Comparative Literature 1

Comparative Literature
(http://www.brown.edu/academics/education/) and the advisor in
Comparative Literature as early as possible (preferably by Semester
V). In accordance with University policy, double concentrators are allowed
a maximum overlap of two courses between concentrations.
Comparative literature is the study of literature and other cultural
expressions across linguistic and cultural boundaries. At Brown, the Track 1: Concentration in Comparative
Department of Comparative Literature is distinct in its conviction that Literature in two languages
literary research and instruction must be international in character. The
department performs a role similar to that of the study of international Requirements
relations, but works with languages and artistic traditions, so as
to understand cultures "from the inside." Both the department’s COLT 1210 Introduction to the Theory of Literature 1
undergraduate and graduate programs are held to be among the finest in TWO literature courses taught above the 1000-level in the 2
the country. first chosen literature. (Courses may be taken in any literature
For additional information, please visit the department's website: https:// department, and may fall under such courses codes as COLT,
complit.brown.edu/ ENGL, FREN, HISP, CHIN, RUSS, GRMN, etc.)
TWO literature courses taught above the 1000-level in the 2
Comparative Literature Concentration second chosen literature. (Courses may be taken in any
literature department, and may fall under such courses codes as
Requirements COLT, ENGL, FREN, HISP, CHIN, RUSS, GRMN, etc.)
The concentration in Comparative Literature enables students to study FIVE electives. Courses taught in Comparative Literature and 5
an illustrative range of literary topics and to develop a focused critical other literature courses at any level (below or above 1000) may
understanding of how cultures differ from one another and what those satisfy this requirement.
differences mean. Our courses provide opportunities to engage with Total Credits 10
literary works across linguistic and cultural boundaries, exploring the
traditions and innovations of the literatures of the world. Examples of courses that may fulfill the requirements,
above, include but are not limited to the following. Students
In the spirit of Brown’s Open Curriculum, a concentration in Comparative are encouraged to discuss class choices with their advisor.
Literature affords great academic freedom. Advanced literature courses
from any literature department at Brown count for concentration credit. Any COLT 0510C The World of Lyric Poetry
language —ancient or modern—supported at Brown may form part of a COLT 0510F Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, The Men
Comparative Literature concentration program. All students take a course and the Myths
in literary theory and have the opportunity to complete a senior essay. COLT 0510K The 1001 Nights
There are three concentration tracks and requirements: COLT 0510P Reading the Renaissance
• Track 1: Comparative Literature in Two Languages COLT 0610D Rites of Passage
• Track 2: Comparative Literature in Three Languages COLT 0610Q Before Wikipedia
• Track 3: Literary Translation COLT 0710C Introduction to Scandinavian Literature
Genre and Period Requirements for all concentrators: COLT 0710I New Worlds: Reading Spaces and Places
• One course in each literary genre (poetry, narrative, and drama/film) in Colonial Latin America
• Courses must cover at least three different historical periods (such as, COLT 0710N A Comparative Introduction to the
Antiquity; Middle Ages; Renaissance/Early Modern; Enlightenment; Literatures of the Americas
Modern: 19th-21st centuries). COLT 0710X Fan Fiction
COLT 0710Z Comedy from Athens to Hollywood
Prerequisites in languages: COLT 0711H The Arabic Novel
Students must demonstrate proficiency in the languages of their selected COLT 0711O Off the Beaten Path: The Diversity of
literatures. We recommend that prerequisite(s) for taking 1000-level Modern Japanese Literature
courses in their languages be completed by Semester V.
COLT 0711Q Writing Love in Korean Literature
Students working in non-European languages may be allowed more
COLT 0810H How Not to Be a Hero
latitude; be sure to be sure to consult a concentration advisor about
constructing an individualized plan. COLT 0810I Tales and Talemakers of the Non-Western
World
Selecting literature courses in your language COLT 0810L The Pursuit of Happiness
areas: COLT 0810M Uncanny Tales: Narratives of Repetition
and Interruption
Readings must normally be in the original language. If English is one of
your languages, courses need to be devoted chiefly to literature originally COLT 0811I Classical Mythology and the Western
written in English. Tradition
COLT 0812O Reading Art in Literature
Transfer of Credits: COLT 0812W The Epic Tradition: from Homer to Milton
Two courses per semester of study abroad may be applied to the COLT 1210 Introduction to the Theory of Literature
concentration, up to a total of four courses (for two semesters abroad). A COLT 1310G Silk Road Fictions
maximum of five courses from external venues (study abroad; transfer
COLT 1310J The Arab Renaissance
credits from other institutions, including summer study) may be applied to
the concentration. COLT 1310N Global Modernism and Crisis
COLT 1410S Classical Tragedy
Joint or Double Concentration: COLT 1420F Fantastic and Existentialist Literatures of
Joint or double concentration programs may also be arranged. Students Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil
may also combine a concentration in Comparative Literature with a COLT 1420O Proust, Joyce and Faulkner
teaching certificate in English or a modern language. A student interested COLT 1421V Modernisms North and South: Ulysses in
in such a program should consult the advisor in the Education Department Dublin, Paris, and Buenos Aires

Comparative Literature 1
2 Comparative Literature

COLT 1422L The Modernist Novel: Alienation and Examples of courses that may fulfill the requirements,
Narration above, include but are not limited to the following. Students
COLT 1422M Reading the Short Story are encouraged to discuss class choices with their advisor.
COLT 1430B Art and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early COLT 0510C The World of Lyric Poetry
Modern Literature COLT 0510F Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, The Men
COLT 1430D Critical Approaches to Chinese Poetry and the Myths
COLT 1430I Poetry of Europe: Montale, Celan, Hill COLT 0510K The 1001 Nights
COLT 1431B Modern Arabic Poetry COLT 0510P Reading the Renaissance
COLT 1431C Poets, Poetry, and Politics COLT 0610D Rites of Passage
COLT 1431F Reading Modernist Poetry COLT 0610Q Before Wikipedia
COLT 1440P Nationalism and Transnationalism in Film COLT 0710C Introduction to Scandinavian Literature
and Fiction COLT 0710I New Worlds: Reading Spaces and Places
COLT 1440U The Listener (Literature, Theory, Film) in Colonial Latin America
COLT 1440X Shéhérazades : Depicting the "Orientale" COLT 0710N A Comparative Introduction to the
in Modern French Culture Literatures of the Americas
COLT 1610B Irony COLT 0710X Fan Fiction
COLT 1610V The Promise of Being: Heidegger for COLT 0710Z Comedy from Athens to Hollywood
Beginners COLT 0711H The Arabic Novel
COLT 1710C Literary Translation Workshop COLT 0711O Off the Beaten Path: The Diversity of
COLT 1710D Exercises in Literary Translation Modern Japanese Literature
COLT 1810G Fiction and History COLT 0711Q Writing Love in Korean Literature
COLT 1810N Freud: Writer and Reader COLT 0810H How Not to Be a Hero
COLT 1810P Literature and Medicine COLT 0810I Tales and Talemakers of the Non-Western
COLT 1811L Travel, Tourism, Trafficking through the World
Ages COLT 0810L The Pursuit of Happiness
COLT 1812A Literatures of Immigration COLT 0810M Uncanny Tales: Narratives of Repetition
COLT 1813M Making a List and Interruption
COLT 0811I Classical Mythology and the Western
COLT 1813N Early Modern Women's Writing
Tradition
COLT 1814S The Balkans, Europe's Other?: Literature,
COLT 0812O Reading Art in Literature
Film, History
COLT 0812W The Epic Tradition: from Homer to Milton
COLT 1814U Politics of Reading
COLT 1210 Introduction to the Theory of Literature
COLT 1815U Encountering Monsters in Comparative
Literature COLT 1310G Silk Road Fictions
COLT 2720C Literary Translation COLT 1310J The Arab Renaissance
COLT 2720D Translation: Theory and Practice COLT 1310N Global Modernism and Crisis
COLT 2820A New Directions for Comparative Literature COLT 1410S Classical Tragedy
COLT 2820M Discourses of the Senses COLT 1420F Fantastic and Existentialist Literatures of
COLT 2821S Historical Form Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil
COLT 1420O Proust, Joyce and Faulkner
Track 2: Concentration in Comparative COLT 1421V Modernisms North and South: Ulysses in
Literature in three languages Dublin, Paris, and Buenos Aires
COLT 1422L The Modernist Novel: Alienation and
Requirements Narration
COLT 1422M Reading the Short Story
COLT 1210 Introduction to the Theory of Literature 1
COLT 1430B Art and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early
TWO literature courses taught above the 1000-level in the 2
Modern Literature
first chosen literature. (Courses may be taken in any literature
department, and may fall under such courses codes as COLT, COLT 1430D Critical Approaches to Chinese Poetry
ENGL, FREN, HISP, CHIN, RUSS, GRMN, etc.) COLT 1430I Poetry of Europe: Montale, Celan, Hill
TWO literature courses taught above the 1000-level in the 2 COLT 1431B Modern Arabic Poetry
second chosen literature. (Courses may be taken in any COLT 1431C Poets, Poetry, and Politics
literature department, and may fall under such courses codes as COLT 1431F Reading Modernist Poetry
COLT, ENGL, FREN, HISP, CHIN, RUSS, GRMN, etc.)
COLT 1440P Nationalism and Transnationalism in Film
TWO literature courses taught above the 1000-level in the 2
and Fiction
third chosen literature. (Courses may be taken in any literature
department, and may fall under such courses codes as COLT, COLT 1440U The Listener (Literature, Theory, Film)
ENGL, FREN, HISP, CHIN, RUSS, GRMN, etc.) COLT 1440X Shéhérazades : Depicting the "Orientale"
THREE electives. Courses taught in Comparative Literature and 3 in Modern French Culture
other literature courses at any level (below or above 1000) may COLT 1610B Irony
satisfy this requirement. COLT 1610V The Promise of Being: Heidegger for
Total Credits 10 Beginners
COLT 1710C Literary Translation Workshop
COLT 1710D Exercises in Literary Translation

2 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 3

COLT 1810G Fiction and History COLT 0711H The Arabic Novel
COLT 1810N Freud: Writer and Reader COLT 0711O Off the Beaten Path: The Diversity of
COLT 1810P Literature and Medicine Modern Japanese Literature
COLT 1811L Travel, Tourism, Trafficking through the COLT 0711Q Writing Love in Korean Literature
Ages COLT 0810H How Not to Be a Hero
COLT 1812A Literatures of Immigration COLT 0810I Tales and Talemakers of the Non-Western
COLT 1813M Making a List World
COLT 1813N Early Modern Women's Writing COLT 0810L The Pursuit of Happiness
COLT 1814S The Balkans, Europe's Other?: Literature, COLT 0810M Uncanny Tales: Narratives of Repetition
Film, History and Interruption
COLT 1814U Politics of Reading COLT 0811I Classical Mythology and the Western
COLT 1815F Memory, Commemoration, Testimony Tradition
COLT 0812O Reading Art in Literature
COLT 1815U Encountering Monsters in Comparative
Literature COLT 0812W The Epic Tradition: from Homer to Milton
COLT 2720C Literary Translation COLT 1210 Introduction to the Theory of Literature
COLT 2720D Translation: Theory and Practice COLT 1310G Silk Road Fictions
COLT 2820A New Directions for Comparative Literature COLT 1310J The Arab Renaissance
COLT 2820M Discourses of the Senses COLT 1310N Global Modernism and Crisis
COLT 2821S Historical Form COLT 1410S Classical Tragedy
COLT 1420F Fantastic and Existentialist Literatures of
Track 3: Concentration in Literary Translation Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil
Requirements COLT 1420O Proust, Joyce and Faulkner
COLT 1421V Modernisms North and South: Ulysses in
COLT 1210 Introduction to the Theory of Literature 1 Dublin, Paris, and Buenos Aires
Literary Translation (COLT 1710) 1 COLT 1422L The Modernist Novel: Alienation and
At least one course in linguistics (including COLT 2720 Literary 1 Narration
Translation and history of the language courses). This may be COLT 1422M Reading the Short Story
taken at any level. COLT 1430B Art and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early
At least one workshop in Literary Arts. This may be taken at any 1 Modern Literature
level. COLT 1430D Critical Approaches to Chinese Poetry
TWO literature courses taught above the 1000-level in the 2 COLT 1430I Poetry of Europe: Montale, Celan, Hill
first chosen literature. (Courses may be taken in any literature
department, and may fall under such courses codes as COLT, COLT 1431B Modern Arabic Poetry
ENGL, FREN, HISP, CHIN, RUSS, GRMN, etc.) COLT 1431C Poets, Poetry, and Politics
TWO literature courses taught above the 1000-level in the 2 COLT 1431F Reading Modernist Poetry
second chosen literature. (Courses may be taken in any COLT 1440P Nationalism and Transnationalism in Film
literature department, and may fall under such courses codes as and Fiction
COLT, ENGL, FREN, HISP, CHIN, RUSS, GRMN, etc.) COLT 1440U The Listener (Literature, Theory, Film)
TWO electives. Courses taught in Comparative Literature and 2 COLT 1440X Shéhérazades : Depicting the "Orientale"
other literature courses at any level (below or above 1000) may in Modern French Culture
satisfy this requirement.
COLT 1610B Irony
A senior thesis, eligible for Honors, consisting of substantial
COLT 1610V The Promise of Being: Heidegger for
work in translation with a critical introduction. Completing a
thesis is required of all Track 3 students but does not guarantee Beginners
departmental honors. COLT 1710C Literary Translation Workshop
Total Credits 10 COLT 1710D Exercises in Literary Translation
COLT 1810G Fiction and History
Examples of courses that may fulfill the requirements,
COLT 1810N Freud: Writer and Reader
above, include but are not limited to the following. Students
are encouraged to discuss class choices with their advisor. COLT 1810P Literature and Medicine
COLT 0510C The World of Lyric Poetry COLT 1811L Travel, Tourism, Trafficking through the
Ages
COLT 0510F Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, The Men
and the Myths COLT 1812A Literatures of Immigration
COLT 0510K The 1001 Nights COLT 1813M Making a List
COLT 0510P Reading the Renaissance COLT 1813N Early Modern Women's Writing
COLT 0610D Rites of Passage COLT 1814S The Balkans, Europe's Other?: Literature,
Film, History
COLT 0610Q Before Wikipedia
COLT 1814U Politics of Reading
COLT 0710C Introduction to Scandinavian Literature
COLT 1815F Memory, Commemoration, Testimony
COLT 0710I New Worlds: Reading Spaces and Places
in Colonial Latin America COLT 1815U Encountering Monsters in Comparative
Literature
COLT 0710N A Comparative Introduction to the
Literatures of the Americas COLT 2720C Literary Translation
COLT 0710X Fan Fiction COLT 2720D Translation: Theory and Practice
COLT 0710Z Comedy from Athens to Hollywood COLT 2820A New Directions for Comparative Literature

Comparative Literature 3
4 Comparative Literature

COLT 2820M Discourses of the Senses COLT 0510C. The World of Lyric Poetry.
COLT 2821S Historical Form Lyric poetry is the prime mode for conveying emotion in many cultures,
from ancient times to the present day. This course will survey the variety
Notes: of forms and themes from the earliest texts from Greece, Rome, China
and Japan, then the glories of the Renaissance and the Tang Dynasty,
Honors in Comparative Literature then move to the challenges for lyric expression in the modern world.
Enrollment limited to 19 first year studens.
Students in all tracks may earn honors in the concentration by successfully
completing a thesis that is granted honors upon submission. Completing COLT 0510D. Poetry and Music.
a thesis in any track does not guarantee departmental honors. Honors are Explores the collaboration between poets and composers in the twentieth
granted upon the recommendation of the two thesis readers. century. It will primarily focus on Modern Greek composers (Hadjidakis,
Theodorakis, Lagios and others) and their collaboration with numerous
Tracks 1 & 2. Theses are analytical studies of literary topics, comparative
poets (Garcia Lorca, Gatsos, Eluard, Elytis, Neruda, Ritsos and others).
in nature, based upon research, and usually between 50 and 100 pages.
These works will also be examined in depth from a literary and theoretical
They are usually composed of 3 chapters, with an introduction and a
perspective. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.
conclusion. Students are expected to choose a topic that involves work in
each of the literatures of their concentration in the original language. COLT 0510F. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, The Men and the Myths.
Track 3. Theses consist of a substantial work in translation with a critical Che Guevara and Fidel Castro are among the twentieth century’s most
introduction outlining the method used and specific problems encountered, iconic figures, thanks to their roles in the Cuban Revolution and in
and commenting on the history of the original work together with other anti-imperialist struggles across the globe. They are also among the
translations, if any. most divisive, eliciting passionate disapproval among some and strong
admiration among others. In this seminar, we will read Guevara and
(See detailed Guidelines for Honors Theses (http://www.brown.edu/ Castro’s speeches and writings alongside literary, visual and cinematic
academics/comparative-literature/undergraduate-program/honors- representations of them, paying particular attention to the ways in which
thesis/) in Comparative Literature on Departmental website). their lives and deaths have generated distinct interpretations, in Cuba and
Capstone option beyond. Open only to first-year students.
COLT 0510G. "The Grand Tour; or a Room with a View": Italy in the
Students in Tracks 1 & 2 not taking Honors are urged, but not required, to
Imagination of Others.
complete a senior essay, which may be less extensive in scope and length
than the Honors thesis but which should constitute an integration of some Italy has for many decades been the place to which people traveled in
order to both encounter something quite alien to their own identities and
aspect of their study.
yet a place where they were supposed to find themselves, indeed to
construct their proper selves. This course introduces students to some
Comparative Literature Graduate Program of the most important texts that describe this "grand tour." We will read
The department of Comparative Literature offers a graduate program texts (both literary and travelogues by Goethe, De Stael, Henry James,
leading to the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree. While doctoral Hawthorne, Freud, among others, as well as view films (such as "A Room
students may also earn the Master of Arts (A.M.) degree en route to the With a View:) - all in order to determine the ways in which Italy "means" for
Ph.D., the department does not admit students into a terminal Master's the cultural imagination of Western civilization. For first year students only.
degree program. COLT 0510I. Virgil and Milton.
For more information on admission and program requirements, please visit We will read the Aeneid and Paradise Lost with interpretive patience.
the following website: The study of fate, character, and poetics will be wedded to investigations
http://www.brown.edu/academics/gradschool/programs/comparative- of beauty, wonder, and nationhood. Enrollment limited to 19 first year
literature (http://www.brown.edu/academics/gradschool/programs/ students.
comparative-literature/) COLT 0510K. The 1001 Nights.
Explores the origins, performance, reception, adaptation, and translation of
Courses the 1001 Nights, one of the most beloved and influential story collections
COLT 0510A. Best-sellers. in world literature. We will spend the semester in the company of genies,
Study of seven novels published within the last decade that have enjoyed princes, liars, slaves, mass murderers, orientalists, and Walt Disney, and
broad success with reading publics in different places. What pleasures of will consider the Nights in the context of its various literary, artistic, and
thought and imagination do we derive from these books, and how can we cinematic afterlives.
express clearly our responses? What is the appeal of these best-sellers COLT 0510L. What is Tragedy?.
first to their home audience, then to readers in other social environments Introduction to tragedy. Readings may include Sophocles, Shakespeare,
and cultures? How may we reshape our own horizons of thought in order Hegel, Chekhov, Chan-wook Park, and Jia Zhangke. Enrollment limited to
to appreciate them? Students will be encouraged to develop their skills of 19 first year students.
literary analysis, interpretation, and critical discussion. Two lectures and
one discussion section per week. Several short papers, quizzes, and a COLT 0510M. Early Modern Selves: From Soliloquy to Self-Portrait.
final exam. We will study the early modern self through its manifestation in the
soliloquy (Shakespeare), philosophical treatise (Descartes), early modern
COLT 0510B. Caribbean Re-writes. poetry, and self-portraiture (Rembrandt). After examining Hamlet's "To be
Through close readings of canonical European texts and rewritings or not to be" speech and other Shakespearean soliloquies as moments
of them in the twentieth-century Caribbean, we explore the literary in which characters represent themselves in speech, we will turn to
possibilities and political implications of writing the old in a new language. Descartes' view of man’s essence as his thinking nature. We will then read
Readings include Columbus's diaries alongside Carpentier's The Harp and metaphysical poetry to understand the influence of religion on the early
the Shadow (Cuba); Shakespeare's Tempest with that of Aimé Cesaire modern self. Readings include Hamlet, Richard II and III, Taming of the
(Martinique); and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights alongside novels by Shrew, Discourse on Method, Meditations, and poetry by John Donne.
Jean Rhys (Dominica) and Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe).
COLT 0510N. Shakespeare (ENGL 0310A).
Interested students must register for ENGL 0310A.

