Undergraduate

What happens when postmodern fiction refuses to stay post? What if the most radical act of postmodernism is embracing history? Pamuk's novels reimagine the past in ways that refuse to settle for the fragmented, chaotic world we are told to expect. This course explores a selection of key works by Nobel Prize-winning author Pamuk, including his modernist novel The New Life and his postmodern masterpieces such as The White Castle, My Name is Red, and A Strangeness in My Mind. How does Pamuk use Istanbul in his work? Does it function merely as a setting, or does it take on the role of a character, with its history, contradictions, and politics reshaping the narrative? We will also engage with selections from Pamuk's essays on literary craft and his memoir Istanbul to better understand his layered relationship with this complex city. Pamuk's works offer a nuanced exploration of East and West, confronting the legacy of Orientalism while subverting postmodern conventions. How does he reframe techniques like metafiction, unreliable narrators, or nonlinear time to explore memory, identity, and the restless nature of modernity? We will also trace the evolution of Pamuk's style and examine how his growing global audience influences his self-presentation as a writer.

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.

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.

For various reasons, short stories have been among the most popular genres in literature. They have also been among the most translated. In this class we will read short stories from all over the world, and from various time periods. From early fables from collections like the Sanskrit Pañcatantra and Arabian Nights we will discuss how translation played a role in the transmission of these tales across linguistic traditions. Entering the modern period, we will discuss how short stories confront questions of Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Gender, Sexuality, Religion, the Climate Crisis etc. We will be guided in our inquiry by classic theorists of the genre like Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James and Vladimir Popp. Authors to be read include well known figures like Lev Tolstoy, María de Zayas, Anton Chekhov and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as lesser known figures such as Manto, Stefan Grabiński, Ambai, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, Premchand, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Chaso. All readings in English.

This course explores the representation of animality in Jewish literature and visual art. We will explore questions of animal ethics and ecological entanglement across a range of secular and religious genres, from folklore and poetry to Hasidic tales and rabbinic narrative. Writers will include Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Celan; artists will include Soutine, Chagall, Sarah Shor, and more. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.

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.  

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.