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.

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.

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.

Introduction to techniques, strategies, and practices of reading through study of lyric poems, narrative texts, plays and performances, films, new and old, from a range of times and places. Emphasis on practical strategies of discerning and making meaning, as well as theories of literature, and contextualizing particular readings. Topics include form and genre, literary voice and the book as a material object, evaluating translations, and how literary strategies can be extended to read film, mass media, and popular culture. Junior seminar; preference given to juniors and majors.

Introduction to techniques, strategies, and practices of reading through study of lyric poems, narrative texts, plays and performances, films, new and old, from a range of times and places. Emphasis on practical strategies of discerning and making meaning, as well as theories of literature, and contextualizing particular readings. Topics include form and genre, literary voice and the book as a material object, evaluating translations, and how literary strategies can be extended to read film, mass media, and popular culture. Junior seminar; preference given to juniors and majors. 

Development of ways to engage films from around the globe productively. Close analysis of a dozen complex films, with historical contextualization of their production and cultural functions. Attention to the development of critical skills. Includes weekly screenings, each followed immediately by discussion.

The chief genres of Sanskrit secular literature set against the background of the cultural history of ancient India. Various literary styles compared with those of other world literary traditions.

Study of the Bible as a literature—a collection of works exhibiting a variety of attitudes toward the conflicting claims of tradition and originality, historicity and literariness.

“We are still mythical” as Kae Tempest intones in Brand New Ancients (2013). This course analyzes creative rewritings of ancient Greek literature in contemporary Anglophone fiction, spanning the novel, lyric poetry, and drama. We consider why and how authors continue to turn to ancient Greek literature and myth to give form and fresh meaning to contemporary experience, ranging from the narratives that we use to articulate our personal, inner lives to the forces of culture, politics, and society. The authors studied in this course come from several different countries and write from diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, and queer backgrounds. In addition to analyzing rewriting as the creation of original literature and the counter-canonical use of the Classics, we also study what happens to the alterity of antiquity in the process of adaptation and rewriting. Above all, this course is an opportunity to read and discuss some of the most scintillating contemporary Anglophone fiction. The authors on the syllabus are Anne Carson, Natalie Diaz, Michael Hughes, Daisy Johnson, Tayari Jones, David Malouf, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Alice Oswald, Kamila Shamsie, Kae Tempest, and Ocean Vuong. Please consult the syllabus for preparatory reading.

The discourse of classicism from antiquity to modern times. Contemporary debates over the value of the classics in education; the emergence of classics as a discipline; changing definitions of the classic across time; notions commonly associated with the classics such as timelessness, beauty, and canon. Readings from Cicero, Horace, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Winckelmann, Eliot, Gadamer, Foucault, Kermode, Calvino, and Nussbaum.