4 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 5

COLT 0510O. Twentieth-Century Experiments. COLT 0610G. Literature and the American Presidency.
In this course, we will read some of the most experimental and We are accustomed to engaging the American presidency as a public
adventurous literature of the 20th century. Instead of understanding texts office approached through the prism of government, political science,
as mirrors of social reality, we will consider them as laboratories—spaces and the like. This course studies the presidency through a literary lens,
for testing out, working through, or mixing up new ideas, categories, and focusing on four presidents and three literary genres: epistolography
ways of seeing and feeling. We will pay special attention to 20th-century (J. Adams and Jefferson), biography (Washington) and literary analysis
international avant-garde movements, including Futurism, Dadaism, and (Lincoln). We will also study on video the inaugurals and farewells of
Surrealism, and we will explore the relation of the literary avant-garde to more recent presidents and, finally, examine non-traditional literary forms,
the avant-garde in painting, cinema, and music. such as pamphlets, songs, posters, broadsides, graphics, newspapers,
magazines, and original documents from various presidential elections.
COLT 0510P. Reading the Renaissance.
How do these works figure the renaissance as a cultural formation? COLT 0610H. Renaissance Epic.
Petrarch, Rime Sparse; Boccaccio, Decameron; Castiglione, Book of the Explores Renaissance attempts to renew, parody, and question the
Courtier; Erasmus, Praise of Folly; Thomas More, Utopia; Machiavelli, classical epic tradition. The study of poetics, narrative, and imagination will
Prince, Mandragola; Wyatt and Ronsard (poems), Spenser, Faerie Queen be wedded to investigations of beauty, wonder, and nationhood. Authors
and Shepheardes Calender, Cervantes, Don Quixote. will include Ariosto, Tasso, Ercilla, Spenser, Camões, du Bartas, and
Milton.
COLT 0510Q. How Poems See (ENGL 0100Q).
Interested students must register for ENGL 0100Q. COLT 0610I. Introduction to Cultural Studies.
We live in a cultural saturated with information. The messages we register,
COLT 0510R. War and the Arts: Guantanamo, Twenty Years On.
the meanings we deduce, and the knowledge upon which we ground our
In January 2002, the first captives in the so-called “War on Terror” were
actions and choices require critical examination if we are to engage as
flown to the Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for indefinite periods
thoughtful actors in our personal and civic lives. This class will encourage
of detention that for some lasted over twenty years. More than a century
students to reflect on their initial impressions of and reactions to various
earlier, in 1901, the Platt Amendment was signed into U.S. law, enabling
media and will give them critical tools to examine how formal and thematic
the lease “in perpetuity” that gives the U.S. military exclusive use of
strategies work to shape and elicit our sympathies, our desires, our fears,
the forty-square mile naval station, despite the Cuban government’s
and our beliefs. Focusing primarily on visual and written texts drawn from
objection. Participants in this seminar will assess the legal and political
popular culture--video, print, film, and Web sources--students will practice
arguments that have structured “Guantánamo” as an exceptional space,
their analytical skills by evaluating these texts in classroom discussions,
of grave concern to human rights advocates and scholars. At the same
several short writing assignments, and one longer essay. Reading the
time, however, and drawing on poetry, art and memoirs by detainees and
work of several cultural theorists, students will learn to analyze persuasive
military personnel at the base and by Cubans living near its border, we
argumentation through an attention to rhetorical and framing devices and
will consider an alternative Guantánamo of sympathies, solidarities and
to recognize and decipher visual cues, enabling them to interpret texts and
shared space.
images and to produce coherent critical positions of their own. This class
COLT 0610A. The Far Side of the Old World: Perspectives on Chinese will prepare participants for college courses that require them to process
Culture. knowledge and not simply acquire information.
A survey of traditional Chinese culture focusing on the major literary and
COLT 0610L. Murder Ink: Narratives of Crime, Discovery, and Identity.
artistic achievements of six major periods in Chinese history, including
Examines the narrative of detection, beginning with the great dramatic
philosophical texts, poetry, various forms of the fine arts, and vernacular
whodunit (and mystery of identity) Oedipus Rex. Literary texts which
fiction and drama. A broad range of primary materials will give the student
follow a trail of knowledge, whether to establish a fact (who killed Laius?)
greater insight and appreciation of Chinese culture in general and also
or reveal an identity (who is Oedipus?) follow in Sophocles' footsteps.
provide a foundation for further study of East Asia in other disciplines.
We read Sophocles' intellectual children. Readings include: Hamlet, The
COLT 0610C. Banned Books. Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Woman in White, and other classic
An examination of literary censorship in which we read various texts novels and plays. We also analyse seminal films of the genre, including
forbidden for putatively violating social, religious, and political norms in Laura and Vertigo. Will include the twentieth-century detective story, with
particular historical and cultural contexts. We also analyze the secondary particular attention to women writers and the genre of the female private
literature surrounding the banning of these ostensibly "dangerous" texts in eye.
order to theorize questions and assumptions about the power of art and
COLT 0610N. Being There: Bearing Witness in Modern Times (ENGL
the ironies generated by these debates.
0710F).
COLT 0610D. Rites of Passage. Interested students must register for ENGL 0710F.
Examines a seemingly universal theme-coming of age-by focusing on
COLT 0610O. The Death of the Subject in Twentieth and Twenty-first
texts from disparate periods and cultures. Proposes that notions of
Century Literature.
"growing up" are profoundly inflected by issues of class, gender and race,
Examines the condition of the subject in Western novels and plays
and that the literary representation of these matters changes drastically
written after 1945. Traditional markers of identity in works of literature are
over time. Texts from the Middle Ages to the present; authors drawn
being eroded by globalization, split families, the invasion of science in
from Chrétien de Troyes, Quevedo, Prévost, Balzac, Brontë, Twain,
genetics, and increased mobility. Signs of this crisis include loss of agency
Faulkner, Vesaas, Rhys, Satrapi and Foer. Enrollment limited to 19 first
and individuality, various pathologies including schizophrenia, and the
year students.
replacement of humans with clones. We will investigate the intricacies of
COLT 0610E. Crisis and Identity in Mexico, 1519-1968. the derailment of the subject and how literary form is affected in novels
Examines four moments of crisis/critical moments for the forging by Beckett, Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq,
of Mexican identity: the “Conquest” as viewed from both sides; the Chuck Palahniuk, and in plays by Caryl Churchill.
hegemonic 17th century; the Mexican Revolution as represented by
COLT 0610P. Stories and Storytelling.
diverse stakeholders; the "Mex-hippies" of the 1960s. We especially
An introduction to stories, how they are constructed, and how they are
explore how key literary, historical, and essayistic writings have dealt with
told. We will explore the role of storytellers in the creation of a story, the
Mexico's past and present, with trauma and transformation. Readings
idea of “plot,” the forms that stories take, and the category of fiction itself—
include works by Carlos Fuentes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Octavio
in essence, how and why stories are made, and made up. Our discussion
Paz, Juan Rulfo, and the indigenous Nican Mopohua on the Virgin of
will range from topics such as fictional forms, the acts of reading and of
Guadalupe. All in English. No prerequisites.
telling, the role of memory, and the invention of self, to questions of time
and duration. Texts examined will be drawn from a variety of genres,
periods, and cultures.

Comparative Literature 5
6 Comparative Literature

COLT 0610Q. Before Wikipedia. COLT 0611C. Literature and Judgment.

How did humans organize knowledge before Wikipedia? This course Investigates the intersections between acts of literature and acts of
explores the fascinating history of encyclopedic texts, archives, and judgment, between language and the law. How is literature to be judged,
databases in various cultural contexts. We consider issues of book history, when is it "good" or "bad"? Does literature lie, and if so, does it matter?
the classification of knowledge, and the obsession to collect, compile, and Does it hide a crime? And, in turn: does literature provide its own particular
document everything knowable and unknowable in both real and fictional kind of judgment, one that may make evident the very fictional status of
encyclopedias. the law? Readings span from the Bible to contemporary post-colonial
readings (Rousseau, Tolstoy, Zola, Freud, Kafka, Arendt, Benjamin, Henry
COLT 0610S. Literature and Knowledge.
James, Primo Levi, Coetzee, Sadegh Hedayat).
What is knowledge? How do we know what we know? We will read literary
texts concerned with these questions to consider how knowledge relates COLT 0710A. Women's Words: Writing in Medieval Europe and
to power, and how deception, stupidity, and mystification force us to Japan.
question what we know. Readings include Austen, Hawthorne, Melville, An introduction to women poets, dramatists, and prose writers from
Flaubert, James, and Schnitzler. medieval court cultures, with an emphasis on what these authors show us
about their educational, social, moral/spiritual environment and civilization.
COLT 0610T. Chinese Empire and Literature.
What did the pen or writing brush enable them to express and achieve?
This course explores ancient and modern approaches to empire and
How were they able to negotiate the gaps between a male classical literary
imperialism, focusing on China from the Qin (221-206 BCE) establishment
language and their own vernacular speech? Readings may include works
of unified empire through the Qing (1644-1911 CE) confrontation with
by Christine de Pizan, Dhuoda, Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen, Hrotsvitha,
the British and other European empires. Emphasis will be placed on the
Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Marie de France, Murasaki Shikibu,
relation between imperial expansion and literary production, and the role
Sei Shonagon, and Trotula plus shorter texts written by both men and
of Chinese and non-Chinese literature in representing China’s multilingual
women. Instructor permission required.
and multiethnic past. Texts include China’s most famous work of historical
literature, Sima Qian’s Shiji; poems, short stories, tomb sculptures, COLT 0710B. Very Short Poetry: From Tanka to Twitter.
contemporary film; as well as critical essays on empire, colonization, and Though implicit and explicit claims have been made for the novel as a
cross-cultural heritage. universal form, the novel does not match the very short poem in terms of
ubiquity across history and cultures. Reading a set of very short poems
COLT 0610U. Altered Cinema: The Cultural Politics of Film Revision
each week, we will move across ages and continents, from Greek and
(MCM 0901R).
Latin epigrams to the Japanese “haiku” and its precursors, from the early
Interested students must register for MCM 0901R.
modern sonnet to experiments with poetic constraints in the computer age.
COLT 0610V. Claims of Fiction (ENGL 0150X). Primary sources will be juxtaposed to touchstones of theory, neat ideas,
Interested students must register for ENGL 0150X. and provocative essays. All readings available in translation as well as in
COLT 0610W. Getting Emotional: Passionate Theories (ENGL 0500Q). the original.
Interested students must register for ENGL 0500Q. COLT 0710C. Introduction to Scandinavian Literature.
COLT 0610Y. Women’s Writing in the Arab World. An introduction to major works of Scandinavian writers, painters and
This course examines Arab women’s writing through the lenses of both filmmakers over the past 150 years. Figures include Kierkegaard, Ibsen,
Arabic and Western feminist theory and criticism. Beginning with a survey Strindberg, Munch, Hamsun, Josephson, Södergran, Lagerkvist, Vesaas,
of pre-modern female literary personae in Arabic (the elegist, the mystic, Cronqvist, Bergman, August and Vinterberg, as well as children's books by
the singing slave), we will then examine major figures in the early modern Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson.
feminist movement, modernist poetry, autobiography, film, and the novel. COLT 0710D. Inventing the Renaissance.
No Arabic required; supplemental Arabic section may be offered at The invention of the Renaissance as a cultural formation and as a part of
the discretion of the professor. Texts by Etel Adnan, Salwa Bakr, Hoda the western cultural imaginary. We will consider the so-called "discovery
Barakat, Assia Djebar, Nazik al-Mala’ika, Alifa Rifaat, Hanan al-Shaykh, of man," humanism and the recovery of the classical past, the production
Miral al-Tahawy, Fadwa Tuqan, Adania Shibli. Films by Moufida Tlatli, of scriptural identity or the "bibliographic ego," courtiership, the formation
Annemarie Jacir. of the early modern state and the discovery of the "new world" through
COLT 0610Z. Intersections of Race and Culture in the West. readings of major English and continental writers of the period.
This course will introduce students to ways in which knowledge, power COLT 0710E. Japanese Literature and Society: Historical Survey of
and race have been interrelated in understandings of culture and in Japanese Literature.
the writing and reception of literature. Beginning in antiquity, we will A reading of the major literary monuments, from early waka to Genji to
trace a history of political, ethnic, and social groups’ perceptions and the fiction of Ōe Kenzaburō. Surveys Japanese literary production from
categorizations of each other and of shifts in the definitions of “race” and the 8th century to the present, examining the formation of literary genres,
“culture” as concepts. We will then consider changing ideas of alliance, aesthetic values, and reading habits of successive eras in the context of
belonging and power, in the context of contemporary American and global political, social, and cultural development. No prerequisites.
politics. The course will draw from readings across various languages, and
COLT 0710F. Latin America: The French Connection.
from the work and lectures of several guest speakers.
Raises questions of intertexuality between French and Latin American
COLT 0611B. Global Detective Fiction. literature, focusing on how each represents the other. Beginning in the late
Though often marginalized as unserious or lowly “genre fiction,” the nineteenth century, questions aesthetic categories of the real, the surreal
detective plot has interested and influenced literary figures ranging from and the marvelous/magical real; and literary responses to World War II
Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon to Tzvetan Todorov and Frederic and the Dirty War, the 1968 student protests in Paris and Mexico City,
Jameson. In this course, we examine both the origins and the afterlives of feminist movements, and globalization.
the detective plot in fiction from around the world. We focus especially on
COLT 0710H. Mexican lettres, 1519-1968.
the figure of the detective as reader and the commentaries detective fiction
The course approaches the history of ideas in Mexico by examining four
offers on reading itself. After beginning with “classics” by Poe, Conan
critical moments/moments of crisis in the country's development. We focus
Doyle, Chesterton, Chandler, we move on to examine select novels and
on the issues and burdens of the past as conceptualized in historical,
stories from Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa. At the end
essayistic, and literary writings of the Conquest, the Baroque, the Mexican
of the course, students will write a 10 to 15-page research paper on a topic
Revolution, and the iconoclastic 1960s. In English.
of their choosing OR a detective story (or other creative project developed
in consultation with the professor) of their own authorship.

6 Comparative Literature
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COLT 0710I. New Worlds: Reading Spaces and Places in Colonial COLT 0710U. Leaves of Words: A Survey of Japanese Literature.
Latin America. While Zen, sushi and animé have become commonplaces in contemporary
An interdisciplinary journey-combining history, literature, art, film, American parlance, Japanese literature and culture remain static enigmas,
architecture, cartography-through representations of the many worlds that conjuring up visions of stolid-faced samurai, cherry blossoms, and post-
comprised the colonial Hispanic New World. We traverse the paradisiacal modern dystopias. In this survey of Japanese literary works from the 8th
Antilles, the U.S. Southwest, Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, Lima, Potosí. We century to the present, we will examine the development of canons of
read European, indigenous, and Creole writers, including: Columbus, Las literature, both poetry and prose, and aesthetics in specific social contexts
Casas, Bernal Díaz, Aztec poets, Guaman Poma, Sor Juana. In English. in Japanese cultural history. Also, we will consider their re-evaluations in
Excellent preparation for study abroad in Latin America. Enrollment limited subsequent eras, raising questions about the stability and continuity of
to 19 first year students. such traditions. In addition to readings, we will briefly look at film, manga
and anime.
COLT 0710L. Storytelling: Verbal Art as Performance.
This course offers a comparative selection of oral and written folktales COLT 0710V. The Arab World Writes Itself: Contemporary Arabic
from Arabic, Chinese, African, North American, and European traditions in Literature.
translation in order to study the formation and reception of storytelling in In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said paraphrases Marx, and
different socio-cultural contexts (Western and non-Western, contemporary suggests that Orientalist attitudes towards the Middle East have produced
and traditional). We will consider storytelling and associated performance a discourse in which the East must always be spoken for, and not allowed
practice in the light of a variety of theoretical disciplines (e.g., rhetoric, to represent itself. Said's argument has become even more relevant in
folklore, sociolinguistics, performance studies, literary criticism, the past decade, given the growing interest in the Middle East as a region
narratology). There will be lectures, presentations, and videorecordings. in the US, coupled with a dearth of spaces where voices from the region
can offer their own narratives. Designed as an introductory course to
COLT 0710N. A Comparative Introduction to the Literatures of the
contemporary Arabic Literature, this course includes a variety of readings
Americas.
in translation and films from across the Arab world; it foregoes an intense
Considers the common links between the diverse literatures of North
exploration of one national literature for a more varied survey of the textual
and South America, approached in relation to one another rather than
output of several countries. We will attempt to situate each literature
to Eurocentric paradigms. Focuses on the treatment of such topics
within its national context and within the larger pan-Arab, regional and
as the representation of the past and the self, the role of memory and
international context while being sensitive to the political, geographical,
the imagination, the nature of literary language, and the questions of
and historical foces that have influenced these texts, including the rise of
alienation, colonialism and post-colonialism, communication versus
silence, and fiction versus history in the works of selected writers from Arab nationalism and the independence struggles of the mid-twentieth
century, and immigration. We will also examine--and hopefully question--
North and Latin America, including García-Márquez, Faulkner, Cortázar,
some of the discursive themes and conceptual frames that have been
Allende, Lispector, Morrison, Doctorow, Rosa, and DeLillo. Enrollment
traditionally used to think about contemporary Arabic literature. Enrollment
limited to 15 first year students.
limited to 20.
COLT 0710P. Women and Writing in Medieval France and Japan.
COLT 0710W. Cultures of Colonialism: Palestine/Israel.
An introduction to women poets and prose writers from early court
Examines the history and literary production of the Israeli-Palestinian
cultures, with emphasis on what these authors show us about their social
colonial encounter from 1948 to the present. Aims to delineate the deep
environment and civilization. What did the pen or writing brush enable
links between domestic culture and colonialism in Israel-Palestine by
them to express and achive? How were they able to negotiate the gaps
raising questions about statehood, dispossession, and exclusion in the
between a male classical literary language and their own vernacular
imaginaries of both peoples and by examining novels in relation to the
speech? What kinds of literary approaches and conventions were
ethical and political imperatives of settler-colonial dynamics. Authors
perfected by them? How did they view their personal social status? What
include: David Grossman, Emile Habibi, Jabra I. Jabra, Sahar Khalifah,
educational, moral, and spiritual concerns did they voice? Readings: works
Kanafani, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua. Sophomore seminar. Enrollment
by Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shônagon, Heloise, Marie de France, Christin de
limited to 20 sophomores.
Pizan, plus shorter texts written by both men and women between 700 and
1450 C.E. COLT 0710X. Fan Fiction.
What is imitation (sincerest form of flattery) to literary canons? Vergil’s
COLT 0710Q. The Odyssey in Literature and Film.
Aeneid appropriated Aeneas from the Iliad, Joyce’s Ulysses modernized
Examines reincarnations of the Homeric figure of Odysseus in
the Odyssey. Admiration as a source of inspiration is a major force in
contemporary literatures and film as modernist figure, postcolonial subject,
the evolution of fiction. ”Fan Fiction” explores intriguing characters in
and existentialist hero. How is the Odysseus myth altered from culture
greater detail and new contexts, allowing them new lives in contemporary
to culture (Greece, Rome, Ireland, the Caribbean)? How is it re-visioned
imagination. This course presents pairs or sets of works that are explicitly
in different historical periods and from different perspectives (feminist,
linked by the intimate relation of imitation. Classic readings will be paired
marxist, postcolonial) and genres (epic, poetry, the novel, film, drama)?
with their mostly contemporary updates, including Pride and Prejudice/
Major authors include Homer, Virgil, Tennyson, Joyce, Kazantzakis,
Murder at Pemberley, Heart of Darkness/State of Wonder, and Monkey/
Cavafy, Seferis, Atwood, Walcott; criticism by Bakhtin, Edith Hall, Adorno,
Tripmaster Monkey.
Derrida. Films include works by Angelopoulos, the Coen brothers; Singer’s
Usual Suspects, Mendes’ James Bond offering Skyfall, and Kubrick’s COLT 0710Z. Comedy from Athens to Hollywood.
2001: Space Odyssey. This course will look at ancient comedy from its birth in Athens and Rome
through Renaissance incarnations to the 19th and 20th century, including
COLT 0710S. Words and Images: A Survey of Japanese Literature.
novels and films as well as plays. We will survey the main topics of
This survey course on Japanese literature will introduce works ranging
comedy, from Aristophanes' focus on the absurdities of daily and political
from the 7th century AD to the present. This course will provide a historical
life in Athens to the Roman codification of a genre of everyman in love and
survey of classic and modern texts, while paying attention to the close
in trouble. We will also examine how later writers and filmmakers use both
relationship Japanese literature has had with visual culture from the
traditions to give comedy its subversive power of social commentary.
calligraphic poems of the Heian period to the postwar influence of manga
upon literature. COLT 0711A. Epics of India (CLAS 0820).
Interested students must register for CLAS 0820.
COLT 0711B. Ishiguro, Amongst Others (ENGL 0710L).
Interested students must register for ENGL 0710L.
COLT 0711C. Postcolonial Tales of Transition (ENGL 0710E).
Interested students must register for ENGL 0710E.

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8 Comparative Literature

COLT 0711D. Comparative Approaches to the Literatures of Brazil COLT 0711M. Off the Beaten Path: A Survey of Modern Japanese
and the United States (POBS 0850). Literature (EAST 0800).
Interested students must register for POBS 0850. Interested students must register for EAST 0800.
COLT 0711E. Reading and Writing African Gender. COLT 0711O. Off the Beaten Path: The Diversity of Modern Japanese
In this course, we will examine ways that gender and literary genre Literature.
figure in postcolonial African writing, and in its reception. We will closely An introduction to major and minor works of Japanese literature produced
read novels by four significant women authors: Mariama Bâ (Senegal), during the Japanese Empire and in post-WWII Japan. Canonical writers
Zoe Wicomb (South Africa), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and include Tanizaki Junichiro, Higuchi Ichiyo and Kawabata Yasunari, as
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria). We will also read short, lesser- well as contemporary novelists Ogawa Yoko, Murata Sayaka and others,
known texts, such as Richard Rive's “Riva” and Binyavanga Wainaina's including women, queers, revolutionaries and Japan-resident Koreans.
“The Missing Chapter,” that question boundaries of gender, genre, and Close reading skills will be emphasized, as well as an understanding of
sexuality. how literature has generated knowledge about race, ethnicity, gender,
class and their intersections.
COLT 0711F. Arabic Literature: The Qur'an to Darwish.
The course offers an introduction to Arabic literature from ancient Arabian COLT 0711Q. Writing Love in Korean Literature.
poetry to contemporary Palestinian novels. Topics include desert poetry, This course looks at literature to explore how intimacy, passion and
the Qur’an, medieval Muslim court literature, popular literature, Arabic commitment have been socially sanctioned and redefined in Korea.
literary theory, and the emergence of modern Western genres, with a focus From Yi Dynasty tales to modern-day webtoons, we will explore the roles
on Palestinian literature as a test-case. We will engage first-hand with different genres have played in the generation of forms of human affect
Imru’ al-Qays’ Qifa Nabki, al-Jahiz’s Books of Misers, Ibn Hazm’s theories that are themselves intimately tied to Korea's tumultuous history. What
about love, Mahmoud Darwish’s I Come from There, and Emile Habiby’s does it mean to love, and to write about love, under the conditions of Neo-
The Pessoptimist. All readings are in English. Confucianism, empire, war, national division, authoritarianism, and the
neoliberal marketplace? No prerequisites.
COLT 0711G. The Realist Novel (Europe, America, Latin America).
How did the 19th-century novel shift from at times idealistic descriptions of COLT 0711R. Writing and Resistance in Indigenous America (1500–
domestic life to realist representations of individual, psychological, social, 1700).
and political “reality”? In this course on the realist novel, we will address Material extraction, forced religious conversion, and physical brutality were
how literary realism attempted a description of the world “as it was”: what but a few of the oppressive acts imposed on the Indigenous populations
were the social and political questions the realist novel took up? How of the Americas by Western colonialism. However, those under Iberian
did it conceive gender and sexuality, and how did it account for issues of and British Rule—in Peru, Mexico and New England—found ways to
social inequality, colonialism, and other types of bourgeois ideology? What resist and negotiate the terms of domination by adopting, and therefore
national projects did non-European novels engage in, particularly in Latin adapting, European forms and norms. This class takes an interdisciplinary
America and the United States? approach that combines historiography, literature, and art, to analyze the
mechanisms of Indigenous resistance within the developing structures of
COLT 0711H. The Arabic Novel.
colonialism: race, religion, geography, and gender. We will read a variety
This course offers students both a foundation in the “classics” of Arabic
of texts that originate from Aztec, Inca, Algonquian, Spanish, Brazilian,
fiction and a foray into recent experimentations with form and langauge.
and British contexts. All readings available in English, but students are
We’ll spend the first half of the semester with Egyptian Nobel laureate
welcome to read any in the original language.
Naguib Mahfouz, tracing his evolution from Victor Hugo-esque chronicler
of life in Cairo to Faulknerian experimentalist. We’ll then examine the COLT 0711T. Writing and Censorship.
works of authors who deem themselves “post-Mahfouzian,” including Book bans have risen sharply during over the past two years. When and
Gamal al-Ghitani, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, and Hanan al-Shaykh. why did school libraries and bookstores become hotbeds of controversy?
Students will emerge with a transnational, inclusive understanding of the Who are the censors today? And how has censorship changed over time?
Middle East glimpsed through the region's literature. No Arabic necessary; In this seminar, we will read books that have been burned, put on trial,
students with Arabic may read in the original. banned or challenged, in earlier periods and in today’s world. We will
think critically about the ideas of decency, protection and security that
COLT 0711J. The Art of Revolution in Latin America.
underlie such censorship: who defines them, and for whose benefit? As
This course considers the role of the arts—visual, literature, music, film,
we consider the role book bans play in public life today, we will explore
and performance—in Latin American social movements. We will study the
anti-censorship practices in the arts, journalism, law and grassroots
work of artists and activists in the Mexican Revolution, Cuban Revolution,
Nicaraguan Revolution, South American dictatorship resistances, and advocacy.
Fall COLT0711T S01 18540 TTh 10:30-11:50(13) (E. Whitfield)
contemporary social movements such as the Chilean student movement
and narco-trafficking. We will trace the use of the arts in organizing, social COLT 0810A. Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Poetry.
critique, collective action, and propaganda, and how they have shaped Various responses to ancient Greek myths by poets in the Western
ideology and culture in Latin America and beyond. tradition, especially modern Greek. Considers how poets since 1800 have
COLT 0711K. Arab Voices beyond the Middle East: Cultural approached, rewritten, or subverted the classical version of myths, such as
Encounters in Europe and the Americas. those of Eurydice, Helen, Orpheus, Persephone, Penelope, and Ulysses.
This course introduces students to literature by Arabs writing outside of Emphasizes the challenges posed by the past, issues of cultural and
their country of origin and in relation to a new cultural landscape, in the political context, and questions of gender. Readings in English.
US, Britain, Canada, and Brazil. We will explore, through poems, short COLT 0810C. Arthurian Tales and Romances of the Middle Ages.
stories, novels, films, and music, the themes of exile, assimilation, gender, Why did stories of King Arthur, his knights, and their ladies fascinate
sexuality and war in transnational and transcultural contexts. Authors writers and audiences throughout Europe? What can Arthurian quests,
include: Rawi Haje, Etel Adnan, Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Sueif, and Saad marvels, and love adventures tell us about successive pre-modern
Elkhadem. societies that shaped them? What are our responses to their cultural
COLT 0711L. The Quran and its Readers. beliefs and forms of playful make-believe? Readings (in modern
Like the Bible, the Quran has had a monumental impact upon world translation) of medieval Latin, French, English, Welsh, and German texts.
literature. Its narratives and imagery permeate the textual, visual, and
auditory landscapes of many societies in the Islamic world and beyond.
In this course, we approach the Quran through the works of some of its
most interesting readers, including Jami, Dante, Rumi, Hafez, Goethe, and
Rushdie. All readings are in English.

