COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Spring 2024 Course Schedule

Spring 2024 Course Schedule

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*The Spring 2024 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.

Spring 2024 course descriptions

Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.

Spring 2024

COMP_LIT 101-8-20 First-Year Writing Seminar: Neon Genesis Evangelion: Ideas, Inspirations, and Influence
This writing-intensive course focuses on the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion by the director Hideaki Anno, generally considered as one of the most celebrated works in this art form. What are the dominating ideas in this series, and how do they evolve? How do discourses of religion, philosophy, and psychology manifest in this series, explicitly or implicitly? How does the saga of Neon Genesis Evangelion achieve its quasi-mythical status, and what influence has it exerted on anime as a form, culturally and economically? The main goal of the course is to introduce students to the conventions and rigors of evidence-based argumentation and analysis in humanistic forms, and we will accomplish this by surveying the original TV series of Neon Genesis Evangelion, its film sequels in the late 1990s, and its more recent Rebuild series with the previous questions in mind. By also reading theoretical works from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and select contemporary cultural critics, we probe into and reflect upon topics that profoundly inform Anno’s series as well as our daily life: the nature of desire, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, the formation of self-consciousness, among all others.

COMP_LIT 200-0-1 Introduction to Literary Theory
This course offers an introduction to key works of criticism and major theories of the study of literature. We will ask questions at the very heart of literary studies: what is literature and what are its uses? How do human beings exist in language and imagine different worlds through it? How does literature employ form to address matters of experience, subjecthood, and society? And how are the literatures of the world related across their differences? We will survey debates about these questions in the criticism of the past as well as in recent, cutting-edge theory, emphasizing modes of reading critically in relation to dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. While the readings in this class will mostly consist of theoretical texts as opposed to literature, we will read the theory itself as a “literary” object, blurring the lines between literature and its criticism as we compare larger patterns of cultural representation across time and space.

This course serves as an introduction to the major in Comparative Literary Studies, but it is open to all students who are serious in their curiosity about the nature of literary expression.

COMP_LIT 201-0-21 Reading World Literature
This class introduces students to the genre of epic poetry and the most influential movements in their composition and their interpretation. No prior knowledge of Greek and Roman culture is required. In fact, this class is designed to offer the foundational knowledge (and then some!) that is often assumed of epics like the Odyssey or the Aeneid and the societies that produced them. In the style of a survey course, students will read widely in translation at home. In class, lectures will supply the historical context and interpretive lenses that help us understand the poems. Our goal is to trace broad trends and themes, define their limits, and push beyond "the big three" (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid) into a fuller appreciation of the Greek and Roman epic tradition. To this end, we'll cover the young love of Medea and Jason in Apollonius' Argonautica, the godless conflict between Julius Caesar and Pompey in Lucan's Civil War, and the tantalizing contradictions of Statius' young Achilles in the Achilleid.

COMP_LIT 202-0-1 Interpreting Culture: Icons, Legends, and Myths in Brazil
Representations in graphic materials, documentaries, film, theater, folklore, narrative fiction, and popular music of historical, literary, and popular figures in the national imagination. Includes English or Portuguese discussion sections.

COMP_LIT 202-0-11 Interpreting Culture
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was, among other things, a grand experiment in family, sex and marriage. How did the backwards Russia of the early twentieth century become the most advanced nation in the world in gender and family legislation by the 1920's? How did Soviet government attempt to translate Marxist theories of the “woman question” into social practice? What happened when revolutionary visions were replaced by the "Utopia in Power" of Joseph Stalin? What becomes of utopian dreams in first a post-utopian and then a post-Soviet reality? How did the state regulate gender representation in the arts? And how did literature and the arts shape, resist or reflect key transformations in Soviet society as the century progressed? We will examine both state-sanctioned and oppositional works, including poetry, short stories, novellas, novels, memoirs, film, and the visual arts as we explore these questions.

COMP_LIT 202-0-21 Interpreting Culture: French Existentialism
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.

COMP_LIT 205-0-1 Reading Difference: Colonial Korean Literature and Culture
Why is the Korean-Japanese relationship so strained to this day? How might we think about the colonial period (1910-1945) on the Korean peninsula from our present, and about intra-Asian colonialism? This introductory course offers students some snapshots of colonial era Korean literature and culture and tackles difficult but rewarding questions about this period. We will read short fictions from prominent authors of the time and discuss visual cultures (illustrations, art, films) surrounding New Woman, Indigeneity, race, and wartime mobilization. The course also invites students to consider the often-forgotten Korean diaspora and migrations created under the vast Japanese empire that exceed the limits of the peninsula: what does it mean to be “Korean” in the shifting identities of the colonized in these different places around the empire? Finally, the course examines more contemporary representations of the colonial period to think about how the colonial period haunts the present as we desire and consume the colonial. No prior knowledge of Korean language or culture is necessary to take this course. Course assignments include a deconstructed paper (short writing exercises), a group presentation, and a final creative group project. Participation in class discussion and peer collaboration are important aspects of this course.

