Una Chung

This course provides an introduction to the diverse field of literary theory. The elusive question—What is literature?—has been addressed in widely differently ways by linguists, historians, philosophers, writers, psychoanalysts, hackers, revolutionaries, and so on, and in different times and places. The concept of literature has at times been substituted by other words, such as text, writing, sign, machine, affect, performance, and network, to name a few, which necessarily require changes in our understanding of related concepts, such as author, audience, and context. We will explore experimental approaches to the writing of criticism as a part of our study of literary theory.

Fernando Pessoa wrote, “Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.” This intriguing insight into the nature of travel offers the starting point for an exploration of a diverse selection of modern and contemporary literature. We will explore travel literature as a site for documentation and transformation of personal and collective experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will also make our own forays into travel writing with weekly field notebook exercises, involving disciplined training in practices of perception, studies of terrain, note-taking and creative nonfiction writing. Major topics of the course include exile, memory, migration, fantasy, ruins, mapping, dislocation, borders, bardo. Authors may include W.G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Christa Wolf, William Gardner Smith, Antal Szerb, E.M. Forster, Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Bhanu Kapil, Ocean Vuong, Cristina Rivera Garza, Samanta Schweblin, Yoko Tawada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Robert Macfarlane, Saidiya Hartman, Han Kang, among others. This course will have biweekly conferences; for students in a first-year cohort, weekly conferences will be held in the first 6 weeks of the fall semester.

This cultural-studies course offers the opportunity to study the nature of aesthetic experience within an Eastern philosophical framework. In particular, feminist, queer, and postcolonial thinkers offer prescient points of cultural translation for Taoist and Buddhist practices in the contemporary context—which this course posits is a world shaped by globalization, social movements, visual culture, and digital media. We will read selections of key works within contemporary critical theory, while assembling individual archives of sound, image, and text to explore in writing and conversation. Students are invited to inhabit the figure of the cultural critic in experimental ways by engaging diverse modes of Eastern and Western praxes. The format of this course balances short lectures, seminar-style discussions, small-group projects, and individual portfolios of writing and/or multisensorial media production.

Fernando Pessoa wrote, “Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.” This intriguing insight into the nature of travel offers the starting point for an exploration of a diverse selection of contemporary literature. We will also make our own forays into travel writing with weekly field notebook exercises and creative nonfiction essays about place, movement, journey. As a part of conference work, students will work in small groups on individual or collaborative projects. Major topics of the course include ethnography, tourism, psychogeography, postcolonial histories, translation, migration, exile, memory. Authors may include: Christa Wolf, Helene Cixous, Jamaica Kincaid, Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, W. G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, Bhanu Kapil, Ocean Vuong, Cristina Rivera Garza, Yoko Tawaka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ayad Akhtar, Robert Macfarlane, and others.

Fernando Pessoa wrote, “Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.” This intriguing insight into the nature of travel offers the starting point for an exploration of a diverse selection of literature from the late 19th to 21st centuries. We will also make our own forays into travel writing with a series of experiments, or exercises, in writing about place, movement, journey. As a part of conference work, students will work in small groups on collective projects. The course has been organized into the following sections: (1) Ethnography and Travel; (2) Documenting Society in Crisis; (3) Race, Postcolonialism, and Queer Affiliations; (4) Exile and Memory; (5) Shifting Borders; (6) Peripheries. Authors may include: Mary Kingsley, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fernando Pessoa, Franz Kafka, Antal Szerb, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Sidiya Hartman, Henri Michaux, Helene Cixous, Christa Wolf, Bruce Chatwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Americo Paredes, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje, W.G. Sebald, Jose Saramago, Orhan Pamuk, Pankaj Mishra, Dai Sijie, Ocean Vuong, Cristina Rivera Garza, Yoko Tawaka, Chimamanda Ngozi Dichie, and Robert Macfarlane. This course will have biweekly conferences, with additional group conference meetings on most alternate weeks.

This cultural-studies course offers the opportunity to study the nature of aesthetic experience within an Eastern philosophical framework. In particular, feminist, queer, and postcolonial thinkers offer prescient points of cultural translation for Taoist and Buddhist practices in the contemporary context, which this course posits is a world shaped by globalization, social movements, visual culture, and digital media. We will read paired samplings of texts in contemporary critical theory and Eastern philosophy/spirituality while assembling our own archive of sound, image, and text to explore in writing and conversation. Students are invited to inhabit the figure of the cultural critic in experimental ways by engaging diverse modes of Eastern and Western praxes. The format of this course balances short lectures, seminar-style discussions, small-group projects, and individual portfolios of writing and/or multisensorial media production.