8 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 9

COLT 0810D. City (B)Lights. COLT 0810L. The Pursuit of Happiness.

Interdisciplinary explorations of the modern urban experience featuring This course will study the emergence of the modern concept of happiness
social sciences, literature and film. Convergences and differences in the from the ancient ideal of the "good life" to the notion of "pursuit of
presentation of urban life in literature, film, the visual arts, urban planning, happiness" as an "inalienable right." We will trace the development of this
and social sciences, including sociology, political economy, urban ecology. concept in the early modern period and read representations of the search
City populations, bureaucracy, power groups, alienation, urban crowds, the for happiness in a variety of literary, philosophical, and political texts
city as site of the surreal, are central themes. Against the background of (including the American and the Haitian Declarations of Independence
classic European urban images, American cities and literary works will be and the French Declaration of Rights). Readings will include oriental and
brought to the foreground. fairly tales, novels, and essays (by Mme d'Aulnoy, Mme du Chatelet,
Montesquieu, Johnson, Fielding, Voltaire, and Rousseau, among others).
COLT 0810E. Confession, Autobiography, Testimony.
Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.
Does writing a life give it coherence and veracity, or create a fiction?
What is the relationship between first-person narrative and truth, and COLT 0810M. Uncanny Tales: Narratives of Repetition and
between authorship and authority? How does the form of a first-person Interruption.
text -- a religious confession, a personal journal, a political denunciation, What makes stories creepy? Close readings of short narratives with
a collective memoir -- affect the telling? Must the reader of such an special attention to how formal and thematic elements interact to produce
account be "you" to the teller's "I", and how does the intimacy of this the effects of uncertainty, anxiety and incoherence peculiar to "the
relationship shape the experience of reading? In this course, we test the uncanny." Topics include: the representation of the self in images of the
limits of self-narration against ethical and physical limits, reading first- arts; the representation of speech; instabilities of identity and spatial and
person narratives that purport to be non-fictional. We will read accounts temporal boundaries; doubles, monsters, automata and hybrids. Texts
of different experiences -- social and sexual transgression, suffering and selected from: Walpole, Shelley, Hoffmann, Kleist, Poe, Dostoyevsky,
perpetrating violence, slavery -- and explore both the possibilities and Freud, Wilde, Cortazar, Kafka, Lovecraft.
duplicities of writing as "I". COLT 0810O. Civilization and Its Discontents.
COLT 0810F. Desire and the Marketplace. Investigates the age-old tension between order and chaos as a central
Studies love and desire as the interplay between men, women, and money dynamic in the making and interpretation of literature. Texts will be drawn
in mercantilized societies, in seventeenth century Japan, eighteenth from drama, fiction and poetry from Antiquity to the present. Authors
century England, nineteenth century France, and twentieth century include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Beckett, Prevost, Bronte,
Africa. Novels featuring female protagonists by Saikaku, Defoe, Flaubert, Faulkner, Morrison, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, and Rich.
Emecheta and Bâ, readings in economic and feminist theory, and visual COLT 0810P. Moderns and Primitives.
art--Japanese woodcuts, Hogarth, nineteenth century French painting, Modernism has been called a 'Renaissance of the Archaic'. We will
West African arts. read from the major works of Anglo-American modernism (Eliot, Joyce,
COLT 0810G. Equity Law Literature Philosophy. Lawrence, Pound), focusing on their attitudes toward the primitive and
Justice, rigorously applied, yields injustice. This paradox haunted the archaic. In addition, we will examine anthropological theories from the
Western aspirations toward legal and political justice from antiquity to the Victorian period to Durkheim, explore primitivism in modernist music and
Renaissance. It necessitated the formulation of a complementary principle, painting, and read about recent controversies surrounding modernism and
equity, whose job it was to correct or supplement the law in cases where primitivism.
the strict application of it would lead to unfairness. In England, equity was COLT 0810U. Lovers, Slaves, Kings and Knaves: Major Plays in
enforced by a separate system of law, and it was a weighty, ambiguous Western Literature.
term of great emotional force, with a particular appeal to Shakespeare. This course will introduce students to representative tragedies and
After its decline, Dickens and Kafka wrote two of the greatest literary comedies, focusing in particular upon their development as literary genres;
works set in a world without equity. continuities and variations of character, plot, and theme; stage and
COLT 0810H. How Not to Be a Hero. performance conventions; and the classical tradition. Readings will include
One of Shakespeare’s greatest plays is about a character who was an Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Racine,
irredeemable failure: Coriolanus. What can failure teach us? What kind Eilde, Ibsen, and Vogel.
of strength does a language of failure possess? We will read the ancient COLT 0810X. European Renaissances.
sources themselves (Livy, Lucian, Plutarch), and modern adaptations of Just what is the European renaissance and when and how did it happen
these stories (Bertolt Brecht, T. S. Eliot, Günter Grass). We will also look at and who decided? Let's look at the renaissances of Petrarch, Boccaccio,
other “exemplary” failures who inspired Shakespeare and later literature, and Giotto, of Erasmu, and Thomas More and Holbein, of Machiavelli and
including Lucullus and Timon. Castiglione and Raphael. Are these renaissances intellectual, aesthetic,
COLT 0810I. Tales and Talemakers of the Non-Western World. visual, rhetorical? Did they happen in the fourteenth century, the fifteenth,
Examines many forms of storytelling in Asia, from the Epic of Gilgamesh the sixteenth? Or in the nineteenth when they were first clearly described?
and the Arabian Nights Entertainments to works of history and fiction in COLT 0810Z. Myth and Literature.
China and Japan. The material is intended to follow the evolution of non- Authors throughout the ages have been fascinated by ancient mythology
western narratives from mythological, historical and fictional sources in a and have incorporated elements of it into their texts, often modifying
variety of cultural contexts. Topics will include myth and ritual, the problem commenting on or even destroying the original myth in the process.
of epic, tales of love and the fantastic, etc. This course will investigate the values, dangers and limitations of myth-
COLT 0810J. The Colonial and Postcolonial Marvelous. making/using in literature. Primary texts will include major works by
A celebration and critique of the marvelous in South American and related Milton, Goethe, Kleist, Racine and Kafka. Texts will be supplemented
literatures (U.S., Caribbean). We follow the marvelous from European by secondary readings and multimedia elements. Students will learn to
exoticizing of the New World during the colonial period to its postcolonial question and engage critically with the historical, cultural, literary and
incarnations in 'magical realism' and beyond. We attend particularly to scientific frontiers that separate myth and reality. Assignments will include
the politics and marketing of the marvelous, in writers including Borges, two short papers and a final paper.
Chamoiseau, Columbus, García Márquez, Fuguet. Reading in English or COLT 0811A. Introduction to Modernism: Past, Future, Exile, Home
Spanish. (ENGL 0700F).
Interested students must register for ENGL 0700F.
COLT 0811C. Belonging and Displacement: Cross-Cultural Identities
(POBS 0810).
Interested students must register for POBS 0810.

Comparative Literature 9
10 Comparative Literature

COLT 0811F. Writing War (ENGL 0100M). COLT 0811W. The Myth of Venice in Literature: Memory, Desire and
Interested students must register for ENGL 0100M. Death.
This course will explore the myth of Venice in literature: focusing on the
COLT 0811G. Literature, Trauma, and War (ENGL 0500L).
topos of Venice in the genre of travel writing, we will study the theme of
Interested students must register for ENGL 0500L.
liberty and decadence associated with Venice’s theatrical and political
COLT 0811H. Monuments and Monsters: Greek Literature and culture. Readings will include Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,
Archaeology. excerpts from De Brosses’s Travels through Italy, Goldoni’s Memoirs,
Surveys Greek archaeology from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period, Rousseau’s Confessions, and Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie. We will also
and reads Greek literature roughly contemporary with the archaeological study the influence of these accounts on the Romantic poets (Goethe,
period surveyed, with an emphasis on epic and drama. No previous Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Musset), and modernity (Henry James’s
knowledge or prerequisites needed. The Aspern Papers, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Donna Leone’s
COLT 0811I. Classical Mythology and the Western Tradition. Death at the Fenice).
Reads classical texts that expound the fundamental mythological COLT 0811Y. Great Jewish Books (JUDS 0681).
stories and elements of the Western tradition, then will read selected Interested students must register for JUDS 0681.
texts from the Renaissance through the twentieth century that utilize
COLT 0811Z. Islands in the Western Imaginary: Paradise, Periphery,
these myths. Ancient texts covered will include the Epic of Gilgamesh,
Prison.
Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and
Paradise, periphery, or prison? The representation of the island has been
plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Later texts will include
described as imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical.
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, Milton's "Lycidas,"
Examines the fascination with islands in the western cultural imaginary.
and lyric poetry by Keats, Shelley, Browning, Swinburne, Rilke, Auden,
Selective readings from literature, film and historical texts focus on ways
and Yeats. This course is suitable for anyone wishing to understand the
in which island spaces have been represented in diverse social, national,
classical background to Western literature.
imperial contexts as well as the effect of such projections on the native
COLT 0811M. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Travel and Transport islanders, their visitors and often subjugators. Authors may include
in Modern Literature and the Arts. Homer, Plato, Marco Polo, Mandeville, Darwin, Defoe, Tournier, Kincaid,
This course studies how new modes of transportation and the experiences Kafka, Durrell, Seferis; theoretical works drawn from critical geography,
they enabled stood as symbols of both the fears and joys of rapid postcolonialism, and the field of island studies.
modernization in 19th- and 20th-century literature, film, and visual art.
How did the speeding locomotive, the plane's aerial view, and the personal COLT 0812A. Hamlet Post-Hamlet.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is perhaps the most widely read, performed,
freedom of the automobile transform the ways people traversed space,
adapted, parodied and imitated literary text of the western tradition. In
experienced time, traded, and came into contact with one another? In
this seminar we will begin by reading/re-reading the play before turning
formal terms, how did these experiences inspire innovations in the media
to a number of appropriations of Shakespeare, both in the west and non-
we examine by Whitman, Kipling, Baudelaire, Marinetti, Brecht, Woolf,
west, in order to address social and aesthetic issues including questions
Huxley, Stein, Ruttman, Wegman, Picabia, Duchamp and others? No
of meaning and interpretation, intertextuality and cultural translation. First
prerequisites.
Year Seminar. Enrollment limited to 19.
COLT 0811N. Poetics of Madness: Aspects of Literary Insanity.
COLT 0812B. What is Colonialism? Archives, Texts and Images.
This course surveys a wide range of literary texts with a view to tracing
Through a close reading of a variety of texts and images from 16th-19th
the long process of transition from pre-modern to modern conceptions
century we will study the transformation of lands and people into
of madness on the one hand, and to identifying the symbolic logic and
appropriable objects and the formation of political regimes in and through
discursive modalities that underlie its respective representations on
different colonial projects. We will follow the encoding of slavery in literary
the other. Spanning several centuries of artistic preoccupation with the
works, in the corpus of laws, in travelers’ visual renditions and in the
alienated mind, these texts will serve as points of reference in a focused
bodies of people. We will use the archive as a source and a site for the
exploration of the relationship between insanity and literature, as it has
production of knowledge. Students will create small textual and visual
been shaped by social dynamics, cultural norms, philosophical ideas,
archives around different topics, and will use them in writing their final
and medical theories. Authors include Euripides, Erasmus, Shelley,
work.
Dostoyevsky, Stevenson, and Woolf.
COLT 0812D. Mythology of India (CLAS 0850).
COLT 0811Q. Mediterranean Cities.
Interested students must register for CLAS 0850.
Athens, Istanbul, Alexandria: three iconic cities of the Levant that will serve
as points of reference in a focused exploration of East Mediterranean COLT 0812E. God and Poetry (JUDS 0820).
history and culture. Reads and discusses a number of texts that span Interested students must register for JUDS 0820.
several decades and a wide range of styles and genres – from realism to COLT 0812G. The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in History, Literature,
postmodernism and from autobiography to thriller – but exhibit a common Film.
interest in the urban landscape and its relationship to basic aspects of An examination of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the lens of
human existence: identity and ideology, memory and desire, isolation and cultural production. The course will explore the history of the conflict, from
connection, hope and fear, life and death. Authors include Theotokas, the 1947 partition of Palestine to the second Intifada in 2005, through
Seferis, Taktsis, Durrell, Mahfouz, Kharrat, Tanpinar, Shafak, Altun. major literary works and films juxtaposed with cultural and historical
COLT 0811T. Statelessness and Global Media: Citizens, Foreigners, texts. We will discuss the way that literature and film provide us with
Aliens (MCM 0901K). humanistic and counterhegemonic narratives, interrogating issues such
Interested students must register for MCM 0901K. as nationalism, ethnicity, gender, colonialism, collective trauma and
cultural resistance. Exploring the tension between historic and aesthetic
production, we will look at how literary and cinematic works challenge, re-
imagine and supplement political accounts of the conflict.
COLT 0812K. Film Classics: The Greeks on the Silver Screen (MGRK
0810).
Interested students must register for MGRK 0810.
COLT 0812M. Hamlet Post-Hamlet (ENGL 0150Z).
Interested students must register for ENGL 0150Z.

10 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 11

COLT 0812N. Film Classics: The Greeks on the Silver Screen (MGRK COLT 0812T. Hideous Monsters of the Mind: Monster Literature,
0810). Monster Theory, and American Identities.
Interested students must register for MGRK 0810. What do ancient beliefs about headless men and giants have in common
with rap music and free love? Strangely enough, a single word has been
COLT 0812O. Reading Art in Literature.
used to refer to each: “monster.” In this course, we examine how monsters
This course will explore the role of art objects in poetry and prose from
from European literary and intellectual traditions are translated into
East Asia and the west. How are objects represented in literature, and
American culture. We begin with a survey of pre-modern traditions: the
how does the language of art inform texts? Authors from antiquity to today
“Monstrous Races” described by Pliny the Elder, the prodigies of Aristotle
have described works of art in their texts to reveal essential aspects of
and Cicero, and the biological/medical tradition that was extrapolated
their cultures: heroic destiny, fatal struggles between life and art, and
from a hybrid reading of Hippocrates and Macrobius. After following these
glimpses of the sublime. Readings include ekphrasis from antiquity, poetry
traditions in Medieval and Early Modern writing, the bulk of the course
from East Asia and the west, and fiction by Wilde, Balzac, Hawthorne,
reads from key moments in American history where resurrected monsters
selections from The Tale of Genji and The Dream of the Red Chamber,
policed (and infiltrated) the boundaries of emerging American notions of
and others.
identity and difference: from white supremacist pseudoscience to black
COLT 0812P. Banned Books of Middle East. abolitionism, and from “freak shows” to postmodern performance art.
From Danish cartoons and fatwas to student protests and the stabbing
COLT 0812U. Beyond Yellowness: Representations of Race and
of a Nobel laureate, in this course we will study several literary scandals
Ethnicity in East Asia.
that have rocked the Middle East since the mid-twentieth century. Our
What do race and ethnicity mean to regions outside Europe and North
focus will be not only on the content and form of the texts themselves,
America? How did the perceptions of different physiological and cultural
but also on the historical, political, social, and cultural circumstances in
features define premodern and modern East Asia? Since when and for
which literature comes to have meaning for particular social and religious
what reasons did some people, whom Marco Polo considered “white,”
communities. Texts by Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, Salman
become racially Asian or yellow in literary and cinematic representations?
Rushdie, Ahmed Naji, Mohammed Choukri, Magdy al-Shafee, Susan
This survey course will demystify East Asian homogeneity and discuss
Abulhawa.
how various literary, cinematic, and critical works from antiquity up to the
COLT 0812Q. Film Classics: Greeks on the Silver Screen (MGRK modern era present notions and issues related to race and ethnicity in the
0810). region now known as East Asia. The reading material will include excerpts
Interested students must register for MGRK 0810. from The Zuo Tradition, The Travels of Marco Polo, Bai Juyi, Min Jin Lee,
COLT 0812R. Reimagining the Americas: Latinx and Indigenous Orientalism, and others. The course will be taught in English, and no prior
Stories of Migration. knowledge of Asian cultures or languages is required.
This course explores migration stories that reimagine the territory known COLT 0812V. Troy: City, Legend, Literature.
today as the Americas, Abya Yala, Turtle Island, and Ixachitlān. It brings This course will examine the legend of Troy: the struggle for and loss of
together narrators who call into question the idea of the nation and the the great city, and the inevitability of the lives destroyed of both besieged
mechanism of borders. What role does language play in community and besiegers, Trojans and Greeks. The city and its destruction are the
building as Native peoples face diasporas and become transnational earliest surviving Western literature, and are a continuous presence
networks? How is mobility bringing forth new forms of storytelling? By through the centuries. Some themes to be examined will include self and
engaging with poetry, essays, films and artwork from Indigenous and other in the narrative, the human and the divine, and fate and free will. We
Latinx writers, class discussions will try to understand Abya Yala in its full will also analyze how different cultures and times both adopt and adapt the
complexity. We will pay particular attention to how our course materials characters for nation-building.
depict the environment as they address questions of land ownership,
COLT 0812W. The Epic Tradition: from Homer to Milton.
settler colonialism and ties to homelands. Readings will be provided in
This course will engage with the epic tradition from its origins in the
English and include Leslie Marmon Silko, Yásnaya Aguilar Gil, Natalie
ancient eastern Mediterranean to the early modern period. Epic, as
Díaz and Yuri Herrera.
the earliest genre and example of ancient literature in the Western
COLT 0812S. Non-human Rights and Wrongs. canon, is foundational to our ideas of literature and our myths of society,
“Even the creature has rights,” says Campion in HBO's Raised by Wolves. national identity, and aspirational achievement. In this course we will
Our course will ask after the past, present and future of rights, including read Gilgamesh, the earliest Near Eastern epic, the Iliad, the Aeneid, and
interpreting literature, television and film to imagine who (or what) might selections from the Odyssey, the epics that formed the cores of ancient
one day possess them. Only persons have rights, but the essence of Greek and Roman literature, as well as medieval and early modern epics
personhood flickers and blurs like a phantom, somehow common to (Inferno, Paradise Lost) that draw on these rich and influential traditions.
corporations, human beings, boats and cities, among other "things." Like Fall COLT0812WS01 18537 MWF 9:00-9:50(09) (M. Ierulli)
ghost-hunting lawyers we'll trace the word "person" from the Ancient
Greek theater mask (prosopon) through Christianity's thought of the COLT 0812X. Culture, Climate, and the Anthropocene’s Others.
Trinity (God as "one substance, three persons") up to contemporary Using the theoretical framework of the Anthropocene, this course
legal cases regarding animal rights such as the 'monkey selfie' case. Key considers a wide array of aesthetic codes—from Ovidian elegy and
authors include: Kafka, Cixous, Plato, Shelley, Chevillard, Zizioulas. Media Shakespearean tragicomedy to zombie narrative and postcolonial ghost
screened includes: Blade Runner 2049, Solaris, Caprica. Students from all stories—to investigate how distinct cultural forms contest, recast, and, at
disciplines are welcome. times, reinstate the (often-hierarchical) boundaries between human and
nature, human and animal, and human and human. Through a sampling
of poetry, narrative, and film, we will explore the uneven terrain of the
Anthropocene, in which the feedback loops of race, class, gender, and
other forms of social difference, along with geography itself, continue
to separate humans, even as evidence mounts for the inseparability of
humans from the rest of the planet, including its nonhuman inhabitants.
Course materials will be provided in English and include works from Ishirō
Honda, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Tommy Orange, J.M. Coetzee,
and Bong Joon-Ho, among others.

