SPRING 2026 Program in Literature Course Offerings
LIT190S Intro to Surveillance
Crosslists: CMAC 190S-01 / VMS 190S-01 / SOCIOL 190S-01
Instructor Rukimani P
Wed/Fri 1:25-2:40PM
Friedl 102
No Prerequisites
With the advancement of technology, the surveillance of civilians—particularly marginalized populations—by the U.S. government, corporate conglomerates, and academic institutions has become a more pressing concern now than ever before. We have witnessed this in various accords over the past decades through the mass harvesting of personal information for target advertising, the violation privacy agreements, the use of military-grade drone surveillance by universities to monitor student protests, and much more.
Thus, this course traces the history of surveillance in the United States through a critical race studies framework, examining its development, implementation and advancement by the state as it is structured and operated within the matrices of anti-blackness, colonialism, and racial capitalism. Students can expect to read and discuss key texts alongside undertaking small-scale computational projects that will explore the logics of surveillance.
LIT209S Banned Books
Crosslists: ENGLISH 242S-01
Professor Robyn Wiegman
Tu/Th 4:40-5:55PM
107 Friedl
No Prerequisites
When are books considered too dangerous to read? This course explores this question by reading across a wide range of banned texts, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Art Speilgman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel Maus. Our aim is to understand the potency attributed to literature as a form of political influence and social instruction. By the end of the term, students will have a broader understanding of the role that literature—and by extension the humanities as a whole—has played in political struggles over cultural representation, historical memory, identity, and democratic debate.
LIT240S Cold War Hollywood: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock
Crosslists: CINE 345S-01 / ENGLISH 388S-01 / VMS 343S-01
Professors Markos Hadjioannou and Rey Chow
Mon/Wed 10:05am-11:20am
102 Friedl
No Prerequisites
This course is designed for undergraduate students interested in cinema, film and critical theory, narrative, and representation. By focusing on the work of prolific and influential filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock, the course offers a broad introduction to some of the topical issues debated by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Matters covered include practices of looking, crime and criminal behavior, troubled personalities, identity theft, romantic coupling, urban life, the middle-class family, all while focusing on the Hollywood establishment and its representation of social matters during the Cold War period.
LIT290S-01 Personal Identity
Crosslists: PHIL290S-01
Professor Maya Kronfeld
Wed/Fri 11:45am-1:00pm
West Duke 202
No Prerequisites
An introduction to the puzzle of personal identity in modern philosophy and literature. Key philosophers and literary authors include: William Shakespeare, John Locke, Dave Hume, Thomas Reid, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Laurence Sterne, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, William James, Henry James, W.E.B Du Bois, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, H.P Grice, Frantz Fanon , Philip K. Dick, Sydney Shoemaker, Toni Morrison, John Perry, Jamaica Kincaid, Judith Butler. Traditionally, the philosophical problem of personal identity -- pertaining to the unity and continuity of the self -- has been construed as a logically separate problem from that of personal identity as constructed socially by class, race, gender, etc. While we will provisionally preserve this distinction, we will also explore ways in which the metaphysical question of the coherent self is shot through with the sociopolitical question of the self as constructed by systems of coercion and domination.
LIT290S-02 Ethics and AI
Crosslists: CMAC290S-01
Professor Luciana Parisi
Tu/Th 10:05am-11:20am
102 Friedl
No Prerequisites
This course engages with current debates about ethics and AI. From the reproduction of biases in search engines to the self-corrections of stereotypes images in the current use of generative AI (machine learning systems and Large Language Models), there is an urgent need to explore ethical questions about what constitutes the subject, the human and living itself. AI writes for us, codes for us, choses our friends, becomes us. While some warn us against the danger of AI for humanity, other argue that AI challenges the colonial, patriarchal principle of the human as a category that represents some as it oppresses others. At the core of this class is an interrogation of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic that will help us discuss ethical theories developed in continental philosophy (from Marxism to post-structuralism). This course offers an overview of ethical conundrums as a guidance for a critical understanding of thriving AI systems today. It will analyze cases where algorithmic models of decision making show the contradictions and paradoxes of ethical solutions and where AI exposes the limits of normative discourses and of the logic of inclusion and exclusion. We will discuss how ethical approaches developed in critical theory, feminist and queer theories and feminist black studies can offer alternative forms of ethics for AI.
