COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Winter 2027 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.

Winter 2027 course descriptions

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

Winter 2027

Comp_Lit 101-8-20: First Year Writing Seminar: The Making of Modern Tragedy
A mother who murders her children. A young woman condemned to death by her future father-in-law for burying her brother. Displaced by war, women gather to learn their fates. These are not newspaper headlines: they are the plots of Greek tragedies, dating back to Athens in the fifth century BCE. But what happens to these stories when they are retold by contemporary playwrights, authors, and filmmakers? How do they redefine tragedy in the 21st century? In this course, you will develop your writing skills through a wide-ranging exploration of what we mean when we classify a work of literature as a "tragedy." 

Comp_Lit 200-0-20: Introduction to Literary Theory: What is Comp Lit?
In this class we explore the foundational questions of Comp Lit as a field of inquiry as well as a methodology for literary analysis. We read and discuss literary theory as a framework to develop answers to: What is Fiction? And how literary prose is different from other forms of narrative? How we move from a text in one “original” language to read its translation in another? How we traverse and cross the boundaries of languages and literature traditions?

We explore the ways in which we move beyond boundaries — in languages, time period, regions, art forms and disciplinary discourses— when reading literature across these differences. We reflect on how our imaginaries about the World or the Nation are informed by these cultural boundaries.

We explore the very definition of aesthetic experience and aesthetic forms as Humanist modes of knowledge, building on a critical vocabulary borrow from philosophical reflections that are anchored in our contemporary perspectives. 

Comp_Lit 201-0-1: Reading World Literature: Introduction to German Literature: 1766-2019 [taught in German]
This course presents an overview of modern German literary history from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Students will learn to examine representative texts in German-language literature through the ages, looking at works of poetry and prose with a special focus on the ever-changing connection between history and literature and the many cultural transformations that the German-speaking world has undergone over the past two and a half centuries. As a small seminar setting, there will also be ample opportunity to practice speaking and writing in German, and to devoting time to the close analysis of celebrated works of literature in a foreign language. **Note: Class taught in German.

Comp_Lit 201-0-20: Reading World Literature: Global Campus Novel
This course considers the popular genre of the “campus novel” (and the occasional film) over time and around the world. Spanning works of mystery, comedy, social realism, and literary fiction from the 1950s to today and across the United States, India, and Africa, what these novels share is the setting of the college or university campus as site of social idealism or ruin. They serve as vehicles for evolving ideas around education, class, identity politics, and gendered and racial faultlines. Throughout we will ask why, as the idea of the American university comes under increasing threat, this genre not only persists, but is arguably more popular than ever.

Comp_Lit 202-0-1: Interpreting Culture: Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago: Text and Context
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: Intro 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 301-0-20: Studies in World Literature: The Maghreb and the Middle East
This course offers the students the opportunity to discover the influential work of the renowned Moroccan thinker and writer, Abdelkebir Khatibi. An innovative writer, philosopher, essayist, and poet, the significance of Khatibi’s thought on contemporary decolonial thought across disciplines, notably sociology, anthropology, political, literary and aesthetics cannot be overestimated. While much of his theoretical insights are based in the history and aesthetic cultures of Morocco, his concepts and methodologies have given new and nuanced breath to how scholars think, write, and study non-Western histories and cultures. His novel Amour bilingue as well as his collections of essays collected in Maghreb Pluriel and La blessure du nom propre are today necessary references for all serious students and scholars of postcolonial and decolonial thought.

In this course, we will begin by first historicizing the Maghreb (Francophone North Africa) as a geographical, historical, and political configuration in order to understand the background of some of Khatibi’s thinking. We will then read several essays and two novels, and autobiography by Khatibi and will consult some helpful critical readings on his key notions. The aim of the course is to familiarize students with one of the leading voices in contemporary debates in postcolonial and decolonial studies.

