Autumn

Ever find yourself getting emotional over a painting or a song? Or staring at a piece of art and thinking, "What on earth am I looking at?" What does art do to us? Is there a "right" way to experience it? Why do we feel the need to talk about artworks we have seen? In college classes and beyond, we spend a great deal of time engaging with and responding to literary texts and artworks. This course offers a chance to step back and reflect on the nature of those encounters-how and why we respond the way we do, why those responses might matter, and how we go about sharing them with others. While we will occasionally turn to aesthetic philosophy, our main focus will be on developing our own concepts and categories for understanding these encounters-the very event of experiencing art, how those experiences linger, and how they shape our social interactions. Readings will include fiction where characters are profoundly transformed by their encounters with art, essays on paintings and museums, poems drawn from music, travelogues that chronicle sustained exposure to art, ekphrastic dialogues between visual arts and poetry, and creative literary translations. Authors may include Ben Lerner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alice Oswald, Anne Carson, Rachel Cusk, Ciaran Carson, Natasha Trethewey, and Mary Jo Salter.

A sprawling, digressive epic like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace may come first to mind when you think of the classic Russian novel. But Russian authors of the nineteenth century also produced short novels distinguished by their intellectual intensity and tight formal structure. An outlet for political speech under censorship or a passionate cry for recognition of the “spiteful man,” the Russian novella lay bare the injustices of late Russian imperial society. It also performed acute psychological analysis of the lovesick and brokenhearted. We will read novellas by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as the unjustly neglected Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who was one of the most popular authors of the 1870s in Russia. In seminar-style discussion, we will examine critical approaches to the novella form, the historical and cultural context of the period with a comparative look at European literature, and the “accursed questions” at the heart of the works themselves. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC). This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26.

This seminar will explore revolutionary erotics as both a modality and site of revolutionary thought and action. We will engage erotics and desire expansively as strategies for sensuous and affective agitation and political resistance, probing topics such spirituality and erotics, as well as erotics and its publics and politics. We will think about how erotics and desire have been central to revolutionary art and politics from anti-imperial and anti-fascist struggles to anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and queer worldbuilding, from revolutionary love to terrorist drag, and from the US to Yugoslavia and Iran. The seminar asks, how has the erotic excited revolutionary action-- challenging at once the taboo and commodity fetish—and how can erotics can help us reimagine agitation today?

The Berlin-based seminar will include studio visits with renown contemporary artists, a guided visit of the Gropiusbau’s current show: Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Punk, a performance by CHEAP collective, and a series of events and performances surrounding art week. Studio visits will include meetings with Berlin-based artists such as AA Bronson– co-founder of General Idea, Sophie Jung, Piotr Nathan, and Hito Steyerl.

While in Berlin students will also have time to explore their own research-based art project in consultation with the instructors, relevant archives, and museums. They will have an opportunity to present their work during the final class review and critique.

Helen of Troy has been a source of fascination for ancient and modern writers alike, serving as a symbol of unattainable beauty and destructive femininity. This course explores the various portrayals of Helen throughout Greco-Roman poetry (epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy) and prose (historiography, oratory), as well as contemporary literature and film. Taking into account the conventions and historical context of each genre we will examine her character as it relates to questions of gender, sexual power, agency, identity, embodiment and social structures. All readings will be in English and include but are not limited to selections from Homer, Euripides, Gorgias, Ovid, Seferis, Marlowe, and Walcott. 

How does one begin something new? What accounts for our ability to do things that have not not been done before or to create something new? And how can we draw on this fundamental human capacity in moments of crisis? This seminar turns to the Hebrew Bible to think through these timely questions. We will read the book of Genesis in different English translations, think of its reception through the millennia that have passed since it was created, and reflect on its relevance to our current moment of crisis. Featuring museum visits and visiting artists and poets, this seminar will explore human creativity and invites students to mobilize their own capacity to make new beginnings.

The Hollywood film studios were established in the same years that the Hittite language was deciphered, and so began two genre-building projects that have barely interacted.  What do the ancient annals of the king’s military exploits have in common with Westerns like Stagecoach and The Searchers?  Can we read the story of a murdered Hittite prince—who would have been the future pharaoh of Egypt—as a film noir, like The Maltese Falcon?  Is a mythological text about a missing deity a better example of Hollywood film style than the musical Singin’ in the Rain?  In the first course in the history of the world to compare Late Bronze Age Hittite texts and classic Hollywood genre films, we will endeavor to understand what makes a genre recognizable across time, culture, and medium.  Topics we will explore include storytelling through text and image, reception, literary and film style, adaptations, and what makes a “classic”.  We will dive into Hittite texts in translation, watch Hollywood films, and consult literary and film theory.

This course examines the long history of queer love poetry, from the ancient world to postmodernism. Its readings are particularly interested in how modernists claimed literary lineages of queer poetics, queered social practices and communal literary spaces, and reinvented verse forms to reflect queer eros. We will study works from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Greek, and several other languages. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.  

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.