Posts in category: Teaching

This past semester I spent a good chunk of my Introduction to Crime Fiction course on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1977 novel Petals of Blood. I wanted my students to spend time with a text where the guilty culprit really was capitalism. By happy coincidence we reached the end of the novel, with its heroic but tantalizingly inconclusive brewery strike, just as the Rutgers faculty/grad unions went on strike. That helped add an experiential dimension to my students’ encounter with a 46-year-old text. Neocolonialism hasn’t exactly gone away either.

It’s a fun and very compelling novel, but it did seem to me to ask for some contextualization. So, as I did when I was preparing Shahid’s ghazals for my other course, I ended up compiling quite a few annotations on Ngũgĩ’s references and non-English words. They’re below, after the jump.

Annotations updated April 21, 2025, fresh from teaching Petals again.

Annotations updated again, June 18, 2026, after reading Ngũgĩ’s Dreams in a Time of War.

Here are some annotations to selected references in Agha Shahid Ali’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight, together with some information about the poet. These are for my students in Principles of Literary Study this semester, who are reading the book this week. But perhaps it will be of some use for other readers of this remarkable poet.

I updated my teaching page with descriptions of my spring 2023 courses and the preliminary syllabuses. I’m teaching Principles of Literary Study and Introduction to Crime Fiction. I’m once again treating Principles as a grab-bag, splitting the semester into seven weeks on poetry and seven weeks on narrative. For the final project, students will rewrite one of the novels we read as an epic poem in hexameters, blank verse, or ślokas. Undergrad crime is a new course for me, though I have taught related material often. The final exam will consist of a single question: “Who did it?”

Note to students: that was a joke about the epic poem. I will also accept a supple free-verse rendition.

Second note to students: I think we all know who did it.

Update, 1/11/23: broken link to crime syllabus fixed. Sigh.

I have two undergraduate courses this fall. I thought I’d post the syllabuses and also give away my hidden agenda.

English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction

Syllabus (pdf)

What do James Joyce, Dashiell Hammett, Mulk Raj Anand, and Zora Neale Hurston have in common? All significant writers of English-language fiction, all active in the first half of the twentieth century, these writers lived through an epoch of global social upheaval—world wars, revolutions, mass migrations, the rise and decline of empire—and their work registers and responds to a world of crisis. Yet Joyce, the Irish experimentalist, writes nothing like Hammett, the pioneer of hard-boiled detective fiction; Anand, the committed Indian leftist, adopts very different perspectives from Hurston, the supreme Harlem Renaissance novelist. This course is a study in what is and is not shared in the fiction of these four writers and others of their era. Students will learn to analyze the forms and themes of exemplary fictions of the early twentieth century and to understand the variety of these fictions as a result of social contestation and collaboration. Readings include case studies in literary modernism (Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner), detective fiction (Dorothy Sayers, Hammett), Harlem Renaissance fiction (Jean Toomer, Hurston), and Indian writing in English (Rabindranath Tagore, Anand).

English 359:207 Data and Culture

Syllabus (pdf)
Syllabus bibliography (pdf)

The digitization of wide swaths of the print record has opened up new challenges and opportunities for researchers in the humanities. This course introduces students to some of the key techniques used by humanities scholars to organize, manipulate, and analyze digital sources—attending both to longstanding scholarly institutions and practices that shape our understanding of digital texts (critical editions, brick-and-mortar archives, and quantitative methods within social, political, and cultural history) and to new methods for studying texts, cultural geography, and relations between and among producers and consumers of culture.

Students who complete this course will develop facility in the use of digital tools for the representation, curation, and analysis of digital text. In each case, however, we will place these relatively new tools within a longer history of humanistic inquiry and will ask: what insights can these tools provide, and what questions (and texts) do they marginalize or occlude? Our aim throughout is to examine how digitization and data science have changed the questions that humanists can ask of their sources. What does it mean to think of culture as data? What new histories do these tools and methods help us uncover? In what ways has digitization helped and hindered the ability of humanities disciplines such as history, literary studies, and art history to provide an understanding of the past that can speak to urgent questions in the present moment?

