Stephen Shapiro, convenor term 1 (s.shapiro@warwick.ac.uk)
Nick Lawrence, convenor term 2 (n.lawrence@warwick.ac.uk)

Note: Please purchase and read this book on writing essays BEFORE Week 4 of Term 1: Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Norton, 2006; rev. ed. 2014)

Term 1

Week 1

Joint session 1: Introduction: C21 US writing and culture
Note: This session will occur on Wednesday night, not Thursday. Location TBA.

Week 2

1. Mark Fisher, selections from Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) [available on forum].
2. Ivor Southwood, selections from Non-Stop Inertia (Zero Books, 2011) [available on forum]. Read pages 1-30.
3. Dale Beran, “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump” [available on forum].
4. Philip Mirowski, [11 Tenets of Neoliberalism] [available on forum]
“Fuck You, Buddy” from The Trap (2007), dir. Adam Curtis (in-class viewing)

Week 3

1. Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, from The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Harvard UP, 2011): 7-32, 45-54 [handout on forum]
2. Michael Denning, selections from The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso 2nd edition, 2011): 3-50 [handout on forum]

Week 4

1. Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Fleet, 2017)
2. Wikipedia on The Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment
3. #blacklivesmatter videos [seen in class]
4. Please listen to Charlie Parker's “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” (1947) and Dizzy Gillespie, "Salt Peanuts" (1945)
5. Read short article “Hair Relaxer Facts - What is A Hair Relaxer?” (Teen Vogue)

Week 5

Please read in this order: Rankine, Samatar, Coates. If possible, wikipedia entry on 'microagression' (on forum)
1. Claudia Rankine, Citizen, An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014), parts I-V, pages 5-79
2. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Text Publishing, 2015)
3. Sofia Samatar, "Skin Feeling"

Week 6: Reading week

Week 7

1. Charles Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets"
2. Gilles Deleuze “Postscript on Societies of Control”
3. Frank Pasquale, Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Society & Money (selections on forum)
4. Antoinette Rouvroy, “The end(s) of critique: data-behaviourism vs. due-process” [on forum]

Week 8

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (selections on forum).
Occupy Wall Street Videos (in-class viewing)

Week 9

Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters (Vol. 1 only) (Fantagraphics, 2016)

Week 10

Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room (Bloomsbury 2017)

Term 2

Week 1

Joint session 2: Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (Little, Brown 2018) [handout on forum]

Note: For this first, joint session of the term, we'll be meeting at 5pm on Wednesday, 9 January, in H545. See the selections from Malcolm Harris's Kids These Days on the forum.

Week 2

Atlanta Season 1 (Donald Glover, director/producer; FX)
from Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Class and Race in the Age of Trump (Verso 2018) [handout on forum]

Week 3

Paul Beatty, The Sellout (Picador 2015)
from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket 2016) [handout on forum]

Week 4

Nick Drnaso, Sabrina (Granta 2018)
from James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso 2018) [handout on forum]

Week 5

Paulo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (Orbit 2016)
Patricia Ventura, “Learning from Neoliberal Las Vegas: Understanding Globalization in Location,” Neoliberal Culture: Living with American Neoliberalism (Ashgate 2012) [handout on forum]

Week 6: Reading week

Week 7

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Fourth Estate 2017)
from Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (Verso 2016) [handout on forum]

Week 8

Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (And Other Stories 2015)
from Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border (Oxford UP 2016) and The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford UP 2015) [handout on forum]

Week 9

Chris Kraus, Summer of Hate (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents 2012)
from Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory (Pluto 2017) [handout on forum]

Week 10

Alex Rivera, dir., Sleep Dealer (Futuro Films 2008)