COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Winter 2023 Course Schedule

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*The Winter 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.

Winter 2023 course descriptions

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

Winter 2023

COMP_LIT 202-0-20 Interpreting Culture: 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 205-0-20 Reading Difference: Colonial Korean Literature and Culture
Why is Korean-Japanese relationship so strained to this day? How might we think about the colonial period (1910-1945) on the Korean peninsula from our present and about intra-Asian colonialism?

This introductory course offers students some snapshots of colonial era Korean literature and culture and tackle some of the difficult but rewarding questions we have about this period. We will read feminist, socialist, and modernist short fictions from prominent authors of the time, as well as discuss visual cultures (illustrations, art, films) surrounding New Woman, Indigeneity, race, and wartime mobilization. The course also invites students to consider the often forgotten Korean diaspora and migrations created under the vast Japanese empire that exceed the limits of the peninsula: what does it mean to be “Korean” in the shifting identities of the colonized in these different places around the empire? Finally, the course will examine more contemporary representations of the colonial period to think about how the colonial period haunts the present as we desire and consume the colonial.

No prior knowledge of Korean language or culture is necessary to take this course. Course assignments include two short papers, a group presentation, and a final creative group project. Student participation, discussion, and peer collaboration are important aspects of this course, and all students are expected to speak in class.

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, Freud, and Weber, paying particular attention to the methods they deploy in the treatment of moral and religious phenomena. We will conclude with a section on Charles Mills and contemporary Critical Race Theory. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings.

COMP_LIT 211-0-21 Readings in Genre: What is Lyric Poetry
What is lyric poetry? What are its roots, and what are its possibilities today? How does it stand in relation to the countless other varieties of rhymed and/or rhythmic language—hymns, pop songs, advertising slogans, campaign mottoes, bumper stickers, and so on—that surround us in our daily life? How does it represent and respond to the world around us and its many histories? We will explore these and other questions by way of examining lyrics past and present, in multiple traditions, from psalms and hymns to epitaphs, elegies, songs, and love poems, both in English originals and in translation. We will pay particular attention to the meanings of poetic form, the nature of poetic translation, and the social and cultural functions of lyric poems.

COMP_LIT 211-0-21 Readings in Genre: The Modern Italian Short Story
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 Comp Lit 307-0-20 Studies in Gender, Sexuality & Representation: Feminist, Queer, Crip: South Korea and Its Discontents
This course examines contemporary discussions on the topics of gender, sexuality, and disability in South Korea. The past decade has seen an explosion of popular interest in feminism in South Korea. Along with this were competing debates on social and economic inequalities and overlooked sites of intersectional violence. Students will explore how queer and crip frameworks trouble and deepen feminist debates and situate these frameworks in relation to Korea’s history of militarism, war, and migration. Course materials include scholarship on feminist, queer, and crip theories beyond the Korean context, novel and short stories, TV show, news articles, and films.

No prior knowledge of the Korean language or culture is necessary. Course assignments include an individual presentation, a group creative writing project, and a final research paper. Student participation, discussion, and peer collaboration are important aspects of this course, and all students will be encouraged to speak in class.

COMP_LIT 311-0-20 Theory and Practice of Translation
A combination of seminar and workshop. Together we will translate several short texts and study theoretical approaches to literary translation and practical accounts by literary translators. We will approach language, poems, poetics, culture and theoretical issues and problems in relation to each other. Your written work will be due in different forms during the course. In your final portfolio, you will present revised versions of your translations and a research paper on translation.

COMP_LIT 312-0-20 Major Authors and Texts: Kafka and his Successors
Almost a hundred years after his untimely death in 1924 Kafka’s literary, cultural, and political significance has only ever increased, for his uncanny imaginary—often populated by animals—continues to speak with renewed urgency to readers across the globe. This seminar is divided into three parts. In the first, we will be reading a series of Kafka’s shorter writings, ranging from “The Transformation [Metamorphosis]” to some fragments about a man who, though dead, sails on the rivers of the earth. In the second part, we will read three writers who absorbed the exactness of Kafka’s imaginary into their own work: Jorge Luis Borges, Ingeborg Bachmann, and J. M. Coetzee. In the final part, we will return to Kafka, and ask ourselves how we see his writing now that we’ve encountered some of his most transformative readers. During the first two parts, students write brief responses to each week’s reading; at the end of the second part, students submit an abstract of their final essay; the third part is reserved for the process of essay writing. No knowledge of German or Spanish is required.

COMP_LIT 383-0-20 Special Topics in Critical Theory: Foucault: Sex, Prisons, and the Plurality of Power
Participants will acquire a foundational competency in the main concepts and texts of Michel Foucault, the most broadly influential late-twentieth-century French philosopher. We will foreground the aspects of Foucault’s approach that have most impacted inquiry and critique in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, giving special attention to the fields of gender and sexualities studies, and Black studies. Thematically, the course will focus on Foucault’s writings on sexuality, madness, health, prisons, delinquency, families, power, biopolitics, surveillance, selfhood and individuality, knowledge, and truth. Conceptually, we’ll debate and apply core Foucauldian concepts such as: archaeology and genealogy; discipline and biopower, the productivity and plurality of power; the social importance of “abnormality;” the conditions under which freedom is also a form of “subjection”; the conditions of social resistance and transformation; the historical a priori; and epistemic rupture. We’ll critically assess the contribution of Foucault’s major works (including History of Madness, Discipline and Punish, The Order of Things, History of Sexuality). In addition to weekly excerpts, students will read their own choice of one of these works as the basis of their final paper. Students should expect to post weekly contributions to class debate. most influential late-twentieth-century French philosopher.

