COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Fall 2026 Course Schedule

fall 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.

fall 2026 course descriptions

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

Fall 2026

COMP_LIT 202-0-20 Interpreting Culture: Italian Fashion: From Velvet to Nylon
A study in craftsmanship, heritage, and creative innovation, the history of Italian fashion can be traced from Renaissance artistry to its modern global commercialization. This course explores the role of Italian fashion through literature, cinema, and the visual arts, highlighting its contribution to Italy’s cultural identity and distinctive aesthetic. We will analyze the rise of iconic fashion houses, the role of tailoring and luxury materials, and the interplay between fashion, art, gender, and class. Through case studies and visual analysis, the course highlights key movements and iconic fashion houses that defined Italian style—from postwar couture to contemporary ready-to-wear. Topics include the “Made in Italy” label as a marker of quality, the influence of cinema, Italian fashion and gender, Italian fashion and the creation of new aesthetic values, and finally the issue of ecological sustainability in modern design. Works by Goldoni, Leopardi, Fellini, Antonioni, Botticelli, Pistoletto, Valentino, Armani, Prada, and Versace. By the end of the course, students will gain a deeper understanding of Italian fashion’s global impact, its economic and cultural significance, and its continued role in helping to shape our ideas of creativity and innovation.

COMP_LIT 202-0-21 Interpreting Culture: Taiwanese New Wave Cinema
"New wave" is a ubiquitous but imprecise term that has been applied to various trends in cinema that emerged around the world beginning in the mid-1950s. As an historical term it is used to delineate shared styles, themes, and techniques that define certain national and international film movements. As a descriptive shorthand, it has been applied more broadly to movements that abandoned conventional narrative techniques in favor of experimentation with the cinematic medium, while also confronting social and political problems specific to the context of production. Thus, the inaugural French "nouvelle vague" has been borrowed to label film trends in Britain, Iran, Japan, Hong Kong, and many other locations around the world. This course offers a critical and historical introduction to one of these latter-day new waves, the "New Taiwan Cinema," which emerged in the early 1980s as a reaction against contemporaneous commercial cinema. Through a careful investigation of the work of the three most important representatives of this "new" cinema—Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, Tsai Ming-Liang 蔡明亮, and Edward Yang 楊德昌—this course will consider not only the experimental form and social consciousness of the Taiwanese New Wave but also the specific economic, social, and institutional structures—national and transnational—that shaped it. We will also study critical and theoretical writings on this cinema to better understand both the Taiwanese cultural milieu that produced it, and the broader global film culture of which it has become such an important part. Whenever possible, we will place individual Taiwanese films in dialogue with the Asian and European film cultures that influenced them as well as the films and filmmakers that they have influenced. There are no prerequisites for this class and no previous knowledge of Chinese or Taiwanese literature, culture, language, or history is assumed. All required readings are presented in English and all films.

 COMP_LIT 270-0-1 Literatures in Translation: Kafka and Nietzsche
“The superhuman,” “the will to power,” “the eternal return of the same”—these phrases are often, and quite rightly, associated with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. For the first part of this class, we will read the principal book in which Nietzsche seeks to communicate his most expansive and deepest thoughts, namely Thus Spake Zarathustra, which begins with the announcement of “the superhuman” and culminates in the teaching of “eternal return.” In the second part of the class, we will examine a selection of Kafka’s stories, beginning with “In the Penal Colony” and proceeding to a sampling of animal stories, guided by the premise that some of the figures we encounter—ranging from the Old Commandant in the penal colony to an enigmatic mouse who was once the singer for her people—are intimately related to what Nietzsche envisioned under the heading of “the superhuman.” This class has been designated for Ethical and Evaluative Thinking Foundational Discipline as well as Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline. All readings and discussions are conducted in English.

COMP_LIT 390-0-20: Special Topics in Comparative Literature: The Logic of 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. NOTE: This class may not be taken by students who have previously enrolled in ENGLISH/COMP LIT 211.

COMP_LIT 398-0-20 Senior Seminar: Let's Write Together!
**Required for CLS Majors but open to all BA and MA students; permission number required.**

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 writing a research essay, 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 refine your graduate application writing 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
This seminar offers a graduate-level introduction to literary and critical theory via a range of avant-gardes movements from the early twentieth century. Each week we will read primary texts from a different avant-garde movement, accompanied by critical and theoretical works, ranging from that period to today. (These primary readings emphasize manifestos and literary texts, but will also touch on the visual arts and film.)

Our first unit analyzes the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics in Italian futurism, Russian and early Soviet avant-gardes, and Dada. The second unit explores the dynamics of cultural appropriation and re-appropriation, primarily through the theme of primitivism in German expressionism, Brazilian anthropophagy, and the négritude movement. Our final unit focuses on the global spread of surrealism, with an emphasis on the movements' resistance to fascism, and on its contradictory and controversial reimagining of gender and sexuality.

