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 course explores the history of engagement by women writers and artists with the place, idea, and myths of Greece. We first read ancient female writers, preeminently Sappho, and examine the representation of women in ancient texts; we then trace the strategies through which "Greece" allows later women writers to assert their authority and authorship, question gender hierarchies and political/sociocultural paradigms, and lay a claim to the classical tradition. We consider how ancient writing affects contemporary understandings of identity and gender, and how modern works, from novels to plays to films, shape our view of the ancient world.

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.

The foreigner, the pervert, the outcast: the imaginary of literary decadence is fixated on figures at the margins of the social order, who are valorized and exalted. This course investigates the aesthetics of abjection in late 19th., early 20th c. (English, French, German) literary and visual culture as it develops in response to European empire. Core themes include: "late" or "decadent" antiquities; decadence and orientalism; Jewish decadence; and how these interact with the catalog of haunting female figures that populate these imaginaries. Class trips include visits to both the Neue Galerie in NYC and Firestone's Special Collections.

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.

Few concepts in the theory of art and literature have been as long-lived, as influential and yet as obscure as mimesis. In what sense does mimesis imply likeness, artifice, making or performance? To what degree is it a natural or human phenomenon? What, finally, is the role of the production and recognition of mimesis in understanding? We'll discuss some ancient, medieval, and modern approaches to these questions, studying works of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. The arts to be considered include poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance.

What happens when we mix Shakespeare with modern Spanish-language theater? This course places issues of migration and legacies of imperialism in conversation with Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations, appropriations, confrontations, and allusive riffs in the present day. By looking at both early modern and 21st-century texts that engage with patterns of mobility and migration from the U.S/Mexico borderlands to U.S. diasporas, as well as the many afterlives of Shakespeare in the present, we will explore the possibilities and risks of a bilingual activist literature of migration that draws from early modern dramatic precedent.

Designed for both undergraduates and graduate students, this course will focus on reading major "modern" poets and writings on poetics, in French, German, English and Spanish, with additional readings in theory of modernity, poetry, and the arts written by several of the poets we read. These include: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Garcia Lorca, Borges, Bishop and Ashbery. Secondary readings will include essays by major theorists and critics who consider the larger questions of representation, temporality, visuality, and language underlying poetic practice.

The age-old relationship between literature and war is fundamentally a problem of ethics. This course is centrally concerned with ethics and aesthetics: the ethics of war, the aesthetics of war literature and film, and the ethics of making art about war. It explores the triangulation of warfare, literature, and ethics in the 20th-21st centuries, approaching this relationship through multiple frames and genres (poetry, fiction, film, photography, and essays), with texts drawn from a diverse array of world cultures. Topics include total war, memory and trauma, translation, partition, war and comics, monsters, and virtual warfare.

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.

This course probes the intersection of world literature and translation in relation to conditions of multilingualism, circulation, and the consolidation/contestation of national literary traditions. In reading key texts from the debates around the concept and practice of world literature, we ask whether its universalizing drive can be reconciled with literary/scholarly investments in locality and specificity. How, moreover, do world literature and translation intersect with questions of empire, race, and non-national formations, especially diaspora? Throughout the semester, we consider the implications for our own work as scholars.

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 early modern Europe, mythology provided the stimulus for a host of performances in theaters, palaces, and different media involving song, stone, gardens, and even water. This course will consider the performance of mythology in early modern Europe. What are the gendered implications of the myths in which women turn into plants, trees, flowers, and animals, and how were they presented in media? How is the trope of the abandoned transformed into song and painting? We'll explore the interactions between artists, poets, and musicians and the ways in which opera - a brand new medium in the early 17th century -brought the ancient world to life.

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.

This course is on the structure and form of the modern manifesto, its role in the shaping of a poetics of decolonization and the making of postcolonial literature. Starting with Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848), the course focuses on the manifesto as a linguistic and performative genre connected to the experience of disenchantment. We closely read the manifestos of the early modern avantgardes (Futurism and Dadaism), explore the work of the genre in the poetics of the New Negro (Alain Locke), and end with its appropriation by anticolonial writers from the 1930s to the 1960s (Surrealism and the Black Arts Movement).

