The Virgin Mary is the world's most storied person. Countless tales have been told about the miracles she has performed for the faithful who call upon her. Although many assume that African literature was only oral, not written, until the arrival of Europeans, Africans began writing stories about her by 1200 CE in the languages of Ethiopic, Coptic, & Arabic. This course explores this body of medieval African literature and paintings, preserved in African Christian monasteries, studying their themes of healing, reparative justice, & personal ethics in a violent world. It develops skills in the digital humanities & comparative literary studies.

This class introduces the historic diversity of socialisms through readings in classic socialist philosophy, literature and political writings. We are guided by these questions: How does socialism relate to communism and capitalism? How does it define democracy, equality, freedom, individuality, and collectivity? How does socialism relate to struggles for racial, gender and ecological justice? Are socialist ethics connected to religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam that teach human equality? What is the "social" in socialism? How may we understand injustices committed in socialism's name alongside its striving for social justice?

Fairy tales are among the first stories we encounter, often before we can read. They present themselves as timeless--"Once upon a time..." - yet are essentially modern. They are often presented as children's literature, yet are filled with sex and violence. They have been interpreted as archetypal patterns of the subconscious mind or of deep cultural origins, yet perform the work of shaping contemporary culture. They circulate in myriad oral variations, and are written down in new ones by the most sophisticated literary authors. In this course we will explore the fantasy, enchantment, labor, and violence wrought by fairy tales.

This course considers the impact of medical history, its advances and effects, in various historical periods and in dialogue with literary representations of human experience. Starting with definitions of medical humanities (in technology, philosophy, social sciences and religious studies), we explore medical history in diverse literary texts chosen from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. From our readings and discussions,we will gain an understanding of how medicine and the humanities are, in fact, inextricably linked.

This course studies artistic and cultural practices that created different aesthetics and politics of memory that have become essential to respond, denounce, and creatively resist to different forms of violence and human rights violations. Looking at essays, literature, visual arts, and sites of memory, the course will analyze how cultural works on memory and human rights have helped to create connections between past and present histories of both violence and resistance. Although the course focuses on Latin America, it will also look at forms of cultural transfer among memory practices from different parts of the world.

This course traces the social and literary history of maritime rebellion. From Pirates of the Caribbean to the specter of "Somali hijacking", Wikileaks, and the Orca uprising, seafaring (or web-surfing) agitators are back. Tracking the figure of the pirate in novels, ethnographies, films, comics, and counter-histories from the 16th century to the present, this course will approach piracy from three angles: "enemies of all mankind" and the making of international political orders; pirate predation and rebellion in the circuits of capital and Empire; mutiny, slave revolt and the new social orders that emerge out of pirate utopias.

Can poetry supplement for the dead? Atone for the ravages of love lost? What is the relationship between mourning and eros? This course will focus on a single genre- the elegy from antiquity until today- in order to explore: lyric's love affair with absence; whether desire is directed toward the physical or the phantasmatic, sensuality or sublimation; the tensions between individual and collective mourning; and the politics of gender and sexuality in lyric address. Through careful attention to individual poems, students will learn the art of close reading and how the finer points of rhetoric and poetic form relate to broader social questions.

Divination might be defined as the attempt to detect sense in passing circumstance, from the flight of birds and planetary motions to handwriting and coffee grounds. This seminar focuses on speech as an object of such divination. We study oracles and prophecies, riddles, Freudian slips and other uncanny transmissions. At the same time, we discuss the techniques of reading to which such alleged omens have given rise in literature, criticism, religion, and psychoanalysis.

Narratology and theory of the novel, related but distinct traditions in literary theory, have in the twenty-first century moved away from their respective formalist/structuralist and literary historical roots, and converged in the post-print era on questions of ethics. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore the new ethical narratologies alongside recent theories of the ethics of the novel.

The Writing and Dissertation Colloquium is a biweekly forum for graduate students in Comparative Literature to share works in progress with other graduate students. The seminar welcomes drafts of your prospectus, article, dissertation chapter, conference paper, exam statement and grant or fellowship proposal. The 90-minute sessions, done in conjunction with a rotating COM faculty member, are designed to offer written and oral feedback. The goal is to provide a space for students to share their work-in-progress and improve the writing and research skills. The reading materials are pre-circulated before each session.

Through a comparative focus on the concepts of dialectic and difference, we read some of the formative theoretical, critical and philosophical works which continue to inform interdisciplinary critical theory today. Works by Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, Arendt, de Man and Benjamin are included among the texts we read.