Hidden agenda after the jump (as they used to say in the Elder Days of Blogging).

My first graduate course at Rutgers, way back in Spring 2013—innocent times, when the worst things we had to worry about were the death spiral of the profession of literary studies, rampant inequality, and climate crisis—was called “Author, Reader, Field: Literary Sociologies of Modernism and the Twentieth Century.” As that ungainly title suggests, it was a mash-up, trying to combine some kind of modernism survey with some kind of discussion of the sociology of literature, while also too-too-cleverly hinting that there is a special connection between modernism and the sociology of literature.

I’m at it again, repeating a graduate course for the first time in my career, and the more plainly titled “Author, Reader, Field” is not nearly as streamlined as the condensed title implies. Also it’s not in three parts. Here’s my draft syllabus, if you’re curious about that sort of thing. Since I recently taught a grad survey of U.S. early twentieth-century literature, this time I bracketed off the Western Hemisphere (more or less) and pinned the course to British literature instead.

But keeping things pretty insular (not totally insular) doesn’t resolve the problem of selection at all. I like literary-historical overviews, and I like theories and methodologies, and I think graduate students ought to have simultaneous doses of both, but even after fourteen years of teaching, the semester still seems too short for what I want to do. I’m less worried about the primary texts than I am about the scholarship. I spend a week on Ulysses with an utterly clear conscience. But I wanted a buffet table of “approaches,” and there’s far less on offer than I initially imagined. Since I am a structured structure functioning as a structuring structure, the spread is mostly Bourdieusian. Tuchman and Fortin stand almost alone for sobering Anglo-American empiricism—which isn’t so bad, but still.

As the culminating poetry reading in my Principles of Literary Study course this term, I assigned Terrance Hayes’s marvelous sequence American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (New York: Penguin, 2018). I thought it would enhance students’ reading of the poems to have a little guidance to some of Hayes’s references, since allusiveness is a key aspect of his poetics. I am copying over the annotations I compiled to this website so that others may find and use them, or—more importantly—be prompted to read this excellent poet.

Another semester is starting up, and we’re all looking forward to an engaging academYOUR INTERNET CONNECTION IS UNSTABLE

That’s not the only thing that’s unstable, but it seems we’re carrying on, and I am teaching two courses this spring. Early Twentieth-Century Fiction is one of my regular offerings, irregularly happening in spring rather than fall. I used to teach Principles of Literary Study as a narrative-only course, but it is now a multi-genre course, and I have had fun dreaming up a compressed introduction to poetry for the first half of the syllabus, and equal fun rejiggering the narrative half of things. I didn’t kill my darlings, but I did add a Raymond Chandler story, which is about the same.

I’ve just taught the first meeting of my fall 2020 graduate seminar, “Science Fiction and Cultural Capital,” so it strikes me that I could now post a link to the syllabus. I suppose I could have tried a little harder to find and assign SF in which people can only connect with others by video link; my hazy and distressing memories of Asimov’s The Naked Sun made me balk there. Anyway, the motto of 2020 is: You do what you can. In this case, what I can do includes assigning a Star Wars novel and making students read about omnivorousness. That, and The Dispossessed.

Syllabuses for my Fall 2017 courses are now up on the teaching page. I am teaching a new graduate seminar, Twentieth-Century Genre: The Case of the Detective, with readings in detective fiction, genre theory, and the high-low cultural divide. I have also significantly revised my undergraduate course on Early Twentieth-Century Fiction, bidding farewell, for now, to some of my favorites (Barnes) and non-favorites (Hemingway) in order to allow for more attention to genre fiction and Indian writing in English. I’m always happy to hear from interested students, including those not currently enrolled.

Descriptions of my Fall 2017 courses are now up on the teaching page. I am teaching a new graduate course on detective fiction as a case study in twentieth-century genre, and a new version of my undergraduate early twentieth-century fiction course. The syllabuses are still in the works, but in the meantime I’m always glad to hear from interested students.