Students are required to obtain the Kraus, NourbeSe Philip, Riley, and McGuire (either by buying or borrowing - or in the case of the Riley - streaming them). Books can be read in either print or e-book.

Students might also benefit from using the two critical companions, below, which can be purchased in hard copy or downloaded as e-copies via the library:

David Lodge and Nigel Wood,Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader3rd Ed., Routledge, 2013.

Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth and Imre Szeman,Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: the Johns Hopkins Guide,Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

Term 1

Week 1: Introduction to the course (Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson)

Unit I: Narrative

*** Text to read over the summer for this unit, Chris KrausI Love Dick***

You might also find the following texts useful as they provide a historical background about two key contexts of the novel, the US-backed civil wars in Guatemala and the rapid gentrification and New York in the 1990s.

Greg Grandin,The last colonial massacre: Latin America in the Cold War,University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, "The fine art of gentrification,"OctoberVol. 31 (1984), 91-111.

Week 2: Structuralism and Structural Linguistics (Dr. Nick Lawrence)

Ferdinand de Saussure, 'The Object of Linguistics' and 'Nature of the Linguistic Sign' and 'Linguistic Value' Course in General Linguistics.Translated by Wade Baskin, Columbia University Press, 2011 [1916], pp. 7-17; pp 65-70; pp 111-122.

Roman Jakobson, 'Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,'Language in Literature.Edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, Harvard University Press, 1987 [1941], pp 96-114.

Week 3: Historical Materialism (Dr. Nick Lawrence)

Karl Marx, excerpt from 'The German Ideology,'Modern Criticism and Theory,Edited byDavid Lodge and Nigel Wood, Routledge 2014 [1845], pp. 31-41.

Raymond Williams, 'Literature,'Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1978.

Week 4: Psychoanalysis (and Structuralism redux) (Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson)

Sigmund Freud, 'The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream,'The Interpretation of Dreams.Translated from the German and edited by James Strachey, Basic Books, 2010 [1899], pp. 121-145.

Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,' (excerpted)Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.Translated from the French by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Books, 2001 [1970], pp.107-126.

Week 5: Feminism (Dr. Abida Younas, and a visit from our subject librarian, Sarah Akhtaruzzaman)

Helene Cixous, 'Laugh of the Medusa,'Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4, Summer, 1976, pp. 875-893.

Juliet Jacques, 'Écriture trans-féminine?'Mal,Vol. 1, November 2018.

Audre Lorde, 'Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power' 1978.

Suggested Further Reading:

Unit II: Poetics

Week 7: Comparative Poetry (Dr. Jonathan Skinner)

Mahmood Darwish 'Sonnet V'; W.B. Yeats 'No Second Troy'; Lorna Goodison 'Mother, the Great Stones Got To Move'

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, 'Poetry as a Way of Saying,' Understanding Poetry, Holt Rinehart and Winston; 4th edition, 1976 [1938], pp. 1-16.

Week 8: Comparative Poetics (Dr. Jonathan Skinner)

Adonis, 'Poetics and Modernity,'An Introduction to Arab Poetics. Translated by Catherine Cobham, Sake, 2003 [1984], pp. 87-122.

Édouard Glissant, 'For Opacity,'Poetics of Relation.Translated by Betsy Wing, University of Minnesota Press, 1990, pp. 189-194.

Audre Lorde, 'Poetry is Not a Luxury,'Sister Outsider,Penguin Books, 1984.

Week 9: Contemporary Poetics I (Dr. Emily McGiffin)

M. NourbeSe Philip,Zong!,Wesleyan University Press, 2011
Christina Sharpe,In the Wake

Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”

Week 10:Poetics of Breath(Dr. Mae Losasso)

Nathaniel Mackey, 'Breath and Precarity, The Inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics,'Poetics and Precarity, ed. Myung Mi Kim and Cristanne Miller, Albany, SUNY Press, 2018. pp 1-30.

