Autumn

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.

Picture a tête-à-tête between Seyh Galip (1757-1799), a mystic poet and leader of a Sufi order in Istanbul, and Mary Robinson (1757-1800), otherwise known as “the English Sappho,” a prolific Romantic poet and actress renowned for Shakespearean roles. We'll dive into their narrative poems on love: Galip’s masnavi Love and Beauty breathes new life into rhyming couplets, and Robinson’s “Sappho and Phaeon” contributes to the revival of the sonnet sequence, with both poets writing at historical crossroads. As the Ottoman Empire undertakes structural modernization efforts amidst decline, England expands its colonial outreach while contending with the legacies of the American and French Revolutions. We will analyze how these poets navigate the delicate balance between tradition and innovation, with a fundamental inquiry into their use of ornamentation and excess. Coleridge’s quip, “she overloads everything,” nods to Robinson’s affiliation with the “Della Cruscans,” while Galip’s opulent works reflect the so-called “Indian style.” What draws poets, or anyone, to such ornate expressive techniques? We'll ponder these questions, exploring their intersections with gendered, cultural, and political realms. In doing so, we might just stumble upon intriguing theories to explain the eventual rise of symbolist movements in modern art.

Religions, like all cultural phenomena, are akin to organic beings: they change, grow and adapt, absorb and assimilate what they encounter, become transformed constantly in relation to challenges and opportunities – and sometimes react against them. This course will focus on one example of religious-cultural-philosophical adaptation and change through a study of the medieval translation of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works into Hebrew during the 12th-15th centuries. We will focus on the translations themselves and translation technique, but principally on what was translated and why, when and where, by whom and for whom. All this with an added emphasis on the result: how did Judaism and Jewish culture change through translation – in all its forms – during the high middle ages.

This interdisciplinary course will synthesize ethnographic and literary discourses to consider the ways in which the culture of the Jewish “shtetl,” the small towns and villages in eastern Europe where Jewish culture thrived for nearly a millennium, has been represented in the United States after the Holocaust, from the 1940s to the present day. We will read a wide variety of materials within the field of anthropology as well as Jewish literatures and cultures to tease out the concept of “salvage poetics” or a literary poetics that has been forged in popular attempts to bridge dramatically different historical moments, different geographic locations, and different cultures across the abyss of the Holocaust. 

Is there an American Jewish literature? At the heart of this question is a reckoning with what constitutes American Jewish experience. Literary expression has played an outsized role in the way that American Jews view themselves, exploring a vocabulary and an idiom of immigration and religion, of ethnic identity and of political consciousness. In this class we will study a selection of the fiction, poetry, essays and films of American Jewish experience with an eye towards the varieties of American-Jewish experience and the role of literature in forging that experience.

The 19th century enslaved scholar Omar Ibn Said opens his autobiography with the words: “I cannot write my life.” This seminar takes this starting point –the thick of chattel slavery, mercantile capitalism, and colonial violence – to investigate literary productions by racialized others dispersed in and by the so-called era of modernity. We will complicate what constitutes the modernity and how Islam, perhaps more than any other tradition, has been configured as its inverse. In doing so, we will read works ranging from poetry, novels, short stories, comics, and memoirs as they relate to encounters and engagements particularly with Islam as a religious tradition, colonialism, industrialization, and nationalism, even as global understandings of tradition, genre, and form are being contested and rapidly changing. In addition to these primary sources, we will theoretically situate these works within larger discussions of racecraft, oral transmission and culture, “folk” vs. “high” literature, Orientalism, politics, gender, sexuality, and identity. We will look at this is articulated in diasporic literary forms written within – and sometimes for - the imperial core. Through in-class discussions, readings, and a final paper, students will strengthen their global literacy, demonstrate knowledge of global historical trends, analyze the shifting and even contradictory interpretations of the role of religion in racial formations, all while identifying, critiquing, and assessing these key course themes within our primary source material.

This course offers a close reading of Giambattista Vico’s seminal work, New Science (1744), which aimed to challenge prevailing notions regarding the fundamental principles of humanity. Often dubbed the “last Renaissance man” or a representative of the “Counter-Enlightenment,” Vico rejected the detached rationalism of his time as he set out to recover the attitude and emotions relevant to the humanities in contrast to the natural sciences. His inquiry revolves around the connection between the factum or what is “made” – anything resulting from human skills (literature, art, law, institutions, etc.) – and the verum or God-begotten truth. What kind of epistemology and interpretive methodologies arise when we turn to Vico, Descartes’s scourge? In our own dissatisfaction with rational empiricism, Vico’s alternative unfolds as an epic exploration through time, guiding us to witness primitive humans uttering their first word, partake in Noah’s ark journey, and retrace the origins of writing and the foundation of civilizations.

Arguably the most debated political theorist of all time due to The Prince, Machiavelli genuinely aspired to be remembered for his creative prowess. He explored various literary genres, such as short stories, dialogues, satirical poetry, letter writing, and, notably, theater, where he demonstrated mastery with The Mandrake, an exemplary Renaissance comedy. This course aims to reintegrate these two aspects of Machiavelli: the serious politician and the facetious performer, a Janus-faced figure who serves as a precursor of both Hobbes and Montaigne. We will revive the image of this “Renaissance man,” and, through him, shed light on his era and fellow humanists by restoring their intellectual unity of prescription and laughter. Indeed, we will discover that Machiavelli encourages us not to take things, including him and ourselves, too seriously! Taught in English.

Taking the astonishing fiction of Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) as a starting point this course asks: how have realist fictions in general and socialist realism in particular been used to transform material and ideological realities? Can realism be revolutionary? Can it be dictated by the state? Grounded in historical context, our reading will venture into the afterlife and future of socialist realism. As philosophers across the world reinterpreted Platonov and other Soviet and socialist authors, what appeared to be gaps in intellectual and literary history now seem to be continuities of influence across borders. Reading Shklovsky, Lukács, Jameson, Timofeeva, Malabou and others, this course traces the new and transnational socialist realism. Topics include ideology, gender, community, colonialism and decolonization.

This course examines Hemispheric Studies approaches to the literatures and cultures of the Americas, which combines a commitment to comparatism with attention to the specificities of local contexts ranging from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to North America. Theories drawn from American Studies, Canadian Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Studies, and U.S. Latinx Studies will be explored in relation to literature written primarily but not exclusively in the 20th and 21st centuries by writers residing throughout the Americas. We’ll examine recent, innovative studies being published by contemporary scholars working with Hemispheric methods across several fields. We’ll also consider the politics of academic field formation, debating the theories and uses of a method that takes the American hemisphere as its primary frame yet does not take the U.S. as the default point of departure; and the conceptual and political limitations of such an approach. No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required. (20th/21st)