Winter 2022 Course Schedule

Winter 2022 Course Schedule

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*The Winter 2022 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 2022 course descriptions

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

Winter 2022

COMP_LIT 200-0-20: Introduction to Literary Theory
This course offers an introduction to key works of criticism and major theories of the study of literature. We will ask questions at the very heart of literary studies: what is literature and what are its uses? What can we learn from literature about contemporary concerns such as feminism, racism, empire, or postcoloniality? How do human beings exist in language and imagine different worlds through it? How does language shape human experience, subjecthood, and identity? 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 literature, language, and the human condition.

COMP_LIT 202-0-20: 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 202-0-21: Literature of 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 202-0-23: Modern Jewish American Literature: Ethnicity, Assimilation, Performance
This seminar consists in modern Jewish American literary text analyses in point of their cultural markers, focusing on the relations between collective and individual memory, mainstream and minority tensions, as well as identity and ethical dilemmas. We intend to focus on the ethnic components of these texts as evidence of cultural assimilation, dissimilation, or performance on the part of the authors who produced them in the U.S. The seminar looks at identity as a contextually based-fluid category, the result of spaces of negotiation. We will compare the representation of Eastern European Jewish experiences in the early twentieth century literature of immigrant authors from the Russian Empire and Romania to the representation of the same early twentieth century experience by contemporary (Jewish) American authors. We will assess how significant moments in the life of early twentieth century Eastern European Jews in America (such as the fusgeyer / marching emigration movement from 1900 Romania, the 1903 Kishinev pogrom from the Russian Empire, the original “Bintel Brief/Bundle of Letters” column in The Yiddish Daily Forward or the 1911 Triangle Fire in New York) were represented in early twentieth century literary works and how they are represented in contemporary, twenty-first century literary works. In this sense, we will consider the input of the gender lens and various literary genres (play, reportage poem, graphic narrative, travelogue, photo-word novel) looking back on the early twentieth century. We will analyze literary works by Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the U.S. from the Pale of Settlement and Romania at the turn of the twentieth century (Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, M.E. Ravage) and literary works rewriting the early 1900s immigrant experience due to contemporary (Jewish) American authors (Liana Finck, Margot Singer, Leela Corman, Jill Culiner, Barbara Kahn, Aleksandar Hemon, Robert Fink, Julia Alekseyeva). By examining moments of struggle and power imbalance in the relation between mainstream and minority groups, the seminar also explores the fundamental role of literature in mourning and historical reparation.

COMP_LIT 202-0-24: Analyzing Freud
This class examines the life and work of the groundbreaking Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud from a comparative and interdisciplinary angle. Long after his death, Freud’s legacy continues to be controversial: some claim that his theories are no longer relevant in the light of new research, whereas others defend his theories and/or expand upon the implications and influence of his ideas, in the realm not only of psychology, medicine, and neuroscience, but also in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, literary studies, criminal justice, queer studies, gender’s studies, and many more. What is certain, however, is that Freud’s work—and the image of his life—have marked the modern world. This class will read fundamental texts from Freud’s body of work in dialogue with texts by Freud’s near and distant predecessors and followers, both to situate Freud in his historical and cultural context, and to think through the many different kinds of questions that Freud’s work addresses.

COMP_LIT 202-0-25: Cervantes
Don Quixote, one could argue, is a novel about how not to write and how not to read. The author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, pens the work in order to demonstrate the absurdity of chivalric romances, the bestsellers of his day. The protagonist, Don Quixote, is incapable of understanding the difference between the fictions he reads and the real world around him. While all this happened some four hundred years ago, reading and writing are still central to our everyday lives (case in point: you are reading this description to decide whether you will enroll in this class). In the spirit of Cervantes, we will study his famous text with a focus on the practices of reading and writing—how and why did people read and write in 17th-century Spain? How were different forms of writing connected to class, gender, race, and religion? What did literacy mean in the early modern world and what implications does this have for us today? We will employ different methods of reading (close, distant, collective, etc.) and different forms of writing (analytical, creative, etc.) to gain a better understanding of this key text. The class will be taught in English.

