Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions: natural disasters have been with humanity as long as we have sought stability and defied the dynamics of the natural world. Often devastating to human life and social order, disasters have occasioned stories, poems, and songs that grapple with the challenging philosophical, religious, aesthetic, and social questions raised by environmental catastrophe. In this course we will examine a selection of works, from ancient myths to post-apocalyptic novels, and discuss how literature can capture the catastrophic, protest the inevitable, and imagine the unimaginable.

This course is an in-depth review and examination of central works by women writers from the nineteenth century to the present. We will read a selection of writers from diverse backgrounds to address the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and social class. We will explore representations of women’s journeys—to literacy, power, and self-fulfillment—through art, marriage, and motherhood in a range of genres (e.g., bildungsroman, slave narratives, realism, naturalism, memoirs). Our goal will be to gain a new appreciation of how a modern woman’s subjectivity is forged through (and beyond) existing gender roles.

Language is a raw material for certain kinds of human play and art, from the invention of sound symbolic words and language games, to the sophisticated verse and narrative forms of epic poetry. This course introduces the study linguistic poetics and semiotics articulated by the Russian linguist and literary scholar Roman Jakobson, and follows the main lines of its development and interaction with other approaches in Europe and the US to the present day, examining the nature of literary language and linguistic form, performance, figures of language (e.g. rhyme, alliteration, parallelism), figures of thought (e.g. irony, metonymy, metaphor), the relation between meter and song, and the linguist structure of narrative. With its empirical focus on English, this course will place the linguistic study of language art within the broader context of the humanities, and draw on findings in the cognitive and communication sciences, anthropology and biology, to probe the nature of language play and language art.