A new semester approaches! Here’s what I’m offering the good people of Rutgers.
English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
Fall 2025, Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:00–3:20 p.m., in Murray 213
Co-taught with Cassandra Schifman
Course page
This course tells two stories about the revolutionary period in twentieth-century literature in English beginning around 1890 and running to the start of the Second World War in 1945. The first story is the story of the modernist breakthrough, when radical innovators transformed how the novel could be written: we will read writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner for their singular experiments in form and content. The second story is the story of the radical expansion of literary production and consumption to new populations, giving rise to new literatures as different as specialized genre fiction, the Indian English novel, and the African-American novel. We will read exemplary works from each of these bodies of writing. Students will learn to analyze what is and is not shared across the radically varied field of early twentieth-century fiction, and to understand the variety of these fictions as a result of social contestation and collaboration.
New features this semester: love stories from four continents! Raja Rao! Nella Larsen! Djuna Barnes revival tour!
English 358:437 Seminar: Research in Genre Fiction
Fall 2025, Mondays and Wednesdays, 3:50–5:10 p.m., in HC–S210
Course page
Crime, fantasy, romance…science fiction, Western, horror: for the last hundred years, most of the fiction people have read in English has been what is now called “genre fiction.” And for most of the last hundred years, these categories of fiction have been largely ignored as features of literary history. Considered merely popular, juvenile, subliterary, genre fiction has only gradually become a subject of serious study in its own right. This course introduces students to the questions and challenges raised by the study of twentieth-century genre fiction: what is distinctive about the subliterary? Who reads and writes it? How has this changed? We will read and analyze exemplary genre fictions from multiple eras, including both early and recent texts in crime, science fiction, and romance. At the same time we will develop the skills necessary to research the literary history of these genres, focusing on both digitized materials and physical artifacts. The course culminates in a research paper focusing on a specific moment in the history of a genre. The major assignments of the course will build up to this research paper and offer multiple opportunities to present and workshop work in progress.
All new this semester!…well, in truth I taught something a little like this in my first semester at Rutgers, but this course is quite different, as my own research on the subject has advanced (sloooowly) and pushed me to think about genre fiction across the whole of the last century-and-more. Hence this course skip-hops from hard-boiled pulp to contemporary queer romance and back. One thing I haven’t learned over the last however many years of teaching is not to bite off more than I can chew. Should be fun.