COMP_LIT 202-0-26: 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. Prerequisite for Portuguese section: PORT 201-0, PORT 202-0, or sufficient score on placement exam. Prerequisite for English section: none. 

COMP_LIT 207-0-20: Introduction to Critical Theory
In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, paying particular attention to their understanding of the origins and explanation of inequality, domination, morality, good and evil, "ressentiment", repression, guilt and shame, rights, legality, and revolution, and the opposition between justice and injustice.

COMP_LIT 211-0-20 Readings in Genre
This course will examine 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, ethical, and cultural aspects of the genre certainly have changed in the last century. Can the modern short story still communicate ethical and social truths? Is the inherent, conclusive brevity and elegance of the genre paradoxically better able to capture the chaos of contemporary life?

We will examine 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. We will focus in particular on issues of love, jealousy, sexuality, gender, friendship and youth culture as defined by Boccaccio, Verga, Morante, Ortese, Pavese, Calvino, Tabucchi and Tondelli.

COMP_LIT 301-0-20: African Literatures and Cultures
Movement and circulation are literature's perennial themes. Yet, the ways in which these motifs are generated through writing differ significantly across time and space. In the same way that our political and social discourses on circulation and migration shift according to changing political social and historical conditions, so do their literary inscriptions. In this course, we turn to these ever-present motifs in Francophone African literary writings and cinema. We clearly cannot exhaustively explore all the rich possibilities of this theme, given the time limit of a quarter. However, the works chosen will expose students to both a broad historical and political framework and geographical expanse. We will begin with migration and movement in the colonial era and move forward in time. We will also travel from West Africa to North Africa and the Indian Ocean in order to explore the modalities of movement and circulation in their political, historical, and geographical contexts. The literary and cinematic corpus of the class is robustly supported with theoretical and historical materials and lectures. Movement also hints at the affective and emotional charge of circulation, be it understood as migration—forced of voluntary—return, or simply as travel. The modalities of affects linked to movement will constitute an important dimension of our analyses.

COMP_LIT 305-0-20: Italian Cinema- (Neo)realism and the Documentary Impulse 
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 then turn to the remarkable production of the 1960s and 1970s and analyze they way in which different directors (Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Rosi, Pasolini) treated the problems of modernity and industrialization, migration, organized crime, and the media industry. 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 the current socio-economic crisis and the resurgence of populism and right-wing politics. Throughout the course, we will also work to acquire the critical and methodological tools necessary to analyze film as a complex mode of cultural production.

COMP_LIT 305-0-21: Introduction to Japanese Cinema I
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.

COMP_LIT 306-0-20: Anticolonial Thought
This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation and literary self-determination from across the world, we’ll consider the shifting claims of the British, American, French, Spanish, and Russian empires, and the colonial subjects, postcolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations from Chile to Alcatraz, India to Ireland, and Azerbaijan to Martinique. Our focus will most often be on the manifestos and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we may also look at a few poems, stories, and films.

This course will be taught in conjunction with parallel courses offered at the University of Chicago and the University of Kentucky. We anticipate building possibilities for cross-campus collaborative research among students as part of an ongoing, large-scale research collaboration.

