Spring

The course will explore continuities of thought between the German language tradition of the Robinsonade and Anglo-American postapocalyptic fiction. At present, our syllabus proposes beginning with Robinson Crusoe itself, with the following weeks dedicated to Arno Schimdt’s Dark Mirrors, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, and Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene. We will also dedicate a week to Sophocles’ Philoctetes, viewed in the Romantic period as an ancient precursor of Defoe’s work, and to the video game The Alters, possibly in conjunction with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, or Octavia Butler’s Parable books. We will explore how the theme of recovered human capabilities interacts in these texts with ideas of mortalism, finitude, and attachment to place. All readings will be in English.

What is your mother tongue if you speak multiple languages, or if you can't write—or even speak—the language that defines your heritage? When language and identity don't align, how do you tell your story? This course explores how writers and filmmakers from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have confronted these questions. We examine writers like Assia Djebar, Mohamed Choukri, and Leïla Sebbar who write in the language of their colonizers, yet use it to reclaim identity and heritage. Their multilingual texts navigate between colonial education and vernacular traditions, between Arabic, Amazigh (Berber), and French. We explore how translation and self-translation shape their work, and what it means to write across languages when some remain unwritten or inaccessible. Cinema offers a different response to these linguistic tensions. Filmmakers like Abdellatif Kechiche and Leyla Bouzid turn to the screen to capture what written language cannot: the multilingual textures of everyday life, oral and written traditions, and immigrant identity in contemporary France. Their films show how diaspora reshapes communities on both sides of the Mediterranean, making belonging, displacement, and home perpetually unresolved. By situating these works within their historical contexts, this course illuminates how cultural production across literature and film continues to redefine identity for communities marked by colonialism, migration, and multilingualism. 

Note: Taught in English. Students registered for French credit will complete all primary source readings and written assignments in French.

In this course, we will read a selection of European crime fiction not only to be in a better position to judge Poe’s protestations, but more importantly, to familiarize ourselves with a selection of canonical writers as well as with the history and the characteristics of the genre. Why is crime fiction one of the most popular literary genres today? What is the relationship between the genre and society? We will consider – among other questions – the figure of the detective, the history of policing, different concepts of justice and guilt, the status of clues, indices, evidence. Materials will include Poe, Foucault, Ginzburg, Droste-Hülshoff, Christie, Doyle, Kleist, Eco among others as well as a selection of films. Readings and discussions in English.

“Frenemies” since the Middle Ages, the literary traditions of Italy and France illustrate the productive tensions that can arise from cultural and geographic proximity. This course explores practices of rewriting and adaptation across the Alps through the lens of gender and sexuality. We will focus on two periods of literary flourishing: the early modern age, when Italy led Europe into the era we now call the Renaissance, and the dawn of literary modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when France stood out for its innovations. We will address topics such as: how do female authors adapt works originally written by men? how do treatments of masculinity change when they move from one cultural setting to another? what role does sexuality play in realist genres? how does the post-modern representation of love and femininity change across French and Italian works in the twenieth century? Authors and works may include fabliaux, chansons de geste, Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Orlando furioso, Émile Zola, Giovanni Verga, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau. Theory readings will include Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and others.    

Class will be conducted in English. Those taking the class for ITAL or FREN credit will read works and complete assignments in French and/or Italian, as relevant. Counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and by Freud's readers. We will explore Freud's various models of the psyche, his interventions into the theory of sexuality, and his writings on religion by tracking the development of key concepts like transference, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, melancholia, the unconscious, and the death drive, among others. 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? Readers of Freud whom we will encounter may include Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler, Spillers, Edelman, Dean, and Musser.

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.

This course examines ways in which various works of Shakespeare have been appropriated and adapted in colonial/postcolonial contexts, with a special focus on Arabic and Palestinian literary and cultural productions. Students will be encouraged to examine the appropriation and adaptation of the works of Shakespeare through a close reading of the selected texts or excerpts. Students will have the opportunity to engage with important concepts such as intertextuality and influence while commenting on the author's admiration of Shakespeare's work or his or her challenge to him. All readings will be in English, although there might be an opportunity to discuss some of the texts in the original language (Arabic).

Can you have sex with God? And, if so, what then does sex mean? What, as a matter of fact, might spiritual sex mean for the cultivation of virtues like celibacy or virginity? While early Christianity and the Christian Middle Ages are often characterized by a disciplined asceticism, erotic desire was just as central to cultivating mystical love for God. In fact, the significance of the language of love, passion, loss, nuptial bliss, jubilation, and the body has rendered the Christian mystical tradition a useful resource for contemporary-and especially psychoanalytic-theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. This course will look both to the past and the present in order to explore the workings of pre- and postmodern desire and to draw connections between Christian mysticism and theories and practices of sex. Working across historical periods, we will read exemplary pieces of Christian mystical literature, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary literature that draws from the medieval past.