Undergraduate

Cinema, videogames, and VR: all moving-image media, which have at times exerted multi-directional aesthetic influences on each other. This course will investigate the raw materials and basic forms at the disposal of artists working in and across these media, with a special focus on horror as a genre. Along with fundamental questions regarding the social, psychological, and political uses (and abuses) of horror as a genre, this course will also look at how horror works across a variety of media. In what way do the possibilities available to game developers differ from those available to filmmakers, and vice versa? How are space, time, and action presented and segmented differently across moving images (cinema), interactive moving images (games), and fully-immersive virtual environments (VR)? How do techniques ranging from psychological identification to jump scares work in each medium, and what aesthetic effects are open to one that are not open to the other? Course materials will include horror cinema, horror games (video and otherwise), VR experiences, and written horror literature.

In 1836, at the age of 26, Margaret Fuller began teaching the great works of German Romanticism to students at Amos Alcott’s radically progressive Temple School in Boston. Fuller’s passion for the German Romantics and their propagation in America is representative of the profound importance that the “American Transcendentalists” (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller) attributed to German literature and its potential to shape American culture and values. In this course, we will explore the elective affinities between German Romanticism and its American counterpart, tracing the ways in which the two traditions mutually illuminate each other. Each unit will pair one major German and one major American text or artwork. Themes / pairings include: gender and mythology in Novalis’ fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Fuller’s fairy tales; spiritual landscapes in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the Hudson River School; slavery and abolition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience;” exemplarity and individualism in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Nietzsche’s “Schopenhauer as Educator.”

This course will focus upon the two most important Renaissance Christian epics, Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata/Jerusalem Delivered 1581) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), as well as selections from Marco Girolamo Vida’s influential Biblical epic, the Christiad (1535). We will examine these Renaissance epics as ambitious efforts to revive an ancient and pagan form in order to depict Christian and self-consciously modern visions. We will consider how Renaissance epic poets imitate and emulate both their classical models (primarily Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and Judeo-Christian sources; seek to forge an elevated and appropriate language for epic; espouse new visions of the human, the heroic, and gender relations; and adumbrate distinctively modern national, imperial, and global ambitions. All non-English texts will be read in translation, but students who can read Latin or Italian will be encouraged to read the originals.

This experimental course—part seminar and part practicum—brings together Berlin-based artist collective Slavs and Tatars and Prof. Leah Feldman (Comparative Literature). It explores material and conceptual approaches to radical reading. In the practicum students will design a creative project informed by the seminar’s exploration of histories, sites, and genres of radical reading (including revolutionary books and manifestos, children’s primers and comics).

The term “deconstruction” has entered popular parlance as a synonym for just about any form of dissenting comment or debunking. But in the more specific sense, deconstruction is a technique of discourse analysis that questions the assumptions involved in making sense of things (even the assumptions on which itself relies). This course will retrace the history of deconstruction (how did it arise?), situate it among other critical options of the 1960s-80s (what is distinctive about it?), and offer readings of some of its best-known texts (how did its proponents perform it?). Now that it is more or less recognizable and accepted as a critical idiom, what tasks remain for deconstruction today? 

A familiar account of modernism in the arts sees a turn from Baroque conventions of allegory (abstract ideas clothed in fragmentary arbitrary pictorial or linguistic signs) to a revolutionary romantic combination of image and content in the symbol, which had a late flowering in the Symbolist movement around 1900. Whether the development is celebrated (Coleridge, New Criticism) or deplored (Benjamin, Paul de Man), few question this historical and explanatory schema, investigate its application outside poetry, or ask what role allegory has played in the art of the ostensibly anti-allegorical nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this course, we will consider neoclassical, romantic, and modern views of allegory, symbolism, and meaning in art.

As part of the post-colonial turn, magic realism is a hybrid mode of narration rejects, overcomes, and offers an alternative to the colonial, Enlightenment episteme. It mobilizes the imaginations and narrative modes of pre-colonial pasts in the articulation of new, post-colonial, often national, selves. In this course, we will unpack some captivating narratives from Southeast Europe in which the visions of the pre-modern mythic worlds emerge as the magic, transcendent core of the modern nations. We will indulge in the sheer enjoyment of the brilliance of these text while focusing on the paradoxes they embody - for example, the simultaneous rejection and reliance on the realist mode, the colonial worldview, and its civilizational hierarchies and models.

The tormented, obsessed, and sadistic characters of Dostoevsky's novels posed a challenge to positivism and reason too scandalous and compelling to be ignored. The novels inspired some of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the fields of religion, philosophy, psychology and literary theory. We will read two of Dostoevsky's philosophically challenging novels alongside works by these critics and philosophers, including Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Levinas. While exploring their ideas about faith and unbelief, madness and reason, violence and torture, society and history, we will also inquire into the relationships among literature, philosophy and biography and examine the processes of influence and adaptation.

Founded on ideals of universalism, pluralism and secularism, France and the United States are fraught with contradictions when it comes to race and religion. Which religions are accepted? Which religions are suspect? Is it minority that defines the difference-or only particular kinds of minority, such as race? To untangle the intersections of race and religion, we will examine Blackness and Jewishness as they are represented in political polemic, fiction, memoir and philosophy from the 1960s to the present. This course introduces students to the foundational concepts for the critical study of race and religion through exploring the constructions of Black and Jewish identity. We will examine the contradictions of secular politics and culture in France and the United States, and discuss how religion, race, and intersecting categories such as gender and sexuality, can become tools of critique. Readings include works by thinkers such as Césaire, Fanon, Memmi, Levinas and Foucault, along with literary classics by Nella Larsen and Sarah Kofman, and contemporary critical essays by Judith Butler, Christina Sharpe and Talal Asad. Throughout this course, we will examine how the concepts of race and religion are key components of the political, philosophical and ethical projects of these authors. No prerequisite knowledge of critical theory, or this historical period, is expected.

The self who writes their life is a remarkably protean form of religious narrative. Autobiographical texts aim to be representative and at the same time are almost always idiosyncratic: they want to instruct, and they must disclose to do so. The course begins by considering two outstanding examples of the genre, Augustine's Confessions (ca. 400 C.E.) and Malcolm X's Autobiography (1965), before proceeding to examine a range of autobiographical narratives whose relation to religion is somewhat less paradigmatic. Our reading of these texts will be structured around four of the genre's major themes: conversion, confession, memory, and identity. Possible authors to be considered include Mahmoud Darwish, Frederick Douglass, and Maggie Nelson, among many others. For the writing component of the course, students will have the option of producing either 1) a series of short, analytic papers on a selected autobiography concerning each of the course themes, or 2) of composing one chapter of their own autobiography.