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COLT 0812Y. Love and Longing across the Indian Subcontinent. COLT 1210. Introduction to the Theory of Literature.
The Indian subcontinent is home to several languages and contains one An historical introduction to problems of literary theory from the classical
of the most strikingly diverse and vibrant bodies of literature spanning to the postmodern. Issues to be examined include mimesis, rhetoric,
several centuries and a wide geographic landscape. The aim of this hermeneutics, history, psychoanalysis, formalisms and ideological criticism
course is to introduce you to primary texts such as poems and narrative (questions of race, gender, sexuality, postcolonialism). Primarily for
works in various languages (in translation) that provide a glimpse into the advanced undergraduates. Lectures, discussions; several short papers.
types of love—romantic, devotional, filial, platonic among others—and COLT 1310B. Classics of Indian Literature (CLAS 1160).
the theories and prescriptive texts that accompany them. From ancient Interested students must register for CLAS 1160.
sensual Sanskrit and Tamil Sangam love poems to multilingual Bhakti
verses, Marathi abhangs and Kannada vacanas; from Urdu and Persian COLT 1310C. Twentieth-Century Western Theatre and Performance
ghazals to Indian cinema, this course combines literary texts with visual (TAPS 1250).
materials and performance arts to acquaint you with the various moods Interested students must register for TAPS 1250.
and expressions of love in the subcontinent and demonstrate the symbiotic COLT 1310D. Between Gods and Beasts: The Renaissance Ovid
and inextricably intertwined relationship between various media in the (ENGL 1360S).
region. Interested students must register for ENGL 1360S.
COLT 0812Z. From Cuneiform to Klingon: Writing Systems and the COLT 1310E. A Classical Islamic Education: Readings in Arabic
Worlds They Make. Literature.
This course will take a comparative approach to writing systems across This seminar introduces students to the essential texts of a classical
time, languages, and cultures. What are the cognitive, literary, cultural, education in the Arabic-Islamic world. What works of poetry, literary
social, and political implications of using systems of symbols to express criticism, belletristic prose, biography, geography, history, and other
ourselves, whether via ink on paper or pixels on a screen? How do writing disciplines were considered staples of a well-rounded education in
systems unite and divide societies, enable nationalism and imperialism, medieval Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, or Fez? Emphasis will be placed
and give flight to interplanetary fantasies? Through readings in theory on close and patient readings of primary sources. At least three years of
and history as well as literary works from Chinese folktales to J. R. R. Arabic required.
Tolkien, students will explore the graphic dimension of human language
and literature. COLT 1310G. Silk Road Fictions.
The course introduces students to cross-cultural comparative work, and
COLT 1001A. Troubled Origins: Accounting for Oneself (Nietzsche to to critical issues in East-West studies in particular. We will base our
Eribon). conversations on a set of texts related to the interconnected histories and
What does it mean to account for one’s life by accounting for one’s hybrid cultures of the ancient Afro-Eurasian Silk Roads. Readings will
origins? Nietzsche, for one, expressed the “uniqueness” of his existence include ancient travel accounts (e.g., the Chinese novel Journey to the
“in the form of a riddle”: “As my father I have already died, as my mother West, Marco Polo); modern fiction and film (e.g., Inoue Yasushi, Wole
I still live and grow old.” We will study literary and philosophical attempts Soyinka); and modern critical approaches to the study of linguistic and
at catching up with one’s troubled origins, including Nietzsche’s _Ecce literary-cultural contact (e.g., Lydia Liu, Emily Apter, Mikhail Bakhtin,
Homo: How One Becomes What One Is_ (self-interpretation); Freud’s Edward Said). Topics will include bilingual texts, loanwords, race and
“Selbstdarstellung” (self-portraiture); Kafka’s "Letter to Father" (paternal heritage, Orientalism. No prior knowledge of the topic is expected and all
confessions); Derrida’s _Monolingualism of the Other_ (native languages texts will be available in English.
and lost origins); Eribon’s _Returning to Reims_ (“class closet”). Fall COLT1310GS01 18547 M 3:00-5:30(03) (T. Chin)
Undergraduates from diverse fields welcome.
COLT 1310H. Classics of Indian Literature (CLAS 1160).
COLT 1020. What Is Friendship?. Interested students must register for CLAS 1160.
Friendship is one of the most significant yet highly vexing experiences of
our human existence. What does it mean to have or to be a friend? How COLT 1310I. Modern African Literature (ENGL1710J).
do friendship and romantic love relate? Why are writers as different as Interested students must register for ENGL 1710J.
Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Derrida so intensely drawn to the statement COLT 1310J. The Arab Renaissance.
attributed to Aristotle: “Oh my friends, there are no friends”? Why does Explores the 19th-century Arabic cultural renaissance known as the
Heidegger’s notion of “Being-With” invoke an ear that listens for the Nahda. Topics include intellectual encounters between Europe and
voice of the friend? To what extent is intimate friendship always also an the Middle East, the birth of the Arabic novel, and the rise of Islamic
experience of anticipated mourning, in which a friend imagines himself modernism. We will read selections from the works of Shidyaq, Tahtawi,
crying over the death of another? Is an enemy a fallen friend? This Zaydan, Shawqi, Bustani, and others, alongside historiographical and
course will trace key concepts of friendship through the Western tradition, theoretical texts. At least three years of Arabic required.
spending quality time with a number of highly influential writers and
thinkers, both ancient and modern. All students welcome. COLT 1310K. History of the Romance Languages (FREN 1020B).
Interested students must register for FREN 1020B.
COLT 1021. Literature and Photography: Writing and Thinking with
Light. COLT 1310L. Political Commitment in Modern Arabic Literature.
"I didn't draw any people," Kafka once wrote, "I told a story. Those are This course will explore the history of and debates surrounding political
pictures, only pictures...one takes photographs of things in order to forget consciousness and commitment in modern Arabic literature. We will
them. My stories are a way of closing my eyes." Kafka's sentences invite trace the diverse literary strategies by which authors, living under difficult
us to reflect upon the relationship between literature, photography, and political circumstances, expressed their criticisms and envisioned social
philosophical thought—from the first heliograph in 1826 and the inception and political justice. Beginning in the mid-20th century and continuing to
of the daguerreotype in 1839 to the digital image of today. Taking as the present, we will read and discuss landmark works of Arabic fiction in
our point of departure the relation of literature and "light-writing," we will translation, and the debates that surround them. Authors include: Etel
address selected issues in the historical and conceptual interaction among Adnan, Sonallah Ibrahim, Sahar Khalifeh, Tayeb Salih, and Hasan Blasim.
word, image, and critical thought. Our wager: texts and photographic
images share a common relationship to time, desire, death, mourning,
and politics. Writers may include Kafka, Proust, Benjamin, Kracauer,
Barthes, Heidegger, and Derrida. Images by photographers including
August Sander and Andrew Moore. Students from diverse fields welcome.

12 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 13

COLT 1310N. Global Modernism and Crisis. COLT 1410C. Chinese Theatre in the Mao Years.
The early twentieth century was marked by a proliferation of crises in This course focuses on two major issues: policing traditional theater and
politics, the economy, language, indeed in the very fabric of society. "model revolutionary drama" as "a new proletarian culture." The course
This interdisciplinary course will insist on the global dimension of crisis, will begin with a study of Mao Zedong's ideas on literature and art in
analyzing how modernist artists in the metropolis and the periphery the light of contemporary cultural theory. It will then look at examples of
represented this situation in different, yet overlapping ways. We will also the "new opera" and "new history play," examining them in relation to a
examine how modernist works provide unique ways of thinking about what complex of censorship issues concerning the exercise of political power
is lost in a moment of crisis and what potential may arise out of it. Authors in administering human life and the body, literature and drama as political
will include: Eliot, Huidobro, Dos Passos, Woolf, Galvão, Arlt and Faulkner. representation, and the hermeneutics of censorship.
COLT 1310P. Silk Road Fictions (EAST 1310). COLT 1410D. Dramatic Literature and Theoretical Practice in
Interested students must register for EAST 1310. Eighteenth-Century England.
An introduction to the dramatic literature of 18th-century England in
COLT 1310R. From "Wild Beast" to "True Born Prince": Native
the context of contemporary theatrical conventions and innovations.
Resistance in Native and Anglo-American Literature.
Plays read alongside treatises on acting techniques, stage design, and
How does Wampanoag war leader, Metacom, go from “a Salvage and
contemporary theatrical pamphlet-debates. The sociopolitical contexts of
a wild Beast” in 1677 to a “true born prince” in 1814? Coaxing Anglo-
the London patent theaters and the coexistent "illegitimate" entertainments
America’s violent Native history into a positive national epic has made
are explored, as well as the influential effects of Continental theatrical
this collective amnesia an American commonplace. In this course, we first
theory and innovation.
concentrate on contemporary accounts of three early conflicts between
Native peoples and settlers: the second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622-’32), COLT 1410E. Japanese Theatre: from Dengaku to De Sade.
“King Philip’s War” (1675-’76), and Tecumseh’s War (1810-’13). The Surveys traditional Japanese theatre from the lofty medieval Nō drama
second half of the course will turn to the Removal Era, a high point in to the more popular genres of Jōruri (puppet theatre) and Kabuki in the
American literature’s obsession with the “fate” of indigenous peoples. This Edo period (1600-1868). Through playscripts, related secondary criticism,
is also the time of James Fenimore Cooper’s and Washington Irving’s videotapes, and films, we will examine the function of spectacle and
contributions to that narrative, both of whom we will read. Accompanying theatre, the problem of representation or mimesis, the notion of audience,
them, however, will be Native retellings of those same conflicts (e.g. and the relation of text to performance. Concludes with more recent
William Apess, George Stiggins, E. Pauline Johnson, and others’). examples of Japanese drama and performance.
COLT 1310S. The Jewelers of the Ummah: The Jewish Muslim World COLT 1410F. Medieval Drama.
is Not History (HMAN 1975U). How drama developed in northwestern Europe between the tenth and
Interested students must register for HMAN 1975U. early sixteenth century-from liturgical tropes and miracle plays to mystery
cycles and morality plays, from popular feasts and minstrel performances
COLT 1310U. History of Romance Languages (FREN 1020B)..
to fool's plays, farces, and other secular comedies. Emphasis on the
Interested students must register for FREN 1020B.
cultural context and social functions of dramatic games and performances
COLT 1310W. Interpretating Literature on Stone, Paper, and Film. in premodern Europe.
This course examines the interpretation of globally renowned epics and
COLT 1410K. European Early Modern Drama.
classic literary works in South Asia and in its diaspora. Beginning with
An introduction to early modern drama in the French, Italian, Spanish,
the sculptural, performed (both in South and Southeast Asia), written,
and English traditions. The goal is to explore a wide range of imaginative
and Bollywood imaginings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, we move
impulses in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Readings will include
into painted and cinematic re-tellings of West Asian classics such as
plays by Corneille, Racine, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare,
Layla Majnun and tales from the Arabian Nights. Rounding up this course
Machiavelli, and Molière.
would be Bollywood interpretations of the Shakespearean plays Comedy
of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth along with Kamila Shamsie’s COLT 1410L. Philosophy and Tragedy.
novel Home Fire, a re-imagining of Sophocles’ play Antigone in the Explores the intersection of philosophy and tragedy in western literature.
contemporary British Muslim community in the United Kingdom. Readings may include Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Hegel,
and Nietzsche.
COLT 1330M. Transatlantic Surrealisms (FREN 1330E).
Interested students must register for FREN 1330E. COLT 1410M. Shakespeare and Philosophy.
Explores the relationship between Shakespeare and philosophy. Readings
COLT 1410A. All the World's a Stage: Seventeenth-Century Drama.
include philosophers who have written about Shakespeare (Hegel,
Readings of representative English and continental plays of the 17th
Nietzsche, Cavell, and others), as well as philosophers who may illuminate
century including Shakespeare, Jonson, Corneille, Molière, Tasso,
interpretive problems in Shakespeare (Plato, Seneca, Spinoza, and
Calderon, and others. How do dramatists represent and negotiate
others).
oppositions between art and nature, imagination and reason, myth and
history, freedom and fate through dramatic form and metaphor? Why is the COLT 1410N. Found in Translation: The Adaptation of Literature to
stage such a powerful metaphor for the world? Film in Japan.
Contrasting the demands of the text versus the screen, we will read eight
COLT 1410B. Chinese Opera: Aesthetics and Politics of the
to ten works of modern Japanese literature and view the film versions
Performing Body.
of each in order to discuss the problem of translation from one medium
Explores traditional Chinese drama, which has always been a music
to another. Possible works for inclusion are Rashomon, Harp of Burma,
theater, from the perspective of contemporary cultural theory, and in a
Woman in the Dunes, and The Makioka Sisters. Finally, we will consider
comparative and interdisciplinary context. Analyzing classical plays in
manga (the graphic novel) and its adaptation into anime.
relation to their staging in today's regional operas, this course will first
examine the dialectics of "prettiness and artistry" in traditional Chinese COLT 1410O. Shakespeare and.
theater aesthetics and its implications in gender politics. It will then Canon formation and disciplinary divisions have deformed the way in
move on to investigate issues of cross-dressing and erotic desire in which we read Shakespeare. Frequently presented as a post-romantic
Chinese drama of the late imperial period in comparison with that of singular "author," cut off from the sources, texts and genres on which he
early modern England. Lastly, the ramifications of Chinese opera as a drew and the collaborators with whom he worked, Shakespeare looks,
national imagination in modern cultural politics, as embodied in the playM. reads and performs differently in relation to the rich contexts in which the
Butterfly,the film Farewell My Concubine,and the Beijing opera version plays were produced and through which they are produced today. We
ofTurandot, will be addressed. will read plays and other materials with attention to formal and historical
questions including genre, the Shakespearean text, gender, sexuality,
status, degree, and nation.

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14 Comparative Literature

COLT 1410P. Shakespeare. COLT 1420A. The Tale of Genji and its Legacy.
We will read a number of Shakespeare's plays from The Comedy of The Tale of Genji (circa 1000 CE), authored by Murasaki Shikibu, a
Errors to The Winter's Tale in relation to the sources, analogues, and woman of the Heian court, has been canonized over the centuries as the
genres (classical, continental and English) on which he drew. We will greatest work of Japanese literature. No work in the Japanese tradition
consider both formal and historical questions. Issues to be addressed has exerted as much literary influence as this mammoth work of prose
include genre, the Shakespearean text, gender, sexuality, status, degree, fiction detailing the private lives of Genji, the brilliant son of the emperor,
and nation. Some attention to what has come to be called "global" those with whom he consorts, and his descendents. We will read Genji in
Shakespeare. Written work to include a mid-term and two papers. its entirety, along with antecedent works, other texts of the period, works
influenced by Murasaki's opus, other historical materials, and secondary
COLT 1410S. Classical Tragedy.
commentary. There are no prerequisites for this course and it is open to all
This course will read the great Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles,
undergraduates.
and Euripides, and some Senecan tragedy. We will then read Renaissance
and later tragedies that use the classical world as a setting, such as COLT 1420B. A Mirror for the Romantic: The Tale of Genji and The
Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and tragedies that rewrite classical Story of the Stone.
themes, including O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. In East Asian Buddhist culture, the mirror is a symbol of the mind in both
its intellectual and emotional aspects. These masterworks detail the lives
COLT 1410T. Tragedy from Sophocles to The Wire.
and loves of Prince Genji, cynosure of the medieval Japanese court, and
Explores tragedy from Athens to Baltimore. Readings will include
Jia Baoyu, the last hope of an influential Chinese clan during the reign of
Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hegel, Chekhov, Jia Zhangke, Chan-Wook
Manchus. We examine both works as well as the sources of Genji and
Park, Marx, Trotsky, and the deindustrialized American city. Open to
literary aesthetics of the Tang dynasty.
juniors and seniors. Instructor permission required.
Fall COLT1420B S01 18546 TTh 2:30-3:50(12) (D. Levy)
COLT 1410U. Shakespeare in Perspective.
We study Shakespeare together with selections from other writers or COLT 1420E. The Nineteenth-Century Novel (ENGL 1561I).
thinkers, including those who have written about Shakespeare (e.g. Interested students must register for ENGL 1561I.
Nietzsche, Emerson, Coleridge), and those who can illuminate interpretive COLT 1420F. Fantastic and Existentialist Literatures of Argentina,
problems in Shakespeare (e.g. Plato, Melville). Uruguay and Brazil.
COLT 1410V. Russian Theatre and Drama (TAPS 1430). Jorge Luis Borges proclaimed that South American writers can "wield all
Interested students must register for TAPS 1430. themes" without superstition, with irreverence. This course examines the
ways in which 20th century writers from Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil
COLT 1410Y. Shakespeare and Embodiment (ENGL 1360Z). appropriated European fantastic and existentialist fictions, taking them in
Interested students must register for ENGL 1360Z. new directions. Readings, in English or original languages, include Borges,
COLT 1411B. Theater and Revolution. Cortázar, Onetti, Lispector. Prerequisite: previous college literature
This class explores how theater and dramatic literature question and course(s).
shape our understanding of “revolution” as a radical turn, incisive rupture, COLT 1420G. Fictions of the Caribbean.
and profound shift in the way we perceive and organize our social and The Caribbean has inspired conflicting cultural and political claims, and
cultural life. How does drama accompany revolutionary movements, and a wealth of visual images. We will rethink the formation, representation
how do revolutions compel political theater to transform itself? Readings and self-presentation of the Caribbean countries, steering our explorations
include Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Büchner’s through postcolonial and postmodern theory to questions of appropriation,
Danton’s Death, Brecht’s Life of Galileo, and Parks’s The America Play. language and identity. Readings from Columbus and Shakespeare to
We will analyze plays and performances, write our own dramatic scenes, Danticat, Santos Febres and Kincaid; essays by Glissant, James Benítez
and discuss key concepts of theater theory and practice. Rojo and others.
COLT 1411D. Antigones. COLT 1420K. Masterworks of Chinese Fiction.
As one of the most revised and interpreted works around the globe, Focuses on three acknowledged classics of Chinese fiction-Three
Sophocles’ Antigone invites a comparison of adaptations across cultural Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and The Dream of the Red Chamber-
contexts. This course examines how the play’s exploration of citizenship, works which demonstrate the range of the genre as they represent
law, gender, family, and resistance to authority has shaped philosophical historical, fantastical, and sociopsychological subjects. Topics include the
conceptions of tragedy and speaks to contemporary political issues. We role of fiction in Chinese society, the masterworks as mirrors of Chinese
will consider reimaginings of Antigone under apartheid laws in South culture from the 14th through 18th centuries, and the comparative theory
Africa, the Mexican drug war, and in the age of ISIS. The class is designed of the novel.
as a workshop where students will study versions of Antigone (theoretical
texts, dramatic literature, poetry, visual art) and engage in adaptation, COLT 1420L. Modern Japanese Fiction.
translation, and performance. Narrative fiction from the Meiji Period (1868-1912) to the present in the
context of modern Japanese cultural and intellectual history. In addition
COLT 1411E. Race and Gender in Early Modern Theater. to more canonical writers such as Natsume Sōseki and Mori ōgai,
In this course, we will cover a selection of Early Modern tragedies examines the legacy of women writers such as Higuchi Ichiyō and Enchi
from various literary traditions (English, French, Italian, Spanish), to Fumiko; proletariat writers such as Hayama Yoshiki, Kobayashi Takiji, and
critically discuss and analyze dramatic representations of gender and Hayashi Fumiko; and more contemporary mass-audience writers such as
race as portrayed on the Early Modern stage. Considering moments of Yoshimoto Banana and Yamada Eimi.
renegotiation, critique, and resistance towards dominant hierarchies, we
will give especial attention to marginalized characters, and/or to characters COLT 1420N. Postcolonial Faulkner.
who are explicitly gendered or racialized in the plays in which they appear. How is it that Faulkner became one of the most influential North American
We will accompany our reading of primary-source texts with selections authors in the Third World? To answer this, we read Faulkner's "The
from contemporary critical theory on gender and race, which will provide Bear" against two of his citational novels, Absalom, Absalom! and The
an important springboard for intersectional analysis. Sound and the Fury. We then turn toward a number of Faulknerian novels
from the Arab world and Latin America. We discuss theoretical texts that
describe the legacies of various colonialisms.

