COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Winter 2024 Course Schedule

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*The Winter 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.

Winter 2024 course descriptions

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

Winter 2024

COMP_LIT 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: Historical Fiction and the Making of the Past
This class explores the genre of historical fiction and its role in shaping our connection to the past. We’ll compare two premodern texts on the border of historical fiction, Vergil’s Aeneid of Ancient Rome and the Vinland Sagas of the Viking North Atlantic, with two 20th century novels that tell the story of these works’ creation and preservation. We’ll reach outside of literature from time to time to consider acts of historical fiction in other media: television and movies, theater, and forged antiquities. The writing component will build up to a book review in the style of the New Yorker.

COMP_LIT 201-0-20 Introduction to Literary Theory: Thus Conscience? 
This course introduces students to a diverse range of important works of world literature and the central debates and questions about the idea of conscience. While we are probably familiar with the prince's woeful lament in Hamlet that "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all," in this course we take the idea of conscience further into and beyond the play's Judeo-Christian context. We will read a more nuanced and variegated set of texts in world literature, trying to understand the critical yet problematic manifestations of conscience in diverse linguistic traditions and cultural backgrounds. In what way is conscience different from modern understandings in Machiavelli's comedy The Mandrake? Why is conscience intimately bound up with colonialism and slavery for Mark Twain? How can one navigate its dictate when one is caught between revenge and redemption in Kikuchi Kan's Beyond the Pale of Vengeance? What is its role in contemporary anti-war narratives and medical ethics? Above all, how does world literature respond to the problems of conscience that face the world at large? Theoretical works read in this course to deepen our understanding of these questions include those of Aquinas, Freud, Judith Butler, Kwame Nkrumah, and Wang Yangming.

COMP_LIT 202-0-2 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. May include English or Portuguese discussion sections.

COMP_LIT 202-0-20 Interpreting Culture: The Theme of Faust Through the Ages
“To sell one’s soul,” “to strike a bargain with the devil,” or even “to beat the devil at his own game”—these expressions and similar ones continue to enjoy undiminished popularity. For more than five-hundred years the legend of Faust has served as a way of expressing the danger of pursuing an aspiration to the point of losing one’s own selfhood. The specter of a “Faustian bargain” appears whenever an inordinate achievement seems to arise from a destructive or self-destructive source. The theme of Faust thus provides a series of perspectives through which one can begin to reflect on one’s highest values. Dr. Faustus has undergone many mutations since he first appeared in central Europe around the early sixteenth century. This class will begin with a question at the foundation of the Faust legend: what is a “soul,” and what is worth? While examining these and kindred questions about the nature of the self, the class will continually reflect on what we are doing when we evaluate a work of art in relation to the culture of its historical period. We begin by examining the earliest versions of Faust, which derives from the earliest days of the Protestant Reformation. We proceed to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s world-renowned drama involving the desire for cosmic knowledge and the lures of sexual intoxication ("Faust, Part I"), followed by its strange sequel ("Faust, Part II"), which culminates in Faust becoming a social reformer who wants to alter the very organizing of the earth. We will ask what Goethe, near the end of his life, gave to “world literature” (a term of his own invention) when he presented his final version of Faust as a man committed to a total terrestrial transformation. And in the final weeks of the class, we turn to Hollywood film, so that we can re-evaluate the Faust legend from the perspective of a modern medium in our own historical period, concluding with Danny Boyle’s "Yesterday" and Greta Gerwig’s "Barbie."

COMP_LIT 207-0-1 Introduction to Critical Theory
In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber, paying particular attention to the methods they deploy in the treatment of moral and religious phenomena. We will conclude with a section on Charles Mills and contemporary Critical Race Theory. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings.

COMP_LIT 211-0-20 Readings in Genre: The Modern Italian Short Story
This course examines the genre of the short story in modern and contemporary Italian literature. Storytelling has been a staple of Italian literature and culture since the days of Boccaccio, but the aesthetic and cultural aspects of the genre certainly have changed in the last two centuries. We will explore works written in a realistic mode and in a fantastic style. Moreover, we will discuss the elements that define the two approaches with an emphasis on close reading and on the historical and social context of each text.

Our focus in particular revolves around issues of love, jealousy, sexuality, gender, friendship, and youth culture as depicted by Boccaccio, Verga, Morante, Ortese, Levi, Buzzati, Calvino, Tabucchi, and Tondelli. The class material will be available on Canvas. (Taught in Italian.)

