“From the modernism you chose you get the postmodernism you deserve.”  David Antin

“If it is art, it is not popular.  And if it is popular, it is not art.”  Arnold Schoenberg.

Texts: In Search of Lost Time—Marcel Proust, 
The Complete Stories—Franz Kafka.

In addition to these primary texts, I will also email assorted essays, including “The Dehumanization of Art” by Jose Ortega Y Gasset, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” by Sigmund Freud, “The Ideology of Marxism” by Georg Lukacs and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Walter Benjamin.   We will also screen Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Le Passion de Jeanne D’Arc, and listen to excerpts from the work of Arnold Schoenberg.  

To begin to discuss even a few of the aesthetic concerns of the period known as Modernism in a single semester is a fool’s game.  With such an explosion of radical formal and intellectual innovation and experimentation, the best we can hope for is to carve out a somewhat manageable slice of pie.  By necessity, we are forced to bracket, defer and ignore some of the most important texts, movements, authors, ideas, experiments, ideologies, technologies, developments, historical happenings etc etc etc of the time.  We are leaving out much more than we are including.  With these discussions, it is highly doubtful we will come to any sort of consensus or resting point.  We will not master these texts as much as try to intelligently submit to them.

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Lot of writing, good amount of reading, workshopping every week, always with an eye toward publication.

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This course is designed to give students time and impetus to generate poetry and discussion of it in an atmosphere at once supportive and critically serious. Enrollment requires admission to the Creative Writing Graduate Program or the instructor's approval of an application manuscript.

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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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This course studies special topics that focus on a theme, genre, or theoretical issue not limited to a specific period or national tradition. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours.

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This graduate seminar will investigate the production, circulation, and translation of 20th- and 21st- century Afro-diasporic cultures that track the Middle Passage and traverse Africa, Europe and the Americas. Taking a cultural materialist approach to literature, visual arts including film, and music, we will think about these works less as finished products than in terms of their movement, exchange, and translation within transnational circuits. Through this lens, we will take up questions of how the histories and losses of the Black Atlantic shift boundaries between persons, spirits, things, and animals; what archives and methods re-member these histories and losses; what political, civic, legal, and disciplinary sites produce Black Atlantic subjects and subjections; and how queer, feminist, immigrant, and indigenous relations forge new Afro-diasporic ontologies, politics, and collectivities.

Course Requirements: Midterm short paper (8-10 pages), presentation, and longer seminar paper, written in stages. Authors may include: Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison, CLR James, Zadie Smith, Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, Sylvia Wynter, Nnedi Okorafor, Alice Childress, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, and others.

MA-Lit Course Designation: C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), Multicultural/ Postcolonial, Literature After 1800

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This course has two goals—to introduce you to Mexican and Latino cultural forms and theory, mostly literary, from the 18^th to the 21^stcentury.  The second is to explore theories of information and New Realist studies, specifically, Ferraris’ theories of documentality, in order to explore the how Mexicans have engaged and been constituted by discourses of un/documentality.  Learning the theory and practice of what I am calling “un/documentality,” we will engage how “acts” across historical, political and aesthetic boundaries constitute and remake an un/documented self.  In doing so, we will juxtapose myriad cultural forms, mainly print narratives and some film, in order to chart the complicated ways in which Mexicans have expressed themselves in the US. Along the way, we will also locate important liminal moments in Latin@ literary, political, cinematic and cultural history.  By the end of the course, I hope we will have a strong grasp of Mexican film, letters, history and the political, gendered, and racial formation of Mexicans and Latinos/as in the US.

MA-Lit Course Designation: B (Technologies/ Epistemologies), C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories), Multicultural/ Postcolonial

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This course focuses on the role played by the intersection of commerce and culture in the creation of a global imaginary in the long eighteenth century. In particular, we shall study the feedback loop that obtained between financial capitalism and joint-stock companies like the South Sea, Mississippi, and East India Companies on the one hand and the worldwide movements of people, things, and discursive and visual practices on the other.

We shall analyze a broad range of texts and objects, including prose narratives, poems, plays, essays, letters, paintings, prints, places, and things associated with movements of people and goods within Britain and between Britain, other European powers, the Ottoman Empire, the Americas, Africa, the Indian Ocean, India, China, and the South Pacific.

Sub-topics include:

• The role played by trading and joint-stock companies in turning the British and European eighteenth century into a global era marked by European expansion and multi-directional encounters;
• The construction of Britishness through competition with other European powers in and outside Europe;
• The ever increasing role played by colonialism and the enslavement of people in the creation of Britain’s self-definition as a free, polite, and
• commercial people;
• The impact of globalization on taste, aesthetics, and the culture of sensibility and sentiment;
• The gendering of the economy, credit, and colonial power;
• Proto-environmental concerns in depictions of the natural world and domesticated landscapes;
• Economic thought and moral sentiments;
• The founding of New Orleans in 1718;
• Globalism versus universalism (or global commerce and universal rights);
• The respective roles of texts and images.

Works by such authors and artists as Aphra Behn, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Maria Sibylla Merian, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Abbé Prévost, Jonathan Swift, Bernard Mandeville, Montesquieu, William Hogarth, Mirza Sheikh I’tsesamuddin, Denis Diderot, Maria Edgeworth, Anna Seward, Ignatius Sancho, George Robertson, James Gillray, William Blake, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

If you would like to see an advance copy of the syllabus or have questions about the course, feel free to contact Professor Labio at labio@colorado.edu.

MA-Lit Course Designation: D (Cultures/Politics/Histories), Literature Before 1800

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We will be exploring the rich and varied poetry of what has come to be called the romantic period. While over the course of the nineteenth century, critics arrived at some consensus about what romantic poetry was and who the romantic poets were, at the time the nature of poetry was very much up for debate. The writers we now consider the major poets of the period were, with the exception of Byron, not the best selling writers of the era. While the canon of romanticism came to limited to six male poets, at the time many women poets helped shape the landscape of poetry. There was no monolithic notion of Romantic Poetry but instead diverse writers and rival theories of poetry.  In order to understand the various ways in which poetry existed in the romantic period, we will focus on the opposition between the so-called Lake School (centrally, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) and the group labeled the Cockney School (Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Hunt among others).  We will also be examining other poets who define the context within which these poets wrote, so we will examine, for example, how Charlotte Smith shaped Wordsworth’s poetry but was never considered part of the same school or how Hemans wrote in competition with and criticism of poets such as Byron and Shelley. Our goal will be to understand some of the great poetry of the period but also grasp the ways in which literature was created and organized within rival communities.

MA-Lit Course Designation: Poetry Intensive, Literature After 1800, A (Formalisms), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

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The plays that survive from the Middle Ages were written for street performances, services in churches and monasteries, entertainment in great halls and outdoor stages, but never for theaters as such. As games and/or worship more so than texts per se, these plays require as much an anthropological as a purely literary approach:  when medieval people performed or attended performances what were they doing, thinking, and feeling? In this course, we will explore the great variety of these performances: cycle plays about biblical history, the so-called morality plays about how to be saved, liturgical plays celebrating important Christian holidays, plays about saints and miracles, and town pageants. To aid in this exploration, we will read theories of ritual, drama, and performance by Catherine Bell, Victor Turner, Bertolt Brecht, and Augusto Boal, among others. Even as we make use of the critical categories we’ve inherited or borrowed, we will question the extent of their usefulness and our own preconceptions about what drama should or shouldn’t be. As an introductory level graduate course, this course assumes no previous knowledge of medieval literature, and we will spend time discussing the expectations for what graduate study of this period/ literature looks like.

MA-Lit Course Designation: A (Formalisms), Literature Before 1800

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