the realities of high school; they can even make our own experiences seem unfulfilled, based on fictional tropes. This course proposes to interrogate “the high school experience” as both a mass concept and as an individual narrative. We will examine the idea of high school alongside and against different kinds of writing on secondary education (history, education, sociology, psychology, literature, and journalism). What really is “the high school experience”? Who does it serve? Why do we fixate on it so much? How does it measure up?

06. Hood Feminism. TTh 4.00-5.15

Alana Edmondson

This course is based on Mikki Kendall’s 2020 NYT Bestseller of the same title which takes
aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that the movement has
chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Through the lens of Black
feminism, we will explore the often forgotten populations and the problems which affect,
and have affected, the lives of millions of women. With each week based on a different
chapter of Hood Feminism, we will use prose, poetry, history, psychology, sociology, and
other media to discuss topics such as: “Race, Poverty, and Politics,” “Reproductive Justice,
Eugenics, and Maternal Mortality,” and “Allies, Anger, and Accomplices.” Looking at the
historical past and our contemporary moment, I hope we might consider the futurity of
feminism. What could feminism look like if it truly represented all women? What could our

world look like if we practiced a feminism that was both intersectional and inclusive?

07. Our Bodies, Ourselves. MW 1.00-2.15

Sarah Guayante

What does the body know? How does our lived experience shape our perception of the world and the kinds of critical questions we ask of it? What does it mean to be embodied—both in the ways our bodies feel and perceive social constructs and our mode of moving, performing through, interacting with, or being in a body that is socially constructed? To engage with these questions, this course investigates the social and political phenomena that have shaped our understanding of the self, particularly through a focus on our contemporary struggle for body liberation—voiced by activists as a fight for gender affirmation, reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and disability justice. Our investigation follows the lineage set in place by both philosophers who reflect on what it means to be embodied—including Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Sara Ahmed—and feminist researchers who reflect on how our writing and knowledge production practices can testify to these embodied ways of knowing—including Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, José Esteban Muñoz, and Katherine McKittrick. Following the lead of these writers, this class invites you to experiment with modes of writing that critically reflect on how embodied experience informs knowledge production. How does our lived experience inform the performance of identity and positionality in our writing? How can we value and affirm our communities’ modes of building and sustaining knowledge while in a university setting?

Alongside reading scholars and theorists from gender, sexuality, disability and writing studies, we will also investigate modes of textual production in a wide range of genres, including poems, personal essays, performance pieces, and zines. I’ve named this class after the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s pamphlet, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) because it is one of many publications that showcase the significance of reforming writing and research practices for a public audience. By shifting the research site from the university to the home, the collective valued and affirmed what women knew about their bodies and made that knowledge more accessible. By the end of the course, we will think about what it means to write from a place of embodied knowledge, how that knowledge can inform the work we do at the university, and how to enact that knowledge in our everyday lives.

08. Secret Lives of Children. TTh 11.35-12.50

Carol Morse

For the children, they mark, and the children, they know The place where the sidewalk ends.
—Shel Silverstein

From angelic innocents to demonic brats, our perception of children runs the gamut: While some sentimentalize childhood, others minimize its significance and seek to curtail children’s autonomy and power. Yet we know that children are marvelously complex–in their imaginations, anxieties, desires, and even in the ways they experience trauma. In this course we’ll consider different models of childhood from a variety of angles–psychological, historical, literary, biological, cultural, artistic. We’ll ask such questions as: How do “secret spaces” enrich children’s imagination and sense of wonder? In what ways do children need both community and solitude, scheduled time and boredom, domestic order and wild spaces? How do young people inherit and respond to the consequences of adult decisions? What is the impact of race, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economics on developing creative identities? Our readings will include works by such thinkers as varied as Malcolm X, Maria Montessori, Gloria Anzaldua, and Bruno Betthelheim, and we will watch a film or two (The Florida Project, Beasts of the Southern Wild). 

09. Creative Obsessions. TTh 2.30-3.45

Carol Morse

What is the nature of creativity? Is there such a thing as “creative genius,” or are most creative endeavors achieved through hard work and practice? Can it be taught? From childhood crushes to white whales, artists, scientists, and writers have transformed ordinary obsessions into expressions of beauty and wonder.  But as much as we praise the imagination and the work it produces, it can have a darker side; creative types are sometimes linked to mental instability, substance abuse, and self-delusion. This class will allow you to explore and write about the many varieties of creativity. We’ll read scholarly work from different academic disciplines, such as neuroscience, psychology, and education, as well as professional writers, artists, and musicians. What is the relationship between creativity and obsession? Creativity and addiction? Are we motivated by external validation or an inward drive to manage, or even escape, reality? Readings may include work by such writers as Gloria Anzaldua, Maurice Sendak, Albert Einstein, and Toni Morrison.

