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 Gilgamesh, which are discussed through comparison across traditions, ranging as far as Chinese poetry. 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.

A first course for students in reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Serious work in ancient Egyptian grammar, vocabulary building, etc. (the staples of a classical language course) plus work on the relation between hieroglyphs and Egyptian visual arts.

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.

A course in the foundational texts of contemporary critical theory. The relationships among literature, philosophy, aesthetics, and linguistics will be investigated as they come to the fore in the intellectual development of the following, among others: modern philology, New Criticism, hermeneutics, structuralism, speech act theory, Marxist and cultural criticism, historical-epistemological aesthetics, rhetorical criticism, and poststructuralism.

For historical reasons most books that come into English are translated from just a few languages, creating a misleading impression of the spread of literature itself. This course provides an opportunity to discover literary works from languages with small reading populations which rarely attract academic attention in the USA. It also offers tools to reflect critically on the networks of selection that determine which books reach English-language readers; the role of literature in the maintenance of national identities; the role of translation; and the concept of "world literature" in Comparative Literary Studies.

This course studies contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean in literature and visual arts. Placing emphasis on the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, it analyzes literary and visual styles that emerge with new forms of imagining the relations between culture and politics while enacting different power relations and cultural dynamics. We will engage with visual works from the Art Museum and will hold some classes at the study rooms. Class taught in English; readings and written assignments can be done in English or Spanish.

This course examines how political repression has shaped the literature and culture of the modern Mediterranean. Each week we focus on a national space (Albania, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria), approaching work from that space in terms of its aesthetic, political, and cultural significance. Through close, historicized, and comparative readings of these texts, we explore the relationship between literature and politics; translation and identity; and representations of state power, authoritarian rule, and struggles for liberation.

This course follows the development of modern Hebrew prose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How was Hebrew refashioned from a liturgical to a modern literary language capable of narrating novels and conveying contemporary dialogue? Who were the revolutionary writers who accomplished this feat and what ideological struggles accompanied it? We will begin with the haskala (Jewish enlightenment), continue with the tehiya (revival) and early writing in the yishuv (Jewish community in pre-State Palestine), and conclude with dor ha-medina (the "independence generation") and maturation of modern Hebrew. Reading knowledge of Hebrew required.

The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning now offers ample practical training and resources for improving classroom performance and building credentials for teaching jobs. This seminar instead explores the politics of pedagogical practice, through discussions of readings from various perspectives and time periods, as well as by sharing our own pedagogical experiences at Princeton and elsewhere. The reading list suggested here is a starting point; in an effort to de-hierarchize our own classroom, we develop a full reading list collaboratively. Graduate students from all departments are welcome.

This seminar familiarizes students with some of the fundamental theoretical, philosophical, and interpretive works on aesthetic formation, temporality, and the techne of sense-making from whose interrelation critical and dialectical literary, social, and media theory all continue to derive today. These include works by Lessing, Hegel, Marx, Saussure, Austin, Husserl, Freud, Jakobson, and Spitzer.

Investigation of the concepts of excess and surplus across several domains: political economy, psychoanalysis, theories of reproduction, environment, literary and artistic representation. In relation to value, affect, energy, material wealth, waste, population, what is an excess? Is more synonymous with "too much"? What are the conditions and uses of surplus? What are its metrics? What are the languages of surplus? In theoretical and literary readings, we consider the parameters and complexities of surplus and excess: the concepts' internal divisions and their capacity to cross discursive thresholds. There may, of course, be too much reading.

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.

What is media's role in shaping the materiality and definition of modern warfare? From image-making machines, drones to algorithms, and satellite mapping to artificial intelligence, war is the inventor of new visual and sensory regimes that give shape to the post/human environments we inhabit. This seminar considers classic French and German media theory on war in a new light, by focusing on Asia (Vietnams, Koreas, Chinas) as the primary site of sensory warfare, and the new inventor of experimental technologies of control. We probe the history of militarized aesthetics and unpack the operations of war machines.

This interdisciplinary course examines the ideas of the Arab, the Jew, and the Arab-Jew as represented in history, literature, and film. It revisits the interdisciplinary scholarship around "Jews and Arabs" since the 1990s in order to reassess past and current approaches and to assist students with their own research agendas. We consider the following analytical frames: memory studies and its politics; historiography, recovery and the archive; hybridity and cosmopolitanism; language politics; and "passing" and cross-identification. Qualified juniors and seniors are welcome.

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 course is an introduction to contemporary Chinese cinemas in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. From postwar musicals and pan-Asian blockbusters, to new wave avant-garde films and experimental documentaries, the diversity of Chinese cinemas reflects cinema's relations to global capitalism, Asia's democratization movements, financial crises, and the arrival of (post)socialism. Creating urban nomads, songstresses, daydreamers, travelers, and terrorists, Chinese cinemas put on full display the forces of globalization in shaping the aesthetics and politics of film. Selections broadly include popular commercial films to rare art house productions.

