COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Winter 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.

Winter 2026 course descriptions

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

Winter 2026

Comp_Lit 108-2-20 First Year Writing Seminar: Islands in Translation: Rendering the Caribbean in Word and Image
We have all heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but could we also say that a word is worth a thousand pictures? Since the turn of the 20th century, many Caribbean artists and writers have investigated this complicated relationship between language and images, oftentimes even pushing so far as to ask how the circulation of slogans, newspaper photos, archival images, and artworks enters the realm of the political. For centuries, the Caribbean has been at the center of the movement of goods, people, and ideas in the Americas, and its cultural expression, in turn, has reflected this fluctuation. Thus, we might ask: what changes occurred in the 20th century that prompted writers and artists to start playing with/manipulating/redirecting images and text, and what can they teach us about our own moment today? By considering the work of artists and writers such as Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Severo Sarduy (Cuba), Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), and Coco Fusco (U.S./Cuba) in relation to their historical context–revolutions! the “avant garde”! sovereignty! dreams!–we will investigate the similarities and differences that arise from “reading” pictures and words. You will then use your own words to articulate a position on some of these problems, incorporating research, formal analyses, and class discussions.

The course will be taught and all readings will be made available in English, but primary texts will also be provided in their respective English, French, and/or Spanish versions for anyone interested.

Comp_Lit 202-0-1 Interpreting Culture: Dr Zhivago Text and Context
This course is designed as a following sequence to Slavic 211-1, a general survey of early 20c. Russian Literature, focused on the interconnections between new ideas in culture and politics. It explores in detail the legendary novel Doctor Zhivago (1957), written by the Noble Laureate Boris Pasternak (1890-1960). This major literary work is discussed in the broad Russian and European cultural and historical context of the Cold War era, and we will follow and compare the paths of literary heroes and their real-life prototypes: Pasternak himself and his long-time companion Olga Ivinskaya. Doctor Zhivago was harshly criticized and censored in Soviet Union, then smuggled to the West with the help of the CIA to be preserved and published for the first time, finally becoming a world literary sensation and winning the Nobel Prize (1958). Through the tumultuous publication history of this manuscript, students can gain a foundational knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union, and an understanding of the changes in the literary climate throughout the history of Soviet Russia.

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. Understand the basic methods involved in classical critical theory.

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 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 and canonical writers – such as Yosef Haim Brenner, Dvora Baron, A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Sayed Kashua, and Orly Castel-Bloom – and more marginal and contemporary writers like Maayan Eitan and Hila Amit Abbas. 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 or Judaism is required! All the Hebrew texts will be read in translation.

Comp_Lit 301-0-1 Studies in World Literature: 1,001 Nights
While in the popular imagination the Thousand and One Nights is often reduced to a few well-known characters, this course will take a wider approach to the collection. Over the quarter, we will read the earliest of these stories, as well as follow the collection's history as an archetypical example of world literature—from its evolution in Arabic oral and manuscript traditions, its eighteenth-century "discovery" and translation into European languages, to its modern afterlives in the novels, film, and visual arts it has inspired. We will consider how the Nights has been used in these works as a vehicle for deeply-considered investigations into narrative form as well as for clichéd and colonially-imbued images of the Middle East. Reading and watching these works next to and against the Arabic originals, we will encounter the vast variety of ways that the Nights has been a source of narrative techniques, literary themes, political allegories, and feminist debates across literary traditions.

Comp_Lit 301-0-20 Studies in World Literature: Memories of Slaves and Legacies of Slavery
TAUGHT IN FRENCH. In 2007, the great Senegalese singer, composer, songwriter Youssou N’Dour undertook a “musical odyssey” to bring a concert to the Gorée Island-Senegal. The journey begins in Georgia, USA, with the story of jazz. The title of the film, “Retour à Gorée,” evokes “the door of no return,” all the doors along the coast of West Africa from which slaves were embarked on ships for Europe and the Americas, never to return. The most famous of these many doors is on Gorée, a slaving post since the 15th century. We will begin, this course with this musical homage to the memory of slaves and the legacies of slavery and then turn to works of fiction where the stories of slaves are not only kept alive but also brought to the forefront of our collective consciousness not only of the past but also of the present. These stories focus our attention on the singular, the forgotten, or the erased from the broader history, including that of slavery itself.

