Posts Tagged ‘American literature’
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* CFP: ASLE 2019: Paradise on Fire. CFP: Trans Futures. CFP: Superheroes and Disability: Unmasking Ableism in the Media.
* The return of the MA in SF at Liverpool.
* American Literature 90.2: “Queer about Comics.”
* ‘Mothers could not stop crying’: Lawmaker blasts Trump policy after visiting detained immigrants. Immigrant moms in SeaTac prison ‘could hear their children screaming.’ Asylum seekers are being sexually assaulted in U.S. detention. A Janitor Preserves the Seized Belongings of Migrants. Morristown, TN. Jeff Sessions is an evil man. There is no bottom. More denaturalization. More surveillance. ‘Again’ is happening right now on America’s border. What will you do?
* Meanwhile. By Trump’s own yardstick, NKorea pact falls flat.
* Meet the guys who tape Trump’s papers back together.
* It’s hard to imagine a shift that better embodies a sound public health response to the opioid epidemic, and yet it’s the result—one among many—of a process initiated by Burlington’s mayor and chief of police, neither of whom have a background in health. What’s happening in Burlington suggests how a small city can begin to confront a monster epidemic and, in the process, stretch ideas about the role of a small-city police department.
* The World Cup of Disputed Nations.
* n+1’s patented World Cup Preview 2018.
* The New York Times is bad, exhibit 657. 658.
* Look what you made me do has emerged as the dominant ethos of the current White House. The Language of the Trump Administration Is the Language of Domestic Violence.
* Computer assistance for the modern novelist.
* Vanity Fair revisits The Staircase.
* Researchers from Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) say the obesity gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever. An explosive U.N. report shows America’s safety net was failing before Trump’s election. Private schools’ curriculum downplays slavery, says humans and dinosaurs lived together. Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health.
* A Dakota Access Pipeline Water Protector Is Sentenced to Prison in North Dakota.
* Sadly The NRA is immune from prosecution no matter how flagrantly it broke the law here. Them’s the rules.
* Moving Animals to Safe Havens Can Unexpectedly Doom Them.
* Oil companies struggling to drill in the permafrost the oil they burn is melting.
* Puerto Rico’s morgue is overflowing with unclaimed dead bodies after a storm nine months ago.
* A Review of the ‘Hereditary’ Wikipedia Page, by Someone Who Is Too Afraid to See ‘Hereditary.’
* Of course: Bill Clinton comes to Al Franken’s defense.
* My petard — it seems to have somehow hoisted… me?
* What Happens When an Adjunct Instructor Wants to Retire?
* New Study on Rising Suicide Rates Suggests Capitalism Is Quite Literally Killing Us.
* Days Before Murder Trial, Prosecutors Reveal a Missing Confession. Dozens claim a Chicago detective beat them into confessions. A pattern of abuse or a pattern of lies?
* Marine Veteran Trains White Supremacists in Military Tactics.
* The best Mario Kart character, according to data science.
* Another military-industrial nightmare stealing its branding from Tolkien.
* The World Can’t Afford High-Tech Insulin.
* We Aren’t Teaching What Students Need to Know About Climate Science.
* Job Satisfaction of Humanities Master’s Degree Recipients.
* Building the Dream: LEGO Friends and the Construction of Human Capital.
* What the world would be like if land and sea were inverted.
* Talk. Talk or suffer the consequences. The state of our union is typical. Quantum computers. Herman Melville. Screenwriting. Dreams of flight.
* Infinity War crosses $2B. That this set of characters has revolutions both comics and film, fifty years apart, is pretty incredible.
* Map of North America, c. 2024 (start of Trump’s third term).
* On the frontlines of extinction in the Gulf of California, where the vaquita faces its final days.
* And giant African baobab trees die suddenly after thousands of years. Seems fine!
Weekend Links!
* I have a short essay in the New Orleans Review‘s science fiction issue. Check it out! (Sorry, it’s not online.)
* CFP: Special Issue of American Literature: “Queer about Comics.”
* Academics of color experience an enervating visibility, but it’s not simply that we’re part of a very small minority. We are also a desired minority, at least for appearance’s sake. University life demands that academics of color commodify themselves as symbols of diversity—in fact, as diversity itself, since diversity, in this context, is located entirely in the realm of the symbolic. There’s a wound in the rupture between the diversity manifested in the body of the professor of color and the realities affecting that person’s community or communities. I, for example, am a black professor in the era of mass incarceration of black people through the War on Drugs; I am a Somali American professor in the era of surveillance and drone strikes perpetuated through the War on Terror.
* Cornell Grad Students Form Unrecognized Union.
* The Irony of Catholic Colleges.
* Fake traffic is rotting the Internet.
* So weird: John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress.
* The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio.
* The Journal of Academic Freedom has a special section devoted to Steven Salaita.
* Science proves you like being ripped off by airlines.
