COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Spring 2026 Course Schedule

Spring 2026 Course Schedule

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*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.

Spring 2026 course descriptions

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

Spring 2026

Comp_Lit 101-8-20: First Year Writing Seminar: Literatures of Exile and Home 
In a world shaped by the rise of nation-states, dreams of global unity, and “melting pots” of cultural diversity, we still find ourselves haunted by the figure of the exile—the migrant, the refugee, the stateless traveler, the border-crosser. This course invites you to explore how the stories we tell ourselves about home and displacement challenge our deepest assumptions about identity, nationhood, the cost of separation, and what it means to belong. We begin with the archetype of the homeward-bound Odysseus and unravel how the “exiled hero” has been reimagined across times and cultures. How do these figures disrupt national myths? What new forms of storytelling—literary, visual, and performative—do we need to truly grasp the experience of exile?

Together, we’ll read, watch, and travel alongside protagonists of diverse genders, sexualities, and abilities as they navigate perilous seas, scorching deserts, and today’s heavily surveilled borders. In the second module, we turn the idea of “heroism” on its head, examining how labor, gender, and the politics of belonging reshape our understanding of courage and resistance. Our texts span genres and geographies—from short stories such as Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun” and Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”, to the exile poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Nazim Hikmet, to cinematic representations of otherness. This seminar is not just about reading stories—it is about rethinking the very idea of home in a world where movement, loss, and resilience define so many lives.

Comp_Lit 201-0-20: Reading World Literature: Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature
This course will introduce students to the major authors, works, and literary movements of Arabic Literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the social and historical contexts within which these works developed. We will explore the role that the multifaceted questions of modernity, colonialism, nationalism, and gender have played in the development of new literary genres and themes (including the novel, free verse, the prose-poem, and revolutionary literature), while also understanding them in relationship to classical texts and concepts. All readings will be provided in English translation, but Arabic texts will be made available to anyone who would like to read in the original.

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 (CLS) or Portuguese (PORT) discussion sections.

Comp_Lit 202-0-20: Interpreting Culture: The Theme of Faust Through the Ages
“To sell one’s soul,” “to strike a bargain with the devil,” or even “to beat the devil at his own game”—these expressions and similar ones continue to enjoy undiminished popularity. For more than five-hundred years the legend of Faust has served as a way of expressing the danger of pursuing an aspiration to the point of losing one’s own selfhood. The specter of a “Faustian bargain” appears whenever an inordinate achievement seems to arise from a destructive or self-destructive source. The theme of Faust thus provides a series of perspectives through which one can begin to reflect on one’s highest values. Dr. Faustus has undergone many mutations since he first appeared in central Europe around the early sixteenth century. This class will begin with a question at the foundation of the Faust legend: what is a “soul,” and what is worth? While examining these and kindred questions about the nature of the self, the class will continually reflect on what we are doing when we evaluate a work of art in relation to the culture of its historical period. We begin by examining the earliest versions of Faust, which derives from the earliest days of the Protestant Reformation. We proceed to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s world-renowned drama involving the desire for cosmic knowledge and the lures of sexual intoxication ("Faust, Part I"), followed by its strange sequel ("Faust, Part II"), which culminates in Faust becoming a social reformer who wants to alter the very organizing of the earth. We will ask what Goethe, near the end of his life, gave to “world literature” (a term of his own invention) when he presented his final version of Faust as a man committed to a total terrestrial transformation. And in the final weeks of the class, we turn to Hollywood film, so that we can re-evaluate the Faust legend from the perspective of a modern medium in our own historical period, concluding with Danny Boyle’s "Yesterday" and Greta Gerwig’s "Barbie."

Comp_Lit 202-0-31: Interpreting Culture: Gender and Revolution in Soviet Russian Literature
The Russian Revolution of 1917 initiative a vast experiment in family, sex, and marriage. How did the backwards Russia of the early twentieth century become the most advanced nation in the world in gender and family legislation in the early 1920's? How did the Soviet government attempt to translate Marxist theories of the family into social practice? What happened when revolutionary visions were replaced by the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin? How did the state regulate gender representation in the arts? How did literature and the arts shape, resist or reflect key transformations in Soviet society as the century progressed? We will examine both state-sanctioned and oppositional works, including poetry, short stories, novellas, novels, literary journalism, film, and the visual arts as we explore these questions. All reading to be done in English 

Comp_Lit 211-0-1: Readings in Genre: Icons
This year we focus on the phenomena of Christian Orthodox icons, from Byzantine through contemporary era, in the dual contexts of Russian and European cultures; topics directly related to iconography and iconology, as well as interconnections among visual arts, literature, religion, and political history.

Comp_Lit 270-0-20: Literatures in Translation: Law and its Discontents: Criminals, Bandits and Outlaws in World Lit.

