Courses

What happens when postmodern fiction refuses to stay post? What if the most radical act of postmodernism is embracing history? Pamuk's novels reimagine the past in ways that refuse to settle for the fragmented, chaotic world we are told to expect. This course explores a selection of key works by Nobel Prize-winning author Pamuk, including his modernist novel The New Life and his postmodern masterpieces such as The White Castle, My Name is Red, and A Strangeness in My Mind. How does Pamuk use Istanbul in his work? Does it function merely as a setting, or does it take on the role of a character, with its history, contradictions, and politics reshaping the narrative? We will also engage with selections from Pamuk's essays on literary craft and his memoir Istanbul to better understand his layered relationship with this complex city. Pamuk's works offer a nuanced exploration of East and West, confronting the legacy of Orientalism while subverting postmodern conventions. How does he reframe techniques like metafiction, unreliable narrators, or nonlinear time to explore memory, identity, and the restless nature of modernity? We will also trace the evolution of Pamuk's style and examine how his growing global audience influences his self-presentation as a writer.

In a present where humanity faces planetary challenges with an unprecedented urgency, the human form – what Marx calls our "genus-being" (Gattungswesen) – has become a focus for artistic production of all sorts. The thesis of the class is this: Contemporary art is an actualization of the human form that doesn't presuppose the form, doesn't take it for granted, but instead troubles the form and poses it as a question. The class considers presentations of the form in performance art (Tino Sehgal, Anne Imhof, Wu Tsang), sculpture (Kara Walker, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cecilia Vicuña), writing (Friederike Mayröcker, Layli Long Soldier, Tracie Morris), sound (Maria Chavez, Christina Kubisch, Samson Young), and painting (Michael Armitage, Tammy Nguyen, Mark Bradford). The class contextualizes these artists with theoretical work by Sylvia Wynter, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jane Bennett, Achille Mbembe, Eva Horn, and Emanuele Coccia. Readings and discussion in English. 

“Romanticism” refers to a broad movement in European thought and culture from the late-18th to the mid-19th century, a period of intense political, intellectual, and religious upheaval. Romantic writers are often portrayed as responding to the emerging “rationalization” of society by celebrating intuition, imagination, and nature. This image obscures a more interesting reality: Romantic writers drew from Enlightenment ideas, saw poetry and natural science as closely related, and held diverse views on issues of religion, reason, and art. They approached these topics rationally, as well as through dream visions, opium-eating, self-mythologizing, fragmentary texts, and pastoral lyrics.

In this survey course, we will read English and German Romantic writers to see how they grappled with these issues, and to pose our own questions. What is “nature,” and how should we relate to it? What roles do intuition, feeling, and imagination play in our understanding of ourselves, and the divine? Are secularization and rationalization forces to contend with, or preconditions for a new spiritual freedom? How do atheists, pantheists, Christian radicals, and orthodox believers fall under the same label, and to what extent did they really share artistic and spiritual aims? How did Romantics engage with non-European religious ideas? We will read, among others, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, de Quincey, and Novalis.

This course explores anticolonial worldbuilding through literature, film, art, and philosophy. It focuses on the aesthetic and political dimensions of anticolonial projects during the twentieth century as well as their impact on our current political moment. The mid-century was marked by imperial violence and political crises that fueled coalitional solidarity across Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and much of the Global South, that included anticolonial festivals, cultural exchanges, and transnational congresses.

We will consider how Pan-Arab, Pan-African, Non-Aligned/Global South, Marxist-Leninist, indigenous land rights, and racial justice movements mobilized class, race, gender, and language politics to critique colonial powers and envision a more just world. Engaging 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 Spirited Away reflect teachings of Japanese Buddhism and Shinto? Or what about Neon Genesis Evangelion? What can pop culture tell us about religion? In this course, we will consider the complex relations between religion and pop culture through Japanese anime and manga. Examples are drawn from a wide range of popular shows and series in these media and others to explore how they represent, borrow, invent, draw inspiration from, and participate in religious life in Japan. The course covers foundational aspects of Japanese religious life through non-traditional sources like Princess Mononoke, Attack on Titan, and Your Name. At the end of the course, students will be able to critically analyze intersections of anime and religion, drawing on their acquired knowledge of the great diversity of religious practices and viewpoints in Japan. Meanwhile, we will consider broader questions about religion, popular culture, and what it means to think of these two things together.

This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre’s tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine—as both thematic and aesthetic tropes—to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. 

Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials. 

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, reflecting the BA paper grade.

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.

The prison theme, as it develops both metaphorically in fictive narratives and more literally in personal accounts of imprisonment, has long been understood as one that emphasizes confinement and bodily restrictions. To be imprisoned is, at least partially, to be unable to move freely—this much seems clear. Literature then, in its innate ability to formulate narratives of movement, progression, and change, becomes an attractive and interesting recourse for those writing from and about the prison. How do literary forms interact with conditions of unfreedom? What does literature do to the experience of incarceration and vice versa? In this course, we will read foundational theorizations on imprisonment, punishment, and unfreedom, including but not limited to Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, and Achille Mbembe. Thinking alongside this theoretical apparatus, we will closely analyze prison writing, both fictive and testimonial. We will also consider carceral spaces more broadly in order to arrive at a capacious and thoughtful understanding of imprisonment and its related apparatuses. At the end of this course, students will articulate their understanding of how literature thinks through the carceral in a final project.

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 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.