Comp_Lit 302-0-2: Reading Across Disciplines: On Violence and the Prefigurative: Abolition, Deposition, Mourning, and Strike

When we grieve communally, we go on a general strike. We demand a suspension and an interruption, the condition of possibility for a beginning that will unfold otherwise. We join forces with the prefigurative, the unthought, and the uncaptured; when we pause, we coalesce with the temporal plasticity of the possible, with that which resists and survives what philosopher María Zambrano calls “sacrificial history.”

In this course we will read and respond, through collective and experimental writing, to a series of texts that insists that to change the world means both to invent a new language and to unearth the language of the buried, the unseen, and the unheard. We will focus on the force of the prefigurative and will study forms of counter-history that acknowledge that both the polysemy and ubiquity of violence pose a problem that can only be disentangled through an insurgent poetic transmutation.

Among others prefigurative propositions, we might encounter Rosa Luxemburg’s general strike; W.E.B. Du Bois abolition-democracy; Walter Benjamin deposition of the law as a form of counter-violence; Eleni Stecoupoulos’s abaton; Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s multiple uses of Leibniz’s corpus infinitum; Werner Hamacher’s afformative strike; Fred Moten’s chromatic saturation; Sarah Jaffe’s excessive and revolutionary grief; Peter Dimock’s injunction to write a love song for imperial times; Paul B. Preciado’s dysphoria mundi; Cristina Rivera Garza’s forensics of the unbearable in Liliana’s Invincible Summer; or Christina Sharpe’s wake work. Additionally, all participants will bring their own examples taken from a variety of artistic practices.

Comp_Lit 302-0-22: Reading Across Disciplines: 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 a their theories of political aesthetics. 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 305-0-20: Studies in Film, Media, and Visual Culture: Loneliness and Longing in Transnational Modernist Cinema

The course will explore films by Michelangelo Antonioni and filmmakers he has influenced, including Wim Wenders, Wong Kar-wai, and Sofia Coppola. We will examine how their distinct cinematic languages express the loneliness, displacement, alienation, and desire for connection that characterize modern life. 

Although emerging from different cinematic traditions, the films we will study develop a remarkably resonant visual and narrative language for articulating experiences of loneliness and longing. These are not merely emotional states but also ways of experiencing the visual and sensory dimensions of modernity, particularly in an age of increased mobility, technological mediation, and geographic displacement. Through music, fragmented narration, repetition, editing, and color, longing becomes almost tangible, as fleeting moments are transformed into enduring affective experiences.

We will focus on how these directors transform cinematic space into a medium of emotional intensity and render longing an aesthetic experience.

Taught in English, Seminar Style

Comp_Lit 307-0-20: Studies in Gender, Sexuality & Representation: Gender & Sexuality
Major trends and perspectives in gender and sexuality studies such as first and second wave feminisms, lesbian writers, AIDS literature, queer theory, gender and orientalism, cross-cultural feminism. Readings and discussions are in English.

Comp_Lit 390-0-20: Special Topics in Comparative Literature: Ecologies of Resistance
This course explores how postcolonial writers engage the environment not as passive backdrop but as a contested site of struggle, survival, and resistance. Students examine how colonialism and global capitalism have reshaped relationships to land, water, animals, and climate, and how literature responds to environmental violence, dispossession, and ecological crisis while imagining alternative modes of care, belonging, and sustainability.

In addition to novels and memoir, the course features brief poetry interludes, engaging short works by writers such as Niyi Osundare, Kofi Awoonor, Gcina Mhlophe, and Benjamin Zephaniah, among others, foregrounding poetry as a vital form of ecological critique, protest, and cultural memory. Literary texts are paired with accessible theoretical readings in postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities by thinkers such as Rob Nixon (slow violence, environmental injustice), Homi Bhabha (hybridity, colonial ambivalence), Robert J. C. Young (colonialism, decolonization, resistance), Cajetan Iheka (African ecologies, resistance aesthetics), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (islands, oceanic ecologies, empire), alongside other scholars at the intersection of postcolonialism, ecology, and resistance. The course emphasizes close reading, historical context, and comparative analysis.

