ENGL 5549

The Modernist Object Readers have traditionally prioritized human characters in literature, finding in those figures a correlative for our own experience of the world. In doing so they have affirmed a subject/object binary in which people exercise varying degrees of control over an allegedly inert material world. However, recent work...

Positioning itself at the crossroads of contemporary literature, geography, and new materialist philosophies, this course will explore how American millennial fictions map and navigate, construct and alter, inhabit and evacuate spacetime; and in tandem it will consider how theoretical texts on space and time (re)conceptualize these categories. In the wake...

Ready to travel the Spaceways? Our propulsion system will be Afrofuturism, the contemporary cultural movement driven by “African American voices” with “other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come.” We’ll begin with theoretical readings (Rammellzee, Kodwo Eshun, Fred Moten, Ytasha Womack), then explore its Caribbean heritage in...