COMP_LIT 205-0-20 Reading Difference
This course is an introduction to philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. What is gender and what is its relation to sex and sexuality? What is gender injustice and why is it wrong? What are the causes of gender injustice and how could we overcome it? And what is the relation of feminist theory to lived experience and to political action? We will read and critically discuss both historical and contemporary texts addressing these questions.

COMP_LIT 211-0-1 Readings in Genre: Coming of Age
A monster, a basement, a storm, a prayer. What scenes haunt a child's mental landscape? Coming of age is a process of wrestling with scenes of the past, and coming-of-age novels present us with identities that are paradoxically both formed and in the process of being formed. Such novels probe our sense of origins and identity, and moreover they reveal a complex relationship between language and the body. The four groundbreaking novels we'll read span 200 years and multiple continents, and explore a striving for belonging that is complicated by issues of ethnic, racial and sexual identity.

Note: Representations and opinions of gender and race in Frankenstein will not align fully with our own notions, and the casual and unreflective nature of its prejudices may be dismaying. We will certainly discuss these issues. Two of the contemporary texts on our course contain frank depictions of juvenile sexuality.

COMP_LIT 270-0-01 Literatures in Translation: Cervantes
Don Quixote, one could argue, is a novel about how not to write and how not to read. The author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, pens the work in order to demonstrate the absurdity of chivalric romances, the bestsellers of his day. The protagonist, Don Quixote, is incapable of understanding the difference between the fictions he reads and the real world around him. While all this happened some four hundred years ago, reading and writing are still central to our everyday lives. In the spirit of Cervantes, we will study his famous text with a focus on the practices of reading and writing—how and why did people read and write in 17th-century Spain? How were different forms of writing connected to class, gender, race, and religion? What did literacy mean in the early modern world and what implications does this have for us today? We will employ different methods of reading (close, distant, collective, etc.) and different forms of writing (analytical, creative, etc.) to gain a better understanding of this key text. The class will be taught in English.

COMP_LIT 270-0-20 Literatures in Translation: Our Setting Sun: Yiddish Literature and Culture in the 20th Century
Yiddish, which was developed in the Middle Ages as a Judeo-German language, became the language which most Jews had spoken in East and West Europe until the Second World War. We will begin the class with learning about the origins of Yiddish and its development into becoming the most widespread Jewish language in Europe. We will then fast forward to the 18th and 19th centuries and the era of secularization among Jewish communities, where Western European Jews saw Yiddish as degraded language while among Eastern European Jews Yiddish became a language of bursting literary expression and flourishing literature. Persecution, poverty, the dissolution of becoming part of intellectual Europe, and Zionist ideology were all reasons for many young Jewish people to immigrate to the US and Palestine in the first decades of 20th century. While Jewish immigrants in the United States sought connections to Yiddish and clanged to it as a remnant of their old world, Yiddish was rejected in Palestine (and later in Israel) as representing the “old and weak Jew” and threatening the status of Hebrew. We will examine the texts of main Yiddish writers from the beginning of the 20th century in the literary centers of Yiddish at the time; Eastern Europe, United States, and Palestine. An important part in our class will be the geographical move of Yiddish from its “natural” habitat of Eastern Europe to the US and Palestine, and the element of loss and grief which was strongly present in the writing of Yiddish poets and authors, during the upheavals in Europe in the two World Wars, and especially after the Holocaust. Class materials will be comprised of articles and book chapters to provide the historical, cultural, and political context of the eras we will discuss, and of essays, short stories, and poems translated from Yiddish to English. No previous knowledge of Yiddish or of Yiddish culture or history is required. All course materials will be in English, as well as the lectures and class discussions.

COMP_LIT 303-0-20 Movements and Periods: The Japanese Economic Novel
The economic novel is one of the most popular literary genres in postwar Japan. Since their inception in the late 1950s, economic novels have sold as well as, if not better, than mysteries and twice as well as the more high-brow form of “pure literature” (jun bungaku). Centering on the economic realities of life under capitalism, Japanese economic novels portray the workings of financial corruption, the mechanics of production and distribution, and the experience of laboring within one of the largest consumer economies in the world. This course traces this genre from its origins in 1957 to the contemporary moment. Reading works by early practitioners of the form to its more recent inflections in the literature of writers like Oyamada Hiroko (The Factory), Tsumuro Kikuko (There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job), and Murata Sayaka (Convenience Store Woman), we will examine the relationship between literature and the transformations in Japan’s capitalist economy. We will consider, among other topics, how this genre depicts changes in the workplace and forms of labor, systemic modes of economic exploitation, the psychological and emotional experience of debt in a financialized economy, and the gendering of particular types of work. Guiding our inquiry will be an overarching question: what are the connections between literary and economic form. The syllabus is subject to change.