10. Time Travel. TTh 1.00-2.15

Kate Needham

Where do we encounter the past? What counts as historical accuracy? What does imagining time travel tell us about our own cultural values? This course explores depictions of time travel both literally (in science fiction) and figuratively (in historical fiction, reenactment, and re-creation). We’ll ask how historians deconstruct our notions of linear historical time and explore depictions of the past and the future in popular media. Through readings in history, literature, art, and cultural studies, we will analyze the faux-medievalism of the entertainment chain Medieval Times, the racial politics of medieval fantasies like Game of Thrones, the depiction of queerness in historical costume dramas like The Favourite, as well as examining trips to the past and future in science fiction works like Doctor Who and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. We will consider how categories like race, gender, and sexuality are related to supposedly neutral ideas like time, history, and authenticity. Ultimately, we will try to answer the question “What does it take to be a responsible consumer of history and fantasy?”

11. War Today. MW 2.30-3.45

Maeva O’Brien

When the last US troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Biden remarked that he was “ending America’s longest war.” No one, however, expected US withdrawal to mean peace for either the US or Afghanistan. The headlines are full of news about US engagement in conflicts in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Less conspicuously, the US manages a militarized global migration crisis, a vast system of military bases, and an intelligence network increasingly attuned to cyberspace and the impact of AI. The temporal and geographic boundaries of war are much harder to define—more full of gray areas, more prone to contentious debate—than President Biden’s rhetoric of an “ending” would suggest. In this class, we will attend to (1) the temporality and geography of war today, (2) the role of advanced technologies, and (3) the modes and technologies of perception that shape our relationship to war in everyday life. We will also consider ways in which legacies of past wars, including those of occupation and empire, saturate everyday experience around the world. This is not a history class, and our focus will not be on tracing a history of conflict in the past two decades. Rather, we will explore methods and questions that might help us better understand the nature of 21st-century war and how we come to know about it. Readings draw upon American examples, but students are encouraged to apply their thinking to any context of interest.

12. Fashioning the Self. MW 9.00-10.15

Imani Tucker

In Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle writes that “[the] Body and the Cloth are the site and material whereon [the] beautified edifice of a Person is to be built.” Whether one puts as much emphasis on the significance of clothing as Carlyle or not, getting dressed is an unavoidable part of our lives, and we deal with this fact in ways ranging from the utilitarian to the artistic and expressive. In this course, we’ll investigate this link between clothing and subjectivity, thinking about the meaning we give to the clothes we wear and the relationship between fashion and self-fashioning. How and why is clothing meaningful? Can we read clothing as a kind of text written on the body? What is “personal” about personal style? How is personal style subject to or influenced by larger discourses and cultural systems like race, class, gender, and age? In this course, students can expect to encounter a variety of texts ranging from the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes to films like Paris is Burning and The Devil Wears Prada in the hopes of finding some unifying threads between the complex composition of the self and the clothing we all wear.


Fall 2023 Sections

01. Superintelligence, Entrepreneurship, and Ethics. TTh 9.00-10.15

Heather Klemann

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” —Henry Ford

This course studies the anatomy of big ideas. We can offer only abstract predictions about the future of a world in which neural lace, biointelligence, and self-driving cars are commonplace. Instead, this course asserts that we have much to learn from how scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and educators argue over such predictions. What makes an idea revolutionary or contrarian in an age when so much knowledge is at our fingertips? How do we speak about that which is yet unknowable? How are narratives about superintelligence composed through the disciplines of economics, philosophy, religion, and engineering; the worlds of finance and entrepreneurship; and the concepts of evolution, futurism, and humanism? And what kinds of racial, gender, or class inequalities might superhuman intelligence reinforce or dissolve? Our course materials include peer-reviewed scholarly research, film, and in-class interviews with contemporary entrepreneurs. Throughout the course, we will reflect on what these issues mean for developing our own strategies of reading, writing, and public speaking—what will we really need to thrive in a world with superhuman intelligence?

02. Home. MW 11.35-12.50

Felisa Baynes-Ross

Where do you call home? Is your sense of home fixed to specific places, persons, languages, or memories? Must the idea of home always suggest rootedness ? What does it mean to feel at home?  In this course, we examine the affective responses elicited by various notions of home, from feelings of nostalgia and familiarity to estrangement, and we consider the ways in which generic and particular spaces enable or constrain individual agency and constitute our relation to others. Unsettling the easy boundary between the private and the public, we will seek to understand what various imaginings of home reveal about our collective and individual desires and anxieties, and we will examine the social and political forces at play in the making of home. Drawing from multiple disciplines and different modes of argument including essays, poetry, song, and film, we will study how home overlaps with spirituality, language politics, hierarchies of gender and labor, and educational opportunities, and how climate crises, pandemics, global economies, and immigration policies impact home. As we examine the debates and contests over space, we will think about who has the right to belong where and what it means—for instance—to belong at Yale. Informed by various theories and poetics of home, at the end of the course, we will revisit the places that make us.

