COMP_LIT 201 The Detective Novel in World Literature
In this course we will explore the global phenomenon of detective literature and its engagement with the category of "World Literature". Emerging in England in the nineteenth century from, in part, an urban unease brought on by the colonial encounter, the detective novel form was quickly "translated" back into colonized territories and beyond, quickly becoming one of the most dominant, and truly transnational, literary genres in the world. We will read novels from England, Sweden, Japan, India, the United States, and Kenya, considering each one within broader frameworks of generic form, translation, and world literature.
COMP_LIT 202-0-20 The "New" Latin American Narrative
So, what's "new" about the New Latin American Narrative? The course approaches this question by considering several major trends in Latin American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels, short fiction, and testimonial writing, we will study representative works from the pre-Boom (1940s-1950s), Boom (1960s to early 1970s) and post-Boom (1970s & beyond) decades in Latin American literature. Although the new narrative is often identified with the Boom era--when Latin American literature "exploded" onto the world stage--and with Boom novels, we will take a broader view to consider the diverse types of texts that represent important new currents in the region. Focus on works by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Rosario Ferré, Carlos Fuentes, Rigoberta Menchú, Manuel Puig, Ana María Shua, or Luisa Valenzuela.
This course, taught in English, will serve as an introduction to existentialism, which not only defined the literary, philosophical and political culture for French intellectuals of the post-war period, but also remain indispensable for an understanding of various currents of contemporary literature and culture. We shall begin by discussing the philosophical and literary foundations of existentialism. Then we will examine the moral, social and political questions central to existentialism, as worked out in the fiction, drama, and essays of such authors as Sartre, Beauvoir, Beckett, and Fanon. Finally, we will consider the extent to which post-existentialist thought and culture may be read as a continuation of or as a reaction against existentialism.
Italian cinema has changed the way in which we conceive of the moving image and its relationship to reality, exercising enormous influence throughout the world. Films like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and actors like Marcello Mastroianni have not only defined a crucial moment in the history of cinema but have also entered our larger cultural imaginary. In this new course format, we will begin by screening a number of contemporary films (including the 2014 Academy Award winning The Great Beauty) and then identify their precursors and sources of inspiration by going back to the heyday of Neorealism in the 1940s (Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti) and the remarkable output of the 1960s and 1970s (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, Bertolucci). At the same time, we will work toward acquiring the critical and methodological tools necessary to analyze film as a complex mode of textual production
COMP_LIT 301 Ancient Lit in Translation: War and Peace in the Ancient World
War and its fallout have always been a central part of the human experience and have thus sparked the fascination of poets and audiences alike. But along with war comes the concept of peace, both in life and in poetry. In this course, we will examine how poets across a spectrum of cultures, eras, and genres have given life to rich expressions of hope, fear, and everything in between, and ask ourselves how these poets succeed in illuminating this part of the human experience, and to what effect. Homer and Vergil will be our guides through the first part of the quarter, but in the second half we will explore poetries of war and peace from around the world, up to the present day.
This course will consider developments in French and Francophone cinema since the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on the works of directors associated or in dialogue with the "New Wave." We will examine the reinvention of cinematic form by these filmmakers, but we will also explore how such formal innovations may be understood as attempts to respond to the historical events and social processes that transformed French culture in that period, most notably the traumas of the Second World War, the emergence of consumer culture, and the processes of decolonization and globalization. Among the directors whose works will be discussed are Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty.
This course uses interdisciplinary and intersectional methods to study the representations of race in African literatures from different linguistic and racial backgrounds. The role of translation (inter-lingual and cultural) in the depiction of race will be central to our discussions. We will read texts originally written in Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese and indigenous African languages to examine how writers come to terms with the idea of race. Who is an African and who is not? Is race biological or socially constructed? How are non-black races (e.g. Arabs, white, Indians etc.) represented in African writing? How is the "black" in Africa different or similar to "black" in other parts of the world? How do "black aesthetics" and "black arts" in Africa differ from similar concepts in black-diaspora cultures? How does racism intersect with other forms of oppression in African societies? How are internal racisms represented in African contexts? How are representations of race in canonical writing (e.g., Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice) treated in African translations and allusions to those texts? Performing both distant and close readings of African writers, we will read primary texts in terms of the techniques individual artists use to treat race matters. Theory texts will include excerpts from well-known works on the black race by Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Fanon, Memmi as well as newer African and African-diaspora engagements with these texts by such scholars as Charles Mills, Emmanuel Eze, Achille Mbembe, Toni Morrison, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Stuart Hall.
How do contemporary poets write about ideas of community formation, and how is their work sustained, promoted, and nourished by the communities to which they belong? What kinds of social relationships and activist "social engagements" does poetry hope to perform or to bring into being? These are questions we will ask through our studies of a wide variety of U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American poets, from 1989 to the present. We will learn to describe the forms and rhythms of particular works by major and emerging poets, such as Rosa Alcalá, Daniel Borzutzky, Fred Moten, Allison Hedge Coke, and Claudia Rankine. We will also emphasize the study of organizations and journals in creating poetic community. This course is organized in conjunction with two major events at Northwestern: the digital reissue of the poetry magazines Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas (1991-2013), and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics (1997-2015), and two 1-day conferences devoted to their legacies. The class will therefore include the opportunity to attend readings and conference workshops, to meet with a wide variety of contemporary poets, translators, and editors associated with the magazines, including Roberto Tejada, Kristin Dykstra, and Mark Nowak, and to work on digital exhibitions appraising their work and its legacies. Students can expect a mixture of creative and critical assignments, emphasizing both close reading skills and research into the literature and politics of the very recent past and present.