* Fordham, Marquette rescind honorary degrees they gave Cosby.
* Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. Yet!
* What a massive sexual assault survey found at 27 top U.S. universities. Counterpoint: The latest big sexual assault survey is (like others) more hype than science. Counter-counterpoint: The University of Chicago’s message to the Class of 2019: Don’t be a rapist.
* Speech and the campus newspaper at Wesleyan. And from the Southern Poverty Law Center: Campus Newspaper Thefts since 2000.
* Today in the apocalypse: Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean.
* Ahmed’s Clock, Banneker’s Clock, and the Racial Surveillance of Invention in America.
* “Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges.”
* A recent study suggests that acetaminophen—found in Tylenol, Excedrin and a host of other medications—is an all-purpose damper, stifling a range of strong feelings. Throbbing pain, the sting of rejection, paralyzing indecision—along with euphoria and delight—all appear to be taken down a notch by the drug.
* Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software. Volkswagen hires BP’s Deepwater defense team as the lawsuits start. But it’s not all bad news.
* Stojcevski was sent to the Macomb County Jail in Mt. Clemens, Mich., on June 11, 2014, to serve a 30-day sentence after failing to appear in court over a ticket for careless driving, according to the lawsuit. During the 16 days between his imprisonment and his death, the lawsuit alleges, staff at the jail knowingly allowed him to suffer through “excruciating” acute withdrawal without treatment.
* Inside the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential bid.
* Inside Salvador Dali’s Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
* Rather than fighting for more and better work, we should fight for more time to use as we please. Proposals like a universal basic income may well lead to this. Most importantly, in thinking about the time bind, we should keep in mind what it would mean to be really free from it. We should keep in mind the full possibilities of liberation: what we want is not to be allowed to work more or in better conditions, but to be allowed to live as we see fit.
* Counterpoint: Against UBI.
* I had nightmares like this: What If the Answer Isn’t College, but Longer High School?
* A Urine Collection Bag from Apollo 11 marked with the initials “NA.”
* The Bowe Bergdahl case is a weird choice for Serial season two, but I suppose nearly anything would be.
* Netflix Data Reveals Exactly When TV Shows Hook Viewers — And It’s Not the Pilot.
* …the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
* Honestly this would work pretty well for academics too.
* Listen, this is just getting silly now.
* We have burned all the furniture for fuel and we’re starting to chop away at the deck. We are a terrible, dispirited society and we finally have the terrible, dispirited Muppets we deserve.
* What Can ‘Star Trek’ Teach Us About American Exceptionalism?
* Rude hand gestures from around the world.
* And I’m devoting the rest of my career to the Mysteries of the Unknown books, now that I’ve been reminded they exist.
Fall Syllabus #2: Grad Seminar, “American Literature after the American Century”!
I’m really excited about this one, too! This should be a great semester. I owe some thanks to Jodi Melamed and Priscilla Wald for this one.
GENERAL COURSE PLAN
WEEK 1: AMERICAN LITERATURE AFTER THE AMERICAN CENTURY
WEEK 2-4: CANONS AND TRIGGER WARNINGS: LOLITA
WEEK 4-6: POPULAR CULTURE(S): THE BODY SNATCHERS
WEEK 6-8: THEORIES AND IDENTITIES: DAWN
WEEK 8-9: POSTMODERNISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
WEEK 10-11: NATIONALISMS AND TRANSNATIONALISMS: TROPIC OF ORANGE
WEEK 11-12: ECOCRITICISM IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES
WEEK 13: AMERICAN LITERATURE AFTER EVERTHING
WEEK 14-15: CLASS SYMPOSIUM
DAY-BY-DAY SCHEDULE
| M | Aug. 31 | FIRST DAY OF CLASS
Henry Luce, “The American Century” [D2L] |
| W | Sep. 2 | American Literature after the American Century
Henry A. Giroux, “Public Intellectuals against the Neoliberal University” [Web] Michael Bérubé, “American Studies without Exceptions” [D2L] |
| M | Sep. 7 | LABOR DAY HOLIDAY—NO CLASS |
| W | Sep. 9 | Canons and Trigger Warnings
Lolita, Foreword and Part One |
| M | Sep. 14 | Lolita, Part Two (first half) |
| W | Sep. 16 | Lolita (whole book including afterword) |
| M | Sep. 21 | Jay Caspian King, “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind” [newyorker.com]
Malcolm Harris, “Western Canon, Meet Trigger Warning” [aljazeera.com] Ira Wells, “Forgetting Lolita: How Nabokov’s Victim Became an American Fantasy” [newrepublic.com] “A Portrait of the Young Girl: On the 60th Anniversary of Lolita” [Los Angeles Review of Books] |
| W | Sep. 23 | Popular Culture(s)
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” |
| M | Sep. 28 | Invasion of the Body Snatchers (whole book) |
| W | Sep. 30 | Invasion of the Body Snatchers (whole book)
Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” [D2L] Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary” [D2L] |
| M | Oct. 5 | Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 film)
Erika Nelson, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Gender and Sexuality in Four Film Adaptations” [D2L] Marty Roth, “Twice Two: The Fly and Invasion of the Body Snatchers” [D2L] |
| W | Oct. 7 | Theories and Identities
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (first half) |