Weekly three-hour seminar, focused on the concept Yugen from aesthetics of the noh theater, with considerations of earlier theories in wake poetics.

This course focuses on how the renewed analysis of a relationality among different violences generated by popular feminisms impact our understanding of justice and accountability. Taking the crossings between social reproduction and prison abolition, personal and systemic violences as critical horizons, we explore different practices and regimes of signification posed in pamphlets, philosophical, literary, and artistic works. Although the course focuses on Latin America, it includes key works by feminists from the U.S. and analyzes processes of translation currently taking place. Readings available in Spanish and English.

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.

The course offers an introduction to moving image cultures in modern Japan with a focus on how technological aesthetic media has transformed the experience and understanding of action. While emphasis is placed on the production and reception of popular action film genres from Japan, the course also explores the relationship of those films to international film cultures in the context of broader historical transformations in media practices and in modes of distribution and reception. We will engage with ethical and political questions concerning issues such as gendered and racialized representations of action and the aesthetics of violence.

In this seminar we closely study ancient and medieval Chinese poetry, with emphasis on the formative stages of the Chinese textual tradition. While all texts will be read in translation, we also explore the ways in which the classical Chinese language shaped this poetry in its unique characteristics and possibilities of expression. In addition, we discuss in depth key texts of Chinese literary thought in their aesthetic, philosophical, social, and historical dimensions. Knowledge of the Chinese language is neither required nor expected.

An overview of three of the most influential writers in the twentieth century, focusing on selected masterpieces. All three were fascinated by similar topics: dreams and memory; sexuality; Judaism. All three lived during traumatic historical periods. Proust during WWI; Freud during WWII; and Borges during Peronismo. Seminar will explore the relationship between literature modernism, politics, and religion.

Since its advent in the 19th century, photography has been a privileged figure in literature's efforts to reflect upon its own modes of representation. This seminar will trace the history of the rapport between literature and photography by looking closely at a number of literary and theoretical texts that differently address questions central to both literature and photography: questions about the nature of representation, reproduction, memory and forgetting, history, images, perception, and knowledge.

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of psychoanalysis as a literary-critical and philosophical tradition of thought. In addition to classic texts by Freud, Lacan, Fanon, and Klein, we will read contemporary writers influenced by psychoanalysis (Cheng, Zupancic, Scott). Topics include interpretation of dreams, Freudo-Marxism, the psychology of colonialism and race, and sexual difference.

John Milton's writings reflect a lifelong effort to unite the aims of literary, intellectual and political experimentation. This class explores Milton's major works, especially his masterpiece epic Paradise Lost. We'll consider Milton's highly original characters, especially Satan, with whom we are invited to sympathize, but also Adam, Eve and Samson. We'll encounter Milton's startling poetic innovations, and his daring attempts to redefine human beings and their potential. We'll compare Milton's writings with other genres, such as early theology and medicine, and see his influence in recent sci-fi, crime fiction, rock and metal.

A course about reading for writers and a course about writing for readers. The first novels in English were written around 1700 and soon became the most popular literary form. We study the novel's evolution from early experiments like Robinson Crusoe to the genre-making masterpiece Pride and Prejudice. How do key aspects of the novelist's craft emerge: voice, point of view, setting, character, and plot? We'll learn how novels are made, and we'll come to understand why they were made then and what novels did that no other literary form had been able to do. Each week, we do short creative writing exercises.

Early modern vernacular writers did not simply imitate classical antiquity or later Italian or French verse as if it were ancient, but traded verse horizontally and multilaterally. Languages faded into one another through proximity, trade and war. We explore this cross-lingual, transnational literary field through the poetry and drama of diplomats, colonists, prophets, pharmacists, indigenous voice, and the work of traveling theater companies. The Netherlands is the polyglot hub for much of this activity, but we also chart rising interest in English beyond the British Isles, and tackle how we can think of an early modern global literature.

If politics always entailed psychopolitics (psychical and political-economic conjunctures) then why do contemporary politics feel so particularly psycho? We investigate this question across a range of theoretical, historical, and political-economic contexts: Freudo-Marxism, platform capitalism, decolonization, authoritarianism, conspiracism, neoliberalism, fossil fascism, and crises of authority. Readings include Thomas Hobbes, Andreas Malm, Adorno and Horkheimer, Jacqueline Rose, Herbert Marcuse, Wendy Brown, Frantz Fanon, Alenka Zupancic, and Freud.

