2020-2021

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.

From the activist literature of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement to contemporary fiction and poetry, this course explores the forms, aesthetics, and political engagements of U.S. Latinx literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Theoretical readings are drawn from Chicanx Studies, Latinx Studies, American Studies, Latin American Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, as we explore Latinx literature in the context of current debates about globalization, neoliberalism, and U.S. foreign policy; Latinx literature’s response to technological and socio-political changes and its engagement with race, gender, sexuality, class, and labor; and its dialogues with indigenous, Latin American, North American, and European literatures. (Poetry, 1830-1940, Theory)

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.

The seminar will focus on classical, medieval, and modern historiography from China, India, and Tibet seeking answers to three general questions: (1) How are senses of historical time created in Asian historiographies by means of rhetorical figures of repetition, parallelism, dramatic emplotment, frame stories, and interweaving storylines? (2) How are historical persons and events given meaning through use of poetic devices, such as comparison, simile, and metaphor? And (3) How do Asian histories impose themselves as realistic accounts of the past by means of authoritative devices using citation of temporal-spatial facts, quotation of authority, and/or reliance on established historical genres? The methods employed to answer these questions are here adapted from pre-modern Asian knowledge systems of literary theory, poetics, dramaturgy, and epistemology, and thus permit looking at other knowledge formations from within the discourse of the traditions themselves.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote that a translation issues from the “afterlife” of the original: “For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origins, their translation marks their stage of continued life.” This graduate seminar focuses on the case of multilingual writers and their self-translations to raise questions concerning the temporality, directionality, and “afterlife” of translated works. The figure of the self-translator challenges models of translation and cross-cultural circulation that assume various cultural and historical gaps between the source and its translation. For one, self-translation calls into question the notions of originality or “the original” and of “fidelity,” and requires us to consider the overlap between translation and rewriting. What brought writers to produce the same texts in different languages, at times for similar audiences of multilingual readers? What theories of translation or world literature might be helpful when approaching the case of Jewish self-translation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? We will discuss these issues also in the context of comparative Jewish studies, considering the difference between internal, Hebrew-Yiddish, self-translation, and the translation between Hebrew or Yiddish and a third “non-Jewish” language, whether European or Middle-Eastern.

This team-taught course invites students to reassess critically the meaning of the Soviet collapse on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary. Topics to be examined include the neoliberal "shock therapy" economic reforms that ushered in a state of wild capitalism, the dissolution of the Soviet empire and rise of rise of new right nationalisms, and the formation of alternative artistic movements that resisted the economic and political devastation that accompanied the transition. The course pedagogy employs economic, political, historical, and aesthetic analysis to develop a robust understanding across a variety of disciplines and methodological approaches.

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 will examine some of the salient texts of postmodernism. Part of the question of the course will be the status and meaning of “post”-modern, post-structuralist. The course requires active and informed participation. This course fulfills the winter core requirement for first-year Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.

This course will involve reading Freud’s major texts, including, e.g.,  parts of The Interpretation of Dreams, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” and  his later work on feminine sexuality. We will consider Freud’s views on bisexuality as well. We will also read case studies and consider theoretical responses to Freud’s work, by Derrida, Lacan, and other important theorists. Course requirements will be one in-class presentation, based on the reading(s) for that day, and one final paper.

Readings in theories of literature and related arts from cultures other than those of the post-1900 industrialized regions. What motivated reflection on verbal art in Greece, Rome, early China, early South Asia, and elsewhere? Rhetoric, hermeneutics, commentary, allegory, and other modes of textual analysis will be approached through source texts, using both originals and translations. Authors to be considered include Confucius, Xunzi, Plato, Aristotle, Zhuangzi, Sima Qian, Augustine, Liu Xie, Abhinavagupta, Dante, Li Zhi, Vico, Rousseau, Lessing, Hegel, and Baudelaire.