“Law and its Discontents” will explore the ways in which the figure of the criminal has been represented in literature and film across national traditions, with a special focus in the Americas.  By carefully examining aesthetic depictions of the “outlaw” –from the American “Cowboy,” to the Argentinian “Gaucho,” to contemporary portrayals of popular heroes and state violence– this course will address not only the role that these figures have played in the construction of national identities, but will also explore their potential for unsettling our conceptions of lawfulness, institutional justice, and ultimately, of the nation itself. These discussions will culminate in a collaborative podcast project, where students will creatively address key questions about the relationship between legal order and violence, criminality and popular justice, law and ecological disaster, and the (out)law’s place in civil society. Course materials for this course will include texts and films from Franz Kafka, J. L. Borges, Angela Davis, Jane Campion, Pedro Cabiya, Sergio Leone, Mariana Enríquez, and Justine Triet, among others.

Comp_Lit 301-0-20: Studies in World Literature: Why Can’t We Be Friends? Politics, Solidarity, Kinship 
We live in an age where friends are rapidly disappearing. On social media, friends have been replaced by ‘followers’. In increasingly precarious job markets and workplaces, we are pitted to compete against (both artificial and human) ‘colleagues’ and ‘co-workers’. Queer relationships, once overflowing with blurred boundaries between friends and lovers, are becoming neatly organized into legal and paralegal vocabularies of primary and secondary ‘partners’.

This course inquires if friendship can still be imagined as a site for political and interpersonal solidarities outside of traditional kinships. Our explorations will be guided by a counter-cultural archive of artist, activist, and informal collectives formed in the backdrop of historical flashpoints like the HIV-AIDS epidemic, the Covid-19 pandemic, and authoritarian and repressive regimes in colonial India, rural Iran, and contemporary US. We will go through memoirs, novels, Hollywood and South Asian rom-coms and “buddy” films, manifestos, and documentaries emerging out of insurgent feminist, queer, and trans* collectives. Together, we will ask if friendship can help us navigate the perils and pleasures of loneliness, desire, and joy in increasingly neoliberal and individualized times? Or does this dreamy and utopic bond collapse in a world riven by hierarchies of race, religion, caste, and class? 

Comp_Lit 305-0-1: Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Football in the Global South: Identity, Postcoloniality, and Society
In 2022, Morocco became the first African and Arab nation to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup in Qatar. Taking the 2022 World Cup campaign as a point of departure for this seminar we will take a prismatic look at the various stakes concentrated in the presence of the sport in Morocco. We will reflect first on questions of formation of national identity through football before examining how football can function at once as an important vector of popular expression as well as solidarity and, simultaneously, how it is used by the state as a tool for governance and geopolitical power. Using a variety of media drawn from television, film, newspapers, digital media, photography and more, we will break down questions of identity pertinent to the consolidation of symbolic value around the national team and individual players, while looking at the material and political consequences the sport brings about. Though we will use Moroccan football as a common prism, perspectives from around the world will be welcome in assignments. This course will include artistic and scholarly works by Hicham Lasri, Sonia Terrab, Achille Mbembe, Benedict Anderson, Partha Chatterjee, Eduardo Galeano, and more.

Comp_Lit 311-0-1: Theory and Practice of Translation: What is Literary Translation?
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 412-0-20: Literary-Studies Colloquium: Montage as Critique: Literature, Cinema, New Media
This course will ask how audiovisual montage can function as a method of critique by fragments and juxtapositions and, at the same time, transform concepts of critique that have been primarily defined in the domain of verbal language. While adopting a transdisciplinary approach, we will turn to key moments in the history of 20^th and 21^st century montage: the films and writings of the Soviet avantgarde (S.M. Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov); the writings of Walter Benjamin; the so-called “montage interdit” (forbidden montage) stance of postwar film criticism (André Bazin); Jean-Luc Godard’s radical experimentation from the 1960s to the 2010s; the multimedia works of John Akomfrah, the Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki, and Hito Steyerl. In the course of our investigation, montage will emerge as a theoretical practice, an orientation toward thinking, a labor process, and a mode of differentiation of the sensible. What are the political implications of this heterogenous aesthetic practice? How does audiovisual montage reshape our experience? How does it redefine the relationship between subject and world? We will be asking these questions from the viewpoint of current changes in technology, devoting special attention to the role played by platform activities.  

Comp_Lit 414-0-20: Comparative Studies in Genre: Society and its Discontents
This seminar explores the intersections of literature and social commentary in Renaissance France and Europe. The 16th century saw the heights of humanism and the progression to what we now call early modernity. Using the works of François Rabelais and Michel de Montaigne as poles who exemplify these two moments, we will examine the tools with which literature probes the world. What literary techniques make up the central engines of social commentary? How do texts construct a self and others as vehicles for critique? How do laughter, skepticism and vituperation enable and/or challenge critical interpretation? We will also read works by Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, Etienne de la Boétie, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli and others.

