Graduate

This course provides students with an opportunity to think race both within a psychoanalytic framework and alongside rituals of loss, grief, and mourning. In particular, we will interrogate how psychoanalytic formulations of mourning and melancholia have shaped theories of racial melancholia that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. Turning to Asian American, African American, and Latinx theoretical and literary archives, we will interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality and ask: How do literatures of loss enable us to understand the relationship between histories of racial trauma, injury, and grief, on the one hand, and the formation of racial identity, on the other? What might it mean to imagine literary histories of race as grounded fundamentally in the experience of loss? What forms of reparations, redress, and resistance are called for by such literatures of racial grief, mourning, and melancholia? And, finally, how, if understood as themselves rituals of grief, might psychoanalysis and the writing of literature assume the role of religious devotion in the face of loss and trauma?

This course examines the literature, history, and theory of global anarchist movements, as well as “proto-anarchist” writers and stateless movements with anarchist resonances. Theorists and historians will include Mohamed Abdou, Paul Avrich, Luisa Capetillo, Emma Goldman, Maia Ramnath, and Dean Spade. Particular attention will be given to decolonial thought, religious anarchism, fugitivity and migration, and gender and race in anarchist literature. The course will include field trips on Chicago anarchist history. 

This course introduces students to ancient, medieval, and early modern literary theory and to modern engagements with these theoretical interventions. We will explore how communities in the past imagined their practices of reading, writing, and interpretation—with especial emphasis on scriptural exegesis—but also what constituted a text, in the first place. How, indeed, were these practices foundational to the formation of communities and, in turn, to alterity? And what role do these literary theories and practices play in longer histories of "theory" and "critique." Staging dialogues between the past and the present, this course will ask what the political implications of designating an archive as "ancient," "archaic," "medieval," or "premodern" are in order to understand how and why the past is continually made and remade.

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 graduate seminar invites students to engage with literary trauma studies, a field that first emerged in the 1990s, and that has more recently been undergoing decolonization processes. Following calls by scholars such as Stef Craps in Postcolonial Witnessing (2013), we will examine foundational and current literary theory by questioning its validity and applicability across different cultural contexts and languages. We will read select fictional trauma narratives, in English translation or in the original language when possible. Readings will include select psychological and psychoanalytical theoretical literature from Judith L. Herman and Cathy Caruth to Bessel van der Kolk; (literary) theory by Ruth Leys, Lauren Berlant and Stef Craps, as well as fictional texts, largely from non-Euro-Anglo-American contexts. Students working on trauma-related literary projects are welcome to contribute materials in their respective research languages. We will end the course by bridging discussions of literary trauma studies with recent debates around a pedagogy of trauma, especially as applicable the context of higher education. Students need to be available for 2 synchronous online meetings per week.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring 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 offers a critical introduction to theories of performance and performativity across a transnational scope. We will read theories of performance that explore the relationship between text, body and audience alongside the history of performative theory and its afterlives in queer and affect theory. Drawing on comparative literary method, this course presents texts both within and beyond the Euro-American canon, across languages, and across disciplines to consider how empire and post-coloniality, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality shape performances and the publics that they address. We will think about the relationship between performance and politics and how performance as both an aesthetic genre and theoretical concept shapes the relationship between text, language, and embodied experience and explore the role of the spectator and their participatory function in the making of performances.   

This course will examine the tradition of spiritual exercises from antiquity to the early modern period. Spiritual exercises were at the core of classical paideia, the regimen of self-formation designed and promoted by ancient philosophers, orators, and other pedagogues. As Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault have demonstrated, ancient philosophy first and foremost has to be understood as a “way of life,” as a set of techniques and practices for shaping the self according to wisdom. It was not until philosophy’s critical turn with Kant that it shed its practical dimension and became a “theoretical” discipline. Early Christianity, stylizing itself as the “true philosophy,” eagerly adopted the ancient spiritual exercises and retooled them for its salvational ends. Throughout the middle ages and early modern period spiritual exercises and meditative techniques informed a host of religious, cultural, and artistic practices and media such as prayer and devotional reading, religious art and poetry, but also theatrical performances and musical works. We will focus on individual exercises like the meditation, the examination of conscience, the discernment of spirits, the application of senses, prosoche (attention), consolation, contemplation, etc., and discuss authors such as Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, John Cassian, Augustine, Bonaventure, Ignatius, Descartes, and others.

El curso ofrece una introducción al concepto de ‘tradición’ y a sus mecanismos de funcionamiento, y analiza su relación con la creación literaria contemporánea a partir del estudio de tres obras fundamentales de la narrativa catalana del siglo XX: "El quadern gris" de Pla, "Mirall trencat" de Mercè Rodoreda y "Estremida memòria" de Jesús Moncada. Estas obras de géneros distintos —diario y relato— serán puestas en relación con la ficción contemporánea universal: leeremos los textos de Pla a la luz de la tradición diarista contemporánea, de Woolf o Nin a Walser, Pavese, Gombrowicz, Torga, Ribeyro o Piglia; la novela de Rodoreda, desde el conocimiento de las técnicas experimentales del modernism; y la de Moncada, a través de los universos ficcionales de Faulkner, Bassani, Carpentier, o García Márquez, y de la novela clásica de aventuras de Dumas y Verne. El propósito es contribuir no sólo a clarificar un concepto esencial en las humanidades, como es el de ‘tradición’, sino a situar en el contexto literario de la ficción internacional tres autores de lengua catalana que han devenido clásicos por su éxito comercial y académico, por el elevado número de traducciones que han merecido, y por su ascendiente en autores posteriores. Estudiaremos el proceso creativo de la ficción contemporánea y sus lazos con la tradición a través de un enfoque comparatista que tiene en cuenta cuestiones como la tensión entre literaturas de lenguas minoritarias y literaturas dominantes.

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.