03. Writing Rebellion. MW 2.30-3.45

Felisa Baynes-Ross

What motivates rebellion? Is resistance always revolutionary? In this course, we will seek to understand the ideologies that energize dissenting discourses and acts of rebellion across a wide range of contexts and histories. As we study resistance to British colonialism and American imperialism, religious non-conformity in the Middle Ages, ongoing struggles for independence and reparative justice, and education reform, we will seek to understand how these various performances disrupt master narratives, subvert political and religious orthodoxies, and enable freedom. Challenging ourselves to think about rebellion beyond political protests, we will ask ourselves how resistance might be enacted in the everyday— in language use, in community building, and in creative projects. How might discourses of rebellion legitimate marginalized identities, and how— as bell hooks suggests— might the margins be a space of “radical openness and possibility,” a place from which to “envision new, alternative, oppositional aesthetic acts?” To what extent can these practices heal deep wounds? What new knowledges and selves emerge in these acts of resistance? What are their limits?  These questions will guide our discussion of topics such as civil rights, Indigenous land recuperation, and contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and Stop AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Hate. As we examine rebellion in its written, spoken, and embodied modes and across various platforms and technologies, we will reflect deeply on how different forms of writing shape meaning and how meaning gives shape to form. Each of you will think about how you can use your own voice to theorize, improvise, and invent new possibilities for meaning.

04.  Black and Indigenous Ecologies. MW 11.35-12.50

Rasheed Tazudeen

“Red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth”
—Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1965)

Who gets to define the meaning of ecology, along with the earth we stand on, and how is this definition bound up with the legacies of colonial power, empire, slavery, and other forms of racialized oppression? And what new modes of ecological thought might emerge once we engage with the perspectives of indigenous peoples and communities of color—traditionally excluded from dominant environmentalist discourses—and their alternative ways of thinking and imagining a relation to the earth? Through readings in anthropology, geology, critical race studies, philosophy, literature, and poetry, this course explores the ecologies and counter-ecologies born of anti-imperial opposition, from 1492 to the present. Struggles for liberation, as we will examine, are never separable from struggles for land, food, water, air, and an earth in common. From Standing Rock to Sao Paulo, the Antilles to New Zealand, and Mauna Kea to Lagos, we will engage with anti-colonial and anti-racist attempts to craft an image of the earth no longer made in the ecocidal image of imperialist Western Man (or the anthropos of “Anthropocene”), and to imagine a future to be held and composed in common by all.

05. When Statues Fall: Exploring the Power of Image Destruction. MW 9.00-10.15

Ido Ben Harush

We’re all familiar with these scenes: the statues of oppressive or autocratic figures being taken down by angry demonstrators, historical monuments covered with paint and graffiti, and the violent desecration of religious sites. From the bust of Saddam Hussein to Confederate monuments in the U.S., defacement or destruction of images is a common practice in making a revolution. In this course, we will ask why people destroy statues of military generals, vandalize pictures of the pope or Muhamad, or burn ancient temples? Equally, we will consider why such actions provoke strong reactions from others. To answer these questions, we will analyze music videos, protest actions, artworks, and stories displaying the destruction of sacred images worldwide over the past four centuries. Through readings in critical theory, religion, media studies, art criticism, and literature, we will find out how people have made sense of such destructions of religious, political, or cultural symbols and consider some tensions inherent within this practice and rhetoric. Among other themes, we will examine how the act of image destruction paradoxically empowers the very objects it seeks to reject, and how this destruction can lead to the preservation of the image. By exploring the power dynamics of dismantling images, we will gain insight into the ways in which power is expressed, embodied, and contested in our contemporary world.

06. Secret Lives of Children. MW 11.35-12.50

Carol Morse

For the children, they mark, and the children, they know The place where the sidewalk ends.
—Shel Silverstein

From angelic innocents to demonic brats, our perception of children runs the gamut: While some sentimentalize childhood, others minimize its significance and seek to curtail children’s autonomy and power. Yet we know that children are marvelously complex–in their imaginations, anxieties, desires, and even in the ways they experience trauma. In this course we’ll consider different models of childhood from a variety of angles–psychological, historical, literary, biological, cultural, artistic. We’ll ask such questions as: How do “secret spaces” enrich children’s imagination and sense of wonder? In what ways do children need both community and solitude, scheduled time and boredom, domestic order and wild spaces? How do young people inherit and respond to the consequences of adult decisions? What is the impact of race, gender, ethnicity, and socio-economics on developing creative identities? Our readings will include works by such thinkers as varied as Malcolm X, Maria Montessori, Gloria Anzaldua, and Bruno Betthelheim, and we will watch a film or two (The Florida Project, Beasts of the Southern Wild). 

07. The Once and Future Campus. MW 2.30-3.45

Ben Card

Once again universities are back in the headlines. Florida is remaking its flagship university system along partisan lines; deans encourage disciplines in the humanities to reduce hiring; and the rise of LLMs forces even once-confident departments such as computer science to rethink outcomes. A raft of small colleges closed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, already rich institutions accept enormous donations from the likes of Stephen Schwarzman and Kenneth Griffin, whose names will adorn buildings and graduate schools presumably forever.

Do universities have values? And is that even the right question to ask? Should universities equip students narrowly for the jobs that already exist, or rather give them well-rounded educations to meet an uncertain future? Can universities promote social justice or must they entrench inequality? None of these questions is settled, and each has a long history. What would our ideal university look like?

This course takes a long view of the global university, especially the American college and with a special emphasis on Yale, to bring the values and goals of higher education into focus. We will read for these themes across a wide range of forms including university reports, scholarly articles, economics and sociology, administrative emails, a documentary film, a recent horror movie, and selections out of novels. Emphasis on non-fiction and college writing in addition to archival skills. Occasional class sessions at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Authors to include John Henry Newman, Owen Johnson, William F. Buckley, R. O. Kwon, and Mariama Diallo.

