Courses

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the aesthetic and political dimensions of anticolonial projects during the twentieth century as well as their impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was marked by imperial violence and political crises that fueled coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and much of the Global South, that included anticolonial festivals, cultural exchanges, and transnational congresses.

We will consider how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, race, gender, and language politics to critique colonial powers and envision a more just world. Engaging anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre’s tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine—as both thematic and aesthetic tropes—to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. 

Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials. 

This workshop begins in Autumn Quarter and continues through the middle of Spring Quarter. While the BA workshop meets in all three quarters, it counts as a one-quarter course credit. Students may register for the course in any of the three quarters of their fourth year. A grade for the course is assigned in the Spring Quarter, reflecting the BA paper grade.

This course introduces the methods and practices that form the field of Comparative Literature. Students will read major critical texts from the middle of the twentieth century to the present, gain theoretical literacy, and hone their skills of close reading, contextual framing, and comparative analysis of texts and other art forms. Broad themes to be explored include: world literature, translation, Structuralism/Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis and literature.

The prison theme, as it develops both metaphorically in fictive narratives and more literally in personal accounts of imprisonment, has long been understood as one that emphasizes confinement and bodily restrictions. To be imprisoned is, at least partially, to be unable to move freely—this much seems clear. Literature then, in its innate ability to formulate narratives of movement, progression, and change, becomes an attractive and interesting recourse for those writing from and about the prison. How do literary forms interact with conditions of unfreedom? What does literature do to the experience of incarceration and vice versa? In this course, we will read foundational theorizations on imprisonment, punishment, and unfreedom, including but not limited to Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, and Achille Mbembe. Thinking alongside this theoretical apparatus, we will closely analyze prison writing, both fictive and testimonial. We will also consider carceral spaces more broadly in order to arrive at a capacious and thoughtful understanding of imprisonment and its related apparatuses. At the end of this course, students will articulate their understanding of how literature thinks through the carceral in a final project.

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as "cute" or "adorable") has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today's conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called "Pink Globalization". With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. Speculative works frequently reimagine the past and present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. We will also consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to studying subgenres-such as Afrofuturism-we will explore speculative fiction as a critical mode of reading that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining.

TBD

This course will examine the themes of exile, migration and diaspora in a variety of literary texts from the late 20th and early 21st centuries in dialogue with recent cultural theoretical work. The texts to be studied will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and films from three sets of locations: authors of South Asian (Indian and Sri Lankan) origin in North America and Europe; writers of Turkish, Japanese and Indian origin in Germany; and Latin American-born writers writing from abroad, in addition to Johny Pitts' ethnographic book Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2020). Besides charting the theoretical coordinates of exile, migration and diaspora studies, we will explore questions such as: How has the accelerated movement of people, ideas, goods, and cultural practices affected literary authors of different racial, class, gender, religious, and national origins? What is the meaning of belonging, home and homeland? How do authors relate to concepts of the nation, national identity, and nationalism? What happens to the physical body, affect, love and intimacy, the family, and intergenerational relations in migration? What are the narrative and lyric patterns and tropes of writing between worlds? Is there a "poetics of dislocation"? How do writers handle issues of language, the mother tongue and bi- or multilingualism? All texts will be read in English translation, but we will also make translation a central issue of discussion by examining original texts whenever possible. 

This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term "queer" and explore the contours of the field's major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory's emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis and later developments in the twenty-first century, especially the emergence of queer and trans of color critique. The course aims to place these theoretical texts within the context of the intellectual, activist, and artistic and literary communities out of which they emerged. Major topics to discuss will include queer grief and melancholia; coalition and community; desire, devotion, and affective attachment; queer theory's ritual conventions; modes of queer critique; assumptions about queer theory's secularity; and the significance, challenge, and critiques of queer and trans joy.

Non-human animals are ubiquitous in India’s literary and visual cultures, whether as characters in epics, fables and moral tale; as objects of study by court scholars and painters; as pets and hunting companions; as part of the Hindu pantheon (such as the elephant-headed god Ganapathi, or the monkey god Hanuman) or as symbols and metaphors. This course explores the complex interactions among human and non-human animals and the realms of   animals/mortals/immortals through examples from India’s literatures, Indian painting and film - across times, places, spaces and religious traditions. It will conclude with contemporary debates on animal activism and provide a non-Western entry point into the field of animal studies. Naisargi Dave’s Indifference will be a key text for us throughout the quarter. 

This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and Freud's readers. We will pay particular attention to the way that Freud's theories of the mind translate into theories of the social world and of history. Taking its cue from the "beyond" of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the course will pay especial attention to the development of the death drive and explore its relationship to a constellation of psychoanalytic terms including but not limited to instincts and the drive, narcissism, melancholia, masochism, and religion/illusion. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions-especially conditions marked by political, ecological, economic, and public health crises?

This course is a proseminar in critical theory for first and second year PhD students in Comparative Literature, offering in depth study of key areas in theoretical research on a rotating basis. This year the focus areas are poetics of cruelty, affect theory, and critical future studies.