Comp_Lit 411-0-20: Critical Practices: History of Aesthetics

This course provides an introduction to foundational texts in the history of modern western (primarily German) theoretical aesthetics. Starting from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's emphatic appropriation the term "aesthetics" to designate the study of beauty and good taste, the course will move chronologically through major texts of aesthetic theory from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. The course will simultaneously examine the specific problems and questions raised by the course texts and consider the texts as historical documents, looking at the ways in which they both respond to one another and to the political and cultural tensions of their respective eras. We will also consider the ways in which these texts cross disciplinary boundaries or indeed are always already transdisciplinary, constantly moving from the fields of artistic and literary criticism to fundamental issues of ethics, epistemology, politics, and psychology and back again, always asking ourselves the questions: What are the historical and political conditions of the ways in which we make and/or think about works of art, broadly conceived, and how do these historical and political conditions, in turn, shape the world that art is said to reflect?

Comp_Lit 481-0-1: Studies in Literary Theory: Russian Formalism

This seminar will examine the school and theory of Russian Formalism, which influenced and informed many developments in the 20th century literary and art theory, from Prague Linguistic Circle through Structuralism and Semiotics. Along with the detailed study of the critical and theoretical essays by such adherents of Formalism as Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, et al., we will be exploring the major works of Russian modernism and avant-garde in literature and film through the methodological approach of Formalist theory. Special focus on the issues of Formalism and Marxism, Formalism and History, and the interconnections between culture and politics of the time.
Discussion and presentations in English.

Comp_Lit 486-0-1: Studies in Lit and Disciplines: Green Materialisms
This course introduces students to a sequence of "materialisms" worked out from the (long) 18th century to the present. While readings and discussions will gravitate toward contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist ecological thought (including the afterlives of ideas like "primitive accumulation" and "metabolic rift" in recent feminist, anti-colonial, and environmental frameworks), we will also spend substantial time looking at the writings and influence of earlier thinkers whose controversial materialisms have returned to critical attention in recent decades (e.g. Spinoza, Herder). A guiding aim of the course is to assemble a fuller sense of the historical and conceptual underpinnings of first-world environmentalism; so we will ask what "matters," and to whom, in large part by putting the nature of "greenness" under scrutiny as a critical category. Readings will emphasize theory and philosophy, but please note there is a strong and central emphasis on poetry throughout, as well.

Comp_Lit 486-0-20: Studies in Lit and Disciplines: Spatial Thought and the Production of Culture
This course offers an introduction to key theories of space alongside a broader consideration of the practice and politics of spatial representation in literary and visual cultures. We will juxtapose readings from the fields of philosophy, landscape studies, art history, critical geography, the history of cartography, the environmental humanities, and infrastructure studies with creative works that “map” and theorize space through alternative means. Our sources will be culturally heterogenous but with a slight emphasis on material from Sinophone contexts.

Comp_Lit 488-0-20: Special Topics in Comparative Literature: The Nahda
This course is an introduction to Arabic literary production of the long nineteenth century as it engages the “nahḍa” (awakening), understood variously as a discourse on modernity, a utopian social project, and an epistemological rupture wrought by colonialism and capitalism. With special emphasis on the genealogies, practices, and problematics of Arabic literary modernity, this course will introduce students to the major works of Arabic literature produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the major debates, social changes, and material developments that attend the period, including (but not limited to) language reform, migration, print capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism. In short, we will try to understand how these authors, through their texts, both produced and theorized modernity for their readers in the localized contexts of Imperial influence and control on the one hand, and the global–though uneven–nineteenth-century processes of social, political, economic, and technological change.

Primary texts will all be available in English translation, but those able are encouraged to follow in Arabic. A separate section can be arranged for discussing the Arabic-language versions.

Back to top