2020-2021 Course Descriptions
*Quarterly topic-specific course descriptions will be added before registration. Please use the course catalog descriptions for a general overview of the course. Please check CAESAR for all up to date course information and descriptions.
2020-21 Course Descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2020
COMP_LIT 202-0-21: 20th C Russian Literature
This course focuses on interconnections between new ideas in literature, culture and politics in the early 20th century. Texts include great Modernist novels Peterburg (1913) by Andrei Bely, Master and Margarita (1940) by Mikhail Bulgakov, and Evgeny Zamiatin's We (1921); poetry by Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Osip Mandelstam. These major works are discussed in the broad Russian and European cultural and historical context.
COMP_LIT 211-0-20: Theme of Faust
"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 means to express the daring and danger of pursuing an aspiration even if it comes at the cost of one's "soul." The specter of a "Faustian bargain" often appears when narratives identify individuals whose inordinate achievements are both destructive and self-destructive. The theme of Faust provides a perspective in which one must thus reflect on the highest and lowest values. Dr. Faustus has undergone many mutations since he first appeared in central Europe around the early sixteenth century. This class will be begin with a question at the foundation of the Faust legend: what is our "soul" worth? While examining this and kindred questions about the nature of the moral self, the class will continually reflect on what we are doing when we evaluate a work of art in relation to the moral culture of its "time" or "period." In addition to listening to some musical compositions and reading some shorter texts, we will examine the earliest versions of Faust, which derives from the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation and then proceed to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's great drama of cosmic knowledge and sexual seduction, Faust I, followed by selections from its strange sequel Faust II, in which Faust invents paper money and then becomes a real-estate developer or social-engineer who wants to reorganize the very nature of our planet. 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 that inadvertently destroys innocent lives. As a conclusion to our analysis of Goethe's Faust, we will read two very different kinds of poetic responses, Paul Celan's "Death Fugue" and Carol Ann Duffy's "Mrs. Faust." And in the final two weeks of the class we will view three versions of the Faust legend for our times: Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate from the 1990s, Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls from the 2000s, and Danny Boyle's Yesterday from 2019.
COMP_LIT 301-0-20: Greek and Roman Drama
2,500 years after the birth of Athenian drama, classical tragedy and comedy continues to inspire and beguile us. In this course, we will read several masterpieces of Greek and Roman tragedy and comedy, as well as adaptations of these plays for the modern and contemporary stage. Throughout, we will examine how classical drama related to its original cultural contexts, how it addresses fundamental questions about human societies and relationships, why these plays continue to provoke reflection, and how audiences experienced and continue to experience classical drama. All readings will be in translation, and as part of the course we will also attend a dramatic performance.
COMP_LIT 302-0-20: Environmental Cultures in East Asia
This course is dedicated to the study of environment and culture in east Asia, particularly in China. China is often imagined both as a site of localized environmental ruination that prefigures imminent global collapse and as a source of contamination and contagion that easily cross national borders. Particularly in the Global North, China has become a focal point for ambient ecoanxieties that are shadowed by longer histories of perceived racial, cultural, and economic threat. It is easy (and essential) to critique the demonization of China; the challenge lies in disentangling the imagined from the very real and present dangers that country’s environmental and public health problems pose at home and abroad. This course confronts that challenge by approaching our current environmental crises not as scientific issues with technological solutions, but as crises of culture and urgent objects of representation. How we imagine and depict our uncertain future has a direct impacts on how we act in the present. Course materials will include secondary scholarship from the field of the environmental humanities as well as works of speculative fiction, contemporary visual art, documentary photography, and film.
COMP_LIT 302-0-21: Learning to Walk: Experiments in Exteriority
While enduring the spring 2020 stay-at-home orders, a simple walk outdoors on the public way emerged for many who were able as a rare form of freedom or escape in a world suddenly bereft of common interior spaces. This course investigates the literature and phenomena of ambulation: its history, its great poets, its social and cultural meanings, and some practices that organize mobile attention to exterior space. Our readings will range from Thoreau’s praise of “sauntering” to the French avant-garde’s collective practice of the urban “drift” in small cadres of two or three, from urbanist Jane Jacobs’s descriptions of the city’s “sidewalk ballet” to Sunaura Taylor’s meditations on the meaning of the walk for the differently-abled, and from Welsh writer Iain Sinclair’s “psychogeographical” rambles around the margins of London to Jamaican writer Garnette Cadogan’s searing account of walking while Black. Just as importantly, we’ll adopt these writers’ practices of attention in our own appreciation of local exteriors, gaining immersive knowledge of the landscapes and built environments on Northwestern’s campus; the situation of Evanston and Chicagoland; or, alternatively, whatever remote diaspora in which we find ourselves in fall 2020.
