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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