COMP_LIT 411-0-20 Critical Practices: Cinema at the End of Film: Theories, Histories, Media
What is cinema in the 21st century? What can it still do? This course will explore the afterlives of cinema in the digital age by turning to theorists and practitioners who have addressed the ques-tion of technology in terms of both aesthetics and politics. We will read texts from a variety of fields, including film and media theory, feminist/queer theory, critical race theory, and post-autonomist Marxism. At the same time, we will consider the way filmmakers such as John Akomfrah, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, and Hito Steyerl have negotiated cinema’s role and envisioned its po-tential in a global image economy.

COMP_LIT 487-0-11 Studies in Literature and the Arts: The Right To Look – Photography and Racial and Gender Regimes of Visibility
This seminar engages as a point of departure with Derrida’s reflections on photography in Droit de regards 1985 (Right of Inspection) and his engagement with Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes — two key philosophers of the image in the 20th century— to interrogate photography, photographic practices and photographic archives in their role as constitutive forms of contemporary regimes of visibility. We will explore photography and representation — its singular capacity to relate to the real and instituting truth claims—; photography and memory, material trace and the politics of archives; photography and inscription, death and practices of mourning; photography and techné, repetition and dissemination, and the ways in which photography works to open itself to alterity and non-self-identity. Working through conceptual account as well as closely reading photographic images, we reflect on this medium as conditioning our access to contemporary aesthetic experience and its ethicopolitical futurity. A fundamental question we explore throughout: If Aesthetics has historically been the realm of thought where universalizing claims of political and self-determined subjecthood posed the threshold of the human subject in and of their representation, how have unfreedom, subjection, and social injustice have administered visibility and recognition? What conceptual instrument contemporary thinking of photography and photographic practices provide us to de-naturalized the way these regimes have taught us to see.

Readings will include, with those mentioned above: Allan Sekula, Harun Farochi, Vilem Flusser, Deborah Willis, Kaja Silverman, Eduardo Cadava, Shawn Michelle Smith and the photographic corpus will encompass historical and contemporary, Latin America and American photography with special focus on Latinx photographers.

COMP_LIT 488-0-22 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Silvia Federici: For a Feminist Politics of the Commons
As a scholar and activist, Silvia Federici interprets Marxism from a feminist point of view, shifting the focus of social critique from production to reproduction. She has led struggles against privatization and the enclosure of lands and social relations with a specific focus on the commons. In Nigeria, where she taught for several years in the mid 1980s, she witnessed firsthand the destruction of communal property through the colonial intervention of the World Bank and the IMF. For her, as a result, the feminist project cannot concern itself exclusively with sexual discrimination, neglecting other political questions. This graduate seminar explores Federici’s understanding of feminism as a history of struggles embedded in other struggles, in constant dialogue with Marxism, antiracism, and environmental politics. We will assess Federici’s criticisms of Marx, Negri, Foucault, Butler, and Haraway while considering her proximity to Vandana Shiva's theory and practice of the commons. Seminar participants are encouraged to find a way to use Federici’s work in their own research projects while exploring anew what Veronica Gago calls “feminist potential.” Keywords: Commons, enclosure, housework, affective labor, the body, ecofeminism, international feminist solidarity.

Works by Federici, Shiva, Mies, Marx, Foucault, Fraser, Haraway, Butler, Mohanty and Gago.

COMP_LIT 488-0-23 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: 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 public exhibitions. Yet as this crucial debate around the ethics of pedagogy has grown, there has been no robust discussion about how we treat these same works in research contexts. What does it mean to feel morally conflicted about picking a novel, theorist, film or image for a class, but less so when it comes to analyzing that same material in an article or talk? As scholars, do we want our object to be “good” too much?

This is a class about what happens when good scholars study bad things, highlighting how this practice has always been a key part of critique. It is often by running up against critical thought that a media work becomes “ethical” or “unethical” in the first place. Moreover, the question of how to engage with “unethical media” motivates a whole array of critical argumentative comportments – it shows us how to canonize, how to excuse, how to elevate, how to politicize, how to aestheticize, how to love or hate – and in this way the question of ethics helps us to assume the identity of a scholar. 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 that try to deal morally with issues of aesthetic distance, visual violence, cancel culture, scholarly privilege, disgrace, eco-pessimism, and the ethical representation of sexuality, gender expression and race.

Theorists may include: Chinua Achebe, Elizabeth Anscombe, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Immanuel Kant, José Esteban Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, Susan Sontag, Judith Jarvis Thompson and Linda Williams. Key media artists will include Anna Biller, Sophie Calle, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Jane Gillooly, Kelly Reichardt and Cindy Sherman.

GAMS 420-2-20 Modernism and Avant-Garde Studies ColloquiumCOMP_LIT 200-0-20: Introduction to Literary Theory
Course description forthcoming.

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