This course is “rain or shine” as well as “hybrid”: for those on campus, we’ll uphold good public health practices by holding a combination of zoom courses to discuss readings but also several class sessions *outdoors and on the move.* Students taking the course remotely will be able to virtually join the outdoor sessions via zoom. If we must go entirely remote due to unforeseen outbreaks, some of our focus on local Northwestern and Evanston will be rerouted to sharing virtual walks with one another wherever we end up. Readings may include one or two novels such as Teju Cole’s Open City; essays by Friedrich Engels, Henry David Thoreau, Guy Debord, Jane Jacobs, Iain Sinclair, Rebecca Solnit, and Garnette Cadogan; poems by Charles Baudelaire, Harryette Mullen, Frank O’Hara and Arun Kolatkar; conceptual art by Francis Alÿs, Erica van Horne, and Helen Mirra; a film by Agnès Varda; and various archival documents on Northwestern campus history such as architectural master plans. *All readings will be made available in digital formats. Required: good walking shoes, a raincoat, cellular access to join group zoom calls when we are outdoors ... and maybe a selfie stick?!
COMP_LIT 305-0-1: Tarvosky Film
In this course, we will review major films of Tarkovsky and of Russian and non-Russian directors whose work is related to his (Eisenstein, Wenders, Bergman, Kurosawa).
COMP_LIT 305-0-2: Rhythm in Art and Philosophy
Whether you are breathing, dancing, or thinking, your activity is marked by a certain rhythm. Rhythm stands at the cusp between body and mind, movement and memory, experience of the self and interaction with others. This course will attend to diverse and at times contradictory notions of rhythm as they have emerged in modern and contemporary Western art and philosophy. After a brief and yet crucial return to ancient Greek philosophy (Plato and the Pre-Socratics), we will focus on Soviet avant-garde cinema (Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov), Italian Neorealism (Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini), Jean-Luc Godard's recent films, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophy. We will devote particular attention to the role that rhythm has played in shaping our understanding of the relation between aesthetic experience and political life: What is the relation between rhythm and power? How do different ideas of rhythm in artistic practice relate to different ideas of society and order? In addition to the aforementioned bodies of work, we will consider contributions from the fields of psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and feminist/queer theory.
COMP_LIT 383-0-20: Gramsci for the Present
This course explores the continued centrality of Antonio Gramsci's thought to contemporary discussions of politics and culture. Arguably the most influential post-Marxist political thinker not only in Europe, but also in India and Latin America, Gramsci's ideas have been crucial when it comes to establishing the fields of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Subaltern Studies. In his eyes, a cultural strategy was a necessary element of the political struggle of the left (an intuition disconcertingly coopted by the right in more recent times). We may well ask, however, is culture in itself sufficient to articulate a political struggle? How did Gramsci define culture in his times and how do we? We will analyze in particular eight "traveling concepts" from the Prison Notebooks: Subaltern, Hegemony, Passive Revolution, Organic Intellectual, Education, National-Popular, The Southern Question, and Americanism/Fordism. We will examine these notions in their original historical context while also exploring the current horizon in which they have proven to be productive in very different geopolitical arenas.
COMP_LIT 398
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 (Fall 2020: colloquium will be held virtually).
COMP_LIT 410-0-20: Recounting the Plague: In and Around Literature
This seminar will in many ways be an experiment: it will combine both my annual Paris Program in Critical Theory seminar with seminars for incoming graduate students in CLS and German. This is made possible by the fact that the seminar will be held virtually, via Zoom, and thus can accommodate students living in disparate locations - as long as the time difference is not too great. In case of a student living in a time-zone that would make it impractical to participate directly in the seminar, the course can be recorded and thus viewed "asynchronously" - although this will preclude direct discussion, which I hope will be an integral part of the experience.
