CMLT

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.

This course introduces methods of study in Comparative Literature. We will take up interdisciplinary approaches, including translation and critical theory. Students will develop and deepen their skills in close reading and the comparative analysis of text and art forms.  

“The story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multiculturalist of narratives.”

—Barbara Johnson

“Moses fails to enter Canaan, not because his life is too short, but because it is a human life.”

—Franz Kafka

The biblical figure of Moses has furnished a diverse range of interpreters—from the early Rabbis, to Black abolitionist activists in the antebellum U.S., to mid-20th century German authors challenging Nazism—with a powerful exemplar of the potential of emancipation and the meaning of national identity. At the same time, the sheer number of interpretations and retellings of the story of Moses and the Exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egypt suggests the contradictions and ambiguities which persistently haunt those political projects. In this discussion-based seminar course, we’ll reflect on both of these aspects of the Exodus story as it is told and retold in modernity. Our journey begins with the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy as well as early rabbinic and Christian exegesis before moving on to more recent representations and interpretations. These include visual artworks (Michelangelo, Chagall); music (Schoenberg, African American spiritual songs); Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent blockbuster The Ten Commandments; Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and a response to Freud by Edward Said; and literary writings by Yehuda Amichai, Shulamith Hareven, Frances E. W. Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Mabanckou, Thomas Mann, and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. The course thus serves as an introduction to comparative methodologies for cultural studies: diachronic, transcultural, and intermedial. Supplementary readings include scholarship by authors like Daniel Boyarin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Barbara Johnson, Albert Raboteau, and Michael Walzer. All readings are available in translation, but students with reading knowledge of Hebrew, German, or French are welcome to read certain texts in the original languages. Prerequisite: At least one quarter of any Humanities Core sequence.

Joseph and Moses share much in common. Both are prominent leaders of the Hebrew minority in Egypt and both oscillate between Hebrew and Egyptian cultures. We’ll look at the Bible’s portrayal of the lives of Joseph and Moses as inextricably connected to communal ones. In fact, the final chapters of Genesis and the Book of Exodus offer an incredibly rich turf for probing the complexities and ambiguities of minority culture in their attention to both individual and collective histories. Among the topics to be discussed: the charm of the hybrid, Hebrew-Egyptian characters of Joseph and Moses and the lingering ambivalences toward this hybridity, the explicit and implicit exposure of the Hebrew minority to Egyptian culture, the role of Hebrew and Egyptian women in the drama – Potiphar’s wife, Yocheved, Miriam, the Egyptian midwives, and Pharaoh’s daughter. We will also explore the reception of the tales of Joseph and Moses in later literary contexts – from S. Y. Agnon and Thomas Mann to Hollywood. We will consider a range of approaches to Genesis-Exodus – from the literary readings of Robert Alter and Mieke Bal to the psychoanalytic writings of Freud and Kristeva. Special attention will be given to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

The Book of Ruth offers the most elaborate tale of a woman to be found in the Bible, but even this relatively detailed account is astonishingly laconic. The Book of Ruth is not really a book. It is only four chapters long – more of a short story, or a very short story, than a book. And yet, despite its ellipses, Ruth’s cryptic tale is remarkable for its capacity to provide, with but few vignettes, a vibrant portrait of one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible. The first part of this course will be devoted to the biblical text itself. We will consider literary and feminist readings of the Book of Ruth while exploring broader issues of biblical poetics. Special attention will be given to questions of migration – to different accounts of the Book of Ruth as a paradigmatic tale of a migrant woman. The second part of the course will be devoted to the reception of the Book of Ruth – from the Midrash and the Zohar to modern literature. Among the modern and contemporary writers to be considered:  S. Y. Agnon, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and Michal Ben-Naftali. The discussion will also entail an exploration of adaptations of the Book of Ruth in art – from Nicholas Poussin to Adi Nes.