14 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 15

COLT 1420O. Proust, Joyce and Faulkner. COLT 1421I. The Paternalistic Thriller and Other Studies in Colonial
A reading of three major Modernist authors, with a focus on the following Fiction.
issues: role of the artist, representation of consciousness, weight of the The impact of colonialism on European fiction from the rise of empire to its
past. Texts include substantial portions of Proust's Recherche, Joyce's decline and fall, focusing on authors who wrote from direct contact with the
Portrait and Ulysses, Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, Light in August peoples of Africa and Asia, such as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, T.
and Absalom, Absalom! Prior background in these authors desirable, E. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Isak Dinesen. Topics will include romantic
especially Ulysses. images of conquest, imperial ideology in literature, differing attitudes
towards acculturation, and the changing symbolism of exotic settings.
COLT 1420Q. The Bildungsroman.
Readings of novels in the Bildungsroman tradition and the theoretical COLT 1421K. Faulkner (ENGL 1710G).
questions of the genre: the historicity and constitution of the self; problems Interested students must register for ENGL 1710G.
of the representation of a life; the category of the unity of a life as a COLT 1421L. "Terrible Beauty": Literature and the Terrorist Imaginary
factor of identity; notions of progress, development and completion. (ENGL 1760I).
Considerations of the successes and failures of this model. Readings to Interested students must register for ENGL 1760I.
be selected from Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Sterne, Goethe, Novalis,
Flaubert, Musil, Kerouac. COLT 1421M. Conrad and Naipaul: The Supremacy of the Visible?
(ENGL 1761T).
COLT 1420S. The Captivity Narrative. Interested students must register for ENGL 1761T.
Because the captivity narrative implies both a feminized subject and
a writing subject, it provides a link among political, social, and literary COLT 1421N. Kafka's Writing (GRMN 1340M).
phenomena common to all modern Western cultures. Examines various Interested students must register for GRMN 1340M.
novels consumed by members of such cultures (including gothic COLT 1421O. W. G. Sebald and Some Interlocutors (ENGL 1761Q).
romances, Bildungs romanen, boys books, girls books, ethnographic Interested students must register for ENGL 1761Q.
journeys, and prison diaries) as versions of the captivity narrative.
COLT 1421Q. Word and Image: Ekphrasis, the Iconic Narrative, and
COLT 1420T. The Fiction of Relationship. the Graphic Novel.
Explores the manifold ways in which narrative literature sheds light on An examination of the tradition of illustrated narratives from the pre-
the relationships that we have in life, both knowingly and unknowingly. modern to the modern periods: the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana,
The novel form, with its possibilities of multiple voices and perspectives, the early eleventh-century Japanese Genji Monogatari, the medieval
captures the interplay between self and other that marks all lives. English Canterbury Tales, the late eighteenth century Marriage of Heaven
Authors include Laclos, Melville, Brontë, Kafka, Woolf, Faulkner, Borges, and Hell, as well as the contemporary graphic novel Persepolis and
Burroughs, Vesaas, Morrison, and Coetzee. examples of Japanese manga. Discussion will focus on the nature of
COLT 1420U. The South: Literatures of the U.S. South and South iconography and symbolism; the historical privileging of text over image;
America. the significance of parallel visual and verbal representation and its
For Jorge Luis Borges, in his story of the same title, the South is a spectral implications for culturally-specific theories of reading. Instructor permission
region, hovering between imagination and reality. The literatures of the required.
U.S. South and South America enact his notion of the South. We examine COLT 1421R. The European Novel from Richardson to Goethe.
the remarkable similarities between the two literatures-similarities that This course studies the rise of the novel in eighteenth-century England,
result from literary influence and from social, cultural, and historical France, and Germany, focusing on the development of epistolary fiction,
circumstances. Prerequisites: previous upper-level literature course(s), but with side-glances at the picaresque and sentimental tradition. Texts
relevant to your studies at Brown. Instructor permission is required and will to be read include Richardson's Pamela, Fielding's Shamela and Joseph
be given after second class. Andrews, Rousseau's Julie, Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses, perhaps
COLT 1420V. Visionary Fictions. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, perhaps Sade's Justine, and
Visionary and apocalyptic writing, subversive of modes of perception and definitely Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.
understanding as well as of political doctrines and systems, from Blake COLT 1421S. The Poetics of Confession (ENGL 1561J).
and Novalis to mid-nineteenth century French writers (Nerval, Rimbaud, Interested students must register for ENGL 1561J.
Lautréamont), Surrealism and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
COLT 1421T. Mediterranean Fictions: On Debts, Crises, and the Ends
COLT 1420X. The European Novel From Goethe to Proust. of Europe.
Readings of major European novels of the 19th century as literary Sun-drenched, seductive, and timeless, the Mediterranean is an appealing
reflections on philosophical questions such as aesthetic and ethical location from which to ponder Europe’s debt to this cradle of western
judgment, subjectivity, mimesis, memory and the novel itself as a genre. civilization. Recently, the region’s economic debt crisis has crystallized
Authors include Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert and Proust. thoughts that, beginning here, a peaceful, unified Europe will come
Selections from Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukács and Benjamin. undone or be rehabilitated. The word ‘crisis’ itself hinges on a making
COLT 1420Y. Gigantic Fictions. a crucial decision, often in marking the turning point of a disease. This
Terms such as ‘epic,’ ‘mammoth,’ ‘gigantic,’ and even ‘loose, baggy course examines representations of this moment through literature and
monsters’ have been coined to describe examples of literary discourse film—but also in history, anthropology, journalism, and art—and in the
that inordinately exceed the normative boundaries of fiction. How are context of other pivotal twentieth-century Mediterranean texts that marked,
we to understand these narratives? What is the relation between literary and anticipated, seismic shifts on the continent.
gigantism and mimesis? How do 'gigantic fictions' threaten to break their COLT 1421U. Words Like Daggers: The Epistolary Novel.
literary bounds? What holds these mammoth narratives together? What Letters as novels, novels in letters: this course traces the development of
impels authors to elect such a grand scope for literary representation? We the epistolary novel, as it was cultivated in Europe from the seventeenth to
explore these questions and others through close reading of several works the twentieth centuries. Through focused discussions of seminal, as much
deemed to be among the most gargantuan from authors such as Rabelais, as fascinating, specimens of the genre, we will study the major impact that
Murasaki Shikibu, Tolstoy and Joyce. epistolary fiction had on the stylistic and conceptual evolution of the novel
COLT 1421F. Esthers of the Diaspora: Female Jewish Voices from in general, also exploring its interactions with a range of established or
Latin America (POBS 1500H). shifting social structures, gender roles, discursive practices, and modes of
Interested students must register for POBS 1500H. consciousness. Authors include Montesquieu, Laclos, Goethe, Hölderlin,
Stoker, Foscolo, Tabucchi, Alexandrou, and Galanaki.
COLT 1421G. Dickens and Others (ENGL 1511G).
Interested students must register for ENGL 1511G.

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16 Comparative Literature

COLT 1421V. Modernisms North and South: Ulysses in Dublin, Paris, COLT 1422L. The Modernist Novel: Alienation and Narration.
and Buenos Aires. This course will examine how the modernist novel is not only about
James Joyce’s Ulysses (Ireland, 1922), André Breton’s Nadja (Paris, alienation—estrangement from others, the meaninglessness of existence,
1928), and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Argentina, 1963): key texts of the divorce of private self from public life—but also incorporates alienation
modernism, the avant-garde, and post-modernism, from different moments into its narrative structures. Through the close analysis of novels by
and outpost of literary modernity, but in intimate conversation with one European and Latin American authors (Kafka, Camus, Woolf, Onetti, Rulfo
another about the place of the human in art, and of art in politics. Join and Di Benedetto), we will consider alienation from a variety of angles: as
Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, Nadja, Horacio Oliveira, a formal problem for narrative; as an existential situation; an experience
and a cast of minor characters on a journey through the hearts, minds, of history and the past; and as a condition related to the uneven global
memories, and nervous systems of various modern metropoles. economy.
COLT 1421W. Blast from the Past: The Historical Novel. COLT 1422M. Reading the Short Story.
Focuses on a popular literary genre known as the historical novel. This course invites students to explore the pleasurable challenges of
We will discuss its defining characteristics, cultural meanings, and close reading within the context of a compressed form, the modern short
basic differences from other types of fiction. We will also explore larger story. Select works from the nineteenth century on wards—many of them
theoretical issues that are intricately related to the development and masterpieces, some hidden gems from around the world—will help us
scope of the genre: the representation of the past and its relationship question what we think they mean and how we know this. We will develop
to the present; the creative integration of the gaps between factual practices and techniques for articulating such quandaries even as we
history and lived experience; and finally the complex interaction between observe how sociocultural themes, theories of interpretation, and literary
authenticity and fictionality, exemplarity and specificity, temporality and movements intertwine with expressions of the self and the politics of
detachment. Authors include Flaubert, Yourcenar, Kadare, Pamuk, identity.
Calvino, Lampedusa, Roidis, and Galanaki. No prerequisites. Open to all undergraduates.
COLT 1421X. Fairy Tales and Culture (FREN 1330A). COLT 1422N. Peasant-Boom-Slum: The Latin American Novel.
Interested students must register for FREN 1330A. Despite being associated with peasants and agricultural goods,
Latin America has become the most urbanized region in the world.
COLT 1422A. The Twilight Zone: Classics of Horror Fiction.
In this course, we will analyze novels that attempt to make sense of
This course discusses a number of seminal works – from Gothic novels
Latin American society in relation to this chaotic and rapid historical
to ghost stories and vampire epics – that exploit the oldest and strongest
transformation. Beginning with nineteenth-century writers who called on
emotion of mankind: fear. Why are authors and readers fanatically drawn
civilization to conquer the barbaric countryside, we move to the so-called
to something as disturbing as horror, supernatural or not? How do the
“Boom” novels of the twentieth century that ambiguously questioned the
gruesome or the macabre become sources of intellectual excitement and
authoritarian and destructive impulses of this modernizing project, and
aesthetic gratification? How can texts whose intended effect is to shock
conclude with contemporary authors who reflect on the utter collapse
and distress compel us to confront suppressed instincts, challenge deep-
of modernization. In these novels, we will see that the topic of the city
rooted certainties, or reflect on things and ideas that we generally prefer to
and the countryside becomes a powerful framework for imagining and
ignore? Are you brave enough to find out?
thinking through issues of indigeneity, gender, industrialization, memory
COLT 1422B. Family Fictions in the Enlightenment. and dictatorship. Authors: Borges, Arlt, Galvão, Rulfo, Fuentes, Vargas
This course will study the changing representation of the family in the Llosa, Arguedas, Lispector, Bolaño and Aira.
literature, art and culture of Enlightenment Europe. We will analyze the
COLT 1430A. Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Poetry.
critique of traditional models of the family and the construction of an
Various responses to ancient Greek myths by poets in the Western
ideal of domesticity based on new concepts of childhood, education
tradition, especially modern Greek poets. Considers how the classical
and marriage. We will read stories of “domestic misfortunes” as well as
version of myths, such as those of Helen, Oedipus, Orpheus, Persephon,
proposals for alternative solutions to “ill husbandry.” Readings will include
Penelope, and Ulysses, are approached, rewritten, or subverted in poetry
novels, plays, theoretical texts and visual documents (paintings and
since 1800. Emphasizes the challenges posed by the past, issues of
caricatures).
cultural and political context, and on questions of gender. Readings in
COLT 1422D. Short Forms: Major Works in a Minor Key (HISP 1330Q). English.
Interested students must register for HISP 1330Q.
COLT 1430B. Art and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern
COLT 1422E. The 19th-Century Novel: Transatlantic Perspectives. Literature.
What happened when the novel crossed the Atlantic? After its rise in In this course we will cover a selection of Classical, Medieval and Early
Europe in the mid 18th century, the novel quickly spread and became Modern works from various linguistic traditions (English, French, Italian,
a dominant literary genre both in the U.S. and in Latin America. In this Portuguese, and Spanish), which feature literary representations of art,
course we will read key 19th-century novels in the European tradition; we especially via scenes that are ekphrastic in nature (the description of
will then discuss how this (by no means homogenous) European genre Achilles’s shield in Homer’s Iliad, for instance), and via textual moments
was assimilated and modified across the Atlantic. What did writers in Brazil that use exemplary ekphrastic scenes as a point of departure for larger
and in the U.S. do with the genre, and how did they transform it according commentaries on: the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the reception
to national specificities? We will focus on English, French, American, and of works of art along with their attendant sociocultural impact. Taking
Brazilian novels. moments of renegotiation, critique, and resistance towards dominant
COLT 1422F. Short Forms: Major Works in a Minor Key (HISP 1330Q). hierarchies as a helpful framework, along with texts that explicitly situate
Interested students must register for HISP 1330Q. themselves against the exemplary model from which they are drawing,
we will give special attention to race and gender by examining the artistic
COLT 1422H. Mediterranean Fictions: On Debts, Crises, and the Ends representation of marginalized bodies that are explicitly gendered or
of Europe (MGRK 1230). racialized in the literary texts in which they appear. We will also look at
Interested students must register for MGRK 1230. race and gender in select works from Medieval and Early Modern artists.
COLT 1430C. Classical Japanese Poetry.
A historical study of various poetic forms of waka or Japanese poetry
from the 8th-century anthology, the Man'yōshū, to the advent of modern
verse, including jiyūshi or free verse, in the latter part of the 19th century.
Focuses on the relationship of poetry to religion, the political implications
of waka, and the dominant aesthetic governing poetic conventions in
different periods.

16 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 17

COLT 1430D. Critical Approaches to Chinese Poetry. COLT 1430U. Measures of Poetry: A Workshop.
Examination of works of Chinese poetry of several forms and periods Rhythm, intonation and their written forms measure poetic matter. This
in the context of Chinese poetic criticism. Knowledge of Chinese not workshop introduces prosody through exercises in theory and practice:
required, but provisions for working with original texts will be made for the line; metrical and stanzaic form; rhyme; music and performance; free
students of Chinese language. verse; language writing; and the task of translation (form). Even monkeys,
Fall COLT1430D S01 18538 TTh 9:00-10:20(05) (D. Levy) Darwin wrote, express strong feelings in different tones. Enrollment limited
to 20.
COLT 1430H. Poetry, Art, and Beauty.
What does it mean to be beautiful in classical and European literature COLT 1431B. Modern Arabic Poetry.
and the arts? How do poems and works of visual art embody beauty? An advanced course with readings in modernist Arabic poetry,
How is the idea of beauty defined by thinkers from Plato to Benjamin and beginning with the so-called neo-classical poets and proceeding through
Danto? Works include Sappho, Plato, Aristotle, Catullus, Horace, Petrarch, Romanticism and Modernism, from Egypt to Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq,
Kant, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Rilke, Benjamin, Stevens. Works of art and beyond. We will examine such recurring themes as love, loss, and
considered range from the Lascaux caves through renaissance classical longing; war, exile, and homeland; cultural heritage (turath) and creative
painters like Giotto and Raphael to contemporary installations. innovation (ibda‘); gender and genre. All readings in Arabic; at least three
years Arabic language study (or equivalent) required for enrollment.
COLT 1430I. Poetry of Europe: Montale, Celan, Hill.
The fifty years between the Second World War and the formation of the COLT 1431C. Poets, Poetry, and Politics.
European Union was a period in which the meaning of "Europe" was The award of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan ignited a
placed under great strain. The class will examine the strains and debates lively debate about who is, and who is not, a poet. Historically, who were
about Europe within the lyric poetry of several literary traditions. It will take deemed poets, what was their function? What do their poems do and
the form of close historical, formal, and critical readings of three books of how do they work? Do they foment revolution or “make nothing happen,”
poems in their entirety: Montale's The Storm and Others (1956), Celan's as Auden once wrote? How does the poet aspire to a unique, individual
No-One's Rose (1963), and Hill's Canaan (1997). Enrollment limited to 25. voice even as he or she may (be seen to) best represent a constituency?
Fall COLT1430I S01 18557 Th 4:00-6:30(04) (K. Haynes) This course relates the poetic act to political action and interrogates the
commonly aired contention that politics makes for bad poetry.
COLT 1430J. Readings in Poetry and Poetics.
Concentrated readings of Hölderlin, Shelley, Baudelaire, and Yeats in COLT 1431D. Reading Modernist Poetry.
conjunction with theoretical texts by Heidegger, Derrida, De Man, and The period between 1880 and 1950, generally known as the age of
Benjamin. Texts include poetry, essays, novels, and dramas of the poets in Modernism, saw profound changes at every level of Western society,
a critical and philosophical context. Focuses on the relationship between including politics, war, religion, and art. In this course, we will examine
figurative and expository language, the limits of commentary, and the how various poets in Europe and beyond responded to and helped
concept of criticism as repetition and translation. French or German shape these changes through their art. Emphasis will be on reading for
required. Frequent writing and oral presentations. form as well as theme and socio-historical context, and on poetry as
performance. Authors may include Yeats, H.D., Hughes, Rilke, Lasker-
COLT 1430K. The Classical Tradition in English Poetry. Schüler, Celan, Apollinaire, Césaire, Montale, Ungaretti, Blok, Akhmatova,
We will read a number of famous short poems from antiquity in conjunction Lorca, and Neruda. Knowledge of at least one non-English language
with the major English writers who later translated, imitated, and reworked highly recommended.
them. We will pay special attention to the question of creative innovation.
We will read Horace, Theocritus, Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Tennyson, and COLT 1431E. Loss in Modern Arabic Literature.
others. This course examines the literary expression of and response to various
forms of loss, including military defeat, diaspora, and prison confinement
COLT 1430L. Voices of Romanticism. in Arabic poems, short stories, and novellas from the 20th century through
Readings of lyric poetry in the European Romantic tradition. Focus the post-Arab Spring. We explore how texts reimagine social and political
on problems of lyric subjectivity and representation, and the rhetoric geographies through diverse poetic and narrative techniques to enrich our
of "voice." Emphasis on formal features of poetry. The course will be understanding of the region and of central debates in its literary tradition.
based on close reading and frequent writing assignments. Readings from Though the topics may seem quite grim, we will find that many of the
Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Novalis, Hugo, Nerval, Lamartine, readings render forms of loss into aesthetics of beauty or empowerment.
Baudelaire and others. Knowledge of French or German required, or by No knowledge of Arabic necessary.
permission.
COLT 1431F. Reading Modernist Poetry.
COLT 1430N. The Albatross and the Nightingale: Nineteenth-Century The period between 1880 and 1950, generally known as the age of
Poetry. Modernism, saw profound changes at every level of Western society,
Readings in French, German, British and American poetry of the including politics, war, religion, and art. In this course, we will examine
nineteenth century. Texts selected from: Hölderlin, Mörike, Heine, Hugo, how various poets in Europe and beyond responded to and helped
Nerval, Baudelaire, Keats, Hardy, Dickinson, Poe and others. Focus on shape these changes through their art. Emphasis will be on reading for
close reading, and rhetorical and formal elements of poetry. Frequent form as well as theme and socio-historical context, and on poetry as
writing assignments. performance. Authors may include Yeats, H.D., Hughes, Rilke, Lasker-
COLT 1430O. The Poetry of Childhood. Schüler, Celan, Apollinaire, Césaire, Montale, Ungaretti, Blok, Akhmatova,
Selected readings from among Rousseau, Blake, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Lorca, and Neruda. Knowledge of at least one non-English language
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Freud, Yeats, Char. highly recommended.
COLT 1430Q. Poetry and the Sublime (GRMN 1440C). COLT 1431H. Women Writing Epic (CLAS 1930F).
Interested students must register for GRMN 1440C. Interested students must register for CLAS 1930F.
COLT 1430S. Latin American Death Trip (LITR 1230K). COLT 1431I. Ovid's Metamorphoses (CLAS 1120X)..
Interested students must register for LITR 1230K. Interested students must register for CLAS 1120X.
COLT 1430T. Leaves of Words: Japanese Poetry and Poetics.
A historical study of various poetic forms of Japanese poetry (waka) from
the 8th-century anthology, the Man'yoshu, to the advent of modern verse,
including jiyushi or free verse, in the latter part of the 19th century into the
20th century. Focusses on the relationship of poetry to society, religion, the
political implications of waka, and the dominant aesthetic modes governing
poetic conventions in different periods.

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18 Comparative Literature

COLT 1431K. Modern Arabic Poetry and Poetics. COLT 1440T. Cinema's Bodies.
This is an advanced course with readings in modern Arabic poetry. It The course explores the cinematic construction of bodies, female, male,
introduces students to a set of topics and formal problems that have animal and others. They are not standing alone as they are framed, cut,
structured poetic production in the Arab world from the mid-twentieth exposed, veiled, enlarged, distorted and gendered. The body is screened
century to the present: the relationship between poetry and prose, at the screen and composed into an imaginary image of beauty, death,
modernity and heritage, (the Arabic) language and progress, political sex, work. Cinematic devices like close-up, camera angle, light etc.
commitment and aesthetic autonomy, and resistance and the everyday. transform bodies into the body of the film and its specific style, from which
Primary readings for this course are in Arabic, with secondary readings in they can't be subtracted. This leads to the question of the spectator’s body
English. At least three years of Arabic language study (or the equivalent) as screen for the filmic body and the many theoretical explorations to the
are required for enrollment. embodied visions cinema entails and stimulates.
Fall COLT1431K S01 18542 TTh 2:30-3:50(12) (M. Pabon)
COLT 1440U. The Listener (Literature, Theory, Film).
COLT 1440B. Killer Love: Passion and Crime in Fiction and Film. Listening is not only the supposedly peaceful, welcoming activity that
Discusses textual and cinematic representations of criminal passion and verges on mere receptive passivity. Listening or not listening also has
its ambiguous relationship to religious, moral, and social norms. We will to do with the exercise of power and this is the reason why we have a
focus on extreme forms of intimacy both as a thematic choice of cultural responsibility as listeners. In order to explore what could be described
production and as a symbolic medium of communication. Why is it that art as the politics of listening, we will follow multiple paths that will lead us
so often explores unsanctioned emotions and deviant behaviors? What from the strategies of listening in concert venues to the medical practice
is at stake when narratives capitalize on violent manifestations of desire? of auscultation and the generalization of surveillance techniques. Our
In what ways is the semantics of excessive love related to conceptions of seminar will interweave readings in literature or theory (Kafka, Nietzsche,
subjectivity, sociability, and sexuality? What role does it play in the creative Calvino, Foucault, Chekhov, Freud, Deleuze. . .) and screenings of
process itself? selected filmic scenes.
COLT 1440F. 1948 Photo Album: From Palestine To Israel. COLT 1440X. Shéhérazades : Depicting the "Orientale" in Modern
Why do we name the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" as we do? The purpose French Culture.
of this class is to use photographs – alongside historical and literary Centered around the storied figure of Shéhérazade, this course explores
documents--to question the framework of a "national conflict" and study literary and visual representations of “oriental” women in France from the
its emergence as a given, unquestioned and axiomatic scheme for 18th century to the contemporary period. Structured in a chronological
any historical narrative of that period. Reading archival material and and thematic manner, the course confronts students with highly influential
post-colonial and photography theories, each week we shall study one orientalist depictions of women (including Voltaire, Loti, and Delacroix),
photograph taken in 1948, reconstructing the photography event as well as as well as postcolonial and feminist responses to orientalism. Primary
its myriad relations among the protagonists involved and its after life as an sources will be supplemented with theoretical readings from Edward Said,
archived image, to include photographed persons, photographers, editors, Fatima Mernissi and Joan Scott among others, in order to question the
journalists, politicians, and more. evolution and relevance of “orientalism” in France today and articulate the
enduringly complex relation between imperialism and gender.
COLT 1440H. The Literature and Cinema of Global Organized Crime
(SLAV 1500). COLT 1440Z. Poets on Poetry.
Interested students must register for SLAV 1500. How do poets think about poetry? How might their ideas differ from those
of professional theorists and critics? In this course we will look at the
COLT 1440K. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Contested Narratives (UNIV variety of ways in which poets throughout history have written about their
1001). craft, from essays and letters, to poems, translations, and writing guides.
Interested students must register for UNIV 1001. In addition to discussing issues surrounding the theory, composition, and
COLT 1440M. Lyric Genre-Benders. ethics of poetry, students will write poems of their own, according to the
In this course, we will ask what constitutes poetic language and how to "rules" of famous poets like Edgar Allan Poe and John Keats. Authors may
identify the lyric as a genre. Are there discernible traits that lyric poems include Celan, Gander, Hayes, Horace, Lorde, Montale, Moore, Neruda,
share, or is poetry, like pornography, something we recognize only when Pound, Shelley, Swensen.
we see it? We will have a special focus on how genre is related to gender, COLT 1441A. The Serial Imagination: Literature and Journalism in the
and consider the historical precedent of poetry calling readers to its 19th Century (ENGL 0151L).
defense. Discussion will revolve around essays on lyric theory both classic Interested students must register for ENGL 0151L.
and contemporary, prose poems by Baudelaire and Davis, fragments by
Sappho, and finally, poems by Basho, Dickinson, Rankine, and more. COLT 1610B. Irony.
A study of the trope of irony and its evaluation, especially in the Romantic
COLT 1440P. Nationalism and Transnationalism in Film and Fiction. tradition. Focuses on the epistemological implications of irony and the role
Reports of the demise of nationalism always seem greatly exaggerated. it plays in contemporary criticism. Readings from Plato, Hegel, Schlegel,
How are notions of transnationalism dependent on rewriting the nation? Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Lukács, Booth, White, De Man.
This course revisits films of world cinema acclaimed for their national
cachet from a transnational perspective and in dialogue with their COLT 1610C. Japanese Aesthetics and Poetics.
literary intertexts. We will study these films’ fictional narration, cinematic Focuses on the historical development of aesthetic values and their
articulation, and critical reception and consider how they signify in relation to social culture, religion, and national identity in Japan from the
multinational networks of funding, distribution, production, conception, and Nara period to the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the literary
critical reception. Students will analyze the political, ethical, and artistic arts. Readings from Fujiwara Teika, Zeami Motokiyo, Sen no Rikyū,
stakes of confronting difference as both a located and universal stance or Okakura Tenshin, and others. A background in critical theory/philosophy
commodity. Films and texts chosen from across the globe. and in East Asian studies helpful.
COLT 1440Q. Stranger Things: The German Novella (GRMN 1440X). COLT 1610D. Theory of Lyric Poetry.
Interested students must register for GRMN 1440X. Through readings of recent critical discussions of the lyric genre, we will
explore general methodological problems of literary theory. Discussions
COLT 1440S. Images d’une guerre sans nom: the Algerian War in include: the role of form, structure and tropes in analyzing poetry;
Literature and Film (FREN 1410R). problems of subjectivity and voice; the relation between poetry and
Interested students must register for FREN 1410R. history; the function of reading: and the problematic "objectivity" of
criticism. Readings from Hölderlin, Shelley, Baudelaire, Yeats, Jakobson,
Benveniste, Riffaterre, Jauss, Johnson, De Man.
COLT 1610E. Aesthetics and Politics (ENGL 1900E).
Interested students must register for ENGL 1900E.

