#syllabi

a literary syllabus [x]

how to read now by elaine castillo

a collection of essays by novelist and essayist elaine castillo about the politics and ethics of reading. castillo exposes the inherently colonial premises behind not only the works of many individual writers; but the way reading cultures analyze and canonize works, the tokenizing nature of the publishing industry that fails writers and readers of color, and the unfulfilled promises by bibliophiles and literary institutions to "build empathy" through reading diverse books.

"time in the codex" and "lastingness" by lisa robertson

two essays by poet lisa robertson from her prose collection nilling, both meditations on reading. “time in the codex” is an ode to the sensory and cognitive processes that reading evokes. “lastingness” explores the relationship between passivity and will when it comes to receiving the stories and ideas we read, using the work of hannah arendt to analyze texts by lucretius and pauline réage. 

a history of reading by alberto manguel

alberto manguel (former director of argentina's national library) compiles a history of reading that encompasses the prehistory of books in ancient mesopotamia, the story of the library of alexandria and its influence in libraries that followed, literary societies such as the heian court, book thieves throughout time, book banning in multiple cultures, and the progression of text formats around the world from clay tablets to modern bookbinding.

selections from not to read by alejandro zambra (trans. megan mcdowell)

essays taken from the collection not to read by chilean writer alejandro zambra about the practice of reading, his own evolving reading life, and writing books; mixed with a variety of literary criticism. selections include "in praise of the photocopy," "against poets," "obligatory readings," "traveling with books," and "novels-- forget it."

"how do we read?", "the reading ape", and "inventing reading" by stanislas dahaene

three chapters from cognitive neuroscientist stainslas dahaene's book reading in the brain. "how do we read?" functionally breaks down how our brain understands written words. "the reading ape" imagines how our ability to read evolved by recycling preexisting neural circuits. "inventing reading" explores how languages themselves have formed over time to serve the way we think.

"when robots read books" by inderjeet mani

essay by computational linguist inderjeet mani on ways that artificial intelligence could enhance literary criticism by analyzing classic texts, particularly cumulative corpuses of works. examples of literary AI usage include finding similar character traits, archetypes, and tropes between different books and authors; quantitatively tracking literary trends; and generating timelines and maps of information pulled from narratives. 

"uncritical reading" by michael warner

essay by english professor michael warner which attempts to define what "critical reading" actually is, the beginnings of a history of that practice, its alignment with agency and morality in academic culture, and what the qualities of "uncritical reading" (such as “identification, self-forgetfulness, reverie, sentimentality, enthusiasm, literalism, aversion, distraction") might offer us.

"someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world" by mary ruefle

Week 1: Historical Romance

Primary Reading: The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian

Supplemental Reading

Butler, J. (1999). 23. Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion. In S. Thornham, Feminist Film Theory (pp. 336-349). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474473224-035

McAlister, J. (2016). “You and I are humans, and there is something complicated between us”: Untamed and queering the heterosexual historical romance. Journal of Popular Romance Studies. https://www.jprstudies.org/2016/07/you-and-i-are-humans-and-there-is-something-complicated-between-us-untamed-and-queering-the-heterosexual-historical-romanceby-jodi-mcalister/

Halperin, D. M. (2019). Queer Love. Critical Inquiry, 45(2), 396–419. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26621858

Notes: The goal of this week was to tee up the premise of the class. Supplemental readings were used to talk directly about the subject of historical romance, queer romance, and queer love, but I was also interested in the Butler (1999) piece as an example of an interestingpiece of critical writing. Butler’s arguments around subversion and their rebuttal to bell hooks in this review of Gender is Burning are both relevant to the content of the lecture and frame what I want to accomplish over the course of the class: giving people the vocabulary, skills, and critical eye to more specifically and rigorously articulate what does or doesn’t work about a novel.

In the future, I’d shorten this reading list to just the Butler piece— the layout of the class is such that people were signing up right until the day before and the amount of supplemental reading was totally unrealistic given the time constraints and my propensity for freewheeling when given open lecture time.

Other Reads I Would Have Assigned if I Had Time: Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas, Again the Magic by Lisa Kleypas, The Jade Temptress by Jeannie Lin, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera, Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale

Week 2: Fandom and Romance

Primary Reading: You, Again by Kate Goldbeck

Supplemental Reading:

Prologue-Ch. 2 of The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

Ch. 1-2 of Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto

Sandvoss, C. (2007). The Death of the Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture. In J. Gray, C. L. Harrington, & C. Sandvoss (Eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (pp. 17–32). New York University Press. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.18574/nyu/9780814743713.003.0005/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOorFkysBZJlcKBJhHRal4Oik-5zPOc3ohVk-26NNa2bqp3tuacpk

Leone, M. (2012). 2012 - Petition and Repetition: on the Semiotic Philosophy of Prayer. Monographic Issue of Lexia, 11-12. https://doi.org/10.4399/978885485105433

Notes: Arguably this was my favorite week of class? Fanfiction and romance genre fiction have existed for nearly the same amount of time, but have crossed paths more often in recent decades, so it merited a separate week of discussion.