It is often in the realm of fantasy, speculative fiction, experimental writing, or the humble notebook that writers chart a path of escape out of foreclosed futures. These are stories that directly address the limits of our ability to know, observe, or believe the many claims of so-called reality. When statements of fact become obstacles to social change, or when political exigencies occlude alternative possibilities for the future, or when mere accuracies drain us of our living vitality, there are certain kinds of stories that can take us on a detour into a more vivid sense of truth. The time-knot responds to the dead-end by diagramming new ways of envisioning space, movement, causality, interdependence, mutation, and evolution. Discussions of literature will be supplemented by a selection of theoretical texts that offer useful terms for conceptualizing how literary form might escape closure; for example, the time-knot, mimetic faculty, fugitive pose, indigenous storytelling, undercommons, pedagogies of crossing, nomadic subjectivity, virtual, and finitude. Authors will include Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gerald Vizenor, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Francois Jullien, Naoki Sakai, Patricia Clough, M. Jacqui Alexander, Fred Moten, Eve Tuck, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Discussions of literature will be accompanied by a series of weekly short-form writing experiments that will invite students to work practically and creatively with the concepts and literary tropes of the course. Primary literature will include: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, Octavia Butler’s Dawn, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum, Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe, Tommy Orange’s There There, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, Can Xue’s Frontier, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, Karen An-hwei Lee’s The Maze of Transparencies, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, David Hinton’s Existence: A Story, Han Kang’s The White Book, Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, Joan Didion’s Notes to John, and Annie Ernaux’s The Years.

This course explores a small selection of contemporary films (1990s to the present) from South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Thailand. Despite the regional organization of films and the continued importance of national histories, our discussions will tend to emphasize transnationalism, intertextuality, and the global circulation of media. Our venture will be to explore emergent troves of myth, fable, fantasy, image, and meme, as they form new imaginariums of cultures evolving with globalizing economies. We will watch two or three films per week, with an accompanying selection of supplementary critical readings.

This course explores writing practices based on principles of Eastern philosophy in dialogue with contemporary critical theory (feminist, queer, postcolonial). The fall semester will focus on relations of space (travel, migration, place, culture, identity), with an emphasis on change, impermanence, and the central notion of bardo. (Readings may include: Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Undercommons, Caliban and the Witch, Wild Things, Transcending Madness, Natural Liberation.) The spring semester will focus on perception of objects (subject, object, contact, sensation, sense, sign, image, affect), as they appear, move, dissolve, transform. (Readings may include: Cinema I and II, Empire of Signs, Unthought: Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Cybernetic Brain, Writing-Machines, Notes on Gesture, Pleasure of the Text, Image Music Text, Practical Philosophy, Everyday Consciousness and Primordial Awareness, Myth of Freedom, Existence: A Story). The course approaches writing not through literary genres or histories but, rather, through a series of experiments that investigate the nature of mind, self, experience, world. We will explore writing as a time-based medium not only for recording but also for directly perceiving movements of the mind. Working with images, sense perceptions, emotions, concepts, dreams, and other mental formations, we will explore ways of writing not based primarily on realist narration. Diverging from familiar literary chronotopes, we will assemble our own tropes of bodies, movements, gestures, signs, and intervals of time and space. We will also explore how to incorporate experimental writing into other genres, such as art criticism, travelogue, ethnography, memoir, and fantasy—as well as into other media, such as photography, video, and other visual and performance arts. Students will be asked to establish a regular (preferably daily) practice of writing and to sustain consistent engagement with practice-oriented writing projects. We will take several field trips and many local excursions during the year. Students will compile archives of their own multimodal compositions throughout the course, which will be showcased in a group festival at the end of the year.

This course asks a simple question: What happens to sex and gender when we travel? We will explore a few of the many causes of transnational movement—immigration, war, political exile, work, education—as they appear in literature, film, and art. These primary cultural sources will provide rich sensory details about such migrations from the perspective of embodied experience. By working with artists’ texts and images, we will not be collecting data about gendered bodies and sexualities; instead, we will develop analytical tools for understanding how bodily experience is captured in language and how that language is used to make decisions about bodies in society. In a nutshell, gender never travels whole and intact across any border. Gender is a part of the force of territorialization. At the same time, the inherent power (or volatility) of the sign of gender has allowed it to animate diverse insurrectionary movements, both social and artistic. In particular, we will work through an assemblage of material, focusing on three transnational sites that pass significantly through South/East Asia, Middle East/North Africa, and US/Europe. This is a writing-intensive course, which will cover different forms of writing—from the short and explosive to the long and thorough.