ENGL S114 Course Descriptions

Telling Stories - Craig Eklund

Human beings are storytelling animals.  We tell stories of our lives, our families, and our nations.  We tell stories of the past, present, and future.  Stories are a natural, universal way for us to order and interpret experience.  But not all stories declare themselves with a “Once upon a time.”  Many, in fact, are told without any announcement at all.  Many are told without any obvious teller.  Many are not so much stories we tell as they are stories that tell us—how to live, how to think, how to understand things.  In this course we will explore how narratives and narrative-like structures secretly shape the way we conceive of the world.  We'll ask what happens to the past when we craft it into the narrative that we call history.  We'll look at the modern myths that populate our cultural landscape and the stories that shape our political convictions.  We'll read the science of stories and the stories of science.  We will think about how our own life stories relate to how we conceive of ourselves.  Examining both the way we tell stories and what stories tell us, this course tries to get the story straight, once and for all.

Craig Eklund is a Lecturer in the English Department.  He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale.  He specializes in French and English language Modernism and wrote his dissertation on the imagination in the writings of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.  He has been teaching writing classes at Yale and Quinnipiac Universities for several years now.

BAMN: What is a Social Movement? - Tim Kreiner

By any means necessary is a slogan with a history. In the US, it is usually associated with Malcolm X. But Malcolm borrowed the phrase from Frantz Fanon, who made the slogan popular among militants in the struggles for liberation from colonialism. And although the revolutionary mood that slogan gathered owes much to the Cold War and liberation movements in the global South, that mood passed through revolts against masters of every kind in much of the global North. This class explores the history of collective action in the postwar US in order to ask what is a social movement? Are the burning of the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, #NODAPL riots, #MeToo no-platforming, and risings against police violence part of the antiracist, feminist, anticapitalist, and climate justice movements born in the 1960s? Or do they suggest that something new is afoot in the twenty-first century? What about Trump-ism and the Capitol riot? Who struggles for freedom from what, why and how, in short? And why do we divide the manifold dynamics of those struggles into discrete “movements”? Readings will be drawn from the writings of militants as well as scholars, and span movement histories, critical theory, and contemporary inquiries into ongoing social struggles.

Tim Kreiner is the Course Coordinator for ENGL 115 and a Lecturer in Directed Studies and the English Department at Yale. He is finishing a book of literary history titled Contentious Poetics: Social Movements and American Poetry in the Postwar World and teaches courses on political theory, global social movements, 20/21 c. American literature, and the relationship between cultural production and social contest.

Against Empire: Postcolonial and World-Systems Theory - Chris McGowan

This course will introduce students to some of the central debates and questions in postcolonial studies and world-systems theory, such as: What motivates and sustains empire? How has imperialism developed historically and what are the distinctive features of imperialism in the present? How have people subjected to colonialism resisted it, and how have they thought about and described that resistance? What role do cultural and educational institutions—or, students, teachers, artists, and writers—play in ongoing decolonization struggles? We read critical works by Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Immanuel Wallerstein, and discuss two works of narrative art: Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers (1966), and Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, Lucy (1990).

Chris McGowan is a Lecturer in English at Yale University. He is currently working on an academic book called "Inherited Worlds: The British Modernist Novel and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre," which studies the relation between British modernism, novelistic genre, and the history of the family under capitalism. At Yale, he teaches courses on literature, creative nonfiction, and first-year writing. He is a founding member of the Left Literary Studies Working Group.

Creative Obsessions - Carol Morse

What is the nature of creativity? Is there such a thing as “creative genius,” or are most creative endeavors achieved through hard work and practice? Can it be taught? From childhood crushes to white whales, artists, scientists, and writers have transformed ordinary obsessions into expressions of beauty and wonder.  But as much as we praise the imagination and the work it produces, it can have a darker side; creative types are sometimes linked to mental instability, substance abuse, and self-delusion. This class will allow you to explore and write about the many varieties of creativity. We’ll read scholarly work from different academic disciplines, such as STEM fields, education, and the humanities. What is the relationship between creativity and obsession? Creativity and addiction? Are we motivated by external validation or an inward drive to manage, or even escape, reality? Readings will include work by or about such artists as Gloria Anzaldua, Richard Deming, and Maurice Sendak, and we'll explore a film about the creative process (Greta Gerwig's Little Women).

Carol Tell Morse is a lecturer in the English Department and a Learning Specialist in the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. Prior to working at Yale, she was the Faculty Director of the Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts at the University of Michigan, where she also taught classes in first-year writing, children’s literature, podcasting, and poetry. She received her PhD in Irish poetry from University College, Dublin.

