Spring 2025 Course Schedule
Spring 2025 Course Schedule
*The Spring 2025 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 2025 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Spring 2025
COMP_LIT 101-8-20 First Year Writing Seminar: Fetish Theory: Colonialism, Political Economy, Sexuality
Fetishism is usually understood as the attribution of non-material value or powers to an inanimate object. It was Friedrich Nietzsche's famous characterization of German 19th century culture as a crass “fetish-being,” which introduced the notion of the fetish into the vocabulary of cultural analysis. Since its origin in the ethnographic writings of the enlightenment in the 17th and 18th century, and therefore deeply rooted in the European colonial exploitation of Africa, the fetish appears in many different incarnations in such heterogeneous discourses as theology, Marxism, sociology, psychoanalysis, the clinical psychiatry of sexual deviance, modernist aesthetics, popular culture, and anthropology. This class will give a historical survey of these transformations by focusing on crucial representations of fetishism in literature, philosophy, and film exploring the nexus of colonialism, political economy, and sexual deviancy.
COMP_LIT 201-0-20 Reading World Literature: Indo-Persian Literature as Global Literature: Love, Longing, and Dissent, from the Balkans to Bengal
Indo-Persian poetry was present at the very birth of the concept of "world literature": indeed, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (d. 1832) coined the term Weltliteratur in part thanks to his admiration for the Persian poet Hafez Shirazi (d. 1390). Of course today the Persian language — or "Farsi," as it is also known — is most commonly associated with the nation-state of Iran. But the historical association with world literature reveals a forgotten cosmopolitanism. Before the nineteenth century, Persian served for nearly a millennium as the literary and political lingua francaacross virtually the entire eastern Islamic world, including vast stretches of South, Central, and West Asia. This course will introduce students to some of the most common genres of Indo-Persian literature, such as the romantic epic (masnavi), the courtly panegyric (qasida), the quatrain (ruba‘i) and especially the lyric (ghazal), as well as to some of the canonical poets of the era and the historical context in which they lived and wrote. Expressions of love, longing, devotion, and dissent against religious orthodoxy were among the most common themes of this literature, giving rise to its many modern afterlives — for example, in Urdu and Turkish literature, but also in European Romantic poetry, American Transcendentalist philosophy, and the music of Bollywood cinema, to name just a few.
All readings will be in English or in English translation, so no prior knowledge of Persian is required for this course; but students who do have some familiarity with Persian, or with related languages like Urdu, Turkish, or Arabic, are of course most welcome to read texts in the original languages if they so desire. Class time will be a mix of lectures that situate our literary readings in their global historical context, with time also set aside for discussing the literature itself, issues of translation, and scholarly debates about "world literature" itself as an analytical category.
COMP_LIT 202-0-1 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.
COMP_LIT 202-0-20 Interpreting Culture: Heart of Europe: Poland in the Twentieth 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 270-0-1 Literatures in Translation: Exploring Hebrew Literature (in Translation): Past, Present, and Future
This course seeks to provide a broad introduction to modern Hebrew literature and explore various literary generations, beginning with the rise of Hebrew Revival Literature in the early 20th century, moving through the later writers of Dor Tashah (The 1948 Generation), the subsequent generation of writers from the 1960s and 1970s, and culminating in the postmodern turn of the 1990s and the more contemporary literature of the 2000s. Throughout the course, we will read texts from both central, canonical writers and more marginal, contemporary ones. Additionally, we will examine aspects of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in Hebrew literature. Ultimately, this course will allow students to discover the beauty and richness of modern Hebrew literature. The literary works will be accompanied by films, academic articles, and theoretical texts. No previous knowledge of Hebrew, Israel, or Judaism is required! All the Hebrew texts will be read in translation.
COMP_LIT 305-0-20 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: 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, Claire Denis and Djibril Diop Mambéty.
COMP_LIT 305-0-22 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: PLAY!
This course explores the role that aesthetic education plays at crucial moments in the development of media culture and technology. We understand aesthetics both in the sense of art and art discourse and as a broader notion that relates to “the theory of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics.” The latter definition, which we owe to Walter Benjamin, points to the role that perception plays in shaping our consciousness and sense of social being. We understand education as a “training” of the senses that occurs not only in institutional settings but also in the course of everyday life by means of disparate technological devices and networks. Finally, we suggest that this training can be conceived of and practiced as a form of “play,” a mode of sensorial and imaginative engagement with the world and our own self that might open up new forms of sociopolitical awareness and agency.