The seminar itself proposes to read a certain number of texts, from the Bible and Thucydides, to more recent writings by Artaud and Camus, articulating different attitudes toward and experiences of "plagues". Although the idea of this course arose before Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan in early January of 2020, the impact of the current pandemic obviously will impact the discussion of previous ones. The focus, not meant to be exclusive but to provide a certain continuity, will be on the manner in which such experiences are articulated in narrative form, whether as founding myths, historical accounts, theatrical, poetical and critical discourses. Although the emphasis will be on more or less direct depictions of plagues, the process of re-counting will emerge as perhaps the decisive medium in which this experience is articulated and transmitted. It is a medium that in which the usual opposition of "fiction" and "reality" is no longer decisive. Instead I propose the notion of a "frictional" text, in order to do justice to the reality of "fictions" and the fictionality of what is usually presented as "real".
In August Prof. Weber will distribute digital versions of almost all the text being discussed in class, with additional recommendations for hard cover versions for those who prefer working with the print medium, as well as suggested secondary readings.
COMP_LIT 414-0-21: Hemispheric Literature and Politics
The geopolitical relationships between the United States and Latin America have left profound marks on the literary histories of the hemisphere. After brief consideration of early twentieth-century geopolitical contexts (dollar diplomacy, assigned sovereignties, and the Good Neighbor policy), this course will focus primarily on the period after 1973: interventions in Chile and Argentina; 1980s inflammation of civil conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama; 1990s neoliberalization policies such as NAFTA; regimes of Caribbean disaster capitalism in the climate emergencies of the 21st century; and the demise of the “pink tide” and the prospects for reemergence of an anti-imperial left in the U.S. This course explores these shared histories, especially through recent works of literary and cultural theory, poetry, memoir, poet’s prose, and literary magazines (made available digitally). The course has three goals: a broad introduction to hemispheric studies as a framework for both U.S. and Latin American cultural studies; a practicum in the construction of a comparative literary historical and political context; a survey of tendencies in U.S., Latino/a/x, and Latin American poetries since 1970. Authors and critics may include Cecilia Vicuña, Roberto Tejada, Raúl Zurita, Carolyn Forché, C.D. Wright, Roque Dalton, Margaret Randall, Ernesto Cardenal, Mark Nowak, Urayoán Noel, Claire Fox, Greg Grandin, Diana Taylor, Edgar Garcia, and others. Magazines will include El corno emplumado, Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, and XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics.
COMP_LIT 487-0-20: Print Culture: Authors, Abdelkebir Khatibi
*this course will be taught in French
This course is dedicated to the influential work of the Moroccan writer and thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi, with particular emphasis on the question of language. A novelist, poet, philosopher and essayist, Khatibi's nuanced and often quite challenging thought and writing have enriched the work of scholars in literary studies, philosophy, postcolonial/decolonial theory, poststructuralist theory and political thought well beyond the Maghreb. Yet, very few have attended to the diversity of his corpus. While his exemplary novel, Amour bilingue is perhaps his best-known work, he is the author of a large body of novels, drama and poetry. A trained sociologist, his writing in this field engages with diverse visual, textual and artistic cultural spheres from North Africa, Europe and Asia, offering us a critical vocabulary and much needed methodology in our approach to studying these areas of cultural production. The author of two biographies where the question of biography as a necessity and as a genre is theorized, Khatibi invites us to dwell on this practice both broadly and contextually. Furthermore, he is one of the most imaginative and provocative interpreters of the Islamic artistic, philosophical and theological traditions.
Khatibi was consistently in dialogue with broad philosophical and literary traditions across the world. His dialogues with Jacques Derrida have been registered in a number of texts by both thinkers, but these by no means limit his wide-ranging intellectual contacts and conversations. While the course is built around Khatibi's novels and theoretical writings, students will be invited to explore in their research projects for the class the broader corpus of his work and its intellectual connections in ways that will be most promising and relevant for their own thinking and research interests.