08. How Romantic! TTh 1.00-2.15

Kathy Chow

The romance is a genre we might turn to for comfort in times of distress without thinking twice. Having a hard day? Throw on a rom-com. But the romance is much more complex than it appears at first encounter. This course samples how the romance is taken up as a keyword in philosophy, contemporary literary studies, and psychotherapy. The philosopher Stanley Cavell argues that the romantic comedy of remarriage, a genre pioneered by the Hollywood talkies of the 1930s and 40s, reveals the “inner desires” of a nation that longs for reconciliation. Over recent decades in the cultural conversation over genre literature, romance novels have been criticized for re-entrenching patriarchal scripts about female passivity on the one hand and lauded as a genre that centers female pleasure on the other. Esther Perel, a couples therapist and host of the popular podcast “Where Should We Begin?,” has long argued that the romantic couple is an unnatural unit of social organization, and that infidelity may be useful for reinvigorating romance. Each of these flashpoints provide a different way of thinking about what constitutes the romantic, and relatedly, the cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of love.

The course engages a range of disciplines, including political theory, feminist studies, queer studies, film studies, literary studies, popular cultural studies, and religious studies. Wielding resources from across the disciplines, we ask: what exactly is the romance, and why is it the source of so much controversy? What are the cultural, political, and ethical consequences of romance’s narrative scripts? Is romance an ideal to be striven for in long-term relationships, or is it a fictive ideal?

09. What We Eat. MW 11.35-12.50

Alison Coleman

You are what you eat. Taking inspiration from a dictum that is widely repeated but multifariously interpreted, this course will draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives and modes of writing to explore how our dietary and culinary practices connect to larger questions of biology, selfhood, and civilization. Readings, discussion, and paper assignments will be organized around a trio of thematic areas: the history of food and nutrition science; agricultural practice, sustainability, and our interrelationship with the foods we consume; and the role of food and eating in shaping individual and cultural identity. Texts will include articles and book chapters by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rachel Laudan, Michael Pollan, Steven Shapin, and Benjamin Wurgaft, among others. We also will look at the genre of contemporary food writing, and in addition to research-based essays, participants will complete a multimedia project about a dish or recipe of personal significance. Please note that roughly one-quarter of class meetings will take place outdoors at the Yale Farm and will involve field time and hands-on experience.

10. The Work of Art. MW 1.00-2.15

Julian Durkin

A Martian anthropologist visits Earth to survey human culture from its wreckage. Can she get to know literature from ordinary language? Say she makes an exhaustive study of human culture, a complete encyclopedia for her assignment, could she then distinguish an avant-garde poem from a CV? After all, what kind of thing is a poem? Brillo Boxes are thing-ly enough—but what in the anthropologist’s toolkit could sift out Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as art? Or distinguish a recycled urinal from Duchamp’s Fountain?

This course will guess at the identity of the aesthetic object. We will read texts in aesthetics, philosophy, and criticism. We will see how recent criticism considers the problem of aesthetic form. We might take a particular interest in the distinction between ordinary and literary language, the denotative and the poetic, the relation between form and content, and the function of metaphor. We will think about the nature of the object and about our experience of objects natural and aesthetic. We will also consider the possible distinctions, and possible equations, of art and craft. We may take field trips to Yale’s art galleries. Authors include Edmund Burke, Thierry de Duve, Roman Jakobson, William Wimsatt, Abigail Zitin, Sandra Macpherson, and Anahid Nersessian.

This course is about art. Art that shows us how odd it is to think about a thing or to take things for granted. Art that isn’t obviously about anything. Art, in particular, that challenges our understanding of what makes art.

11. Main Character Syndrome. TTh 11.35-12.50

Alana Edmondson

‘Main character syndrome’ is a term popularized on TikTok to describe people who are self-centered or out of touch with the reality. What does it mean to have ‘main character energy’? What does this world view look like in practice, and when does it become a ‘syndrome’? This course will explore the roles of human psychology, media, and the evergreen need to tell ourselves—and each other—stories as an act of self-soothing, self-fashioning and world building. Is it narcissistic to place ourselves in the center of the narratives we tell ourselves about our positions within the universe? What are prevailing cultural attitudes about romanticizing the mundane; and how do these interact with social judgments placed on individuals within different generations? In our seminar, we will engage Freudian theory with short stories, film, and digital media to investigate the concept of ‘main character syndrome’ and where we might identify main characters in world history, literature, and song. What are the stories we engage in to make our worlds feel less threatening and…more fun? Is main character energy always harmful or narcissistic—or could it also translate as self-love? Could treating oneself as the main character illuminate the dullness of daily life? Is there always a price to pay for self-adulation? When does ‘main character syndrome’ become an ‘everyone problem’? This course’s multidisciplinary approach will encourage students to engage with fields including psychoanalysis, classical studies, media theory, and literary prose.

