The instruction style for Summer Session I — which begins May 20 — is in-person. Please check Albert for up-to-date course times.
Summer 2024 Course Offerings
Radical Environmentalisms: Philosophy & Activism for an Imperilled Planet:
Professor Nicole Grimaldi
This course—a reckoning with the environmental crisis that defines our time—considers what political, social, aesthetic, and technological afterlives become available to us when we devote our critical energies to envisioning radical climate futures rather than dwelling on irretrievable pasts. For the purposes of this course, “radical” environmental thought is understood to be invested in initiating significant structural transformations to the political, social, and economic order as it exists to meaningfully respond to the pressing problem of anthropogenic (human-made) climate change. We will take up themes central to contemporary environmental theory and activism, whether perennial or emergent, such as: techno-scientific approaches to climate mitigation; discourses surrounding the Anthropocene; environmental racism and postcolonial environmentalisms; ecological advocacy; environmental policy; posthuman publics; eco-feminisms and queer ecologies; futurist orientations (Afrofuturisms, Indigenous futurisms, cyberpunk, steampunk, solarpunk); the affective dimensions of climate change (eco-anxiety, eco-grief); and the relationship between environmental art and activism. This course will also involve critically reading against the grain of course materials to locate the traces of what one might consider contrary to a “radical” orientation: conservatism, quietism, moderation. We will debate the efficacy and sustainability of specific radical or revolutionary strategies as well as how the relationship between environmental theory and actionable political practice can be cultivated. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, this course will incorporate philosophical texts, public-facing articles, documentaries/films, scientific reports, podcasts, speculative fiction/sci-fi/climate fiction, eco-poetry, and visual art to better engage and imagine environmental futures through a variety of critical and creative resources. The readings are subject to change based on student interests and suggestions.
Ways of Doing Nothing: Unproductivity in Literature and Film
Professor Santiago Ospina Celis
In recent years, we have seen an influx of political manifestos, self-help manuals, university courses, and books for the general reader that decry the spread of what has been dubbed the “productivity culture.” Not without reason, these sources critique the productivist ethos that seems to underlie capitalism—a dominant mandate to be productive at all times, entwining work as a social duty, an ethical obligation, and the core source of meaning in one’s life. The objective of this course is to explore the opposite concept of this ethos, namely unproductivity. What does it mean to be unproductive? What figures and affects show up in scenes of unproductive activity, and what notion of subjectivity emerges from them? Is unproductivity, along with the refusal to work, inherently radical, contributing to the crucial task of envisioning what Kathi Weeks calls “postwork futures”? How is unproductivity incarnated, represented, explored in literature and film? We will pay special attention to the ways in which “unproductivity” becomes a style. We will also be exploring our preconceptions about what it means for a character (and for us) “to do something” or “to do nothing,” why is important that characters (and us) do stuff, and why this action (or inactivity) is dependent on a set of assumptions about what novels and other narrative forms are supposed to do. Additionally, we will examine states where activity comes to a standstill, work is suspended, and an individual is rendered both physically and verbally “unproductive:” confinement, refusal, mystical ectasis, failure, and waiting, among others. We will read works from Melville, Kafka, Mann, Beckett, Woolf, and Moshfeg, but we will also delve into other lesser-known works from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, including novels by Di Benedetto, Lispector, Hilst, El Wardani, and Platonov.
The instruction style for Summer Session II — which begins July 3 — is in-person. Please check Albert for up-to-date course times.
Top Tens, Catalogs, Invent-ories: Fictions of the List
Professor Eesha Kumar
*also open to precollege students
Lists are among our earliest known writings and continue to saturate popular culture in the form of listicles, playlists, menus, and more. In this course we will encounter the list in various guises: as a record of everyday life (as in a shopping list), a bureaucratic tool (as in a census), a technology for information retrieval (as in an index), a form of financial management (as in double-entry bookkeeping) and as a poetic, creative, and artistic form. We will think about the aesthetic and political effects of different kinds of lists, and what lists might teach us about the ways in which we know and experience the world. Although the aim of this course is to provide an expansive overview of the list form, it provides a special foray into literary approaches to lists. We will read literary criticism on the list form (including an essay on the word “and”), and study the role of listing in fictional and poetics accounts of loss and exile, itineraries of travel, attempts at humor/comedy and more. We will ask whether the list might be considered a form of storytelling (and consider its relationship to “narrative”) with an eye to theoretical and philosophical issues (to do with naming and counting) thrown up by a study of lists.
Vampire Theory: Queer and Gothic Figures in Culture, Literature, and History
Professor Sylvia Gorelick
*also open to precollege students
The shifting image of the vampire has captivated culture and haunted minds for over two centuries. The vampire has been used in literature, philosophy, and film to represent the villainy of the ruling class as well as the liberatory power of the oppressed. A social outcast who hunts by night and lives in secret, the vampire has long been associated with queerness, beginning with Sheridan Le Fanu’s 19th-century lesbian vampire novel Carmilla. We will explore queer theories of the vampire including that of Laura Westengard, who views Gothicism and vampirism as resources for processing and understanding queer trauma and marginalization. We will also consider vampiric traditions of feminism, including Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Bruna Fionda’s film The Mark of Lilith, which, in different ways, provide Black feminist readings of the vampire with a view toward liberation. In pop culture, vampires have acted as receptacles of both fear and desire, often at the same time—and always as subjects of fascination. Sometimes identified with a historical person, like Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the 16th-century Hungarian serial killer said to have bathed in the blood of her victims; sometimes figured as a mythical goddess, as in Anne Rice’s book The Queen of the Damned and the film of the same name; and sometimes as an anti-hero (see Dracula), the vampire embodies mystery, horror, and curiosity to this day. From the critical perspective of queer and feminist studies, this course will provide a history of vampires and their role within the collective social imagination from Lord Byron and John Polidori’s novella The Vampyre—conceived in the context of the ghost story competition from which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein emerged—to contemporary pop culture, with TV series like True Blood and First Kill. Throughout the course, we will explore theories of the vampire as a means of understanding modernity, identity, and resistant praxis.
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