This course introduces students to twenty-first-century Asian women writers (Japan, Korea, China) whose works achieved global popularity through translation in the past two decades. Written by writers living in East Asian countries dealing with capitalist developments, financial crises, and neoliberal free trade agreements, the texts collectively suggest the global interest and transmission of women's rights and LGBTQ movements in Asia and beyond. We explore, firstly, the meaning of "capitalism" as seen by the author in each text, and secondly, a commodified urban-based cosmopolitan culture that depends on the continued orientalism of Asia.

This seminar considers the issues of language, writing, and inscription in a broad comparative perspective that brings together critical theory and recent scholarship on Korea and East Asia. It traces the issues of language and inscription against the frameworks of semiology (Derrida, Irigaray), discursive order (Foucault, Kittler), folds of matter and power (Deleuze), and ideological control (Althusser). The class also uses this theoretical framework to build our understanding of Korean (and, when applicable, East Asian) writing systems, from calligraphy, to the development of print and digital culture. All readings available in English.

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.

If we remember one thing about ancient myths, it is not to read them literally: Icarus didn't really fall into the sea because he flew too close to the sun. In this class, we will explore the frequently contentious debates about how to interpret myth as they played out in Europe from about 1500-1750. As we shall see, writing about myths ("mythography") mattered to the early moderns as a powerful way of making arguments about topics including politics, philosophy, religion, science, and sexuality. We will consider the histories of literature, ideas, and visual art, and treat authors ranging from Boccaccio and Machiavelli to Milton and Newton.

What is literary theory and how does it allow us to think language and power in concert with categories of representation that exceed language: race, gender, coloniality, ecology, and subjectivity? This course will introduce students to literary theory, exploring how to read theory and how it helps us read other texts. We will consider the synergy between theories of signification and contemporary feminist, critical race, and postcolonial interventions. We will ground our analyses within particular literary, visual, and theoretical works, learning how to read cultural production as theory, rather than "applying" theory to selected texts.

The Bible created and divided the world. This course explores that deep history by examining how the Bible itself was shaped: when, how, and by whom it was written; how it recorded and reworked history; how it responded to and changed politics and culture; how it gave birth to the way we read everything today. No experience with literature or the Bible is necessary. Short exercises will show how to read translations closely, and how to work with the original Hebrew and Greek versions.

In conjunction with University College London, this course will examine texts about and set in London--novels, plays, poems, films, and essays--from the 19th century to the present, to address interrelated topics, including the roles of class, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and performance in the social dynamics and geography of London life. By attending to the texts in their historical contexts and in relation to one another, we will explore writing about London that is as varied as the city itself. In addition, students will develop junior papers or senior theses, working collectively on their writing and reporting on their research.

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 though proximity, trade and war. We explore this cross-lingual, transnational literary field through the poetry of diplomats, colonists, itinerant prophets and pharmacists, 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.

Exploiting the homonymic play between "red" and "read," this course considers the relations between political engagement and different forms of activist literacy. In what way are reading and writing a means of doing political work? Why is it that, in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser famously insists that "only since Marx have we had to begin to suspect what, in theory at least, reading and hence writing means"? Analyzing writings by, among others, Marx, Luxemburg, Benjamin, Du Bois, and Jameson, we will think of how sentences are inseparable from the possibility of mass formations, insurrectionary politics, and collective action.

Our aim is to examine how the "social" and the "economic" become intertwined. From Enlightenment narratives about the origins of civilization, whether philosophical, ethnographic, or fictional, by Swift, Rousseau, or Graffigny, we also consider history-writing by Voltaire and Gibbon. We read early economic and sociological thought by Malthus, Saint-Simon, Balzac, and Smith, and delve into the crystallization of broadly Marxist approaches to society and culture in Engels, Benjamin, and, of course, Marx. While the category of "literature" will be an important lens for our thinking, archival and historical approaches will also be stressed.

This course offers the opportunity for a close examination of certain French or francophone novels that are widely considered to be among the most important of the twentieth century, all from the post-WWII period and all to be read in conjunction with pertinent critical texts. It is neither an historical survey of the twentieth-century novel nor a systematic introduction to narratology nor an overview of contemporary critical perspectives. Instead, our ambition is to articulate and discuss literary and related issues that arise from the close reading of these novels and the inflection imparted to such issues by secondary texts.