12. On Being (Un)Reasonable. TTh 1.00-2.15

Craig Eklund

Human beings have long been defined as rational animals. But is it really reason that defines us? One might look at wars, carbon footprints, and Tide Pod eating challenges for evidence to the contrary. It hardly stops there, however. Irrationality plagues our political convictions, motivates our economic behavior, and dominates our psychic lives. In this course, we will examine models of human reason that try to explain such failures of rational thinking. We’ll investigate the role of irrationality in behavioral economics and modern political culture. We’ll read one of literature’s great arguments for willful irrationality and look at surrealist art designed to defy reason and aesthetics. We will explore the ancient Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna’s efforts to push logic to its limits and discover enlightenment on the other side and we will engage Zen koans in all their seeming absurdity. This course seeks out the reason for human beings being so unreasonable and tries to decipher the logic of the illogical.

13. Writing Essays with AI. TTh 1.00-2.15

Ben Glaser

ChatGPT can code, dash off student recommendations, make “stunning” rhymes and “pretty awful verse,” write a “graduate level” essay on pedagogy. It will be the “death of student papers” or maybe just the death of a paper no one wants to write or read. How will we write college essays in the presence of AI? What new skills are required of essayists and readers, and who will have access to those skills?  What can be automated—ethically, productivity, creatively, without fear of plagiarism? At a recent roundtable, one faculty member argued that chatGPT “confronts us with a new aspect of ourselves.” Another recognized its threat to our sense of authenticity—what’s mine?—perhaps because it reveal this is always partly a fiction. We’ll attempt to write authentically in this class by directly exploring the impact of AI on the written expression of knowledge. The course begins with literary analysis (human and not) of poems and songs (human and not), but research projects will study a range of disciplines and cultural contexts in which authorship matters. No coding skills are required.

14. Antiquity in Pieces. TTh 2.30-3.45

Anna Grant

How do we know what we know? In the case of the Ancient Greco-Roman World, we construct much of our knowledge out of fragmentary pieces of evidence, broken off from their wholes thanks to both accidental and intentional processes: we can only read the famous Sappho today because small sections of her poetry happened to survive on scraps of papyrus and because later authors decided to quote her words. The iconic Parthenon monument in Athens has been damaged and rebuilt through centuries of wars and natural disasters, while its sculptures are kept separate across the continent at the British Museum. Even though fragments give us incomplete or piecemeal access to ancient literature, history, and material culture, in this course, we will discover that stories of piecing together the past have much to tell us about the beliefs and values of modern audiences.

Throughout the semester we will scrutinize the choices that editions of ancient texts, archeological sites, museums, and archives—including the Beinecke Library and Art Gallery here at Yale—make in displaying and contextualizing the remains of the past. We will also encounter how “the fragment” (and its attendant themes of brokenness, loss, recovery, decay, decline etc.) has been used as a tool to conceptualize the human condition and the passage of time. We will ask questions including: What counts as a fragment? Is knowledge ever complete? What are the stakes of reconstructing, preserving, and reusing ancient material? How did ancient thinkers themselves confront the impermanence of their world? Who owns the past?

15. Our Bodies, Ourselves. MW 4.00-5.15

Sarah Guayante

What does the body know? In 1970, the Boston Women’s Health Collective published the first version of their book on women’s health, Our Bodies, Ourselves. The book reformed practices for the collection and dissemination of reproductive health information, relying on the experiences of the women around them as the primary starting point for their research. By shifting the research site from the university to the home, the book valued and affirmed what women know about their bodies. Following the lead of this set of researchers, this course invites students to think about how to value embodied experience in a university setting. How do these experiences shape our perception of the world and the kinds of critical questions we ask of it? How do they inform the performance of identity and positionality in our writing? How can we value and affirm the ways our communities have built and sustained knowledge while writing in a university setting?

To engage with these questions, this course also investigates the social and political phenomena that have shaped our understanding of the self, particularly through a focus on our contemporary struggle for bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, gender affirmation, and body liberation. Our course content will draw from a wide range of genres: poems, personal essays, short narratives, and zines in addition to scholars and theorists from gender, sexuality, disability studies and writing studies. By the end of the course, we will think about what it means to write from a place of embodied knowledge, how that knowledge can inform the work we do at the university, as well as how to enact that knowledge in our everyday lives.

16. Mind Reading. TTh 1.00-2.15

Audrey Holt

I know what you’re thinking. Well, maybe not, but, within reason, I might be able to guess: Because you’re reading a course description, perhaps you’re thinking about your Fall schedule, and because the class has a slightly supernatural title, maybe you’re thinking I’m promising more than I can realistically deliver. And while it’s true that this course won’t actually teach psychic powers, we will explore the practice of ‘reading’ minds — of figuring out what other people are thinking — that is a fundamental and essential characteristic of human communication and cognition. Sometimes called the Theory of Mind, this ability is what lets you finish your loved ones’ sentences, guess people’s emotions from their expressions, and read between the lines in everyday conversations. In this course, we’ll explore recent work in psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics that attempts to explain this seemingly psychic capacity: How did it develop? What are its limits? How can we get better at it? How does it affect the way we understand one another? Is it universal or cultural? We will also consider questions of how neurodivergence and demographic differences may affect habits or expressions of mind reading, and, inversely, how our assumptions about mind reading ability affect the way we view disability and difference in our communities. As we explore these questions, we will also ask what Mind Reading has to teach us about reading texts and writing them. How do you imagine what your audience knows, and how can you change their mind with your argument? We will break down the mechanics and techniques of writing the college essay with these questions in mind as we practice building essays around a central claim, thinking into and alongside the minds of others.

