Undergraduate

This course examines the literature, history, and theory of global anarchist movements, as well as “proto-anarchist” writers and stateless movements with anarchist resonances. Theorists and historians will include Mohamed Abdou, Paul Avrich, Luisa Capetillo, Emma Goldman, Maia Ramnath, and Dean Spade. Particular attention will be given to decolonial thought, religious anarchism, fugitivity and migration, and gender and race in anarchist literature. The course will include field trips on Chicago anarchist history. 

In this seminar, we will read short stories, ethnography, philosophy, and cultural/art criticism that obsesses over one ecological thing e.g., petroleum, axolotl, pecans, palm trees, or fungi. We will study how a seemingly simple living or non-living object can be a guide, source, muse, and catalyst for social, political, and cultural knowledge. How do thinkers mix scholarly critique with creative/generative practices like autobiography, ancestral storytelling, and speculative fiction to express the politics of the earth? In a final research paper intersecting literary art, activism, and critique, students will reflect on this question to frame their own ecological obsessions. The course literature will focus on themes like deep time, extractivism, futurity, the nature-culture divide, and the relationships between human and nonhuman life. We will close-read representative modern and contemporary works of ecological obsessions from Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl” to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

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 introduces the methods and practices that form the field of Comparative Literature. Students will read major critical texts from the middle of the twentieth century to the present, gain theoretical literacy, and hone their skills of close reading, contextual framing, and comparative analysis of texts and other art forms. Broad themes to be explored include: world literature, translation, Structuralism/Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis and literature.

Human transformation into animals (and into wolves in particular) is a recurring trope in many cultures’ storytelling. Authors have used the story device to explore the nature of humans and animals, human fear and vulnerability, psychological problems and mental illness, gender and sexuality, social/racial hierarchy, marginalization, identity, and our own capacity for violence and savagery. In this course we will examine werewolves in literature and film from several cultures (French, English, German, Finnish, Blackfoot, Japanese) in English translation, primarily from the late 20th century onward. We will focus on how the aforementioned themes are used and developed in each work and the overarching patterns of werewolf stories. Students will write a final analytical paper or produce a creative project.

Non-human animals are ubiquitous in India’s literary and visual cultures, whether as characters in epics, fables and moral tale; as objects of study by court scholars and painters; as pets and hunting companions; as part of the Hindu pantheon (such as the elephant-headed god Ganapathi, or the monkey god Hanuman) or as symbols and metaphors. This course explores the complex interactions among human and non-human animals and the realms of   animals/mortals/immortals through examples from India’s literatures, Indian painting and film - across times, places, spaces and religious traditions. It will conclude with contemporary debates on animal activism and provide a non-Western entry point into the field of animal studies. Naisargi Dave’s Indifference will be a key text for us throughout the quarter. 

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the role of the cultural Cold War in shaping anticolonial aesthetics and politics during the twentieth century as well as its impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was characterized by an expansion of anticolonial festivals, exchanges, and congresses and marked by political crises and coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Soviet and US imperial expansion, and the May 1968 student protests. We will explore how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, gender, and language politics. Exploring anticolonial literature, film, and art across a multilingual and transnational archive we will ask how socialist and speculative realisms, engaged literature, third cinema, agitprop, and other aesthetic movements generated powerful internationalist imaginations and networks of resistance.

How does war affect art? Over the past decade, Ukrainian artists have been raising this question in their work, alongside questions about personal and collective identity, authority and authenticity, language and imperial violence, epistemic injustice and decolonization. In this course, we will examine art, literature, and film arising out of the war-triggered crises, whether political, aesthetic, ethical, or existential, focusing on the artists’ creative engagement with different kinds of documentary and source material, experiments with form, and intermodal and inter-genre dialogue. Readings may include work by Stanislav Aseyev, Yevgenia Belorusets, Andrey Kurkov, Olena Stiazhkina, Natalya Vorozhbit, and Serhiy Zhadan; as well as films, cartoons, and a range of audiovisual sources. Students can expect to engage with the newest cutting-edge work from Ukraine; to develop individual research projects in collaboration with their peers; and to write a final paper.

This course will examine the tradition of spiritual exercises from antiquity to the early modern period. Spiritual exercises were at the core of classical paideia, the regimen of self-formation designed and promoted by ancient philosophers, orators, and other pedagogues. As Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault have demonstrated, ancient philosophy first and foremost has to be understood as a “way of life,” as a set of techniques and practices for shaping the self according to wisdom. It was not until philosophy’s critical turn with Kant that it shed its practical dimension and became a “theoretical” discipline. Early Christianity, stylizing itself as the “true philosophy,” eagerly adopted the ancient spiritual exercises and retooled them for its salvational ends. Throughout the middle ages and early modern period spiritual exercises and meditative techniques informed a host of religious, cultural, and artistic practices and media such as prayer and devotional reading, religious art and poetry, but also theatrical performances and musical works. We will focus on individual exercises like the meditation, the examination of conscience, the discernment of spirits, the application of senses, prosoche (attention), consolation, contemplation, etc., and discuss authors such as Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, John Cassian, Augustine, Bonaventure, Ignatius, Descartes, and others.