Fall 2023 Course Schedule
fall 2023 Course Schedule
*The Fall 2023 course schedule is subject to change. Please check CAESAR for all up to date course information, including day/times, course descriptions, and mode of instruction.
fall 2023 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2023
COMP_LIT 202-0-1 Icons, Legends, and Myths in Brazil
Course description forthcoming.
COMP_LIT 202-0-11 Heart of Europe: Poland in the Twentieth Century
Over the last century, Poland has undergone an extraordinary range of transformations and traumas: the end of partition among three empires (Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian) leading to the brief period of interwar independence; Nazi conquest, and the virtual elimination of Poland's Jewish population; Soviet subjugation; Solidarity and the revolt against Soviet rule; martial law; and in 1989, independence once again. Poland's shifting borders and the complex history and politics they represent provide a unique point of entry into modern European history. In this course, we will explore the distinctive ways in which history and culture combine in a colonized nation at Europe's heart by way of novels, films, essays, memoirs, journalism, and poetry. Authors to be read will include Nobel Laureates Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Olga Tokarczuk.
COMP_LIT 202-0-21 The End of a World: South Korean Fictions, Films, and Webtoons of Disaster
What does one talk about when one talks about disasters? Whose world ends in “end of the world” narratives? This course invites students to read and watch South Korean and diasporic narratives centered around disasters, both real and fictional, to engage questions of politics, representation, and inequalities that shape disaster narratives.
Ranging from disasters of the past to more contemporary ones such as pandemics and Sewol ferry, the disasters examined in this course have sparked complex conversations surrounding a more just society and the doomed end of the “normal.”
Engaging scholarship on disasters, speculative fictions, critical race theory, and gender studies, the course introduces students to the varied academic and cultural responses to disasters and the underlying stakes that drive these responses.
Students will be assigned a variety of texts to analyze, such as film, paintings, novels, webtoons, and news, as well as choosing a disaster narrative of their own interest to examine.
No prior knowledge of Korean culture or language are required to take this course.
Students are expected to actively participate in class and work in groups on collaborative projects as well as producing two short papers. Waitlist will be enabled for the course, and all inquiries to the instructor once the course is full should state relevant coursework and why you wish to take the course for permission number considerations.
COMP_LIT 202-0-23 Analyzing Freud
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 studies, women's 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.
COMP_LIT 211-0-1 The "New" Latin American Narrative (Taught in English)
So, what's "new" about the New Latin American Narrative? The course approaches this question by considering several key trends in Latin American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels, short fiction, and testimonial writing & film, we will study representative works from the so-called pre-Boom, Boom, and post-Boom decades (1940s-50s, 1960s-70s, 1980s). Although the new narrative is often identified with Boom novels (such as One Hundred Years of Solitude) and with the Boom era overall—when Latin American literature "exploded" onto the world stage--we will take a broader view to consider the diverse types of narrative representing "new" currents in the region. Reading and discussion will focus on formal aspects of narrative and on cultural and historical contexts that shaped the production and reception of new narrative works by well-known figures. Primary texts: Borges's and Cortázar's "fantastic" fictions and essays on narrative poetics; Fuentes's revolutionary Boom novel about 20th-century Mexico (The Death of Artemio Cruz); Ferré's irreverent feminist stories about Puerto Rican society and culture; Valenzuela's ironic dramatic fictions about political repression in Argentina; García Márquez's documentary-testimonial tale about an exiled filmmaker's covert return home during the Pinochet era (Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin). Secondary materials will provide literary, historical, and cultural contexts for primary works. Readings and discussion in English.
