Spring 2023 Course Schedule

Spring 2023 Course Schedule

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*The Spring 2023 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.

Spring 2023 course descriptions

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

Spring 2023

COMP_LIT 200-0-20 Introduction to Literary Theory: Postcolonial and Decolonial Literary Theory 
 This course offers an introduction to key works of criticism and major theories of the study of literature, with a specific emphasis on postcolonial and decolonial literary theory. We will ask questions at the very heart of literary studies: what is literature and what are its uses? How does language shape human experience, subjecthood, and identity? What can we learn from literature about contemporary concerns such as feminism, racism, empire, postcoloniality and decoloniality? How does literature function as a vehicle for critiquing and questioning dominant knowledge narratives and versions of history, particularly the legacies of empire? We will survey debates about these questions in the criticism of the past as well as in recent theory, emphasizing modes of reading critically in relation to dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. We will conclude our class by examining the various possible futures of literary theory, as well as its significance and capacity to reshape and reimagine the world. 

COMP_LIT 201-0-20 Reading World Literature: Poetry and Performance in the Americas 
This course explores the linked histories of poetry and performance across the Americas (from Harlem to Havana, and from Chicago to Mexico City and Buenos Aires). We’ll focus especially on modern and avant-garde poetry and dance from their origins to the present. Along the way, we’ll consider how experimental writers and artists of color navigated racial discrimination, how poets and performers understood their relationship to national and international politics, and how their extraordinary formal experiments in language and embodiment sought to imagine new social possibilities. Students will learn to describe how the expressive capacities of poetry and dance have shaped major episodes in 20th and 21st century cultural history.

Poets may include José Martí, Rubén Darío, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Pedro Pietri, and Claudia Rankine. Performers may include Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, José Limón, Merce Cunningham, Eleo Pomare, Bill T. Jones, and Will Rawls.

COMP_LIT 202-0-20 Interpreting Culture: Poland in the 20th Century
Over the last century, Poland has undergone an extraordinary range of transformations and traumas: the end of partition among three empires (Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian) leading to the brief period of interwar independence; Nazi conquest, and the virtual elimination of Poland's Jewish population; Soviet subjugation; Solidarity and the revolt against Soviet rule; martial law; and in 1989, independence once again. Poland's shifting borders and the complex history and politics they represent provide a unique point of entry into modern European history. In this course, we will explore the distinctive ways in which history and culture combine in a colonized nation at Europe's heart by way of novels, films, essays, memoirs, journalism, and poetry. Authors to be read will include Nobel Laureates Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Olga Tokarczuk.

COMP_LIT 205-0-20 Reading Difference
Course description forthcoming.

COMP_LIT 270-0-1 Literatures in Translation: 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. 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 270-0-20 Literatures in Translation: Turkish Fiction Now
How is it possible to make art under conditions of authoritarianism and state repression? This course asks this question in the context of Turkey where state law forbids works that insult the Republic. Students will be introduced to contemporary Turkish fiction through its major authors—Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak, Murathan Mungan, and Ferit Edgü. Through different styles and genres, these authors interrogate Turkey’s traumatic past and turbulent present. How do modern Turkish authors represent Turkey’s minorities, for example, or such politically repressed questions as the Armenian Genocide or gay liberation? This course will be led by Visiting Scholar Fahri Öz, academic, translator and poet currently in exile after being dismissed from his position at Ankara University for signing the Academic for Peace declaration in 2016.

COMP_LIT 302-0-20 Reading Across Disciplines: Depictions of Criminality in Literature and Film
“Law and its Discontents: Depictions of Criminality in Literature and Film” will explore the ways in which the figure of the criminal has been represented across national traditions throughout the 20th and 21st century, with a special focus in the Latin American region. By carefully examining aesthetic depictions of the “outlaw” –from the American “Cowboy” to the Argentinian “Gaucho”– this course will address not only the role that these figures have played in the construction of national identities, but will also explore their potential for unsettling our conceptions of lawfulness, institutional justice, and ultimately, of the nation itself. Thus, in analyzing written and visual cultural practices that revisit the figure of the criminal, this course will explore topics such as the relationship between legal order and violence, criminality and popular justice, as well as of the (out)law and civil society. Primary readings for this course will include works from Roberto Bolaño, J. L. Borges, Angela Davis, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Franz Kafka, and others.  