This class focuses on poetry in Old Occitan and Old French, two transregional languages born in medieval Europe and spoken throughout the Mediterranean. We will explore the aural, visual, and tactile nature of medieval poems, whether sung, declaimed, or read silently. We will reflect on questions of death, politics, gender roles, sexuality, and religious sentiment raised by such texts, while also considering the at times off-putting aesthetic experiences they present to our modern sensibilities. Out-of-class activities will allow us to engage with manuscripts and address the performativity and relevance of medievalism in North America.

In 1835, when Franz Liszt checked into a hotel in Geneva, he registered Europe as his lieu de residence. But the country to which the Hungarian composer referred doesn't exist. We Europeans have the European Union, but we haven't been able to define a common European culture. A transnational vista from a cultural perspective is missing. Hotel Europa will try to delineate the common features of the European conflictual heritage, the very idea of a European cosmopolitan civilization, through a cross-cutting approach, using various fields, including history, literature and art history.

A study of Marcel Proust's works and "imaginaire", some of his most remarkable readings, along with readings of/by some of his most remarkable readers (writers, philosophers, critics, artists, and film makers).

The author has been cyclically proclaimed dead by critics, yet it remains at the center of modern Western judicial, aesthetic, and philosophical systems of belief and knowledge production. We explore some of the causes of this centrality and critically examine ways to uproot them. Our focus spans French and Non-French writings, films, and political documents from the Middle Ages to the 2023 Writers Guild strike against AI. Authorship is analyzed through the lenses of theories of sin and subjecthood, book culture and media ecologies, as well as theories of creativity, intertextuality, relationality, and reception.

The magical personal relations associated with the term "charisma" originally referred not to a political category but a dynamic in interwar Germany's literary cults. How did a poetic phenomenon become a political one? What are the figures, metaphors, or narratives through which the mystery of charisma has been described? We will explore how early 20th c. German culture represented charisma as an occult phenomenon, erotic seduction, drug-like intoxication, a result of financial crisis, or a media effect. We will also study the role of charisma in debates about whether today's world resembles that of the Weimar years.

Poetry occupies a significantly large space in the public sphere in South Asia. In addition to the expected areas of literature and performing arts, poetry is routinely performed in different domains of everyday life. This course will introduce students to various traditions, texts, and genres of Hindi-Urdu poetry that are routinely publicly performed as part of religious rituals, social practices, performing arts, and protest rallies. We will closely read some of the most widely performed Hindi/Urdu poems as independent literary texts, experience them as performances, and then analyze both texts and performances in their own contexts.

Second in the two-semester sequence on East Asian literary humanities, this course begins at the turn of the twentieth century and covers a range of themes in the history, literature, and culture of Japan, Korea, and China until the contemporary period. Looking into the narratives of modernity, colonialism, urban culture, and war and disaster, we will see East Asia as a space for encounters, contestations, cultural currents and countercurrents. No knowledge of East Asian languages or history is required and first-year students are welcome to take the course.

Nostalgia is one of the most pervasive and multifaceted feelings of our time; an engine of artistic production, it informs the works of Homer and James Joyce. One can be nostalgic for childhood or for a time when one's country was different. Fashion and music are imbued with nostalgic feelings, as are countless videos on our feeds. This class studies nostalgia from an interdisciplinary and global perspective: leveraging literature, cinema, philosophy, history, and cultural studies, it will explore how nostalgia is formed, and its role in the arts and society.

Focusing on René Char's wartime "notebook" of prose poetry from the French Resistance, Feuillets d'Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos), this course joins a study of the Resistance to a poet's literary creation and its ongoing "afterlife" around the globe. History, archival research (traditional and digital), the practice of literary translation, and a trip to France that begins in Paris and follows Char's footsteps as poet and Resistance leader on the Maquis will all be part of our exploration. The poet's widow and editor will accompany us in France. We conclude with a presentation of the "notebook" in multiple languages by seminar participants.

"What shall we say of the Marxian philosophy and of its relation to the American Negro?," Du Bois once asked. His answer was that "it must be modified," not because Marx was wrong but because Capital is one of the four "books in the world which every searcher for truth must know." To know Capital to be true, in this seminar, is to understand how Marx, after the American Civil War, learned to include in his work the most brutal facts of capitalism: chattel slavery, servitude, and extraction in colonies across the globe. "Race," and everything signified by this four-letter word, completes Marx's own expansive account of modernity.

