Undergraduate

This course introduces models of comparative analysis across national literatures, genres, and media. The readings pair primary texts with theoretical texts, each pair addressing issues of interdisciplinary comparison. They include Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”; Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” Kafka’s “Josephine the Mouse Singer,” Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller; Victor Segalen’s Stèles; Fenollosa and Pound’s “The Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry” and Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei; Mérimée, “Carmen,” Bizet, Carmen, and the film adaptation U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (South Africa, 2005); Gorky’s and Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths; Molière, Tartuffe, Dostoevsky, The Village Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants, and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”; Gogol, The Overcoat, and Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.”

This workshop begins in Autumn Quarter and continues through the middle of Spring Quarter. While the BA workshop meets in all three quarters, it counts as a one-quarter course credit. Students may register for the course in any of the three quarters of their fourth year. A grade for the course is assigned in the Spring Quarter, based partly on participation in the workshop and partly on the quality of the BA paper. Attendance at each class section required.

Comparative Mythology has been one of the most controversial disciplines in the Humanities. Interdisciplinarity at its finest and most erratic, different definitions of Comparative Mythology have found their roots in linguistics, psychology, the history of religions, structuralism, and many more hybrid fields. Haunted by the question of “What is Myth?” and equally concerned with the toolkits that allow us to make sense of myths, it has been the source of constant fascination as an important part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history. Its ambitions cut across boundaries of time, geography, and languages. Its results have inspired revolutions in the academy with critical political consequences, building and destroying nationalistic essentialisms, forging communities and tearing them apart. In this course we will review its complex history and attempt to assert its role as an important catalyst of academic debate by focusing on the manner in which myth and poetry—two often inscrutable and difficult-to-define categories of cultural production—so often appear to work alongside each other in order to probe at ineffable mysteries whilst developing dazzling ideological programs that can grant us a purchase on the myriad ways in which poets, scribes, scholars, religious leaders, political agitators, and university professors have attempted to make sense of the world.

We will encounter myths from around the world. Readings will be drawn from Homer, Latin poetry, the Vedic Hymns, Norse poetry, Anatolian and Mesopotamian texts (such as Gilgamesh), Native American traditions, Chinese stories, and North African myths.

The course will consider translation -- both theory and practice -- in relation to queer studies and gender and women's studies. Authors will include Naomi Seidman, Monique Balbuena, Yevgeniy Fiks, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kate Briggs, and others. For the final essay, students may write a research paper or translation project.

Recent work in history and anthropology has stressed the need for deeper models of origins and relations, perhaps even dispensing with “prehistory” as an alternative to more familiar forms of historical self-understanding. This class will look at how the ancestral in literature imagines such deep forms of historical belonging, staging modes of revenance whose cryptic vitalism challenges the phenomenological basis of new materialism. Readings will include Martin Heidegger, Ronald Hutton, Ethan Kleinberg, Quentin Meillassoux, Hans Ruin, and Anna Tsing, poetry by Li He and Osip Mandelstam, weird fiction by H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and futurology by Cicely Hamilton, Jean Hegland, Sarah Moss, and Will Self.

This workshop begins in Autumn Quarter and continues through the middle of Spring Quarter. While the BA workshop meets in all three quarters, it counts as a one-quarter course credit. Students may register for the course in any of the three quarters of their fourth year. A grade for the course is assigned in the Spring Quarter, based partly on participation in the workshop and partly on the quality of the BA paper. Attendance at each class section required.

This seminar will examine the intersection of culture and Zionism. We will begin by considering the historical formation referred to as "cultural Zionism" and examining its ideological underpinnings. Other topics include: Hebrew revival, the role of culture in the Zionist revolution, Israeli culture as Zionist culture. Readings include: Ahad Haam, Haim Nahman Bialik, S.Y. Agnon, Orly Kastel-Blum, Edward Said, Benjamin Harshav.  

What kind of empire was the Soviet Union? Focusing on the central idea of Eurasia, we will explore how discourses of gender, sexuality and ethnicity operated under the multinational empire. How did communism shape the state's regulation of the bodies of its citizens? How did genres from the realist novel to experimental film challenge a cohesive patriarchal, Russophone vision of Soviet Eurasia? We will examine how writers and filmmakers in the Caucasus and Central Asia answered Soviet Orientalist imaginaries, working through an interdisciplinary archive drawing literature and film from the Soviet colonial 'periphery' in the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as writings about the hybrid conception of Eurasia across linguistics, anthropology, and geography. 

This course traces the intellectual genealogies of the rise of a Global New Right in relation to the contexts of late capitalist neoliberalism, the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as the rise of social media. The course will explore the intertwining political and intellectual histories of the Russian Eurasianist movement, Hungarian Jobbik, the American Traditional Workers Party, the French GRECE, Greek Golden Dawn, and others through their published essays, blogs, vlogs and social media. Perhaps most importantly, the course asks: can we use f-word (fascism) to describe this problem? In order to pose this question we will explore the aesthetic concerns of the New Right in relation to postmodern theory, and the affective politics of nationalism. This course thus frames the rise of a global new right interdisciplinary and comparatively as a historical, geopolitical and aesthetic problem.

This course will investigate the complex relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze for whose benefit the nations stage their quest for identity and their aspirations for recognition. We will focus on the problems of Orientalism, Balkanism and nesting orientalisms, as well as on self-mythologization and self-exoticization. We will also think about differing models of masculinity, and of the figure of the gypsy as a metaphor for the national self in relation to the West. The course will conclude by considering the role that the imperative to belong to Western Europe played in the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s.