Contemporary Literature

Our faculty in contemporary literature and culture are an appropriately diverse group. Areas of expertise include American literature and culture since 1945; African American literature and rhetoric; twentieth and twenty-first century world literatures in English; Latino/a literature; Asian American literature; American Jewish literature; the history of the avant-garde; poetics; the rhetorical discourses and practices of biotechnology; literature and other arts; post-postmodernism as the logic of “just-in-time” capitalism; queer theory; feminist studies; and disability studies.

Faculty in contemporary literature and culture teach graduate seminars in such subjects as African American literature, experimental poetry, contemporary fiction, science fiction, cultural studies, post-colonial literature, various ethnic literatures, and scientific and medical issues viewed from literary and rhetorical perspectives. We help students understand not only the means of cultural production but also the cultural production of meaning. While we profess no common methodology or object of study, we believe that contemporary studies offers something not available in other periods, the challenge of grasping the contemporaneity of the contemporary, together with the long-term transformations wrought by modernity over the course of the past few centuries.

Recent Grad Courses