Comparative Literature
- ANT 326/COM 329/ECS 315/TRA 326: Language, Identity, PowerLanguage determines our expressive capacities, represents our identities, and connects us across various platforms and cultures. This course introduces classical and contemporary approaches to studying language, focusing on three main areas: 1) language as a system of rules (structure), 2) language as a symbolic mechanism through which individuals and groups mark their presence (identity) and 3) language as a tool of communication (sign). The course examines various ways through which language molds our individual selves in cultures from Africa to the Americas to Asia to Europe: from organizing dreams and desires to shaping autobiographies.
- CLA 203/COM 217/HLS 201/TRA 203: What is a Classic?"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.
- CLA 506/HLS 506/COM 502/GER 507: Greek Tragedy: Oedipus: Tragedy, Philosophy, PsychoanalysisClose reading of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and sections of Oedipus at Colonus in dialogue with the history of thought on Greek tragedy. Authors may include Aristotle, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Arendt, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Vernant, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari,Butler, Honig.
- CLA 532/CHV 532/COM 588: Translatio: Translating and Adapting Greek and Roman Classics in Theory and PracticeThis course analyzes translations of Greek and Latin texts through the lens of translation and adaptation studies. Starting with the theory and practice of translating ancient Greek authors in Rome, we proceed to consider modern translations and adaptations of ancient Greek and Roman texts and to theorize the activity of translation as a distinctive way of knowing and receiving literature. Individual seminars focus on the translation of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Catullus, Horace, and Ovid, as well as classical adaptation in contemporary works by Rita Dove, Anne Carson, Ocean Vuong, and Kae Tempest.
- COM 212/THR 212: Learning Shakespeare by DoingA course on works of dramatic literature whose comparative dimension is theatrical performance. We will consider four Shakespeare plays covering a range of theatrical genres; the emphasis will be on the ways in which Shakespearean meaning can be elucidated when the reader becomes a performer. Students will move from the reading/performing of individual speeches to the staging of scenes to the question of how an overall theatrical conception for a play might be a key to the fullest understanding of the text. Students will write papers about their readings and performances; grades will be based on both the writing and the performing.
- COM 300: Junior Seminar: Introduction to Comparative LiteratureThis course provides an introduction to some of the questions and methodologies central to the discipline of Comparative Literature, while also addressing practical questions related to the major (how to prepare a prospectus, ways to approach comparative projects, and so on). What, we will ask, are the stakes of comparison, what is literature, who makes and mediates it, how do we gain access to it? How do we approach texts that were originally written in languages other than the ones we speak? How do we go about a close reading of a text?
- COM 351/TRA 351: Great Books from Little LanguagesFor 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.
- COM 373/AAS 383/AMS 388: Cinema in Times of Pandemic: Research Film StudioThis course is dedicated to the study of critical film curation. The Pandemic disrupted traditional film production, distribution and canonization. Could this disruption be turned into a creative subversion of the strong industrial and commercial aspect of American filmmaking and the Jim Crow system of Hollywood? In cooperation with the Sundance and the Berlin Film Festivals, we will practice critical curation of films made by women and Afro-American directors and interview filmmakers, film festival directors and leaders of the film industry. Work-products of the class (interviews, reviews, synopses) can be published on our course website.
- COM 375/ENG 265: Writing the World: Nature, Science, and Literature in Early Modern EuropeThe idea that the poet "created a world" was a commonplace of Renaissance literary criticism. In this course we will be thinking about how poetry's worldmaking powers responded to changing ideas of what makes up the world - from revolutionary visions of the cosmos to new conceptions of the nature of matter and life - as well as to the new technologies which made these discoveries possible. How do the "creative" qualities of literature interact with an emerging scientific emphasis on facts and "things as they are"? We will consider these and similar questions in the different contexts of early modern Italy and England.
- COM 376/AAS 371/GSS 439/LAS 376: Crafting Freedom: Women and Liberation in the Americas (1960s to the present)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.
- COM 457/HUM 457/ENG 457: Ways of Knowing: Philosophy and LiteratureDo works of poetry and fiction produce their own distinctive forms of knowledge, or do they simply help preexisting philosophical concepts get absorbed more easily? This course explores the mutual implications of philosophy and literature for epistemology. We'll read lyrical poems, short stories and novels alongside philosophical accounts of language and mind, linking textual phenomena with features of cognition. Topics include conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality, argument vs. narrative, metaphor and image schema, knowledge by acquaintance vs. by description, defamiliarization and estrangement, logic vs. association, form and spontaneity.
