SELECT COURSES
Serious & Smut: Reading Romance
If romance novels account for 25% of all books and 50% of mass-market books sold just in the US, our course asks what even is “romance.” We will examine this genre’s history, popularity, and overwhelmingly gendered marketing and readership. Our course will analyze what makes a genre—in this case, romance—and how romance as “genre fiction” has taken its present shape. We will look at the contemporary popularity and accompanying disdain associated with romance alongside the genre’s historical antecedents. We will not only read romances popularized by BookTok and Bookstagram, but also examine the evolution of the tropes that have come to define this genre. Overall, we will question the divide between “serious” and “smut,” “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction, and ultimately take stock of the gulf between literature and literary criticism.
You can read all about popular romance tropes on our “Tropestagram” page here, and hear me talk about the course in the video embedded on the left (or above, depending on the device you are on).
Image Details: Marc Chagall, Birthday (1915), artchive.net.
Feasts, Famines, Revolutions: The Hungry Nineteenth Century
This course seeks to reimagine the long nineteenth century as one driven by its hunger. Focusing on various manifestations of hunger in this period—famines, feasts, food riots, and rebellions—provides a global and visceral understanding of nineteenth-century history, culture, and politics. We begin by evaluating the revolution of regimes and tastes during the French Revolution, a period marked by food shortages, the rise of gastronomy, and the figure of the gourmand. Then, we examine the subject of literal and metaphorical sweetness vis-à-vis sugar and the enslaved bodies that produced it in the textual and visual archives of British and French Abolition. Next, we move from the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution to weave together a gustatory understanding of Abolitionist rhetoric with representations of the first successful rebellion against enslavement. We see how the vampiric alimentary logic of transatlantic enslavement and global capitalism emerge as interrelated phenomena. A careful analysis of hunger, starvation, and migration follows, ushered in by the potato failures of the 1840s, particularly devastating in Ireland. We then study the role that tea and beef play in the self-representation of both Britain and its colonized subjects. Finally, we close with a discussion of how gastronomy, in the hands of fin de siècle writers, develops into texts and tropes of desire, decadence, and disease.
Texts covered will include: Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, The Gourmand’s Almanac (1803-1812), The Host’s Manual (1812); Jean-Anthleme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Gôut (1826); Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia (1823); William Fox’s An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum (1791); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789); Uriah Derick D’arcy, The Black Vampyre (1819); Mrs. Hoare’s Shamrock Leaves (1851); Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Green Tea (1871); Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853); Krishna Mohana Banerjea’s The Persecuted (1831); Henry Meredith Parker’s “Young India: A Bengal Eclogue;” Richard Leveridge’s “When mighty roast Beef was the Englishman’s Food;” Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901); Elizabeth Robins Pennell, The Feasts of Autolycus, or The Diary of a Greedy Woman (1896); Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1896).
This course received a Graduate Student Course Development Grant from the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida. Students in this course also developed a public-facing food history page on Instagram. You can read about the history of passionfruit, biscuits, pepper, plantain, goulash, colonial cookbooks, the afterlife of the Irish Potato Famine, and more on @feasts.famines.revolutions!
Image Details: “Tom Raw Between Smoke and Fire,” Illustration from Anonymous, Tom Raw (R. Ackermann, 1828).
Survey of World Literature, 17th Century to Present
As the world around us shrinks to the size of our palm, the distance between us threatens to become insurmountable. Not only are we distanced from each other on account of an increasingly virtual lifestyle but also because of the novel and unforeseen health risks of in-person interactions. Why should we know about the world even as we try to keep it out? There is a need now—more urgent than ever—to learn, empathize, and, where possible, understand lives, cultures, and experiences that are not our own.
This course is designed with the aim to educate its participants about the broader "world" that we inhabit by charting desire, in all its messiness, outside of the dominant West. We follow the material desires of an unremarkable clerk through the snowy streets of St. Petersburg to the forbidden desires of a Mexican nun who was a feminist even before the coining of the word feminism. We see how the desire for manhood is informed by the desires created by colonialism and how decolonizing desire must speak to the ways in which it has been historically weaponized by the powerful. Who is allowed to desire? Whose desires are given voice? Which voices speaking (of/in) desire are acceptable? The course focuses broadly on issues of gender, race, and colonialism.