We will study only selected works from the vast corpus on this question by African and Caribbean writers and thinkers. Despite time restraint, we will nevertheless pluralize our frame of reference to account for how this history has imbricated different times and places as well as the diversities of approaches to it. We will close the course with a film suggesting that dynamics that fed the violence of slavery are not merely in the past, but insinuate themselves in global economic and social inequities fueled by continued exploitation and extractivism that send people into the dangerous waters of the Atlantic, become emblematic of the risk and violence of forced displacement generally.

Close analyses of these novels and films together with theoretical and critical works will enable students to reflect on literature and cinema’s critical role in foregrounding the present’s entanglement with the past in general, a question at the heart of this course. 

Comp_Lit 303-0-20 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Intro to Japanese Cinema I: From Early Cinema to the Golden Age
How do fantastic figures and imagined places help us understand the real world? This focuses on early modern French and European literature and philosophy, exploring the ways in which the 16th century imagined its “others” and molded its ideals. How do satire and scepticism function as modes for social commentary within their historical and political contexts? How the “Renaissance” define itself against the religious, pedagogical, political, philosophical and literary norms of the past? Why did giants, cannibals, monsters and imaginary places play such a critical role in redefining society in this period of intense political and religious upheaval?
This course will be taught in English.

Comp_Lit 305-0-1 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Intro to Japanese Cinema I: From Early Cinema to the Golden Age
This course explores literary and cinematic representations of the Holocaust across languages, cultures, and genres. Through fiction, memoirs, diaries, and film (all in translation), we will examine how writers and filmmakers have grappled with the challenges of representing trauma, memory, and survival. Readings and screenings will include works by survivors and postwar artists, and we will consider questions of testimony, ethics, aesthetics, and the role of narrative in shaping Holocaust memory. The literary works and films will be discussed alongside academic articles and theoretical texts. All literary texts and films will be read and viewed in English translation.

Comp_Lit 305-0-20 Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Representations of the Holocaust in Literature and Film
This course offers a history of Japanese cinema from its earliest days through the so-called “Golden Age” of the 1950s. We will consider how film and other moving image technologies have reflected historical moments and shaped cultural discourses in modern Japan. Focusing on films that raise disciplinary questions related to both the cinematic medium and Japan, we will examine, among other topics, the era of silent cinema; the relationship between nationhood and the formation of a “national” cinema; technological transformations and the coming of sound; the wartime period; cinema during the occupation; and 1950s modernism. We will also study the place of important individual directors – Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa – within the broader economic and institutional contexts of Japanese cinema and its global circulation. Students will learn how to critically analyze various films from multiple theoretical perspectives while gaining an understanding of the major figures and movements in the history of Japanese cinema. Syllabus subject to change. (Please note that the specifics of this course syllabus are subject to change in the case of unforeseen circumstances. The instructor will notify students of any changes as soon as possible. Students will be responsible for abiding by the changes.)

Comp_Lit 312-0-20 Major Authors and Texts: Experimental Lives: Friendship and Love in Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux
Course description forthcoming.

Comp_Lit 411-0-20 Critical Practices: Translation in Theory and Practice
This course seeks to bridge theoretical inquiry and methodological insight with practical problem-solving and collaborative workshopping. We will approach both the theoretical and practical materials of this course with a recognition of the ways in which translations – as products and processes – are central in our scholarly and creative lives. We read in translation, we teach translations, we translate. Many of you will navigate careers in an academy in which there are few established norms for the recognition and reward of translation as scholarly achievement; what kind of awareness and evaluative rigor can we cultivate to change these norms? How does the theory and practice of translation intersect with empire, nation, gender, sexuality, race, and caste in the production, circulation, and reception of literature? Throughout this seminar we will shuttle between big interpretive questions and small strategic ones and attempt to bring abstract thought to bear on pragmatic decisions. Throughout we will foreground our own positionalities vis-à-vis the materials and the authors with whom we enter into collaborative relationships as readers, teachers, and translators.