| M | Oct. 12 | Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (second half) |
| W | Oct. 14 | Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites (excerpts) [D2L]
Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto” [D2L] Donna Haraway, Primate Visions [excerpt] [D2L] |
| M | Oct. 19 | Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” [D2L] |
| W | Oct. 21 | Postmodernism and Consumer Culture
David Foster Wallace, “Octet” David Foster Wallace, “The Depressed Person” |
| M | Oct. 26 | CONFERENCES—NO CLASS |
| W | Oct. 28 | David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” |
| M | Nov. 2 | Nationalism and Transnationalism
Tropic of Orange (first half) FINAL PAPER PROSPECTUS DUE |
| W | Nov. 4 | Tropic of Orange (second half) |
| M | Nov. 9 | Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands [excerpts] [D2L]
Junot Díaz, “Monstro” [D2L] |
| W | Nov. 11 | Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (first half) |
| M | Nov. 16 | We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (second half) |
| W | Nov. 18 | Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” [D2L]
McKenzie Wark, “Critical Theory after the Anthropocene” [D2L] |
| M | Nov. 23 | American Literature after Everything
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” [D2L] Giorgio Agamben, “What Is The Contemporary?” [D2L] Natalia Cecire, “Humanities Scholarship Is Incredibly Relevant, and That Makes People Sad” [Web] |
| W | Nov. 25 | THANKSGIVING—NO CLASS |
| M | Nov. 30 | Syllabus Workshop
GROUP SYLLABUSES DUE |
| W | Dec. 2 | Class Symposium (day one) |
| M | Dec. 7 | Class Symposium (day two) |
| W | Dec. 9 | Class Symposium (day three) |
| F | Dec. 18 | FINAL PAPERS DUE BY 10 AM |
Course Descriptions for Fall 2015 (Yes, Already!)
Course Number: 4610/5610
Course Title & Subtitle: Individual Authors: J.R.R. Tolkien
Course Description: This decade will see the hundredth anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s earliest writings on Middle-Earth (The Book of Lost Tales, begun in 1917) alongside the completion of Peter Jackson’s career-defining twenty-year project to adapt The Lord of the Rings for film (1995-2015). This course asks the question: Who is J.R.R. Tolkien, looking backward from the perspective of the twenty-first century? Why have his works, and the genre of heroic fantasy which he remade so completely in his image, remained so intensely popular, even as the world has transformed around them? Our study will primarily trace the history, development, and reception of Tolkien’s incredible magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings (written 1937-1949, published 1954-1955)—but we will also take up Tolkien’s contested place in the literary canon of the twentieth century, the uses and abuses of Tolkien in Jackson’s blockbuster films, and the ongoing critical interests and investments of Tolkien fandom today. As Tolkien scholars we will also have the privilege of drawing upon the remarkable J.R.R. Tolkien Collection at the Raynor Library here at Marquette, which contains the original manuscripts for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Farmer Giles of Ham.
Major Readings: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and selected additional readings
Assignments: two shorter papers, one final paper, weekly forum posts, one presentation, class participation
Course Number: 6700
Course Title & Subtitle: Studies in Twentieth Century American Literature: American Literature after the American Century
Course Description: In 1941, Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce called upon the twentieth century to be “the first great American Century,” and it’s been ending ever since. This course takes up American literary and cultural studies from the post-everything standpoint of the “after.” What is it to study American literature today, after the American Century, after American exceptionalism, after modernity, after the university, after the idea of the future itself? Our shared investigation into contemporary critical and scholarly practices will focus on key controversies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary study, including the ongoing reevaluation of “the canon” (Lolita), popular culture studies (The Body Snatchers), identity and identity politics (Dawn), nationalism and transnationalism (Tropic of Orange), postmodernity and neoliberalism (the short stories of David Foster Wallace), and ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). Our reading will also draw heavily on recent scholarship in critical theory, especially “the new American studies” and the emerging discipline of critical university studies. Alongside weekly reflections and enthusiastic class participation, students in this course will produce a 15-20 page seminar paper on a subject of their choosing related to the themes of the course, as well as present their work to their peers in a conference-presentation format and develop a sample syllabus for an undergraduate course in American literary or cultural studies.
Readings: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers; Octavia E. Butler, Dawn; Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange; Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; the short stories of David Foster Wallace; selected additional readings
Assignments: weekly reflections, class participation, conference-style presentation, seminar paper (15-20 pages), sample syllabus
Gerry Canavan 