This course will explore how the image of the machine influenced the cultural meanings of masculinity and femininity from the fin de siècle to WWII. Reading novels, short stories, and essays by both women and men, we will attempt to understand the period’s fears and fantasies about becoming “intimate with machines.” Why was a problematic femininity so pervasively—and perversely—linked to technology and modernization? How did new industrial, domestic, and media technologies influence the ways gender was imagined and performed? How were machines implicated in new theories of perception, consciousness, sexuality, and the body? What’s erotic about the typewriter? The course will treat technology not only as a theme in the text but also as a way of reading that illuminates the politics of aesthetic form. We will ask how the idea of the machine affected the understanding of writing itself, giving rise not only to distinctly “modern” conceptions of gender and sexuality, but also to different literary styles, such as realism and modernism. Authors may include Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Bram Stoker, Sophie Treadwell, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf.

Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal, declared a recent article in the New York Times. This graduate seminar proceeds from the alternative position that gossip must be historicized for its changing purposes, routes of circulation, and impact to be properly understood. Taking a cue from the truism that the theater furnishes the best gossip, we will focus chiefly on one strand of gossips diverse history: its role in Anglo-American theater from the late seventeenth century through the present. With equal attention paid to dramatic works and performance histories, we will consider gossips deployment in both the content of plays and the contexts of their production. Turning finally to twentieth and twenty-first century culture, we will also put pressure on and expand the notion of theater as we investigate gossips role in psychoanalysis, journalism, politics, television, and film. Throughout the course, the imbrication of gossip and scandal with constructions of gender and sexuality will be foregrounded. Authors include Behn, Congreve, Freud, Mankiewicz, Sheridan, Starr, Wasserstein, Wilde, and Wycherley.

Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal, declared a recent article in the New York Times. This graduate seminar proceeds from the alternative position that gossip must be historicized for its changing purposes, routes of circulation, and impact to be properly understood. Taking a cue from the truism that the theater furnishes the best gossip, we will focus chiefly on one strand of gossips diverse history: its role in Anglo-American theater from the late seventeenth century through the present. With equal attention paid to dramatic works and performance histories, we will consider gossips deployment in both the content of plays and the contexts of their production. Turning finally to twentieth and twenty-first century culture, we will also put pressure on and expand the notion of theater as we investigate gossips role in psychoanalysis, journalism, politics, television, and film. Throughout the course, the imbrication of gossip and scandal with constructions of gender and sexuality will be foregrounded. Authors include Behn, Congreve, Freud, Mankiewicz, Sheridan, Starr, Wasserstein, Wilde, and Wycherley.