Comp_Lit 414-0-20 Comparative Study in Genre: Epic, World, History
Ezra Pound called epic "a poem including history," relating and distinguishing two aspects of what may be the most ancient of all poetic forms. Epic poems articulate stories that are also histories; they represent history, and as they are passed from age to age and culture to culture—as they pass into history—they become history themselves, of their world and of their own form. Individual epics emerge from many different worlds—of archaic Greece, newly imperial Rome, the colonial Americas, revolutionary early modern England, the myriad-minded Caribbean archipelago, among others—and take it upon themselves to contain worlds, the one they emerge from and other, possible worlds. Individual epics and epic as a genre has been associated with primitive nationalism, imperialist ambition, and the agentless insatiability of capitalist modernity, but also with resistance to them, especially among contemporary writers who have explored epic as a critique of the universal solvency of the novel. In this course we will explore epic as a poetic form that seeks to make worlds and histories.

Comp_Lit 481-0-1 Studies in Literary Theory: Socialist Realism
This course focuses on the theory and practice of Socialist Realism dogma in literature and beyond. We will examine Socialist Realism in contrast to the most innovative and experimental forms of modernism and avant-garde visual and literary narratives (from prose and poetry to political posters and commercial advertisements) forged in a crucible of intense political and cultural interaction in Russia and Europe in 1920- 1930-s. We focus on the ways the images and metaphors have been used as carriers of cultural value and ideological meaning, exploring such issues as word and image, gender and nationality, aesthetics and psychology, politics and propaganda. Since the course topic involves such disciplines as visual art, literature, cultural theory, and philosophy, readings include modern and contemporary aesthetic theories (Shklovsky, Gyorgy Lukacs, Boris Groys) and twentieth-century political and ethical philosophy (Gramsci, Ortega-i-Gasset, Walter Benjamin et al.), and psychology (Freud, Edward Bernays).

Comp_Lit 487-0-1 Studies in Literature and the Arts: Modernist Tragedy
This seminar will explore what Kierkegaard referred to as “the ancient tragical motif as reflected in the modern,” tracking the persistence of Greek Tragedy as a resource for creativity in the 20^th-21^st centuries. We will put into dialogue theorists of Greek Tragedy (Aristotle, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Williams, Butler, Cavarero, Critchley, et al.), musicians (Strauss, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Partch, Honegger, Orff, Barber, Britten, Rochberg, Nono, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Rihm, Rzewski, Soper, Chen, Lim, et al.) and writers (Hölderlin, Racine, Cocteau, Yeats, Brecht, Christa Wolf, et al.). The course is organized around “complexes” of philosophical, literary, and musical entanglement treating Elektra, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, the Oresteia, Medea, and other tragic dramas.

Comp_Lit 487-0-20 Studies in Literature and the Arts: Holocaust Writing
Course description forthcoming.

Comp_Lit 487-0-30 Studies in Literature and the Arts: Palestinian Cinema
For over a century, Palestinian film and media have made significant contributions to visual history. Since the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century, Palestine has always been on screen, in the periphery. Palestinians cannot be erased, ignored, or discredited in the history of cinema. How does centering Palestine in film and media studies reconfigure cinematic history? How have Palestinian film and media responded to the trauma of displacement across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

This course offers an historiographic account of Palestinian film and media in relation to Indigeneity, settler colonial occupation, right to return, genocide, diaspora, and survival and resilience. By contextualizing the cultural, political, and social conditions that have shaped Palestinian film and media for more than one hundred years, this course draws attention to production, circulation, and exhibition practices within the theatrical and nontheatrical realms.

In addition, the course interrogates the category of “national” cinema. This query includes studying film and media made in all parts of occupied Palestine; transnational productions; filmmakers of the diaspora; and films made in the Global South as a gesture of solidarity and support for the Palestinian cause. In addition, we will connect our study to race and ethnic studies in the U.S. (Latinx, Indigenous, Black, Asian, and Arab).

Prominent scholars and reputable human rights organizations explain that the ongoing genocide in Palestine is perhaps one of the most documented forms of violence. This is due in part to the proliferation of media technologies, such as cellphones. Ultimately, the course offers students the methods to chart Palestinian film and media history and its future.

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