Undergraduate Courses

As we navigate the demands of the 21st century, an onslaught of new technologies, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering, has pushed us to question the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. At the same time, scientific findings about animal, and even plant intelligence, have troubled these boundaries in similar fashion. In this course, we examine works of literature and film that can help us imagine our way into these “limit cases” and explore what happens as we approach the limits of our own imaginative and empathetic capacities. We read works of literature by Mary Shelley, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Powers, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, and Jennifer Egan, and watch the movies Blade Runner, Ex Machina, Arrival, Avatar, and Her.

Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.

Paris in the 1920s—as a place and an idea—was important to a whole generation of post-war writers who were trying to reinvent literature as a radical form of interiority. These writers wandered the streets of Paris in search of inspiration and raised café culture and the art salon to a new prominence. Why did this city, with its mix of tolerance and bourgeois values, become a place where iconoclasts such as the Surrealists could thrive? How did it allow expatriates and revolutionaries to take a critical look at their home cultures? How did salons, literary movements, and Paris neighborhoods allow space for new gender and racial identities and artistic formations to arise? Writers include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Colette. The focus is on French and American authors, with some attention to the role of the visual arts and music. 

Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program. This course is not open to students who previously enrolled in LITR S244.

A study of cinema as it developed into a significant art form, including its interactions with fiction, theater, and painting. Focus on André Bazin’s reflections on cinema in response to Chaplin, Welles, and Cocteau, as well as to writers such as Faulkner, Sartre, and Malraux.

Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.

College is a crucial institution in which our society works through its expectations for young people. The first half of this course explores some of the purposes that have been ascribed to college, including development of personal character, participation in a community, preparation for citizenship, and conversation with others on intellectual matters. The second half touches on the social and economic contexts of college education, including the history of the curriculum, the role of social class, the cost of higher education, and career preparation. We read Plato’s Republic, a key text for the philosophy of education, in its entirety. Other readings from Aristotle, Confucius, Bhagavad-Gita, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, Max Weber. Lectures are designed for interactive conversation. 

Preference for first-year and sophomore students, but all students are welcome.

An undergraduate seminar on the life and work of one the greatest poets of all time, and founder of modernity, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Readings include œuvre de jeunesse, his collection of poems in verse, Les fleurs du mal, his collection of poems in prose, Le spleen de Paris, as well as his writings on fashion, contemporary culture, drugs, the arts, especially painting, his translations from English and American including Edgar Allan Poe, his private journals, the infamous late writings on Belgium and the Belgians, as well as his rare attempts at theater. His afterlives in literature, painting, music, dance, film, translation, and philosophy. Secondary materials including but not limited to Benjamin, Bonnefoy, Derrida, Fondane, Sartre. Readings in French, discussions in English.

Ability to read in French is necessary.

Biblical references in modernist literary works illustrate literature’s potential to transform ancient forms and conceptions into driving forces of renewal. This renewal concerns both literature and the Bible. Their encounter in modernist texts rarely occurs in a straightforward fashion. While the modernist literary reception of Biblical material occasionally does appear as pious affirmation or outright rejection, more characteristically, it alters, displaces, or distorts the original Scriptures. Not only do these transformations enact modernism’s basic injunction to “make it new,” but they also illuminate its complex relationship to tradition as such. The course explores this dynamic in the work of major German-Jewish modernists such as Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schüler and Paul Celan.

One of the most obvious and agreed-upon traits of realist literature seems to be its exclusion of the fantastic; the two are typically seen as opposites which define strictly different modes and genres of literature. However, while the term fantastic conjures up products of the imagination—Einbildungskraft, phantasía—, one of the most influential theorizations of the fantastic consists precisely in a text’s leaving undecided the question of whether or not a ‘fantastical’ element is a product of the characters’ or the narrator’s imagination (Tzvetan Todorov). The course uses this paradox as a point of departure to explore mainly, but by no means only German-language literary and programmatic texts of the past 200 years and their entanglements of realism and the fantastic. We study, among other things, ghosts, doppelgänger, recent modes of magical realism, and their functions. Readings include E.T.A. Hoffmann, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Haruki Murakami, and Olga Tokarczuk.

Ever since literature left its ancillary position in the service of extraneous creeds, ideologies and educational purposes or, in the eyes of some, became their substitute, it had to rethink itself. Reflections about its own raison d’être and how it relates to the world politically, philosophically, and emotionally became a primary substratum of literary modernism. This is particularly true for modernism in German language contexts where some of the major theories about literature originated and where philosophy, politics and literature had been closely intertwined for centuries. Following general reflections on the term Modernism and its variations in different linguistic and national contexts (Die Moderne, la modernité, modernismo) as well as its relation to Realism, to the Avant Garde and to Postmodernism, this course explores some of the major works of German Modernism. Among the texts to be discussed are works by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Kafka as well as selected poetry and short prose by authors ranging from Expressionists to poets writing in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Special attention is given to intertextual references to the literary tradition and, in this context, to the self-reflexive dimension of the modernist writings.