Undergraduate Courses
LITR 279 Introduction to Vietnamese Culture, Values and Literature
Introduction to Vietnamese culture and values. Topics include cultural and national identity, aesthetics, the meaning of life, war, and death. Selected readings from Zen poems, folklore, autobiographies, and religious and philosophical writings. Course is taught in English and is an alternative to Western perspectives.
Readings in translation. No previous knowledge of Vietnamese required.
LITR 279: Introduction to Vietnamese Culture, Values, and Literature
Introduction to Vietnamese culture and values. Topics include cultural and national identity, aesthetics, the meaning of life, war, and death. Selected readings from Zen poems, folklore, autobiographies, and religious and philosophical writings. Course is taught in English and is an alternative to Western perspectives.
Readings in translation. No previous knowledge of Vietnamese required.
Introduction to Vietnamese culture and values. Topics include cultural and national identity, aesthetics, the meaning of life, war, and death. Selected readings from Zen poems, folklore, autobiographies, and religious and philosophical writings. Course is taught in English and is an alternative to Western perspectives.
Readings in translation. No previous knowledge of Vietnamese required.
LITR 286 Pessoa, Lispector, Rosa, Saramago
Study of works in translation by four contemporary masters in the Portuguese language, Fernando Pessoa, Clarice Lispector, João Guimarães Rosa and José Saramago. These authors radically experiment with prose in order to question notions of identity, existence, and meaning.
LITR 289 Literature of the Americas, North and South
Readings of U.S. and Latin American short stories and novels to explore related themes and narrative structures. Topics include the literary dialogue between Anglo and Latin American writers and their comparative treatments of history, myth, memory, and war. Paired readings of Poe and Cortázar; Bierce and Fuentes; Crane and Borges; and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Conducted in English; a section in Spanish available depending on demand. Readings of Latin American texts in Spanish for Spanish and Literature majors.
LITR 289: Literature of the Americas, North and South
Readings of U.S. and Latin American short stories and novels to explore related themes and narrative structures. Topics include the literary dialogue between Anglo and Latin American writers and their comparative treatments of history, myth, memory, and war. Paired readings of Poe and Cortázar; Bierce and Fuentes; Crane and Borges; and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Conducted in English; a section in Spanish available depending on demand. Readings of Latin American texts in Spanish for Spanish and Literature majors.
LITR 299: Colonial Narrative, Postcolonial Counternarrative
Readings of paradigmatic, colonial era texts that have provoked responses and rewritings from postcolonial writers and filmmakers. In some cases the rewriting is explicit and direct, in other cases the response is more oblique. Readings may include: Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest after Shakespeare’s Tempest, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation after Camus’s The Stranger, and Claire Denis’s film Chocolat after Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy.
LITR 301: Putin's Russia and Protest Culture
Survey of Russian literature and culture since the fall of communism. The chaos of the 1990s; the solidification of power in Putin’s Russia; the recent rise of protest culture. Sources include literature, film, and performances by art collectives. Readings and discussion in English; texts available in Russian.
Survey of Russian literature and culture since the fall of communism. The chaos of the 1990s; the solidification of power in Putin’s Russia; the recent rise of protest culture. Sources include literature, film, and performances by art collectives. Readings and discussion in English; texts available in Russian.
LITR 302 France by Rail: Trains in French Literature, Film, and History
Exploration of the aesthetics of trains in French and Francophone literature and culture, from the end of the nineteenth-century and the first locomotives, to the automatically driven subway in twenty-first century Paris. Focus on the role of trains in industrialization, colonization, deportation, decolonization, and immigration. Corpus includes novels, poems, plays, films, paintings, graphic novels, as well as theoretical excerpts on urban spaces and public transportation. Activities include: building a train at the CEID and visiting the Beinecke collections and the Art Gallery.
May not be taken after FREN 306.
LITR 305: Advanced Literary Translation
A sequel to LITR 348 or its equivalent, this course brings together advanced and seriously committed students of literary translation, especially (but not only) those who are doing translation-related senior theses. Students must apply to the class with a specific project in mind, that they have been developing or considering, and that they will present on a regular basis throughout the semester. Discussion of translations-in-progress are supplemented by short readings that include model works from the world of literary translation, among them introductions and pieces of criticism, as well as reflections by practitioners treating all phases of their art. The class is open to undergraduates and graduate students who have taken at least one translation workshop. By permission of the instructor.
Prerequisite: LITR 348.
A sequel to LITR 348 or its equivalent, this course brings together advanced and seriously committed students of literary translation, especially (but not only) those who are doing translation-related senior theses. Students must apply to the class with a specific project in mind, that they have been developing or considering, and that they will present on a regular basis throughout the semester. Discussion of translations-in-progress are supplemented by short readings that include model works from the world of literary translation, among them introductions and pieces of criticism, as well as reflections by practitioners treating all phases of their art. The class is open to undergraduates and graduate students who have taken at least one translation workshop. By permission of the instructor.
Prerequisite: LITR 348.
LITR 308: Literature at the Limit from Palestine and Israel
Films and readings on Palestine and Israel after 1948, with emphasis on historical and political contexts. The discussion of Jewish and Palestinian spaces and histories is based on postcolonial and anticolonial theory.
LITR 312: The Russian Short Story and Beyond
Examination of the hugely important, but often ignored short story form, primarily in Russia from the early nineteenth-century onward. Reading of important works by major artists of the short story like Karamzin, Turgenev, Pisemsky, Tolstoy, Leskov, Chekhov, Bunin, Zaitsev, Gorky, Babel, Zoshchenko, and Pilnyak, as well as lesser known work, using tools from the digital humanities. Knowledge of Russian useful but not required.
LITR 318 The Arabian Nights, Then and Now
Exploration of Arabian Nights, a classic of world literature. Topics include antecedents, themes and later prose, and graphic and film adaptations.
LITR 323: Animals in Literature and Theory
Consideration of the role animals play in our aesthetic, ethical, political, and scientific worlds through reading of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and critical theory. Topics include: animal sentience and experience; vegetarianism; animal fables; pet keeping; animals alongside disability, race, and gender; and the representation of animal life in the visual arts.
LITR 324 Representations of the Underworld
What is the underworld? What questions have different ideas about the underworld posed about mortality, freedom, and goodness? Topics include dreams, hell, ghosts, the unconscious, and string theory.
Sophomore standing required.
What is the underworld? What questions have different ideas about the underworld posed about mortality, freedom, and goodness? Topics include dreams, hell, ghosts, the unconscious, and string theory.
Sophomore standing required.
LITR 324A: Latin American Political Thought in Comparative Perspective
Historical examination of Latin American political thought through key texts in the history of political theory in the Spanish-American continent and through the lens of comparative political theory.
LITR 330: Heidegger's Being and Time
Systematic, chapter by chapter study of Heidegger’s Being and Time, arguably the most important work of philosophy in the twentieth-century. All major themes addressed in detail, with particular emphasis on care, time, death, and the meaning of being.