Winter 2025 Course Schedule
*The Winter 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.
Winter 2025 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Winter 2025
COMP_LIT 200-0-20 Introduction to Literary Theory
This course is about learning how to read closely, that is, how to “do” a deeply informed comparative close reading. Tailored to the time constraints of the quarter, it introduces students to a series of episodes in the recent history of the study of literature and culture: the influential heroes of these episodes are engaged intellectuals who have together helped to inform how we read today. Pairing a handful of shorter primary texts with field-defining theorists and readers of the past and present, students will not only build fluency in the vocabulary of “literary theory,” they will emerge as more worldly, technically savvy, and theoretically sophisticated readers themselves. In this course, we are not interested in theory for its own sake, but in the ways the thing we call “theory” — like literature — is not only shaped by, but helps to shape the world around us.
COMP_LIT 201-0-1 Reading World Literature: Love Scripts: from Sappho to Taylor Swift
Romantic love, although a personal and intimate experience, unfolds amid social norms that guide or regulate many of its aspects, from the identification of a desirable partner to expectations about the outcome of the relationship. The “scripts” to be studied in this course refer both to the material traces of love songs transmitted from antiquity to the present on papyri, calf skin, or medieval manuscripts, and to the social protocols implied in and through those texts. As we read poems originating from ancient Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome—including homoerotic poems sung at drinking parties and sophisticated love elegies addressed to mysterious and probably fictional addressees—we will draw on the resources of literary analysis to explore the narratives and poetic images through which love has been reimagined over time; we will historicize social constructions of the interplay of love, sex, and reproduction; and we will analyze the rhetorical construction of erotic bodies and partners’ roles.
COMP_LIT 202-0-2 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. Includes English or Portuguese discussion sections. Prerequisite for Portuguese discussion section: PORT 201-0, PORT 202-0, or sufficient score on placement exam. Prerequisite for English discussion section: none.
COMP_LIT 202-0-11 Interpreting Culture: Analyzing Freud
This class will take a look at the life and work of the groundbreaking Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud
from a comparative and interdisciplinary angle. Almost 80 years 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, women's studies, communications, and many more. What is certain,
however, is that, one way or another, Freud's theories and ideas have marked the world for all time. 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 202-0-20 Interpreting Culture: Modern Chinese Popular Culture, Part I
Introduction to Modern Chinese Popular Culture, Part I covers the history of modern Chinese popular cultural production between the mid-19th century and 1949. The course is designed around the introduction and adaptation of four media technologies: photography, film, mass print culture, and sound recording.
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. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings.
COMP_LIT 305-0-1 Studies in Film, Media and Visual Culture: Beyond Bollywood: Indian Cinema after 1947
In the last two decades, "Bollywood" has become a cultural shorthand for Indian cinema as such, usually associated with elaborate song and dance sequences, plots that focus on "family values," and a mass audience who worship film stars as religious icons. This class will locate the phenomenon of Bollywood cinema within the rich and complicated history of Indian cinema since the Partition of 1947, when the British colonial administration divided the region into the sovereign nation-states of Pakistan and India. We will take mainstream Indian film as a key site for reflecting on the politics of nationalism, globalization, and forms of social belonging. We will begin with Indian cinema's reflections on the affective and political aftermath of the Partition. We will then move into an analysis of the formation of gendered citizenship, generic modes, and regional cinemas. In the final unit of the course, we will address the transnational circulation of Indian cinema and the rise of Bollywood as a global brand, as well as the explosion of contemporary experimental documentary and video art, which circulate in art galleries and film festivals abroad. We will put pressure on the boundaries between “popular” cinema and parallel cinema, investigate the role of film in social life, and address the differences of class, race, gender, and ethnicity in the construction of the filmic text. Students are expected to complete readings, and acquaint themselves with the history and culture of the subcontinent to prepare for the political discussions that these films engage in.
Course participation includes attendance at weekly screenings and discussions, one in-class presentation, brief reflections to be posted to the course discussion board, and two short response papers to be submitted during the quarter.