COMP_LIT 270-0-1 Images of the Shtetl
In collective memory the shtetl (small Jewish town) has become enshrined as the symbolic space par excellence of close-knit, Jewish community in Eastern Europe; it is against the backdrop of this idealized shtetl that the international blockbuster Fiddler on the Roof is enacted. The shtetl is the central locus and focus of Modern Yiddish Literature; Fiddler on the Roof itself was based on a Sholem Aleichem story. In this seminar we shall explore the spectrum of representations of the shtetl in Yiddish literature from the nineteenth century to the post-Holocaust period. We shall also focus on artistic and photographic depictions of the shtetl: Chagall and Roman Vishniac in particular. The course will include a screening of Fiddler on the Roof followed by a discussion of this film based upon a comparison with the text upon which it is based, Tevye the Milkman.
COMP_LIT 270-0-20 It's Complicated: Love Stories in Hebrew Literature
Whether as a dangerous rival of traditional Jewish life or the only escape from the cruel, alienated modern world, love has always been a preoccupation in modern - and postmodern - Hebrew literature and culture. This course observes and discusses various depictions of the notion of "love" from the early 20th century onwards, as captured in Hebrew novels, short stories, films, and other cultural representations. What stories do Hebrew and Israeli culture tell us about love? What kinds of love (and sexualities) does it portray? And why does it seem that even the greatest love stories must be painful and complicated? Throughout the course we will explore and examine different aspects of the cultural formation of love in Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. We will discuss notions such as the eruption of love and its decline; the myth of love; the diasporic Jewish men's complex attitude toward Eros and the suffering of the abandoned wives of the shtetl; the gendered roles and power relations; the queer alternatives of love; and postmodern love. Moreover, we will adopt close reading practices in order to critically read and interpret different literary texts from different perspectives and prisms - social, political, historical and cultural. The literary and cultural texts will be accompanied by theoretical essays - mainly psychoanalytical, feminist, and queer - as we will discuss and investigate the potentiality of bringing together literature and theory. While focusing on the concept of love, this course also provides an introduction to Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. During the course, we will read literary texts from Yosef Haim Brenner, Dvora Baron, Yehudit Hendel, David Grossman, Orly Castel-Bloom, Alon Hilu and others. We will also watch some recent Israeli films/TV shows. No previous knowledge of Hebrew, Israel or Judaism is required! All the Hebrew texts will be read in translation.
COMP_LIT 301-0-1 Greek and Roman Drama
The scripts and fragments from plays produced in fifth-century BCE Athens in honor of Dionysos, god of wine and theater, are among the most enduring and powerful legacies of ancient Greek culture. Since their rediscovery in the early modern period, directors, translators, and adapters have repeatedly turned to the poetry of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to reflect on political, ethical, social, and theological issues of their time. Most recently, the plays have proved fertile ground for directors eager to imagine alternative ways of thinking about race, gender, and class. We will read a selection of Athenian tragedies, with special emphasis on their form, ancient performance context, and themes, as well as select examples of contemporary adaptations for diverse audiences. All readings will be in translation, and students will be encouraged to work in groups to perform and develop creative responses to individual scenes.
COMP_LIT 303-0-20 Giants, Cannibals, and Critique
How do fantastic figures and imagined places help us shape and critique the real world? This course will focus on early modern French and European literature and philosophy to explore the ways in which the 16th century imagined its "others" and moulded its ideals. We will discuss satire and scepticism as modes for social commentary, situating our primary texts in their historical and political contexts. We will ask how the Renaissance defined itself against the religious, pedagogical, political, philosophical and literary norms of previous centuries. Why did images of giants, cannibals, monsters and imaginary places play such a critical role in redefining society in this period of intense political and religious upheaval? We will also use that long-ago past to examine the ways in which those norms and prejudices continue to affect everyday life today. This course will be taught in English.
