African literature and films have been a vital (but often unacknowledged) stream in and stimulant to the global traffic in invention. Nigerian literature is one of the great literatures of the twentieth century. Ethiopian literature is one of the oldest literatures in the world. Senegalese films include some of the finest films ever made. In this course, we will study the richness and diversity of foundational African texts (some in translation), while foregrounding questions of aesthetics, style, humor, epistemology.

"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.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Japanese films held the attention of large international audiences, seeming to parallel the emergence of Japan from the disasters of the Pacific War and its aftermath. Recognition in film competitions drove directors such as Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi to international stardom, and reflected back upon the domestic box office. This course will engage with several of these major films to learn how they interrogated the ethical and moral complexity of postwar Japan and its broader international significance. Comparisons with Hollywood, French and Italian films of the era.

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.

A seminar on magic speech, defined as performative language that does not so much describe reality as change it. Our subjects will range from spells and enchantments to blessings, curses, prayers and oaths. We will focus on medieval literature, philosophy, and theology; at the same time, we will discuss some contemporary perspectives on magic and speech acts in literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology. Attention will be paid to the Arabic, Scholastic, and vernacular traditions of medieval Europe.

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.

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 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 do non-binary pronouns make (some) people so angry? How do pronouns regulate our relation to the world, to one another, and to gender? This seminar investigates the history of theoretical reflection on and literary experimentation with pronouns. How does the constitution of the "I" grant access to the symbolic order? How does second-person address produce ethical relationality? How can the enunciation of the "we" avoid coercion and instead model flourishing, robustly multiplicitous community? Can the singular "they" circumvent the traps of gendered language? Readings in poetry, gender theory, linguistics, philosophy, political thought.

This seminar considers how the Enlightenment idea of "moral character," as something understood and engendered through reading, connects the emergence of both pornography and the novel as distinct categories of representation in Europe. We will explore the ongoing reverberations of those connections in terms of ethical questions and changing ideas of identity, gender difference, individualism, privacy, subjectivity and new media. Readings in recent criticism, history and theory of pornography and the novel accompany primary readings, which will be drawn mainly from the core of the tradition in French and English literatures.

In-depth discussion and analysis of conceptions of the sensory in writings by philosophers, poets, art critics and theorists, and artists, from the early modern to contemporary periods. We will investigate the ways in which the sensory is understood as the necessary basis for conceptual thinking of diverse kinds, including systematic and dialectical philosophy (Kant and Hegel), sign theory (Saussure), imaginative and figural writing, and theory and practice of the plastic arts (Rilke, Mallarmé, Adorno, Greenberg, Serra, Stella, Scully, Buchloh, Warhol, among others).

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 explores questions and practices of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to social justice, structural violence, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

A seminar on the concepts, principles and uncertainties informing the theory and practice of teaching. We read a series of attempts from diverse periods and cultures to define the conditions and limits of learning, even as we seek to measure their potential today. Questions to be discussed involve the relations between the acquisition and the remembering of knowledge, the place of the teacher in the classroom, schools and society, and the roles of memory and writing in the development and transmission of skill and knowledge.

Divination might be defined as the inference of sense from passing circumstance, be it the flight of birds or the movement of the planets, handwriting or coffee grounds. This seminar explores speech as the object of divination. We study ancient oracles and prophecies, medieval riddles, modern haunting phrases, and Freudian "slips." At the same time, we discuss the techniques of reading to which they have given rise in literature, religion, and psychoanalysis.

This seminar introduces students to fundamental works, terms, and concepts in poetics. Readings are drawn from literature, linguistics and philosophy from the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary periods. Subjects to be discussed include the senses of mimesis as imitation, representation and performance; the differences between verse and prose; theories of metaphor and poetic reasoning; diglossia and the vernacular; consciousness in modernist fiction; poetic form and formlessness; art and the inhuman.

In this class, students of literature, art, and music read deeply and broadly in peer-reviewed journals in their disciplines and fields as a way of learning current scholarly debates 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.

Capital, vol. 2--the least well-known volume of Marx's opus--may paradoxically now be the most pertinent in global contemporaneity. In terse and highly formalized terms, it theorizes the total subsumption of society under interlocking yet clashing circuits of capital. It also gives a powerful account of how the system reproduces itself in and through the negotiation of its inherent crises. We read vol. 2 intensively and supplement it with Marx's writing on subsumption and Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital.