COMP_LIT 211-0-22 Readings in Genre: Introduction to Italian Cinema
Italian cinema has changed the way in which we conceive of the moving image and its relationship to reality in its social, political, and affective dimensions. This course begins with the heyday of Neorealism in the 1940s (Rossellini’s war trilogy, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and Visconti’s The Earth Trembles), placing this defining moment in film history in the context of World War II and the break from the Fascist period. Particular attention will be devoted to questions of gender and race, as the memory of Italy’s racial laws and colonial past in Africa was about to be dimmed by the cultural politics of postwar recovery and, later, the economic miracle. Mindful of this process of historical erasure, we will turn to the remarkable output of the 1960s and 1970s and analyze the way in which different directors (Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Rosi, Pasolini) treated the problems of industrialization, migration, and organized crime. Finally, we will assess the return of a documentary approach to reality in films like Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008) and Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea, 2016) in the context of globalization and the resurgence of populism and right-wing politics. Throughout the course, we will work to acquire the critical and methodological tools necessary to analyze film as a complex mode of cultural production.

COMP_LIT 301-0-30 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Culture in a Changing Climate
This course is designed around creative responses to climate change and other environmental crises in recent literary, cinematic, and artistic works from different sites around the world. We will pay close attention to how familiar aesthetic forms and the critical methods used to understand them are (or are not) changing in the face of overlapping existential environmental crises. Are there specific genres or media best suited to addressing climate change and helping to inspire political action? What are the effects of identifying or writing within a "new" literary genre such as "climate fiction"? Can we speak of similar modes in other media: is there such a thing as "climate cinema" or "climate art"? And if there is, how do these categories shape both the art that gets made and how we understand it?

COMP_LIT 303-0-20 Movements and Periods: Erotic Grotesque Nonsense to the Aesthetics of War
The period from 1912 to 1945, spanning the Taisho and Early Showa Periods, was one of the most tumultuous in modern Japanese history. It witnessed the brief flowering of democracy, the rise of women’s suffrage, robust left-wing movements, colonial expansion, and fifteen years of war driven by fascist ideology. This course focuses on the literature of this period. It examines how writers experimented with the formal resources of the literary medium while responding to the economic, political, and social transformations that characterized these pivotal years. We will consider, among other topics, the rejection of naturalist modes of writing and the rise of “modernist” experimentation, the relationship between the political and artistic avant-gardes, the literary construction of a timeless national identity, and the role that writers and their work played in Japanese imperialism. Our exploration of Taisho and Early Showa literature not only sheds light on the contradictions of the past but also highlights the legacy these contradictions have left on Japan’s contemporary cultural and historical landscape.

COMP_LIT 305-0-20 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: French Film
This course will consider developments in French and Francophone cinema since the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on the works of directors associated or in dialogue with the "New Wave." We will examine the reinvention of cinematic form by these filmmakers, but we will also explore how such formal innovations may be understood as attempts to respond to the historical events and social processes that transformed French culture in that period, most notably the traumas of the Second World War, the emergence of consumer culture, and the processes of decolonization and globalization. Among the directors whose works will be discussed are Jean Renoir, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Claire Denis and Djibril Diop Mambéty.

COMP_LIT 305-0-21 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 its earliest days through the so-called "Golden Age" of the 1950s. We will consider how film and other moving image technologies have reflected historical moments and shaped cultural discourses in modern Japan. Focusing on films that raise disciplinary questions related to both the cinematic medium and Japan, we will examine, among other topics, the era of silent cinema; the relationship between nationhood and the formation of a "national cinema;" technological transformations and the coming of sound; the wartime period; cinema during the occupation; and 1950s modernism. We will also study the place of important individual directors - Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa - 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 movements in the history of Japanese cinema. Syllabus subject to change.

COMP_LIT 312-0-2 Major Authors and Texts: John Cage
This course explores the music, writing, and collaborations of John Cage (1912-1992) through archival materials held in Northwestern University Library's Special Collections. It will introduce students to the rich historical documentation held on site as well as develop students' skills using archival material. The course will focus largely on John Cage's collaborations with other musicians and artists including Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman, Cathy Berberian, Joan La Barbara and Charlotte Moorman. The class will meet in Deering Library 200 and is limited to 15 students. Familiarity with music notation is helpful but not required.

COMP_LIT 390-0-20 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: The 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. 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 411-0-20 Critical Practices: Translation in Theory and Practice
This class is built on the premise that translation is a central concern, albeit one too often taken for granted, in the work of literary, cultural, and historical scholarship in any language. In this class we will explore both the foundational texts of translation theory (e.g. Benjamin, Jakobson), as well as more current approaches to subjects like translation and world literature, translating minoritized voices, queer theory and translation, and ‘untranslatability.’ Class discussions will consider not only how to “do” translation, as well as considerations of its ethics and politics, but also how to read and teach works in translation. Finally, the course will also function as a translation workshop: all students will work over the course of the quarter on a translation of their own into English that they will workshop with the class.