The course is divided into three parts. The first part attends to the history of aesthetics and aesthetic education starting with Schiller’s famous series of letters (1795) at the time of the French Revolution. We return to those letters from the perspective of the current globalization and financialization of cultural processes. We investigate the entanglement of perception and technology—its limits and possibilities—in relation to class, race, gender, and ability. In particular, we consider the influence that Italian theorist, writer, and politician Antonio Gramsci has exercised on cultural and postcolonial studies. The second part focuses on an expanded case study: postwar Italian cinema. Here we reassess the contribution of the world-making cinematic practices gathered under the umbrella of Neorealism by foregrounding play as the expression of both historical trauma and historical hope. The third part turns to a contemporary form of mass entertainment, video games, and investigates their shadow existence in the domain of warfare.
COMP_LIT 307-0-20 Studies in Gender, Sexuality & Representation: Populism, Sexuality, and the Future of Feminism
This course turns to the history of feminist thought and practice in the wake of the recent resurgence of populism and far-right politics. We will begin by focusing on the case of Italy, which has often been described as the “political laboratory” of the old continent, if not of the West at large. Our working thesis is that the massive convergence of economic and political interests in the careers of Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump, both business tycoons turned political leaders, cannot be properly understood without attending to issues of gender and sexuality. We will then expand our inquiry to the case of the United States and, in particular, to the role that intersectionality (here as in Italy) plays in our understanding of both past predicaments and future possibilities.
COMP_LIT 311-0-20 Theory and Practice of Translation: Literary Translation: Practice and Theory across Genres
What is literary translation? In this course, students will both practice and evaluate literary translation across four genres: poetry, fiction, drama, and literary non-fiction (essays, memoirs, autobiography, literary journalism, and so on). We will explore various approaches to literary translation (including AI), critically assess multiple translations of the same work, and discuss essays and articles by translators past and present. Students will translate one work in each of the four genres and submit a final translation with commentary in a genre of their choice for their final project. All translations to be done in English. Prospective students must have advanced reading skills in a language other than English. Instructor approval required.
COMP_LIT 390-0-20 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Inhuman Conditions
Over the last decade, posters announcing “Refugees Welcome Here” have appeared across the American landscape. The post-9/11 era has seen the displacement of 38 million people over the Middle East and North Africa due to the ever-escalating effects of US militarism, not to mention the thousands of civilians who have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and surrounding regions. Against the backdrop of what Afghan anthropologist Anila Daulatzai calls “serial war,” what does the figure of the refugee tell us about the status of human rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In other words, what are human rights and why do we care about them? Who gets to be a human and who doesn’t? Beginning with fiction from the mid-to-late twentieth century, this course examines the dialectical logic of dispensation and denial of human rights through literary texts across nations and genres. We will employ the lens of political theory around race, citizenship, territory, and the category of the human across global sites like Kashmir, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Mexico as well as detention sites like Guantánamo, and Manus Island. The course problematizes an investment in the rhetoric sympathy and sentiment to unlearn what Didder Fassin calls “humanitarian imperialism,” instead asking what it means for human rights subjects to make demands, rather than petitions, for protection from torture, genocide, and extralegal violence. We will read fictional as well as nonfictional accounts by global authors to consider key figures such as the refugee, the undocumented migrant, the detainee, and the animal as instantiations of what Giorgio Agamben calls “homo sacer,” i.e. the human who remains outside of a polity as a sacrificial surrogate against the safe haven of the settler/citizen within. Students will be introduced to scholars working in the intersections of political theory, human rights, and literary studies such as Judith Butler, Joseph Slaughter, Achille Mbembe, Sonali Thakkar, and others.
COMP_LIT 412-0-20 Literary-Studies Colloquium: Wynter’s Fanon: Race, Gender, Coloniality
A revolutionary, thinker, psychiatrist, and physician, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) produced a diverse and groundbreaking work from Martinique to Algeria that has shaped generations of activists and scholars. As wide-reaching as his works were, there have been many different Fanons that have been engaged over the years. A novelist, dancer, and scholar, Sylvia Wynter (1928-present) has written extensively from Jamaica to the U.S. on the Caribbean, colonialism, and what it means to be human, similarly shaping generations of activists and scholars.
This graduate seminar will examine major writings of Frantz Fanon in relation to the writings by Sylvia Wynter, to focus on Wynter’s Fanon. Touching on colonialism, anti-Blackness, the racialized gender system, the Caribbean, and multiple revolutions and paradigm shifts, Wynter infused Fanon’s writings with new depth and problems. The course encourages seminar participants to think critically with and about Fanon’s and Wynter’s work, to incorporate both into their research and explore the renewed significance of Fanon’s work today.