No text in the German tradition has impacted World Literature as much as Goethe's Faust. The first half of this seminar will engage in a close reading of the play's first and second parts, exploring key themes that have shaped modern society: the quest for knowledge, erotic desire, the invention of paper money, the human destruction of the environment, and war. In the second half of the seminar, we will study landmark "adaptations" of the Faust story, including texts by Valéry, Pessoa, and Mann as well as films by Murnau and Szábó.

Reading and viewing of select Hindi/Urdu literary works and their cinematic adaptations, covering a wide-range of registers, genres and styles: drama, short story, novel (excerpts), as well as commercial and alternative cinema. Attention will be given to historical and social context, as well as different styles and trends. Stories and films will address issues of discrimination, inequity, and reform, representations of gender, social and cultural norms and conventions, stereotypes, taboos, and transgressions. In-depth classroom discussion in Hindi/Urdu of all materials.

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. The course aims to allow students to explore the unique aspects of East Asian civilizations and the connections between them through an interactive web-based platform, in which assignments are integrated with the texts and media on the website. No prior knowledge of East Asia or experience working with digital media is required.

'Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani's 11th century Arabic work of literary theory, Asrar al-balagha (The Secrets of Eloquence), is arguably one of the most sophisticated treatises on poetics in the world. His aesthetic theory of simile and metaphor, which he develops over the course of his almost 400-page work, resonates with several modern conceptions of the poetic and with Aristotelian poetics. Students will be able to read the entire work for the first time in English as translated by Prof. Harb. We will discuss questions of translation, terminology, and the applicability of Jurjani's poetics cross-culturally. Course is in English.

An examination of Nietzsche's central views, including the role of tragedy, the place of science, the eternal recurrence, the will to power, and the primacy of the individual. We will also examine Nietzsche's ambiguous attitude toward philosophy and his influence on literature and criticism.

Why do we like some works of art more than others? Can an evil artwork be beautiful? How do aesthetic and interpretive norms vary across mediums? The aim of this course is to introduce students to philosophical issues about the nature of art objects and their interpretation, with a special focus on film and literature. On-going topics of discussion will include the relationship between moral and aesthetic evaluation, the interpretive significance of medium, and the nature of fictional representation. Assignments will include watching films, which will be central subjects of class conversation.

In 1919, at the age of twenty, Vladimir Nabokov fled "the bloated octopus of state" of his native Russia and embarked on a dazzling bilingual literary career in emigration. This course focuses on Nabokov's masterly writing, which reflects a modernist preoccupation with narrative, temporality, and memory. The Russian and American novels are at the center of our attention, but readings include also a sampling of his shorter fiction, poetry, essays on literature, and the memoir Speak, Memory.

Bodies of evidence, bodies of knowledge, the body politic, bodies-inviolate to mutilated, saintly to criminal-are figured in Medieval and Early Modern literature and objects in ways that reveal not only cultural paradigms, myths, and obsessions, but also some widely divergent realities. Notions of the body and its cultural inscription involve the history of marginal social groups, the history of the senses, of sexuality and gender. The relations between bodily and cognitive systems will form the basis for our analyses and discussions of such texts and authors.

The course will explore the relationship between literature and politics since the 19th century, starting from the processes of independence led by intellectuals who based their ideas on the French illustration to the U.S. Constitution of 1776. Those ideas defined the new Latin American nations. However, dictatorships dominated above the laws. This contradiction gives oppression and misery a decisive weight in literary creation and the figure of the dictator emerges as the dominant character in the 20th century novels. The seminar will be taught by internationally acclaimed writer Sergio Ramírez, former vice president of Nicaragua.

Although in open societies we tend not to view the writing and reading of fiction as an activity potentially fraught with danger, other ages and places have. In fact, since the time of Plato, literature has often been considered to be one of the most potentially dangerous media of communication. At the same time, examples and parables have, over the centuries, offered models of behavior that are overtly instructive, projecting the values of the official culture in which they were produced. This course explores these key aspects of Premodern literature.

Theater relies on the physical and emotional vulnerability of live bodies to experience the pity and terror that plague, war, systemic injustice, and more ordinary forms of disease and death inflict. As we face the twin pandemics of our own time, what can "plague drama" (prompted by outbreaks of typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, AIDS, etc.) tell us about how writers use literal and metaphorical diseases to give shape to a given cultural moment? We'll look at a wide variety of mostly theatrical texts to explore how playwrights use the medium of the theater to literally embody and thus make visible physical, social, and metaphysical "dis-ease".

Some of the best movies ever made focus on the how and why of theatermaking. This course will focus on five classics of Global Cinema that deploy filmic means to explore how theaters around the world have wrestled with artistic, existential, moral, cultural, and professional issues equally central to any serious consideration of moviemaking. These films prompt questions about the nature of each medium, their interrelationship, and our apparent need for both. Along the way, they also offer compelling snapshots of theater and film history.

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.

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.