COMP_LIT 307-0-20 Feminist, Queer Crip: South Korea and Its Discontents
This course examines contemporary discussions on the topics of gender, sexuality, and disability in South Korea. The past decade has seen an explosion of popular interest in feminism in South Korea. Along with this were competing debates on social and economic inequalities and legislations, as well as debates on gender identity, everyday experiences of discrimination, and overlooked sites of intersectional violence. \
As the scholar Alison Kafer has poignantly shown, thinking through the entanglements of feminist, queer, and disability concerns is important to rethinking exclusionary claims and their attendant problems. Students will explore how queer and crip frameworks trouble and deepen feminist debates, and situate these frameworks in relation to Korea’s history of militarism, war, and migration. Course materials include scholarship on feminist, queer, and crip theories beyond the Korean context, novel and short stories, TV show, news articles, and films.
No prior knowledge of the Korean language or culture is necessary. Student participation, discussion, and peer collaboration are important aspects of this course, and all students will be encouraged to speak in class.
COMP_LIT 312-0-20 William Blake's Afterlives
How did the poetry and visual art of William Blake (1757-1827) come to inspire later artistic misfits and countercultures? Where and how can we trace Blake's visions in the formal experiments and political orientations of modern art and literature? How does his example prepare us to read poetry differently, today? This course explores the unique poetry of Blake alongside its experimental, politically committed, sometimes hallucinogenic afterlives. Blake — a deeply eccentric poet and engraver who was always an odd fit with his British Romantic contemporaries — might be seen as the prototype of the artistic genius outside their time: obscure while he lived, nearly two hundred years after his death he is ever more widely celebrated as a visionary iconoclast and outsider original. The course gives students a strong grounding in some of Blake's own most famous "illuminated" works, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and America: A Prophecy, reading these alongside 20th & 21st-century works across and between genres. Emphasis will be placed on the poetic inventiveness of Blake's mixed-media forms, and his reinvention of the book, as we compare his illuminated poetry and innovative printing techniques with successors in poetry as well as across artistic media (including abstract expressionism, beat poetry, punk rock, and film media). Teaching Method: Brief lectures & seminar discussion. Evaluation Method: short writing assignments, final project.
COMP_LIT 398-0-20 Senior Seminar
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 410-0-20 Worlds of Comparison
This seminar focuses on comparative, interdisciplinary, and relational methods as practiced in (and around) Comparative Literary Studies (CLS) and the Environmental Humanities (EH). It begins with a brief history of CLS and some of its most influential practitioners—Wellek, Auerbach, Levin, Said, and Spivak, among others. Despite their different times and investments, these thinkers consistently looked beyond the geopolitical confines of national traditions to imagine the field of CLS in the most expansive terms possible, as worldly, earthly, or planetary. CLS’s concern with the more than national, along with its openness to interdisciplinary methodologies and its foundational sense of crisis, make it an ideal, if rarely acknowledged, counterpart to work in the EH. After examining related examples of comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship in a worldly mode (by Glissant, Lowe, Chow, Buck-Morss, and others), the final part of the course reconsiders the planetary concerns of EH (in the work of Heise, Chakrabarty, Pratt, and others) in light of CLS’s commitment to thinking literature and other creative forms in situated and relational terms.
COMP_LIT 413-0-20 Lyric Environments
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 do connote familiar romantic scholarship on "nature poetry," and the relations of language to nature; but we'll be thinking about "nature" here bearing in mind that for the romantics and their newer interlocutors, natural "environments" implicate social space and psychic geographies as well. Relevant critical work will be drawn from romantic studies, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminist standpoint theory, affect studies, critical geography, and linguistic anthropology. Alongside the romantics, we'll read a handful of works by living poets that distinctively (and sometimes self-consciously) reconfigure conventions for lyric space and scenes of address laid down in the romantic era. Teaching Method: Brief lectures, seminar discussion.
COMP_LIT 413-0-32 Orientalism and Its Discontents
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.
COMP_LIT 481-0-1 Voice in Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Deconstruction
The seminar will take of up the theme of voice across philosophy and critical theory as it has manifested in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. Authors discussed will likely include Roland Barthes, Adriana Cavarero, Michel Chion, Jacques Derrida, Mladen Dolar, Nina Eidsheim, Don Ihde, Jacques Lacan, Fred Moten, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kaja Silverman, and others.Students will be expected to read closely and participate actively. They will also co-lead a seminar session with the professor. Regular written responses and a final project will also be required.
