COMP_LIT 104 Freshman Seminar: Disability in world literature & global cinema
This course focuses on the nature, meaning, and consequences of what it is to be defined as disabled and explores the implications of this definition in literature and cinema from Persian mythology to recent Disney's adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. The course will introduce students to different theoretical approaches to studying dis/ability and provide an overview of the relatively new field of Literary Disability Studies, enabling students to think critically about conventional conceptualizations of disability and normality of body and mind. Through this course, we focus on these questions: how the body's shape and capacities have been assumed to determine character and fate, how physical and mental impairments have been used in literature and cinema to signify moral and psychological states, and how representation may challenge conventional conceptions of "normality" and "disability?" Literary texts from various periods and geographies will be supplemented with some films.
COMP_LIT 201 Reading World Literature: Global Literary Ecologies
This course introduces students to a diverse range of important works of world literature and the central debates and questions about the idea of world literature. We will explore the interface of global ecological developments and the circulation of texts across the globe. In what ways can literature be compared to the environment? How can we preserve endangered literary texts and languages? How does a text qualify to be part of "world literature"? In what ways does translation affect the circulation of a text? How appropriate is the term "world literature" as a descriptor of planetary literary production? What are the best methods of reading world literature today? Discussing and writing about a variety of theories of world literature, we will assess the merits of different approaches (e.g., distant reading, close reading etc.) in the encounter with specific texts from various parts of the planet. Furthermore, we will study how a local text is affected by worldwide movementsand how it affects other texts, such that it is best be understood comparatively on a global scale. Primary readings will include works by Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Anita Desai, Abduralzak Gurnah, Witi Ihimaera, Amitav Ghosh, and Zakes Mda. Theory materials will comprise commentaries on world literature and world literary ecologies by Goethe, Marx, Emily Apter, Gayatri Spivak, Alexander Beecroft, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Neville Alexander, and Adam Kirsch.
COMP_LIT 201 The Art of Talking Trash: Invective Poetry from Antiquity to the Present
Whether they are attacking personal enemies, poetic rivals, or political antagonists, sometimes poets are just plain mean. This course will focus on the art of trash-talking in ancient Greek and Roman poetry. We will consider a variety of invective poets operating in different genres, including from ancient lyric and curse poetry, comedy and satire both ancient and modern, and contemporary genres such as hip-hop and Lebanese Zajal. In each case, we will study and consider the specific contexts in which this poetry was created, the individual(s) at whom it was directed, and to what ends. We will also investigate broader themes and purposes of invective poetry, such as the advancement of notions of (often toxic) masculinity, the control of social norms, and political protest.
This class will take a look at the life and work of the groundbreaking Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud from a comparative and interdisciplinary angle. Almost 80 years after his death, Freud's legacy continues to be controversial: some claim that his theories are no longer relevant in the light of new research, whereas others defend his theories and/or expand upon the implications and influence of his ideas, in the realm not only of psychology, medicine, and neuroscience, but also in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, literary studies, criminal justice, queer and gender studies, communications, and many more. What is certain, however, is that, one way or another, Freud's theories and ideas have marked the world for all time. This class will read fundamental texts from Freud's body of work in dialogue with texts by Freud's near and distant predecessors and followers, both to situate Freud in his historical and cultural context, and to think through the many different kinds of questions that Freud's work addresses.
This course offers an introduction to Japanese literature, film, animation, and manga from the 1960s to the present. We will consider these media in relation to the historical developments that defined this period such as globalization, the "bursting" of the bubble economy, natural and human-made disasters, and the extension of digital technology into daily life. We will pay special attention to the transformations in media culture that shaped the production, distribution, and consumption of these cultural forms. An overview of Japanese culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this course provides training in the analysis of literary texts and forms of visual narration.
