10 College Courses to Read Along With This Semester (From Your Couch)

This time of year, I always get the back-to-school blues. Not, mind you, because I have to go back to school, but because other people get to, and I have to keep on being an employed adult, at least for the time being. I know, I know, I’m a nerd. Whatever. Once in a while, I like to poke around the college course catalogs to see what kinds of literature classes colleges are offering these days. This year, I went a little further, finding full syllabi (or even just book lists) where I could, to see what exactly kids are reading this semester at some of the best colleges and universities in America. This did not assuage my school-sickness, but it did give me some good ideas for my own fall reading plans.

NB: Though I found hundreds of amazing-sounding classes out there, I limited myself here to courses with syllabi (or at least a book list) publicly available—which were fewer than you’d think, and depended a lot on the school in question’s online system. Below, ten classes being taught this fall that I wish I could take, and the books you’ll need to vicariously read along with them. Click on the course title to see the entire syllabus or description.

Futurities, Stanford University
Taught by Professor Michaela Bronstein

Course Description: Literary studies has long had a wide array of methods for theorizing the past. In more recent years, scholars have begun to theorize the future with equal energy. But what do we talk about when we talk about the future? Events that might happen, the way the thought of the future affects our actions today, or something more? We will discuss queer futurities, Afrofuturism, ecological futurity, revolutionary futures, reception and the futures of texts, and more.

Selected texts:

Lee Edelman, No Future
José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
Amiri Baraka, The Slave
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Anne Washburn, Mr. Burns

Special Topics: Black Science Fiction, UC Berkeley
Taught by Professor Namwali Serpell

Course Description: This course addresses two genres—black fiction and science fiction—at their point of intersection, which is sometimes called Afrofuturism. The umbrella term “black fiction” will include texts that issue out of and speculate about the African-American experience. The category “science fiction” will comprise texts that speculate about alternative, cosmic, dystopian, and future worlds. Overlapping—and mutually transforming—concepts will include: genetics, race, diaspora, miscegenation, double consciousness, technology, ecology, biology, language, history, futurity, space (inner and outer), and, of course, the alien. We will consider stories, novels, graphic novels, comics, films, music, and television clips.

Book list:

Octavia Butler, Dawn
Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17
Damian Duffy, Kindred: A Graphic Novel
Mat Johnson, Pym
Victor LaValle, Destroyer
Kiese Laymon, Long Division
H.P. Lovecraft, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
George Schuyler, Black No More

Wondrous Literatures of the Near East, Cornell University
Taught by Professor Deborah A. Starr

Course Description: This course examines Near East’s rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will trace three major threads: myths of creation and destruction; travel narratives; and poetry of love and devotion. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ and ‘The Song of Songs,’ as well as selections from medieval works such as the ‘Travels’ of Ibn Battuta, the ‘Shahnameh’ of Ferdowsi, poetry of Yehuda HaLevi, and The Thousand and One Nights. The modern unit will include work by Egyptian Nobel Laureate, Naguib Mahfouz. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

Required texts:

Stephanie Dalley, ed., Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others
The New Oxford Annotated Bible
Saint Augustine, Confessions
The Qur’an (trans. Abdel Haleem)
One Thousand and One Nights (trans. N. J. Dawood)
Abdolqasem Ferdowsi, Rostam: Tales of Love and War from the Shahnameh
The Travels of Ibn Battuta (trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith)
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days

Wonder, Williams College
Taught by Professor Christopher L. Pye

Course Description: We tend to imagine “wonder” as a naïve, wide-eyed response, something quite distinct from the cold and sophisticated act of critical analysis. In this discussion class, we will consider wonder as an eminently analyzable concept, but one that raises provocative questions about the nature and limits of our own, distinctly modern forms of critical engagement. The course examines three historical incarnations of “wonder,” each involving complex relations among the aesthetic, philosophical, and social domains: the Renaissance tradition on wonder and the marvelous; the eighteenth-century analysis of the sublime; and twentieth-century accounts of the culture of spectacle. We will consider writers such as Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Wordsworth, Borges, and W.G. Sebald (all wonderful); painters such as Leonardo and Vermeer, the photography of Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth; films including Lang’s Metropolis and Scott’s Blade Runner; and critical or philosophical writers, including Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Walter Benjamin.

