I’ve updated the Teaching page with descriptions for my Spring 2015 courses. I’m always glad to hear from interested students at my Rutgers e-mail.
In the undergraduate program, I’m teaching Principles of Literary Study: Prose, one of the English major requirements. There’s nothing quite like having the chance to be the pied piper introduce the great intellectual pleasures of my subject. (This was formerly “Principles of Literary Study: Fiction,” and I really teach the course as a principled introduction to fictional narrative. A course goal: students will be able to explain the distinction between prose, fiction, and arrative.) This syllabus is forthcoming.
My graduate course is new, and very experimental: Literary Data: Some Approaches. It’s about quantification and data in literary studies, an issue current discussed in and around “DH” but really part of the long dance of literary studies with the other human sciences. We’re going to learn enough programming (in R) to start in on analyzing data. I hold no particular brief for “coding” or “making,” but I think this is the best route into the quantitative at the moment, as well as an important way to concretize the theoretical and methodological debate about literary data.