COMP_LIT 307-0: Studies in Gender and Sexuality & Representation-Gender, Race, and Aesthetic Resistance in Film and Media
This course will focus on films, TV programs, and music videos that expose and attempt to counter the formation of gender and race hierarchies in the fabric of daily life. Our point of departure is Italy’s current predicament, which sees the resurgence of right-wing politics and a widespread homophobic and racist stand. Several anti-immigration policies and the recent rejection of the Zan bill (which was meant to make violence against LGBT people and disabled people, as well as misogyny, a hate crime) urge us, yet again, to contest still enduring images of Italy as the land of love and of Italians as basically “brava gente” (“decent people”). We will begin by considering the ways in which mass media have contributed to construing gender and race stereotypes at different junctures in Italian history, keeping in mind the longstanding repression of Italy’s colonial past in Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. However, the bulk of the course will be devoted to those practices of cultural resistance that developed within commercial film/television production as well as in more lateral or experimental contexts. Among the examples we will consider are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s queer documentary, Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1964); Cecilia Mangini’s Essere Donne (Being Women, 1965), a feminist take on Italian Marxism and anthropology; Adriana Monti’s Scuola senza fine (School without End, 1983), produced in the context of the experimental “150 hours” course; Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi Dal Polo all’Equatore (From the Pole to the Equator, 1985), which re-edits archival footage of colonial travel and sport from the Fascist period; and contemporary works by Afro-Italian writers and artists such as Gabriella Ghermandi, Dagmawi Yimer, and Karima 2G. We will conclude by addressing the resonances between Afrofuturism and feminist poetics in the US and Italy.

COMP_LIT 312-0: Borges
In this course we will focus on the poetry, essays, and short fiction of Jorge Luis Borges.  We explore comparatively both the connections to the Latin American and European literary traditions that saw his figure emerged and also to the many debates that his literature helped define: What constitutes a literary text? What is an author/authority? How to write/read literature in the age of the mass media? How does literary translation inform cultural translation? What cultural traditions can the Latin American writers claim as their own? Starting with his 1920s poetry Fervor de Buenos Aires and his relation to Martin Fierro avant-garde group, we move into the core of his Fictions stories, "El Aleph," "El Sur," "The Library of Babel, " to finally discuss programmatic essays, such as "The Argentine Writer and Tradition."  The bibliography on Borges is vast and rich, so we accompany our reading of Borges' fiction with secondary readings that focus on providing a historical, cultural and specifically literary context.

COMP_LIT 411-0: Aesthetics: From its Inception to its "Destruction," 1735-1835-1935
The seminar seeks to encompass two major moments in the field of aesthetics:  during the first five weeks we will examine the founding of science of aesthetics in Alexander Baumgarten’s doctoral dissertation (1735) and its putative completion in Hegel’s posthumously published lectures (1835); and in the following five weeks, we turn to the attempts on the part of Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger around 1935 to dispose with the founding conception of aesthetics and correspondingly approach the work of art in very different—but also perhaps complementary or entangled—ways.  The four primary texts for the seminar are, therefore, Baumgarten’s Mediationes philosophicae de nonnullius ad poema pertinentibus (Philosophical meditations on something more than nothing pertaining to the poem), the introduction to Hegel’s Vorlesungen über Ästhetik (Lectures on aesthetics), Heidegger’s “Ursprung des Kunstwerks” (Origin of the artwork), and Benjamin’s “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter des technischen Reproduzierbarkeit“ (The Artwork in the age of its technical reproducibility).  Other ancillary and secondary works will be also be considered, depending on student interest and the direction of the conversation.  We will work closely with the Latin and German texts; but the seminar will be conducted in English, and no knowledge of either German or Latin is required. 

COMP_LIT 486: Studies in 18th Century Literature: Green Materialisms
This course introduces students to a sequence of “materialisms” worked out from the 18th century to the present. While readings and discussions will gravitate toward contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist ecological thought (including the afterlives of ideas like “primitive accumulation” and “metabolic rift” in recent feminist, anti-colonial, and environmental frameworks), we will also spend time looking at the writings and influence of earlier thinkers whose controversial materialisms have returned to critical attention in recent decades (e.g. Lucretius, Spinoza, Herder). A guiding aim of the course is to assemble a fuller sense of the historical and conceptual underpinnings of first-world environmentalism; so we will ask what “matters,” and to whom, in part by putting “greenness” under scrutiny as a critical category. Readings will emphasize theory and philosophy, but occasionally cross into poetry and science as well.