17. Plastic Planet, Plastic People. TTh 11.35-12.50

Caitlin Hubbard

Plastic is the material of the modern world. We come into contact with it innumerable times within a single day: from the moment we roll out of bed and grab our toothbrush to the moment we turn off the lights at the end of the night with a flick of a plastic switch. Debuting in the 1930s and exploding during the time of the Second World War, plastic is a defining feature of the Anthropocene. This course will ask students to explore how plastic, as both a material and a concept, has transformed the human experience: on the level of culture (art, clothing, consumerism, plastic surgery, food preservation/cooking), as well as on the level of environmental and human health. Should plastic be considered as significant as Climate Change in our battle to maintain a habitable planet? What would a world without plastic look like? How can our understanding of plastic’s deep infiltration of modern culture help us build solutions to lessen our reliance on this toxic substance? In this course, students will look at both scholarly and public-facing writing on plastic from a variety of disciplines: environmental studies; art history; political theory; cultural history; public health; and marine biology. Students will learn a range of writing techniques suited to different disciplines and audiences, and will develop a final writing project based on their individual interests. 

18. On Beauty. MW 1.00-2.15

Rosemary Jones

Beauty has challenged thinkers both ancient and modern to describe and account for its place in our lives. How do we “see” beauty and in what ways does beauty matter? When you look at a beautiful thing, does it stay with you, or leave quickly only to be replaced by another? What shapes our various definitions of beauty? How do certain stereotypes of beauty narrow our field of vision or even oppress us? Can beauty be a force for the good? Perhaps embracing a broader understanding of beauty and its role in society has the potential to enhance our humanity. In this course we will read both written and visual texts to construct arguments that explore questions of beauty and truth and the relationship between what we see, or are persuaded to see, and who we are. This course requires that students adopt a readiness to look at art. While a background in art history is not required, if the Yale art galleries stay open safely, you will be asked to visit them and to use your observations as evidence in your work.

The assigned readings will form the basis of our class discussions and will prove helpful as models for creating your own arguments. We will analyze and evaluate how writers identify a problem, how they generate a line of reasoning in response to that problem, how they use evidence to support their claims, and how they demonstrate a motive for their thinking. As you practice writing these elements of argument, you will learn how to write clear, compelling prose. Your major paper will be a researched argument about an aspect of beauty and its place in the world.

19. K-Pop Phenomenology. MW 1.00-2.15

Taylor Kang

What is K-pop, and what kinds of critical tools do we use to engage with it? Mainstream Western discourses surrounding K-Pop often treat it as a “factory-product” or “unoriginal” without adequately reflecting on the potentially loaded connotations of such language. This class will instead approach K-Pop through cultural criticism and media theory, asking how our experiences of it are affected and structured through parasociality (a sort of psychological relationship experienced through mediated encounters with celebrities) and media phenomenology (broadly put, the study of how media transforms experiences of the world). Units will be dedicated to K-pop “paratexts,” from the history of the photocard to the potential applications of philosophy of game to variety show content. Points of cross-cultural, transhistorical comparison will include interventions from Girl Studies, riot grrrl, and Black American art. How do we closely engage with K-Pop without falling into exoticization and fetishism?  How do we think about global forms of media production and consumption under late capitalism?

20. Archaeologies of the ‘Other’: Knowledge Construction Past and Present. TTh 9.00-10.15

Naila Razzaq

What role do institutions, empires, political entities, museums, monuments, universities, libraries, archaeological sites, among other spaces, materialities, and beings (including ourselves!) play in discourses surrounding knowledge and access to knowledge creation? This course invites students to consider how narratives about past and present “others” have been and continue to be produced, negotiated, augmented, manipulated and erased from antiquity to the present. Drawing from multiple disciplines including art history, religious studies, anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, comparative literature, race and migration, and media studies, we will discuss the intersections of colonialism and imperialism, nationalism, language, religion, archaeology, collective memory, representation, identity and knowledge production. Readings from seminal authors including Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Saidiya Hartman, Umberto Eco, Benedict Anderson, and Gayatri Spivak, among others will provide historical and theoretical frameworks while challenging us to deconstruct who has the power and legitimacy to create knowledge and who is left out. We’ll delve into several case studies to better understand how objects from historical pasts and especially from “orientalized,” “third world,” and non-European “others” have been collected, fetichized, displayed and taught. Along the way we’ll also look at art pieces, material objects, selections from literature, music, personal journals, documentaries and exhibitions. Students are encouraged to reflect on their own practices of curating and creating knowledge through a creative project at the end of the semester. Ultimately, the varied class materials and discussions will help us consider what new critical insights we can gain by centering and problematizing the question of collecting, curating and producing knowledge.

21. The Power of Ritual: Between Tradition and Creativity. MW 1.00-2.15

Evelyne Koubkova

What are rituals and how do they differ from routines or habits? Why do people of all times and places perform rituals? Is the drive towards ritual behavior a human universal?

