Benjamin Graves

Reading Literature
Please refer to each section for specific course descriptions.

Global English in the New Media Environment
Far from spelling the end of literature, the rise of new technologies of communication has continually energized Anglophone literary production. Reading literature through the lens of media theory (Stuart Hall, Friedrich Kittler, Gilles Deleuze, Rey Chow) , students in this course will explore how the global circulation of information, media, and images has transformed the literary imagination. While we will sample canonical modernist engagements with earlier transformations in print and visual culture, our main goal will be to bridge the gap between media studies and Anglophone postcolonial literature throughout the world. Readings will be selected from Benyamin, Jasmine Days; Chimamanda Ngozie Adihchie, Americanah; NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names; Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest; Zadie Smith, Swing Time; David Mitchell, Ghostwritten; and the poems of Jean Binta Breeze and Linton Kwesi Johnson. 3 hrs. lect. (REC)

Twentieth-Century English Novel
This course will explore the development of the novel in this century, with a primary focus on writers of the modernist period and later attention to more contemporary works. We will examine questions of formal experimentation, the development of character, uses of the narrator, and the problem of history, both personal and political, in a novelistic context. Readings will include novels by Conrad, Joyce, Forster, Woolf, and others. 3 hrs. lect./disc.

Human Rights and World Literature
In this course we will explore the idiom of human rights in law, literature, and political culture. We will place literary representations of human rights violations (genocide, torture, detention and forced labor, environmental devastation, police violence) in dialogue with official human rights treaties and declarations in order to historicize and critique the assumptions of human rights discourse. Who qualifies as a “human” deserving of humanitarian intervention? How do human rights rehearse a colonial dynamic based on racial and geo-political privilege? To answer these questions we will turn to some of the most controversial voices in global fiction and poetry. 3 hrs. lect. (not open to students who have taken ENAM 0230)
(Diversity) (Rec)

Kazuo Ishiguro
Winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro is among the most influential and celebrated of contemporary writers. In novels like Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro gives shape to today’s most pressing questions: about work and workers, the difficulties of intimacy and caring, the political consequences of historical perspective, and the ethical dilemmas facing scientists and educators. Moving between Europe and Asia, his novels also address the complex negotiation of cultural difference in a globalized world. We will explore his major works in great depth, supplementing our literary investigation with materials from other disciplines. (Diversity) (Rec)

Multi-Ethnic British Literatures
"My name is Karim Amir," announces the protagonist of a Hanif Kureishi novel, "and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost." In this course we will investigate the complex subject of ethnic and national identity in the writing of British authors of Asian, African, and Caribbean descent. We will trace the shifting meanings of "black" and "British" as we move from 1950s migrant fictions to more recent reckonings with British multiculturalism. Topics to be considered will include diaspora and the work of memory; race and religion after 9/11; the representation of urban space; and the experience of asylum-seekers and refugees. 3 hrs. lect./disc. (Diversity) (Rec)

Afro-Asian Encounters
Scholars have recently uncovered a rich history of black and Asian solidarity against racism. Yet the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992 provided a painful reminder of the antagonisms between black and Asian diasporic groups. This course will explore how Asian American and African American identities have historically been constructed in relation to one another. We will foreground key sites in the making and undermining of Afro-Asian intimacies, from the racial formation of coolie laborers to the cross-racial imagination of Kung-Fu and Hip Hop. Authors will include Richard Wright, Chang-Rae Lee, Vijay Prashad, Frank Chin, Das Racist, Mira Nair, and W.E.B. Dubois. 3 hrs. sem. (Diversity) (Rec)

Special Project: Literature
Approval Required.

Senior Thesis: Critical Writing
Individual guidance and seminar (discussions, workshops, tutorials) for those undertaking one-term projects in literary criticism or analysis. All critical thesis writers also take the Senior Thesis Workshop (ENAM 700Z) in either Fall or Spring Term.