COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Fall 2025 Course Schedule

fall 2025 Course Schedule

• Jump to course descriptions

*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 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 211-0-20 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 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.

Back to top