“Present Tense: Fiction for Our Time” WR151, Spring 2022
Course Description: Our contemporary moment has been marked by various crises: the pandemic, the climate emergency, the migration crisis, widening economic disparities, rising nationalist extremism, and racial inequalities and police violence. These crises have combined to create a present of profound uncertainty and growing unrest. To better understand this present moment, as well as our potential futures, this course will look to the crucial work done by literary fiction writers of the last decade who anticipate, respond to, or reimagine the social, economic, and environmental challenges of our time. Authors include, but are not limited to, Mohsin Hamid, Ling Ma, Colson Whitehead, and Jenny Offill. Our approaches to literary works and to our own writing will be critical and creative. We will hone our academic writing and reading skills through classroom discussions and collaborative composition exercises. We will also spend time crafting creative projects that engage our contemporary moment in genres and forms other than conventional academic essays, including our final podcast assignment.
“Under Construction: Infrastructure and Culture” WR150, Spring 2021
Course Description: Although we are often encouraged to write what we know, the best research writing is motivated by our interest in the unknown: What do we want to discover, how can we discover it, and what are the most effective ways to communicate our discoveries? These questions will drive our work in WR 150. Building on WR 120 or its equivalent, this class will help you cultivate your writing and research skills through a range of assignments, including a scholarly research essay in which you will be responsible for identifying and refining a topic, devising research questions, and answering those questions by finding and using a range of scholarly and non-scholarly sources. You will also translate your academic writing into genres targeted at different audiences. These experiences will help you practice and better understand the ways information is produced, disseminated, and used today. The specific topic of this section is “Infrastructure and Culture.”
The term infrastructure refers to collectively engineered systems—transportation systems (roads, railways, ports), energy systems (pipelines, power plants, hydroelectric dams), communications systems (telephone lines, internet connections), and water and waste systems (sewers, aqueducts, treatment plants). These are the systems, the cogs and wheels, that facilitate the movements and workings of the modern world. When these systems are working well, we often take them for granted; they become no more than an invisible backdrop to the daily drama of modern life. However, underlying these systems are the political questions of access, provision, and entitlement—where they are, who has access to them, who takes care of them, and who is forced to live without them. To think through these questions, this course surveys a variety of forms of infrastructure from critical, creative, and cultural perspectives.
“Reconsidering Infrastructure Through the Arts” WR120, Fall 2020
Course Description: The First-Year Writing Seminar will help you cultivate skills and habits of mind essential to your academic success and to your future personal, professional, and civic life. Writing is a way not only to express what you have to say but also to discover and evaluate it. You will write a great deal at BU and beyond, and each occasion will present you with a range of questions: Who is my audience, and what kind of writing does the occasion call for? How should I structure my writing to engage, inform, persuade, and perhaps even entertain my audience? How can I judge sources wisely and use them effectively and responsibly? How can I clearly express my ideas? In this class we will review general principles about how to address such questions, and we will put those principles into practice as we read, talk, and write about our topic: “Reconsidering Infrastructure Through the Arts.”
So much depends on infrastructure. Roads and railways provide spaces for transportation. Water systems provide easier access to water and waste drainage. Electrical grids provide power for nearly everything. However, when infrastructures are working well, we tend to take them for granted as an invisible backdrop to the daily drama of modern life. In this course, we will consider a variety of artworks that take up this issue of (in)visibility in order to answer questions about the physical and digital infrastructures that make up our world—where they are, who has access to them, who takes care of them, who is forced to live without them, and what communities form because of them. We will examine contemporary literary texts, films, and public art installations. Authors and artists include Colson Whitehead, Karen Tei Yamashita, Bong Joon-ho, and Mohsin Hamid.
“Introduction to Fiction: A Global Perspective” EN 141, Spring 2019
Course Description: This course will employ a global perspective to investigate the relationship between two elements essential to fictional narratives: character and setting. Although seemingly simple, the concepts of literary character and setting contribute to our growing understanding of identity formation in particular places. We will attempt to understand literary characters through the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in different historical and (trans)national settings. Setting is more than just the physical environment in which the action of a narrative takes place; it also involves the messy interactions between politics, capital, culture, and history, all of which impact identity formation and all of which take on new meanings during globalization. The scope and structure of setting can vary widely, from multiple nations across a century, to the specific streets of Dublin in 1904, showing how even the most localized of lives are affected by worldwide movements. By paying special attention to geographically diverse narratives, we will explore how identities form through the shifting terrains of place, proximity, and position in an increasingly globalized world. The course will employ a comparative transnational framework that partners texts by canonical modernists with texts by writers from the Global South—Joseph Conrad and Tayeb Salih, James Joyce and V.S. Naipaul, William Faulkner and Juan Rulfo.
“Literature for the Long Emergency” EN 120, Fall 2018
Course Description: Chemical spills. Hurricanes. Market Crashes. Hardly a day goes by without news of an environmental or economic disaster. Yet, “catastrophic” situations are not singular events; they emerge from longer historical processes of capitalism and environmental degradation. Even more, they often force human populations into small and large-scale migration, with populations moving from one part of a region to another, or from one nation to another. To situate disasters in their deeper histories, this course will focus on literary works that anticipate, respond to, and/or take place during periods of crisis and catastrophe. What are the social and political causes and consequences of catastrophes? What migration patterns emerge during and after, and what difficulties do these migrants/refugees face? What types of communities form in times of crisis? How are the distinctions between normalcy and emergency connected to political rhetoric and policy? This course will contain a diverse selection of texts across the 20th and 21st centuries. Writers include William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, Mine Okubo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Moshin Hamid, and Emily St. John Mandel.
“Who Tells Your Story: Historical Narrative and Popular Culture in Hamilton, An American Musical” WR150, Spring 2018
Course Description: This course considers the intersections between historical narratives, public memory, and popular culture through a sustained engagement with Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, investigating the ways in which history is transmitted, adapted, transformed, and/or mythologized through different narrative and cultural forms. The purpose of this course is to develop critical reading, listening, and writing skills through close analyses of the intersections of race, gender, and class found in Hamilton and its past and present historical contexts. In addition to the musical itself, this course will feature primary historical documents and excerpts from Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, as well as close studies of the musical genres Miranda employs throughout the musical—namely, hip-hop and musical theater. This course is designed in such a way that students may participate fully regardless of the level of their prior musical or historical knowledge and experience.
“The Resistance Mix-Tape: Music and Politics” WR100, Fall 2017
Course Description: This course considers music as a radical political tool, investigating how music actively participates in and shapes our culture, offering modes of resistance to regimes of power. The purpose of this course is to develop critical reading, listening, and writing skills through close analyses of the intersections of race, gender, and class in popular music. Guided by a different genre of music each week (from early 20th Century folk to contemporary hip-hop), we will listen to politically resonant songs that are not only representative of their genres, but also their historical contexts. For example, our musical range will span from the pro-union folk music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to the racially motivated hip-hop and pop of Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce. This course is designed in such a way that students may participate fully regardless of the level of their prior musical knowledge or experience. All of the music we will be examining involves texts that are linguistic, sonic, and occasionally, in the case of music videos, visual; these texts will facilitate our writing throughout the semester.