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.

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 examines the comic book as an expressive medium in Japan. Reading a range of works, classic and contemporary, in a variety of genres, we consider: How has the particular history of Japan shaped cartooning as an art form there? What critical approaches can help us think productively about comics (and other popular culture)? How can we translate the effects of a visual medium into written scholarly language? What do changes in media technology, literacy, and distribution mean for comics today? Coursework will combine readings, written analysis, and technical exercises. All readings in English. No fine arts experience required.

This course examines postwar Japanese experience through major literary, cinematic, and intellectual achievements. The objective is first to analyze a multitude of struggles in the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, and then to inquire into the nature of post-industrial prosperity in capitalist consumerism and the emergence of postmodernism. The course will cover representative postwar figures such as, Oe Kenzaburo, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, as well as contemporary writers such as Murakami Haruki. Topics include the rise of democratic ideas, unsolved issues of war memories, and the tension between serious and "popular" fiction writing.

Using family as a lens and a theme that brings together an array of vastly different literary, filmic, and theoretical works, this class will examine key moments in the history of Korea from 2019 to old times. We will look into disenchanted families, violent families, cyborg families, mixed race families, immigrant families, South and North Korean families, royal families, and more. Maintaining the longue-duree historical perspective, we will ponder on the ethical and aesthetic premises of kinship and family as modes of configuring human reciprocity and ways to imagine and live life.

This course explores feminist pedagogies and praxis across East Asia, focusing on historical practices of political and social activism, collective action, community work, and healing, care and self-discovery. It investigates how these practices, whether explicitly framed as feminist and/or pedagogical, have constituted powerful forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power, particularly those of masculinity and hetero-patriarchy. By studying historical contingent and concretized forms of pedagogy, we aim to gain a greater understanding of feminist pedagogies as complex, embodied and social processes of knowledge-making.

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.

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 study 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 all areas of study at the university. No prior knowledge of these thinkers is required.

Frantz Fanon is among the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this course we will concentrate on two of Fanon's major books: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. We will read Fanon's contemporaries like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor as well as responses to Fanon by Jean-Paul Sartre, Hanna Arendt, Judith Butler, Sylvia Wynter, Ng'g wa Thiong'o, and others. Topics we will cover are decolonization, infrastructural critique, systemic racism, existentialist phenomenology, négritude, violence, dialectics, psychiatry (vs. psychoanalysis), national consciousness, revolution, poesis, praxis.

Though often considered elementary-associated with the instruction of children and beginning language learners-fables, tales, riddles, and aphorisms are among the most ancient, powerful, and haunting literary forms. These short forms seem transparent, yet the brevity that makes them seem simple challenges our wit, queries the morals they seem to announce, and stymies our distinctions between sense and nonsense, humans and animals, reason and absurdity. In addition to riddles, we will read fables from Aesop to Kafka, fairy tales from Perrault to Angela Carter, and aphorisms from Bacon to bathroom grafitti.

The New Eve is a distinctly modern creation, a radical and arresting re-imagining of her mythical original, the first woman venerated as the mother of humankind and blamed for its fallen humanity. We read the literary works of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers (e.g., Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Nella Larsen, James Joyce) and directors (e.g., Fritz Lang, Jane Campion) alongside psychoanalytic case studies and contemporary works of feminist, critical race, and trans theory to think anew Freud's notoriously unanswered question, what does a woman want. No prior knowledge of critical theory is required.

During the first half of this course we look closely at Baruch Spinoza's major works, the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, studying Spinoza's texts themselves and resituating them in conversation with contemporary interlocutors. During the second half of the course we trace the reception of Spinoza since the late 1960s, considering how and why various theorists have retrieved Spinoza/ism in an attempt to rethink power, labor, ideology, affect, and the body.

This course is an invitation to rethink established accounts of postcolonial literature outside national allegory, modern subjectivity, and the symbolic. Focusing on "non-places" and "minor" characters, the course seeks to understand the postcolonial imaginary beyond the utopia of community and the dystopia of postmodern angst and to explore selves and non-selves formed in deterritorialized zones, degraded ecologies, and spaces of exclusion. The course focuses on disposable subjects, bare life, and with experiences locked in a range of heterotopias--middle passages, islands, deserts, penal colonies, and spaces of death.