COMP_LIT 487-0-21: Russian Modernism, Avant-Garde, Elena Guro: Text and Context
This study focuses on the theoretical issues, concepts, and poetics of the early Russian avant-garde (Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Larionov, Goncharova, Malevich, Kandinsky; secondary sources: Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, among others.) The interrelation of aesthetics and politics of art world, art and ideology are my central concern. I don't interpret ideology in purely Marxist terms, but rather see it as any abstracting "system of ideas." Ideology in art is the idea system that arises when art defines itself as creative human activity in relation to the social, philosophical, and political aspects of reality and consequently to the audience that assimilates this art. One of the specific characteristics of the Russian avant-garde (and Russian culture generally), is that the interaction between painter and viewer or poet and audience has always been a particularly acute issue. This aesthetic ideology, which I call the aesthetics of anarchy, in turn shaped the unique style, technique, methodology and philosophy of the movement.
COMP_LIT 488-0-1: Studies in French Philosophy - Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics
This course offers an introduction to biopolitics, "necropolitics" and "thanatopolitics" as intersectional terms in contemporary critical theory. In this context, intersectional takes on two meanings. On the one hand, it refers to the interrelations of race, gender, sexuality, class, poverty, health, immigration status, ability, and national "exceptionalism". On the other, it refers to the intersections of forms of power: including sovereign, disciplinary, governmental, securitizing, negative, andproductive, bio-, necro- and thanato-political. A prerequisite of the course is a basic foundation in Foucauldian theory, in particular Discipline and Punish and the first volume of History of Sexuality. Through one third of the course, students will consolidate this foundation through study of a group of Foucault's College de France lecture relevant to this period:, reading excerpts from Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population, Psychiatric Power, and Abnormal. The remainder of the course is devoted to the critical engagement with, and transformation of the biopolitical problematic in a range of contemporary critical theorists working in race, gender and sexuality studies, including Mbembe, Hartman, Wright, and Puar.
COMP_LIT 488-0-2: Unethical Media
In recent years, the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have challenged how scholars approach moral questions surrounding the works, artists or genres they select for syllabi and exhibitions. Yet as this debate around the ethics of pedagogy has grown, there has been less discussion about how we treat these same works in research contexts. What does it mean to feel conflicted about picking a novel, theorist, film or image for a syllabus, but relatively unconflicted about focusing on that same material in an article or talk at a professional meeting?
This is a class about what happens when good media scholars study bad things, highlighting how this practice has in fact always been a key part of critique. It is often by running up against theory that a media work becomes "ethical" or "unethical" in the first place. Moreover, the question of how to engage with "unethical objects" motivates a whole array of critical argumentative comportments - it shows us how to canonize, how to excuse, how to politicize, even how to love or hate - and in this way the question of ethics helps us to assume the identity of a scholar. More deeply, these engagements organize and the category of the problematic itself, making it recognizable to a discipline and its members.
To gain perspective on this process, our class will look at the intersection of contemporary theory and moral philosophy, along with films, photographs, graphic novels and radio dramas dealing with issues of aesthetic distance, visual violence, cancel culture, scholarly privilege, disgrace, and the ethical representation of sexualized and racialized bodies. Theorists will include: Chinua Achebe, Elizabeth Anscombe, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Immanuel Kant, José Esteban Muñoz, and Linda Williams. Students will also be asked to present objects they find intellectually compelling but ethically challenging. This class is meant to be especially beneficial for students who find themselves at an impasse about how to behave toward their objects of doctoral research and seek tools to help them move forward as well as a community of discussion.
Some questions will include: What ethical approach is fitting for research that isn't fitting for teaching? How does morality shape how we cancel, celebrate, highlight, hatewatch or sequester works of art, literature and media? How does what we choose to research reflect privilege, and what shape should scholarship take to recognize that? Where does the legitimacy of the researcher toward an object come from, how is it recognized? What languages to scholars deploy in talking about - and often excusing - their moral discomforts, in formal terms? What sort of moral and affective duties spin out of our relationship with our research objects, and how are these both pre-structured and contingent?
Films to be studied include:
Jonathan Demme, The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Anna Biller, The Love Witch (2016)
Nao Bustamante, Neapolitan (2003)
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, A Screaming Man (2010)
Kelly Reichardt, Night Moves (2014)
Alfred Hitchcock, Marnie (1964)
Spike Lee, Bamboozled (2000)
Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing (2014)
Jane Gillooly, A Suitcase of Love and Shame (2013)
COMP_LIT 488-0-3: Society and Its Discontents
*Class discussion will be predominantly in French.