18 Comparative Literature
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COLT 1610F. New Theories for a Baroque Stage (TAPS 1280N). COLT 1610V. The Promise of Being: Heidegger for Beginners.
Interested students must register for TAPS 1280N. “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is,”
Martin Heidegger writes, “that we are still not thinking.” Our undergraduate
COLT 1610G. Mihail Bakhtin (RUSS 1895).
seminar will study, slowly and carefully, some of Heidegger’s most
Interested students must register for RUSS 1895.
fascinating and challenging paths of thinking, especially as they relate
COLT 1610I. Getting Emotional: Passionate Theories (ENGL 1560W). to questions of Being and our being-in-the-world. We will encounter
Interested students must register for ENGL 1560W. his unique engagements with art and literature, his critique of modern
COLT 1610J. Holocaust Literature (JUDS 1820). technology, his reflections on what it means to “dwell” somewhere, his
Interested students must register for JUDS 1820. views on finitude and death, and his notion of being “on the way” toward
language. No previous familiarity with Heidegger is assumed; curious
COLT 1610K. Literature and Multilingualism (GRMN 1340N). students from diverse fields welcome.
Interested students must register for GRMN 1340N.
COLT 1610W. Whites, White Jews and Us: Radical Black, Arab &
COLT 1610L. What is Reading?. Jewish Thinkers.
The answers to this question will be read—deciphered—in the many Inspired by Houria Bouteldja’s book White, Jews and Us, which we will
“reading scenes” found throughout the history of literature or philosophy. In read in class, we will read authors who are engaged with generations of
Plato’s Phaedrus, reading thus appears caught in a network of desire and (forced) displacement and concomitant fraught cartographies. The class
power: the dominant role—the erases (“lover”) who writes and teaches— will proceed along lines drawn by two questions: (a) what makes these
and the passive or submissive position—the eromenos (“beloved”) who texts radical and how does their radicalness opens paths of refusal, care
reads and learns—are constantly permutated and destabilized. Hobbes’ and repair of and in shared worlds; (b) how do these authors engage
Leviathan, Melville’s Moby Dick and Billy Budd, Goethe’s and Valéry’s with identities made and remade by displacement and catastrophe, and
Faust will lead us to question what we do when we read and reflect upon how imagination, fabulation, remembrance and reclamation of never-
what could be called a politics of reading. completely-lost worlds are mobilized to question these identities, borders
COLT 1610M. Twentieth-Century Russian Approaches to Literature: and injustices they produce. We will read texts by Ella Shohat, Houria
Bakhtin and the Russian Formalists (SLAV 1890). Bouteldja, Saidiya Hartman, Susan Slymovics, Anarkata, Aliyyah Abdur-
Interested students must register for SLAV 1890. Rahman, Lital Levy and others.
COLT 1610N. Ecological Thought. COLT 1610Y. Of Friends and Enemies.
This course will serve as an introduction to the new interdisciplinary field “And so will believe in our stellar friendship, though we should have
of the environmental humanities. Discussing an exciting range of texts to be terrestrial enemies to one another,” Nietzsche says. How are
and films—from Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Arundati Roy to Ridley friendship and enmity construed in the Western traditions? What are the
Scott and Werner Herzog—we will investigate how literary and cinematic philosophical and ethical implications of dividing one’s personal, cultural,
works make ecological crisis perceptible. The following topics will be and political world into friends and enemies? What is the elusive relation
central to our discussions: garbology (especially hoarding, collecting, between friendship and community, hospitality, war, and mourning? We
and the relation between trash and modern poetry); “slow violence” will scrutinize the history and theory of friendship and enmity through
and postcolonial environmentalism; queer ecology; biopolitics; the close readings of writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, Kant,
representation of non-human animals; the effects of 24/7 consumerism; Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Schmitt, Blanchot, Nancy, and
and the political uses of ecological nostalgia, disgust, grief, and wonder. Derrida. Students from diverse fields welcome.
COLT 1610P. Holocaust Literature (JUDS 1820). COLT 1611A. The Uncanniness of Being: Freud, Heidegger, Derrida.
Interested students must register for JUDS 1820. It is one of the defining features of modernity that the human being has
become wholly problematic to itself. We can no longer take for granted
COLT 1610Q. Gender Theory and Politics in France (FREN 1420C). what it means to be human, and our being-in-the-world poses itself as
Interested students must register for FREN 1420C. an abiding question mark. To be human and to live in time has become
COLT 1610R. Visions of Liberation: African Decolonization Now?. inextricable from a certain uncanniness. We will study key texts by three
If, as many African thinkers contend, the acquisition of formal national of the most insightful thinkers of this uncanniness: Freud, Heidegger,
independence did not signify liberation, it is necessary to imagine and one of their best readers, Derrida. Whether engaging with the dark
decolonization now. In “Visions of Liberation,” we will examine ideas, vagaries of our sexuality, posing the question of “Being” in relation to
particularly those of Césaire and Fanon, that have shaped decolonial the horizon of our death, or elucidating the work of mourning: Freud,
thinking in Africa. What is the contemporary relevance of notions of Heidegger, and Derrida help us to come to terms with the mysterious
freedom imagined by thinkers of the early and mid-twentieth century? How adventure of dwelling in the world as radically finite human beings.
have postcolonial and post-apartheid writers conceived of freedom? What Students from diverse fields welcome.
does it mean to call Mali a “postcolony” or “neocolony,” or to state that COLT 1611C. Gift and Debt.
South Africa is not postcolonial? Previous knowledge of the topic is not By alternating literary and philosophical approaches to gift and debt, we
required. will try to gain a historical perspective on what Maurizio Lazzarato has
COLT 1610U. Gender, Sexuality, and Culture in the Modern Middle called “the making of the indebted man” in our contemporary neoliberal
East. era. Important landmarks for our approach will include: Shakespeare’s The
An introduction to women’s and gender studies in the Middle East, with Merchant of Venice, Bataille’s The Accursed Share, Goethe’s Faust I and
a particular focus on Arabic literature and film. We will begin by laying Faust II, and Derrida’s The Gift of Time.
critical foundations for discussing gender issues in the Middle East, with COLT 1710A. Introduction to Literary Translation.
readings on Orientalism, the harem, and the veil. Other units include: pre- This is a workshop course introducing the history and theory of literary
modern female literary personae, gender and revolution, women writing translation, with demonstrations and exercises translating poetry and
war, feminism and class, colonialism and culture. prose. All languages welcome, but students must be proficient to the level
of reading literature in the original language. Foreign language through
0600 or permission of the instructor.
Fall COLT1710A S01 18548 W 3:00-5:30(10) ’To Be Arranged'
COLT 1710B. Advanced Translation (LITR 1010F).
Interested students must register for LITR 1010F.

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COLT 1710C. Literary Translation Workshop. COLT 1810H. Tales of Two Cities: Havana - Miami, San Juan - New
The primary focus of this course is the practice of literary translation York.
as an art. Using the workshop format, each student will complete a In this course we will compare representations of Havana and San Juan
project by the end of the semester. Examples and theoretical texts will in contemporary fiction and film to literary inscriptions of Cuban Miami
illuminate the historical, ethical, cultural, political, and aesthetic values that and Puerto Rican New York. We will explore mapping the city as mapping
underlie every translation, keeping an eye towards opening up the field identity and city-writing as reconstruction and creation, viewing through the
beyond inherited practices to consider the contemporary implications of eyes of children, tourists, and urban detectives. Authors include Antonio
our choices, intentions, and purposes in translation. Open to all levels. José Ponte, Roberto G. Fernández, Mayra Santos Febres and Ernesto
Heritage speakers are welcome, collaboration is permitted, and an open- Quiñones. Good preparation for study abroad on the Brown-in-Cuba
spirited approach to this developing and fascinating practice is strongly program. Not open to first year students.
recommended. COLT 1810I. Gates of Asia.
COLT 1710D. Exercises in Literary Translation. An exploration of the growth of European knowledge of Asia from the rise
Exercises and investigations in the history, theory, and practice of literary of the Mongol empire through the Great Game and its aftermath. Primary
translation. Students pursue individual projects for translation workshops. sources include three kinds of accounts provided by travelers who set
Common exercises draw on Shakespeare translation, from classic their hearts on Asian exploration: personal narratives, official reports and
translations in Europe to unique examples like Nyerere’s Swahili Caesar dispatches, and scholarly studies of the exotic cultures. Enrollment limited
and current projects like Shakespeare in Modern English or The Chinese to 20.
Shakespeare. Prerequisite: one foreign-language course in literature at COLT 1810J. History and Aesthetic Form.
1000-level (or equivalent). In this course, we will examine the co-articulation of theories of history with
COLT 1810A. Onnade: The Woman's Hand in Classical Japanese and theories of language and aesthetics. Focus will be on the interdependence
Medieval Western Literature. between an emerging interest in history and the origin of language, and
A consideration of various genres of women's writing from 700 to 1450 approaches to literary history, genre definition, and general aesthetic
C.E. focusing on such issues as literary conventions, the relationship to categories. Readings to be selected from Vice, Rousseau, Herder,
the vernacular, the role of religion in education, and questions of gender Lessing, Schiller, Negel, Novalis, Lukacs, Adorno, Derrida and De Man.
and social class. Writers may include Berthgyth, Murasaki Shikibu, Sei COLT 1810L. Housing Problems.
Shōnagon, Héloïse, Marie de France, the comtessa de Dia, Ladu Nijō, Examines architectural figures and problems of containment and
Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pisan, and various anonymous women. construction in a variety of literary and theoretical texts. We will consider
COLT 1810B. Aesthetics in the Colonial Frame. how images of buildings structure texts and outline spaces for subjectivity.
Draws together works from a wide range of contexts and genres- Themes include the gothic, haunted houses, foundations, ruins, walls, and
Enlightenment philosophy, romantic travel literature, Arabic novels and doors. Texts selected from Descartes, Derrida, Goethe, Hegel, Austen,
poems-to compose a conversation about aesthetics in the colonial context Coleridge, Poe, Baudelaire, Melville, Hawthorne, Kafka, Tschumi and
of Egypt. Senior Seminar. Borges.
COLT 1810C. City (B)Lights. COLT 1810M. Image and Text: the Reconstitution of Narrative.
Interdisciplinary explorations of the modern urban experience featuring An examination of the tradition of illustrated narratives in several
social sciences, literature and film. Convergences and differences in the premodern cultures: the early 11th-century Japanese Genji Monogatari,
presentation of urban life in literature, film, the visual arts, urban planning, the medieval English Canterbury Tales, and the ancient Indian epic the
and social sciences. City populations, bureaucracy, power groups, Māhābharata. Discussion focuses on the nature of iconography and
alienation, urban crowds, the city as site of the surreal, are central themes. symbolism; the historical privileging of text over image; the significance of
Against the background of classic European urban images, American parallel visual and verbal representation and its implications for culturally-
cities and literary works are foregrounded. specific theories of reading. Seminar.
COLT 1810E. Dwellers Amid the Clouds: the Literature of the Court. COLT 1810N. Freud: Writer and Reader.
A survey of three court traditions-Heian Japan, medieval Iceland, and early A broad survey of Freud's writings, with particular emphasis on
modern England-in which the relationship between the literary genres psychoanalysis' relevance to literary theory and cultural analysis.
and the specific social context from which they emerge is highlighted in Readings include Freud's major works, as well as secondary sources
the form of particular literary conventions. Topics include the question focused on applications to literary studies.
of patronage, the function of particular literature as shibboleth, the idea COLT 1810O. Latin American Literature in Dialogue with France.
of spectacle and play, the politics of literature, and the trope of irony as Complicates the question of influence in Latin American literary and
courtly emblem. intellectual self-fashioning, specifically with regard to France. Explores
COLT 1810F. Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment in Eighteenth- the productivity and perplexity of this relationship through romanticism
Century Germany. and articulations of the real (as realism, surrealism and magical
Some of the most intractable questions of contemporary philosophy were realism). Approaching the twenty-first century, considers Latin American
vigorously debated in eighteenth-century Germany. What are the limit of perspectives on French theories of feminism, postmodernism and
reason? Does its supposed neutrality and universality mask its own set of globalization.
prejudices? Are there any universally valid claims in truth or ethics? How, COLT 1810P. Literature and Medicine.
why, should Christian, Jew, and Muslim tolerate their differences? We will The purpose of this course is to examine a number of central issues in
read literary and philosophical works by Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, Kant, medicine-disease, pain, trauma, madness, the image of the physician--
Lessing, and Mendelssohn. from the distinct perspectives of the sciences and the arts. Texts will be
COLT 1810G. Fiction and History. drawn from authors such as Sophocles, Hawthorne, Gilman, Tolstoy,
How the historical fiction that has flourished over the past four decades Kafka, Anderson, O'Neill, Hemingway, Ionesco, Verghese, Barker, Sacks,
challenges the notions of objectivity and totalization, while providing Foucault, Sontag, Scarry, Gawande and others. Open enrollment course:
alternative viewpoints for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the lecture + section.
past. Authors considered include Grass, Doctorow, Delillo, García- COLT 1810Q. Literature and Money in the Age of Paper.
Márquez, Allende, Danticat and Gordimer. Theoretical texts by White, Focuses on the complex and highly ambivalent relationship between
LaCapra, Benjamin, Ricoeur, and Chartier. Films such as The Official literature and money in nineteenth-century European literature. Works by
Story and Europa, Europa will be viewed and incorporated into the Poe, Balzac, Dickens, Baudelaire, Stevenson, Hardy, and Zola. Relevant
discussions. Prerequisite: two previous courses in literature. Enrollment philosophical writing by Smith, Marx, Nietzsche, and Derrida.
limited to 19. Instructor permission required.

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 Comparative Literature 21

COLT 1810S. Literature and the City. COLT 1811D. Reading Revolution, Representations of Cuba, 1959-The
Literature's obsession with the modern city, in 19th- and 20th-century Present.
American, English, and French fiction and poetry, in writers such as Blake, Considers the cultural and ideological impact of the Cuban revolution
Whitman, Balzac, Dickens, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eliot, Williams, Bellow, inside and outside Cuba. Starting in the 1960s, reads Latin American
Morrison. Opportunities for work in other literatures and genres, e.g., in "boom" novels, European theorists and U.S. civil rights activists. Moving
Germany, Brecht. to today, addresses post-Soviet Cuba's literary production and the impact
of new technologies on culture, as well as political change under Raúl
COLT 1810T. Literature and the Culture of Capitalism.
Castro. Fiction, film and essays by Castro, Sartre, García Márquez,
This course will examine the literary responses to capitalism in terms
Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Fernando Pérez and others.
of five organizing tropes: regionalism, urbanization, consumerism,
Excellent preparation for the Brown-in-Cuba program.
aestheticism, and modernism. Our investigation will begin sometime
in the early 19th-century with the moment that consolidated conditions COLT 1811F. The "Tenth Muse" Phenomenon.
favorable for industrialization and conclude in the first decade of the 20th- The texts and contexts of women writing in English, Spanish and French,
century with literary modernism and the collapse of the cultural myths of during the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries. Often dubbed
progressive enlightenment and democracy. Readings include texts by "Tenth Muses," these first early modern women writers to gain public
Wordsworth, Malthus, Sue, Mayhew, Marx, H. Rider Haggard, Stowe, prominence wrote iconoclastic texts and/or epitomized socially sanctioned
Carroll, Zola, Wilde, Stoker, Freud. Three papers and a final essay. scripts for women. Authors include: Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Lucas
Cavendish, Sor Juana, Mme de Lafayette, Maria de Zayas.
COLT 1810U. Angela's Ashes and What Went Before: Irish
Immigration and Literary Creation. COLT 1811H. The Idea of Beauty.
Readings in the major works of Joyce, Beckett and Farrell, without What does it mean to be beautiful in classical and European literature?
forgetting Jonathan Swift and William Butler Yeats. How is beauty defined by thinkers from Plato to Benjamin? Readings from
the classical, medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods are brought into
COLT 1810V. Marx and Modern Literature.
question by works concerning the problems of aesthetics. Works by Plato,
A contrastive and integrative study of the range of Marx's writings and
Aristotle, Horace, Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Racine,
works by writers such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Baudelaire, Flaubert,
Tolstoy and others in addition to readings from the history of aesthetics
Woolf, and Stevens. Examines Marx's leading concepts in philosophy,
from Kant through the present.
history, economics, ideology, and aesthetics in relation to the particularities
of literary forms. One or two short papers and a longer final study of a COLT 1811I. The Nordic Legacy: Ibsen, Strindberg, Munch and
literary work chosen from the student's major field. Enrollment limited to Bergman.
30. This course examines the work of four major Scandinavian artists. As key
figures in the development of modern theater, painting and film, these four
COLT 1810X. Mirror for the Romantic: The Tale of the Gengi and The
figures share a number of common concerns: challenging the pieties of
Story of the Stone.
bourgeois mores; reconceiving the relations between the sexes; moving
In East Asian Buddhist culture, the mirror is a symbol of the mind in both
from the social to the metaphysical; undermining the unitary view of the
its intellectual and emotional aspects. These masterworks detail the lives
self; and forging an artistic "language" through which the in-dwelling power
and loves of Prince Genji, cynosure of the medieval Japanese court and
of the psyche can be revealed.
Jia Baoyu, the last hope of an influential Chinese clan during the reign of
Manchus. We examine both works as well as the sources of Genji and COLT 1811J. The Paternalistic Thiller and other Studies in Colonial
literary aesthetics of the Tang dynasty. Prerequisites: COLT 0710, RELS Fiction.
0040 (0088) or 0100 (0006), or permission of the instructor. The impact of colonialism on European fiction from the rise of empire to its
decline and fall, focusing on authors who wrote from direct contact with the
COLT 1810Y. Modern Japanese Women Writers.
peoples of Africa and Asia, such as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, T.E.
An examination of women's writing from the Meiji Period (1868-1912) to
Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Isak Dinesen. Topics will include romantic
the present. Readings include works from such writers as Higuchi Ichiyo,
images of conquest, imperial ideology in literature, differing attitudes
Miyamoto Yuriko, Enchi Fumiko, and Tsushima Yūko. Topics include the
towards acculturation, and the changing symbolism of exotic settings.
relation of 'woman' to the modern, the legacy/construction of the past, the
implications of joryū bungaku (women's literature), and the problem of COLT 1811L. Travel, Tourism, Trafficking through the Ages.
resistance and subversion. Why go away to find ourselves? How does the self constitute itself
“elsewhere”? This course considers the genre of travel writing and
COLT 1810Z. Nietzsche.
its theory: how are roots, routes, and rootlessness treated in diverse
Intensive and extensive reading of Nietzsche and some of the reception
racial, spiritual, sexual, national, and imperial encounters. Today, when
that has made him so prominent in contemporary literary and cultural
cosmopolitan tourists, intellectuals, or exotic and erotic adventurers
theory. Topics include Nietzsche's aesthetics, theory of history, the concept
share the same beach as downtrodden, abject refugees and their
of the eternal return, European decadence, misogyny and anti-semitism.
traffickers, what are the cultural, ethical and political implications of
Texts will be selected from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno,
leisurely seeking out (self-) discovery, disappearing authenticity, and
Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, de Man, Kofman, Lacoue-Labarthe, Foucault,
commodified otherness? Readings include Herodotus, Equiano, Chatwin,
Hamacher, Ronell, etc.
Kingsley, Montagu, Darwin, Twain, Miller, Durrell, Baldwin, Phillips, Iyer,
COLT 1811B. Postcolonial Theory and Fiction. Houellebecq, Woolf, Thompson, Theroux, Baudrillard
There is hardly a place in the contemporary world which has not somehow
COLT 1811N. Persons and Portraits: Self in Early Modern Europe.
been touched by the histories and consequences of colonialism.
Challenges the presumed supremacy of the "modern subject," the
What does it mean, then, to speak about the postcolonial? Should
sovereign rational mind personified by Descartes. Rival theories of self
the postcolonial be seen as a new periodization in the study of world
in Machiavelli, Luther, Montaigne, Hobbes, Pascal, and Spinoza are
literatures, a recent trend in critical theory, or another type of minority
explored alongside the richly embodied "persons" pictured in painting
discourse involving previously colonized peoples?
(Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez), conduct literature (Castiglione, La
Rochefoucauld), drama (Milton, Molière, Calderón), psychological fiction
(La Fayette), and satiric prose (La Bruyére).