This class introduces students to a variety of philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. Together, we'll read classic and contemporary texts that examine questions such as: what is gender - and how, if it all, does it relate to or differ from sex? What does it really mean to be a woman or a man - and are these categories we're born into or categories that we become or inhabit through living in a particular way under specific conditions? Human history all the way up to the present seems to be rife with asymmetrical relations of power that relegate those marked out as women to a subordinate position - what explains this? What would it mean to overturn this state of affairs - and which strategies are most likely to accomplish this task? And to what extent is it possible to grapple with all of the above questions - questions of gender, sex and sexuality - without also, at the very same time, thinking about how they relate to questions of class and race? Readings will include selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler, Talia Bettcher, and others.
COMP_LIT 211 Intro to Poetry: The Experience and Logic of Poetry
The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. The experience of poetry includes both of these models, and theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process.
COMP_LIT 211 Japanese Cinema II: From New Waves to Present
This course offers a history of Japanese cinema from the beginning of the New Wave movements in the mid-1950s to the present moment. We will consider how the cinematic has reflected historical moments and shaped cultural discourses in this period. Focusing on films that raise disciplinary questions related to both the cinematic medium and Japan, we will examine, among other topics: the relationship between cinema and the era of high economic growth, the decline of the studio system, postmodernism, and cinematic responses to the post-bubble economic recession. We will also study the shifting position directors within the broader economic and institutional contexts of Japanese cinema and its global circulation. Students will learn how to critically analyze various films from multiple theoretical perspectives while gaining an understanding of the major figures and trends in the history of postwar Japanese cinema. Syllabus subject to change.
COMP_LIT 270 Confronting the Canon: Intro to Modern Chinese Literature
When does modern literature become a category in China? What does that category include/exclude and what are its standards of inclusion/exclusion? How do individual works and authors enter "the canon"? Confronting the Canon examines literary prose (novels, short stories, essays) written in Mainland China between the late nineteenth century and the Communist Revolution in 1949. It provides an introduction to many of the best known works and authors of this period?Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, and Ding Ling, among others?but it does not treat their canonicity as an aesthetic or historical given. Carefully curated and hotly contested, literary canons are not simply the "sacred works" of the nation; they help create the nation and its people. We no longer ascribe such powers to novels and short stories, but in 20th China these were politically explosive forms. This course places canonical literary works in their historical context in order to better understand how and why we continue to read and re-read certain texts today, while also exploring some of the literary paths (including experimental modernism and science fiction) that were foreclosed or discounted for political reasons. All readings will be in English. No previous knowledge of China or Chinese is required.
COMP_LIT 301 Postcolonial Noir: Crime, Fiction, Empire, and the Postcolony
Crime fiction is where questions of law, justice, and community are investigated, but only rarely resolved. This course will explore this problem in a transnational context, to expose the fundamental issues of power and difference that have underlain the classic detective novel, and then work our way through texts produced in colonial and postcolonial settings in the Middle East and North Africa. Surveying over 150 years of detection, we will use these texts to understand the relationship between criminal investigation and literary interpretation, between history and the present, and between literary style and political authority.
COMP_LIT 301 Studies in World Literature: Greek and Roman Drama
2,500 years after the birth of Athenian drama, classical tragedy and comedy continues to inspire and beguile us. In this course, we will read several masterpieces of Greek and Roman tragedy and comedy, as well as adaptations of these plays for the modern and contemporary stage. Throughout, we will examine how classical drama related to its original cultural contexts, how it addresses fundamental questions about human societies and relationships, why these plays continue to provoke reflection, and how audiences experienced and continue to experience classical drama. All readings will be in translation, and as part of the course we will also attend a dramatic performance.
The course will read Indian Ocean texts in the context of broader African and South Asian writing and oceanic cultural practices. Topics will include slavery, Swahili poetic forms, Indian Ocean translations, cultural translation, women's writing, and queer representations. Engaging a broad range of critics and theorists in oceanic and diasporic studies (e.g., Paul Gilroy, Subramani, Gaurav Desai, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Françoise Lionnet), we will read, discuss, and write about such authors as Nadifa Mohamed, Abduralzak Gurnah, M.G. Vassanji, Mwana Kupona, Sofia Mustafa, and Shaaban Robert.