Charles Olson, 'Projective Verse' (1950)

Term 2

Unit III: Performance

*** Text to be read alongside material for weeks 1-3: Saadallah Wannous,Soiree for the 5th of June***

The following excerpt from Suzanne Kassab's chapter 'Critique After the 1967 Defeat' (Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective,Columbia University Press, 2010. pp 48-65) provides an excellent introduction to both the author’s work as well as the larger context, namely, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and its reverberations for Syrian society and the Arab World more broadly. If you're interested in learning more about the 1967 war and its relevance to the current Gaza war, you might find this recentPolitics, Theory, Otherpodcast featuring Leila Farsakh useful. The podcast is available here: https://soundcloud.com/poltheoryother/1973war.

Week 1: Semiotics of Theatre (Dr. Stephen Purcell)

Ric Knowles, 'Introduction' and 'Chapter 2: Theatre,'How Theatre Means,Palgrave Press, 2014, pp.1-10; 43-80.

Week 2: Modernist Approaches to Theatre (Dr. Matt Franks)

Antonin Artaud, 'The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto,'The Theatre and Its Double.Translated by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, 1958 [1938], pp. 89-100.

Week 3: Theatre and Social Change (Dr. Stephen Purcell)

Augusto Boal, 'Preface to the 1974 Edition' and 'Poetics of the Oppressed,'Theatre of the Oppressed,Pluto Press, 2008 [1970], pp. 95-135.

Suggested further reading:

Saadallah Wannous, 'Manifestos for a New Arab Theatre,'Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics39, 2019, pp. 190-227.

Week 4: Gender and Performativity (Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson)

Judith Butler, 'Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,'Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Dec., 1988), 519-531.

Sylvia Federici, 'Wages Against Housework,' Falling Wall Press, 1975, pp. 1-8.

To watch: Martha Rosler, 'Semiotics of the Kitchen,' (1975) and Aisha Mizra, 'Fuck Me or Destroy Me, feat Haraam Kaur' (2017).

Suggested further reading:

Julia Serrano, 'Introduction' and 'Putting the Femme Back in Feminism,'Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,Seal Press, 2016 and 'Julia Serrano on Judith Butler' (2015)

Jules Joanne Gleeson, 'Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics,'Viewpoint Magazine,2017.

Week 5: Performance and Racialisation (Dr. Christine Emmett)

To read: Frantz Fanon, 'The Fact of Blackness,'Black Skin White Masks.Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press [1952], pp. 82-108.

To watch: Boots Riley,I'm a Virgo, Amazon Prime, 2023.

Unit IV: Image

Week 7: Photography (Dr. Alírio Karina)

Chris Pinney's "The Parallel Histories of Photography and Anthropology"

Suggested Reading

Mireille Miller Young, "Exotic/Erotic/Ethnopornographic,"Ethnopornography

Okwui Enwezor, "Reframing the black subject ideology and fantasy in contemporary South African representation."

Third Text, 11.40, 21–40.

Malek Alloula,The Colonial Harem,Manchester University Press, 1987.

Week 8: Spectacle (Dr. Christine Emmett)

To read: Guy Debord, 'Separation Perfected,'Society of the Spectacle.Translated by Black & Red, Radical America, 1970 [1967]), Paragraphs 1-35.

To watch: Xin Xin, 'Foxconn.tv' (excerpt, 2015)

Culture Jammed ipod ads

Week 9: Graphic (TBD)

Richard McGuire, Here,Pantheon Books, 2014 [1989].

Andreas Malm, 'Introduction: Theory for the Warming Condition,'The Progress of This Storm: on society and nature in a warming world,Verso, 2018, pp. 7-20.

Roy Scranton, 'Introduction: Coming Home,'Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: reflections on the end of a civilisation,City Lights Press, 2015, pp. 8-14.

David Farrier and Aeon, 'How the Concept of Deep Time is Changing,'The Atlantic,October 31, 2016.

Week 10: TBD