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 course is intended to familiarize literature students with the most influential text in Western culture. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres and strategies in the Bible; the historical situation of its writers; the representation of God as a literary character; recurrent images and themes; the Bible as a Hebrew national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the "Old Testament" (or Hebrew Bible); and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since time will not permit a complete reading, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, Amos, Jonah, Second Isaiah, and Daniel; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms, and the Song of Songs, along with the saga of King David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John and the book of Revelation. We'll look more briefly at issues of translation; traditional strategies of interpretation, such as midrash and allegory; and the historical processes involved in constructing the Biblical canon.

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?").

In our time of Snapchat and Twitter, the term epic has entered the urban dictionary. As the genre of "heroic song," though, one way it defines itself, epic predates even the invention of writing, so that epic is perhaps the oldest continuing form of poetic production. What has allowed such epic success? The persistence of epic through cultural and linguistic change is one of the form's central themes: how can words heroically uttered and deed heroically dared be passed on from one lifetime to those that follow? How are they transformed? What does it mean to take up as one's own something that has been passed down from a culture no longer present? Such questions become even more pressing in moments when one culture encounters another and is asked in its new context what to retain, what to adopt, and what to invent. In this course we will consider how epic narrative projects, recalls, and reworks its history as tradition?literally as what is handed over?and follow several examples of epic through their cross-cultural contexts. We will survey four thousand years of epic poetry, at least glancing at works from Indic, Irish, Germanic, and Finnish traditions. The bulk of our time, though, will go to reading and analyzing Homer's Iliad, Vergil's Aeneid, The Song of Roland, Camões' Lusiads, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Wolcott's Omeros.

The film movement known as Italian Neorealism has changed the way in which we understand cinema and its relationship to reality. It has produced masterpieces such as Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1947) and inspired generations of filmmakers in countries as diverse as Brazil, France, India, Iran, Senegal, and the United States. This course will explore the history of Neorealism and its aftermath from a global, transnational perspective. Neorealism was soon marked as "Italian" and yet its origins and influence go well beyond the boundaries of a single nation, one of the aims
of this course will be to assess the role that diversity and plurality have played in shaping the forms and themes of Neorealist cinema and its aftermath. While drawing from the field of cinema and media studies, we will analyze films by renowned directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Abbas Kiarostami, Glauber Rocha, and Martin Scorsese, among others.

Rabbinic literature contains a large corpus of stories. In this course we will explore different methods of reading such stories. These range from naïve historiography to sophisticated historiography, from reading these stories as fables with didactic morals to reading them as windows onto a class-stratified and gender-divided rabbinic culture. Our analysis of these methods of reading rabbinic stories will be conducted in conversation with different twentieth century literary theorists.

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, artsong, 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, Italian, Japanese, and Russian for starters. Given the character and complexity of the material, and the multimedia and interdisciplinary natures of Shakespeare-inspired musical works and scholarship, this course is open to students whose primary interest or field of study is comparative literature, film, English, performance studies, or theatre, as well as any area of music. 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. It is hoped that the diverse backgrounds and perspectives that inform class discussion in this venue can further inspire unique collaborative and cross-disciplinary work long after the quarter is over.

This course examines literary works by Iranian women writers after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. We will investigate how these writers define gender and femininity in literature after the revolution and during crucial moments of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. The Islamic Republic of Iran implemented changes that influenced the role of women in both social spaces and their private lives. We will examine how authors employed their characters to speak out about women's pre-existing and emerging
needs and desires during the Islamization of society after the revolution. This objective is pursued
simultaneously via close readings of fictions (and some Iranian films) which pay close attention to the situation of Iranian women after the revolution. The syllabus will incorporate methodological and theoretical readings about gender and sexuality in Iran from the early modern period to the contemporary moment.

Much scholarship has focused in recent decades on Romanticism and various forms of historicism, with Edward Said's influential concept of an "orientalizing" West dependent on an imagined Eastern Other at the fore. 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 Segur, called, in 1779, "the Orient of Europe"? We will explore these and other questions chiefly through the work of three figures, George Lord Byron (1788-1824), Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), and Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837)

In the seminar we will read key texts from the vast secondary literature on Byron to examine recent AngloAmerican approaches to literary studies; to test their applicability to the very different literary traditions of Poland and Russia; and to challenge the critical and theoretical vocabulary in Slavic and Anglo-American Romantic scholarship alike.

We will also address key topoi in the Romantic movement generally (the Romantic hero, Romantic nature, Orientalism, nation, politics, prophecy) by way of works in multiple genres: lyric, drama, narrative poem, novel in verse.

All works will be available in translation. Slavic students will be expected to read Russian texts in the original. Polish texts will be available in the original and in both Russian and English translation. Questions of literary and cultural translation will form part of our discussion.

With the dominance of the Atlantic as a model for the study ofcultural exchanges between continents, the Indian Ocean is often excluded from critical theory discussions despite its centrality in the circulations of various philosophical traditions in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America. This course will use literary and philosophical texts from and about the Indian Ocean to comparatively examine how intellectuals and artists have viewed the world using scripts and terms different from those developed in the West. It is out of convenience that we use epistemology as an entry point toward a comprehensive engagement with Indian Ocean critical theory; much of the philosophical debates from the region (e.g., work by Mbiti, Nyerere, Tempel, Masolo) are on epistemological issues. However, a transdisciplinary reading of each text will engage with various perceptions of the critical practice the Global South, including the interface of aesthetics and activism. Taking Indian Ocean theories of knowledge as multiple because of their diverse sources and cross-cultural interactions for centuries, the course will be interested in unearthing the splintering differences among the philosophers and the changes over time in what might beconsidered a single school of thought. We read works by such thinkers as Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Valentin Mudimbe, Sugata Bose, Sharifa Ahjum,and Achille Mbembe, especially in relation to their critiques or repurposing of western epistemologies. Indian Ocean philosophical traditions to be compared with western ones (and with one another) include Sufism, Negritude, Creolite, Transmodernism, Coolitude, and Ubuntu.

This course explores cultural and aesthetic responses to fascism in the wake of World War II. With a focus on Japan, and reference to the German and Italian contexts, we consider the uneasy relationship between fascist aesthetics and aesthetic critiques of fascism in the postwar era. We begin by examining how writers, filmmakers, and other artists in the immediate aftermath of the war produced moralizing narratives about the evils of fascism. We then turn to critiques that claimed such narratives reinforced the binary logic of fascist ideologies and challenged the totalizing tendencies of all moral discourses. These critiques lead us to a set of questions about "post-fascist aesthetics:" How did the cultural politics of fascism shape the range of aesthetic responses to it and forms of authority in the postwar era? How might works of literature and film illuminate the breaks and continuities between fascism and postwar political regimes? What images, rhetorical styles, and aesthetic techniques were used within and across various cultural contexts in responding to the aesthetics of fascism? Throughout the course we will consider the implications of the term "post-fascist" and how it has been used to define cultural and political movements since the war. All material will be available in English translation.

This course will be taught by the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor, Rocio Zambrana.

This course will consider key texts in Frankfurt School Critical Theory alongside Decolonial Thought and Decolonial Feminism. Discussions will consider conception of critique at work in these texts in order to construct a decolonial critical theory of society. Readings will include texts by Gyorgy Lukacs, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Anibal Quijano, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Santiago Castro-Gomez, Maria Lugones, Yuderkis Espinosa-Minoso, and Gloria Anzaldua.