Race and Real Estate
	Professor: Peter L'Official
	Course Number: LIT 328		CRN Number: 10387	Class cap: 15	Credits: 4
	Schedule/Location:	Mon 12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 304
	Distributional Area:	LA  Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: American & Indigenous Studies; Architecture; Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies
This seminar explores how race and racism are constructed with spatial means, and how, in turn, space can be shaped by racism. Our tools to investigate these constructions will be literary (novels, essays, poetry), theoretical (urban and architectural theory & criticism), historical (art history, urban history), and cultural (film and music). Of these works, we will ask: how have contemporary works of literature, film, architecture, and visual art captured and critiqued the built environment, and offered alternative understandings of space and place, home and work, citizenship and property? How are our spaces and structures imagined and coded in terms of proximity to whiteness and Blackness, class, gender, and ability, and how have we learned to read and internalize such codes? We will consider particular built forms, from shotgun houses to skyscrapers, and from ethnic enclaves to cities writ large. Authors and artists may include: Colson Whitehead, bell hooks, Spike Lee, June Jordan, Mat Johnson, Paule Marshall, Chester Himes, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison. This course is a Literature Program junior seminar and fulfills the American and Indigenous Studies junior seminar requirement. This course is also part of the "Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck" Initiative.

Bad Art: On Amateurs, Hacks, Sellouts, and Robots
	Professor: Adhaar Desai
	Course Number: LIT 365		CRN Number: 10389	Class cap: 15	Credits: 4
	Schedule/Location:	Tue 3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 305
	Distributional Area:	LA  Literary Analysis in English
On what grounds may someone responsibly declare that a work of literature is mediocre, mid, trash, or simply not worth one's time? In what ways does it make sense to judge artwork by a generative AI differently than artwork we know to be by human beings? This course interrogates the ethics and practices of critical judgment by studying theoretical concepts like the sublime, the mediocre, the merely interesting, and the hack. As we read influential theoretical texts by writers like Longinus, Benjamin, Fanon, Sontag, and Ngai, we will also tackle aesthetically challenging works that reflect upon artistic cultural production like William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths, Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai, and Percival Everett's Erasure. Students will be challenged to compose responsible aesthetic criticism of texts of their own choosing while also developing a research project related to one of the course's major readings.  This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

Climate Fiction
	Professor: Daniel Williams
	Course Number: LIT 3251		CRN Number: 10395	Class cap: 15	Credits: 4
	Schedule/Location:	Mon 12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 206
	Distributional Area:	LA  Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies
What is the role of literature in understanding, representing, and adapting to climate change? How has our urgent ecological crisis shaped the scales, genres, and plots of contemporary fiction? This course surveys the literary genre that has lately come to be characterized as climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Alongside the dystopian science fiction central to the genre, we will consider realist novels, nonfiction journalism, scientific writing, environmental memoir, poetry, and film from across the globe. Regions may include the United States, Europe, West Africa, and India; authors may include Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jesmyn Ward, Amitav Ghosh, and Ian McEwan. We will examine how literature engages (or not) central concepts in earth-system science and scenarios of ecological calamity (hurricanes, megafires, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss); how it critiques (or not) environmental racism and injustice; and how it envisions possible futures for humanity in the Anthropocene. Reading critical materials from across the environmental humanities, we will also think about the challenges of narrative, representation, sympathy, and imagination as they apply to literature and climate policy. The course will emphasize methods of research, writing, and revision essential for Senior Projects in literature and other humanities fields. This course fulfills the Literature Junior seminar. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.