COMP_LIT 301-0-22 "Where Memory Dwells": The Memory Debate within Contemporary Latin America
This class will introduce students to the various roles that memory, as a concept, has played in twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American politics and society. To consider such roles, this class will address a range of sociopolitical contexts, such as Argentina's and Brazil's authoritarian regimes and Guatemala's civil war. At the same time, it will not be limited to instances of state-sponsored violence but will interrogate broader systems of repression to explore how memory is constructed and what its limits are. While this class will focus on a range of primary sources, it will focus primarily on feature films, novels, and sites of memory.
This course offers students the opportunity to explore some of the many intersections between Shakespearean drama and music from the late sixteenth century through the early twenty-first, not only in many sorts of performance of the plays themselves, but also in opera, ballet, film, musical theatre, art-song, popular music, and the symphony, to name only a few. Textual languages include not only The Bard's original English and its more modern forms, but also French, German, Hindi, Italian, and Russian, for starters. Because the original productions of all of Shakespeare's plays included music, and each one has inspired many musical interpretations since that time, we will concentrate on three. Students will have the opportunity to work with other plays for research and/or performance projects.
COMP_LIT 305 Andrei Tarkovsky's Aesthetics and World Cinema
In this course, we will review major films of Tarkovsky and of Russian and non-Russian directors whose work is related to his (Eisenstein, Wenders, Bergman, Kurosawa).
Throughout the twentieth century, Latin America experienced a wave of violent and authoritarian dictatorships that threatened the survival not only of individual victims but of the respective nations whose democracies had been overturned. These regimes, with the support of foreign countries such as the United States, committed atrocities that the region still reckons with today. In their horror and unexpectedness, these atrocities—such as the genocide of indigenous communities; the illegal incarceration, torture, and sexual abuse of political dissidents; and the disappearance of victims’ bodies—destabilized not only the regimes themselves but their democratic successors as well. This course addresses the question of survival through contemporary films that reflect upon the authoritarian regimes in Brazil (1964–85), Chile (1973–90), and Argentina (1976–83). Together, we will explore documentary and feature films that grapple with the effects that these regimes had—and continue to have—on society, politics, and international relations. While our focus will be on films released after 2000, we will turn to works of criticism to situate those films within historical cinematic traditions in Latin America.
A combination of seminar and workshop. Together we will translate several short poems and study theoretical approaches to literary translation and practical accounts by literary translators. We will approach language, poems, poetics, culture and theoretical issues and problems in relation to each other. Your written work will be due in different forms during the course. In your final portfolio, you will present revised versions of your translations and a research paper on translation.
This course will be devoted to an intense engagement with one of the major figures in the history of literature, Marcel Proust, and to his In Search of Lost Time, which remains a crucial text in the development of modern thought. The focus will be on four volumes of the Search: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Time Regained. We will explore Proust's reinvention of the novel as a form in relation to a number of Proustian problems and themes: his analyses of desire, perversion and sexuality; his reflections on the nature of time and memory; and his exploration of the relationship of art to life. We will also consider Proust's powers as a satirist and critic of ideology, who mercilessly dismantled the individual and collective illusions of his contemporaries.
This course reviews some of the most important ideas and arguments produced in Latin American Philosophy and Critical Theory. Latin American Philosophy was born out of aims to understand how geopolitical conditions produced intellectual coloniality – understood as the impossibility of reaching an age of majority due to dependence on western thinking. Most recently, Latin American critical theorists — such as Santiago Castro-Gómez, Rita Laura Segato, Verónica Gago, and the Zapatistas,— have asked : What discourses of power lie behind the understanding of Latina American as otherness to Europe? What is the relation between war and the increase of femicide? How do aesthetic practices, social movements, and the exercise of memory change politics? How can those practices be understood as part of a "potencia feminista”? With which theoretical sources should we understand Latin American experiences such as "zapatismo" and its political principle of “governing obeying”?
