Undergraduate Courses
LITR 407: Ecology, Ecocriticism, and Narration
The course takes up a pressing topic from the sciences and looks at it from the angle of the humanities: how are ecological crises, how is–most specifically and urgently–our current climate crisis represented and reflected upon in non-scientific public discourse: in journalism, in the social media, in literature, and in film? With a focus on, but not limited to literary texts, the course draws on established categories of literary analysis, such as plot patterns or the techniques of narration and/vs. description, and links them to philosophical concepts such as Karen Barad’s agential realism and Donna Haraway’s “chthulucene.” In so doing the course not only looks into (and questions) the common accusation that literature is conspicuously silent when it comes to the matter of the climate crisis, but also investigates (literary and non-literary) ecological narration as situated at the intersection of representation and ethics. Literary readings include Adalbert Stifter, Amitav Ghosh, W.G. Sebald, Ian McEwan, Judith Hermann, Ilija Trojanow, and Kim Stanley Robinson.
LITR 409 Internet Cultures, Histories, Networks, and Practices
Examination, through the lenses of histories, network studies, and cultural studies, of how human beings have seemingly overnight learned to use and depend on computer networks for various kinds of work, military operations, pursuits of scientific knowledge, religious proselytizing, political organization, searches for mates and social communities, illegal activities, and infinite varieties of play.
LITR 409: Internet Cultures, Histories, Networks, and Practices
Examination, through the lenses of histories, network studies, and cultural studies, of how human beings have seemingly overnight learned to use and depend on computer networks for various kinds of work, military operations, pursuits of scientific knowledge, religious proselytizing, political organization, searches for mates and social communities, illegal activities, and infinite varieties of play.
LITR 410 Interpretations: Simone Weil
Intensive study of the life and work of Simone Weil, one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. We read the iconic works that shaped Weil’s posthumous reputation as “the patron saint of all outsiders,” including the mystical aphorisms Gravity and Grace and the utopian program for a new Europe The Need for Roots. But we also examine in detail the lesser-known writings Weil published in her lifetime–writings that powerfully intervene in some of the most pressing debates of her day. Reading Weil alongside contemporaries such as Trotsky, Heidegger, Arendt, Levinas, and Césaire, we see how her thought engages key philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic problems of the twentieth century: the relation between dictatorship and democracy; empire and the critique of colonialism; the ethics of attention and affliction; modern science, technology, and the human point of view; the responsibility of the writer in times of war; beauty and the possibility of transcendence; the practice of philosophy as a way of life.
LITR 414: Non-Cynical Social Thought
Living together is difficult. How do some people do it? How can we do it less badly, or much better, or in the very best way? In this seminar we read sources from several disciplines that describe positive modes of conviviance. Much social thought is cynical, starting from where we are not and mapping why we haven’t gotten there. Some social thought is revolutionary, looking for an exit, casting hopes toward the future. What both of these lack is contents. Without ignoring the massive difficulties involved, we try to fill this in with images of viable and livable groups, collectives, festivals, syndicates, congregations, planets.
LITR 418: Politics of Modern Hebrew Literature
Overview of the Poetics, Culture, History and Political dynamics of Modern Hebrew Literature as a national literature over the last 300 years. The course will trace the literary development of its diasporic condition in Europe through the Hebrew Literature that is created in the Israeli Jewish sovereignty. Readings in translation.
No background in Jewish literature, Hebrew literature, or Jewish culture is required.
LITR 418: The Classics of Modern Hebrew Literature
Overview of the Poetics, Culture, History, and Political dynamics of Modern Hebrew Literature as national literature over the last 300 years. The course traces the literary development of its diasporic condition in Europe through the Hebrew Literature that is created in the Israeli Jewish sovereignty. The course is taught in Hebrew and the readings of literary texts are also in Hebrew.
No background in Jewish literature, Hebrew literature, or Jewish culture is required.
LITR 420: The Jungle Books
A study of novels, stories, and films about a journey to the jungle in search of personal fulfillment and the origins of history. Authors include Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, André Malraux, Alejo Carpentier, W. H. Hudson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, José Eustasio Rivera, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Readings and discussion in English.
LITR 423 Politics and Literature in Modern Iran and Afghanistan
This course traces the emergence of modern Persian literature in Iran and Afghanistan, introducing the contemporary poets and writers of fiction who created this new literary tradition in spite of political, social, state, and religious constraints. Our readings include Iranian novelists working under censorship, Afghan memoirists describing their experience in a warzone, and even contemporary writers living in exile in the US or Europe. Major writers include Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, Sadegh Hedayat, Simin Behbahani, Forugh Farrokhzad, Homeira Qaderi (who will visit the class), and Khaled Hosseini.
LITR 426: Feminist and Queer Theory
Historical survey of feminist and queer theory from the Enlightenment to the present, with readings from key British, French, and American works. Focus on the foundations and development of contemporary theory. Shared intellectual origins and concepts, as well as divergences and conflicts, among different ways of approaching gender and sexuality.