This course offers a rare chance to study great works of medieval German Romance together with early modern English epic-romance. The two traditions do connect, not only through European-wide romance narrative culture, but also through growing Anglo-German cultural interaction. We address three major, world-class narrative poems, and also extracts from others and many far shorter works (songs, lyric poems, mystical and aesthetic treatises) in the light of historical and theoretical discussion of sexual difference, dissidence, erotic knowledge, and their religious and political indices.

This course explores the basic ideas, works, and principles of Surrealism as it developed in France and around the world from the early 1920s into the present. A very wide array of material will cover diverse literary genres and media to show how the Surrealists wanted to revolutionize both art and life in its political and ethical dimensions, as well as the movement's ongoing impact. The course is highly interactive, built around two digital creative and critical projects, which will constitute the students' assignments throughout the semester.

A seminar on the nature, varieties and powers of signs as defined and evoked in the philosophy, theology, and poetry of the Middle Ages. Subjects to be discussed include typologies of natural and artificial signs, theories of imposition, analogy and equivocation, self-signification, and "efficacious" meaning. Case studies are furnished by the sacraments, romance obscenities and euphemisms, proper names, Tristan and Yseut's "potion," Lancelot's cart, and the dates of Villon's Testament.

This seminar explores recent debates about the ecological dimension of Marx's critique of political economy. At a time when global ecological disasters appear as the most glaring manifestation of capitalism's contradictions, new readings are challenging the cliché of Marx's myopic productivism and elaborating the environmental theory latent in his concept of human-nature metabolism. We focus on debates surrounding the concept of 'metabolic rift,' the connection between fossil fuel extraction and social control, and the convergence of these perspectives with ecofeminism, critiques of racial capitalism, and environmental aesthetics.

This course covers the three major historical moments of documentary work from its emergence in the interwar avant-gardes to its rediscovery in the 1960s and the contemporary documentary turn. With an eye toward the specific political conditions, technologies, and formal conventions that established the boundary between reality and representation at each of these three moments, this seminar considers: deskilling and the industrialization of writing; the contest between literature and technical media; the emergent properties of mass culture; changing conditions of authorship; documentation, the archive and forensic investigation.

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 in the seventeenth 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.

Artificial intelligence existed in fiction well before the first computer was built. In fact, storytelling and AI appear to be inseparable: apart from countless science-fiction works, stories ranging from mass unemployment to doomsday scenarios have become entangled with real-world AI and its development. This class studies some iconic representations of AI in the arts alongside non-fiction texts that shed some light on how AI works, its potentialities, limits, and biases. In so doing, we will make sense of the stories that we read about AI, and reflect on whether the former can teach us anything about the latter.

The poetries of Latin American nations and the United States, like the histories of the American hemisphere, are in many ways intertwined and wrapped up in the legacies and continuities of imperialism and displacement. This course offers an exploration of the ways in which Latin American and U.S. literatures intersect, especially at pivotal moments of hemispheric political history: (1) the "Good Neighbor" era, (2) inter-American Cold War, (3) US military invasions, (4) second-wave neoliberalism, (5) present day. We pay particular attention to Latin American and Latinx writers, cultivating a South-to-North comparative approach.

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.

The ways in which individuals and societies define space and place is very revealing. The investigation of space and place-how cultures turn material, racial, and/or metaphysical settings into human landscapes defining home, neighborhood, and nation-is a deeply important optic that dramatizes social, racial, political, and religious factors. At the same time, it can be used to track the changes of these realities over time. Because of its unique mix of Jews, Christians, and Moors, medieval Iberia offers near laboratory conditions for the study of space and place in their racial, ethnic, literary, religious, and political identities.

A hands-on approach to this interdisciplinary field. We will apply key readings in performance theory to space and time-based events, at sites ranging from theatre, experimental art, and film, to community celebrations, sport events, and restaurant dining. We will observe people's behavior in everyday life as performance and discuss the "self" through the performativity of one's gender, race, class, ability, and more. We will also practice ethnographic methods to collect stories to adapt for performance and address the role of the participant-observer, thinking about ethics and the social responsibilities of this work.

This course explores how the drama of ancient Athens is restaged and rewritten for today's audiences. Students will read plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes to confront the interpretative and performative challenges they offer on the page and on the stage - as well as the opportunities they provide contemporary playwrights to speak to the present moment. Our research will be enhanced by recorded productions preserved online, and if available, by live performances.

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.