In this course, we will understand how the Philosophy of Liberation, and other Latin American productions, form part of a “knowledge dispositive” (a term in dialogue with the French philosopher Foucault) engaging the political needs of colonial and colonized nations. Students who have enjoyed the study of foundational critical theorists such as Marx, Nietszsche and Freud (and frameworks such as historical materialism, genealogy and psychoanalysis) will encounter authors in critical dialogue with these methodologies. This is a creative dialogue, given that theories produced in western traditions do not always attend to the current realities of Latin American countries. We will consider how gender-based critique has formed an important part of recent Latin American critical theory and address the role of race, gender, and class intersectional critique in this context.
Thus, the course moves from Anibal Quijano’s critique of coloniality of power to María Lugones’ critique of this category in light of her parallel account of a modern gender system. We will study projects to overcome intellectual coloniality by concentrating on the debate, and differences, between Dussel and Santiago Castro-Gómez, and their respective theories of a philosophy of liberation and a genealogy of coloniality. Further keywords from this course on decoloniality and critical theory include gore capitalism, coloniality and transmodernity, potentia/potestas, endebtedness, and baroque identity.
This course examines the participation and significant contribution of Latin American and Latinx artists and writers working at the same time and alongside their US and European counter parts in the turbulent decades of mid-20th century to construct a hemispheric vision of Pop Art. Introducing new historical frameworks reshapes debates over Pop's perceived political neutrality, social inclusiveness, and aesthetic innovations creating a vital dialogue that crosses national borders and connects the design of the Chicano/a movement in the US with the vivid images of the Cuban Revolution and innovations in the tradition of Mexican printmaking. We will highlight the Pop art's rich visual strategies and explore how these artists and writers, poets made bold contributions to conceptualism, performance, and new-media art, emphasizing their stance on social protest, justice movements across the continent, and debates about capitalist consumption, freedom and counter-culture. Analyzing the production of artists like Jorge de la Vega, Marta Minujin, Beatriz Gonzalez, Marisol, Helio Oiticica, Hugo Rivera Scott alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana among others, we build transnational accounts and a full view of America following iconic Pop images as they travel between New York, Sao Paulo, Bogota, Mexico, San Francisco, Buenos Aires and La Habana.
This course is taught in English and in conjunction with the Block Museum exhibition Pop America so we will have a rich programming: a curator's talk, gallery visits and guest speakers.
COMP_LIT 390 The Plague — In and around Literature
This course will investigate texts - literary, historical, critical - which respond to the terrifying effects of the plague. Going back to the Old Testament, on the one hand, where the plague is portrayed as divine punishment, and to Greek tragedy and history,, on the other (Sophocles, Thucydides), the ways different cultures confront the threat of decimation and death will be studied in a variety of texts including Boccaccio's Decameron, La Fontaine's Fables,, Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year," Kleist's unfinished "Tragedy of Robert Guiscard," Poe's "Mask of the Red Death," Artaud's "The Theater and the Plague," and finally Camus' novel, "The Plague".
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.
This course takes its point of departure from a careful reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt's massive study of Nazi totalitarianism and its origins in anti-Semitism and European imperialism. For the first three weeks of the class, we will read the three sections of the Origins along with a selection of Arendt's contemporaneous writings on issues at the heart of her study: wide-scale statelessness and forced migration; racism and imperial expansion; totalitarian propaganda and the "holes of oblivion." Arendt recognized that the Origins posed a question that remained unanswered in that work: faced with the manufacture of living corpses, what preserves our humanity and redeems our actions? Arendt's next major work, The Human Condition, thus moves toward an analysis of the conditions and modes of human activity: from the biological life process, to the world-creating capacity of homo faber, to the urgency and fragility of human action. As we read The Human Condition, which seeks to answer the question posed by the Origins by accounting for what European philosophy has generally failed to analyze with sufficient clarity?namely, the dimensions of the "active life"?we examine Arendt's attempt in the same period to review and, in her own way, deconstruct the concepts of thinking around which the ideal of a "contemplative life" concretized. This prepares us for a reading in the final weeks of the seminar of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she re-conceptualizes evil as a certain implementation of systematic thoughtlessness. As we examine these three major works, each of which is a reflection on the relation between language and politics, we will continually attend to the varying ways in which Arendt sought to understand where poetry stands in relation to human "conditionality," and we will use her often-neglected suggestions in this regard to develop an Arendtian poetics.