COMP_LIT 486-0-20 Hannah Arendt: Poetry, Politics, & Thought
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 Arendt 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.
COMP_LIT 487-0-1 Archive Poetics: Subaltern Knowledges and Irreverent Uses
This seminar studies the contemporary appropriation, uses and reactivations of cultural archives in modern and contemporary Argentine literature and culture. We conceive the archive as a social machine that organizes and administers both texts and documents as well as our bodies through different forms of technology that registered our present. We explore the processes of memory that foreground the central role of archives, especially when it comes to the production of knowledge and experiences of subaltern communities, historically excluded. If archives have often been the basis for the rethinking of cultural heritages and foundational fictions, we pay particular attention to the new elaborations of historical, social and cultural models and uses deployed by 20th and 21st Argentine writers. Thus, we delve into art and literature engagements that erode the national archive's former boundaries, stability, function and meaning performing political intervention and subversions that prove to be increasingly recombinant and generative. At the core of our theoretical framework, we test Jorge Luis Borges' famous proposition that marginal cultures -minor literatures have legitimate access to a multiplicity of cultural traditions advocating an irreverent use of the universal archive as the source of true originality.
COMP_LIT 488-0-1 Remnants of Marx
What is left of Marx? This class investigates the emergence and actuality of Karl Marx's thought in the context of its political, philosophical, scientific, and literary contexts in the first half of the 19th century. We will read Marx in conversation with a variety of interlocutors among them the philosophers Hegel and Feuerbach as well as the writers Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Georg Büchner.
Readings will focus on the early writings of Marx: The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature; German-French Yearbooks (On the Jewish Question, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, letters to Ruge and Bakunin); The Communist Manifesto; The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; German Ideology; Theses on Feuerbach as well as some journalistic writings (Law on the Theft of Wood). Key concepts that will be discussed are the notion of critique, the idea of universal human rights, the swerving motion (clinamen) of historical progress, the status of affects (anger, shame) in political discourse, and the aesthetics of revolution.
In addition to close readings of Marx's writings, we will discuss their reception in 20th-century theoretical debates in the works of Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukacs, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Werner Hamacher.
COMP_LIT 488-0-21 Theories of Freedom & Liberation
"Freedom" is a basic term in Western culture, for it became the formal designation of the right way to live—to think, to act, to exist—through which European culture replaced the classical idea of the good life, which had consisted in the exercise of the virtues. At the same time, however, "freedom" is a thoroughly ambiguous and dubious word that, from the beginning of its function as a basic concept, contained implicit and explicit programs for new forms of domination, including domination in the relation of the self to itself, to the world, and to others. For this reason, a critique of freedom is necessary.
The seminar will focus on the idea that freedom exists only in becoming, that is, as "liberation." For it is precisely this idea of liberation that underlies the dominant narratives of post-classical Western culture (and modernity in particular): liberation defines its notions of history, subjectivity, education, politics, the arts, etc. And it is therefore also the thought and process of liberation that most clearly exhibits the dialectical knot that links freedom and domination in their contradiction. From this perspective, processes of liberation will be examined in the seminar. We will ask, for example: what drives those processes? How do they proceed? How do they fail and/or how do they establish new orders of domination?
The seminar will pursue these questions by examining a variety of methodological approaches. These include the following: the exploration of the putative Greek origin of Western freedom in the history of ideas (Meier, Patterson, Raaflaub); the systematic conceptualization of the relations between freedom, capacity, and habit (Arendt, Hegel); the psycho-social analysis of the entanglement between emancipation and domination (Fanon, Hartman); the relation between experience and liberation in aesthetic theories of freedom (Adorno, Blanchot, Heidegger, Nancy); and the question of the relation between religion and freedom (Lévinas, Santner).