COMP_LIT 487-20: Studies in 20th Century Russian Literature
This advanced graduate seminar will explore Late and Post-Soviet and Russian Prose from mid-20th to 21 cent., with emphasis on Postmodernist works in the context of social and political issues of the era. Readings are in Russian (or in both Russian and English translation where available) and include major works and short stories by Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Andrei Siniavsky, Mamleev, Pelevin, Sorokin, Shargunov, and others.

COMP_LIT 487-21:  Aesthetics of Solidarity
This course focuses on connected political and social movements--both within the MENA region and between movements outside of it--alongside the aesthetic forms those movements and solidarities produced and sometimes shared. Specifically, this course helps us think critically about the long history of solidarity politics and forms as well as their future, and even about the terms "solidarity" [تضامن]. and "aesthetics" [جماليات] themselves.

What can we learn from historical examples of connected movements in order to understand the way in which allegiance and disidentification are articulated through multiple aesthetic platforms and modalities? What can aesthetics teach us about the possibilities and limits of shared imaginations and political aspirations? Additionally, we ask how activists, artists, and scholars mobilize the aesthetic and the linguistic to address tensions in translocal solidarities between national or local specificities and singularities on the one hand, and shared or cognate experiences and structures on the other? Are "solidarity" and "aesthetics" even the most accurate or desirable terms to describe such diverse movements as they exist in the history of connected struggles across the long 20th century (from third worldism of the mid-century to more contemporary actions such as DecolonizeThis Place/BDS)?

Our investigations will bring us to study literary texts, manifestos, journals, art works and projects, scholarly debates, and films emanating from or concerned with the formerly (or still) colonized regions of the Middle East.

This class includes a professionalization component in that it culminates in a symposium of 20 minute presentations from all class members, the texts of which are to be handed in for graded assessment which feeds into final grades, otherwise equally based on class participation and contextual research presentations. A significant majority of materials will be available in English, but language skills in Arabic and/or French would be helpful.

COMP_LIT 488-20: Hannah Arndt
This course takes its point of departure from a careful reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s massive study of Nazi totalitarianism and its origins in anti-Semitism and European imperialism.  For the first three weeks of the class, we will read the three sections of the Origins along with a selection of Arendt’s contemporaneous writings on issues at the heart of her study: wide-scale statelessness and forced migration; racism and imperial expansion; totalitarian propaganda and the “holes of oblivion.”  Arendt recognized that the Origins posed a question that remained unanswered in that work:  faced with the manufacture of living corpses, what preserves our humanity and redeems our actions?  Arendt’s next major work, The Human Condition, thus moves toward an analysis of the conditions and modes of human activity:  from the biological life process, to the world-creating capacity of homo faber, to the urgency and fragility of human action.  As we read The Human Condition, which seeks to answer the question posed by the Origins by accounting for what European philosophy has generally failed to analyze with sufficient clarity—namely, the dimensions of the “active life”—we examine Arendt’s attempt in the same period to review and, in her own way, deconstruct the concepts of thinking around which the ideal of a “contemplative life” concretized.  This prepares us for a reading in the final weeks of the seminar of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she re-conceptualizes evil as a certain implementation of systematic thoughtlessness.   As we examine these three major works, each of which is a reflection on the relation between language and politics, we will continually attend to the varying ways in which Arendt sought to understand where poetry stands in relation to human “conditionality,” and we will use her often-neglected suggestions in this regard to develop an Arendtian poetics.

COMP_LIT 488-21: The Global Avant Garde
This course offers an overview of 20th century avant-garde movements in Europe and the Americas analyzing the historical contexts in which they emerged. In particular, we explore the literary and visual culture vanguard practices as they migrate from metropolis into significant transfer points through travel, exile, translation, exhibitions, intellectual correspondence, thus fostering international aesthetic movements. We pay special attention to how avant-garde artists and writers negotiated foreign influence and local conditions; and how these movements conceived themselves as profoundly local while speaking in an international idiom. We will also contrast the "historical avant-garde" period of 1920s with its resurgence in the 1960s and the politics of counter-culture movements. Critical readings include: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Frederick Jameson, Brent Edwards, Beatriz Sarlo and Roberto Schwartz.

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