Presentations should last between 5-8 minutes long. You may use notes and, if you feel it necessary, you may bring in visuals (but this is not expected and usually unnecessary). Biography should be kept to an absolute minimum and used only to situate the writer or the piece historically. Do not simply repeat basic information you find on the internet – by now I have read (or heard presented) what’s already available on Wikipedia for most, if not all, of the available presentations.

A good presentation will synthesize the text for the rest of the class. Your job will be to highlight two or three interesting points about the writer’s work, their position as related to their historical situation, and how this might relate to what we’ve already done in class. This will be especially important for those pieces not everyone is required to read. You will also be asked to raise a question or two that can lead our discussion — it doesn’t have to be a grand, complex question (often the simpler the better), but I do ask that it be at least thoughtful and that it can’t be answered with an opinion on taste (i.e., “Did you guys like this?”). A good question might be, “How can we read Tanizaki in relation to Kafka’s story?” or, “What impulses or rhetorical maneuvers are at work in Solana’s manifesto?”

Feb 3
Ihara Saikaku (open)

Feb 7
Kant, Descartes, Johnson, Diderot & D’Alembert (Jay)

Feb 10
Ueda Akinari (Yanmei)

Feb 14
French Revolution (Kumar)

Feb 17
Percy Bysshe Shelley (open)

Feb 24
Edgar Allan Poe (Kate)
Charles Baudelaire (open)

Mar 7
Leo Tolstoy (Hang Jie)

Mar 10
Higuchi Ichiyō (Shunan)

Mar 14
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (Linda)

Mar 17
Tanizaki Jun’Ichirō (open)

Mar 21
Franz Kafka (Junmo)

Mar 24
Expressionism (open)

Mar 28
Chen Duxiu (Ziyi)
Lu Xun (Yilong)

Mar 31
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti “Futurist Manifesto” (Ying)
Vincente Huidobro “Creationism” (Xiaoming)

Apr 4
André Breton (Domenica)

Apr 21
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Minji)

Apr 25
Tadeusz Borowski “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” (1946) (Brayan)

Apr 28
Black Panther Party Manifesto (open)
Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (open)

May 2
Marjane Satrapi (Juhui)

May 5
Hanan Al-Shaykh (open)

May 9
Sandra Cisneros (open)
Junot Díaz (open)