Tolstoy’s novel is at once a national epic, a treatise on history, a spiritual meditation, and a masterpiece of realism. This course presents a close reading of one of the world’s great novels, and of the criticism that has been devoted to it, including landmark works by Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Isaiah Berlin, and George Steiner. (B, G)

This course provides a survey of the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural, and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. Especially important for our examination will be the exchange of film techniques, practices, and cultures in an international context. We will also pursue questions related to the historiography of the cinema, and examine early attempts to theorize and account for the cinema as an artistic and social phenomenon.

This course offers a close reading of Giambattista Vico’s seminal work, New Science (1744), which aimed to challenge prevailing notions regarding the fundamental principles of humanity. Often dubbed the “last Renaissance man” or a representative of the “Counter-Enlightenment,” Vico rejected the detached rationalism of his time as he set out to recover the attitude and emotions relevant to the humanities in contrast to the natural sciences. His inquiry revolves around the connection between the factum or what is “made” – anything resulting from human skills (literature, art, law, institutions, etc.) – and the verum or God-begotten truth. What kind of epistemology and interpretive methodologies arise when we turn to Vico, Descartes’s scourge? In our own dissatisfaction with rational empiricism, Vico’s alternative unfolds as an epic exploration through time, guiding us to witness primitive humans uttering their first word, partake in Noah’s ark journey, and retrace the origins of writing and the foundation of civilizations.

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What makes it possible for the imagined communities called nations to command the emotional attachments that they do? This course considers some possible answers to Benedict Anderson's question on the basis of material from the Balkans. We will examine the transformation of the scenario of paradise, loss, and redemption into a template for a national identity narrative through which South East European nations retell their Ottoman past. With the help of Žižek's theory of the subject as constituted by trauma and Kant's notion of the sublime, we will contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity.

This course is a combined research seminar and curatorial practicum with students co-curating an exhibition of artists’ books. 

Following World War II, visual artists took up the book as an artistic medium, experimenting with and expanding the essential components of a medium that had remained unchanged for centuries. The results defied all expectations about traditional understandings of what constitutes a book, including the primacy of text and the use of paper, pages, and binding. This class will consider how books became visual and material objects to be viewed rather than read; made from modern materials such as plastics, concrete, or newspaper and in sizes as small as a square inch or as large as an over-life-sized wood construction; featuring unusual objects such as a sack of flour, a display shelf, or a comic book with stenciled holes; or prompting readers to actions with urban performance instructions or do-it-yourself watercolor kits. 

Drawing on (U)Chicago collections and a recently gifted private collection, students will work on a fall 2027 exhibition in the Regenstein Library’s gallery, including researching artists, visiting local collections, selecting artists’ books, assessing conservation needs, writing object and section labels, and designing layout.

This course will examine the themes of exile, migration and diaspora in a variety of literary texts from the late 20th and early 21st centuries in dialogue with recent cultural theoretical work. The texts to be studied will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and films from three sets of locations: authors of South Asian (Indian and Sri Lankan) origin in North America and Europe; writers of Turkish, Japanese and Indian origin in Germany; and Latin American-born writers writing from abroad, in addition to Johny Pitts' ethnographic book Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2020). Besides charting the theoretical coordinates of exile, migration and diaspora studies, we will explore questions such as: How has the accelerated movement of people, ideas, goods, and cultural practices affected literary authors of different racial, class, gender, religious, and national origins? What is the meaning of belonging, home and homeland? How do authors relate to concepts of the nation, national identity, and nationalism? What happens to the physical body, affect, love and intimacy, the family, and intergenerational relations in migration? What are the narrative and lyric patterns and tropes of writing between worlds? Is there a "poetics of dislocation"? How do writers handle issues of language, the mother tongue and bi- or multilingualism? All texts will be read in English translation, but we will also make translation a central issue of discussion by examining original texts whenever possible. 

This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term "queer" and explore the contours of the field's major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory's emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis and later developments in the twenty-first century, especially the emergence of queer and trans of color critique. The course aims to place these theoretical texts within the context of the intellectual, activist, and artistic and literary communities out of which they emerged. Major topics to discuss will include queer grief and melancholia; coalition and community; desire, devotion, and affective attachment; queer theory's ritual conventions; modes of queer critique; assumptions about queer theory's secularity; and the significance, challenge, and critiques of queer and trans joy.

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 offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and Freud's readers. We will pay particular attention to the way that Freud's theories of the mind translate into theories of the social world and of history. Taking its cue from the "beyond" of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the course will pay especial attention to the development of the death drive and explore its relationship to a constellation of psychoanalytic terms including but not limited to instincts and the drive, narcissism, melancholia, masochism, and religion/illusion. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions-especially conditions marked by political, ecological, economic, and public health crises?

What texts and contexts constitute American Jewish experience? In this class, we will consider the birth of a unique Jewish ethnicity in America, with a deep dive into the literature, the theology, and the politics of American Judaism from the turn of the 20th century to the post-October 7th moment we now inhabit. Beginning with reflections on the protestantization of American Judaism, special attention will be paid to the intersection of ethnic and religious experience in contemporary American Jewish life. With a foray into the boom in American Jewish Passover Haggadahs, we will explore the unique shape of the seemingly oxymoronic American Jewish religious secularism. We will consider Jews, Civil Rights, neo-Hassidism, and the counterculture and read ethnographies of American Jewish immigrant communities and aging urban synagogues. Debates on the silence of the American Jewish community after the Holocaust will be set against the backdrop of the quest to reconstruct East European Jewish life during that same period. Finally, we will explore the powerful growth of Diasporism in American Jewish culture today.

This course is a proseminar in critical theory for first and second year PhD students in Comparative Literature, offering in depth study of key areas in theoretical research on a rotating basis. This year the focus areas are poetics of cruelty, affect theory, and critical future studies.