2021-2022

Whether fighting incredible monsters or baking bread, mythological texts invite us to consider the value of labor in unique ways. By reading across a number of premodern traditions (including Greek, Roman, Near Eastern, Scandinavian, Iranian, South African, Indian), this course looks at differences between heroic labor and manual or domestic labor, labors usually expected of men and of women, labors with religious value versus labors with material consequences, as well as the role of affective labor in the ancient world. As we learn about labor in the past through these texts, the readings will allow us to raise new questions about labor today in the world of global capitalism. Examples of primary texts we will cover are portions of the Homeric epics, Hesiod’s Works and Days, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Livy’s History of Rome, the Norse Edda and “Prose Edda,” Xhosa narratives, the Near Eastern Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish, chapters from the Vendidad, and some Vedic hymns. The course readings will be given in translation, and no prior language knowledge is expected, but students with knowledge of a relevant language can take the class for credit toward their major on the basis of a specifically tailored midterm exam and/or final paper.

This course surveys key human rights texts (philosophical texts, literary works, and legal documents) of the 20th and 21st centuries. By reading global literatures alongside international human rights instruments, and by treating literature as an archive of ideas that circulate among a literary public invested in human rights, this course explores the importance of art and literature to legal and political projects and provides students with the opportunity to conceptualize the role of narrative for human rights advocacy and human rights imaginaries. We will chart the rise of the global human rights movement, beginning with the 1940s up to our contemporary moment, paying close attention to key human rights issues such as genocide, citizenship, enforced disappearance, detention, apartheid, refugee crises, and mass incarceration. Readings will include works by Anna Seghers, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Jacobo Timerman, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rigoberta Menchú, Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Antije Krog, Dave Eggers, and Albert Woodfox.

The course will consider translation—both theory and practice—in relation to queer studies, transgender studies, disability studies, and gender and women's studies. We will consider the intersections of translation with religion, postcolonialism, decolonialism, and feminist thought. Authors studied will include Monique Balbuena, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kate Briggs, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others. There will be workshops with guest translators. Students may undertake a final research paper or translation project. A minimum of reading knowledge with at least one non-English language is required

This course introduces models of comparative analysis across national literatures, genres, and media. The readings pair primary texts with theoretical texts, each pair addressing issues of interdisciplinary comparison. They include Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”; Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Kafka’s “Josephine the Mouse Singer,” Deleuze and Guattari, "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," and Mario Vargas Llosa’s "The Storyteller"; Victor Segalen’s "Stèles"; Fenollosa and Pound’s “The Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry” and Eliot Weinberger’s "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei"; Mérimée, “Carmen,” Bizet, "Carmen," and the film adaptation "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" (South Africa, 2005); Gorky’s and Kurosawa’s "The Lower Depths"; Molière, Tartuffe, Dostoevsky, "The Village Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants," and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”; Gogol, "The Overcoat" and Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.

This course will include close readings of the works of both poets, as well as a consideration of the historical and political events which surrounded them. We will also read various critics, from Symons to Derrida (critical theory texts can be read in English). Reading knowledge of French is required, as we will be reading the texts in the original. The course, however, will be conducted in English and the final paper can be in either English or French. This course will include close readings of the works of both poets, as well as a consideration of the historical and political events which surrounded them. We will also read various critics, from Symons to Derrida (critical theory texts can be read in English). Reading knowledge of French is required, as we will be reading the texts in the original. The course, however, will be conducted in English and the final paper can be in either English or French.
Other requirements: one final paper and at least one oral presentation.

The final decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries saw the rise of sexology, a new “science” of human sexuality, led by German-speaking psychiatrists, physicians and other intellectuals. Sexology impacted a very wide sphere of public discussions around issues reaching from medical knowledge, sexual hygiene, homosexuality and prostitution to women’s rights and legal reform. Sexological ideas were not only taken up throughout Europe but also across Asia, Latin America and Africa, leading to sexual science as a global set of discourses. The aim of this research seminar is to re-examine sexology against the background of German and European cultural history (including its imaginaries, anxieties and obsessions) and to chart the processes of global interactions in an “Age of Empire”. Particular attention will be given to literary writings as channels of propagating sexological knowledge and as sites of socio-political intervention, and to destabilizing some of the myths surrounding this field, e.g. through the recovery of the work of women and non-Western authors and sexologists. Knowledge of German is desirable but not required.

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 looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the world, we'll consider the shifting claims of the British, American, French, Spanish, and Russian empires, and the colonial subjects, postcolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations from Chile to Alcatraz, India to Ireland, and Azerbaijan to Martinique. Our focus will most often be on the manifestos and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we may also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Vicente Huidobro's fantasies of a secret international society to end British Imperialism to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's call to abolish the English Department, how did the radical claims of anticolonial political thought take shape in literary writing?

This course will be taught in conjunction with parallel courses offered by [Professor Harris Feinsod at Northwestern University] and [Professor Peter Kalliney at the University of Kentucky]. The class will meet remotely on zoom one day a week across the three campuses and one day in person. We anticipate building opportunities for cross-campus collaborative research among students as part of an ongoing, large-scale research collaboration.

NB: This course is designed for undergraduates and MA students. PhD Students will not be admitted.

This course explores the diverse ways that gender and sexuality are represented in contemporary cultural texts—film, fiction, and art—from the Middle East and North Africa. These creative works will be paired with critical writings from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives (gender studies, queer theory, affect theory, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, Islamic studies, and activist literature). While we will attend to the layered histories and legacies of colonialism, orientalism, globalization, military occupation, and war, our goal is to center gender discourses and practices as they are negotiated, performed, and contested by artists, writers, and thinkers in and from the region. Our readings and films emphasize how questions of agency, affect, and embodiment shape the lifeworlds and creative imaginaries of cultural producers from the Middle East and North Africa.

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.