In this interdisciplinary class, students of race as well as gender, sexuality, disability, etc. read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

"What is a Classic?" asks what goes into the making of a classic text. It focuses on four, monumental poems from the ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, which are discussed through comparison across traditions. Students will consider possible definitions and constituents of a classic, while also reflecting on the processes of chance, valorization, and exclusion that go into the formation of a canon. Topics will include transmission, commentary, translation, religion, race, colonization, empire, and world literature.

This course offers a multidisciplinary introduction to one of the finest and most influential of all Greek tragedies. We discuss its major themes, its historical and literary context, and investigate how it might have been understood by its original Athenian audience. We also consider examples of the play's modern poetic reception (reading Jean Anouilh's Antigone and Athol Fugard's The Island) and of its influence on gender studies and political theory. Select passages of Greek are translated in class that have particular thematic and interpretative importance and that illustrate Sophocles' poetic technique and literary art.

What is comparison, and what are its stakes? How do we compare across languages, genres, and/or media? How and why might we "read" closely, at a distance, historically, politically? What can we learn from engaging in and with translation(s)? This course incorporates readings and exercises that will get us out of our read-and-discuss comfort zone: we visit archival spaces on campus; explore data-driven projects in the digital humanities; engage in archival research; imagine collaborative, plurilingual projects that embrace broad histories of production and circulation; and experiment with translation, editing, and the creation of paratext.

What is the 'place' of fiction? How are senses of place configured in literary language and philosophical concepts? How does the question about real and fictional space become a problem within the very practice of writing? This course will approach these questions as they appear in different literary and critical texts throughout the modern and contemporary periods. Some of the topics to be discussed include: the poetics of imaginary spaces, architectural diagrams, dystopias, and the relations between metafiction, writing, and non-place.

This course surveys twenty and twenty-first century Southern African literature, with a focus on African epistemologies (ways of knowing). How have Southern Africans thought about human beings, the city, the divine, and nature? How do they conceptualize Black African futures? How do these literatures reflect indigenous theories of the world? Students will close read these epics, novels, and a few poems (some in translation from African languages) and develop their skills in exegesis and use of critical methodologies, such as postcolonial criticism, African feminism, and ecocriticism.

This course studies contemporary Latin American & Caribbean literature and visual arts. Looking at the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, we will analyze how textual and visual works respond to different forms of violence and express other forms of imagining relations among bodies, communities, and territories. Texts will be available in the original & translation. Some classes will take place at the Art Museum study room at Firestone

Why are borders so central to our political, moral and affective life? Examining legal theory, novels and films of 20th- century migrations alongside poetry and forensic reports of recent border-crossings, this course traces how mobile subjects - from stowaways to pirates and anticolonial militants - have driven the formation of new ethics, political geographies and radical futures. We will situate borders in relation to practices of policing the colonies, the plantation, the factory and, finally, we will ask: why did we stop relating to migrants as political subjects and begin treating them as the moral beneficiaries of humanitarianism?

This course, required for all seniors majoring in the Department of Comparative Literature, represents work completed to progress the research and writing of the senior thesis. Students' progress will be monitored by their COM thesis adviser. Writing assignments include a thesis prospectus of 8 double-spaced pages, due in Week 6, and 20 double-spaced pages of writing towards the thesis (a chapter or its equivalent), due in Week 12. Students are also required to meet with their primary COM advisers at least three times over the course of the semester; these meetings constitute the participation component of the course.

This seminar covers the nuts and bolts of undergraduate teaching, discussing pedagogical theory and practice as well as job market preparation. Topics include weekly class preparation, running a discussion, active learning strategies, handling sensitive issues with students, writing instruction, grading and feedback, new media in the classroom, syllabus design, and teaching statements. We will devote considerable attention to race, gender, neurodiversity, and disability in the classroom. Our last two weeks are dedicated to radical pedagogy.

An introduction to Comparative Literature through the exploration of the ways of saying I, a question that has long been fundamental to the practice and theory of literature and the disciplines that have informed it, from linguistics and psychoanalysis to theology and philosophy. Topics to be discussed include narrative perspective, personal pronouns, confession, memory, the history of sexuality, and the expression of private experience.

Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 10-15 page sample, with commentary, 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 15-20 page sample, with commentary, 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.

This class explores games and the culture of play in East Asia through a variety of angles, ranging from the aesthetic to the ideological, from the historical to the technological. By doing so, we familiarize ourselves with the increasingly prolific literature on (video) games as well as the longer history of game theory. Though the class serves foremost to explore the theoretical readings within this new discipline, game studies, it also allows the hands-on exploration of particular East Asian games, entertains the question of how to teach games, and encourages students to apply game theory beyond the realm of games studies itself.

This course examines how politics and culture play out in that most refined of art forms: opera. The course will introduce students to the history of European opera, focusing on 19th century composers in France, Germany, and Italy. We will closely examine three operas: one French (Bizet's Carmen), one Italian (Verdi's Aida) and one German (Wagner's Die Meistersinger). Following Edward Said's work, we will examine how politics and culture play out in these works: European colonialism in Aida; the question of antisemitism in Wagner; stereotypes of Spain in Carmen. Includes excursions to the Metropolitan Opera.