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COLT 1811O. Modernism: From Paris to Athens, 1900s - 1950s. COLT 1811Z. Literature and the American Presidency.
The course examines Modernism as it developed in major European cities. We shall read widely in writings by, and about, selected American
Apart from focusing on major venues of modernism (Zurich, Berlin, Paris) presidents, but also focus on the ways in which presidents have used
it centers on marginal geographical spaces with specific emphasis on literature as a dictional source in their own writing and thinking. We will
Athens, Greece. It further explores the rise of such movements as Cubism, attend also to the relationship of culture to power as evidenced in other
Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism and proceeds to explore the reaction of textual media, such as film.
Greek modernists to these movements. COLT 1812A. Literatures of Immigration.
COLT 1811Q. Poisonous or Prophetic?. Why do people migrate? How do literary genres, including poetry, fiction,
Wright's Native Son, Burrough's Naked Lunch, Derrida's Specters of Marx, autobiography and memoir, characterize immigrant experiences? How is
and Rimbaud. the experience of "coming from somewhere else" similar and different for
each subsequent generation of immigrants? How does literature indicate
COLT 1811S. Philosophy and Literature of German Romanticism.
the impacts of migration on the culture, politics and economics of the
A fateful collaboration between philosophy and literature was centered in
countries of immigration and emigration? How do literatures of immigration
Germany roughly between 1788 (Schiller's 'Gods of Greece') and 1807
imagine the past, present and future of networks and communities of
(Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit). A survey of the major literature of this
immigrants? Focusing on twentieth-century literary texts and the socio-
period, organized thematically, will serve as an introduction to this complex
historical context of mass migration, the first half of the course examines
phenomenon. Authors include (in translation) Fichte, Goethe, Hölderlin,
immigration literature in the U.S., the second half of the course explores
Novalis, Schelling, Schiller, and Tieck.
literatures of immigration beyond the U.S., and the course concludes with
COLT 1811T. Levantine Cities: Alexandria, Istanbul, Athens. an inquiry into immigration in our presently globalizing age.
Explores the literary and filmic imagination of three Eastern Mediterranean
COLT 1812B. Aesthetics and Politics (ENGL 1900E).
cities, Alexandria, Istanbul, and Athens. It examines the history, culture
Interested students must register for ENGL 1900E.
and politics of these cities and the ways in which they emerge in literature,
film, poetry and travelogues. How is the city defined in these works? COLT 1812C. The Ethics of Romanticism (ENGL 1560Y).
How are social tensions addressed, such as those between Greeks and Interested students must register for ENGL 1560Y.
Turks and Arabs or between Christians, Muslims and Jews? How are COLT 1812F. Violence and Representation.
thematic and historical issues resolved, such as those involving antiquity Traces diverse genealogies from which to theorize violence and its relation
and modernity, tradition and modernization, colonialism and nationalism, to aesthetics. We will identify a disciplinary philology for “violence” as a
religion and secularism? How are these cities defined in the works of signifier within visual culture, art practice and literature; historicize key
western writers? Enrollment limited to 30. transitions in varied invocations of violence in representation; study texts
COLT 1811U. Literature and the Arts. (photography, film, novel, installation) that create a space where violence
Readings in the apparitions and articulations of the arts in fiction, can be discussed as both everyday and extraordinary. Some issues
philosophy, criticism and poetry. Focus on the interaction between to be considered: representability in moments of historical crisis (war,
language and other media, the figure of the artist, problems of expression colonialism, genocide); the efficacy of genres and artistic movements in
and performance. Readings from Diderot, Hegel, Balzac, Hoffmann, representing violence (tragedy, surrealism, theater of cruelty); and the
Baudelaire, Poe, Nietzsche, Wagner and Mann. violence of representation (surveillance, spectatorship, voyeurism).
COLT 1811W. Visual Obsessions: Japanese Film, Fiction, and COLT 1812H. "Women's Literary Make-up": Mirrors, Maquillage and
Modernity. the Tenth Muse.
The pervasiveness of visual obsessions in contemporary Japanese culture Focuses on the problem of creative inspiration for women writers and how
prompts us to rethink the impact of modernity in terms of visuality. Through the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, both somatic and literary as well as their
the examination of a wide range of filmic, literary, and visual art forms interrelation, becomes a recurring motif in women's writing from various
produced in Japan from the 1920s to the 2000s, this course explores traditions. Readings will include fiction and poetry from the English,
the question of visuality as a historically and technologically conditioned Japanese, and Arab traditions, both modern and pre-modern. This is
way of seeing. The issues to be considered in this class include: the an undergraduate seminar open to juniors and seniors. Prerequisite:
construction of "Japanese" aesthetics, orientalism, ocularcentrism, the coursework in literature and at least one course in gender studies/
problems of interiority and the subject, the relation between habit and the women's studies. Instructor permission required.
everyday, and cultural nationalism. This course will introduce important COLT 1812I. Collective Struggles and Cultural Politics in the Global
theoretical concepts about vision and modernity, asking students to South.
interrogate these concepts through the close examination of specific Traces the historical and ideological mapping of the North-South axis and
Japanese texts and films discussed in class. Writers, filmmakers, and the regional mythologies informed by racism, empire and nationalism.
visual artists include: Tanizaki Jun'ichirô, Edogawa Rampo, Abé Kôbô, We will examine the ways in which imagined geographical hierarchies
Karatani Kôjin, Ozu Yasujirô, Kurosawa Akira, Ichikawa Kon, Suzuki continue to shape cultural and political struggles and the vectors of
Seijun, and Murakami Takashi. globalization. Along with readings on imperial histories, liberal and
COLT 1811X. Marx and his Critics. neoliberal political economies, and postcolonialism this class seeks
This course will focus on a close study of the work of Karl Marx and its to establish connections between resistant narratives and collective
legacy for critical theory. The first part of the course will be dedicated to a struggles in the Global South. We will discuss political philosophies of
reading of Marx's most important texts, with special emphasis given to his Marx, Gramsci, Arendt, Fanon, Harvey and Schwarz, as well as the works
theories of economy, of ideology, alienation and fetishism. The second part of Achebe, Hurston, Kincaid, Rushdie, Roy, Sembene, and Wright. First
will be dedicated to a reading of some of Marx's most important readers: year students require instructor permission.
Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser, Zizek and Derrida. Instructor's permission COLT 1812J. Poetry and Ethics.
required. If history is, as Charles Olson claims, a "form of attention" and we are all
COLT 1811Y. Genius and Melancholia in the Renaissance. participants in a collective reality relative to our capacity for language use,
Explores Renaissance accounts of genius, genial inspiration, and what ethical issues come to bear on what the poet chooses to attend to--
melancholia, and their accompanying ideas of intellection and immortality. not only as subject matter but as form? Can poetic language be sufficiently
Primary materials include Dürer, Montaigne, Rabelais, Ficino, Ariosto, responsive to the challenge of empathy? Is there an ethics of attention?
Erasmus, Saint Teresa, and Luther. Secondary or contemporary texts Guided by philosophical texts, we shall investigate ethical possibilities in a
include Warburg, Panofsky, Saxl, Klibansky, Wind, Benjamin, Kierkegaard, range of world poetries.
and Sebald. COLT 1812K. European Intellectual and Cultural History: Exploring
the Modern, 1880-1914 (HIST 1220).
Interested students must register for HIST 1220.

22 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 23

COLT 1812M. Erotic Desire in the Premodern Mediterranean (CLAS COLT 1813H. God, Sex and Grammar: Literary Ethics in Medieval
1750L). Europe.
Interested students must register for CLAS 1750L. What does it mean to read and write ethically? While modern culture
values intellectual property, many medieval texts celebrated what we
COLT 1812N. Culture and Anarchy (ENGL 1511I).
call plagiarism. On the other hand, medieval thinkers saw serious
Interested students must register for ENGL 1511I.
consequences in literature, which could lead authors and readers to
COLT 1812O. Lying, Cheating, and Stealing (ENGL 1760V). heaven or hell. But then as now, ethics were rarely clear-cut, subject
Interested students must register for ENGL 1760V. to forces as diverse as religion, sexual desire, capitalism, and even
COLT 1812P. Essaying the Essay (CLAS 1120J). language itself. Reading some of the great authors of the period, as well
Interested students must register for CLAS 1120J. as modern critical reflections, we will explore the ethical dimension of
literary production in the medieval world and in our own society.
COLT 1812S. Violence and the Multiple Responses of Medieval
France. COLT 1813I. The Colonial and the Postcolonial Marvelous.
Examines violence and its representations from a variety of perspectives: A celebration and critique of the marvelous--as the strange, wondrous,
literary, historical, psychological, etc. Different literary forms (11th - 13th) magical, or unreal--as it has been wielded in Spanish American and
introduce conflicts between competing value systems, problems raised related literatures (French Caribbean, Brazilian). We follow the marvelous
by militant religion, vendettas and the pursuit of justice. Across the gamut from European exoticizing of the New World during the colonial period to
of appetites and emotions, violence takes a variety of shapes, producing its postcolonial incarnations in "magical realism" and beyond. We attend
broken hearts and broken heads. The beautiful seductiveness of violence, particularly to the political, ideological, social, and commercial implications
despite its horrors, is frequently transformed into artistic and literary of the marvelous in writers including Carpentier, Chamoiseau, Columbus,
expression, from the highest forms of Western tradition to the cheap Esquivel, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and García Márquez. Readings in
exploitations of pulp fiction. What can the Middle Ages teach us about English, though you may read texts in the original French, Spanish, or
violence, yesterday and today? Not open to first year students. Portuguese.

COLT 1812T. On Being Bored (ENGL 1511L). COLT 1813K. The Problem of the Vernacular.
Interested students must register for ENGL 1511L. It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Under what conditions do dialects, vernaculars, creoles, and slangs
COLT 1812U. Queer Relations: Aesthetics and Sexuality (ENGL become mediums for literary and artistic expression? How have writers in
1900R). different cultures managed the relationship between their "official" national
Interested students must register for ENGL 1900R. languages and their more intimate mother tongues? This course explores
COLT 1812V. War, Anti-War, Postwar: Culture and Contestation in the this problem in a variety of literary traditions, including Chinese, Arabic,
Americas. Greek, Hebrew, Scots, Latin and the Romance vernaculars, and a variety
This course addresses the relationship among language, war and the of other languages.
arts from the mid-twentieth century on. Even as armies engage in combat COLT 1813M. Making a List.
around the globe, the term "war" legitimates a much broader spectrum of The list is one of the most ancient and enduring figures of rhetoric and
situations, lending them the structure of organized hostility and the moral one of the most versatile means of organizing literary works. From the
opposition of right to wrong. From the "Cold War" to the "War on Terror", catalogues of Homeric epic to the postmodern fables of Borges to new
to Argentina's "Dirty War" and Cuba's "War on Imperialism", literature, digital media, from medieval encyclopedism to Renaissance copia, from
cinema, visual arts and community-based projects have responded to real the descriptive realism of novels to modernist techniques of collage, the
and rhetorical declarations of "war." Drawing from U.S. and Latin American simple list has produced an astonishing variety of effects in a wide range
contexts, we will explore a range of responses and challenges. of genres and authors. We will read widely in this course, from many
COLT 1812W. Love, Adultery, and Sexuality (RUSS 1450). periods, literatures, authors, and genres.
Interested students must register for RUSS 1450. COLT 1813N. Early Modern Women's Writing.
COLT 1812X. Literature and History: Russian Historical Imagination Interested in women writers, feminism? If so, it's vital to understand their
in the European Context (RUSS 1600). early modern origins. This course explores the rich feminist tradition
Interested students must register for RUSS 1600. enacted in the often edgy texts of women writing on the cusp of modernity.
We study writers from England, France, Latin America, North America,
COLT 1812Y. Central Europe: An Idea and its Literature (SLAV 1790). and Spain, focusing on self-fashioning, gender and sexuality, love and
Interested students must register for SLAV 1790. marriage, imagined worlds, religion, eccentricity, and writing and fame.
COLT 1813B. Dying God (CLAS 1930B). Authors include Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Sor Juana
Interested students must register for CLAS 1930B. Inés de la Cruz, Mme de Lafayette, María de Zayas. Enrollment limited to
20. Texts and class in English.
COLT 1813C. Erotic Desire in the Premodern Mediterranean (CLAS
1750L). COLT 1813O. Adventures of the Avant-Garde.
Interested students must register for CLAS 1750L. In the early years of the twentieth century, a series of artistic movements
rippled across the Western hemisphere, exploding conceptions of art
COLT 1813D. Issues in World Literature (ENGL 1761Y). and culture while reconfiguring international relations. Explores those
Interested students must register for ENGL 1761Y.
movements, from their predecessors (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé),
COLT 1813E. Chinese Women, Gender and Feminism from Historical through overlapping –isms (Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Vorticism,
and Transnational Perspectives (EAST 1950B). Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism), to avatars in the Americas. In keeping
Interested students must register for EAST 1950B. with the avant-garde's cross-pollinating spirit, we study texts from a variety
of traditions, forms, and genres: from poetry through prose to manifestoes,
COLT 1813F. Communication Culture and Literary Politics (MCM
from painting and photography to film, music, and dance, touching on
1503Q).
questions of translation and translatability between languages, cultures,
Interested students must register for MCM 1503Q.
and art-forms. Enrollment limited to 25.

Comparative Literature 23
24 Comparative Literature

COLT 1813P. Captive Imaginations: Writing Prison in the Middle COLT 1814G. Political Commitment in Arabic Literature.
Ages. This course will explore the history of and debates surrounding political
Many great works of the Middle Ages were written in prison or about the consciousness and commitment in modern Arabic literature from the
experience of imprisonment. Reading some of these masterpieces, we mid-20th century to the present. Through close readings of mainly
will discover why the medieval prison was such a fruitful space for poetic novels, novellas, and short stories, we will ask how, why, and with what
creation, and how the perspective of incarcerated writers helped to shape consequences Arab authors have challenged political realities with
a diversity of literary traditions. Topics will include fortune and free will, literary expression. We will trace the diverse strategies by which authors
sexual and cultural difference, and the construction of the individual. We articulated their criticisms and envisioned justice grounded in their political
will also explore the nature of medieval systems of captivity, which differed context. Topics and themes will include socialist realism, resistance
greatly from those of modern society. Selected authors: Boethius, Mas'ud literature, alienation, self-criticism, and responses to colonialism and
Sa'd Salman, Juan Ruiz, Chaucer, François Villon. censorship. No knowledge of Arabic required.
COLT 1813Q. Literature and Judgement. COLT 1814L. Apartheid in Post-Apartheid South African Literature.
There exists a close but complex relationship between the acts of making In this course, we explore the political stances that contemporary South
literature and making judgments. This course will explore some of these African writing articulates towards the apartheid regime. We bring
relationships and ask, for instance: how does judgment weigh upon the particular attention to the textual emergence of queer subjectivities. During
literary act? how do literary considerations bear on our making judgments? apartheid (1948-1994), South Africa became a global symbol of racial
what criteria are called forth in both of these moments? Texts treated injustice, and several South African writers became famous for their anti-
will be literary, critical-analytical, legal, and cinematic, and include such apartheid literary production. Since 1994, critics have looked for new
authors as Arendt, Benjamin, Derrida, Freud, Henry James, Kafka, Kant, frames in which to analyze a “new” literature. In the search for “newness,”
Primo Levi, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Verga. however, we may forget to consider how the “old”–apartheid–reappears in
post-apartheid literature. Authors include Zackie Achmat, K. Sello Duiker,
COLT 1813R. The Ekphrastic Mode in Contemporary Literature (ENGL
Phaswane Mpe, and Zoe Wicomb.
1762B).
Interested students must register for ENGL 1762B. COLT 1814M. Postcolonial Literature + Thought in the Middle East
and North Africa.
COLT 1813V. The Cash Nexus: Economy and Literature.
This course examines postcolonial literature and thought in the ME
At a time when human existence is grounded with unprecedented
and North Africa through literature, theory and film. During the early
conviction in a rigid set of utilitarian principles and materialistic values, the
and mid-20th century, anticolonial movements transformed the region’s
relationship between literature and various modes of economic exchange
cultural landscape, igniting new intellectual circles and literary scenes.
presents itself as a richly rewarding field of research. The texts we will
We will study these movements as a launching ground for regional
focus on offer rare insights into the ways monetary factors affect personal
culture, interrogating local anti-colonial thought in works by writers such
identity, interpersonal relationships, and social life in general. These works
as Memmi and Fanon, and examining its evolution from the 1960’s-1990’s
reflect a diachronic tension between human interactions and financial
in work from Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Morocco
transactions that will be the basis of our critical engagement with a series
and Palestine. How did intellectuals and artists articulate issues like
of issues and questions that are more pertinent today than ever before.
national liberation, Westernization, radical culture, feminism, Marxism and
COLT 1813X. Getting Emotional: Passionate Theories (ENGL 1560W). Orientalism?
Interested students must register for ENGL 1560W.
COLT 1814Q. Species Matters: Animals in Literature, Film, and
COLT 1813Z. Soil: The Earth and Environmental Writing. Theory.
Why do people fight over soil? In an increasingly urbanized world, how Nonhuman animals constitute the limit against which humans define
have the ways we talk about soil, earth, and land shifted? In this class, we themselves; at the same time, they challenge such boundaries. Thinking
will explore the politics and aesthetics of writing about soil in its particular about animals, then, always also means exploring our own humanity.
relations to ecology, homeland, geography, and race. Readings include In this course, we will draw on the vast archive of literature, philosophy,
Homer’s Odyssey, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and ecological criticism from and art that engages animals in order to reconsider what and how these
ancient China to Rachel Carson and Ramachandra Guha and beyond. representations mean. Considering our complex relationships with other
Limited to 20. animals, we will address questions of ontology, aesthetics, and ethics:
COLT 1814A. Fashion and Power (GNSS 1960Y). What makes an animal? Can animals be represented? How should animal
Interested students must register for GNSS 1960Y. suffering affect us?

COLT 1814D. East-West Encounters: Politics and Fictions of COLT 1814R. Reflections from Damaged Life: Freud, Adorno,
Orientalism. Blanchot, Derrida (GRMN 1891).
We will explore the myth of the East that develops in Europe during Interested students must register for GRMN 1891.
the Enlightenment in the wake of the extremely popular and influential COLT 1814S. The Balkans, Europe's Other?: Literature, Film, History.
translations of The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla) in the Introduces the modern Balkans through a critical examination of literary
early eighteenth century. We will focus on narratives of the encounter and visual, historiographic and political, narratives. The course considers
between East and West, on the discovery and construction of the Oriental the contestation over a shared historical past and interreligious geographic
“Other,” and on its representation in the literary and visual culture of the space through common and divergent master narratives, motifs, myths,
Enlightenment. Particular attention will be paid to the figure of Shahrazad and recurring discourses. It also examines the region’s aesthetic, religious,
and the theme of the harem. We will study some modern versions of the and political relation to Europe. Do the Balkans constitute a traumatized,
Arabian Nights. “balkanized,” self-colonized, abject modernity at Europe’s edges, its
COLT 1814F. Erotic Desire in the Premodern Mediterranean (CLAS inner alterity? Given the acclaim achieved by Balkan filmmakers since
1750L). 1989, the course also asks how Balkan artists, caught in-between
Interested students must register for CLAS 1750L. nationalism, Orientalism, Eurocentrism and globalization, assert agency
and subjectivity and captivate our imaginations.

24 Comparative Literature
 Comparative Literature 25

COLT 1814T. Maghrebi Fiction and Psychoanalysis. COLT 1815T. Narratives of Disability in Greek and Latin Literature
Recent fiction from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya) (CLAS 1070)..
in both French and Arabic has been preoccupied with mothers and Interested students must register for CLAS 1070.
fathers, gestation and regeneration, inheritance and transmission, filled COLT 1815U. Encountering Monsters in Comparative Literature.
with figures for desires and origins blocked or diverted. In this course, What is a monster? What happens when one encounters a monster? This
we will read Maghrebi literature together with works of psychoanalytic literature-based seminar considers monsters in different literary traditions,
theory, focusing in particular on uncertain origins and aborted futures, including ancient epic, folktale, poetry, theory, science fiction, and cinema.
geographies of the North African landscape and of the soul. Texts by Monstrous figures from different cultural traditions, places, eras, genres,
Achaari, Berrada, Chraïbi, Djebar, Kateb, al-Koni, Mustaghanimi, Wattar; and forms will guide us through various representations of monstrosity
Deleuze & Guattari, Fanon, Freud, Jameson, Jung, Lacan. Students of —a concept which both invites and defies definition. We will ask: What
French or Arabic invited to read in the original. cultural and imaginative needs do monsters fill? How do monsters help
COLT 1814U. Politics of Reading. us think about identity politics, and the cultural production of ideas of self
What do we do when we read? And do we even do something, or, as and other? To what extent are monsters tools of ideological oppression,
Blanchot suggests, do we rather let be? While being true to Michel de and to what extent are monsters liberatory figures that offer conceptual
Certeau’s plea for a “politics of reading” and an “autonomy of the reader”, alternatives to systems of oppression and violence?
we will question its binary logic (active vs. passive): 1. by looking closely COLT 1815V. "Blitzlesen", or Fascism and Speed-reading: Deleuze,
at the (de)construction of a “sovereign reader” in Hobbes’ Leviathan; 2. Cixous, Heidegger.
by analyzing the reading imperative—“Read!”—as it is staged in Plato’s Today everyone, it seems, is a lightning reader, or "Blitzleser". Rather than
and, above all, in Sade’s erotics; 3. by taking seriously Walter Benjamin’s feel guilty about this, our course will ask: what would it mean to speed-
paradoxical intuition that one should “read what was never written”. read responsibly? Reading is, like democracy, always a matter of counting,
COLT 1814Y. Posthumanism and the Ends of Man. of deciding which frequencies count (whether of letters, words, motifs etc.).
Have we ever been human? As mechanical implants, virtual Speed-reading risks overloading democracy with too much information
extensions, and organic interdependencies challenge self-contained and too many dots to connect, feeding paranoiac narratives in the style
conceptualizations of human being, posthumanist theories invite us to of QAnon or indeed Nazism itself. How to speed-read like a democrat?
rethink our self-understanding. In this course, we will explore the human Our eyes will dart from Deleuze's claim that Cixous invented stroboscopic
as a fluid category in perpetual motion. Focusing on female and gender literature – difficult literature which only becomes readable when one
nonconforming bodies, which have traditionally been situated at the limits reads quickly – to fascism's obsession with speed, which led Hannah
of the human, we will analyze the critical potential of hybrids, androids, Arendt to claim fascism desires "only a movement that is constantly kept
and cyborgs. Readings among others by Ovid, the Brothers Grimm, E.T.A. in motion." Key authors include: Bernhard, Woolf, Martinetti, Deleuze,
Hoffmann, Han Kang, and Octavia Butler; films will include Metropolis, Guattari, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger. Media: The Lighthouse,
Mad Max: Fury Road, and the series West World. Speed Racer.
COLT 1815A. Apocalypse. COLT 1815W. How to Do Things with Modernism (HMAN 1976F).
The End of the World is central to the Abrahamic faiths. From the Jewish Interested students must register for HMAN 1976F.
sources, through Christian and Islamic tradition und until the present day, COLT 1815Z. Between Word and Image: The Twentieth-Century Arab
the idea of the End of World is decisive for the understanding of major Avantgarde.
events in history, such as the birth of Islam or Modernity. Through readings What is the Arab avantgarde, and why is visuality its main project? How
across the religious and the secular traditions starting with the Torah and do experimental works of art and literature question dominant historical
ending with Steve Bannon and ISIS. and political narratives? This seminar explores form-agitating literary
COLT 1815F. Memory, Commemoration, Testimony. and artistic works that emerged from major Arab cities in the twentieth
In this course we will study problems of remembering and forgetting in century. It examines the role of the metaphorical and literal image as
a variety of texts including poetry, philosophy, psychoanalysis, memoirs, a new mode of storytelling, as an act of witnessing and documenting.
public monuments, memory studies and trauma theory. We will explore Throughout the course, we will also touch on themes of memory and
the roles of language and representation in dealing with the past, the nostalgia, postcolonial nationalism, freedom and commitment, exile
temporality of the self, the operation of the unconscious, the memorial and and return, as we navigate the complexities and developments of Arab
the monument. We will also look at the politics of memory in relation to the cultural modernisms. Most primary texts will be read in Arabic with English
cultural traumas of slavery, the Holocaust, Viet Nam and 9/11. Readings translations offered when available. At least three years of Arabic (or
from Rousseau, Hegel, Wordsworth, Proust, Derrida and de Man; Freud, equivalent) are required for enrollment.
Caruth, Saidiya Hartman, Segalen; Arendt and Reznikoff. COLT 1970. Individual Independent Study.
COLT 1815G. Repetition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud (GRMN Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct
1200D). section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.
Interested students must register for GRMN 1200D. COLT 1980. Group Independent Study.
COLT 1815I. Torn Halves of Modernism. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please see the registration staff for the
This course analyzes the constitutive contradictions of modernist works correct section number to use when registering for this course.
from a global perspective. We will address, for instance, tensions COLT 1990. Senior Thesis Preparation.
between the periphery and the metropolis, city and countryside, realism Special work or preparation of honors theses under the supervision of
and modernism, aesthetic autonomy, commodification and political a member of the staff. Open to honors students and to others. Section
commitment. We will also examine these questions across various media: numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section
novels, poetry, photography, architecture and film. Readings include works number and CRN to use when registering for this course.
by Dos Passos, Faulkner, Döblin, Manuel Maples Arce, Roberto Arlt,
Patrícia Galvão. COLT 2450. Exchange Scholar Program.
Fall COLT2450 S01 16662 Arranged ’To Be Arranged'
COLT 1815O. Modern Greece in the World (MGRK 1240).
Spr COLT2450 S01 25239 Arranged ’To Be Arranged'
Interested students must register for MGRK 1240.
Spr COLT2450 S02 25240 Arranged ’To Be Arranged'
COLT 1815P. The Coming Apocalypse: Between the Earth and the
World (HMAN 1974L).
Interested students must register for HMAN 1974L.
COLT 1815R. Germans and Jews (GRMN 1340Y).
Interested students must register for GRMN 1340Y.