Through a range of interdisciplinary readings at the intersection of cultural anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and performance studies, accompanied by a range of audio-visual materials, we will dive into questions surrounding the kind of meaning and function that rituals can have. Are ritual participants always aware of these meanings? Or is there a kind of embodied meaning that cannot be captured with words?

We will start with a broad notion of rituals that span both religious and secular contexts and we will address the process through which an action can be ritualized, ie. transformed into a ritual, or ritual-like, activity. If we understand this process, is there a way to implement its principles to provide structure and meaning for our own lives? That is, can we create rituals?

This question will lead us to question the unchanging nature of rituals and traditions. Exploring the dynamic nature of rituals as an active response to our situation and surroundings will challenge us to reflect on our agency within, and in relation to, established rituals.

22. Creative Obsessions. TTh 4.00-5.15

Carol Morse

What is the nature of creativity? Is there such a thing as “creative genius,” or are most creative endeavors achieved through hard work and practice? Can it be taught? From childhood crushes to white whales, artists, scientists, and writers have transformed ordinary obsessions into expressions of beauty and wonder.  But as much as we praise the imagination and the work it produces, it can have a darker side; creative types are sometimes linked to mental instability, substance abuse, and self-delusion. This class will allow you to explore and write about the many varieties of creativity. We’ll read scholarly work from different academic disciplines, such as neuroscience, psychology, and education, as well as professional writers, artists, and musicians. What is the relationship between creativity and obsession? Creativity and addiction? Are we motivated by external validation or an inward drive to manage, or even escape, reality? Readings may include work by such writers as Gloria Anzaldua, Maurice Sendak, Albert Einstein, and Toni Morrison.

23. Writing the Emotions. MW 4.00-5.15

Elizabeth Mundell Perkins

How do we express emotion in language? In what ways does emotion shape moral, political, and rhetorical discourse? Does emotion have a place in critical writing? In this course, we will be exploring how thinkers from a range of genres and disciplines have engaged with the emotions, both as an object of study and as an expressive device. We will consider the distinction between written and oral forms of expression, the racial and gendered dynamics in theories of feeling and “affect,” and the arguments for and against using emotion as an ethical guide to live our lives.

24. The Modern Metropolis. TTh 2.30-3.45

Pamela Newton

What makes a city great? How can we build communities on a large scale without fostering inequality and injustice? What do we most want from our cities, and what can our cities tell us about ourselves? In this course, we will investigate these and other questions through our study of texts about city life in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, history, urban ethnography, and political science, as well as through cultural artifacts, such as newspaper articles, photographs, and video clips. Keeping our own urban experiences in mind throughout, we will engage with these texts in order to explore the changing nature of the world’s cities, continually asking ourselves what are the greatest gifts and the greatest challenges the modern metropolis offers. Along the way, we will investigate a number of constructs within the study of cities, including city planning/design, urban renewal, public policy/infrastructure, the intersection of race and class, and the city as a conduit for personal discovery. 

25. War Today. MW 1.00-2.15

Maeva O’Brien

When the last US troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Biden remarked that he was “ending America’s longest war.” No one, however, expected US withdrawal to mean peace in Afghanistan. Moreover, the end of America’s war did not necessarily mean America was at peace. The US maintains a global network of military bases, is heavily involved in the war in Ukraine, and faces a militarized immigration crisis at the US-Mexican border. Ongoing conflict and legacies of past wars saturate everyday experience all around the globe. Defining the temporal and geographic boundaries of war is much harder—more full of gray areas, more prone to contentious debate—than President Biden’s rhetoric of an “ending” would suggest. Technologies like the nuclear bomb, the drone, and advanced AI and surveillance systems keep parts of the world in constant, militarized face-offs. Some would argue that the US has been perpetually at war since the beginning of its colonial projects at the end of the 19th century, or that the history of settler colonialism means the US has never been *out* of war. In this class, we will explore the nature of war today, with particular attention to (1) its temporality and geography, (2) the role of advanced technologies, and (3) the modes and technologies of perception that shape our relationship to war in everyday life. Likely authors include Grégoire Chamayou, Judith Butler, Teju Cole, Susan Sontag, and Paul Virilio. Readings draw upon American examples, but students are encouraged to apply their thinking to any context of interest.

26. What is Friendship For? TTh 2.30-3.45

Megan Perry

“Are we better friends today than people were in the past? This course invites sustained reflection on the idea of friendship in time and place. It asks whether the meaning of friendship has changed alongside the profound intellectual and cultural transitions from pre-modernity to modernity and post-modernity. Together, we will ask whether the friendships classical and medieval thinkers like Cicero, Confucius, and Aelred of Rievaulx envisioned even ‘translate’ into contemporary life, and if so, whether they are desirable. Do these older accounts rest on ideals that no longer have cultural purchase, or are there features that transfer across time and space? Does the practice of friendship hinge in any concrete way on culturally specific structures, institutions, or technologies? Do monasteries or social media, in other words, facilitate better friendships? Underlying all of these is the larger question of what is constant in human experience across time, and what is shaped, even defined, by historical contingencies. In dialogue with thinkers and scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, global intellectual history, religious studies, classics, and psychology, and looking into the premodern past, we will dive deeply into questions of what makes friendship worthwhile in the present day.”