What We Eat - Alison Coleman

You are what you eat. Taking inspiration from a dictum that is widely repeated but multifariously interpreted, this course will draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives and modes of writing to explore how our dietary and culinary practices connect to larger questions of biology, selfhood, and civilization. Readings, discussion, and paper assignments will be organized around a trio of thematic areas: the history of food and nutrition science; agricultural practice, sustainability, and our interrelationship with the foods we consume; and the role of food and eating in shaping individual and cultural identity. Texts will include articles and book chapters by Jiayang Fan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Steven Shapin, among others. One class meeting per week will take place at the Yale Farm and will involve field time and hands-on experience; all abilities are welcome, and prior agricultural experience is not expected.

Alison Coleman is a Lecturer and university administrator who teaches multidisciplinary writing seminars on topics ranging from awe to food studies to unplugging; in 2023 she received the English department’s Fred Strebeigh and Linda Peterson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her pedagogy emphasizes deceleration and immersive inquiry, and her current research focuses on the habits of mind of artists, scholars, and other social contributors. A former journalist for The Miami Herald, she is a fellow of Ezra Stiles College.

Fakes, Imitations, and Knockoffs - Taylor Kang

What is a “fake”? A plastic-leather bag? A fake Caravaggio? The word alone invokes complicated ideas surrounding “authenticity,” in addition to long histories of capitalism, labor, and (e)valuation. In this course, we examine our longstanding cultural obsession with “the authentic” – and the forms of artistic anxiety, panic, and outrage that often accompany good fakes. We take a transhistorical approach, moving from the Renaissance practice of aemulatio, to Roman and Las Vegas architecture, to recent discussions of autofiction in the contemporary book world. In the process, we interrogate what we mean when we talk about “originality,” and why we often denigrate imitations, fakes, and knockoffs.

Taylor Yoonji Kang (she/her) is a PhD student in Comparative Literature & Early Modern Studies, where she works on poetry, philosophy, and visual culture between the early modern period and the twentieth century. Before coming to Yale, she got her A.B. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Outside of academics, she enjoys running, reading, and making art.

Hope - Sam Steinmetz

What is hope? What may we hope for? Is hoping hardwired into our biology or a socially constructed behavior? In whom or what should we invest our hopes? And what is the use—if there is any use at all—of hoping? Keeping our own hopes (and fears) in mind, we’ll explore the concept, rhetoric, and politics of hope from a variety of academic perspectives in the humanities and sciences. We’ll pay particular attention to the place of hope in discussions about climate change, academic success, and the good life. And we’ll examine artistic expressions of hope in poetry, fairy tales, and painting. Last, but certainly not least, we’ll ask how we can share our hope with others.

Sam Steinmetz is a PhD candidate in the German department, and is currently finishing a dissertation about aesthetic theories of the novel and cinema in early twentieth-century Europe. Before coming to Yale he taught high school English in Austria and studied comparative literature at Boston University. His non-scholarly pursuits include riding his bike, playing go, and baking vegan chocolate chip cookies.

Cultures of Violence - Barbara Stuart

According to an August 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center, four-in-ten adults in this country live in a household with a gun, including 32% who personally own one. 72% of gun owners surveyed have purchased that gun for protection. But the Pew survey also shows that “six-in-ten U.S. adults say gun violence is a very big problem in the country today.” The survey reveals tensions in a culture where gun ownership is significant and legal and where citizens are concerned about the pervasiveness of gun violence. (Source: Pew Research Center: Key Facts About Americans and Guns)

This course seeks to look beyond the polarizing rhetoric over rights to gun ownership to explore how individuals and communities can work towards responding to and reducing gun violence. We will be looking at the cultural, social, political, and institutional structures that have contributed to the U.S.’s higher rates of gun violence as compared to peer countries and at a range of creative efforts to make U.S. communities safer through local, regional, and national endeavors. In doing so, we will be examining these key questions: Through what mechanisms can individuals and communities come together to reduce gun violence? How can a persistent problem like gun violence be addressed?

Barbara Stuart earned her PhD long ago and happily taught at Yale for 30 years. The focus of her doctoral work was the Victorian novel, and she often re-reads those novels with great pleasure, but at Yale she has taught documentary film, the contemporary essay, and two courses inspired by her own and her students’ interest in our food system: “The Real World of Food” and “Writing about Food.”