Comparative Literature 25
26 Comparative Literature

COLT 2520A. City (B)Lights: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the COLT 2650C. Romantic Theory: Theirs and Ours.
Study of the City. Recent criticism will serve as the point of departure for looking into the
Literary texts from the U.S., England, France, and Germany, together relation of literary criticism to its Romantic history. Emphasis on how
with substantial readings in the social sciences and selected works of art "Romantic" problems inform contemporary criticism on such topics as
and cinema. Intended as a laboratory for interdisciplinary studies in an periodization, literature and history, theory of symbol and allegory, and
expansive educational spectrum for humanities Ph.Ds. the relation between literature and philosophy. Texts will be selected from
Benjamin, M.H. Abrahms, de Man, McGann, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy,
COLT 2520B. Dark and Cloudy Words: Metaphor and Poetry.
Chase, et. al.; Fichte, Schelling, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Schlegel, Novalis.
An examination of the philosophical significance of metaphor and its
literary function in poetry ranging from makurakotoba in the Man' yōshū to COLT 2650D. Theory of Comparative Literature.
kenningar in Skaldic poetry, to the use of the trope in a number of modern Designed to introduce students to some of the central theoretical issues
poets. Critical writings include works by Aristotle, Ki no Tsurayuki, Shelley, that define the discipline of Comparative Literature through the study
Christine Brooke-Rose, Max Black, Donald Davidson, Paul Ricoeur, and of twelve central texts in the field. We will begin with Erich Auerbach's
Jacques Derrida. foundational text Mimesis, and end with Gayatri Spivak's Death of a
Discipline. In between the authors to be read and analyzed will be Bakhtin,
COLT 2520C. Irony: Language and Failure.
Lukacs, Barthes, Derrida, DeMan, Jameson, Greenblatt and others.
A study in the trope of irony and the ways in which it complicates the
Open to graduate students, and to undergraduates by permission of the
possibility of understanding. Focus on Socratic irony, the dialogue, and
instructor.
Romantic irony. We will also consider the epistemological implications of
irony and the role it plays in contemporary criticism. Readings from Plato, COLT 2650E. Theory of Lyric Poetry.
Quintillian, Diderot, Hegel, Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Lukács, No description available.
Booth, De Man, Rorty and Derrida. COLT 2650F. Irony.
COLT 2520D. The Literature of the Americas. A study of the trope of irony and its evaluation, especially in the Romantic
Forsaking the dominant Eurocentrism in comparative literary studies, this tradition. Focus on the epistemological implications of irony and the role it
seminar will search for the common links between the diverse literatures of plays in the philosophical tradition and in contemporary criticism. Readings
North and Latin America, approached in relation to one another rather than from Plato, Hegel, Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Lukács, Booth, De
to "Old World" models. Authors to be considered include Margaret Atwood, Man, Rorty and Derrida.
Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, William Faulkner, Gabriel García-Márquez, COLT 2650G. Literary Readings in Aesthetic Theory.
Clarice Lispector, Machado de Assis, Toni Morrison and João Guimarães The seminar will examine not just the major themes but also the rhetorical
Rosa. complexities of a number of powerful texts in the history of aesthetic
COLT 2520E. Dialectics of Word and Image. theory. Authors to be considered include Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Burke,
Explores how proximities and interactions of text and image construct and Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno. Literary texts
complicate meaning. It brings together a constellation of theoretical and will be considered in conjunction with these texts, sometimes by way of
historical readings that have bearing on particular problems generated at famous arguments or exchanges (e.g., Heidegger and Staiger on Mörike).
the nexus of word and image. Readings by Horace, Abd al-Qahir Jurjani, COLT 2650H. On the Sublime (GRMN 2660A).
Lévi-Strauss, Ricoeur, Derrida, Mitchell and others will anchor a cross- Interested students must register for GRMN 2660A.
disciplinary investigation of European and non-European paradigms of the
relationship between text and image in various literary and visual cultures COLT 2650N. Hamlet: Appropriation, Mediation, Theory (ENGL
since late antiquity. We will examine specific examples of the interaction 2360X).
between word and image in several Islamic manuscripts. Interested students must register for ENGL 2360X.
COLT 2520F. Theories of the Lyric. COLT 2650T. Foundations of Literary Theory (POBS 2600C).
Through readings of recent critical discussions of the lyric genre, we Interested students must register for POBS 2600C.
will explore more general methodological problems of literary theory. COLT 2650U. Theory, Technics, Religion (ENGL 2901K).
Questions to be raised include: the role of form, structure and tropes in Interested students must register for ENGL 2901K.
analyzing poetry; problems of subjectivity and voice; the relation between
poetry, history and politics; the function of reading; and the problematic COLT 2650V. Italian Theory: In and Out (HMAN 2400U).
"objectivity" of criticism. Readings from Jakobson, Benveniste, Jauss, Interested students must register for HMAN 2400U.
Benjamin, Johnson, De Man, Lacoue-Labarthe, Agamben, Badiou and COLT 2650W. Vision and Visualization in Literature: The Rhetoric of
Derrida. Focus on poets Hölderlin, Baudelaire and Celan. Enargeia (CLAS 2110K).
COLT 2540C. Romanticism and Cultural Property (ENGL 2560Y). Interested students must register for CLAS 2110K.
Interested students must register for ENGL 2560Y. COLT 2650X. Police, Strike, Justice: Revisiting Walter Benjamin's
COLT 2540D. After Postmodernism: New Fictional Modes (ENGL "Critique of Violence" (GRMN 2662F).
2760X). Interested students must register for GRMN 2662F.
Interested students must register for ENGL 2760X. COLT 2720A. Advanced Practicum in Literary Translation.
COLT 2540E. Political Romanticism (GRMN 2320E). Readings in theory of translation, and in monuments of literary translation
Interested students must register for GRMN 2320E. from Renaissance times to the present, will be assigned to students
needing further background in these areas. Students will each complete
COLT 2540F. Romanticism and Cultural Property (ENGL 2560Y). two projects: (1) by mid-semester, a critical treatment of a published
Interested students must register for ENGL 2560Y. translation or a comparison of such translations; (2) for the final seminar
COLT 2540M. Latin American Existential Literature (HISP 2520L). presentation and paper, the student's own translation into English from
Interested students must register for HISP 2520L. some literary text in a language familiar to the student.
COLT 2540N. Alexandrian Poetry (CLAS 2930A).
Interested students must register for CLAS 2930A.
COLT 2650A. Comparative Literature and Its Others.
Is there such a thing as comparative literacy? This course examines the
history and practices of Comparative Literature as a major discipline,
including its self conceptualizations, its relations with national literatures
and with other disciplines, and its evolving methods of reading. Texts
include literary as well as theoretical ones.

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COLT 2720B. Theory and Practice of Literary Translation. COLT 2820H. The Politics and Aesthetics of Masochism.
Readings in the history and theory of translation from the Renaissance to Masochism is defined as a, aestheticized positive, consensual investment
the present, along with selected major examples of literature in English in power relations. As such, it directly engages the relationship between
translation. Students will write two papers: (1) an analysis of a theoretical politics and aesthetic forms, but as a sexualized relationship. Masochism
issue in translation, with ample attention to the historical context of that articulates relations of gender in ways that seem to challenge traditional
issue; and (2) either a discussion of an important translation as a criticism structures. Readings include novels and films, as well as theoretical
of the original work; or a critical comparison of several translations of an engagements with masochism.
original work; or an annotated translation into English of a literary text from COLT 2820I. Literature and the State of Exception.
a language familiar to the student. This course takes as its point of departure Walter Benjamin's famous
COLT 2720C. Literary Translation. diagnosis of modernity as a paradoxical condition under which the
Study and practice of translation as art and a potent form of literary exception has become the rule. We will consider the aesthetic and political
criticism. Translation is an act of interpretation, which informs the language implications of such a state of exception in nineteenth- century literature.
of the translator and the text as a whole: context, intent, and language. Authors include Baudelaire, DeQuincey, Arnold, Melville, Whitman,
Discussion will include the impact of cultural difference, tone and time on Benjamin, Derrida, Nancy and Agamben.
translation, and the role of analytical as well as intuitive understanding of COLT 2820L. Moderns and Primitives.
the original in the translator's endeavor. Major writers, artists, and theorists of European modernism put a new
COLT 2720D. Translation: Theory and Practice. emphasis on the status of primitive society and archaic pre-history. We
This seminar will address the theory and practice of translation, and their will consider the works of Durkheim, Eliot, Joyce, Picasso, and others
place in the Humanities. Essays by translators, authors and scholars with reference to the anthropology and ethnography of their period, and to
will be drawn from a range of contexts, as will literary and historical subsequent post-colonial critique and controversy.
texts. Each participating student will work on a substantial translation COLT 2820M. Discourses of the Senses.
project over the course of the semester. The seminar is a requirement for A comparative study of a variety of discourses dealing with the relation
students completing the Department of Comparative Literature's Graduate among the senses, the arts, and the problems of comparativity,
Certificate in Translation Studies. Open only to graduate students. interdisciplinarity, and intermediality. Topics will include ekphrasis,
COLT 2820A. New Directions for Comparative Literature. synaesthesia, mysticism and the theory of correspondence, the
In this seminar we will read a number of recent critical and theoretical Gesamtkunstwerk, and the limits between media. Readings from
works (not limited to the humanities) which may fruitfully suggest new Condillac, Lessing, Kant, Swedenborg, the German Romantics,
directions for literary studies. Our readings may include topics such as Baudelaire, Wagner, Balzac, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Panofsky, Tschumi
the new history of capitalism, sociological approaches to the modern and others.
choice architecture of emotions, recent philosophy of science, border COLT 2820N. City (B)Lights.
studies and migration, decolonization, ecocriticism and public humanities. Interdisciplinary explorations of the modern urban experience featuring
Participants will be expected to contribute to the syllabus according to their social sciences, literature and film. Convergences and differences in the
own research interests. presentation of urban life in literature, film, the visual arts, urban planning,
COLT 2820B. Fiction and History. and social sciences, including sociology, political economy, urban ecology.
Focuses on how the historical fiction that has flourished over the past City populations, bureaucracy, power groups, alienation, urban crowds,
three decades challenges the notions of objectivity and totalization, while the city as site of the surreal, are central themes. Against the background
providing alternative viewpoints for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of classic European urban images. American cities and literary works are
of the past. Authors to be considered include E. L. Doctorow, Gabriel foregrounded.
Garcia-Marquez, Günter Grass, José Saramago Isabel Allende, Lídia COLT 2820O. Jacques Derrida's of Grammatology.
Jorge, Coover. Attention will also be paid to theoretical texts by Hayden This course is an introduction to the thought of the French philosopher
White, Dominick LaCapra, Walter Benjamin, Linda Hutcheon, and Roger Jacques Derrida. We will focus on his most important work, his
Chartier. "Grammatology", though a series of some of his essays will also be part
COLT 2820D. The "Tenth Muse" Phenomenon. of the readings. Other readings will include the works of authors crucial
The texts and contexts of women writing in English, Spanish and French, to Derrida's thought and to an understanding of the "Grammatology":
during the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries. Often dubbed Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Rousseau and Levi-Strauss.
"Tenth Muses," these first early modern women writers to gain public COLT 2820P. Aesthetics and the Eighteenth Century Subject.
prominence wrote iconoclastic texts and/or epitomized socially sanctioned The debates about taste, judgment, beauty, sentiment, and sensation in
scripts for women. Authors include: Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Lucas the eighteenth century gave rise to the discourse of aesthetics as we know
Cavendish, Sor Juana, Mme de Lafayette, Maria de Zayas. it today, but they also exerted a powerful influence on how knowledge,
COLT 2820E. What was Enlightenment?. virtue, and subjectivity were imagined in the post-enlightenment period. In
Emphasizes two of the Enlightenment's most durable artists-Mozart and this course, we will examine some of the founding texts of aesthetic theory
Jane Austen-situating them in the context of other writers of their times from the era (including Locke, Smith, Burke, Lessing, and Kant), and then
(such as Kant, Casanova, and Adam Smith) and modern appropriations of turn to consider how aesthetic questions informed and were taken up by
their work (in criticism and performance). Sub-themes are desire, reason, Goethe's narrative of subject-formation in his Bildungsroman, Wilhelm
education, and forms of otherness. Class hours include viewing time. Meister's Apprenticeship. In English.
COLT 2820F. Latin America and Theory. COLT 2820Q. Culture and Politics in Cuba and the Caribbean.
Explores the engagement of Latin American literature and criticism Complicating standard narratives about intellectuals and the Cuban
with non-Latin American bodies of literary and cultural theory (including Revolution, explores writings whose relationship to the state is neither
poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism and cultural studies), affirmative nor oppositional. Focusing on journals and on recent work in
addressing tensions between the autochthonous production of theoretical cultural theory, history, anthropology, and political science, addresses the
frameworks and their import from other contexts. Readings include the evolution and potential of civil society; articulations of marginality; revisions
Latin American Subaltern Studies group, Revista de Crítica Cultural, of socialism and the Soviet legacy; and the mobility of theory. Spanish
Rama, García Canclini, Sarlo, Richard and current new media theorists. required.
Open to graduate students and qualified seniors.

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COLT 2820R. Postcolonial Melancholia. COLT 2822C. What Is Called Thinking? On Critical Styles (GRMN
Figures of loss and defeat proliferate widely in the accounts of 2661T).
colonization, national liberation, and decolonization in South Asia, Africa, Interested students must register for GRMN 2661T.
the Arab world, and the Americas. We will attend to the particularity of loss COLT 2822K. Virgil's Aeneid (LATN 2010E).
by juxtaposing readings in literature and postcolonial theory with readings Interested student must register for LATN 2010E.
on mourning and melancholia, drawn from a range of disciplines.
COLT 2822O. Literature and Philosophy: Case Studies of a Vexed
COLT 2820S. Poetry after Kant. Relationship (GRMN 2662Q).
Begins with the intensive study of a selection of writings by Immanuel Kant Interested students must register for GRMN 2662Q).
focused especially on force and conflict in politics and aesthetics. This
study, along with relevant readings from more recent work, will provide the COLT 2822R. Metals, Mining, and Jewelry: Making the World Anew
basis for an approach to this topic in nineteenth-century poetry. Readings (HMAN 2402D).
of Kant (Critique of Judgment, "Toward Eternal Peace," The Conflict of the Interested students must register for HMAN 2402D.
Faculties), Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben and COLT 2822T. Book-Objects (HISP 2351E).
will lead to several "case studies" of nineteenth-century poetry, including Interested students must register for HISP 2351E.
works by Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold.
COLT 2830C. Literature and the Arts.
COLT 2820T. Universals. An investigation of the discourse of the arts in the modern European
Explores the status of universals in classical, Hellenistic, Scholastic, and tradition. Topics include the relation between the Ancients and the
Renaissance metaphysics. Also explores the literary implications of this Moderns, evaluations of the possibilities and limitations of differing media,
philosophical problem. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Chrysippus, the role of language in discussions of the "other" arts, and conceptions
Augustine, Cicero, Seneca, Abelard, Avicenna, Aquinas, Scotus, Ficino, of synaesthesia and correspondence. Texts selected from Perrault,
Cusanus, Pico, and Suárez. Winckelmann, Lessing, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Hoffman,
COLT 2820U. Literature and Judgment. Baudelaire, and others.
Investigates the intersections between acts of literature and acts of COLT 2830F. Walter Benjamin and Modern Theory.
judgment, between language and the law. How is literature to be judged, An intensive reading of selected essays by Walter Benjamin on language,
when is it "good" or "bad"? Does literature lie, and if so, does it matter? literature, aesthetics, and politics will be paired up with the study of the
Does it hide a crime? And, in turn: does literature provide its own particular interpretation and impact of this work on contemporary work in literary
kind of judgment, one that may make evident the very fictional status of theory and philosophy. In addition to Benjamin, we will also read Jacques
the law? Readings span from the Bible to contemporary post-colonial Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Samuel Weber, Giorgio Agamben, and
readings (Rousseau, Tolstoy, Zola, Freud, Kafka, Arendt, Benjamin, Henry Peter Fenves. German and/or French helpful but not required. Open to
James, Primo Levi, Coetzee, Sadegh Hedayat). graduate students only.
COLT 2820V. Nietzsche, Foucault, Latour (ENGL 2900K). COLT 2830H. Cultural Translation: Theory and Practice.
Interested students must register for ENGL 2900K. Across a range of disciplines, "cultural translation" today stands for the
COLT 2820W. Ethical Turns (ENGL 2900N). dynamic interactions among cultures. Derived from cultural anthropology
Interested students must register for ENGL 2900N. and linguistic translation, the metaphor of translation (already a metaphor:
trans+latere, to bear across) is used increasingly to analyze how cultures
COLT 2820X. Things Not Entirely Possessed: Romanticism and are transmitted through the operations of colonial expansion, diaspora
History (ENGL 2561B). and immigration. Though cultural globalization is assumed to be a 20th
Interested students must register for ENGL 2561B. century phenomenon, the result of an expansion and acceleration in the
COLT 2821C. From Hegel to Nietzsche: Literature as/and Philosophy movement and exchange of ideas, commodities and capital, this seminar
(GRMN 2660O). considers a longer historical frame for understanding cultural competition.
Interested students must register for GRMN 2660O. Theoretical texts including Schleiermacher, Jakobson, Benjamin, Derrida,
Spivak, and a "case study," Shakespeare.
COLT 2821L. Postcoloniality and Globalism (ENGL 2900Z).
Interested students must register for ENGL 2900Z. COLT 2830I. Histories of the Early Modern Body.
This seminar considers the production of knowledge about the body in
COLT 2821S. Historical Form.
the early modern period. The institution of science and how the emerging
This class explores comparative literary approaches to historical narrative,
"science" of the body was visualized; discourses of the erotic, the scientific
especially in the context of recent work in transnational studies. Questions
and the religious; the body in varied cultural performances including the
to be considered will include: what are the implications of transnational
blason, devotional texts, erotica, drama etc. Texts include theoretical work
and postcolonial historiography for the formal study of historical writing and
on gender and sexuality. Open to graduate students only.
knowledge? What are the aesthetic resources of non-European traditions
for narrative analysis? What tropes and spatiotemporal frameworks do COLT 2830L. Economies of the Visual (The Reverse of Images).
writers use to narrate the connected past? In The Time-Image, Deleuze wrote: “Money is the reverse of all the
Fall COLT2821S S01 18552 Th 4:00-6:30(04) (T. Chin) images that the cinema shows and edits on the obverse, so that films
about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the
COLT 2821Z. Objects of (and in) Animation (MCM 2120H). film.” What are the implications of this sentence for the economy of images
Interested students must register for MCM 2120H. (what Susan Buck-Morss terms their iconomy)? From The Big Store (Marx
COLT 2822A. War. Brothers) to Peter Jackson’s King Kong, we will trace various mobilizations
More than a century ago, the mass scale of modern industrial warfare of the gaze, leading from the proto-cinematographic elevators and
seemed to mark a break in Western philosophy and literature. Innovative escalators to the actual developments of eye-tracking technologies,
theoretical analyses and a new, self-conscious genre of “war poetry” allowing for an increasing commodification of the gaze itself.
emerged to engage with the consequences of the mass slaughter, COLT 2830P. The History of Wonder in Colonial Spanish American
concerned with such topics as nihilism, the limits of empathy, and the Lettres (HISP 2350H).
discontinuity of experience. These issues only intensified after the Second Interested students must register for HISP 2350H.
World War and have remained pressing. We will read representative texts
from the First World War to the present, exploring such issues as the COLT 2830Q. Augustan Literature and Egypt (LATN 2090I)..
linguistic representation of war, the problem of visibility, and the civilian- Interested students must register for LATN 2090I.
military divide. COLT 2980. Reading and Research.
COLT 2822B. Introduction to Italian Studies (ITAL 2100). Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct
Interested students must register for ITAL 2100. section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

28 Comparative Literature
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COLT 2990. Thesis Preparation.

For graduate students who have met the residency requirement and are
continuing research on a full time basis.
Fall COLT2990 S01 16663 Arranged ’To Be Arranged'
Spr COLT2990 S01 25241 Arranged ’To Be Arranged'

Comparative Literature 29