27. Translators on Translation. MW 2.30-3.45

Emily Glider

What meanings get lost in translation? What new meanings might be discovered along the way? In this seminar, we will explore the theory of translation from the translator’s perspective, thinking through the possibilities, challenges, and limitations of translation practice in conveying literary language, news information, activism, medical facts, popular culture, and performance. We will consider how translation has been performed and theorized by a variety of professional translators and how present-day events from international protest movements to a global pandemic pose concrete and specific problems for translators in our own time. Readings include classic works by Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and Umberto Eco, as well as interpreters translating live speech, multimedia translators captioning movies and television, and machine translation experts working to provide accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic to a global readership. 

28. On Dolls, Puppets, and AI. TTh 11.35-12.50

Gabrielle Reid

Who’s the real automaton— the sassy, sentient doll M3GAN or her workaholic creator? The recent horror-comedy M3GAN is just one example of the trope that while dolls may murder us, they are capable of worse: exposing the blurry boundary between humans and human-like machines. In this course, we will read and watch various sources that deal with dolls, puppets, and automata to contextualize the figure of the violent doll within the framework of a broader fear of toys and machines that mimic us. We will cover the literal and metaphorical appearances of dolls and puppets in various works across different media, discussing a range of philosophical and literary questions about aesthetics, human agency, and the relationship and tension between the mechanic and the organic. What, if anything, can humans do that these automata can’t? In what ways do these machines shed light on what it means to be human? As we shall see, many works thematize artistic production as the area in which the organic will always outshine the mechanic. The metal and wooden limbs are often depicted as clumsy imitations of our own bodies; nevertheless, the puppets still dance, sing, and write poetry, sometimes more authentically than we’re comfortable with. And what about M3GAN’s dance? What happens when the dancing doll no longer imitates us, but instead we take our cue from her mechanic movements?

29. Censorship and the Arts. MW 9.00-10.15

Timothy Robinson

What right does any authority have to control expression?  This writing seminar will treat legal and critical debates from recent times, as well as various arguments concerning politics, artistic freedom, and religion, ranging from those of Plato to contemporary cancel culture.  Written assignments will comprise argumentative essays and research papers of various lengths and formats, carefully designed to introduce a variety of writing skills.  For more detailed information, please refer to the online syllabus.

30. The Art of Time. TTh 4.00-5.15

Steven Shoemaker

Time is a problem.  Even in common parlance it attracts a rich set of metaphors, all signaling our obsession with the rate at which it moves:  Time “races” when we wish we could “freeze” it, “crawls” when we wish it would “fly.”  Reminding us of the old maxim “time is money,” business gurus want to tell us how to “manage” it, while gurus of the religious sort offer the hope that it can be “transcended.”  Even so, we’re not really quite sure what “it” is.  Physicists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, philosophers like Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, and artists from Shakespeare to Marcel Proust  have all tried to penetrate the enigma.  This course will suggest that the urge to investigate—and intervene in–the dilemma of time is a basic force driving the creation of art, literature, philosophy, and science.  As we explore the human experience of time, we will examine the problem of mortality, the mysteries of memory, the malleable nature of subjective time, and the way our understanding of time is influenced by technological and cultural factors.  As the course concludes, students will reflect on how they navigate the challenge of living in time and consider how our relationship with time shapes who we are and what we do.

31. Fashioning the Self. MW 9.00-10.15

Imani Tucker

In Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle writes that “[the] Body and the Cloth are the site and material whereon [the] beautified edifice of a Person is to be built.” Whether one puts as much emphasis on the significance of clothing as Carlyle or not, getting dressed is an unavoidable part of our lives, and we deal with this fact in ways ranging from the utilitarian to the artistic and expressive. In this course, we’ll investigate this link between clothing and subjectivity, thinking about the meaning we give to the clothes we wear and the relationship between fashion and self-fashioning. How and why is clothing meaningful? Can we read clothing as a kind of text written on the body? What is “personal” about personal style? How is personal style subject to or influenced by larger discourses and cultural systems like race, class, gender, and age? In this course, students can expect to encounter a variety of texts ranging from the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes to films like Paris is Burning and The Devil Wears Prada in the hopes of finding some unifying threads between the complex composition of the self and the clothing we all wear.

32. Presence, Mindfulness, and Belonging. 

Helen Yang

With the explosion of information made available through instant and constant connectivity to some nebulous ‘elsewhere,’ presence has become both elusive and at the same time, much needed and desired. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” What does it mean to be present, and how do we experience it—individually, through various social and intimate relationships, and in nature?

Whether it is experienced in the form of attention and translated into something of a currency (Michael H. Goldhaber remarked that the global economy would increasingly run on human attention), or it is experienced as something sacred and ineffable, presence offers a dynamic look into how we define success and fulfillment, experience meaningful relationships (with other humans and the nonhuman world), and understand our sense of belonging.

In this course, we will examine these questions through nature writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Mary Oliver, and Wendell Berry who encouraged readers to cultivate attentiveness and a focus on the present moment in the natural world, authors of popular self-help texts such as Jon Kabat-Zinn and Jack Kornfield, a novel by Ruth Ozeki, as well as various studies from neurobiology and psychology concerning mindfulness.