Teaching
In the Department of English at the University of Chicago, I teach broadly across the history of Anglo-American fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. I also teach the Media Aesthetics sequence in the University of Chicago’s College Core, which explores philosophical and aesthetic debates about media (including painting, photography, writing, film, and song) from antiquity to the present in various cultural contexts.
Courses of my own design that I have recently taught or will soon teach include:
Climate Fiction, Modernism, and the Future (scheduled for Winter 2025)
This course explores novels about climate change alongside works of criticism and theory about aesthetic modernism, capitalism, and science fiction. The course investigates how climate fiction can critique capitalist modernity by imagining the ecological dimensions of its future persistence or supersession. In particular, it attends to how this literary genre can both exemplify and challenge the contentious modernist imperative to “make it new.” Thus, at the same time as it attends to the ways in which science fiction can render intelligible the causes and consequences of climate change, it also surveys debates about modernism’s aesthetic, historical, and political specificity as an artistic movement. Readings in fiction include Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, and Jessie Greengrass. Readings in critical theory include Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Perry Anderson, Nathan Brown, Nicholas Brown, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Amitav Ghosh, Andrew Milner, McKenzie Wark, Darko Suvin, and Matthew Huber.
The African American Novel: Satire and Critique (scheduled for Fall 2024)
This course explores the centrality of satire to the African American novel. By examining the genre of satire in general and in a set of African American novels and short stories, it attends to how narrative fiction can critique the category of race and attempt to effect social change. Focusing on the relationship between racism and capitalism, the course incorporates readings in literary criticism, critical theory, and social history to inform the study of literary works. Fiction writers include Percival Everett, George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, Cord Jefferson, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, and Ishmael Reed. Critical writers include M.M. Bakhtin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Fields, David Levering Lewis, Adolph Reed, Judith Stein, and Kenneth Warren.
Machine Fictions: New Media and the Art of Storytelling (Summer 2024)
This course explores how short fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present takes up new media technologies as occasions to innovate the art of storytelling. It investigates how imaginative literature can clarify, critique, and compound the ways that innovations in communication and computational technology have transformed and are currently transforming our world. Readings progress from accessible yet nuanced contemporary short stories about generative artificial intelligence and digital social media to more experimental works of twentieth-century writing about (old) new media like tape recording and radio. Authors include Jennifer Egan, Vauhini Vara, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Orson Welles, Henry James, and Bertrand Bonello.
Hypnotic Modernism: Literature, Psychology, Automaticity (Winter 2023)
The idea of automatic writing, or writing undertaken without conscious control, animates some of literary modernism’s most groundbreaking works. This course traces a history of automatic writing from late nineteenth-century hypnotism and literary impressionism, through Cubism and Surrealism, to midcentury photography and the emergence of postmodernism and peripheral modernisms. Readings in psychology and art criticism guide investigations into not only the modes and meanings of automatic writing but also, more fundamentally, the concept of the “automatic” that underpins how we think about art, mindedness, and agency. Authors and artists include James Agee, André Breton, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, G.V. Desani, Walker Evans, Guy de Maupassant, Frank Norris, Kyoshi Kurosawa, Clarice Lispector, Joan Miró, Muriel Spark, and Gertrude Stein. Theorists and critics include Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Michael Fried, Alan Gauld, Pierre Janet, and Charles Palermo.