Edward Said's "Orientalism" (1978) has been one of the most influential - and controversial - works of scholarship of the last half century. As a pioneering work of postcolonial theory, it has reshaped entire disciplines, from history and area studies to comparative literature, anthropology, and even the study of English literature(s). But Said has also had his critics, some very astute and others not so much. In this course, we will begin by closely reading Said's own works to try to understand them in all their nuance and complexity, and then examine some of the arguments of his critics of various disciplinary backgrounds.
This course serves as an introduction to the "greater romantic lyric," as well as an abbreviated survey of lyric theory. While tracking the sequence and dialogue of a handful of key critical paradigms from the last half century (and more), we will investigate how lyric poetry situates its reader in a universe of discourse through rhetorical address, affective cues, and social disposition. The "environments" in question thus connote familiar Romantic scholarship on "nature poetry," and the relations of language to nature; but we will do so always bearing in mind that for the Romantics, natural environments implicate social and psychic geographies as well. Relevant critical work will be drawn from intersections of phenomenology, theories of voice, sound ecologies, social theory, and linguistic anthropology. We end the course with a handful of works by living poets that distinctively (and sometimes self-consciously) reconfigure the conventions of romantic lyric. Poets include Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Anna Barbauld, John Clare, Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans and John Keats (depending on student interest, this list may extend farther forward into the C19); contemporary poets: Claudia Rankine, Ed Roberson, Tommy Pico, Lisa Robertson and Daniel Borzutzky.
COMP_LIT 414 The Floating World: World Literature and Modernism’s Japan
In this course we will study the global circulation, reception, and use of Japanese culture in the first half of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on literary modernism. While we will learn some of the particulars of that history, our emphasis will be on broader literary-critical questions about translation, the circulation of forms, the relationship between literature and the visual arts, comparative and alternative modernities, and the category of world literature: which “world” and what counts as “literature”?
Following an introduction to the historical background of and methodological debates around the topic, our second unit will consider some of the diverse ways in which japonisme in the visual arts carried over into the European novel. Our third unit considers the global circulation of the haiku in the 1910s and 20s, including French- and Italian-language haiku written in the trenches of the First of World War and Mexican political haiku, in addition to some more widely known Anglo-American modernists. We conclude with the impact of japonisme on theories of theatricality and film.
Literary and primary authors will include, Kobayashi Hideo, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pierre Loti, Marcel Proust, Masaoka Shiki, José Juan Tablada, Ezra Pound, and Sergei Eisenstein; secondary sources and critics will include Alexandre Kojève, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Pheng Cheah, Karatani Kōjin, and Roland Barthes.
Our focus will be on literary and critical works, but we will also study the close relationship of these writings to visual culture and we will plan a group trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. Students will have the opportunity to develop a research project relevant to their field and/or national area of interest. Please note there will be assigned readings for the first meeting, so students who plan to take the course but are not yet enrolled by the first meeting should contact the instructor ahead of time if possible. Readings will be provided as pdfs via Canvas (in English and in their original language).
COMP_LIT 414 20th Century Literature – Jewishness, Modernity, Autobiography: Mandelstam, Babel and Schulz
This course will focus on the prose writings of three great Jewish modernists from Eastern Europe, Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938); Isaac Babel (1894-1940), and Bruno Schulz (1892-1940). Both Mandelstam and Babel were born into the so-called "Pale of Settlement," the outskirts of the Imperial Russian Empire to which its Jewish population was largely confined. Schulz spent most of his life in the the Western Ukrainian town of Drohobycz, at what was, at the time of his birth, a remote corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How did these writers work through their identities as Jews in an age of collapsing empires and radical upheaval? We will explore these and other questions by way of the autobiographical and quasi-autobiographical texts the writers produced in interwar Eastern Europe.