Required texts:

W.G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
Natalie Zemon Davs, The Return of Martin Guerre

Pleasure, Power and Profit: Race and Sexualities in a Global Era, Princeton University
Taught by Professor Anne McClintock

Course Description: Pleasure Power and Profit explores the intimate ways that sexualities and race are entwined in contemporary culture, historically, and in our own lives. Why are questions about sexuality and race some of the most controversial, compelling, yet often taboo issues of our time? Exploring films, popular culture, novels, social media, and theory, we engage themes like: race, gender and empire; fetishism, Barbie, vampires and zombies; sex work and pornography; marriage and monogamy; queer sexualities; and strategies for social empowerment such as: Black Lives Matter, the new campus feminism, and global movements against sexual and gender violence.

Sample reading list:

Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex
Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
Linda Williams, Porn Studies
Frederique Delacoste, Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Claudia Rankine, Citizen

America’s Queer Canon: from Melville to Moonlight, Harvard University
Taught by Kathryn Roberts

Course Description: This course examines a range of works from the US canon that engage themes of same-sex desire, homosexual and transgender identity, and other ?queer? relations. Questions around sexual norms have been central to American literature from its beginnings, but the course will focus on texts from the second half of the nineteenth century through the very contemporary. With help from queer theorists and social historians, we?ll pay close attention to how changing legal, medical, and religious discourses shape queer literary expression, and how queer writers have changed culture. Authors include Melville, James, Cather, Larsen, Baldwin, Lorde, Bechdel, and Nelson.

Required texts:

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name
Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
James Baldwin, Another Country
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Nella Larsen, Passing
Dennis Cooper, Sluts
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Heran Melville, Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Black Women Writers, University of Florida
Taught by Professor Debra Walker King

Course Description: This course examines the subject positions of African American women within the social and political context of the United States, focusing foremost on contemporary representations of the captive female and the body. As an inquiry generated by feminist issues in literary scholarship, it explores the following questions. If some of contemporary feminist praxis and epistemology are grounded in notions of “freedom,” “individuality,” and the freedom of the body to “labor,” deeply implicated in the rise of modern capitalism, then what gaps must be brought to light in order for this discourse to achieve a broader articulation? Where are the points of conversion and foreclosure between Womanism and Feminism? What cultural configurations are (and might be) derived from a widened point-of-view regarding both the culture-work and the cultural apprenticeship of Black women today? What spaces do the bodies of Black women occupy in the symbolic contract? To what degree do the texts under survey articulate a Black feminist / womanist perspective? In what ways do they fall short?

Book list:

Sonia Sanchez, Morning Haiku
Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose
Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
Gayl Jones, Eva’s Man
Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Nisi Shawl, Everfair: A Novel

An Introduction to Latino Literature and Culture—Latina/o Literary Worlds, Princeton University
Taught by Professor Christina A. Leon

Course Description: Latina/os have long been present in the story of the United States. Yet, contemporary media headlines often report an increasing, and often alarmist, “browning” of America. These headlines often rely upon stereotypes of Latina/os—morphing them into a static and falsely unified identity category. We will examine to Latina/o literature and art to note how such headlines leave out many stories. Looking at Latina/o narratives, we will consider the uniqueness of each piece in relation to place, history, and gender. Attention will be paid to how these aesthetic pieces perform modes of resistance.

Required reading:

Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends
Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (trans. Lisa Dillman)
Dolores Dorantes, Style (trans. Jen Hofer)
Cristina Henríquez, The Book of Unknown Americans
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Luis Alberto Urrea, The Water Museum
Giannina Braschi, United States of Banana
Justin Torres, We the Animals

Border Literature, Northwestern University
Taught by Professor John Alba Cutler

Class Description: The US-Mexico border has been the site of intense cultural conflict since the mid-19th century. It marks both the connection and the division between two nations, and many of our most fraught conversations concern whether the border should be a bridge or a wall. As an entry point into these conversations, this course will survey literature and film centering on the US-Mexico border. Students will become familiar with the history of the border, beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 and extending through NAFTA and up to the current political climate. Together we will consider how the border has become such a potent site for contemporary mythmaking, a flashpoint for anxieties about race, labor, gender, and sexuality.

Required reading:

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Carlos Fuentes, The Crystal Frontier
Juan Felipe Herrera, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border
Carmen Boullosa, Texas

Language, Identity, Power, Princeton University
Taught by Professor Serguei A. Oushakine

Course Description: Language determines our expressive capacities, represents our identities, and connects us with each other across various platforms and cultures.This course introduces classical and contemporary approaches to studying language, focusing on three main areas: 1) language as a system of rules and regulations (“structure”), 2) language as a symbolic mechanism through which individuals and groups mark their presence (“identity”) and 3) language as a means of communication (“sign”). In addition to this, the course examines various ways through which language molds our individual selves: from organizing dreams and desires to shaping autobiographies.

Sample reading list:

Aristotle, Rhetoric
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power
George Lakoff; Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By