COMP_LIT 305-0-20 Studies in Film, Media and Visual Culture: Global Neorealism
Italian Neorealism changed film culture worldwide by bringing to the screen issues of political freedom and social justice and adopting a language that was unadorned and close to reality. Films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1947) have been influential for generations of filmmakers in countries as diverse as Brazil, France, India, Iran, Senegal, and the United States. This course will explore the history of neorealism and its aftermath from a transnational perspective, paying attention to the role that diversity and plurality played from the start. We will follow how the neorealist approach developed under varied geopolitical conditions and adapted itself to document and, indeed, participate in different struggles for liberation, equality, and socioeconomic justice. While reading key texts in film and cultural studies, we will watch and analyze films by renowned directors such as Charles Burnett, Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Ousmane Sembène, and Jia Zhangke.
COMP_LIT 307-0-21 Studies in Gender, Sexuality & Representation: Romantic Comedies Old and New
Does the popular genre of the romantic comedy continually renegotiate the social contract? Or do its “happy endings” continually impose the safety of closure on love’s wayward digressions? This course maps the literary and cinematic DNA of the contemporary “rom com,” from William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and the screwball comedies of 1930s Classical Hollywood to the 1990s blockbusters and the Netflix revolution. Along the way we may ask: What do the comedic conventions of Western classical drama, the medieval genre of “romance,” or the political aesthetics of Romanticism have to do with the romantic comedy as it exists today? The anarchic space of the “comedy” genre is often understood to house a subversive potential, using absurdism or satire to scramble power dynamics or to question social norms governing gender, sexuality, race, and family. One standout question for us will be: Does the romantic comedy threaten to tame the comedy genre’s subversive potential? Or does it promise to release its chaotic energies in ever renewed ways? Why do some literary forms and characters seem endlessly adaptable for different social subjects; and how does a screen actor’s “star text” or public image help direct the genre’s history? Students will regularly be asked to watch two movies in a single week. Evaluations are based on participation and preparation; writing several short papers, film analyses, & response posts; presentation on an episode, scene, or clip from a recent TV show that helps us understood the genre and its history; and a final exam.
COMP_LIT 312-0-1 Major Authors and Texts: Kafka and his Readers
A century after his untimely death in 1924 Franz Kafka’s literary, cultural, and political significance continues to speak with renewed urgency to readers across the globe. In the first three weeks we read a sample of Kafka’s shorter writings, including “The Judgment,” “The Transformation [Metamorphosis],” “The Stoker,” and “The Hunger Gracchus.” In the fourth week, we turn to Walter Benjamin’s commemoration of Kafka on the tenth anniversary of his death. In the following five weeks we consider three further responses to Kafka’s work from around the world, specifically those of Ingeborg Bachmann, J. M. Coetzee, and Han Kang. Readings are in English, and so, too, the discussion; but the class welcomes students who can read the texts in the original languages (German, English, and Korean).
COMP_LIT 390-0-20 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Postcolonial Noir
Crime fiction is where questions of law, justice, and community are investigated, but only rarely resolved. This course will explore this problem in a transnational context, to expose the fundamental issues of power and difference that have underlain the classic detective novel, with emphasis on empire and colonialism. We will then work our way through texts produced in colonial and postcolonial settings in the Middle East and North Africa. Surveying over 150 years of detection, we will use these texts to understand the relationship between criminal investigation and literary interpretation, between history and the present, and between literary style and political authority.
COMP_LIT 411-0-20 Critical Practices: Aesthetics and Political Theology
The goal of this seminar is to consider the manner where, when and how aesthetics can function as a critique of political theology. The meaning of each term in this summary—“aesthetic,” “critique,” and “political theology”—comes under discussion in each stage of the seminar, most especially the last, “political theology.” The seminar begins with Carl Schmitt; turns back to Baumgarten and Kant’s twin inauguration of aesthetics; examines three attempts to sketch the political dimensions of the Critique of Judgment (Schiller, Arendt, Shell); and concludes with an examination of Schelling’s Stuttgart lectures.