COMP_LIT 303-0-20 Movements and Periods: Contemporary Jewish Fiction of the Americas
Describing his upbringing as a child of Eastern European immigrants, the Jewish Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011) once said, “At home, you speak Yiddish, eat gefilte fish and celebrate Shabbat. But in the streets, you have soccer, samba, and Portuguese. After a while you feel like a centaur.” Scliar’s fictional explorations of Jewish identity have led the literary scholar Nelson Vieira to observe that the Brazilian writer’s stories “are reminiscent of work by Canadian-Jewish writer Mordecai Richler and the American novelist Philip Roth, both of whom struggle to capture the perplexing and exasperating paradoxes of people who live between two worlds.” This course will take Vieira’s remark as a critical point of departure to read contemporary Jewish literature of the Americas comparatively. Building on critical/theoretical readings, we will explore selected post-WWII novels and short stories published by Jewish writers across North and South America. While such fiction is often framed solely as part of a national tradition, we will look beyond national borders to understand some of the convergences and divergences of Jewish literary discourses which have emerged in different national contexts of the Western Hemisphere. Over the term, we will examine ways in which modern and contemporary Jewish fiction writers have approached themes of religion, culture, assimilation, diaspora, race, gender, sexuality, the legacy of the Holocaust, and other key concerns.

COMP_LIT 305-0-1 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Writing Cinema between the World Wars 
In this course we will study literary and critical writings about cinema during the 1920s and 30s, learning about the global circulation of films and of ideas about cinema in the historical context of the period. In addition to France, we will also consider (and students will have the opportunity to do research on) texts and films from elsewhere in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, East Asia, and Latin America. 

We will read several classics of early film theory that try to define cinema and its potential as an art and/or a mass medium. Beyond film criticism in the narrow sense, these texts ask broader questions about the relationship between art and technology, entertainment and politics, perception and reality. We will also read several works of poetry and fiction that responded in formally innovative ways to the experience of cinema. 

Films may include: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Kid (1921), A Page of Madness (1926), Un Chien andalou (1929), São Paulo, Symphony of a Metropolis (1929), A Propos de Nice (1930), and An Amorous History of the Silver Screen (1931). Literary authors may include Blaise Cendrars, Patricia Galvão, and Carlos Oquendo de Amat; critics and scholars: Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Miriam Hansen, Imamura Taihei, and Liu Na’ou. 

COMP_LIT 305-0-20 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Cyber Japan
This course explores the interaction between cybernetic technologies and cultural production in modern Japan. We focus on how visual and literary media have been used to represent such technologies (robotics, cybernetics, and the Internet) as well as how these technologies have shaped Japanese culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The notion of the “cyber” – its origins in cybernetics and ensuing proliferation of meanings – forms the conceptual core of the course. After considering early definitions of this term, we turn to how Japanese manga, animation, film, and cultural theory explore the ways in which cybernetic technologies, like cyborgs and cyberspace, have expanded our understanding of human subjectivity and agency, transformed social relations, and blurred boundaries between the human and the animal, the biological and the artificial, and the physical and non-physical. 

COMP_LIT 305-0-21 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Cinemas of Care
This course examines the representations of care in a wide range of films from Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India, and China among others. Through close readings of these films, we will consider the ways through which care intersects with gender, race, nationality, and class. What does care mean? What is the relationship between care and narrative? How does film shape or challenge our understanding of care? To respond to these questions, the seminar brings together cultural products and critical texts across time, languages, and geographies. Ultimately, our objective is to think critically about how care is culturally constructed and represented.  

COMP_LIT 305-0-22 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Netflix Nation: The Turkish TV Boom
In the last two decades, Turkish television has boomed, and become the second largest exporter of televised series after the United States: more than 100 Turkish series are exported to more than 150 countries and have garnered more than 500 million viewers worldwide. But while Turkish government media have promoted historical dramas glorifying an Ottoman past, new platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and HBOMax have also introduced viewers to controversial Turkish social issues throughmob thrillers, modern romances, and supernatural adventures. This course concentrates on Turkish series and films available on the Netflix, as well as the public conversations about them and the policies that surround them in the form of bans, censorship, and boycotts. The study of these series and movies will help us explore the prevalent tension in the Turkey between the real situation in society and the ideological aspirations of government-backed productions. This course will be led by Visiting Scholar Fahri Öz, academic, translator and poet currently in exile after being dismissed from his position at Ankara University for signing the Academic for Peace declaration in 2016.

COMP_LIT 312-0-20 Major Authors and Texts: The Uncanny in Theory and in Literature 
“Uncanny” is the English word generally used to translate the German “Unheimlich,” a category theorized first by Ernst Jentsch, then by Freud, in an essay of that name (1919), and in a different way taken up by Heidegger in the late 1920s and 30s, and finally also by Derrida. It competes with the more traditional notion of “alienation” as a categorization of contemporary life, at least in the “West” (or if you prefer “Global North”). What is explicit in the German word but not in the English is the reference to the “home”. What however distinguishes the notion of the Unheimlich from previous theories of alienation or estrangement is that the experience no longer can be framed within the mutually exclusive polarity of domestic vs foreign, since the Unheimlich turns out to be most at home in the home, its strangeness reveals itself to be strangely familiar. Formulated in this way, literature emerges as a privileged medium of the Uncanny. 