A combination of seminar and workshop. Together we will translate several short poems and study theoretical approaches to literary translation and practical accounts by literary translators. We will approach language, poems, poetics, culture and theoretical issues and problems in relation to each other. Your written work will be due in different forms during the course. In your final portfolio, you will present revised versions of your translations and a research paper on translation.
What does literary and/or aesthetic form do, and what is the relationship - if any ¬- between form and ethical value? What is the critic's proper relation to the text or artwork? What does it mean to read - much less, to read professionally? This seminar will consider the history as well as the present of such questions through a broad overview of representative texts on ethics and aesthetics from Lessing to the present day, with a particular emphasis on contemporary theoretical paradigms and debates. Parallel to the course readings, students will get training in skills necessary to graduate- and professional-level academic work, including the preparation and workshopping of a paper, ideally for publication.
Friedrich Schlegel famously claimed that the French Revolution, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and Fichte's Foundations of the Science of Knowledge represent the great trends of his age. Another term for this age is modernity. This class will follow Schlegel's intuition and reconstruct the precarious relationship between politics, philosophy, and literature which marks a specific notion of revolutionary modernity, i.e. the interruption of historical time in the name of something radically new and different. Paradigmatic for such a rupture is the French Revolution. Its literary representations and philosophical conceptualizations will be the topic of our discussions. A tentative reading list includes (but is not limited to): Friedrich Schlegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Heinrich von Kleist, Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt.
The great scholar of early modernity Aby Warburg declared, "Every age has the Renaissance of antiquity that it earns." That is, different times have found different things to admire or to deplore in the Renaissance, and have framed their own cultural projects accordingly. There is thus not one Renaissance, and not just because the period itself was multiple There have been many Renaissances, and they have served different purposes in different cultural moments. The Renaissance has been asked to stand for the rise of science and the decline of faith; an upwelling and channeling of powerful, ancient forces; a point of resistance to industrialism, capitalism, and modernity; the very opening of modernity. Taking its cue from reception studies in Classics, this course will consider how the Renaissance as a cultural and historical phenomenon has been framed and reframed for various ideals in various eras. Case studies may include Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, when the Renaissance declared itself a Renaissance of ancient culture; the 19th century, when historians like Burckhardt and Michelet and artists like William Morris, Ruskin, and the pre-Raphaelites imagined a Renaissance that opposed the industrialization that they saw marring Europe; the later 19th century, when Pater and Symonds used the Renaissance to explore sexual desires that their own culture did not sanction; and the early 20th century, when Warburg and Walter Benjamin imagined an apocalyptic Renaissance that shattered the linearity of history itself. Students will be asked to research another moment in the history of the reception of the Renaissance.
Biographies, both popular and scholarly, remain among the most widely-read of all genres. Yet biography itself continues to be, as one recent scholar puts it, "radically under-theorized" in cultural and literary studies today. How do we use biography in reading post-romantic poetry? How do poets themselves perceive, and manipulate, their biographies in creating and assessing their own work? What does it mean to read biographically?
In this seminar, we will explore these questions both through theoretical texts and the work of poets themselves. Poets to be discussed may include: Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, and Wislawa Szymborska, along with key figures in modern Anglo-American poetry. All readings will be available in English translation.
This course offers an introduction to what was arguably the most long-lasting and widespread avant-garde movement of the twentieth century: surrealism. Although generally thought of as a Parisian movement whose influence radiated outward, both the origins and the travels of the movement as overdetermined as they were variegated. In addition to being historically important, then, the movement also provides a kind of test case for the global circulation of literary, artistic, and political ideas.
About the first third of the course will focus on the surrealism in Paris, from the 1924 manifesto through its early literary production, into the emergence of various "dissident" surrealisms as the group became increasingly politicized and fragmented in the 1930s. Our emphasis will be on what one critic has called "ethnographic surrealism": the movement's strong interest in non-Western art and culture, but also its auto-ethnography of European modernity. The latter two-thirds of the course will explore a variety of non-European movements affiliated with surrealism: Japanese surrealism; the Cairo-based Art and Liberty group; international négritude (particularly in Martinique and Senegal); and Latin America (particularly Mexico).