LIT290S Imagining Technology
Crosslists: ISS 290S-05 / VMS 290S-05
Instructor Vladimir Lukin
Wed/Fri 1:25pm-2:40pm
East Duke 204A
No Prerequisites
We often assume technology is universal, cutting across cultures—but is it? Why is U.S. science fiction filled with AI takeover fears while Soviet robots appear as loyal companions? How do Japanese cyborgs challenge Western ideas of sexuality? How did the same digital devices symbolize oppression for the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s yet become tools of liberation during Twitter revolutions? Why did industrial machines inspire utopias in the USSR and dystopias in Weimar Germany? What insights into digital media can Chinese sci-fi or Afrofuturism bring? Through films and theory, this class explores how culture shapes our vision of technology and guides technological development.
LIT301S Theory Now
Crosslists: CULANTH 303S-01
Professor Christina Leon
Tu/Th 11:45am - 1:00pm
102 Friedl
No Prerequisites
This seminar functions as an introduction to key theoretical concepts and debates that animate theory historically and in our current moment. Concentrating on the legacies and relevance of critical and literary theory for the now, this course will look at canonical texts and, also, current theorizations. We will read across several traditions of critical theory that allow us to think about questions of language, difference, power, subjectivity, and political economy. Moving into contemporaneous concerns, we will see how such historical theorizations emerge and shift in current theories of gender, race, coloniality, materiality, mediation, and the environment.
LIT316S Film Theory
Crosslists: CINE 203S-01 / VMS 298S-01
Professor Markos Hadjioannou
Mon/Wed 11:45am-1:00pm
Friedl 102
No Prerequisites
What is film? What is the relationship between film, other media and other art forms? And what is the relationship between film and the real world that it captures, or that it purposefully or inadvertently leaves out of the image?
These questions have been central to many thinkers who have tried in various ways to tackle that seemingly simple first question: what is film? Offering an in-depth introduction to this field of inquiry, “Film Theory” turns to some of the major debates, figures and films of the 20th and 21st centuries, moving from the field’s emergence to its establishment in the postwar period, and from its influence in the ‘70s to the contemporary turn toward digital cinema.
LIT320S Social Media and Social Movements
Crosslists: AAAS 247S / AMES 318S / ICS 320S / ISS 323S / LATAMER 320S / RIGHTS 323S / VMS 323S
Professor Negar Mottahedeh
Mon/Wed 4:40pm-5:55pm
Friedl 102/Zoom
No Prerequisites
Examines uses and abuses of social media by social movements. Interested in a broader historical study of mediating technologies and oppositional public sphere, course considers the uses of cameras, phones, cassette players, radio, and social media platforms, but also books, bodies, art, fashion, and automobiles as oppositional technologies. Studies political and ethical uses of technologies in social unrest. Investigates impact of technologies on social movements and social transformations in contemporary history. Student driven case studies will highlight contemporary engagement with social media by networked social movements.
LIT333 Bad Behavior
Crosslists: SOCIOL 330-01
Professor Nima Bassiri
Tu/Thu 3:05pm-4:20pm
Friedl 107
No Prerequisites
What does it mean to behave badly? How is 'bad behavior' distinguished from actions that are otherwise described as evil or criminal? This course addresses these questions by examining ideas of deviance, wrongdoing, and misconduct in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—that is, modern behavioral categories that are considered to be aberrant without necessarily being strictly defined as transgressions of the law. We will consider how bad behavior concerns the disruption of implicit social norms rather than the explicit violation of legal or moral codes.
LIT380 Marxism and Society
Crosslists: CULANTH 203-01 / EDUC 239-01 / POLSCI 371-01 / SOCIOL 339-01
Professor Michael Hardt
Mon/Wed 10:05am-11:20am
Friedl 107
No Prerequisites
Introduction to Marx's core concepts, such as alienation, commodity, and revolution. Includes examination of Marx's own major historical & political analyses, his economic texts, and his philosophical writings. Students also gain familiarity with the role of Marxist thought in different fields and disciplines, including feminist theory, anthropology, history, political science, and literary studies.