To enroll in the course, please email an inquiry to the instructor with: *brief* description of 1) your research interests, 2) previous course work (if any) on race, gender, and colonialism, and 3) how this course will help you on your research.
COMP_LIT 481-0-20 Studies in Literary Theory: Economies of Literature
This class explores the development of the concept of the so-called Homo Economicus in 19th-century literature, philosophy, law, and political economy. We will examine how ideas related to property, exchange, debt, and credit play a central role in the growing interconnection between emerging economic knowledge and literary representation, from Goethe and German Romanticism to the post-revolutionary literature of restoration and realism. Literature will be understood as a practice of extensive exchange. Following Adam Smith's influential work, The Wealth of Nations, the desire to accumulate wealth is crucial to the processes of subjectivization, positioning the modern bourgeois subject in a precarious situation at the intersection of industrialization, financialization, and colonial exploitation. Our readings will primarily focus on German literature, including works by Goethe, Novalis, Tieck, Stifter, Keller, and Freytag, alongside contemporary critical reflections from thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon, Sohn-Rethel, Marcuse, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Agamben.
All texts (with a few exceptions) are available in English translation, therefore reading knowledge of German is not required.
COMP_LIT 486-0-1 Studies in Literature and the Disciplines: Translation Problems: Coloniality, Resistance, Solidarity
This course aims to give students grounding in postcolonial and decolonial translation studies by focusing on some of the problems embedded in its history and practice: translation's employment in the contexts of war, displacement, and empire; its role in national canon formation and transnational literary circulation amid the hegemonic force of Anglicization; and the importance of translation problems —mistranslation, pseudo-translation, "bad translation," and untranslatability—to projects that we might organize under the sign of "solidarity." We try to account for translation's politics and ethics, that is. We will do so by focusing on important examples of translation theory as well as by using case studies drawn from the history of Arabic-English and Arabic-French translation from the 19th to the 21st century (using work from Algerian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Palestinian authors) and by class visits—funding pending—from working translators. Readings will be provided in English. No knowledge of a foreign language is required, but students with reading knowledge of Arabic or French are particularly welcome. We will work collaboratively and creatively with all of our competencies to further the course goals.
COMP_LIT 488-0-1 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Toward an Aesthetics of Singularity: Kant's Critique
In a famous note to the first section of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant remarks that "only the Germans" persist in associating the notion of "aesthetics" with the "criticism of taste." He argues that this is based on the "false hope […] of bringing the judgment of the beautiful under rational principles. […] It would be advisable, therefore, to drop the name in that sense […]" Scarcely ten years later, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant grudgingly revises his view and seeks precisely to construe "the faculty of taste (Geschmacksvermögen) as an aesthetic power of judgment" from a "transcendental point of view" (in transzendentaler Absicht). In so doing, Kant acknowledges that the major challenge to defining a transcendental principle of aesthetic judgment consists in its "immediate relation [to] feelings of pleasure and displeasure." How the immediacy of this relation might derive from a principle that is neither psychological nor empirical, but transcendental and a priori, constitutes the enigma -- "das Rätselhafte" - that his Critique seeks to resolve.
But Kant had no illusions concerning "the great difficulty involved in resolving a problem that nature has rendered so complex (verwickelt hat)." I suggest that nothing less is involved in this "complexity" than the task of rethinking the way singularities - events that don't conform to established general schemes - can be communicated and shared. Which is to say, encountered and experienced collectively. The seminar will retrace the contours and trajectory of Kant's response to this encounter with the singular, through a close reading of the first part of Kant's Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment. In the process, the interdependence of knowing and feeling will be reexamined in relation to a notion that plays no obvious role in Kant's lexicon (although it will later for Freud), namely, tension.
COMP_LIT 488-0-10 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Foucault and After: From Biopolitics to Necroresistance
This course in Foucauldian and contemporary post-Foucauldian biopolitics offers an introduction to the field organized by the themes of biopower, resistance, necropolitics, and thanatopolitics. In this context, to think with the interrelations of race, gender, sexuality, class, poverty, health, citizenship, immigration status, abilities, and nationalist exceptionalism, is also to consider the intersections of heterogeneous techniques of power. We'll consider engagements with and challenges to the Foucauldian lexicon of power (including the terms: sovereign, discipline, pastoral, governmental, biopolitical, security, neoliberal governmentality) that have been contributed by post-Foucauldian analyses whose lexicon also includes: domination, exploitation, occupation, expropriation, coloniality, and decoloniality, and which has asked how contemporary forms of resistance to power have centered around such as problems as: the formation of a sovereign right to maim; of freedom as burdened individuality; of neoliberalism as am omnipresent form of governmentality; the making of endebted life, and the deadly aspects of biopower.