COMP_LIT 305-0-22 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Intro to Japanese Cinema I: Early Cinema to the Golden Age
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 cinema 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 of 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 305-0-23 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: German Contributions to World Literature: German Cultural Criticism (and Beyond)
German society has a particular relationship to the critique of culture. Ever since the philosopher Immanuel Kant described enlightenment as a person’s “emergence from their self-imposed immaturity,” writers and thinkers in German have engaged in a perpetual analysis of the values, practices, and cultural products of their time, with the aim of understanding, evaluating, and, at times, even changing or revolutionizing the culture in which they lived. This class looks at the history of cultural critique through a reading of major texts in German cultural criticism from the late eighteenth century to today, as well as selected texts outside the German critical tradition but indebted to it. We will both examine the history and development of this tradition – from critiques of religious dogma and satires of romantic poetry to mass-media analyses and critiques of contemporary pop culture – and analyze individual case studies for what they have to say about the art and culture of their day, as well as, importantly, how they say it. Students will also have the opportunity to reflect on aspects of their own culture and create a work of original cultural critique based on class models.

COMP_LIT 306-0-1 Studies in Race & Ethnicity: Transpacific Literature: Tricksters and Saboteurs
This seminar is organized around two multilingual and experimental literary texts by Native American and Asian American authors on intertwined histories of violence across the Pacific, paired with secondary readings on Korea, Japan, and Native America. The seminar asks: what happens when literary texts approach historical violence with irony and irreverence? How do we engage different scales of violence across the Pacific without reducing them to relics of the past or objects in a museum framed by somber mood? Would doing so cause offense, or reveal something unsaid about how we are often asked to engage such histories? First, you will read the Anishinaabe writer and thinker Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), followed by the Korean American poet and non-fiction writer Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution (2007). Weaving together stories of the atomic bombing, military occupations, settler colonialism, imperialism, and disablement, these texts serve as a gateway to explore the questions raised in transpacific studies on decolonization. While focusing on Hiroshima, Kwangju, and White Earth reservation as key sites of inquiry, the seminar will bridge relevant readings from Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. This seminar will be discussion-centered with several writing assignments. No prior knowledge of the geographic areas or language skills are necessary. Students with prior exposure to at least one literary, cultural studies, or theory course at 200 or 300 level (if you are unsure, email Professor We) are encouraged to enroll, though there are no pre-requisites. The course engages closely with histories of violence, and participation is an essential component of this course. There will be frequent collaborative writing assignments and one final research paper.

COMP_LIT 312-0-1 Major Authors and Texts: The Uncanny (Unheimlich) in Theory and Literature
The "Uncanny" -- the sense of something being simultaneously familiar and yet strange -- can arguably be understood to be one of the distinctive features of modern experience. It is the English language version of the German word, Unheimlich, -- literally the "Unhomey" -- which hints at the ambiguous status of the "home" as a place of shelter but also a site of danger. This course proposes to investigate three of the most influential attempts to think through this ambiguity, in the work of Freud, Heidegger and Derrida. And since all of these thinkers base their considerations of the Uncanny upon literary texts, we will also consider the texts to which they refer: -- E. Th. A. Hoffmann's novella, "The Sandman," and Sophocles' Theban plays -- and whether the experience of the Uncanny can be limited to the modern period. Comparisons of texts from different languages and different historical periods will allow us to explore this question.

COMP_LIT 312-0-21 Major Authors and Texts: Proust
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.

COMP_LIT 412-0-20 Literary-Studies Colloquium: Russian Poetry: Romanticism East & West
What do notions of empire, colonization, Orient and Occident look like from the vantage point of an expanding Eurasian empire (Russia) and a colonized nation at the juncture of Eastern and Western Europe (Poland)? What does Romanticism look like as it moves eastward to what Louis Phillipe, Comte de Ségur, called, in 1779, ‘the Orient of Europe’? We will explore these and other questions through the work of George Lord Byron (1788-1824), Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), and Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837).

