Course:	LIT/MES 303 Petroculture
Professor:	Elizabeth Holt
CRN:	15725		Schedule/Location:	Fri 12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 308
Distributional Area:		MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice
Credits: 4					Class cap: 15
Crosslists: Environmental & Urban Studies; Literature, Science, Technology, Society

This course joins a growing movement to imagine a world after oil, focusing on North America’s relationship with the Middle East. We will read from the Petrocultures group and a broad range of work produced in English and Arabic – from Allen Ginsberg and William Faulkner, to Shell Oil, to the Iraq Petroleum Company, to Amitav Ghosh, to Ghassan Kanafani and Abdelrahman Munif – in order to historicize and theorize the literary formations, aesthetics and metaphors produced by and productive of petroleum. This course is part of the World Literature Course offering.

Course:	LIT 353 Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Professor:	Adhaar Desai
CRN:	15730		Schedule/Location:	Mon 3:10 PM – 5:30 PM Olin 309
Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4					Class cap: 15
Crosslists: Theater and Performance

In this course we’ll read all ten of Shakespeare’s tragedies: “Titus Andronicus”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Julius Caesar”, “Hamlet”, “Macbeth”, “Othello”, “Antony and Cleopatra”, “Timon of Athens”, “King Lear”, and “Coriolanus.” Our aim will be to think of these texts as platforms for sustained thought, as provocations to feeling, and as distorted mirrors of contemporary society. In them, we’ll find intricate examinations of agency, coercion, belonging, and hatred, and we’ll witness what happens when oppressive systems and volatile emotions collide. These tragedies remain flexible, durable mechanisms for exploding assumptions in topics as diverse as politics, gender, race, and economics. We’ll discover where they came from, how they were revised and rewritten, and how they have been reshaped over time by artists like Toni Morrison and Akira Kurosawa and in formats as diverse as fiction, film, graphic novels, children’s literature, and video games. Over the course of the semester, students will design a research project on a topic of their choosing and will be encouraged to think about these plays as literature, in performance, via adaptation, and as historical artifacts. This course is a Literature Junior Seminar course.

Course:	LIT 3251 Climate Fiction
Professor:	Daniel Williams
CRN:	15733		Schedule/Location:	Thurs 3:10 PM – 5:30 PM Olin 309
Distributional Area:		LA Literary Analysis in English
Credits: 4					Class cap: 15
Crosslists: 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 Junior Seminar course offering.