- COM 500: Comparative Literature Graduate Pedagogy Seminar: Radical PedagogiesThe 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.
- COM 521: Introduction to Comparative LiteratureAn introduction to poetics, its history and some of its fundamental works and terms, from antiquity to the medieval, modern and contemporary periods. Our readings are drawn from philosophy and linguistics as well as literature. Subjects to be discussed include the senses of poiesis; performance; mimesis; the definition of verse; the poetics of prose; represented speech and thought; the concept of the vernacular; poetics and rhetoric; the grammar of poetry; poetry and the inhuman.
- COM 535/ENG 538/GER 535: Contemporary Critical Theories: Marx's Capital: Reading Volume 2Capital, 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 important works that sustain or develop its theses (inter alia: Marx's unpublished chapter on subsumption, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Aiwha Ong, Neferti Tadiar).
- COM 540/EAS 528: Ocean Media: Islanding, Space, ModernityThis seminar explores the oceanic imaginary of space and the spatial technologies of islanding in the modern world-including the emergence of mega-ports, artificial islands, and the creation of political and economic zones of exception and military bases, with an emphasis on East and Southeast Asia. Posing islanding in the verb form, the readings deconstruct "island" as a natural geographic setting and probe its role in mediating the relations between individual and totality, insularity and world, mainland and periphery, land and sea, etc. We explore different mediations of oceanic imaginary and work toward theories of resistance.
- COM 547/ENG 530: The Renaissance: The Early Modern 'I'Terms like "self" and "subjectivity" and the question of their historical or transhistorical meaning remain at the heart of literary study in the pre-modern period. With those issues in mind, this seminar focuses on the early modern first person, the "I." We begin with some classical and medieval precursors, and with critical and theoretical writing on our subject matter. Then we turn to the heart of the matter: Petrarch, Montaigne, Shakespeare, the first two being the great European masters of the first person, the last said to have buried the first person in the voices of his characters.
- COM 579/TRA 502: Translation and World LiteratureThis course probes the intersection of world literature and translation, in relation to conditions of multilingualism, processes of cultural transfer, 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 inaccessibility, locality, and specificity, and what role translation plays in these formations. Throughout, we consider the implications of these debates for our own work as scholars.
- CWR 205/COM 249/TRA 204: Creative Writing (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 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.
- CWR 305/COM 355/TRA 305: Advanced Creative Writing (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.
- EAS 236/COM 228: Chinese CinemasThis 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.
- EAS 344/COM 344: Postwar Japanese Narrative: Modern to PostmodernThis 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.
- EAS 372/COM 319: Strange Korean FamiliesUsing 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.
- ECS 381/COM 458: Incorrect Literature: Modernist Masterpieces and the Controversies They UnleashedWhy do we continue to read politically incorrect novels? This seminar will analyze a selection of controversial masterpieces of European modern fiction, from Spain to Austria, that were deemed offensive. Some of them touch on issues that are still important to us, like race and ethnicity, while others touched on issues such as religion and national identity that were sensitive at the time but are less so today. We will read excerpts from Plato to Marx on the function literature plays in society. Is literature inherently evil, as Bataille suggested?
- ENG 339/COM 342/GSS 438: Topics in 18th-Century Literature: Love Gone WrongShakespeare wrote, "the course of true love never did run smooth" and Freud wrote of the "vicissitudes" of the passions, yet most readers regard heterosexual love stories as transparent, intelligible, and above all inevitable. We will read classic 18th-century novels from England, France, and Germany that show roads to and through the love plot to be rocky and full of impasses and swerves, with no certain endpoint. Such "vicissitudes" mark the very form of the narratives we will encounter. Class will examine issues such as gender fluidity, cross-dressing, queerness, love-madness, violence, repression, and panic.
- ENG 390/COM 392/HUM 390: The Bible as LiteratureThis course will study what it means to read the Bible in a literary way: what literary devices does it contain, and how has it influenced the way we read literature today? What new patterns and meanings emerge? This course will examine the structures and modes of the Biblical books; the formation of the canon and the history of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books; questions of authorship; its literary genres; histories of exegesis, interpretation, and commentary; the redaction, division, and ordering of biblical texts; the cultural, political, and intellectual worlds within which these texts were written.
- ENG 523/COM 519: Renaissance Drama: Tragedy: Theory and Practice, 1500-1700In this course, we trace and analyze the ways in which tragic drama was theorized and written in the 16th and 17th centuries. Our focal points are i) the recovery of Artistotle's theory of tragedy and its integration with broader notions of the tragic; ii) the ways in which different tragic writers lent on, appropriated, ignored, and creatively subverted these theoretical developments. Other than reminding ourselves that the relationship between theory and practice is a two-way street, we think hard about the connections between tragic drama and questions of history, human agency, religion, modernity, and secularization.