COMP_LIT 414-0-1 Comparative Studies in Genre: Russian Modernist Prose
This course is a general survey of Russian Prose of the early 20th century, with emphasis on Modernist works in the context of Formalist Theory. Readings are in Russian (or in both Russian and English translation where available) and include major works and short stories by Ivan Bunin and Maxim Gorky; Fedor Sologub, Andrei Platonov, Boris Pilniak, Mikhail Bulgakov, and others.
COMP_LIT 414-0-21 Comparative Studies in Genre: 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 486-0-20 Studies in Literature and the Disciplines: Media Times
Time, World, Power: this course explores how audiovisual technologies have contributed to ordering the world by ordering time. We will start by considering the ways cinema has contributed to reshaping the very idea of time in conjunction with the expansion of capitalism, industrialization, and colonial rule; to remapping the world according to standards of temporal calculation and synchronization; to turning the dictum “time is money” into a maxim of subject formation at the very level of the sensorium. We will then consider how this logic of temporal control has mutated with the diffusion of digital technologies and under the pressure of finance capitalism. But we will also attend to the ways specific cinematic practices have resisted or subverted this logic and pointed in the direction of non-hierarchical forms of differentiation. Texts from film and media theory, feminist/queer theory, critical race theory, post-autonomist Marxism. Films/installations by John Akomfrah, Charlie Chaplin, Maya Deren, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Ousmane Sembène, Hito Steyerl.
COMP_LIT 487-0-1 Studies in Literature and the Arts: Walter Benjamin’s Small History of Photography
The course will explore the theory and history of the photographic medium taking as point of departure Benjamin’s writings from the 1930s on. As he studied the revolutionary changes in perception that technology introduced, he became one of photography’s most important and influential thinkers. Photography’s relation to memory, the medium’s relationship to the unconscious, the changes mechanical reproducibility introduced for our aesthetic experiences, the social and political significance it acquired as a way to understand modern life and how it facilitates as well as shapes social relations, as well as how it allegorizes embodied and cognitive processes through which we engage the world are reflections that stem from his now famous essay. Taking as a point of departure the essay’s reflection on the first century of photography’s history, and the corpus of both photographers (Atget, Renger Patzsch, Sander, Bossfeldt, Freund, Krull, Abbott) and photographer’s historians it gathers, we explore both the critical vocabulary Benjamin develops around them as well its conceptual apparatus. We closely analyze the photobooks Benjamin reviews in his essay as well as the photobook phenomenon in interwar years globally. Then we move to a secondary bibliography that produced significant interpretations of Benjamin’s essay: Cadava, Silverman, Didi-Hubermann, Collingwood-Selby, Zervigón, and finally we assess its oblique influence in Barthes’ Camera Lucida.
COMP_LIT 487-0-21 Studies in Literature and the Arts: Word and Image
This seminar will be focused on the ways Word and Image co-exist within Russian culture, from medieval icons and folk art, through early Avant-Garde, to contemporary graphic novels. We will look at the material 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; new aesthetic ideology. Poetry and visual works by Bely, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Malevich, Elena Guro et al. Critical and theoretical readings from Lessing's Laocoon to Michel's Foucault "This is Not a Pipe." Students will visit the Art Institute and have one of the sessions in NU's Rare Books library reading room to explore the original Futurist and Constructivist books and journals.
COMP_LIT 488-0-20 Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Counter Cinema & the Aesthetics of Revolution
This class surveys the range of theoretical debates within film and visual art on the aesthetics of “counter-cinemas” or practices of filmmaking that engage with revolutionary politics as an aesthetic problem. Topics addressed will include the work of the Soviet avant-garde, surrealism, social documentary filmmaking, indigenous and first-nations filmmaking, Black cinema in the US, films of the New Left post-’68, anticolonial and Third Cinema movements. Readings will draw on a range of thinkers and debates within film theory, art history, and literary theory, particularly focusing on Marxist aesthetic criticism and its limits.