Authors will include Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Claude Cahun, Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Kitasono Katue Michel Leiris, Jane Nardal, Takiguchi Shuzo, and Ramses Younan.
Our focus will be on manifestos and literary works, but we will also study the close relationship of these writings to the visual arts and we will plan a group trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. Students will have the opportunity to develop a research project relevant to their field and/or national area of interest.
COMP_LIT 487-0-21 On the Life of On the Life of Images in the Digital Age
On the Life of Images in the Digital Age: The aim of this course is to introduce graduate students to 20th- and 21st-century theories of visual culture, sound, and media, with special emphasis on the French and German contexts. Rather than attempting a survey, we will work around specific topics—labor, war, surveillance, migration—and trace the ways in which they have been explored by theorists and practitioners alike. We will focus on the relation between art and technology and the shift from analog to digital media as it affects the life of images at the level of both inscription and reception. While considering different kinds of media, we will read texts by Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Byung-Chul Han, among others. We will also analyze films by Martin Arnold, Guy Debord, Walid Raad, Hito Steyerl, and Harun Farocki.
Marcel Proust's work foregrounds two tasks of the work of art. First, art provides a locus for thinking our relationship to the past: it serves as the site in which the different worlds and selves through which we have passed can coexist with and communicate with one another. But for Proust art also has a privileged relation to the transformative power of the involuntary: it creates the forms through which we can articulate our relationship to the desires, sensations and events for which our existing forms of life and representation have least prepared us. This course will begin by examining the ways in which these two tasks are intertwined in Proust, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which his aesthetic and ethical elaboration of these problems situates his work in the history of modernism. In the second half of the course, we will turn to the ways in which these two tasks of the work of art are rethought in the works of two of Proust's inheritors and filmmakers?writer Jean Genet and filmmaker Chris Marker?who, even as they engage Proust's legacy, can no longer presuppose the aesthetic, discursive and institutional forms of modernism. In Genet's autobiographical and political fictions, and in Marker's cinematic works of Chris Marker, the relationship between memory and the involuntary are intertwined in new ways, which oblige us both to rethink the place and function of aesthetic experience in culture after modernism and to reconsider the potential importance of the Proustian legacy in elaborating an aesthetic politics that resists postmodernity's dominant cultural forms.
In recent years, scholars have grown increasingly reflective about framing triggering classroom material in light of #MeToo and other paradigm-shifts in attitudes toward questionable works, artists and intellectuals. Yet as this debate around the ethics of pedagogy has grown, there has been much less discussion about how we treat these same works in research contexts. What does it mean to feel conflicted about picking a novel, theorist, story, play, film, image or song for a syllabus, but unconflicted about focusing on that same material in an article or talk? This class starts with the premise that this rift is not new, but has always been a part of critique itself; the question of how to engage "unethical objects" motivates critical interventions constantly, just as these interventions have, in turn, reorganized the very category of the problematic.
To gain perspective on this dialectic, our class will look at case studies in ideology critique, aesthetic distance, visual violence, privilege, intellectual disgrace, and representing racialized bodies. Theorists we read will include: Chinua Achebe, Theodor Adorno, G.E.M. Anscombe, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Immanuel Kant, José Esteban Muñoz, Plato, Edward Said, Sherry Turkle and Linda Williams. Artists, writers and filmmakers will include: Amiri Baraka, Sophie Calle, Walker Evans, Jane Gilloly, Yael Hersonski, Alfred Hitchcock, Errol Morris, Leïla Slimani and Lars von Trier. Students will also present objects from their own research they find ethically challenging. Some questions will include: What ethical approach is fitting for research? If there are objects that require more study, then are there also objects that should be studied less? How does what we choose to research reflect privilege? Where does the legitimacy of the researcher come from, how is it recognized? What sort of moral and affective economies emerge in our relationship with our research objects, and how are these themselves culturally contingent?
