Autumn

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)

This course investigates the shifting relations between Hebrew/Israeli literature and culture and Zionism as a political project, ideology, myth, and power structure. We will investigate multiple forms of cultural articulation, from built environment, to popular culture, to culture as a set of practices that govern everyday life, while devoting special attention to poetry – an institution valorized by classical secularist Zionism yet one often seen as standing in tension with Zionism’s contemporary religious-nationalist forms. What role has Hebrew culture played within the Zionist project, as bearer, expression, reflection, or refraction of nationalist ideology or myth? What are the relationships between culture’s putative forms of autonomy and forms of dissent, resistance, or alternative political vision in Israel and Palestine? How might this connect to Mizrachi and other ‘minority’ identities, and the roles of Palestinians as cultural producers within Israeli frames? What is to be learned about secular nationalism, Jewish secularism, post-secularism, religiosity, and political theology particularly in an era of what seems to be the rising hegemony of expressly religious Zionism.

This course explores the genre of the strange, weird, bizarre and wonderous in literary works from around the world and across various time periods. In contrast to the voyeuristic and expected othering of the ‘exotic’, the course interrogates the strange as an aesthetic mode that estranges the reader and disturbs and upends our familiar and predictable worlds. Theorists have explored art’s ability to unsettle our automatized perception, interrogating our relationship to reality, the way we know things, and the basis on which we make assumptions. This course will trace how specific literary forms (like magical-realism, fantasy, sci-fi, miracle literature, comedy/dark comedy, and even scripture) evoke wonder and a sense of the strange. We will explore how these genres mystify and make strange things like the individual, society, modernity, the nation-state, the secular, economy, and more to unearth the myth-making inherent in processes of world-building, as well as in narrative. We will see ghosts in court, hallucinating nation-states, dead narrators, animated-inanimate objects as we move into the world of dreams, madness, and the supernatural in literary works from Iceland, Iran, Palestine, Japan, Egypt and more.

Human transformation into animals (and into wolves in particular) is a recurring trope in many cultures’ storytelling. Authors have used the story device to explore the nature of humans and animals, human fear and vulnerability, psychological problems and mental illness, gender and sexuality, social/racial hierarchy, marginalization, identity, and our own capacity for violence and savagery. In this course we will examine werewolves in literature and film from several cultures (French, English, German, Finnish, Blackfoot, Japanese) in English translation, primarily from the late 20th century onward. We will focus on how the aforementioned themes are used and developed in each work and the overarching patterns of werewolf stories. Students will write a final analytical paper or produce a creative project.