This course builds upon the foundation in Classical Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary established during 1st and 2nd year Sanskrit, and also builds knowledge of Sanskrit poetry and South Asian culture through reading selections from Sanskrit poetic works and traditional theoretical treaties on poetics. It is primarily a reading course, focusing on passages from poems by Kalidasa, Murari, Bhavabhuti, Bhartrhari and other classical poets in combination with readings from Dandin's theoretical work on poetry the Kavyadarsa. This course provides students a comprehensive introduction to the Sanskrit poetic literature of different periods.

This course will introduce students to the richness and diversity of women's writing in India; it will open many windows into regional Indian societies, cultures, and subcultures; and it will allow students to examine social issues and cultural values from women's perspectives. By studying women's writings from at least ten major Indian languages (in English translation), students will be able to identify differences and disagreements among different canons as well as some common features among them that justify the category of Indian women's writing.

This seminar will focus on the legal, moral, religious, social, psychological, & political dimensions of crime, blame, shame, & punishment as discussed in major works of Russian literature considered against Western cultural background. The 1st part of the course will compare & contrast visions of justice in Eastern & Western Europe and emphases on divine versus human justice. The 2nd part will move to the psychology of the individual person, the criminal. Part three of the course will focus on the state institutions of criminal justice. Students will discuss from their perspectives both the literary & moral critiques of legal justice.

"Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language," writes Raymond Williams in his celebrated book Keywords. This course explores the many meanings of "nature" and attitudes towards the environment in East European literature. We will examine responses to political projects such as collectivization, industrialization, and resource extraction, and trace how ideas about progress competed with aspirations for conservation and agrarian living. Looking at works from Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, and the former Soviet Union, we will investigate how literary forms shape our understanding of ourselves in relation to the more-than-human world.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky both applied Christian thought to modern existential questions in startlingly similar ways. Both took a symphonic approach to truth: Kierkegaard by writing under a series of pseudonyms, and Dostoevsky by creating a "dialogic" universe in which radically opposing voices clash. Both writers were master humorists, deploying both earnestness and irony in confronting life's cursed questions. By reading them together, we will allow them to dialogically illuminate one another as we address fundamental questions of what it means to exist in freedom and subjectivity.

We start with Tolstoy's artistic stimuli and narrative strategies, exploring the author's provocative visions of war, gender, sex, art, social institutions, death, and religion. The emphasis is placed here on the role of the written word in Tolstoy's search for truth and power. The main part is a close reading of his masterwork "The War and Peace" (1863-68) - a quintessence of both his artistic method and philosophical insights. Each student will be assigned to keep a "hero's diary" and speak on behalf of one or two major heroes of the epic (including the Spirit of History).The roles will be distributed in accordance with the will of fate.

An exploration of material culture with the first modern novel of the Western world. It is about contemporary, 21st-century reading practices as well as those that prevailed at the time of the Quixote's production. We will survey intersections of material and digital objects in addition to digital surrogates. Hands-on experience of Firestone's rare books will introduce us to the dramatic effects of varying formats. Our modern, paperback versions will also reveal how media shape our understanding of the text. Images and contemporary reading practices of the "app generation" will increase our grasp of how media shape textual interpretation.

Every archive is a posthumous device. To archive is to die a little bit, even when the archived author still lives. This seminar explores another function of archives, namely, that they go beyond the funereal and give rise to somatic permutations that challenge the division between living and dying, between an author's material end and the cessation of artistic production. We look beyond death to examine the creative and plastic afterlife, or what develops and survives independent of the author's living hand. To write again, the dead author relies on the prosthetic hands of others. The archive lies beyond life's closed circuit.

Translation is at the heart of the humanities, and it arises in every discipline in the social sciences and beyond, but it is not easy to say what it is. This course looks at the role of translation in the past and in the world of today, in fields as varied as anthropology, the media, law, international relations and the circulation and study of literature. It aims to help students grasp the basic intellectual and philosophical problems raised by the transfer of meanings from one language to another (including in machine translation) and to acquaint them with the functions, structures and effects of translation in intercultural communication.

Academic work in disciplines across the humanities and humanistic social sciences are fueled in part by practices of translation, and many disciplines are moving toward a consideration of translation as scholarship in its own right. Yet few graduate students are trained in practices of translation, either within their discipline or as an interdisciplinary mode of intellectual engagement. This graduate translation workshop aims to help students from various departments hone a practice of translation that can stand on its own as a scholarly endeavor, while also deepening and enriching the other forms of research & writing in which they engage.