Fall 2025 Course Schedule
fall 2025 Course Schedule
*The 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.
fall 2025 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2025
COMP_LIT 200-0-20 Introduction to Literary Theory: The concept of Fiction
What kind of reader are you? Can you discriminate fiction from fact? How do you navigate between the real and the imaginary when reading?
Literary theory examines how we understand and analyze literature, providing frameworks and concepts for interpreting literary texts. Central to literary theory thus is the concept of fiction, which interrogates what constitutes a fictional text as distinguished from other social discourses, like journalism, historical narrative, testimonial accounts, or personal statements. If we commonly think of fiction as defined by its imaginary or non-factual nature, how does this still impact our perception of reality? And why do we feel real feelings about fictional and identify with fictional characters? Guided by modern and contemporary authors and theorists, we critically examine the distinction between the claim of truth and the construction of verisimilitude. Reading a diverse array of texts, we work through the differentiation of genres, the construction of discursive voices, and how fictional worlds develop coherency and a sense of realism our of the use of particular language. Finally, we playfully experiment with large language models like AI to test these insights.
COMP_LIT 201-0-20 Reading World Literature: Is Surgery the New Sex? And Other Body Horror Questions
Visceral, disgusting, and perverted - there are many ways to describe body horror as a loose genre. This course looks at different body horror texts across the world as world literature. Students will explore how body horror asks questions about body politics when the capacity to alter one's body and the political limits on one's body collide.
We will discuss fictions, graphic novels, and films in the genre as well as scholarship on gender, sexuality, race, violence, ethics, colonialism, and capitalism. This course comes with a major content warning, as many of the materials will have graphic depictions of violence and may be triggering.
COMP_LIT 201-0-30 Reading World Literature: Indo-Persian Literature as Global Literature: Love, Longing, & Dissent
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 franca across 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, mysticism, 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. Includes English or Portuguese discussion sections. Prerequisite for Portuguese discussion section
COMP_LIT 211-0-1 Readings in Genre: Introduction to Poetry
The experience of poetry can be understood in it at least two radically different ways: as a raw encounter with something unfamiliar or as a methodically constructed mode of access to the unknown. Theories of poetry from antiquity to the present day have grappled with these two dimensions of the poetic experience. In order to understand a poem, a reader must, in some sense, enter into its unique and complex logic, while nevertheless remaining open to the sometimes unsettling ways it can surprise us. In this class, we will read some of the greatest lyric poems written in English, as we systematically develop an understanding of the formal techniques of poetic composition, including diction, syntax, image, trope, and rhythm. Students should come prepared to encounter poems as new and unfamiliar terrain (even if you've read a particular poem before), as we methodically work through the formal elements of the poetic process.
COMP_LIT 211-0-20 Readings in Genre: What is Lyric Poetry
Course description forthcoming.
COMP_LIT 270-0-1 Interpreting Culture: We’re Here, We’re Queer: Queer Narratives in Hebrew Literature and Culture
The corpus of Hebrew prose works and cultural representations that focus on LGBT characters and queer life stories is on the rise. Such texts and films are no longer inherently considered completely marginal, despite not yet being a major part of the literary canon. This course presents a broad examination of LGBT/queer Hebrew literature and culture - from the new wave of gay and lesbian literature in the 1990s up to some more contemporary works. What stories and questions do Hebrew queer literary texts and films present? Is queerness in the Israeli context being celebrated or is it still fighting for acceptance and tolerance? Throughout the course, we will explore Hebrew prose works and films that engage with LGBT/queer identities and topics, and examine questions and themes, such as "coming out of the closet," "queer identity," "the lesbian continuum," "heteronormativity/ homonormativity," and the queer notion of "no future." The literary and cultural texts will be accompanied by theoretical texts from Adrienne Rich, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, J. Halberstam, and more. No previous knowledge of Hebrew is required! All the Hebrew texts will be read in translation, and all the films will be accompanied by English subtitles.
COMP_LIT 270-0-2 Literatures in Translation: The Italian Short Story (taught in Italian)
This course examines 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 and cultural aspects of the genre certainly have changed in the last two centuries. We will explore 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.
