ENGL 938 (01) - Seminar: Studies in 20th Century American Literature

Spring 2025 Special Topic: The Wake, the Fold, the Jump: Cultural Studies on the Move 

In a moment of intense backlash against nearly everything cultural studies holds dear—women’s rights to bodily autonomy; borderlessness; racial justice, environmental justice—the field is on its toes, jumping and diving into the deep, into the archipelagic, into the ocean. It is examining evacuations, wakes, folds, and spills. We will unpack scholarly works (many recently published by Duke UP) to assist us in reading the course’s primary sources: contemporary American novels, short stories, one graphic narrative, one film. This course will be good preparation for thinking through difficult texts together, asking questions of them, crafting essays for seminars and for publication, and for engaging in enjoyable discussions about literature. Possible primary sources: Everett’s James; Ma’s Severance; Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation; Munoz’s The Consequences (short stories); Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake; Whitehead’s Making Love With the Land; Martinez’s Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir; film by Diane Paragas, Yellow Rose; one graphic narrative TBD. Possible secondary sources (weekly: one chapter, from one source, to be read with the primary source): Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; Tenorio’s Jump: Black Anarchism and Antiblack Carcerality; Shimizu’s The Movies of Racial Childhoods; Ball’s The Only Way Out: The Racial and Sexual Performance of Escape; Chen’s Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire; Bow’s Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy; Liboiron and Lepawsky’s Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power; Marks’ The Fold; Gumbs’ Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity; Adey’s Evacuation: The Politics and Aesthetics of Movement in Emergency