This seminar considers the intersections of literature and social commentary in Renaissance France and Europe. The 16th century saw the heights of humanism and the progression to what we now call early modernity. Focusing on the works of Rabelais and Montaigne who exemplify these two moments, we will consider the interactions between literature and society, politics and intellectual and religious culture. What literary techniques make up the central engines of social commentary? How do texts construct a self and others as vehicles for critique? How do laughter, skepticism and vituperation enable and/or challenge critical interpretation? Examining the tools with which literature probes the world, we will also read works by Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, Etienne de la Boétie, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli and others.
In addition to our early modern texts, this class will also include discussion of issues and best practices in academic research and the profession.
COMP_LIT 488-0-4: Trauma, Politics, and the Uses of Memory
Trauma Studies has become an integral interpretative paradigm for critical theorists, politicians, activists and the popular media alike, where it functions as a diagnostic tool that articulates specif- ic relationships between violence, vulnerability, and late capitalist modernity. Initially embedded in a psychoanalytic framework, the paradigm of trauma attempted to capture the violence wrought by modernity, primarily in the context of twentieth century Western Europe. Seismic upheavals caused by forms of totalitarian govern- ment and Western colonial rule, and subsequent attempts of de- colonization, ask us to rethink trauma as a decidedly internation- al phenomena and a transmutable category that exceeds national boundaries, even as it is at times mobilized by the nation state as cause for new acts of violence.
Critical approaches to trauma will be considered through a transna- tional approach to memory and politics, as we seek to understand the universalist appeal of this model of subjectivity in cultural con- texts that overlap, contrast, and challenge one another, even when ostensibly speaking the same critical language. We will examine a range of archives and media: film, testimonio, biography, novels, poetry, memorials, and photography.
Winter 2021
COMP_LIT 200 Intro 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, thus blurring the lines between literature and its criticism.
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 literature.
COMP_LIT 201 Reading World Literature: Global Literary Ecologies
This course introduces students to a diverse range of important works of world literature and the central debates and questions about the idea of world literature. We will explore the interface of global ecological developments and the circulation of world literature. How does a text qualify to be part of “world literature”? What does the reader bring to the text to make it a “world literature” text? What are the similarities/differences between “world literature,” on the one hand, and “world music” and “world cinema” on the other? In what ways can literature be compared to the environment? How can we preserve endangered literary texts and global languages? How does world literature respond to problems that face the world at large (e.g., global pandemics, world wars, and climate change, etc.)? How appropriate is the term “world literature” as a descriptor of planetary literary production and circulation? What are the best methods of reading world literature today? We will try to answer some of these questions and others that arise during class and one-on-one meetings.
COMP_LIT 202-0-1 Gender and Revolution in Soviet Russia
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 202-0-3 Literature of 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 Taiwanese New Wave Cinemas
“New wave” is a ubiquitous but notoriously imprecise term that has been applied to various trends in cinema that emerged around the world beginning in the mid-1950s. As a historical term it is used to delineate shared styles, themes, and techniques that define certain national and international film movements. As a kind of descriptive shorthand, it has been applied more broadly to movements that abandoned conventional narrative techniques in favor of experimentation with the cinematic medium, while also confronting social and political problems specific to the context of production. Thus, the inaugural French New Wave has lent its title to film trends in Britain, Iran, Japan, Hong Kong, and many other locations around the world. This course offers a critical and historical introduction to one of these latter-day new waves, the “New Taiwan Cinema,” which emerged in the early 1980s as a reaction against contemporaneous commercial cinema. Through a careful investigation of the work of the three most important representatives of this “new” cinema—Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, Tsai Ming-Liang 蔡明亮, and Edward Yang 楊德昌—this course will consider not only the experimental form and social consciousness of the Taiwanese New Wave but also the specific economic, social, and institutional structures—national and transnational—that shaped it. We will also study critical and theoretical writings on this cinema to better understand both the Taiwanese cultural milieu that produced it, and the broader global film culture of which it has become such an important part. Whenever possible, we will place individual Taiwanese films in dialogue with the Asian and European film cultures that influenced them as well as the films and filmmakers that they have influenced. There are no prerequisites for this class and no previous knowledge of Chinese or Taiwanese literature, culture, language, or history is assumed.