Our focus in particular revolves around issues of love, jealousy, sexuality, gender, friendship, and youth culture as depicted by Boccaccio, Calvino, Morante, Moravia, Lahiri, Levi, Tabucchi, and Tondelli. The class material will be available on Canvas.
COMP_LIT 270-0-3 Literatures in Translation: German Environmentalism
Course description forthcoming.
COMP_LIT 301-0-20 Studies in World Literature: Speculative Fiction
While attending to the major debates and keywords in postcolonial studies, this course will read speculative fiction from formerly colonized regions of the world. How can we account for the explosion of interest in speculative fiction from the Global South in the 21st century? How do these texts compare with their Western counterparts? In what ways have foundational mimetic texts from the Global South incorporated aspects of speculative fiction? What are the benefits and the perils of the use of non-mimetic modes of narrative in postcolonial societies? As we grapple with these questions, we will also respond to the debates about literature in the Global South, especially its intimacies with folklore, and its unconditional acceptance of marginalized identities currently being contested in some parts of the West. Primary texts will include works by Nnedi Okorafor, Kojo Laing, Lauren Beukes, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Indrapramit Das, etc. We will put these texts in conversation with much more conventional postcolonial genres and speculative fictions from other parts of the world. We will also watch, discuss, and write about relevant films from and about the Global South (e.g. Wanuri Kahiu\'s Pumzi, Ryan Coogler\'s Black Panther, Sharon Lewis\'s Brown Girl Begins, C.J. \'Fiery\' Obasi \'s Hello Rain and Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman\'s Neptune Frost). Topics will include how writers use speculative fiction to present a wide range of topics (e.g., the universal human condition; technology and culture; environmental crisis; expressions of gender/sexual identities; racial politics; political power; people with disabilities; and human/non-human relations). Experimenting with different ways of reading a text (e.g., close reading, distant reading, surface reading, etc.), we will attempt to critically write about materials read in class using ideas by such literary and narrative theorists as Aristotle, Judith Merril, Pierre Bourdieu, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Diana Waggoner, Kathryn Hume, Tzvetan Todorov, Fredric Jameson, and Robert Scholes. At the end of the class, the student should be able to appreciate the nature and function of artistic production in the Global South and demonstrate a holistic understanding of the incredible diversity and capaciousness of non-Western societies.
COMP_LIT 305-0-20 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Cinemas of Global Solidarity
This seminar surveys a range of transnational cinematic practices of politically committed filmmaking, focusing on the global emergence of revolutionary thought and political action through filmmaking in the mid-20th century. This course will provide students an introduction to key films and filmmakers operating outside formal institutions of the film industry and their interventions in the history of film and their theories of solidarity through filmmaking. Topics we will cover will include anticolonial aesthetics in African cinema, the rise and spread of Third Cinema practices in Latin America, the aesthetics of protest in globalized Asia, and the practices of solidarity in an age of digital media.
COMP_LIT 398-0-20 Senior Seminar: Let's Write Together!
**Required for CLS Majors permission numbers provided by instructor consent for other students.**
This course provides the tools and techniques to write sustained scholarly essays in the Humanities. We build on all the writing skills acquired through the work on previous courses to actively engage in every step of the writing, from the discussion of ideas, to developing an outline, to revising and editing drafts. We approach the writing process in a collective, supportive environment, reading and critiquing together to improve our arguments and produce a substantial piece of humanities scholarship. We explore research avenues related to your topic and field: from secondary sources, visual analysis, historical contextualization, digital archives and databases.
If you are a rising senior and want to write your capstone essay, get started with your Honors thesis, or your graduate applications sample, this course is where you find your voice and your own style. If you have something informed and relevant to say, just write it! With focused weekly assignments, peer review and discussion, and instructor's advice we will make the writing process fun and meaningful.