The City of Light beckons. Beyond the myth, however, this course proposes to look at the real sides and "lives" of Paris. Focusing on the modern and contemporary period, we will study Paris as an urban space, an object of representation, and part of French cultural identity. To do so, we will use an interdisciplinary approach, through literature, history, sociology, art history, architecture, etc. And to deepen our understanding, we will actually travel to Paris. During Fall Break (Oct. 11-19), students will not only (re)visit the city, but also meet guest speakers and conduct personal projects they will have designed in Princeton.

Filmmaking was always inspired by different kinds of texts (scripts, plays, novels, comics...) while raising crucial questions: Why retell a story that is already well-known? What makes a good adaptation? How faithful should it be? When does it become appropriation? Engaging comparatively with the texts and their cinematic transformations, we will examine the limits and possibilities of adaptation as an art through a wide range of genres and topics (social class, humor, love, homosexuality, intercultural relations, racism, colonialism, art...) and cultures from different countries (Canada, France, Japan, Morocco, Senegal).

Modern citizens' struggle for liberty produced a radical literary tool of defense: the novella. Part everyday life, part sudden event, these short forms gave advice to those fighting the Man: How can outcasts question authority? What is a feminist plot? Can resistance be a reader response? We will discuss and read how these stories organize, formulate, and intensify real-world arguments through fictional protagonists in examples from the Americas and Europe, esp. 19th-century Germany. Alongside key theories, we will assess how novellas clarified and complicated issues of civil liberties, politics, religion, racism, gender, law, and the media.

Walter Benjamin--a humanist, social-scientist, and media theorist in one--is among the most original thinkers of the 20th century. This seminar is a deep introduction to his work and its wide influence from the Frankfurt School to deconstruction and anthropocene thought. We study Benjamin's philosophies of language and of art; his theories of media experience, of urban and architectural space, and of childhood; his critiques of violence and of history; his studies of surrealism, Kafka, Brecht, and the baroque; as well as his style of writing, form of thought, and coining of concepts such as storyteller, dialectical image, and aura.

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.

This advanced undergraduate seminar explores themes of revolution, violence, and gender in modern Arabic literature and culture. Our focus will be on close readings and viewings of novels, poetry, and film. We will also read widely in the scholarly literature on modern Middle East and North African history; theories of revolution, violence, and gender and sexuality; and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. All readings are in English, though students who would like to work with materials in Arabic are encouraged to do so in consultation with the instructor.

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.

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.

What is the exact relationship between literature and history? What does it mean to read literature historically and history as a work of art? The course explores these and related questions through texts from antiquity to the present. We will explore the claim that literature is both more and less than "what really happened"; literary works as an escape from, but also remedy for, historical predicaments; modes of interpretation that allow one to read a single text simultaneously both as historical and fictional; and instances when literature followed historical events or, inversely, served as their blueprint.

The purpose of this course will be to explore the dynamics of spectacle and performance (artistic, political, sexual, anthropological) in representative plays by major Italian authors of the 20th century. A close analysis of works by the Futurists, Eleonora Duse, Pirandello, Fo, and Ovadia will enable us to address questions of a textual and critical nature related to contemporary social issues. Special attention will be given to the representation of individual and societal tensions, the imaging of the female voice, and the relations between the political and artistic imagination.

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.

This course considers the diverse, and at times contradictory, ways in which modernity has both shaped and been shaped by the reception of the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the books of Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and Job, the course explores how the Bible inspired an array of modern writers, philosophers, and political theorists, from Machiavelli to Shakespeare to Melville to Kierkegaard to Camus to Baldwin to Morrison, and beyond.

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 emphasizing 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.

The first part of the class deals with a general survey and description (physiology) of Russian realism as a cultural movement. In the second part, we focus on Russian Realists' ideological struggle against Romantic values and an unpredicted result of this struggle -- "spectralization" of social and political realities they claimed to mirror in their works and creation of the image of Russia as a house haunted by numerous apparitions: ghosts of the past and guests from the future, tormented women and suffering children, afflicted peasants and demonic nihilists, secret societies and religious sects.

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.

Translation is at the core of our encounters with East Asia. From translations of the literary classics to contemporary novels and poetry, from the formation of modern East Asian cultural discourses to national identities to East-West travels of works in theater and film, the seminar poses fundamental questions to our encounters with East Asian cultural artifacts, reflecting on the classical principles of translation and problematizing what the "translation" of "original works" even means anymore in our globalized world. Open to students with or without knowledge of an East Asian language.

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.