COMP_LIT 413-0-20 Comparative Studies in Theme: Politics and Poetics of Language and Writing
In 1986, the Kenyan writer and critic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o published Decolonizing the Mind, a canonical reference for the language debate in the decolonial/postcolonial era. In this work, he famously called for a more nuanced and perhaps more difficult project of decolonization after pollical independence from colonialism. Language, he observed, must be an essential feature of every long lasting decolonial project. Subsequently, he changed his own creative language from English to Gikuyu. Ngũgĩ’s book has resonated with the thorny entanglement of language and the colonial legacy across the African continent and beyond since at least the mid-20th century. For instance, in 1962 Malek Haddad famously abandoned creative writing all together following Algeria’s independence since he could not write in Arabic and refused to continue in French. In Senegal, Boubacar Boris Diop shifted two decades ago his primary language of creative writing to Wolof and has undertaken self-translation. In 2013, the Moroccan Abdelfattah Kilito published Je parle toutes les langues mais en Arabe, a title inspired by Kafka, foregrounding the irony subtending the decolonial/postcolonial context to date since the book is written in French. This course is dedicated to understanding the ways in which this multifaceted problematic has been thought both theoretically and creatively by thinkers hailing from Francophone Africa, in conversation with theorists of language and translation from beyond the continent. The aim of the course is neither to be exhaustive nor to limit the scope of our investigations regionally or linguistically. Students will be invited to reflect with nuance on the questions in context and develop their own projects by bearing in mind both the universality of the question and the singularity of its inscription. We will have the great opportunity to discuss with Souleymane Bachir Diagne via zoom his recent book De language à langue (2022).

COMP_LIT 481-0-1 Studies in Literary Theory: Proseminar: How to Read
"Reading" has a history. The aim of this course is to examine the past and present of literary interpretation and reception, in order to better understand the changing relationship of art to commentary and, from there, to critically reflect on our own practices and habits of analysis. Questions that will be addressed are: What is the ethics and the politics of reading? How does the reading of literature exist in a symbiotic relationship with the literary text? What is the place of "theory" in literature? What is the import of forms of interpretation vis-à-vis the choice of subject matter being interpreted? What does it mean to read professionally? This seminar will address such questions through a historical overview of particular approaches to reading, with a particular emphasis on contemporary theoretical paradigms and debates culminating in a case study of different approaches to a single work of literature. In parallel to these discussions, students will get instruction in skills necessary to graduate- and professional-level academic work, including the workshopping of previous academic work with an eye towards the preparation of a publication-ready article.

COMP_LIT 481-0-20 Studies in Literary Theory: Russian Formalism
This seminar will examine the school and theory of Russian Formalism, which influenced and informed many developments in the XX century literary and art theory, from Prague Linguistic Circle through Structuralism and Semiotics. Along with the detailed study of the critical and theoretical essays by such adherents of Formalism as Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, et al., we will be exploring the major works of Russian modernism and avant-garde in literature and film through the methodological approach of Formalist theory. Special focus on the issues of Formalism and Marxism, Formalism and History, and the interconnections between culture and politics of the time.

Discussion and presentations in English.

COMP_LIT 486-0-20 Studies in Literature and the Disciplines: Global Caste
Critical and comparative caste studies is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field. This is a graduate-level, reading intensive course in which we will collectively investigate both classic and emerging scholarship on caste in South Asia and around the world from a number of different disciplinary perspectives (literature, history, media, performance, anthropology, religious studies etc.). The organization of the class will be democratic and syllabus will be built collectively: everyone will contribute texts and/or critical questions from their own fields of expertise and inquiry and together we will shape the intellectual journey of the course. Books may include: Aniket Jaaware, "Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching" (Fordham UP 2018), Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Fordham UP 2017), Shailaja Paik, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP 2022), and Joel Lee, Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (Cambridge UP 2021).

COMP_LIT 488-0-20 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe
In this course, we will take a comparative approach to reading the fundamental texts that in recent decades have shifted entirely the site of the political: Foucault’s essays on biopolitics, Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and Mbembe’s Necropolitics. If for Foucault the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics still exists, such a prospect is no longer true for Agamben and Mbembe. To understand the implications of this shift, we will focus first on Agamben’s Homo Sacer and its reinterpretation of biopolitics as thanatopolitics, paying attention to the text’s epistemic and geopolitical limits and its ongoing relevance for refugee studies. We will then explore Mbembe’s post-colonial redefinition of biopolitics as necropolitics, or the racist subjugation of life to the power of death of unwanted population. What is the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics? Is racism an effect of biopolitics or its premise? In order to confront these questions, we will reflect on a specific constellation of notions in our contemporary philosophical lexicon that have originated in these and other key texts: state of exception, the ban, homo sacer, bare life, the living dead, death worlds, enmity, abandonment, wars, borders, and brutalism. In addition, we will assess the meaning of the different paradigmatic sites of the modern politicization of life: the camp for Agamben and the plantation, the colonies, and the occupied territories for Mbembe. In the last phase of the course, we will read recent essays by Mbembe in which he tries to conceive forms of resistance to necropolitics. We will pay special attention to Mbembe’s concepts of restitution, reparation, and care.

Seminar participants are strongly encouraged to find a way to use Foucault, Agamben, and/or Mbembe’s work in their own research projects.

Readings will include works by Foucault, Agamben, Schmitt, Mbembe, Fanon, Azoulay, Táíwò, and Weheliye.

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