The Modernist Object 

Readers have traditionally prioritized human characters in literature, finding in those figures a correlative for our own experience of the world. In doing so they have affirmed a subject/object binary in which people exercise varying degrees of control over an allegedly inert material world. However, recent work in literary and cultural studies, philosophy, sociology and anthropology has worked to trouble this opposition. In complex and intriguing ways, contemporary “thing theory” and associated schools of thought have suggested that objects act and constitute human subjects in ways we have only begun to recognize. This course will introduce students to some of the core theoretical arguments in the multidisciplinary field of object studies. We will also read a selection of short stories and four novels published in Britain during the interwar period that feature compelling, strange, or disturbing objects. Among our questions will be: what is the correlation between objects and sensation? How do we apprehend things? What happens to objects in the absence of a human observer? Under what circumstances might objects become more important than people?

Students will post weekly to Canvas, give two oral presentations, and write one seminar paper which we will workshop at the end of the semester. Required texts (in addition to a course reader that I will compile): Candlin and Guins, The Object Reader; Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex; Jean Rhys, Good Morning Midnight; Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca.

Studies special topics that focus on a theme, genre, or theoretical issue not limited to a specific period or national tradition. Topics vary each semester.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to English (ENGL) and English Lit- Creative Writing (CRWR) graduate students only.
Additional Information:Departmental Category: Graduate Courses

Taught by Jane Garrity.

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Positioning itself at the crossroads of contemporary literature, geography, and new materialist philosophies, this course will explore how American millennial fictions map and navigate, construct and alter, inhabit and evacuate spacetime; and in tandem it will consider how theoretical texts on space and time (re)conceptualize these categories. In the wake of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene (in which the divisions between nature and culture, human and extra-human scales have been destabilized) we will grapple with the emergent spacetime of “postnature”—a category that considers the escalating contamination, homogenization, and mediation of the natural, often through posthumanist and post-anthropocentric lenses. Beginning with the premise that posthumanist theory sees itself as a philosophical corrective to poststructuralism’s overemphasis on language (to the exclusion of pressing political, environmental, and ethical considerations), we will consider the degree to which American millennial fictions are responsive to such concerns as we investigate literal and imaginative spacetimes and the ways they inevitably overlap. We will ask how millennial novels approach these representational challenges, from the largest planetary scales to the tiniest (contradictory) scales of living bodies, from the attenuated gradualism of slow violence to the instantaneity of events. We will also take account of the “spacetime of the text” and the ways it shapes, echoes, and contradicts its internal depictions of spacetime. We will read a selection of the following: Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985); Robert Coover, Pinocchio in Venice (1991); William T. Vollmann, The Atlas (1996); Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (1997); Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (1997); Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000); Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead (2002); Percival Everett, Watershed (2003); and Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005).

MA-Lit Course Designation: Literature After 1800, A (Formalisms), B (Technologies/Epistemologies)

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Ready to travel the Spaceways? Our propulsion system will be Afrofuturism, the contemporary cultural movement driven by “African American voices” with “other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come.”  We’ll begin with theoretical readings (Rammellzee, Kodwo Eshun, Fred Moten, Ytasha Womack), then explore its Caribbean heritage in the practice of marronage, the work of Marcus Garvey, and the wisdom of Rastafari and roots reggae. We’ll turn to Sun Ra’s poetry and prose for a blueprint for better worlds to come. But our main aim will be to survey the extraordinary output of Afrofuturism across a variety of genres: fiction (Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor), film (Space is the Place, The Last Angel of History, Black Panther), visual arts (Jack Kirby, Joshua Mays, Krista Franklin, Wangechi Mutu), and of course music (from Sun Ra to the Art Ensemble of Chicago to George Clinton to Deltron 3030 to Heiroglyphic Being to Flying Lotus to Janelle Monáe to Mbongwana Star to...). Requirements include a presentation on Afrofuturist art, a long paper or equivalent project, and several short critical writings.

MA-Lit Course Designation: A (Formalisms), C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories), Multicultural/Postcolonial Literature

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