Kelly Rich
Assistant Professor of English
Current and upcoming courses
Global Fictions After Empire
ENG285
This course serves as an introduction to contemporary Global Anglophone literatures, as well as a survey of postcolonial and transnational approaches to the field. It asks: What stories do we tell to make sense of our world, and how are these narratives shaped by histories of imperialism and independence? What kinds of critique of empire do these fictions sustain, and what role do they play in establishing a sense of community, language, and place in empire’s wake? The course studies writerly engagements with residual and emergent imperial forms, bringing together key works of postcolonial and U.S. multiethnic literatures. Issues to be discussed include migration and diaspora, cosmopolitanism and globalization, human rights, racial and sexual politics, and transnational kinship.
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Representing War
ENG277-2
As author Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” The ways armed conflicts are represented play a determining factor not only our collective memory of them, but also in the way we conduct ourselves. This course will explore a range of approaches to representing war in the twentieth century. Among the questions we will ask are: When does war begin, and when does it end? At what distance do we sense war, and at what scale does it become legible? What are the stakes of writing, filming, or recording war, or for that matter, studying its representations? We will address these issues through units on violence, trauma, apocalypse, mourning, repair, visuality, and speed. Texts will include novels, short stories, Supreme Court cases, poetry, graphic novels, films, journalism, and theory. (ENG 277 and PEAC 277 are cross-listed courses.)