Graduate

This course provides an overview of different methods, approaches and themes in the study of literary texts and traditions from comparative perspectives. Topics covered will include literary history, textual criticism, translation (theory and practice), book history, genre theory (e.g. the novel), narratology, literature and colonialism, “world literature” and new philologies. We will discuss these different approaches against the intellectual historical background from which they have emerged but also with reference to the texts with which participating students are working for their various projects, and literary texts from any language, time and geography are welcome. While the course is organized primarily from a literary studies perspective, it will also be of interest to students of history, anthropology and other disciplines dealing with ‘texts’.

These two philosopher-teachers, Mengzi (Mencius) in 4th century BCE China and Epictetus in the 2nd century CE Greco-Roman world, both foregrounded an embodied ethics, and both were concerned with questions of living in harmony with nature, achieving freedom from external constraints, and dealing with the disruptive turbulence of passionate emotions. This course is a literary and philosophical comparative study of Mengzi’s writings alongside the Handbook and Discourses of Epictetus. Course readings are all in English, and no knowledge of classical Chinese or Greek language or philosophy is needed, but separate meetings can be scheduled for students interested in reading either of these texts in the original language.

The Jordanian artist Sulaïman Majali writes that Arabfuturism/s is part of “a growing counterculture of thought and action that through time will be found and used in the construction of alternative states of becoming” (2015). For Majali, like many contemporary artists interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst territorial, existential, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, Arabfuturism, Gulf Futurism, and Muslim Futurism—like their sister projects of Afrofuturism/s, Sinofuturism, and Indigenous Futurism—speak to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture in order to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. These speculative projects can be understood as a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and biopolitics that theorize other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counter-futures disrupt the geo-spatial logics of the past, present, and assumed future to not only “write alternative histories but also articulate counterfuturisms as imaginaries of times-to-come” (Jussi Parikka, 55).

Beyond the toll of US-backed “forever wars,” recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that catapulted the Arab Spring across Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, and more recently, Lebanon. While moments of catastrophe, crisis, and collapse may seem antithetical to imaginaries of the future, the capacity to dream or speculate is essential to undoing to sites of epistemic and ontological violence, while also charting possible paths forwards. Moreover, speculative acts of world-building can realize the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination that empower us to envision entirely new archeologies of the future.  

This seminar reflects on questions of speculation, imagination, and futurity across modern works of literature, film, and art from the Middle East and North Africa. It asks: how can representations of apocalypse, eschatology, dystopia, science fiction, (non)futurity, or fantasy help us grapple with the very real existential threats to communities across the MENA region? How are dystopian technologies or aesthetics being mobilized in our current geopolitical landscape? What are the existing and emergent formal, critical, or conceptual vocabularies for such times of crisis, and what do they tell us about the present-future? How do they shape questions of representation, mediation, and aesthetic value? Finally, what are the political and ethical stakes of futurity as an existential, epistemic, and aesthetic project? 

The concept of “modernism” embraces a number of artistic trends and movements that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe (and beyond) and continued well into the twentieth century. The task of the seminar is to exfoliate core features of that concept by examining works of literature and visual art that are understood as “modernist” as well as works of criticism and philosophical contributions devoted to understanding what modernism is. As the seminar title indicates, the work of Rainer Maria Rilke will be an important point of reference. We will study his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as well as selected poems and essays. Since Paris is the locus of (much of) Rilke’s novel, we will look back to Baudelaire, especially his essay The Painter of Modern Life, while considering his much-discussed poem À une passante (To a passerby) along with relevant commentaries. Moreover, the fact that Rilke worked on the novel during a period when he was also deeply engaged with Cezanne’s painting affords an opportunity to consider certain paintings by Cézanne. Here we will be guided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay Cezanne’s Doubt, Robert Pippin’s study After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (2014), and T.J. Clark’s recent book If these Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022). The course is conceived as a participatory (discussion-intensive) seminar, conducted at a graduate level. English translations will be provided for works in French and German, but seminar discussions will be dotted by references to the original works. Participation by interested undergraduates who have done advanced work in the arts and/or philosophy is possible but requires permission from the instructor.

Friedrich Nietzsche was as much a critic (of literature, art, music, culture) as he was a philosopher, and the purpose of this seminar is to bring out the conception of criticism that unfolds across his work. Doing so will require some comparisons: with the Enlightenment (Lessing) and Romantic (esp. the Schlegel brothers) conceptions of criticism, but also with notions of criticism advanced, for example, by the New Critics, by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and in contemporary work on aesthetics. Our main focus, however, will be on pertinent writings by Nietzsche, including the early essay on “Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense,” Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, relevant aphorisms from Human, All Too Human, Dawn, Joyful Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and Twilight of the Idols, concluding with Case of Wagner. The topic of criticism in Nietzsche is not separable, of course, from the core themes of Nietzsche’s work and the seminar may therefore be considered as one avenue of approach to Nietzsche’s overall achievement. Major positions in the boundless secondary literature on Nietzsche will be considered. This course is open to graduate students. Advanced undergraduate students with a special interest in the topic may be admitted only after consultation with the instructor.