COMP_LIT 481-0-1 Studies in Literary Theory: Benjamin on Goethe
The aim of this seminar is to reflect on two constructions of the aesthetic. The first construction, proposed by Kant, makes a certain mode of judgment into the final element of the enterprise of critical reflection on the limits of knowledge and sources of action. The second, proposed by Kierkegaard under a variety of pseudonyms, presents aesthetics into a “sphere of existence” that consists, above all, in the avoidance of decision, beginning with the decision to marry. The first half of the seminar thus begins with a brief look at Kant’s early inquiry into the “finer feeling” (1764) and then spends some time with the opening sections of the "Kritik der Urteilskraft" (Critique of Judgment, 1790). It continues with an inquiry into certain sections of Kierkegaard’s "Enten/Eller" (Either/Or, 1841) and "Frygt og Bæven" (Fear and Trembling, 1843). The second half of the seminar revolves around the theory of beauty that Benjamin develops in the final section of a long essay he wrote in the early 1920s on Goethe’s novel "Die Wahlverwandtschaften" (Elective Affinities, 1809). In preparation for reading Benjamin’s essay and a set of related fragments on cognition, we will read and discuss Goethe’s novel as well as a small number of his writings on nature and art.

The class will be conducted in English and all texts will be available in translation as well as in the original German and Danish.

COMP_LIT 481-0-20 Studies in Literary Theory: Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes stands out as one of last century’s leading European essayists and critics. Whether writing on pop culture phenomena like soap-ads and James Bond movies, revolutionary art practices like Soviet avant-garde cinema and Brechtian theatre, or the most intimate of photographs, Barthes has changed the way we think of writing and its relationship to life. "I must admit that I have produced only essays...," Barthes noted upon being elected to the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France (1977). In his hands, the essay produced the most subtle and incisive of effects—an understatedly virtuosic reworking of the relationship between image, music, text, affect. This course will follow Barthes's career from the early alliance with structuralism to the so-called turn to poststructuralism and the development of a style of inquiry that resists any assimilation into predetermined intellectual currents. We will read from Mythologies, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, among others, and the Courses on Idiorrhythmy and the Neutral. While paying attention to the specific form and the larger context of his writings, we will put them in dialogue with current interventions in media aesthetics, feminist/queer theory and critical race theory.

COMP_LIT 488-0-1 Special Topics in Comparative Literature:
In this course we will read 19th century, mostly canonical novels from Brazil, alongside short stories by the afro-descendent writer Machado de Assis (1839-1908), considered by many to be the most important author in the entire history of Brazilian literature. Each week we will read one novel and two or three of his short stories dealing with the same themes, such as: slavery, indigeneity, race and racial mixture, fugitivity, education and the bildungsroman, queer families, gender, sexuality, and adultery. The purpose of the course is threefold: first, to offer an in-depth survey of the foundational writings and authors of Brazilian literature; second, to understand, from a comparative approach, how these writers approached some of the most pressing issues of 19th-century; third, to imagine how Machado de Assis read and evaluated the novels produced at the time. Because we want to read as much fiction as we can, the class discussions will not require any secondary readings, although a list of relevant theory and criticism will be provided and may be utilized in the oral presentation, exam or research paper. All readings will be available in Portuguese and English translations, and almost all in Spanish translations, and almost all will be available on reserve in the Northwestern library.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Instead of meeting on January 4th, we will have our first class in November, during reading week.

COMP_LIT 488-0-20 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Podcast Studies
Taking its title from a key essay from a moment in which radio studies first emerged, this class investigates the formation of research agendas around podcasting in recent years. Tracking some of the essential texts, podcasts, and journals, this class considers the poetics, structure, economics, pedagogical functions and social ramifications of the form. Some questions will include: What roles have particular genres such as comedy, true crime, storytelling and audio drama played in narratives of "boom" and "bust" around podcasting? What narratological challenges have podcasts taken on in the past fifteen or twenty years, and how do they fit into the broader context of media consumption and production? What is (or isn't) at stake in positing podcasting as a "new" medium, separate from radio, audiobooks and other similar digital media? How has the debate about who podcasts are for been evolving? Where is the "idea" of podcast studies forming? And how do we "critically listen" to a podcast in a scholarly setting, anyways?

When it comes to a medium about talk, there is a lot to talk about. To help, we will look at major texts and audio works from 2005 to today. In pairs, students will interview a scholar working in the field; leads on willing writers will be provided by the instructor if required, and students can take this interview in whatever direction they wish. Students will also help to generate a database of annotated podcasts based on their listening interests, to be shared among other researchers. Finally, students will have the option of writing a paper or producing an audio work that digs into a key problem facing podcast studies today, from podcast preservation to racial representation in the field and podcast narrative poetics.

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