Spring

The term “deconstruction” has entered popular parlance as a synonym for just about any form of dissenting comment or debunking. But in the more specific sense, deconstruction is a technique of discourse analysis that questions the assumptions involved in making sense of things (even the assumptions on which itself relies). This course will retrace the history of deconstruction (how did it arise?), situate it among other critical options of the 1960s-80s (what is distinctive about it?), and offer readings of some of its best-known texts (how did its proponents perform it?). Now that it is more or less recognizable and accepted as a critical idiom, what tasks remain for deconstruction today? 

We will read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves for its visionary portrayal of social life in an expanded sense that embraces ancestors and nonhuman actors. Close reading of The Waves will be the primary task, but we will also look at theorists of ancestrality, intersubjectivity, and the public sphere for additional insight (Hans Ruin, Alfred Schutz, Bruno Latour). We will also briefly compare Woolf’s project in The Waves with works of single consciousness fiction — Woolf’s own Mrs. Dalloway and Flush, James Joyce’s Ulysses — and engage with Woolf’s critical thinking in her letters, lectures, and The Common Reader.

To an observer steeped in the classical tradition, Modern Greece is a layer cake of survivals, revivals, and innovations. To Greeks today, antiquity is only one element of a vastly more complex cultural heritage. This course, originally designed for Study Abroad, will investigate contemporary Greece in multidisciplinary fashion, with readings from history (narratives as well as primary texts), art history, theology, philosophy, music, and poetry, as well as film. Topics to be covered range from the late-antique iconoclasm controversies to the contemporary financial crisis. We will compensate for the lack of field trips with virtual visits from professionals in Greece and elsewhere. Knowledge of Greek (classical or modern) is not required, though we will often be pausing to examine the effects of language hybridity and change.

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 dialog 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 when possible.

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century, but his influence on film theory and practice and on cultural theory generally is also considerable. In this course we will explore the range and variety of Brecht's own theatre, from the Threepenny hit to the agitprop film Kühle Wampe) to classic parable plays, as well as Brecht heirs in German theatre and film (RW Fassbinder & Peter Weiss) theatre and film in Britain (Peter Brook & John McGrath), and African theatre and film, South Africa to Senegal, influenced by Brecht, and the recent NYC adaptation of Brecht’s Days of the Commune

NOTE: This is *not* a basic intro course. PQ: complete Hum core and one or more of the following: International Cinema or equiv. AND/OR TAPS AND/OR ACTIVE German. Please ASK about other courses you have taken that may count as PQ.

St. Petersburg, Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, Piter. Russia's "Window to Europe" has as many faces as it has names: eastern and western; imperial and revolutionary; physical and mythical. This course explores the relationship between geographical space and cultural imaginary by examining what Vladimir Toporov has called the "Petersburg Text of Russian Literature," a mythology of Russia's European capital that has arisen from and through a unique constellation of literary classics. Readings include a close analysis of Andrei Bely's modernist masterpiece Petersburg, as well as works by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, Akhmatova and Kharms.

Why are films and literature constantly remade and adapted from culture to culture across differences of time and space? What is at stake? What is gained and what is lost in cinematic remakes and adaptations? And how do cultural, historical and narrative conventions transform the adapted stories? Focusing on Akira Kurosawa’s cinematic adaptations of literary works, for example Ran, based on Shakespeare, or Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot; and on remakes of Kurosawa’s own films, such as Sergio Leone's “spaghetti” Western A Fistful of Dollars, Georg Lucas's Star Wars episode "Phantom Menace" and Sturges' Western The Magnificent Seven, we will discuss how originals relate to remakes and how films transform their literary counterparts. The course is an introduction to the cinema of Akira Kurosawa and its international afterlife as well as to the problems of intercultural adaptation. Course books are available at the Seminary Co-op. The films will be viewed independently through links posted on Canvas.

Animals that sometimes prey on humans occupy critical niches in individual imaginations, global culture, and natural ecosystems. While our interactions with these creatures have shifted drastically over the millennia, only recently—thanks to factors such as ecological collapse and urbanization—has the majority of the world’s population come to live without the threat of predation. This class draws on a variety of disciplines to interrogate the relationship between people and the mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish that sometimes eat us. We will read epic literature from the Middle East and Europe; examine news reports from 18th-century France and 21st-century Florida; explore the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of tiger-hunting in India; and navigate ways in which ecology, paleontology, and other scientific disciplines can inform humanistic inquiry.

Graduate writing workshop for PhD students in Comparative Literature to engage in various modes of writing, editing, and revision. Writing assignments may include developing conference papers, writing the dissertation prospectus, generating a chapter draft, curriculum vitae and letter of interest drafting, and other professional writing development to prepare students for the academic job market and writing in the academy.

The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible (KJV) set off a series of events and texts dedicated to the great influence of this literary classic—a vernacular English Bible from 1611. What is it about the KJV that has so obsessed readers and writers? How has it become part of and affected world literature? Are there competing ways of conceiving the biblical text in English literature? In this course, we will trace some of the KJV’s thematic and stylistic influences in global Anglophone literature; sometimes we will deal with direct allusion and rewriting, and other times we will study the possibilities of more tenuous links. In parallel to this work, we will problematize the KJV’s astounding centrality by: examining some pre-KJV literature and alternative early-modern and 20th century translations (particularly as these intersect with Jewish tradition); attending to subversive and postcolonial literary uses of the translation; and close-reading the political and ideological motivations behind certain forms of critical adulation. Texts examined may include works by authors such as George Peele, William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Zora Neale Hurston, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.