COMP_LIT 307 Film, TV, and Spectacle of Everyday Life
This interdisciplinary course explores the relation between gender/sexuality and Italian visual culture, with an emphasis on film and television. Italy's complex history (from the years of Fascism to Silvio Berlusconi's rise to power in the 1990s) will provide us with a unique platform for investigating the dynamics of visual representation and its effects on society. While drawing from the fields of cinema and media studies, visual studies, and feminist/queer theory, we will focus on the ways in which film and television have simultaneously reflected and shaped our everyday experience and our understanding of gender/sexuality. We will pay particular attention to questions of power, technology, and performance. Among the films we will analyze are Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961), Matteo Garrone's Reality (2012), and Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (2013).
COMP_LIT 390 Sexual Dissidence and Activism in Latin America: AIDS as Critique
The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s produced a new body and subjectivity. While the Global North experienced loss, mourning and activism for retroviral therapy, in the Global South too there was an emergency for viral knowledge and political recognition/inclusion. This course looks to situate the AIDS epidemic in the Latin American historical context while, at the same time, introducing its aesthetic manifestations.
This seminar is designed as a forum for the independent development and completion of a substantive scholarly paper in the field of Comparative Literature. The paper must involve either the study of literary texts from different literary traditions or the study of literature in relation to other media, other arts, or other disciplines. To this end, a number of short written assignments will be required, including an abstract, an annotated bibliography (using bibliographical software), and a formal project outline. The bulk of the coursework will comprise the senior paper itself (12-15 pages) and an oral presentation of the project to the class. The latter assignment will serve as a dress-rehearsal for the Senior CLS Colloquium, which will be held at the end of the quarter. The colloquium allows (and requires) all students to present their projects to the entire CLS community, including faculty and graduate students who will be in attendance.
COMP_LIT 410 The Construction of the Aesthetic: Kant, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Benjamin
The aim of this seminar is to reflect on two opposing constructions of aesthetics: the first, developed by Kant, makes aesthetic judgment into the final element of the enterprise of critical self-reflection on which a solid philosophical system can be built; the second, developed by Kierkegaard, presents aesthetics as a mode of life lived in the perpetual avoidance of decision, which constitutes the first, altogether fallen "sphere of existence." The seminar begins with an analysis of Kant's Critique of Taste (in the Critique of Judgment); in the second part, it turns to certain sections of Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Concept of Anxiety; and it concludes with an examination of the long essay Benjamin wrote in the early 1920s on Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften ("Elective Affinities," 1807). In addition to Benjamin's essay, we read some of his related earlier writings, where he stage critical confrontations with Kant and Kierkegaard. The final part of the seminar will also consider, time permitting, the "inaugural dissertation" Adorno wrote under Benjamin's influence in the early 1930s (after an earlier, failed "inaugural dissertation" on Kant), Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic
This interdisciplinary course integrates readings from contemporary French philosophy and from critical race, gender and sexuality studies. Focusing on the field of biopolitical theory (and its complement, "thanatopolitics"), and the political management of life and death in both domains, it engages the legacy and ongoing influence of Michel Foucault. One section of the course is devoted to a group of lecture series offered by Foucault at the College de France, allowing students to augment their knowledge of core texts such as Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, with a study of some of the following: Psychiatric Power, Society Must Be Defended, and Security, Territory, Population. The second section of the course considers the role of Foucauldian biopolitics within a number of debates from contemporary gender, queer and race studies. Topics will be selected from: politics of utopianism, futurism, the anti-social thesis, critique of reproductive futurism, necropolitics and afro-pessimism, cruel optimism, social ontology and precarious life, debility, biopolitics and the management of language, and the politics of plural temporalities.
Literatura and Anthropology: Brazil and France In his Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss refers to Jean de Léry's History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578) as the "breviary of the anthropologist." Since then, accounts of the native cultures of Brazil (often nostalgic and melancholic) have played a central role in Western epistemologies, as well as in the construction of the modern Brazilian nation and aesthetics. This course is intended as both a thematic survey of Brazilian lettered culture and an investigation of the development of modern ethnography (largely in France). Firstly, we will discuss the role of European accounts of encounters with the Brazilian landscape and indigenous peoples in the development of modern ethnography; then we will analyze how the Brazilian lettered elite responded to the image of Brazil that was constructed by Europeans as an exotic space, and how they incorporated it into their projects of nation building (from 19th-century Romanticism, to Modernist avant-gardes and beyond). Finally, we will discuss how indigenous cultures remain a heterogeneous space in the national and global imagination, and the political consequences of this contradiction in contemporary societies. Readings will include travel narratives, novels, poems, essays, ethnographic accounts and films. Essays by Montaigne, Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Frank Lestringant, Michel de Certeau, Silviano Santiago, James Clifford, Krupat, Walter Mignolo, V. Crapanzano, Vincent Debaene, Viveiros de Castro, among others. NOTE: Reading knowledge of Portuguese, Spanish and/or French desired but not required
This seminar offers an introduction to the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. Our survey includes canonical European avant-gardes and their international circulation, but also a range of non-European movements: Futurism in Italy and Russia; Berlin Dada; Stridentism in Mexico; Surrealism in France, Japan, and Egypt; Brazilian Anthropofagism; and Négritude. Our focus will be on manifestos, literary works, and critical theories of the avant-garde, but we will also consider the visual arts, with a planned group trip to the Art Institute of Chicago.
