Undergraduate

This workshop will focus on literature as a tool to explore tragic and traumatic events in history, such as wars, genocides, and natural disasters, among others. Through different examples, we will review different poetic and narrative forms that delve into historical and personal memory, remembering, reflecting, and analyzing events that have marked the lives of individuals, communities, and nations. We will discuss how writing can be an effective way of coping with the painful burden of history, helping to heal the wounds of the past, as well as to reflect on the ways in which literature can serve as a way of preserving the memory of the victims of these tragic events, allowing their stories to be told, remembered and honored in order to bring us a little closer to reparation and justice.

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 gender insecurity and interwoven practices of reading and writing that invite non-narrative, meta-narrative, or intertextual exploration in 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 and pre-modernity in European and East Asian literature. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to discuss texts in French and Chinese in the original language.

Picture a tête-à-tête between Seyh Galip (1757-1799), a mystic poet and leader of a Sufi order in Istanbul, and Mary Robinson (1757-1800), otherwise known as “the English Sappho,” a prolific Romantic poet and actress renowned for Shakespearean roles. We'll dive into their narrative poems on love: Galip’s masnavi Love and Beauty breathes new life into rhyming couplets, and Robinson’s “Sappho and Phaeon” contributes to the revival of the sonnet sequence, with both poets writing at historical crossroads. As the Ottoman Empire undertakes structural modernization efforts amidst decline, England expands its colonial outreach while contending with the legacies of the American and French Revolutions. We will analyze how these poets navigate the delicate balance between tradition and innovation, with a fundamental inquiry into their use of ornamentation and excess. Coleridge’s quip, “she overloads everything,” nods to Robinson’s affiliation with the “Della Cruscans,” while Galip’s opulent works reflect the so-called “Indian style.” What draws poets, or anyone, to such ornate expressive techniques? We'll ponder these questions, exploring their intersections with gendered, cultural, and political realms. In doing so, we might just stumble upon intriguing theories to explain the eventual rise of symbolist movements in modern art.

This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to the history of the relationship between China and the Soviet Union, surveying both important historical sources and representative scholarship on the topic. For the Chinese side, we cover both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China. Moreover, we extend our timeline beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union to inquire how the historical Sino-Soviet alliance is being perceived in the present day. Our focus will primarily be on state-level politics and highbrow artistic-literary production, but we will also pay attention to the social history of the population living in the expansive border regions and the biography of important individuals. Students are expected to bring their own expertise and interest to the class by presenting on an individualized research topic, in addition to writing two short papers. All readings are in English.

Religions, like all cultural phenomena, are akin to organic beings: they change, grow and adapt, absorb and assimilate what they encounter, become transformed constantly in relation to challenges and opportunities – and sometimes react against them. This course will focus on one example of religious-cultural-philosophical adaptation and change through a study of the medieval translation of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works into Hebrew during the 12th-15th centuries. We will focus on the translations themselves and translation technique, but principally on what was translated and why, when and where, by whom and for whom. All this with an added emphasis on the result: how did Judaism and Jewish culture change through translation – in all its forms – during the high middle ages.

The Fortunoff Archive at Yale, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem are just a few of the repositories of audiovisual Holocaust testimonies throughout the world. As these testimonies come to be all that remains of the generations of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, how are researchers approaching them? In this class we will explore four distinct discourses and their approaches to testimony: Historical, Literary, Cinematic, and Photographic. Our final projects will be an analysis of a testimony from one of the above-named archives that incorporates all four perspectives. 

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.

This course focuses on expressions of mourning and explores how in response to catastrophic experiences and histories of colonialism, writers and filmmakers narrate loss and trauma. We will investigate how these authors renegotiate their identities, how they fashion national and political imaginaries, and how they envision alternative futures in their diverse bodies of work. Engaging with an array of literary and cinematic depictions, our aim will be to examine and compare the rich landscape of voices that animate African, Native American, and Palestinian experiences and representations. Together, we will analyze source materials related to the themes of violence, memory, gender, race, and trauma. Through our weekly assignments and discussions, we will seek to determine the tropes and aesthetic tools that ignite modes of storytelling, and to answer: how do writers and artists employ aesthetic form to portray catastrophes? How might expressions of grief also be mobilized for resistance and struggle?

Our class will be organized into three modules, touching upon African, Native American, and Palestinian prose, poetry, and film alongside theoretical works in memory and trauma studies. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to develop their own complex evaluations of these narratives—and recognize how comparisons through artistic expression can be a powerful tool for amplifying a multiplicity of stories about mourning and defiance.

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.

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.