CMLT

Romanticism is often represented, both popularly and in grand intellectual histories, as a movement of retrieval or re-enchantment. In such narratives, some cosmic or spiritual unity has been lost, hidden, or fractured by the rationality of the Enlightenment, and Romanticism is seen as one of western Europe’s first attempts to grapple with the consequences of this loss. In this course we will closely read the poetry and prose of six key German and English Romantic writers, with a focus on how they variously characterize the philosophical and spiritual significance of their work. Alongside these writers we will look at several influential accounts of the place they hold within religious, philosophical, and literary history, and ask how the primary texts support or resist these framings. Is poetry, as the above narrative would have it, a way of picking up the broken pieces of religion? What sorts of ‘pasts’ do Romantic writers take up, and how do such pasts figure into the present? Is re-enchantment a necessary step, or is disenchantment a myth from the start? Is the imagination a means of countering the pernicious effects of scientific rationalism, or ‘reason in her most exalted mood’ We will read works by Novalis, Schlegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats to ask how each figure articulates a spiritual charge for poetry, and what poetry’s spiritual task means for the relationships between literature, religion, and philosophy. 

This course explores the multifarious entanglements between shamanism—as a religious phenomenon, as an anthropological imaginary, and as a mode of existence—and global modernity. How did shamanism as a concept emerge in the age of colonial expansion and ethnological racialization, how did it affect modernity's understanding of human history, and how do shamanic (dis)articulations of historicity, personhood, sexuality, trauma, translation, and the "nature/culture divide" intervene in modernity's politics? In contemplating these questions, we will consider a variety of "shamanic" artworks ranging from shamanic liturgies to travelogues, music recordings, film, performance art, contemporary literature, and beyond. We will attend both to the spiritual worlds of the "original" shamans of Northeast Asia (through texts from the Evenki, Khakas, Manchu, Tuvan, and other Siberian languages) and to a much broader corpora of (Anglophone, Chinese, German, Greco-Roman, Indigeneous American, Japanese, Tibetan, etc.) works that can be generatively thought of as shamanic in some way. In doing so, we will reflect on the limitations and powers possessed by the figure of the shaman in various broader contexts, both in the history of ideas and in the contemporary world.

This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and Freud's readers. We will pay particular attention to the way that Freud's theories of the mind translate into theories of the social world and of history. Taking its cue from the "beyond" of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the course will pay especial attention to the development of the death drive and explore its relationship to a constellation of psychoanalytic terms including but not limited to instincts and the drive, narcissism, melancholia, masochism, and religion/illusion. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions-especially conditions marked by political, ecological, economic, and public health crises?

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This course provides an overview of different methods, approaches and themes in the study of literary texts and traditions from comparative perspectives. Topics covered will include literary history, textual criticism, translation (theory and practice), book history, genre theory (e.g. the novel), narratology, literature and colonialism, “world literature” and new philologies. We will discuss these different approaches against the intellectual historical background from which they have emerged but also with reference to the texts with which participating students are working for their various projects, and literary texts from any language, time and geography are welcome. While the course is organized primarily from a literary studies perspective, it will also be of interest to students of history, anthropology and other disciplines dealing with ‘texts’.

These two philosopher-teachers, Mengzi (Mencius) in 4th century BCE China and Epictetus in the 2nd century CE Greco-Roman world, both foregrounded an embodied ethics, and both were concerned with questions of living in harmony with nature, achieving freedom from external constraints, and dealing with the disruptive turbulence of passionate emotions. This course is a literary and philosophical comparative study of Mengzi’s writings alongside the Handbook and Discourses of Epictetus. Course readings are all in English, and no knowledge of classical Chinese or Greek language or philosophy is needed, but separate meetings can be scheduled for students interested in reading either of these texts in the original language.

Interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst existential, territorial, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, Arabfuturism-like its sister project of Afrofuturism/s-speaks to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. It is a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and biopolitics that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counter-futures disrupt the logics of the past, present, and assumed future to envision entirely new archeologies of futurity. Beyond the toll of US-backed "forever wars," recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Arab Spring. This seminar explores representations of apocalypse, dystopia, science fiction, speculative history, (non)futurity, and fantasy across works of literature, film, and art from the Middle East and North Africa. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame imagination and futurity in relation to the extractive economies of war, colonialism, and capital. Foregrounding the political and ethical stakes of futurity as an existential, epistemic, and aesthetic project, we consider how speculative acts of world-building can not only chart possible paths forward but also reveal the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination.

This course examines ways in which various works of Shakespeare have been appropriated and adapted in colonial/postcolonial contexts, with a special focus on Arabic and Palestinian literary and cultural productions. Students will be encouraged to examine the appropriation and adaptation of the works of Shakespeare through a close reading of the selected texts or excerpts. Students will have the opportunity to engage with important concepts such as intertextuality and influence while commenting on the author's admiration of Shakespeare's work or his or her challenge to him. All readings will be in English, although there might be an opportunity to discuss some of the texts in the original language (Arabic).

What constitutes the materiality of film? How do we understand the "material world" in relation to cinema, and how does the film camera mediate it? What does the process of mediation look like when the goal of cinema is not solely to represent but also change the world? This course will pair theoretical readings on new materialist approaches to cinema with select case studies drawn from Chinese and Soviet revolutionary cinema. Our primary aim is twofold: to introduce students to the "material turn" in cinema and media studies, and to reflect on what the specific fields of Soviet and Chinese Film Studies bring to the discussion. We will look closely at works by socialist filmmakers in the twentieth century who argued that cinema had a special role to play in mediating and transforming the material world. How does socialist cinema seek to orient its viewer to a particular relationship to objects? How does it treat the human relationship to the environment? How does it regard the material of film and the process of filmmaking itself? Ultimately, the course will familiarize students with diverse understandings of materiality and materialism and with key figures and works in global socialist cinema. Readings and screenings will range from the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s to Chinese revolutionary cinema of the early 1970s, and conclude with recent documentary and video experiments that engage with their legacies.

Can you have sex with God? And, if so, what then does sex mean? What, as a matter of fact, might spiritual sex mean for the cultivation of virtues like celibacy or virginity? While early Christianity and the Christian Middle Ages are often characterized by a disciplined asceticism, erotic desire was just as central to cultivating mystical love for God. In fact, the significance of the language of love, passion, loss, nuptial bliss, jubilation, and the body has rendered the Christian mystical tradition a useful resource for contemporary-and especially psychoanalytic-theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. This course will look both to the past and the present in order to explore the workings of pre- and postmodern desire and to draw connections between Christian mysticism and theories and practices of sex. Working across historical periods, we will read exemplary pieces of Christian mystical literature, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary literature that draws from the medieval past.