Graduate

The final decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries saw the rise of sexology, a new “science” of human sexuality, led by German-speaking psychiatrists, physicians and other intellectuals. Sexology impacted a very wide sphere of public discussions around issues reaching from medical knowledge, sexual hygiene, homosexuality and prostitution to women’s rights and legal reform. Sexological ideas were not only taken up throughout Europe but also across Asia, Latin America and Africa, leading to sexual science as a global set of discourses. The aim of this research seminar is to re-examine sexology against the background of German and European cultural history (including its imaginaries, anxieties and obsessions) and to chart the processes of global interactions in an “Age of Empire”. Particular attention will be given to literary writings as channels of propagating sexological knowledge and as sites of socio-political intervention, and to destabilizing some of the myths surrounding this field, e.g. through the recovery of the work of women and non-Western authors and sexologists. Knowledge of German is desirable but not required.

This course explores the diverse ways that gender and sexuality are represented in contemporary cultural texts—film, fiction, and art—from the Middle East and North Africa. These creative works will be paired with critical writings from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives (gender studies, queer theory, affect theory, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, Islamic studies, and activist literature). While we will attend to the layered histories and legacies of colonialism, orientalism, globalization, military occupation, and war, our goal is to center gender discourses and practices as they are negotiated, performed, and contested by artists, writers, and thinkers in and from the region. Our readings and films emphasize how questions of agency, affect, and embodiment shape the lifeworlds and creative imaginaries of cultural producers from the Middle East and North Africa.

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance - the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

This course provides a survey of the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural, and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. Especially important for our examination will be the exchange of film techniques, practices, and cultures in an international context. We will also pursue questions related to the historiography of the cinema, and examine early attempts to theorize and account for the cinema as an artistic and social phenomenon.

This course explores literary and cinematic works of horror from around the world. Subgenres of horror include gothic/uncanny, sci-fi horror, post-apocalyptic, paranormal, monsters, psychological horror, thrillers, killer/slasher, and gore/body-horror, among others. As a mode of speculative fiction, horror envisions possible or imagined worlds that center on curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias that simultaneously repel and attract. Works of horror are most commonly concerned with anxieties about death, the unknown, the other, and our selves.

Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on societal, cultural, and political imaginaries of the non-human and Other. The genre often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Horror subsequently dwells within the uncomfortable corners of our collective unconscious where the line blurs between that which we fear and that which we desire.

Works of literature, film, and art will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre’s history, as well as its aesthetic, formal, and thematic tropes. We will also interrogate the critical implications and possibilities of horror in relationship to affect theory, biopolitics, gender studies, queer theory, critical race studies, postcolonial criticism, Afropessimism and black ontology.

Graduate writing workshop for Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature aimed at cultivating familiarity and fluency with various genres of writing in the academy—from seminar papers, conference presentations, and journal articles, to doctoral degree documents as well as fellowship and academic job market materials. Enrolled students will have the opportunity to share and individually workshop works-in-progress, while attending to the craft of producing creative, engaging, and persuasive scholarly writing. In addition to tackling the various stages of academic writing development, editing, and revision, we will address practical aspects of the writing process—such as writing habits, challenges, and technologies.

The concept of ecstasy is often associated with an extraordinary experience of the philosophical, sexual, and religious varieties, but in what way is ecstasy also bound to rituals of the ordinary? In this course we will explore numerous ways that ecstasy and synonymous terms like “orgasm,” “bliss,” and “jouissance” have been conceptualized in philosophical, theological, and literary texts from late antiquity to the present. What does the figural relationship between ecstasy and orgasm suggest about the broader relationship between philosophy, theology, sexuality, and desire? What role do pleasure and pain play in philosophical and theological reflection? How has ecstasy been deployed both as a form of political resistance and as complicit in the perpetuation of histories of violence? Focusing on the Christian tradition and its impact on queer theory, our readings may include, but are not limited to, texts by Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Margaret Ebner, Hadewijch, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Ávila, Lacan, Glück, Edelman, and Muñoz.

This seminar will engage major texts by these three writers. Fanon was a strong  influence on Sartre and Beauvoir, and all three wrote about the oppressed and political power struggles In varying contexts. The issues we will be considering are decolonization, racism (including anti-Semitism), sexism/misogyny, and the Palestinian situation that ultimately created a rift between Fanon and Sartre, Questions will include Fanon’s support of violence, Sartre’s problematic positioning in the wake of Fanon’s ideas, and Beauvoir’s “feminist” stance in relation to issues of power.

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how “world histories” may be hidden within “word histories,” as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own.

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.