COMP_LIT 207 Introduction to Critical Theory
In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, paying particular attention paid to methods they devise and deploy in their treatment of moral and religious phenomena. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings.
COMP_LIT 211-0-1 Introduction to 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 305 Art and Activism in Modern Japan
This course examines the relationship between the arts and political movements in modern Japan. We will examine historical examples of how art has been conceived as a form of political activism and how social movements have, in turn, shaped cultural and aesthetic forms. The course will move chronologically while exploring a set of historically persistent questions: How have art and politics been defined as distinct or overlapping realms of human activity? What is the relationship between aesthetic forms and political ideologies? How is artistic production itself a form of social organization and engagement? We will consider, among other topics, how transnational anarchism and struggles for democracy in the late 19th century shaped the modern novel; feminist literature; the proletarian arts movements; fascist aesthetics; practices of democracy in the postwar avant-garde; Afro-Japanese solidarities and cultural exchange; the intersection of art and social protest in the sixties; and the role of the arts in anti-nuclear movements. Drawing from an array of disciplinary perspectives, this course investigates how the arts have been used to imagine and enact social change on local, national, and global scales.
COMP_LIT 307 South Asian Feminist Fictions
In this course we will engage critically and closely with diverse works by women writers and filmmakers from both India and Pakistan. We will pay special attention to how these artists articulate and re-imagine the female experience in South Asian societies, offering diverse and fierce challenges to multiple foundations of patriarchy.
COMP_LIT 312 Kafka and his ‘Readers’
Almost a hundred years after his untimely death in 1924 Kafka’s literary, cultural, and even political importance has only increased, as his strange imaginary—often populated by animals—speaks with ever greater urgency to readers across the globe. This seminar will be divided into three parts. In the first, we will be reading a variety of Kafka’s shorter prose writings, especially those involving animals—a salesman who turns into a bug, an ape who writes a letter to university administrators, and a mouse who becomes the singer of her “people.” In the second we will read two readers of Kafka who are similarly visionary writers: Jorge Luis Borges and J. M. Coetzee. And for the third section, the class will collectively decide which readers of Kafka they would like to examine, as we widen the focus of “reading,” so that it may include visual arts, film, and contemporary media
COMP_LIT 383 Studies in French Philosophy
This course offers an overview of the work of one of the most influential late-twentieth-century French philosophers, Michel Foucault. Focusing on his studies of madness, sex, the medical gaze, prisons and other disciplinary institutions, the search for truth, knowledge, and liberation, students will gain an understanding of Foucault's most important concepts - concepts that over the last four decades have become central categories of inquiry and critique in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. These include archaeology, discipline, biopolitics, power-knowledge, resistance, governmentality, and genealogy. The course is reading intensive. In addition to weekly excerpts, you should plan to read two of Foucault's major texts throughout the quarter.
COMP_LIT 411 Derrida/Agamben: Convergences and Disagreements
The seminar explores key texts of two of the most important voices of so-called poststructuralism, both of whom reframe Heidegger’s legacy in crucial but dissimilar ways that suggest the limits of the long shadow cast by the German philosopher on contemporary thought. Derrida and Agamben each originate or shape a distinctive field, i.e. deconstruction and biopolitics. Each pointedly contributes to a contentious dialogue over the years, resulting in reciprocal criticism revolving around the questions of language, law, and sovereignty. The course highlights the divergent ethical and political implications of their respective philosophies by reading the following texts: Derrida, The Death Penalty, Vol I; Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben, The Use of Bodies, Mbembe, Necropolitics.
COMP_LIT 413 Orientalism and Its Discontents
Topic: Muslim History of Eastern Europe The way we organize knowledge about the world into different silos of specialization is principally determined by what are thought of geographic markers: Europe, Asia, North America, Middle East, etc. as in this course catalogue. However, geography itself is mostly a product of the knowledge systems it supposedly organizes. Nowhere is this fact more salient than the attributes of "the Balkans" and the "Middle East" where geographic markers signify civilizational divisions even as they are created by them. In this course we will explore the historical development of these presumably self-explanatory categories and how they have influenced the way we conceptualize the world. Our readings will be organized chronologically covering the period from the seventeenth to the turn of this century. Examples include: Larry Wolff, the Invention of Eastern Europe and The Singing Turk; Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters; and Noel Malcom, Useful Enemies.
