Archive for the 'Teaching' Category

Fall Texts

Sunday, July 5th, 2015

Women’s Diasporic Literature: – No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff (1987) – The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat (2004) – Sula, Toni Morrison (1973) – Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine (2014) + Short Stories and Essays Weird Fictions – Kindred, Octavia Butler (1979) Butler’s obituary  – Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) Something about Kathy… – Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (1955) […]

Imre Kertész and the Nobel Lecture

Monday, May 4th, 2015

Heureka! “Whereas I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded – and which I had to […]

The Idea of Europe

Monday, May 4th, 2015

One of my favorite seminars to teach at Hampshire is a close study of the contemporary European novel. Of course, I have to be very selective and attend to the limitations on text length imposed by a 14-week semester. Each time that I have offered this seminar, I switch up the novels. It keeps me […]

Teaching 2014-2016

Friday, February 14th, 2014

2014 – 2015 Fall 2014 100 Level – Reading Generically: Modern Short Prose (Tutorial) Fall 2014 High 100 level – Disturbing the Peace: Baldwin, Morrison, and a Black Literary Tradition Spring 2015 100 Level – Representing Reality: The Literature of Kleist and Kafka Spring 2015 200 Level - The Idea of Europe: Readings in the 20th […]

History and Movement

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

Times would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and utility which matters, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come […]

Two Citations

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

I think this is how I want to guide the introduction to the concept of a Black literary tradition: To be an Afro-American, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise honorable defend-which […]

My New Seminar for Fall 2014

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

This will be offered for the first time in Fall 2014 as a high-100 level seminar. I am happy to do it although it means a lot of work for me over the summer to make it accessible but not ‘easy’ and to make sure that I have a set of learning objectives in place […]

Reading, Writing, Seeing, Thinking