Course multi titled as WGSS340/ENGL357
Instructor: Jill Richards
Historical survey of feminist and queer theory from the Enlightenment to the present, with readings from key British, French, and American works. Focus on the foundations and development of contemporary theory. Shared intellectual origins and concepts, as well as divergences and conflicts, among different ways of approaching gender and sexuality.
LITR 428 The Quran
Introduction to the study of the Quran. Topics include: the literary, historical, and theological reception of the Quran; its collection and redaction; the scriptural milieu of late antiquity; education and religious authority; ritual performance and calligraphic expression; the diversity of Muslim exegesis.
LITR 431: Latin American Languages of Liberation: The Long Sixties
This is a multi-media seminar that studies the Latin American cultural and political discourses of liberation throughout the sixties, with an eye at assessing their legacy today. While the language that characterized the foundation of the nation-states in the 19th century was emancipation, in the second part of the twentieth century, and particularly around 1968, Latin America embraced the world discourse of liberation. This seminar examines languages of liberation in an array of disciplines and artistic practices from South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. We explore regional debates that were also inserted in the larger discourse of the anti-colonial struggles of the global South. Topics include Philosophy of liberation (Dussel), Theology of liberation (the 1968 Council of Bishops in Medellin, Colombia), Theater of the oppressed (Boal), Pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire), Cinema of liberation (manifestos of Third Cinema), the New Song protest movements across the region (both Spanish and Portuguese American music), anti-colonialism in the Caribbean (Césaire, Fanon), anti-neocolonialism (dependency theory, internal colonialism), Indigenous liberation (from the Barbados declarations to the Lacandon jungle declarations), experimental “boom” literature (Cortázar) etc.
LITR 432 World War II: Homefront Literature and Film
Examination of quotidian, civilian World War II experiences in many parts of Europe. Modes of literary and filmic reflection occasioned by the war; civilian perspectives on the relationship between history and everyday life, during and after the war; children’s experience of war; and ways homefront and occupation memories shaped postwar avant-gardes.
Examination of quotidian, civilian World War II experiences in many parts of Europe. Modes of literary and filmic reflection occasioned by the war; civilian perspectives on the relationship between history and everyday life, during and after the war; children’s experience of war; and ways homefront and occupation memories shaped postwar avant-gardes.
LITR 434: Cervantes & Don Quijote
This course dedicates an entire semester to a close reading of the two parts of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote de la Mancha. Announcing itself as a “true history,” yet, whose fictional devices clearly shine through, Don Quixote occupies the privileged space of first modern novel where, within its literary fabric(ations), a theory of the novel is devised. Our readings of Don Quixote examine how the classic novel inserts, parodies, and transforms all previous literary and non-literary discourses to ingeniously invent a new narrative form. To contextualize Cervantes and his literary-historic tradition, this seminar also explores questions of erotic and literary desire, the role of madness and mental health, empire and the circulation of material culture and material wealth, the Edenic narrative and ecologies of the natural world, censorship and the Inquisition, the status of representation and performance, translation, as well as the constructions of class, gender, race, and nation. We also study the legacy of Don Quixote and its quixotic narratives through contemporary art, essays, films, novels, science fiction, and television.
LITR 437: Judeo-Spanish Culture, Language, and Literature
This course explores the rich body of culture, language, and literature that emerged in the Sephardi (Judeo-Spanish) diaspora following the expulsion of Jews from Iberia in 1492, and continuing to the present. This course is taught in English. TR
LITR 439: Living Form: Organicism in Society and Aesthetics
Starting with Kant, the organic is defined as a processual relation of the part and the whole, thereby providing a new model of the individual as a self-contained totality. Students explore the implications of this conception in Goethe’s writings on morphology (The Metamorphosis of Plants, “Orphic Primal Words”), the Romantics’ Atheneum, Hanslick’s On the Beautiful in Music, Oswald Spengler’s cultural morphology, the concept of autopoeisis in Maturana and Varela, Luhmann’s systems theory, and Canguilheim’s critique of the analogy of organic life and society.
LITR 441: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud
The revolutionary ways in which Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud redefined the ends of freedom. Key works of the three authors on agency in politics, economics, epistemology, social life, and sexuality. Agency as individual or collective, as autonomous or heteronomous, and as a case of liberation or subversion. Additional readings from Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Weber.
Course multi titled as HUMS314/GMAN211/PHIL412
LITR 444: Modern Arabic Poetry and Poetics
Poetry was the preeminent art of the Arab world for much of the twentieth century. Poets served as the region’s public intellectuals, framing and shaping debates about the most urgent events and topics of communal concern. The post-WWII period was also a moment when the very definition of Arabic poetry—formally as well as historically—was subject to important transformations. This course serves as an introduction to the major Arab poets of the post-war period—including Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala’ika, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, and Iman Mersal—as well as central debates about the nature and scope of poetry. Topics include the poetics of exile, “committed literature,” poetry and myth, the dialectic of tradition and modernity, the prose poem, and translation. Primary readings are in Arabic, with occasional secondary readings in English.
Prerequisite: Arabic L5 or higher, or permission of instructor.