Aristides Dimitriou (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor of English and Mellon Faculty Fellow at Gettysburg College. He is currently working on a book that examines how U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American authors innovated with time, space, and narrative to conceptualize the course of history as U.S. expansion reproduced French, Spanish, and British forms of imperial governance in the twentieth century. His work has appeared in College Literature and is forthcoming in other academic journals.
Courses Taught
Intermediate study of a variety of authors, themes, genres, and movements during the 20th and/or early 21st centuries. Courses may cover American, British, transnational, and/or post-colonial literatures. Fulfills Humanities requirement.
Survey of Latinx literatures and their historical contexts. Students analyze novels, poems, and films to investigate what Latinx identity means along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they intersect with issues of code-switching, immigration, diaspora, revolution, exile, and citizenship. Students compare the experiences and aesthetic choices of different Latinx communities in the United States, while thinking more broadly about their transnational contexts in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Survey of African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American works across the 20th and 21st centuries. In this course, students encounter literary expressions of colonialism and racialization; double consciousness and code-switching; migration and diasporic writing; alienation and assimilation, while considering complex intersections of class, gender, and sexuality. In this way, students assess how ethnic literature challenges more traditional forms of American culture, thereby revising traditional notions of American identity.
Advanced study of a variety of authors, themes, genres, and movements during the 20th and/or early 21st centuries. Courses may cover American, British, transnational, and/or post-colonial literatures. Fulfills Humanities requirement
Students in this course will examine U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American literature in a comparative and interdisciplinary context. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century and moving through more contemporary voices, we will read novels, poems, and critical works that address the historical and cultural relationship between the American North and South, i.e., between global geographies that
have been divided into core and peripheral zones. The concept of the 'Western hemisphere' gained cohesion through the displacement and erasure of indigenous populations across the global South. We will therefore assess how the recovery of knowledge, history, and freedom remains central to literary works that mobilize a hemispheric imagination. Students will explore how imperialism, racialism, polyculturalism, and multilingualism not only shaped cultural production in the Americas but also provided a shared experience of loss and fragmentation that becomes the object of modernist representation across national divides. Moreover, students will examine the literary devices and narrative structures that constitute cross-regional anxieties concerning historical origins, geography, chronology, and memory across the continent. In addition to primary texts, we will engage criticism
across the fields of Atlantic, borderlands, and diaspora studies to identify and understand key concepts that span the fraught yet emerging field of transnational American literature.
Intensive studies of announced topics in American literature. Prerequisite: one course from 290-299.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, many science fiction and fantasy writers took interest in the subject of “disembodied consciousness" an imagined byproduct of life in the virtual terrain of “cyberspace." New currents in science fiction and fantasy, however, are returning to an older engagement with the subject of “embodiment," especially within the representation of technologically advanced, near-future societies marked by ecological crises and dystopian regimes. A renewed focus on the status of the body within the context of contemporary, imminent, and potential scientific revolutions revisits the historical tensions between Romantic and Enlightenment thought, famously portrayed, for example, in the nineteenth-century works of E.T.A. Hoffman, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells. Returning to this subject, as questions of racialization and proletarianization grow larger in the popular imagination, the broad field of science fiction and fantasy—often termed “speculative fiction"—interrogates with renewed intensity the social legibility and legitimacy of bodies. As such, speculative modes of writing, especially those written by authors that belong to marginalized groups, give expression to the embodied experiences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability: experiences that often shape identity by way of exploitation, alienation, and disempowerment. In this course, we will engage with literature, film, and other media to examine the speculative representation of embodied experience. As we explore the projected realities of genetic engineering and cloning; of cyborgs and hybrid life-forms; of orphaned monstrosities and disposable androids, we will focus on what it means to be human, precisely as the human subject enters a new stage of posthuman and transhuman redefinition. How and why might speculative fiction endow the non-human body with a greater sense of humanity? Why do some works assume that subhumanized bodies, such as monsters and zombies, deserve unmitigated violence (even to comedic or effect)? How does speculative fiction interrogate what it means to exceed the human, i.e., to be “more human than human" within an economic structure that renders such excess illegitimate for society yet suitable for the maximization of profit? In other words, how and why does the representation of embodied experience represent the way that society defines human, posthuman, or non-human subjects? In this class, we will read, watch, and interact with various media to explore these questions, while developing our critical thinking skills to improve our writing and composition.