LIT390S-4 Blackness, Cinema, Poetics
Crosslists: CINE 390S-01 / VMS 390S-01 / ENGLISH 390S-6-01
Professor Zakiyyah Jackson
Mon/Wed 3:05pm-4:20pm
Friedl 102
No Prerequisites
What happens when a film is crafted with the language of poetry in mind? How does knowledge of poetry shape formal experimentation in film? In what ways has the history of film already been conversant with poetry? Why might black filmmakers, in particular, look to poetry as a guide for filmic representation? Is there something about blackness—about processes of racialization—that elicits knowledge of poetry and poetic understanding?
This course investigates poetic effects in recent experimental and narrative film, exploring the affinities between the language of cinema and that of poetry. We will examine the filmmaking of both avowed poets and putative non-poets, considering how certain films—at the registers of both content and style—evoke poetry.
LIT576S Theory & Aesthetics: Rousseau
Crosslists: ISS 576S-01 / ROMST 576S-01 / VMS 576S-01
Professor Anne Garreta
Tues 4:40pm-7:10pm
Friedl 102
No Prerequisites
How do philosophers view, read and make sense of literary texts, works of art and other philosophers? This course aims to elucidate the key conceptual articulations and hermeneutic moves undergirding a given philosophical signature and to delineate the status of aesthetic objects in theory.
It explores 2 of Rousseau’s most critical texts. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his Confessions to focus the articulation between modern autobiography and the development of modern political subjectivity. The philosophical and literary background of both texts will be explored in depth.
Texts will be discussed in English translation, but Students can read them in French.
LIT690S-01 Science and Politics
Crosslists: HISTORY 590S-02 / ICS 590S-08 / SOCIOL 590S-01
Professor Nima Bassiri
Wed 1:25pm-3:55pm
Friedl 216
No Prerequisites
This course introduces students to the deeply intertwined relationship between scientific knowledge and political thought and power in the modern era. We will begin with discussions around the socially, economically, and politically embedded nature of scientific knowledge production before moving on to analyses of the relationship between scientific and political authority. We will examine how modern states, for example, deploy scientific knowledge and technologies to establish social, political, and economic order, while also examining the implicit political norms that underlie scientific practices and theories. The course will be devoted to the idea that scientific knowledge and political systems have been “coproduced” or reciprocally shaped after the eighteenth century and into the present. Readings will be drawn from scholarship in science and technology studies, history of science, and social and political theory.
LIT690S-02 Marx’s Grundrisse
Professor Michael Hardt
Tues 3:05pm-5:35pm
Friedl 216
No Prerequisites
This seminar will be oriented toward a detailed reading of a single text, Marx’s Grundrisse, which in recent decades has played a major role in Marxist theory and reoriented understandings of Marx’s thought. The seminar will also engage interpretations of the Grundrisse by theorists including Antonio Negri, Moishe Postone, Stuart Hall, David Harvey, and Mario Tronti.
LIT690S-03 Sex/Gender
Crosslists: ICS 590S-03 / GSF 690S
Professor Zakiyyah Jackson
Mon 10:05am-12:35pm
Friedl 225
No Prerequisites
This course investigates the complex and contested ways in which ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are constructs—and how they construct each other. In light of the recent explosion of contemporary feminist, trans, intersex, and queer approaches to topics such as biology, gender, embodiment, materiality, and the organismic body, we explore how contemporary theory, philosophy, and science both inform and are informed by social worlding, positionality, power, history, and identity practices. Rather than approaching the subject of “sex/gender” from a single disciplinary framework, we begin with these questions and survey how various (inter)disciplinary tools and methods attempt to provide insight.
LIT690S-04 Late Jameson
Crosslists: ENGLISH 590S-4 / ROMST 690S / GERMAN 690S
Professor Ranjana Khanna
Wed 8:30am-11:00am
Smith Warehouse Bay 6 B177
No Prerequisites
The course will introduce Fredric Jameson’s work as a window on theory concerning cultural production and its emergence in the world over the last century. It will also highlight the singularity of Jameson’s project over his thirty or so monographs published between 1961-1990 (in Part One in Fall 2025); and 1991-2024 (in Part Two in Spring 2026). Participation in part two is not dependent on participation in part one. In addition to examining his own thought, the courses will also, of necessity, engage with that of some of his major interlocutors: Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Hitchcock, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Ursula LeGuin. Importantly, it will examine how his work exemplified and also attempted to engage with a worldview of the arts (in literature, architecture, cinema, opera, the visual arts) such that any site of cultural production was understood as emerging in the context of a rich and varied world that nonetheless emerged from a singular modernity.