In addition to our early modern texts, this class will also include discussion of issues and best practices in academic research and the profession. 

Comp_Lit 481-0-1: Studies in Literary Theory: Premodern Literary Theory
The colonial Latin American world has given rise to major modern theoretical frameworks that continue to shape literary and cultural studies (for instance, transculturación, coloniality, hybridity and so on). But how should we understand the role of the corpus of premodern theories that shaped literary and cultural production in the early modern Iberian transatlantic? This seminar engages with the question of premodern theories in the transatlantic world by providing a grounding in key ancient and medieval understandings of (for example) style, mimesis, the sublime, aesthetic form, and sensory experience. Furthermore, this seminar seeks to problematize assumptions about theory itself by studying writers such as Aristotle and Maimonides alongside verbal and visual arts from the premodern and colonial Americas–for instance, the khipu (knotted cords used for recordkeeping in the Andes) and the huehuetlatolli (“speech of the elders,” examples of the Nahua rhetorical tradition). The class will be taught in English.

Comp_Lit 481-0-20: Studies in Literary Theory: Hannah Arendt
This course takes its point of departure from a careful reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s massive study of Nazi totalitarianism and its origins in anti-Semitism and European imperialism. For the first three weeks of the class, we will read the three sections of the Origins along with a selection of Arendt’s contemporaneous writings on issues at the heart of her study: wide-scale statelessness and forced migration; racism and imperial expansion; totalitarian propaganda and the “holes of oblivion.” Arendt recognized that the Origins posed a question that remained unanswered in that work: faced with the manufacture of living corpses, what preserves our humanity and redeems our actions?

Arendt’s next major work, The Human Condition, thus moves toward an analysis of the conditions and modes of human activity: from the biological life process, to the world-creating capacity of homo faber, to the urgency and fragility of human action. As we read The Human Condition, which seeks to answer the question posed by the Origins by accounting for what European philosophy has generally failed to analyze with sufficient clarity—namely, the dimensions of the “active life”—we examine Arendt’s attempt in the same period to review and, in her own way, deconstruct the concepts of thinking around which the ideal of a “contemplative life” concretized.

This prepares us for a reading in the final weeks of the seminar of Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she re-conceptualizes evil as a certain implementation of systematic thoughtlessness. As we examine these three major works, each of which is a reflection on the relation between language and politics, we will continually attend to the varying ways in which Arendt sought to understand where poetry stands in relation to human “conditionality,” and we will use her often-neglected suggestions in this regard to develop an Arendtian poetics.

Comp_Lit 487-0-1: Studies in Literature and the Arts: Media of Obsession
What is the meaning of obsession within mediated narratives? What is the meaning of obsession when it comes to consuming media – do we live in an “obsession culture?” Is doctoral labor in the humanities itself a way of standing in obsessive relation to an object? This interdisciplinary course draws on media studies, intellectual history, narratology and cultural theory to examine obsession as a theme, problem and metacritical behavior in a variety of works, including film, television, literature, podcasts and the visual arts. Historical work will look at obsession in cultural history from the era of monomania and collecting culture to the age of OCD and algorithms; we will dig into a series of critical concepts that draw on single-mindedness in various ways, including the theory of “the interesting,” masochistic desire, mimesis, attachment theory and cringe culture. Some works we will consider include Jane Shoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, Andre Breton’s Nadja, Jordan Peele’s Us, the Serial podcast, and Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl. Students will be asked to reflect on what instincts, power structures, and cultural understandings subtend and structure their own capacities to fixate on objects of study, as well as the way in which scholars narrate their obsessions through disciplinary languages, doctrines and ways of imparting value.

Comp_Lit 487-0-20: Studies in Literature and the Arts: Deleuze and Cinema
This course, conducted in English, will be devoted to an exploration of Deleuze’s philosophy of film in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2:The Time-Image, both in the context of Deleuze’s approach to art and to his philosophy as a whole. The class will also focus on close readings of many of the films central to Deleuze’s argument. Although our primary emphasis will be on reading Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema in its entirety, we will also discuss related texts by Deleuze (and Guattari) (including excerpts from such works as The Logic of Sense, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and What is Philosophy?) as well as from works by other thinkers with whom he is in dialogue.

Comp_Lit 487-0-40: Studies in Literature and the Arts: Psychoanalysis and Cinema 
What are the concepts, methods and approaches worth retaining from the field-defining encounter between Lacanian psychoanalysis and film theory, nearly half a century after its high point in the late 60s and early 70s? am Throughout, we will be elaborating on the proposition that the unconscious is a conceptual necessity for understanding the relations engendered by contemporary media and the social worlds they mediate. Each weekly meeting will consist of a screening and a discussion. Screenings will include a variety of genres and modes of filmmaking.

Familiarity with psychoanalytic theory is not required, though welcome. We will spend some time in the first sessions working through some key texts in Freud and Lacan to build a shared vocabulary for the course.

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