In this course, we will retrace its emergence of a theory of the Uncanny in the texts of Freud and Heidegger, each of which reserve a special place for literature as a privileged setting for this “apparition”: for Freud the story by E. Th. A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman;” for Heidegger Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone. If these ¨classical¨ articulations of the uncanny in literature can be understood as a challenge to traditional Western notions of self-identity, we will look at some responses to this challenge in texts as diverse as The Odyssey (books 23 k& 24), Oedipus at Colonus, several shorter “stories” by Kafka (“Cares of a Housefather,”  “The Silence of the Sirens”) and finally two “science fiction” stories adapted for radio: “Child’s Play” by William Tenn (1948-51) and Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947). 

Reading knowledge of German, although desirable, is not required. 

COMP_LIT 390-0-20 Special Topics in Comp Lit: Shame: Histories and Cultures of an Emotion
Emotions are integral to our lives and influence how we navigate the social worlds we inhabit. This course explores an emotion that is notoriously difficult to characterize–shame–as it manifests itself in literary and visual media in history and contemporary culture. During the quarter, we will explore the concept of shame in contexts ranging from sexuality studies (transsexuality, #MeToo), to Black feminist theory (white supremacy), post/neo-colonial discourses (Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa), Holocaust and postcolonial studies (survivor guilt), and inequity (poverty and class struggle). We will discuss a variety of materials, selected from a variety of literary texts (J.M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, Nella Larsen, Primo Levi, Thomas Mann), essays (phenomenology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies), film (Boys Don’t Cry, reality T.V.), and excerpts from political commissions (TRC in South Africa). Topics for discussion may include: How do we “read for” emotion/render emotion legible? What role do identity and identification (gender, race, class, religion, and sexuality) play in shame? Does shame differ from guilt (and why should this matter)? Can shame be political and a social force? Does shame have a history? Is shame a social or a private emotion; a bodily or a psychic reaction? We will pose these and other questions and search for answers to them during the course of the quarter.  

COMP_LIT 412-0-20 Literary Studies Colloquium: Fanon Now: Race, Gender, Coloniality
A revolutionary, thinker, psychiatrist, and physician, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) produced a diverse and groundbreaking life work from Martinique to Algeria that has shaped generations of activists and scholars, and continues to do so.  

This graduate seminar will examine early and late major writings of Fanon, and a selection of scholarship on and influenced by Fanon in the fields of critical race theory, feminist theory, and decolonial thought, such as Gordon, Karera, Maldonado-Torres, Zambrana, Mbembe, Al-Saji, Snorton, and Wynter, among others. The range and nature of responses to Fanon’s work since his time speaks to the continued problem of colonialism, anti-Blackness, and the racialized gender system, as well as the changes in paradigms and discourse surrounding these issues. The course encourages seminar participants to think critically with and about Fanon’s work, to incorporate Fanon into their research and explore the renewed significance of Fanon’s work today.  

COMP_LIT 486-0-21 Studies in Literature and Disciplines: The Blue Humanities
This course focuses on a recent profusion of criticism in the “blue humanities,” which we will define as the cultural study of marine and aqueous environments, especially as these spaces shape discourses of environmentalism and political geography. Although we may give some attention to urban hydroscapes, lakes, and rivers, we will mostly focus on the world’s oceans. In constructing our object of inquiry, the course takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on literary theory, art history, Black studies, postcolonial studies, environmental and labor history, legal studies, and media theory. Scholars may include Sekula, Rediker, Hofmeyr, Khalili, Sharpe, Blumenberg, Blum, Bolster, and a few novels and films such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Claude McKay’s Banjo, Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, or Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman (to be finalized with student input). 

COMP_LIT 488-0-1: Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Modern French Poetry and Poetics in the World
In this course we will study the global contexts and consequences of French poetry and poetics between the World Wars. We will read poems and critical writings by some of the most important French-language poets from the period, with an eye to their international origins, interests, and travels. At the same time, we will read works by their contemporaries, from around the world, who were based in Paris and/or were in dialogue with these writers.

Some of our themes will include the Great War; French colonialism; primitivism, orientalism, and the search for cultural alternatives; the transformation of experience by urbanization, transportation, and technological media; poetry’s relationship to the visual arts; and, of course, the formal and aesthetic innovations of these poets.

Authors will include Apollinaire, Cendrars, Breton, and Césaire. Readings will be available in English as well as the original language, and students may choose to focus on a non-French writer for their research paper. 

COMP_LIT 488-0-2: Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Postcolonial Theory
How do the legacies of slavery and colonization structure the enterprise of critical theory? This course will provide a survey of the work of key thinkers in the field of postcolonial theory, paying particular attention to theoretical debates around the colonial origins of modern subjectivity and the figure of the human, the problem of racial difference, and the attendant questions of aesthetic and political representation. 

GAMS 400-0-20 Modernism and the Avant-garde: History and Theory
Course description forthcoming.

GAMS 420-3-20 Modernism and Avant-Garde Studies Colloquium
Course description forthcoming.

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