CMLT

This course is a combined research seminar and curatorial practicum with students co-curating an exhibition of artists’ books. 

Following World War II, visual artists took up the book as an artistic medium, experimenting with and expanding the essential components of a medium that had remained unchanged for centuries. The results defied all expectations about traditional understandings of what constitutes a book, including the primacy of text and the use of paper, pages, and binding. This class will consider how books became visual and material objects to be viewed rather than read; made from modern materials such as plastics, concrete, or newspaper and in sizes as small as a square inch or as large as an over-life-sized wood construction; featuring unusual objects such as a sack of flour, a display shelf, or a comic book with stenciled holes; or prompting readers to actions with urban performance instructions or do-it-yourself watercolor kits. 

Drawing on (U)Chicago collections and a recently gifted private collection, students will work on a fall 2027 exhibition in the Regenstein Library’s gallery, including researching artists, visiting local collections, selecting artists’ books, assessing conservation needs, writing object and section labels, and designing layout.

“Romanticism” refers to a broad movement in European thought and culture from the late-18th to the mid-19th century, a period of intense political, intellectual, and religious upheaval. Romantic writers are often portrayed as responding to the emerging “rationalization” of society by celebrating intuition, imagination, and nature. This image obscures a more interesting reality: Romantic writers drew from Enlightenment ideas, saw poetry and natural science as closely related, and held diverse views on issues of religion, reason, and art. They approached these topics rationally, as well as through dream visions, opium-eating, self-mythologizing, fragmentary texts, and pastoral lyrics.

In this survey course, we will read English and German Romantic writers to see how they grappled with these issues, and to pose our own questions. What is “nature,” and how should we relate to it? What roles do intuition, feeling, and imagination play in our understanding of ourselves, and the divine? Are secularization and rationalization forces to contend with, or preconditions for a new spiritual freedom? How do atheists, pantheists, Christian radicals, and orthodox believers fall under the same label, and to what extent did they really share artistic and spiritual aims? How did Romantics engage with non-European religious ideas? We will read, among others, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, de Quincey, and Novalis.

This course is a proseminar in critical theory for first and second year PhD students in Comparative Literature, offering in depth study of key areas in theoretical research on a rotating basis. This year the focus areas are poetics of cruelty, affect theory, and critical future studies.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the aesthetic and political dimensions of anticolonial projects during the twentieth century as well as their impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was marked by imperial violence and political crises that fueled coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and much of the Global South, that included anticolonial festivals, cultural exchanges, and transnational congresses.

We will consider how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, race, gender, and language politics to critique colonial powers and envision a more just world. Engaging anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

The prison theme, as it develops both metaphorically in fictive narratives and more literally in personal accounts of imprisonment, has long been understood as one that emphasizes confinement and bodily restrictions. To be imprisoned is, at least partially, to be unable to move freely—this much seems clear. Literature then, in its innate ability to formulate narratives of movement, progression, and change, becomes an attractive and interesting recourse for those writing from and about the prison. How do literary forms interact with conditions of unfreedom? What does literature do to the experience of incarceration and vice versa? In this course, we will read foundational theorizations on imprisonment, punishment, and unfreedom, including but not limited to Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, and Achille Mbembe. Thinking alongside this theoretical apparatus, we will closely analyze prison writing, both fictive and testimonial. We will also consider carceral spaces more broadly in order to arrive at a capacious and thoughtful understanding of imprisonment and its related apparatuses. At the end of this course, students will articulate their understanding of how literature thinks through the carceral in a final project.

Printing is one of the truly transformative communication technologies, but in the fifteenth century it was by no means certain it would succeed or even survive. One thing that we will learn in this course, is that new media are always accompanied by a deluge of optimistic prophecy, and this was the case with printing just as much as with the internet. New technologies do not destroy what went before: instead they take their place in an ever-richer communication nexus. This course will examine all aspects of this fragile trade, authors and readers, booksellers, printers and publishers, along with the numerous strategies pursued by members of the book trade to find their audience. It will engage with how the new tools at the disposal of book historians are transforming our understanding of the early modern print world. It takes the story through to the new technologies of the last two centuries, and how the knowledge revolution made possible through new technology and the provision of universal educational transformed the book world.

Caribbean literature is having a moment. NPR reported in 2023 that "this region has long been punching above its weight on the international literary scene." We will read Safiya Sinclair's (Jamaica/U.S.) How to Say Babylon, a memoir of self-discovery after being raised by an authoritarian father; a new translation of Mayra Santos Febres' (Puerto Rico) collection of migration poems, Boat People; Myriam Chancy's novel What Storm, What Thunder (Haiti/Canada/U.S.), set after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; and poems from Shivanee Ramlochan (Trinidad & Tobago) and Dionne Brand (Canada/T&T). Our class will also include trips to literary events and visiting speakers.

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how "world histories" may be hidden within "word histories," as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will regularly carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own. (20th/21st)

This course examines the diverse ways in which love, sex, and desire are represented in Middle Eastern literatures from the seventh century through the modern period. With a focus on primary source readings (in English translation), we will explore love as a concept, affect, and practice as it pertains to all kinds of relationships: familial, romantic, pederastic, political—even the relationship between believers and God. We will pay special attention to how literary representations of love and sex are informed not only by genre conventions but also medical, legal, and philosophical discourses and consider the ways in which these texts can—and cannot—shed light on actual social practices and lived realities. Throughout our investigations, we will remain cognizant of how the Orient has been erotically fantasized in the Euro-American imaginary, while also noting how widespread modern notions of love and sex often fail to fully account for the modes of eroticism portrayed in the works that we will study.

This course explores the origins and evolution of the Italian American community in Chicago, examining its local presence and artistic, cinematic, and literary representations in the context of a global history of the twentieth century. For example, we will compare the current absence of Christopher Columbus statues in Little Italy to the permanence of the Balbo monument, an ancient column gifted to the city by the Italian fascist regime in 1933. These case studies will allow us to engage with broader issues, such as local and national Italian-American identity and how it is represented artistically. The course will be structured in three units: Past, Present, and Fiction. Past: Where did Italian Americans come from? What are the racial implications of this migrant community's existence in the United States? How does the local history of Chicago’s Italian Americans intertwine with the global history of the 20th century? Present: How does the city show traces of Italian American history? When and how have Italians assimilated? What does it mean for a migrant group to be assimilated? Fiction: What role have fictional representations of Italian Americans played in their assimilation? In what ways do representations of the home-country and of the migrant experience differ in texts by Italian authors and ones by Italian American authors? As a Chicago Studies class, we will also engage deeply with Chicago's urban landscape and local heritage sites.