COMP_LIT 414 Theories of Realism
This course looks at the notion of realism as both historical literary movement and epistemological/aesthetic problem. We will read classic theories of realism by Hegel, Auerbach, Barthes, Lukács, Blumenberg, and others, as well as significant new work by contemporary critics and theorists, together with exemplary texts of nineteenth-century European realist prose fiction. The temporal focus of the class will be mid- to late-nineteenth-century Europe and the particular literary form that dominated at this time; however, we will also go beyond this to look at the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the notion of "realism" itself. Special attention will be devoted to the following questions: the purpose of genre, the place of the human, the relationship between realism and reality (or the real), the elevation of the ordinary, and the possibilities and limits of representation.
COMP_LIT 487-0-1 Visual Culture
Topics in Literary Theory Introduction to Cinema/Media/Sound Studies The aim of this course is to introduce new graduate students to twentieth-century theories of film, media, and sound studies, with special emphasis on the French and German contexts. We will work around specific questions and trace the ways in which they have been pursued by theorists and practitioners alike. How can we conceptualize the relation between art and technology? Can we speak of perception and memory independently of specific technical apparatuses? What is at stake in the shift from analog to digital media at the level of both inscription and reception? As we focus on different kinds of media, we will read texts by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Kittler, Bernard Stiegler, and Lisa Nakamura, among others. We will also analyze films and art installations by Guy Debord, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, and John Akomfrah.
Spring 2021
COMP_LIT 202-0: Oral Poetry from Homer to Hip Hop
What do Homer, Vyasa, and Kendrick Lamar have in common? All three practiced “oral poetry” – poetry that is improvised or composed extemporaneously before an audience. In this course, we will explore a variety of poetic traditions, beginning with the Homeric epics and weaving our way through the spaces, times, and traditions of Indian epic poets, West African djelis, Slavic bards, and contemporary hip-hop. Along the way, we will study the contents of these poetic traditions, but we will also investigate the modes and moments of poetic creation, and consider the effects of transcribing, and thus rendering immutable, that which was once spontaneous and ever-shifting.
COMP_LIT 205-0: Gender, Politics and Philosophy
This class introduces students to a variety of philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. Together, we'll read classic and contemporary texts that examine questions such as: what is gender -- and how, if it all, does it relate to or differ from sex? What does it really mean to be a woman or a man -- and are these categories we're born into or categories that we become or inhabit through living in a particular way under specific conditions? Human history all the way up to the present seems to be rife with asymmetrical relations of power that relegate those marked out as women to a subordinate position -- what explains this? What would it mean to overturn this state of affairs -- and which strategies are most likely to accomplish this task? And to what extent is it possible to grapple with all of the above questions -- questions of gender, sex, and sexuality -- without also, at the very same time, thinking about how they relate to questions of class and race? Readings will include selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler, Talia Bettcher, and others.
COMP_LIT 211-0: The Bible as Literature
This course is intended to familiarize students of literature 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.
COMP_LIT 301-0 Comedy and Culture Wars in Antiquity
Every culture, it would seem, has its wars. In this course, we will examine how the medium of comedy – both on the stage and on the page – has been used as a means to move the needle in these wars, and to force members of their cultures to reflect on the disputes and the debates that raged. Along the way, we will read comic plays by Aristophanes and Plautus, satire from ancient Rome, and many others.
COMP_LIT 302-0 Literature to Opera to Film
This cross-listed, interdisciplinary course will feature operas from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which were based on pre-existing literary or theatrical works, and which, in turn, inspired cinematic or televised works in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. In each case, we will study the literary or theatrical inspiration in its own right (those who can are encouraged to read these classic works in their original languages), become familiar with the opera, and proceed to some famous films and other video adaptations of each opera. We will end the course with a popular film that is not directly based on a literary work or an opera, but which relies strongly on conventions from both and which features a performance of one of our featured operas. Students who read French, German, Italian, and/or Spanish will have an opportunity to use these languages, and others may be important for individual projects.
