Undergraduate Courses

The very concept of ‘avant-garde’ is steeped in a masculine warlike imagery, and the founding manifesto of Futurism directly expresses ‘contempt for the woman’. Yet, feminine, queer, androgynous, and non-binary perspectives on sex and identity played a central role–from Rimbaud to current experimentalism–in the historical development of literary and artistic experimentalism, especially in Italy. In this seminar we cross the history of literary and artistic vanguardism through the material, textual, and phonetic records left behind by experimentalists who did not identify as men. We read poems that are actually images, look at paintings conceived as texts, listen to audio-performances, and treat the avant-garde as an archaeological stratigraphy of bodies, emotions, objects, and ideas.

No previous knowledge of Italian language, art, or literature required. Students seeking departmental credit for Italian do their writing and reading in the original language, and attend a discussion session in Italian.

Reflections on how the Holocaust has shaken the self-understanding of modern Western culture. We focus on theoretical reflections characterizing the Holocaust as undermining the very possibility of experience, representation, and of inhabiting a shared world. The course aims to give perspective on the complex factors conditioning the Holocaust; the rise of nationalism and fascism, antisemitism and racism; the relation between modernity and barbarism; inclusion and exclusion; law and bare life; World War II and the emergence of the Camp System in Eastern Europe; collaboration, resistance, survival, and testimony. Readings by Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Shoshana Felman, Primo Levi, Timothy Snyder, and others.

This course introduces students to a diverse group of modern Jewish poets—from Gertrude Stein, Moyshe Leyb-Halpern, and Adrienne Rich to Muriel Rukeyser, Yehuda Amichai, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Leonard Cohen, and others. Writing in English, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and French, these poets gave seminal expression to Jewish life in a variety of modes and permutations, and in the process produced poems of lasting and universal value. The class explores work as art and considers pressing questions of cultural, historical, and political context. All readings are in English.

A research seminar exploring issues at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. We discuss the modern idea that in order to attain their highest vocation human beings need to form and transform their nature like a work of art. On this picture, we have to turn our sensible nature into a “second nature” that is expressive of supersensible ideas. After a brief look at the affinity of the virtuous and the beautiful in ancient thought, we discuss the emergence and articulation of the modern idea in Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche, before exploring how this thought has informed 20th century thought (Adorno, Foucault, Rancière, Agamben). In the last section of the seminar, we highlight the critical notion that the most recent phase of capitalism has exploited the idealist, romantic, and critical ideas of artistic creation and self-creation and turned them into a new disciplinary mechanism (Boltanski/Chiapello).

Participants should be familiar with issues in modern aesthetics and ethics. Priority is given to juniors and seniors, who are asked to write a brief e-mail to the instructor, detailing their interest in the course and their familiarity with its topics.

Close reading of major novels by two of Russia’s greatest authors. Focus on the interrelations of theme, form, and literary-cultural context. Readings and discussion in English.

Close reading of major novels by two of Russia’s greatest authors. Focus on the interrelations of theme, form, and literary-cultural context. Readings and discussion in English.

What is genuinely valuable? What makes one thing better than another? How can we make judgments of value that transcend personal or group prejudice? These questions are fundamental to our lives and yet seem impossible to answer. In order to gain insight into our predicament, this course offers a moral psychology of the human subject since 1800: an account of the transformations of human consciousness that accompanied the social changes of modernization, including the rise of capitalism and democratic egalitarianism, the decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the growth of technology and the mastery of nature. Readings are split evenly between philosophy/social theory and literature, and include Schiller on aesthetic education, Hegel on the master/slave dialectic, Marx on alienated labor, Nietzsche on nihilism and the revaluation of values, William James on religious experience, Du Bois on double consciousness, Weber on rationalization and disenchantment, Adorno and Horkheimer on the dialectic of enlightenment, and poetry and prose texts by Wordsworth, Keats, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Baldwin that imagine ways of valuing persons, things, and existence itself. We also reflect upon our own methods of judgment in order to ask: What criteria of value can we bring to bear upon works of art and thought? What does it mean to “get it right” in the humanities as opposed to the sciences? What counts as an insight? Above all, we seek to grasp how the act of valuing is central to what it means to be a person.

This course is an introduction to Japanese literature written in the last fifty years, with a focus on women writers. We read poetry and prose featuring mothers, daughters, and lovers, novels that follow convenience and thrift store workers, and poetry about factory girls. Our reading takes us from the daily grind of contemporary Tokyo to dystopian futures, from 1970s suburbia to surreal dreamscapes. We attend carefully to the ways in which different writers craft their works and, in particular, to their representation of feelings and affects. Whether the dull ache of loneliness, the oppression of boredom or the heavy weight of fatigue, it is often something about the mood of a work–rather than its narrative–that leaves a distinct impression. We develop the tools to analyze and discuss this sense of distinctness, as well as discover ways to stage connections and comparisons between the works we read. 

An introduction to Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Works by Borges, García Márquez, Paz, Neruda, Cortázar, and others.

Exploration of the life of English literature in the colonial and postcolonial world, from the nineteenth century to the present. Close reading of literary texts, publishing statistics, school textbooks, film, and postcolonial theory. Topics include canon formation, education reform, colonial publishing, gender and education, global Shakespeare.

Recent headlines about China in the world, deciphered in both modern and historical contexts. Interpretation of new events and diverse texts through transnational connections. Topics include China’s international relations and global footprint, Mandarinization, Chinese America, science and technology, science fiction, and entrepreneurship culture.

Readings and discussion in English.

After Independence dictators emerged in the newly established Latin American countries.  Not a few were military men who had risen to prominence during the struggle against Spain.  They established repressive regimes bolstered by the army and powerful landowners.  Some, like Juan Manuel Rosas in Argentina became all powerful figures who provoked intense, often bloody opposition.  Their tradition continued in the twentieth century in figures such as Anastasio Somosa in Nicaragua, and Fidel Castro in Cuba.  An accompanying tradition of books about dictators, mostly novels, arose, with famous works such as El señor presidente (1946) by the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, and others like El otoño del patriarca (1975), by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, El recurso del método (1974), by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, and Yo el supremo (1976), by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos.  More recently Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian, published La fiesta del chivo (2000), about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. All of those novels will be read in the course, plus Facundo (1845), of uncertain genre, their precursor, by the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Tirano Banderas (1925), the first dictator novel, by the Spaniard Ramón del Valle Inclán.  The aim of the course will be to learn how literature has portrayed such a figure, which became the most prominent protagonist in Latin American fiction, and to ponder the reasons for the emergence of dictators in the region.  Essays by Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Juan Linz, among others, will be discussed, as will the history of Latin America by Edwin Williamson.