LIT890S-01 Theorizing The Literary
Crosslists: ROMST 790S-01 / GSF 890S-01
Professor Christina Leon
Mon 1:25pm-3:55pm
Friedl 216
This course will examine the importance the literary has had for theoretical thought and that theoretical thought has had for a reconsideration of the literary. Pairing literary pieces with theoretical readings, the course will consider a few central schools of thought in literary theory historically and in the present: semiotics, poetics, translation, deconstruction, feminist & queer theory, and critical race theory. How do thinkers theorize the status of literature, the literary, and the literariness of language? How have theorists considered literary as a catalyst for thought and as a problem for thought? What can translation tell us about language and the literary more generally? What is the relationship between language and the literary? And how can these theories revise, perhaps, how we read more than just literature? Literary writings will include Edgar Allan Poe, Willa Cather, Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, Roque Salas Rivera, and others.
LIT890S-02 Media Theory Today
Crosslists: ARTSVIS 790S-02 / CMAC 790S-02
Professor Mark Hansen
Thurs 10:05am-12:35pm
Friedl 216
Over the last two decades, media has become an ever more prevalent and powerful force in our world. During the same period, media theory (like theory before it) has transformed from a specialization within the theoretical humanities into a central element in many areas of interpretative research. The question this seminar will address is: can and how can we delimit the field of media theory when media quite literally permeates all facets of cultural production and life? To this end, we will read recent works by media theorists focusing on core issues and concepts such as: information, noise, algorithms, race and bias, the internet, code, the environment, smartness, simulation, computation, data, assembly, platform, ecology, secrecy, exteriorization, negentropy, feeling and nonconscious cognition, automation, energy, machine learning, artificial intelligence, communication, cybernetics, and war. Our explorations will facilitate collaborative thinking about how media theory can help us conceptualize what has become an existential condition of the human: our multi-scalar co-individuation with and within technical operations. Readings will include work by Chun, Geoghegan, Halpern and Mitchell, Vogl, Franklin, Wilkins, Dhaliwal, Stiegler, Weatherby, Hayles, and Terranova. Novelist Tom McCarthy’s recent meditation on information and simulation, The Making of Incarnation, will help us frame our explorations in relation to the technical realities of contemporary culture and life.
LIT890S-03 The Form In Question
Professor Maya Kronfeld
Thurs 1:40pm-4:10pm
East Duke 108
Can literary form (metaphor, prosody, narrative point of view, intertextuality and other modes of rewriting like parody, translation, etc.) create revolutionary changes in the ways we frame theoretical questions from aesthetics to the politics of gender and race? In this graduate seminar, we first trace the evolution of this question through a survey of critical trends from Russian Formalism through Czech and French Structuralisms to Tel Aviv School Neo-Formalism and 21st-century New Formalisms, only to call into question such progressive chronologies by zeroing in on the crucial role that questions of literary form continue to play in feminist, queer theory and Black Studies as they recover marginalized investments in form in unacknowledged precursors. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Christian, Stephen Best, Michael Sawyer, Tyler Bradway, Heather Love, Zohar Weiman-Kelman, and the verbal artists with whom they theorize, we will examine ways in which novelistic and poetic form can hold non-deterministic ways of knowing that are negated under the reigning social order.
LIT892S Publication Workshop
Professor Robyn Wiegman
Tues 10:05am-12:35pm
Friedl 118
This course is a writing intensive, works-in-progress course for doctoral students interested in preparing an article for publication. It will explore the everyday challenges of writing and introduce students to the professional practices and protocols of journal publication. During the term, you will read and comment on the work of your peers, learn how to interpret and generate feedback in the form of reader's reports, revise your own article, and explore potential publication venues. The final act of the course will entail submitting your article for publication in the journal of your choice. The course is designed for mid- and late career doctoral students. Course admittance requires instructor permission. To apply, please send the following materials in a SINGLE PDF file: 1- a brief cover letter stating the ways in which the course will be useful to your career development, 2- a copy of the paper you plan to revise, and 3- a 1-2 pg CV to Robyn Wiegman, rwiegman@duke.edu. Application review will begin Nov 1, 2025.