Winter

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century, but his influence on film theory and practice and on cultural theory is also considerable. We will explore the range and variety of Brecht's work, 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), African theatre and film influenced by Brecht, and the NYC post-Occupy adaptation of Brecht’s Days of the Commune. (Drama, 1830-1940)

This course also includes a weekly screening session.

Iconology is the study of images across media and cultures. It is also associated with philosophical reflections on the nature of images and their relation to language—the interplay between the “icon” and the “logos.” A plausible translation of this compound word into Chinese would describe it as “Words in Pictures, Pictures in Words”:  诗中有画，画中有诗.
This seminar will explore the relations of word and image in poetics, semiotics, and aesthetics with a particular emphasis on how texts and pictures have been understood in the Anglo-European-American and Chinese theoretical traditions. The interplay of painting and poetry, speech and spectacle, audition and vision will be considered across a variety of media, particularly the textual and graphic arts.
The aims of the course will be 1) to critique the simplistic oppositions between “East” and “West” that have bedevilled intercultural and intermedial comparative studies; 2) to identify common principles, zones of interaction and translation that make this a vital area of study. (Theory; 20th/21st)

This is a course on fakes, forgeries, hoaxes, and all manner of intentional anachronisms designed to forge fake pasts, with a particular emphasis on how invented texts and artifacts might impact contemporary society and the "post-truth" world. By engaging in weekly case-studies around four central authors (Samuel Constantine Rafinesque, Pierre Louys, James Macpherson, Thomas Carlyle), students will learn to describe and categorize different kinds of such "flippancies" and to articulate their political weight across time. Examples include invented poems from Ancient Greece, spurious Native American epics, forged ancient Scottish epics, and the like. Our study of the main texts will be accompanied by a look at other forgeries that have played a not so fake role in the course of history (such as the Donation of Constantine). This course is appropriate to undergraduates of all levels interested in critical theory, the study of premodern cultures in a political dimension, as well as contemporary debates about cultural appropriation.

This course is dedicated to a slow reading of two of Melville’s novels, roughly among his first and last works. We will explore how neither is a very traditional novel, and how they verge into the terrain of other prose genres (travel literature, utopian narrative, satirical pastiche). Students will learn to think about the novel as a flexible form organized along several conceptual axes, although we will give a special emphasis to affects and how texts produce paradigms of emotivity through which to interpret the complexities of a world on the verge of globalization, the emergence of international forms of capitalism, and the more general fraying of nerves associated with the arrival of the so-called “modern” period. This course is appropriate to undergraduates of all levels interested in the study of literature, especially those invested in questions of form, close reading, and the connections between history and literature.

Religion, nation, race: as familiar as these terms and the categories they name may be, they prove strangely resistant to definition—especially when, as often happens, they are entangled with one another. This seminar course orients students in the busy field of contemporary theoretical writing on these categories and the myriad ways they mutually complicate one another. Our central texts will be two recent books addressing a pair of historically, culturally, and geographically disparate examples: Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (2021), on Hindu right-wing nationalism in contemporary India, and Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy (2018), on the figure of the non-Jewish other in late-ancient Jewish literature. These books will be supplemented by shorter texts by philosophers, religionists, literary theorists, political scientists, and anthropologists. The major assignment for this course (in lieu of a final paper) is the collaborative production of a critical lexicon of keywords for the study of religion, nation, and race. Prerequisite: completion of a Social Sciences core sequence.

Elective writing workshop for PhD students in Comparative Literature to develop and refine skills in various modes of writing, editing, and revision. Writing assignments may include developing conference papers, writing the dissertation prospectus, generating a chapter draft, reformulating a paper for submission as a journal article, and other professional writing development to prepare students for writing in the academy and communicating with readers.

PhDs in Comparative Literature: as an elective, this workshop is designed for students in the third year and beyond who have completed most of their required courses and are ready to move to academic and professional writing for readers other than the instructor of a course. Second years with permission of instructor.

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as “cute” or “adorable”) has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today’s conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called “Pink Globalization”. With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

This course explores contemporary theoretical approaches to premodern cultural objects. How do we establish relationality with thought worlds whose archives are only partially preserved? Or redress the “discovery” of premodern cultural objects in contexts of political instrumentalization? How do we care for the earliest cultural objects as legacies of non-literary worldmaking?

Where possible, the course will pair readings in contemporary theory with class visits from scholars engaged in premodern comparative projects, with research engaging cultural objects from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. We will ask: What is at stake in characterizations of cultural objects as “ancient,” “archaic,” or “premodern”? And: How does the practice of comparison change when its objects are located in a distant past?

This course explores twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and cinematic works from the countries of North Africa. We will focus in particular on the region of Northwestern Africa known as the Maghreb—encompassing Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Situated at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, the Maghreb has a layered colonial past culminating in France’s brutal occupation of the region through the 1960s. Inflected by this colonial history, Maghrebi studies tends to privilege Francophone works while overlooking the region’s rich Arabic and indigenous traditions. Understanding the Maghreb as both a geopolitical as well as an imagined space, our course materials reflect the region’s diverse cultural histories and practices. We will consider the Maghreb’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism in dialogue with broader questions of cultural imperialism, orientalism, decolonization, and globalization. Fictional and cinematic works will be paired with relevant historical and theoretical readings. In light of the recent ‘Arab Spring’ catapulted by the Tunisian uprising in January 2011, we will also touch on contemporary social and political happenings in the region.

Designed for graduate students in the humanities, this course begins with fundamental texts on ideology and the critique of capitalist culture by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Althusser, Wilhelm Reich, and Raymond Williams, before moving to Marxist aesthetics, from the orthodox Lukács to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin) to the heterodox (Brecht), and concludes with contemporary debates around Marxism and imperialism (Lenin, Fanon, and others), and Marxism and media, including the internet.