In assigning these readings, I set myself up to lecture about three things: (1) outlining the way an archive works in fanfiction and, consequently, in romance, as a thing that responds to and alters in response to itself rather than a thing that is subject to the original work it is derived from, (2) the notion of “authority” in a text: namely, the utility of not just regarding authorial voice as sole arbiter of what is “true” in the world of fiction (a la Barthes & Death of the Author) while remaining cautious of the limitations of reader experience alone as a metric of quality and efficacy of a text, and (3) a working conceptualization I have about fanfiction as a form of prayer— that is, a thing that declares a relationship to a maker, declares the possibility of change (a kind of dissatisfaction with god), and imagines other ways of being (a kind of worldmaking).

In talking about fanfiction this way, I wanted to draw out qualities in romance— its archival nature, the way that the genre’s more commercial origins shape the nature of ‘authority’ in the author-reader relationship, the way that repetition proves generative in both spaces.

Other Reads I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, Beautiful Bastard by Christina Lauren

Week 3: Contemporary Romance

Primary Reading: 7 Days in June by Tia Williams

Supplemental reading:

Waldman, K. (2019, October 31). Carmen Maria Machado’s Many Haunted Stories of a Toxic Relationship. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/carmen-maria-machados-many-haunted-stories-of-a-toxic-relationship

Iaccarino, M. (2025). The Otherwise of History. Saidiya Hartman’s New Radical Aesthetic of Historical Representation. De Genere - Rivista Di Studi Letterari, Postcoloniali e Di Genere, (11), 247–257. https://degenere-journal.it/index.php/degenere/article/view/249

First few pages (through prologue) of In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Notes: The supplemental readings this week attend more closely to the world of 7 Days in June to present an interpretation of the novel as a kind of critical fabulation, a concept Saidiya Hartman used to talk about historical life. I was interested in blurring the porous boundaries between “reality” and “fiction,” especially in the context of articulating “memory,” and set up Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House as a text to supplement that point of view.

I find contemporary romance difficult to pin down, so this week I tried to express something more specific about the novel, rather than general about the subgenre, as I did the previous week. Fortunately, 7 Days in June is an enormously generative text.

Other Texts I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: Kiss an Angel by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Reel by Kennedy Ryan, Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert, You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle

Monday, Feb 9: Paranormal, Monster, Sci-Fi Romance

Primary Reading: Slave to Sensation by Nalini Singh

Supplemental reading:

McCormack, D. (2022). The Monstrous and Critical Posthumanism. In Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (pp. 249–274). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3_18

Notes: Used the supplemental reading to frame the lecture, which was about Paranormal Romance and monstrousness as an uncertain, ambiguous, unknown quantity that can be politically and narratively fruitful. The conversation this week was more far-ranging— Slave to Sensation was a divisive text for folks, and we ended up talking a lot about the in-world gender politics and consent politics and reader reactions to those realities.

Other Texts I Would Have Assigned If I Had The Time: I have a whole post on Monster Romance on my insta!

Other Readings That Came Up:

Toscano, A. R. (2012). A Parody of Love: The Narrative Uses of Rape in Popular Romance. Journal of Popular Romance Studies. https://www.jprstudies.org/2012/04/a-parody-of-love-the-narrative-uses-of-rape-in-popular-romance-by-angela-toscano/

Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10257

That is a weird question.

The answer seems to be that it depends on the university. At CUNY, where I work, I own my syllabi, it turns out.

To organize my syllabi, I use a master chart format. I color code each class at the top of the chart, put the term at the top (we’re on quarters so I put “Fall Quarter”), then I fill in the dates for the days of the week for that term. 

Then I look at all my syllabi and enter the dates that readings, assignments, papers, and group projects are supposed to be due.  I also add in notes to self about papers. For example, “start looking at instructions/rubric,” “pick topic and research,” “outline,” etc. 

For many students, procrastination is a big problem that keeps even the best of us from reaching out goals. However, what if I told you there was a right way to procrastinate? 

If you struggle with procrastination, the best thing you can do is give yourself plenty of time to procrastinate. I’ll give you an example:

For my World History class, my teacher has all the assignments outlined in the syllabus. What I do is start the assignment weeks or months in advance and then procrastinate on it for a while. By the time I am ready to work on it again, I still have ample amount of time to complete the assignment.