COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

This course will introduce students to the ways in which South Asian (dominantly Indian, but also Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and diasporic) feminist intellectuals, artists, and activists help to shape the global discourse of feminism. After an introduction to the major contours of South Asian feminist discourse and artistic and activist practice, we will pay special attention to modern and contemporary media forms (film, web serials, blogs, journalism etc.) in South Asia that bring a feminist perspective to myriad social issues (gender identity, sexuality, caste, classed labor etc.). Students will also collaborate on critical multimedia media projects of their own

This class will read and discuss selected works of modern Jewish literature in the context of their historical background. We will focus on certain themes and stories in the Bible and in Jewish folklore as well as on particular events and movements in European, American, and Israeli history as a way of better understanding this literature. Though most of this literature dates from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries up until the present, a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual and religious currents such as the Enlightenment, Jewish Mysticism, Zionism, and Socialism will help us to understand the literature in its changing historical and social context. Thus while some writers saw modern Jewish literature as a means of educating the masses to modern secular needs, others saw it as a means of reshaping older forms and religious values, while still others saw it as a means of reflecting timeless humanistic concerns. Among the writers we will read are Sholom Aleichem, I. B. Singer, Anzia Yezierska, Primo Levi, Ida Fink, Ava Schieber, Philip Roth, Amos Oz and Shani Boianjiu.

Literature always resists -- even as it demands -- interpretation. In certain texts of modern literature, the resistance to interpretation issues into a particularly violent struggle in which points of defiance are difficult to distinguish from moments of defeat. This class will examine some of the literary texts of modernity and the tendency of these texts toward two interpretive gestures or situations: incomprehensible self-closure (and the attendant contraction of a space for self-legitimation) and an equally incomprehensible self-expansiveness (and the exhilarating, scary freedom it entails). We will begin the course with the enigmatic words of resistance repeated by Melville's odd scrivener, Bartleby ("I prefer not to"), and end with the apocalyptic conclusion to Ellison's Invisible Man ("Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?").

Easily the most famous Italian writer of the twentieth century, Italo Calvino’s mature, fabulist narratives advanced a cosmopolitan ideal of literature. His creative oeuvre opened new worlds because of his taste for literary and ethical adventures and nimble, luminous style. At the beginning of his career, Calvino resisted the appeal of literary realism and neorealism and invented an idiosyncratic new genre of whimsically comic science fiction in Cosmicomics. He also was a restless traveler, who wrote extensively about his journeys through the USA, Russia, Japan, etc., and eventually joined the international literary group known as Oulipo, whose members were vocal proponents of the notion of literature as a game. Starting in the 1970s, he became a firm believer in the promise of world literature, which resulted in Invisible Cities, Calvino’s rewriting of Marco Polo’s accounts of his travels through China. In his “hypernovel,” If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Calvino created a sort of imaginary index of world literatures, playfully deploying globe-trotting characters who undertake a worldwide quest through a shifting landscape of literary genres. Finally, in his celebrated Charles Norton Lectures for Harvard University, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, he articulates for his readers the fundamental values of the world literatures that still are to come: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. In response, we may well ask: what is the geopolitical map on which Calvino’s imaginary explorations unfold? To what extent do Calvino’s writings create new possibilities for redefining the very concept of world literature? (Note: This class is taught in English.)

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.

“Textuality in Transition”; Medieval literary theory can often seem strikingly modern and even postmodern in its concern with probing the nature of human language and its inherent limitations. For writers such as St. Augustine, the Occitan troubadours, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante Alighieri and the authors of the Roman de la Rose, writing is always an act of interpretation, one which confronts the essential indeterminacy of linguistic signs, both spoken and written. This anxiety reflects the unstable nature of medieval textual culture, as well as the fractured reality of spoken vernaculars dialects in contrast with the universal status of Latin as the language of literary and historical authority. In this class, we will study texts from a variety of genre (poetry, exegesis, romance) that interrogate the nature and function of language, from early medieval Biblical hermeneutics to the scholastic renaissance of the 12th century, the rise of vernacular literary cultures in the 13th and 14th century, and the textual revolution brought about by printing in the 15th century. How might medieval texts from this period of rapid cultural and technological change speak to our own current shifting media landscape? Classwork will include close examination of medieval manuscripts. Reading knowledge of French is required.

This seminar will examine the school and doctrine 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.

This course traces the writing of absence in select works of fiction by writers from various parts of Francophone Africa. While the writing of absence is a dominant political and historical theme in contemporary literatures of migration, exile, and war, we will frame the question much more broadly in order to attend to absence as a constitutive dimension of literary writing. In this sense, the writing of absence may also imply absence as writing. In order to begin thinking the possibilities that the relationship between these two elements suggest, we will make brief excursions into theoretical works that may help frame the question for us in a preliminary fashion.

A thinker who has suggestively elaborated the relationship between absence and writing in his own work is Maurice Blanchot. We will therefore begin the first segment of our course with selections from Blanchot’s work so that we can glimpse some of the stakes of this mode of reading and questioning. We will then move to theoretical and literary works by writers from the African continent written in French and try to tease out the ways in which these diverse approaches to literary writing might think absence in relation to writing.

Given Blanchot’s own mode of writing where the literary and the theoretical are often not distinguishable, we will not prioritize the theoretical over the literary. Rather we will read them in conversation with each other allowing them to interact by confirming and/or challenging each other’s stakes. This course is designed to accompany the Department of French and Italian’s Fall Colloquium focused on Maurice Blanchot entitled “Maurice Blanchot: Thought of Absence,” which will take place on Friday November 3rd, 2017.