In this course we will read influential texts in political thought and theory. We will examine authors you hear a lot about but perhaps never had the opportunity to study in detail, much less in one setting: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, Foucault, Fanon, Debord, Jameson, Spivak, and Butler. Students majoring in Politics as well as literature, Philosophy, and History are welcome, as are majors in the Social, Natural, and Applied Sciences. No prior knowledge of these thinkers is required; just the wish to read challenging works and discuss thought-provoking topics.

This class considers Jane Austen not only as the inventor of the classic novel but also as an inspiring, ceaslessly discussable author who is--thanks to a steady stream of adaptations and spinoffs--our contemporary. Pairing each novel with recent adaptations and current issues, we will discuss how Austen treats love, violence, sisterhood, sex, and power. Exploring Austen's difference as well as her modernity, we will learn as much about ourselves as about her novels.

The Bible is more than one book. "Bible" comes from a Greek word that literally means "books." Some are hauntingly beautiful, others profoundly philosophical. Some are simultaneously boring and terrifying; some are riveting and funny. We'll think about how these different kinds of literature belong in the same overarching book: how are the ways in which they are written a part of the overall meaning or meanings of the Bible? We'll survey the literary devices that Biblical texts use and the beauty of its language. This way of reading isn't intended to challenge any faith tradition, nor does it assume that you've ever looked at the Bible before

Exile entails a wrenching relocation in space, but it also can disarrange the sense of time. This course explores the double time of exilic life, what Nabokov in Pnin calls physical time and spiritual time. Physical time accentuates the pangs of exile--inhabiting a present so radically different from the familiar past. Spiritual time, in which memory and nostalgia seek refuge, is more mobile and creative; it can recall a vanished world and project a future return. We explore the theme of exilic time through its modern variations from Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Joyce's Ulysses to Naipaul's The Mimic Men.

How did Montreal become the world's second-largest French-speaking city? How has its unique multicultural identity inspired generations of explorers, artists, architects, dancers, dramaturgs, and filmmakers? Spanning from its origins as Tiohtià:ke ("Where the waters meet") to New France and today's Créole-and Yiddish-speaking scenes, this course explores the city's cultural, environmental, architectural, and political history. We will examine colonialism, immigration, displacement, Québec-Canada relations, Francophonie, identity, religion, language, ecology, gender, queerness, and race in the 'Paris of North America'.

While it is a truism that literature speaks of society, calling the social sciences literary seems unsound. How did this asymmetry evolve and what are its poetic, epistemic, and theoretical effects? This seminar traces the literature-sociology-nexus from its 1800 origins to today. We read sociological case-studies by novelists and experimental fictions by sociologists, study analyses by Simmel, Lukács, Lenk, Barthes, Bourdieu, Lepenies, and Sapiro and investigate key crossovers such as the Collège de Sociologie, the Frankfurt School, ethnographic surrealism, sociology of literature, affect studies, critical fabulation, and autofiction.

The course will focus on topics and issues related to literary translation, from Urdu into Hindi, Hindi into Urdu, as well as the translation of Hindi/Urdu literary works into English and from English into Hindi/Urdu. Readings will address issues of theory and practice, as well as selected literary works and their translations. Includes student translation workshops.

An introduction to the literature, art, religion and philosophy of China, Japan and Korea from antiquity to ca. 1600. Readings focus on primary texts in translation and are complemented by museum visits and supplementary materials on the course website; we emphasize close reading and discussion, encouraging students to engage with both the past and present meanings of these texts. The course explores the unique aspects of East Asian civilizations and the connections between them through assignments integrating text with visual and material sources. No prior knowledge of East Asia is required.

This course will provide the historical and theoretical background essential for understanding the evolution of women's film in European cinema. Particular attention will be paid to questions of sexual difference and to the challenges feminist and queer theory pose to a politics of identity in film. Students will explore and assess the ways cultural identity determines the cinematic representation of women, while receiving a solid grounding in the poetics of cinema as it developed across time, genres, and cultures.

This course will explore the ways in which national identity was imagined and implemented within Italian literature, culture, and cinema before, during, and after the period of Italian unification in the mid-XIX century. Examples are drawn from a wide range of literary, artistic and cultural media.

The Arabian Nights (The 1001 Nights) is a masterpiece of world literature. However, its reception and popularity are fraught with challenges and problems. By tracing its journey from its Persian origins, through its Arabic adaptations, and finally its entry into Europe, this class will consider how the Nights were used to construct imaginings about the Self and the Other in these different contexts. We will cover topics such as orientalism, gender and sexuality, and narrative theory as they relate to the Nights' most famous story cycles and look at the influence of the Nights on modern authors and filmmakers. All readings will be in English.

A study of the thought of the great German pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer.

The purpose of the course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course focuses on theories that emphasize the role of formal elements in producing meaningful discursive and social effects. Works of Russian formalists and French (post)-structuralists are discussed in connection with psychoanalytic and anthropological theories of formation.

This course will explore the crucial connections between migration, language, and translation. Drawing on texts from a range of genres and disciplines - from memoir and fiction to scholarly work in translation studies, migration studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology - we will focus on how language and translation affect the lives of those who move through and settle in other cultures, and how, in turn, human mobility affects language and modes of belonging.