Independent Study
AS.060.800 (01)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/5

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (02)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Achinstein, Sharon
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/5

Journal Club
AS.060.696 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5

On the Difficulty of Saying I
AS.213.639 (01)

This course takes as its point of departure the position that language carries within it the traces of something that exceeds the cognitive grasp of the subject and to this extent undoes any claim to knowledge the subject might make. This position has been central to twentieth and twenty-first century thought from psychoanalysis and poststructuralism to media theory and new materialism. This course will not take issue with this position. It will examine instead how this position evolved from the Idealism of Fichte to the eerily inhuman, if not mechanical, talking figures in texts by Novalis (“Monolog”), Poe (“Maelzel’s Chess Player”), Hoffmann (“Die Automate”), Büchner (Leonce und Lena), and Kafka (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”). We will explore the literature of the personal and impersonal in romantic and modernist texts in order to ask what moves and motivates works in which the first-person narrator would seem to be nothing more than a fiction—a staged phenomenon or a mechanical device.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: F 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Tobias, Rochelle
• Room: Gilman 443
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15

Individual Work
AS.060.893 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/30

Fiction and Doubt After 1888
AS.060.607 (01)

Examines the interrelation between fiction and doubt since the late nineteenth century. Authors may include Ward, Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, Stevens, Woolf, Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Ishmael Reed, Sefi Atta, R. O. Kwon.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: T 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mao, Douglas
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/8

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (03)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Daniel, Andrew
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/5

Independent Reading
AS.060.894 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Thompson, Mark C
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/10

Sentimental Reasons
AS.060.619 (01)

Recent work in cognitive approaches to literature have led critics to return to the sentimental novel of the eighteenth-century as a “laboratory,” in Daniel Goss’s words, for the investigation of human emotion. There is no easy “fit” between these literary narratives and the narratives of cognitive science, nor between them and the regnant moral philosophy of the age (built upon the mechanism of human sympathy or upon “nervous” association). There is rather a discomfort that reveals social inequities as well as alternative possibilities for both thinking and feeling. The sentimental mode took hold in the circuits of the Atlantic world. This course will study several sentimental narratives that traveled promiscuously through those circuits: Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling; Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; Williams’ Peru; and Brown’s The Power of Sympathy. Alongside these works we will read studies by critics working the seams between affect and cognition, philosophy and literature, rhetoric and science. The course will provide a broad history of the sentimental mode, stretching to reflections on the links between the sentimental and the melodramatic. It will simultaneously attend to the experience of reading for sentiment, to forms of feeling and what those feelings know.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: M 1:00PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Favret, Mary
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/8

The History of the Book
AS.060.629 (01)

The course will account for the major transformations in the media used for writing from the scroll to the web as well as the rich account of this history and its theorizations.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: W 12:00PM - 3:00PM
• Instructor: Cannon, Christopher
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10

What is a Person? Humans, Corporations, Robots, Trees.
AS.300.618 (01)

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course investigates recent debates about being a person in literature and law. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Although our explorations will be focused on these questions, the genre of materials examined will be wide-ranging (including legal essays, philosophy, contemporary novels, and film). Texts will include novels by William Gibson and Lydia Millet, essays by John Dewey and Daniel Dennett, and films such as Ex Machinaand Her.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Siraganian, Lisa Michele
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10