COMP_LIT 410-0-20 Theories of Literature: The Resonances of Trauma
Over time, the field of trauma studies has proven to be one of the most productive domains of critical theory, increasingly coming to seem like a much-needed conduit to a world of historical, ethical, and political possibilities. In the first part of the course, we will explore the original, psychoanalytic notion of trauma developed by Freud and Lacan and its role in post-deconstructive criticism in relation to memory and testimony, focusing especially on how trauma in this context came to define the so-called ethical turn in literary studies. We also will consider the conceptualization of post-traumatic stress disorders, which introduced a new critical paradigm in the 1980s, and ultimately the most recent redefinition of trauma in neuroscience. In the second half of the course, we will consider how feminist studies and decolonial studies have reframed the question of trauma in political terms, reorienting it around the concerns of gender, race, colonial violence, domestic violence, harassment, rape, etc. and distancing it from its narrowly Eurocentric genealogical roots. What are the boundaries between individual and collective traumas? What is the role played by affect, vulnerability, resistance, action, and justice vis à vis trauma? To what extent can literature and the visual arts help us to identify and repair trauma? These are some of the questions that will guide our readings as we try to understand why this notion has been so productive and vital yet also problematically pervasive, giving rise to what Fassin calls "The Empire of Trauma." Seminar participants are strongly encouraged to find a way to use the texts on the syllabus in their own research projects in different genres and media. Works by Freud, Lacan, Caruth, Rothberg, Malabou, Herman, Fanon, Hartman, Lorde, Lazali, Craps, Fassin, and Berlant.
COMP_LIT 481-0-1 Studies in Literary Theory: Writing the Revolution
Friedrich Schlegel famously claimed that the French Revolution, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and Fichte's Foundations of the Science of Knowledge represent the great trends of his age. Another term for this age is modernity. This class will follow Schlegel's intuition and reconstruct the precarious relationship between politics, philosophy, and literature which marks a specific notion of revolutionary modernity, i.e. the interruption of historical time in the name of something radically new and different. Paradigmatic for such a rupture is the French Revolution. Its literary representations and philosophical descriptions will be the topic of our discussions. A tentative reading list includes (but is not limited to): Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt. Although the class will focus mostly on the German tradition it is possible to include other texts, images, films, etc. depending on the particular interests and backgrounds of the participants.
COMP_LIT 481-0-20 Studies in Literary Theory: Marxism and Form
Course description forthcoming.
COMP_LIT 486-0-1 Studies in Literature and the Disciplines: Latin American Literature in the Anthropocene: Criticism and Theory
What place has the colossal epistemic shift that we call the Anthropocene had in Latin American lettered practices? More than simply a look at the literary representations of nature, ecological transformation, and climate-driven catastrophes in the region, this course proposes to explore the significance of thinking beyond the Enlightenment notions of the human and its impact for conceptualizing the region in the world. In considering this issue, we will draw on eco-criticism, animal studies, indigeneity studies, thing theory, as well as critiques of the so-called new extractivisms and local and global capital. We will pay careful attention to notions of nature, animality, non-humanity, and geology in order to consider what the stakes are of thinking the region’s history, society and culture outside of anthropocentric models and assumptions. We will be especially interested in the question of Latin Americanism in this context. A broad selection of authors from a variety of national literatures will be considered and may include Andrés Bello, José Eustasio Rivera, Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, Gamaliel Churata, Gabriela Mistral, Mário de Andrade, José Marín Cañas, Óscar Cerruto, Alejo Carpentier, Clarice Lispector, José María Arguedas, Giaconda Belli, Samanta Schweblin, Manuel Cornejo Chapparo, and Rigoberta Menchú.
**Readings in Spanish; discussion bilingual
COMP_LIT 487-0-20 Studies in Literature and the Arts: Liberation and Form
This course considers aesthetic developments—both material and discursive—in North Africa and the Middle East from the decolonizing movements of the 1960s until the present, tracing how artists, authors, and cultural practitioners articulate through aesthetic forms what it means and what it looks like to be a sovereign territory and a sovereign people. Special attention is therefore paid to the role of form in literary and cultural practice, as we ask how formal operations on canvas, in text, or on screen, for example, articulate a grammar of liberation that seeks to chart new paths towards a decolonial present if not a more fully liberated future with regards not only to political sovereignty but also gender, sexuality, economic, and religious equity. The challenges of navigating these paths through conditions of permanent war and/or its threat necessarily undergird our attention, and readings will draw from a range of historical and contemporary studies and primary sources, as well as secondary sources both critical and theoretical. This course is being run in tandem with “Forms of Liberation and the Liberation of Form” offered at the University of Pennsylvania (History of Art); we will work independently but also explore creative modalities to collaborate across peer institutions when possible.