COMP_LIT 306-0-1 Politics of Exclusion: Caste and Race in India and the United States
In this course we will explore the historical, political, intellectual, and aesthetic connections between caste in India and race in the United States. We will use the occasion of the recent publication of Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which has brought increased public attention to the shared structures and political philosophies that underwrite both U.S. racial segregation and Hindu/Indian caste hierarchies as particular kinds of political systems that mobilize social hierarchies through color and colorism. We'll seek to contextualize Wilkerson's evocative analogy through a focused reading of the works of scholars of race, caste, postcolonialism, religion, history, ethnic and area studies who have traced this relationship in more specific contexts. We will also pay special attention to the genre of memoir, reading several recent examples from both Dalit and Black American writers.
COMP_LIT 312-0 READING ELENA FERRANTE: THE REINVENTION OF FRIENDSHIP AND LOVE
In 2016, Time magazine included the Italian novelist who works under the pseudonym “Elena Ferrante” on its list of the year’s hundred most influential people. We will explore some of the most celebrated novels of this mysterious writer, who is beloved not only in Italy but also in the US and around the world. Critics in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and numerous other publications have given ecstatic reviews to her writings, typically describing their effect as “mesmerizing,” “stunning,” and “brutally honest.” Indeed, Ferrante’s fearless, cliché-annihilating explorations of friendship, loneliness, troubling loves, sexuality, violence, and maternity suggest a creative and disruptive refashioning of traditional feminist concerns on an epic scale. We begin our consideration of her work with The Days of Abandonment, which revises the trope of the abandoned woman in new and startling ways. We will also discuss the cinematic adaptation. We will then read The Lost Daughter, the novelist’s sophisticated and uncanny investigation of the agonized ambivalence of love and motherhood. Finally, the course concludes with My Brilliant Friend, the first volume of her bestselling series of Neapolitan novels. In particular, we will focus on how this text redefines the contested territory of women’s friendship. Throughout, we will address Ferrante’s decision to keep her true identity secret, thus setting in motion the media’s frenzy to unmask her. Taught in English, seminar style.
COMP_LIT 412-0 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, and Djibril Diop Mambéty.
COMP_LIT 481-0 Russian Formal Theory and Practice
RUSSIAN FORMALISM. This seminar will examine the school and theory of Russian Formalism, which influenced and informed many developments in the 20th 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 481-0-2: 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 such questions through an overview of approaches to the question of interpretation, with a particular emphasis on contemporary theoretical paradigms and debates. In parallel to the course readings and discussions, students will get training in skills necessary to graduate- and professional-level academic work, culminating in the workshopping and preparation of a publication-ready article.
COMP_LIT 487-0 Russian Modernism, Avant-Garde, and Elena Guro
ELENA GURO: A WOMAN IN THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE.
This course will be focused on Russian Modernism, and early Avant-Garde, reflecting on the works of the first futurist woman poet and artists, Elena Guro (1877-1913) in the context of major issues visual and literary Modernism and Avant-garde carries within: 'life-building' (zhiznetvorchestvo), and mythologization; search for new cultural, national, and personal identity; gender politics; word/image interrelationship; new aesthetic ideology. Poetry and visual works by Bely, Briusov, Gippius, Khlebnikov,Kruchenykh, Malevich, Goncharova et al.
No language prerequisite.
COMP_LIT 488-0 The Letter in Latin America
This course has two goals. First, it seeks to familiarize students with Latin American intellectual traditions in the modern period. In order to do so, it surveys a representative selection of pivotal figures in three different, and crucial, historical moments: the post-revolutionary 19th century and its responses both to Independence and an emerging neocolonial order; the frenetic 1920s and 30s and the articulations of a properly Latin American identity and culture; and the late 20th century, which has witnessed an attempt to reckon with the repercussions of the revolutionary projects of the mid-century. Second, within and across these historical constellations, the course will analyze prominent conceptual paradigms that have defined intellectual discourse in the region, such as mestizaje, hybridity, and heterogeneity, focusing particularly on their evolution and metamorphoses. As we consider the advent and waning of elite, lettered production's influence and power to shape national and regional conceptualizations, we will pay special attention to how alterity and coloniality inflect the region's intellectual production. Readings will be derived from a list of primary texts with optional supplements from other sources.