Undergraduate

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the aesthetic and political dimensions of anticolonial projects during the twentieth century as well as their impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was marked by imperial violence and political crises that fueled coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and much of the Global South, that included anticolonial festivals, cultural exchanges, and transnational congresses.

We will consider how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, race, gender, and language politics to critique colonial powers and envision a more just world. Engaging anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

The prison theme, as it develops both metaphorically in fictive narratives and more literally in personal accounts of imprisonment, has long been understood as one that emphasizes confinement and bodily restrictions. To be imprisoned is, at least partially, to be unable to move freely—this much seems clear. Literature then, in its innate ability to formulate narratives of movement, progression, and change, becomes an attractive and interesting recourse for those writing from and about the prison. How do literary forms interact with conditions of unfreedom? What does literature do to the experience of incarceration and vice versa? In this course, we will read foundational theorizations on imprisonment, punishment, and unfreedom, including but not limited to Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, and Achille Mbembe. Thinking alongside this theoretical apparatus, we will closely analyze prison writing, both fictive and testimonial. We will also consider carceral spaces more broadly in order to arrive at a capacious and thoughtful understanding of imprisonment and its related apparatuses. At the end of this course, students will articulate their understanding of how literature thinks through the carceral in a final project.

Printing is one of the truly transformative communication technologies, but in the fifteenth century it was by no means certain it would succeed or even survive. One thing that we will learn in this course, is that new media are always accompanied by a deluge of optimistic prophecy, and this was the case with printing just as much as with the internet. New technologies do not destroy what went before: instead they take their place in an ever-richer communication nexus. This course will examine all aspects of this fragile trade, authors and readers, booksellers, printers and publishers, along with the numerous strategies pursued by members of the book trade to find their audience. It will engage with how the new tools at the disposal of book historians are transforming our understanding of the early modern print world. It takes the story through to the new technologies of the last two centuries, and how the knowledge revolution made possible through new technology and the provision of universal educational transformed the book world.

Caribbean literature is having a moment. NPR reported in 2023 that "this region has long been punching above its weight on the international literary scene." We will read Safiya Sinclair's (Jamaica/U.S.) How to Say Babylon, a memoir of self-discovery after being raised by an authoritarian father; a new translation of Mayra Santos Febres' (Puerto Rico) collection of migration poems, Boat People; Myriam Chancy's novel What Storm, What Thunder (Haiti/Canada/U.S.), set after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; and poems from Shivanee Ramlochan (Trinidad & Tobago) and Dionne Brand (Canada/T&T). Our class will also include trips to literary events and visiting speakers.

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how "world histories" may be hidden within "word histories," as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will regularly carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own. (20th/21st)

This course examines the diverse ways in which love, sex, and desire are represented in Middle Eastern literatures from the seventh century through the modern period. With a focus on primary source readings (in English translation), we will explore love as a concept, affect, and practice as it pertains to all kinds of relationships: familial, romantic, pederastic, political—even the relationship between believers and God. We will pay special attention to how literary representations of love and sex are informed not only by genre conventions but also medical, legal, and philosophical discourses and consider the ways in which these texts can—and cannot—shed light on actual social practices and lived realities. Throughout our investigations, we will remain cognizant of how the Orient has been erotically fantasized in the Euro-American imaginary, while also noting how widespread modern notions of love and sex often fail to fully account for the modes of eroticism portrayed in the works that we will study.

This course explores the origins and evolution of the Italian American community in Chicago, examining its local presence and artistic, cinematic, and literary representations in the context of a global history of the twentieth century. For example, we will compare the current absence of Christopher Columbus statues in Little Italy to the permanence of the Balbo monument, an ancient column gifted to the city by the Italian fascist regime in 1933. These case studies will allow us to engage with broader issues, such as local and national Italian-American identity and how it is represented artistically. The course will be structured in three units: Past, Present, and Fiction. Past: Where did Italian Americans come from? What are the racial implications of this migrant community's existence in the United States? How does the local history of Chicago’s Italian Americans intertwine with the global history of the 20th century? Present: How does the city show traces of Italian American history? When and how have Italians assimilated? What does it mean for a migrant group to be assimilated? Fiction: What role have fictional representations of Italian Americans played in their assimilation? In what ways do representations of the home-country and of the migrant experience differ in texts by Italian authors and ones by Italian American authors? As a Chicago Studies class, we will also engage deeply with Chicago's urban landscape and local heritage sites.

Weird fiction is a form of (mostly) short fiction that emerged as a distinctive kind of writing in the late nineteenth century: strange landscapes, uncanny presences, historical beings encountered where they ought not to be. We will read representative works by some of the major figures: Algernon Blackwood, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Harriet Spofford. To frame our guiding question — what is so weird about weird fiction? — we will also read short fiction by significant precursors in European and American Romanticism: Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The course will explore continuities of thought between the German language tradition of the Robinsonade and Anglo-American postapocalyptic fiction. At present, our syllabus proposes beginning with Robinson Crusoe itself, with the following weeks dedicated to Arno Schimdt’s Dark Mirrors, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, and Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene. We will also dedicate a week to Sophocles’ Philoctetes, viewed in the Romantic period as an ancient precursor of Defoe’s work, and to the video game The Alters, possibly in conjunction with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, or Octavia Butler’s Parable books. We will explore how the theme of recovered human capabilities interacts in these texts with ideas of mortalism, finitude, and attachment to place. All readings will be in English.

What does it mean to call a book, a film, or an artwork “immersive”? What do we gain when we lose ourselves in a work of art, and what is it that we lose? Whereas Diderot lauded the feeling of “delicious repose” elicited from pastoral paintings, literary theorist Victor Shklovsky claimed that art exists “to return sensation to life, to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony.” Are these reactions opposed or related? What are the dangers of this kind of attraction in the age of mass spectacle or of its use for the ends of an autocratic or fascist ideology? In this seminar, we will examine literary, film and media theories of immersion in international perspective. Case studies in world cinema and literature, from 19th century second-person narratives to recent VR experiences. Students will introduce works from their own area of specialization over the course of the term. Advanced undergraduates may enroll with permission of the instructor.