Teaching Portfolio
Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture: New York City
Robert Moses, the (notorious) American urban planner who transformed New York City in the twentieth century, called the Empire City “too big, too complex to be served by any one writer.” While his actions remain contentious, he was right about this: few cities have inspired as much great art and literature.
In this course, we will look at twentieth-century literary and visual representations of New York City. We will read some of Sara Teasdale’s New York poems and O. Henry’s story, “The Duel” (1910). We will then analyze the visual poetics of the City Symphony film Manhatta (1921) by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. We will study the importance of Harlem, a predominantly Black neighborhood, and the Harlem Renaissance with the poems of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay and the music of Bessie Smith. Paul Rosenfeld’s Port of New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “My Lost City,” and John Steinbeck’s “Making of a New Yorker” (1953) are important essays to understand the city’s impact on the twentieth-century artist. We will also analyze the visual depictions of the city and gender roles in Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Finally, we will read the New York chapters of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) and Bright Lights, Big City (1984) by Jay McInerney to analyze the city’s growing consumerism and impacts on the individual.
Course assignments include two position papers, a panel presentation, library trip fieldnotes, and an informative social media post on the official course Instagram account.
Image Details: New York Mural (1932) by Stuart Davis.
Writing about Ghosts
The ghost as a spectral entity is a trope that has been long established in literary narratives. In such stories, the dead are known to haunt the living, and the emotions extracted from such encounters usually include fear, guilt, or grief. If we were to closely speculate on this figure of ‘absent-presence’, how do we define that which is dead and that which is living? How do we mark the distinctions between the haunting and the haunted? How do emotions play a role in defining this other-worldly relationship? If the phenomenon is merely psychological, how do bodies figure in the definitions of ghosts?
We will speculate on such questions in this course by looking at novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008) and the more recent work Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) by George Saunders. We will also look at shorter fictions including Amelia B. Edwards’ “The Phantom Coach” (1864), Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” (1887), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914) and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Black-Eyed Women” (2017). For visual texts, we will look not at canonical ghost films but at the seemingly benign romantic drama 45 Years (2015) by Andrew Haigh.
Image Details: The Ghost of Banquo (1855) by Théodore Chassériau.
Film Analysis: City Films
This is an introduction to film analysis, history, and theory. The course introduces students to film’s unique language, familiarizing them with both narrative and stylistic elements. The course also provides a brief overview of genres and contemporary film movements, which is supplemented by various critical and theoretical approaches.
For this class, we will use the city film form as a framework. From early 20th-century works such as Manhatta (1921) to the more recent Past Lives (2023), the city functions not only as a mere backdrop but as a central motif that captures the thematic sensibilities of the narrative. We will examine various city films through the technical knowledge of mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound, and narrative structure; understand how genre shapes cinematic aesthetics; and discuss key concepts such as film auteurs and film theory.
Image Details: Still from Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) Agnès Varda.
Survey of American Literature
The United States is a fascinating space because it is defined not only by its vast geographical territory but also by ideologies understood to be intrinsically “American”. We have at its roots the ideals of democracy, freedom, opportunity, and individualism, which conglomerate to form the American Dream. With this much complexity, how do we make sense of what it means to be an American? Who gets to make this definition? In this survey course, we will try to answer these questions by critically reading the works of some canonized as well non-canonized American writers. We will assess these texts on the basis of their social, historical, and cultural contexts and grapple with the question of the American identity.
After going through a brief history of American literature till the nineteenth century, we will start with Ralph Waldo Emerson, considered to be at the crux of Americanism and end with Toni Morrison who breaks the Emersonian expectations. Our course will look at different kinds of texts – essays, novels, short stories, poems, plays, TV episodes, and films for a comprehensive understanding of American literature and its contexts.
Image Details: American Gothic (1930) by Grant Wood.
Issues in American Literature and Culture: American Modernism
In the first half of the twentieth century, the onslaughts of the two World Wars along with the rapid industrialization of the United States recalibrated conventional ideas of time, space, and reality. There was a desire to turn towards a new mode of meaning-making that could represent the transformations in the national culture. Thus, when Modernism arrived in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, it made its mark in visual art, literature, film, music,architecture, and public life. Roughly from the 1900s to the 1940s, American Modernism allowed the unfolding of complex sensibilities and philosophies that previous ages could not contain.
In this course, we will look at this fascinating period when every marker of American culture was going through a transformation. We will study T.S. Eliot’s influential “The Waste Land” (1922) and Imagism in Ezra Pound, H.D., and Marianne Moore. We will also engage with the gender politics of Cubist perspectives in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). We will pair this with the Modernist poetics of city symphony films like Manhatta (1921). We will study Modernist jazz influences in the context of the Harlem Renaissance through the works of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. We will also study experimental sentiments in the fiction of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck, as well as in the drama of Eugene O’Neill.
Students will interact with the Architecture & Fine Arts Library resources at UF and write a field-note essay.
Image Details: Blue and Green Music (1921) by Georgia O’Keeffe.