All readings will be available as pdfs via Canvas and will be available in English, but original-language texts will be provided as well. There will be assigned readings for the first meeting, so students who plan to take the course but are not yet enrolled by then should contact the instructor.

COMP_LIT 413-0-1 Comparative Studies in Theme: German Literature and Critical Thought, III: Benjamin on Truth, Tragedy, and Trauerspiel
The aim of this seminar is for all of its participants to gain a better conception of what Walter Benjamin was seeking to accomplish in the habilitation-thesis he prepared for the University of Frankfurt in the mid-1920s, later published under the title Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Mourning Play). The seminar is broken into two parts. In the first, we begin by discussing the brief essays Benjamin identifies on the book's dedication page as its preconception, and we proceed to examine various habilitation-themes with which Benjamin experimented before deciding to concentrate on the theme of the German Trauerspiel. In the second part of the seminar, we will work through the three sections of the book, starting with a brief examination of its "Cognition-Critical Preface," to which we return in the final weeks, when we also read the preliminary draft of the Preface along with the outlines Benjamin prepared for a conclusion he never completed. In the early weeks of the quarter every participant is expected to identify a tragedy or Trauerspiel that will be the basis of an in-class presentation during the second part of the seminar. The tragedy or Trauerspiel does not have to be one that Benjamin discusses; it's best if it is one that derives from the participant's planned field of expertise.

COMP_LIT 414-0-1 Comparative Study in Genre: Reading the 19th C. Brazillian Novel with Machado de Asis
In this course we will read 19th century, mostly canonical novels from Brazil, alongside short stories by the afro-descendent writer Machado de Assis (1839-1908), widely considered critics to be the most important author in the entire history of Brazilian literature. Each week we will read one novel and two or three of his short stories by Machado dealing with the same themes, such as: slavery, indigeneity, race and racial mixture, fugitivity, finances, education and the bildungsroman, queer kinship, gender, sexuality and adultery. The purpose of the course is threefold: first, to offer an in-depth survey of the foundational writings and authors of Brazilian literature; second, to understand, from a comparative approach, how these writers approached some of the most pressing issues of 19th-century; third, to imagine Machado de Assis no only as a fiction writer, but as a theorist. Because I want you to expose you to as much Brazilian fiction as possible, the class discussions will not require any secondary readings, although a list of relevant contemporary theory and criticism will be provided and may be utilized in the oral presentations, exam or research paper. All readings will be available in Portuguese and English translations, and almost all in Spanish translations. I will also try to make them available on reserve in the Northwestern library. NOTE: For the first class, we will discuss the short story/novella O Alienista (The alienist). 
Graduate students; Advanced undergraduate students my register with permission of the professor.

COMP_LIT 486-0-20 Studies in Literature and the Disciplines: The Ethics and Politics of Care: From Self to Others
The question of care for the self and for others – and their relationship to each other – is one of the most politically and ethically resonant issues in contemporary culture. Questions of reproduction, education, meaningful work, and social engagement lie at the core of our ability to respond to the current form of neocapitalism.

This course will consider how in his later work Foucault regards care as entangled with power and control whereas feminist and ecocritical critics approach the concept in terms of a shift toward gendered, relational, and emotional labor. What does it mean that care is not only something we give, but something we cultivate? Who gets to provide care and whose work is undervalued (e.g., women, minorities, migrants)? How should we understand the value of an ordinary ethics of interdependent care in relation to the more abstract notions of ethics and justice?

We will explore these questions while focusing on issues of precariousness, vulnerability, disability, and environmental crises. Topics include life, care, and power in Foucault, Tronto’s definition of ethical and political care, Federici and Callaci on “Wages for Housework” and unpaid labor, Segal’s concept of radical care, Lorde on race, illness and care of the self, and finally ecological care for the more-than-human. 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.

COMP_LIT 487-0-1 Studies in Literature and the Arts: Archive Poetics: Subaltern Knowledge and Irreverent Uses
This seminar studies the contemporary appropriation, uses, and reactivations of cultural archives in modern and contemporary literature and culture. Even if archives are often imagined as architectures of knowledge, places where the past is organized, protected, stabilized, and made legible through systems of order, we will challenge this idea and conceive the archive as a social machine that organizes and administers both texts and documents as well as our bodies through different forms of technology that register our present. We explore the processes of memory that foreground the central role of archives, especially when it comes to subaltern knowledge and experiences of minoritized communities, historically excluded. We analyze how archives have often been the basis for the rethinking of cultural heritages and foundational fictions, embodied as state repositories and libraries, cabinets of curiosities and colonial herbariums, natural history collections, and forensic databases, family albums, community memory projects, and volatile infrastructures of the digital cloud. We reflect on the poetics and the politics of archives in contemporary engagements that erode the national archive’s former boundaries and stability, performing intervention and subversions in counter-archives that probe to be recombinant and generative of other futures.

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