Undergraduate

This course is dedicated to a slow reading of two of Melville’s novels, roughly among his first and last works. We will explore how neither is a very traditional novel, and how they verge into the terrain of other prose genres (travel literature, utopian narrative, satirical pastiche). Students will learn to think about the novel as a flexible form organized along several conceptual axes, although we will give a special emphasis to affects and how texts produce paradigms of emotivity through which to interpret the complexities of a world on the verge of globalization, the emergence of international forms of capitalism, and the more general fraying of nerves associated with the arrival of the so-called “modern” period. This course is appropriate to undergraduates of all levels interested in the study of literature, especially those invested in questions of form, close reading, and the connections between history and literature.

Religion, nation, race: as familiar as these terms and the categories they name may be, they prove strangely resistant to definition—especially when, as often happens, they are entangled with one another. This seminar course orients students in the busy field of contemporary theoretical writing on these categories and the myriad ways they mutually complicate one another. Our central texts will be two recent books addressing a pair of historically, culturally, and geographically disparate examples: Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (2021), on Hindu right-wing nationalism in contemporary India, and Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy (2018), on the figure of the non-Jewish other in late-ancient Jewish literature. These books will be supplemented by shorter texts by philosophers, religionists, literary theorists, political scientists, and anthropologists. The major assignment for this course (in lieu of a final paper) is the collaborative production of a critical lexicon of keywords for the study of religion, nation, and race. Prerequisite: completion of a Social Sciences core sequence.

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as “cute” or “adorable”) has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today’s conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called “Pink Globalization”. With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

This course explores twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and cinematic works from the countries of North Africa. We will focus in particular on the region of Northwestern Africa known as the Maghreb—encompassing Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Situated at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, the Maghreb has a layered colonial past culminating in France’s brutal occupation of the region through the 1960s. Inflected by this colonial history, Maghrebi studies tends to privilege Francophone works while overlooking the region’s rich Arabic and indigenous traditions. Understanding the Maghreb as both a geopolitical as well as an imagined space, our course materials reflect the region’s diverse cultural histories and practices. We will consider the Maghreb’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism in dialogue with broader questions of cultural imperialism, orientalism, decolonization, and globalization. Fictional and cinematic works will be paired with relevant historical and theoretical readings. In light of the recent ‘Arab Spring’ catapulted by the Tunisian uprising in January 2011, we will also touch on contemporary social and political happenings in the region.

This course introduces methods of study in Comparative Literature. We will take up interdisciplinary approaches, including translation and critical theory. Students will develop and deepen their skills in close reading and the comparative analysis of text and art forms.  

“The story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multiculturalist of narratives.”

—Barbara Johnson

“Moses fails to enter Canaan, not because his life is too short, but because it is a human life.”

—Franz Kafka

The biblical figure of Moses has furnished a diverse range of interpreters—from the early Rabbis, to Black abolitionist activists in the antebellum U.S., to mid-20th century German authors challenging Nazism—with a powerful exemplar of the potential of emancipation and the meaning of national identity. At the same time, the sheer number of interpretations and retellings of the story of Moses and the Exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egypt suggests the contradictions and ambiguities which persistently haunt those political projects. In this discussion-based seminar course, we’ll reflect on both of these aspects of the Exodus story as it is told and retold in modernity. Our journey begins with the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy as well as early rabbinic and Christian exegesis before moving on to more recent representations and interpretations. These include visual artworks (Michelangelo, Chagall); music (Schoenberg, African American spiritual songs); Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent blockbuster The Ten Commandments; Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and a response to Freud by Edward Said; and literary writings by Yehuda Amichai, Shulamith Hareven, Frances E. W. Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Mabanckou, Thomas Mann, and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. The course thus serves as an introduction to comparative methodologies for cultural studies: diachronic, transcultural, and intermedial. Supplementary readings include scholarship by authors like Daniel Boyarin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Barbara Johnson, Albert Raboteau, and Michael Walzer. All readings are available in translation, but students with reading knowledge of Hebrew, German, or French are welcome to read certain texts in the original languages. Prerequisite: At least one quarter of any Humanities Core sequence.

The Book of Ruth offers the most elaborate tale of a woman to be found in the Bible, but even this relatively detailed account is astonishingly laconic. The Book of Ruth is not really a book. It is only four chapters long – more of a short story, or a very short story, than a book. And yet, despite its ellipses, Ruth’s cryptic tale is remarkable for its capacity to provide, with but few vignettes, a vibrant portrait of one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible. The first part of this course will be devoted to the biblical text itself. We will consider literary and feminist readings of the Book of Ruth while exploring broader issues of biblical poetics. Special attention will be given to questions of migration – to different accounts of the Book of Ruth as a paradigmatic tale of a migrant woman. The second part of the course will be devoted to the reception of the Book of Ruth – from the Midrash and the Zohar to modern literature. Among the modern and contemporary writers to be considered:  S. Y. Agnon, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and Michal Ben-Naftali. The discussion will also entail an exploration of adaptations of the Book of Ruth in art – from Nicholas Poussin to Adi Nes.

A resurgence of contemporary life writing has been characterized by the terms “autotheory” and “autofiction.” These terms point to ways in which contemporary life writing complicates narrative presentations of selfhood by inflecting autobiography through generically estranged kinds of writing, theory and fiction. Narrative exposition may be further complicated by issues of non-monolingualism and gender insecurity that invite non-narrative exploration within the presentation of a life project. In this course we will examine contemporary exemplars of autotheory and autofiction in light of exemplars from earlier phases of modernity. Readings will include: Fernando Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, Robert Glück, Lyn Hejinian, Clarice Lispector, Rachel Cusk, Cecilia Vicuña, Paul Preciado, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Raquel Salas-Rivera. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to discuss texts in French and Spanish in the original language. 

This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. Speculative works frequently reimagine the past and present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. We will also consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to studying subgenres—such as Afrofuturism—we will explore speculative fiction as a critical mode of reading that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. 

Diasporic Narratives and Memories: Designing a New Concept for a Multi-Ethnic Museum of Belarusian Emigration This course project takes the instability of Belarusian identity as an advantage for creating a new model of multi-ethnic, open emigrant community with a potential of cooperative democratic integration into a larger multi-ethnic landscape of Chicago. This project's relevance goes beyond the Chicago community, offering a model of multi-ethnic integration for building a civil society in the Belarusian homeland. The course will involve theoretical readings in the studies of diaspora, training in oral histories gathering provided by the Chicago History Museum, and weekly field trips to the diasporic museums in Chicago. We will analyze these museums' curatorial and narrative concepts in order to build upon their strengths and to avoid their weaknesses. This course is part of IFK's Experimental Capstone (XCAP) program for students interested in building upon their experience by adding practice, impact, and influence as important dimensions of their undergraduate work.