Texts covered here include: Selected Poems by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, "The Overcoat" by Nikolai Gogol, "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Xala by Ousmane Sembène, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, Persepolis, The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, "Douloti the Bountiful" by Mahashweta Devi, poems by Phyllis Wheatley, poems and speeches by Audre Lorde, Oronooko by Aphra Behn, “Lois, the Witch” by Elizabeth Gaskell, and "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell.
This course won the Graduate Student Teaching Excellence Award from the Dept. of English at UF. The syllabus for this course is available here: World Literature (17th century to Present).
Image Details: The Dream (1910) by Henri Rosseau. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Survey of English Literature, 1750 to Present
This course surveys a wide swathe of British literary history—from the Romantic Period, through the Victorian Age, Modernism, the post-War period of Reconstruction, to the current decade. The one thing that unites these vastly disparate time periods is the continued colonial and imperial endeavors, successes, and failures of Great Britain. As will become evident in our readings, it is impossible to read British literature without contending with British colonialism. To this end, this course seeks to reimagine these time periods as follows: the Romantic period with its latent-but-ubiquitous colonial themes, the Victorian “high noon of Empire,” the imperial nostalgia of Modernism, the writing/biting back of Empire post-World War II, and the decolonial endeavors of the twenty-first century.
We will interpret “British” and “English” expansively and messily—whereas, these terms have historically functioned to exclude, we will use them to accommodate peoples, places, cultures, and texts. Thus, our readings will show how the established canon of English literature stands on the shoulders of working-class people, enslaved people, and colonized people. We will take seriously Wordsworth’s mandate that a poet is “a man speaking to men” to ask: who qualifies as a “man”? who can “speak”? who are the “men” spoken to? what is acceptable speech? when can this speech occur? why must only “man” speak to “men”? The course focuses on various aspects of colonialism as they construct “Englishness”: race, gender, property, and labor.
Texts covered include: Poems by Felicia Hemans, Fidelia Hill, Anne Yearsley, Joanna Baillie, Henry Meredith Parker, Alfred Tennyson, and Rudyard Kipling; selections from John Robert Seeley’s The Expansion of England; William Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads; selections from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women; The Woman of Color: A Tale by Anonymous; selections from Yesterday and Today in India by Sidney Laman Blanchard; The Persecuted by Krishna Mohana Banerjea; Sheridan Le Fanu’s Green Tea; Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell; short stories by Rudyard Kipling, and Katherine Mansfield; Mark Twain’s “To the Person Sitting in Darkness;” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe’s essays and Things Fall Apart; Sally Rooney’s Normal People; opinion pieces by Akwugo Emejulu and David Olusoga; selections from Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museums.
Image Details: The Plumb-pudding in danger; - or - State Epicures taking un Petit Souper (1805) by James Gillray. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Witches, Shrews, and Scorned Women: Writing about Women and Anger
At a time when conventional gender norms are being scrutinized, overhauled, and rejected, the stereotype of the quietly enduring, passive woman is giving way to the woman who refuses to subdue her anger. We find mad women, bad women, and enraged women inside and outside the literary world. In Beowulf, Grendel’s mother avenged her son; Chaucer’s Wife of Bath refused to be subservient to scriptural teachings on women’s role in marriage. Given such literary history, why do more recent expressions of women’s anger sometimes strike a nerve? If proud and angry Achilles became a Homeric hero of epic proportions, tennis superstar Serena Williams’s expression of pride and anger at the 2018 U.S. Open finals played out much differently. If women who break their silence about the wrongs that they have quietly endured are ostracized, demonized, and punished, then what are the acceptable alternatives available to them? This course will investigate the gendered politics of anger in literature and culture, grappling with such questions as they find renewed relevance in our contemporary culture informed by the momentous #MeToo movement.
We will examine portrayals of angry women and women’s anger, across historical periods and geographical regions. Texts will include (but not be limited to): selections from Homer’s The Iliad, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Gil Junger’s Ten Things I hate About You, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, poems by Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich, Knock Down the House, When Sophie Gets Angry – Really, Really Angry by Molly Bang, and I, Tonya. We will think through these texts alongside mediations on female anger, its many forms, and uses by Audre Lorde, Mary Beard, Rebecca Traister, and Soraya Chemaly.
Image Details: Medusa (1597) by Caravaggio. Source: Wikimedia Commons.