This course navigates the global refugee, exilic, expatriate and émigré crises and experiences as modes of displacement that permeate modern and contemporary literature. Using a comparative approach, this course offers a sustained and nuanced examination of the notion of displacement in most of its forms as represented by many canonical literary works produced by writers of various nations. This course compares the historical, socio-political, economic, cultural and national motives behind the experiences of displacement discussed throughout the course. The main topics covered in this course are: Loss, Alienation and Disorientation, Displacement and Gender Crossing, Displacement and Imperialistic Gestures, Displacement and Mobility, Displacement and Self-fashioning, Acts of Departure: Roots and Routes, Home-Abroad Dichotomy, Displacement, Memory and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination, Displacement and Individual/ National Identity, Abjection and Assimilation, Cross-Cultural Psychology and Dialogical Acculturation, The Crisis of Acceptance and Belonging, Biopolitics and Zoopolitics, The American Dream and Otherness.

Did Asian American literature exist before Asian America? How do we access the enslaved and indentured lives that archives have little to tell us about? Can we reimagine the unheard lives of Asian diasporas historically perceived as “diseased,” inscrutable, and undesirable? What kind of interracial violence and intimacies did they form with Afro-diasporic and indigenous peoples under Spanish and British colonial occupations? To answer these questions, this course turns to the pre-twentieth-century history of Asian diasporas in the Americas, principally in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru. We will closely examine archival sources (inventory records, legal documents, lyrics, spiritual biography, etc.) on two historical trends of forced migration—the early modern transpacific trade of chino slaves and the nineteenth century coolie trafficking of Chinese and Indian laborers—and reflect on the constitutive limits of the archives. In addition, we will read anti-racist, feminist, and queer reimaginations of the Asian-diasporic past by contemporary authors and artists such as David Dabydeen, Michelle Mohabeer and Patricia Powell, etc. These primary sources will be supplemented by theoretical readings on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and Afro-Asian solidarity.

This course analyzes a range of Palestinian life narratives produced by authors based in different places, both in Palestine and the diaspora, united in a common cause and a desire to speak out, thereby circulating their works as a form of Palestinian testimony. This course sees these writers conversing with each other, each attempting to represent their own personal experience but also responding to the broader context of ongoing Palestinian dispossession, making this integral to the snapshot of experience they want to narrate. This course shows that such texts, individually meaningful but also conversant with wider concerns and messages of solidarity and advocacy, are ideal components of contemporary Palestinian literature that position itself as future-orientated, and expresses a desire to combat the international community’s failure to acknowledge Palestinian rights for justice and self-determination. This course contends that contemporary Palestinian life writing goes beyond narrating the specifics of the conflict in order to reflect on central questions of dignity, justice, and solidarity at the time Palestine is still a place that is not fully recognized. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to read and discuss texts in the original language (Arabic).

Ideas of justice are not self-evident truths but constructed through a variety of practices. This course will explore how the language of human rights, which scholars have called the moral lingua franca of our time, is constructed and circulated through aesthetic representation (such as literature, painting, and film), the law, HRNGOs, and public intellectual debates in the 20th and 21st centuries. Throughout the course, we will ask: How are ideas of human rights produced, transformed, or troubled by aesthetic production? What kinds of aesthetic and political claims can we stake in the name of human rights? And what might alternative visions of justice look like? We will discover how literature and visual art help both constitute and reflect the social and political truths by which we live, as well as how these seemingly obvious truths produce a variety of normative assumptions about what constitutes justice. Works will include texts by Ernst Bloch, Richard Wright, Kwame Nkrumah, Rigoberta Menchú, Leon Golub, Jacobo Timerman, and Ai Weiwei. Texts can be read in the English translation or original.

This workshop will focus on literature as a tool to explore tragic and traumatic events in history, such as wars, genocides, and natural disasters, among others. Through different examples, we will review different poetic and narrative forms that delve into historical and personal memory, remembering, reflecting, and analyzing events that have marked the lives of individuals, communities, and nations. We will discuss how writing can be an effective way of coping with the painful burden of history, helping to heal the wounds of the past, as well as to reflect on the ways in which literature can serve as a way of preserving the memory of the victims of these tragic events, allowing their stories to be told, remembered and honored in order to bring us a little closer to reparation and justice.