- ENG 571/COM 574: Literary and Cultural Theory: Ecological Poetics of the 19th C. AmericasThis course explores how 19th century (mostly) American authors registered the transformation of natural history into the sciences of life, and how attentiveness to the ecological fashioned their ethics. Most of our authors adopted a vitalist and materialist understanding of life, which led them to understand the boundaries of individual phenomena as porous and environmental. Changing their understanding of what the natural is, they proposed a series of cosmological, poetic and ethical responses to the idea that life is common to all creatures and in fact to all phenomena, and that matter is inherently dynamic and vitalized.
- ENG 573/COM 580/AAS 573: Problems in Literary Study: Black ModernismsA foundational moment in the history of European modernism in the twentieth century was the discovery of the world of Black others and the use of Blackness as a mechanism for maintaining and sustaining a new style of art. At about the same time, Black writers and artists adopted modernism as the aesthetic that would represent Black subjectivity in a world defined by racial violence. This course has two aims: to explore how black writers and artists in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean responded to high modernism's exoticism and to explore how they adopted and transformed the aesthetic ideology of global modernism.
- ENV 380/ENG 480/COM 386: Cities, Sea Level Rise and the Environmental HumanitiesThis course explores how cities worldwide will be impacted by sea level rise. Students will consider solutions being put forward to address the impacts, such as managed retreat; hard engineering, such as building sea walls; or soft engineering, such as preserving and restoring natural buffers, be they coral or oyster reefs or mangrove forests. Through global texts engaging the issue of sea level rise, the course considers how ideas, meanings, norms and habituations differ from one location to another and how these differences manifest in and are informed by laws and social practices as well as arts and literature.
- FRE 350/COM 381/ECS 366/ART 399: France on Display: Shaping the Nation under the Third Republic, 1870-1940This course is a metaphorical visit to Third Republic France (1870-1940) in which we will examine images and public spaces as a language communicating republican ideology. We will investigate how the Republic molded the new citizen in schools and townhalls; served as gatekeeper of culture and advocate of progress in museums and world fairs; and influenced the marketplace. We will consider how writers, artists, architects, and filmmakers contributed to the representation of France and how they critiqued its displays. The seminar will draw parallels with the U.S. at moments of its history when shaping a common sense of nationhood was paramount.
- FRE 417/COM 455: Looking for the Beast: Animals as Spectacle in Literature, Film, and CultureThis course focuses on the ways literature, film, but also cultural events and spaces (circus, zoo, museum) present animals as objects of admiration and subjects of performance. We will consider the fascination that animals inspire in humans, which might lead to question the distinction between "us" and "them". What is at stake, what are the consequences, for us and for them, when animals are seen or shown as an elusive Other who still beckons a closer encounter? How do the poetic power of language, or the evocative nature of images, affect their agency and our empathy, and eventually our mutual relationship?
- FRE 530/COM 511/HUM 530: Essayism: Trajectory of a GenreThis course explores the thematically capacious genre of the essay, a compact prose form where science and poetry meet. Students learn the essay's history, explore various theories of the essay, and encounter prominent examples of essayistic writing from across the centuries. The essay, itself a hybrid form, seems always to reach beyond text toward other media: essay-film, photo-essay, desktop essay. The class invites students to analyze these new essayistic experiments and consider the implications the essay form might have for their own scholarly writing.
- FRE 560/PHI 504/COM 557: Medieval Speech ActsA seminar on medieval practices and theories of performative speech, from lies to oaths, promises, blessings, curses, deeds and sacraments. Readings are drawn from Old and Middle French poetry as well as earlier and later medieval grammar, logic and theology, where doctrines of "efficacious" signification and the force of words play major roles. To bring into focus the medieval treatments of speech acts, we also consider selected twentieth-century philosophical, linguistic and sociological accounts of performative speech (particularly by Austin, Benveniste and Goffman).
- FRE 583/COM 583: Seminar in Romance Linguistics and/or Literary Theory: LevinasThe seminar focuses on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas from its origins in Husserlian phenomenology and Heidggerian ontology to the major articulations of Levinasian ethnics. It examines encounters between Levinas and such thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, and considers the implications of Levinas's thought for aesthetics, gender, and politics.
- GER 520/COM 556: Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: From Minimalism to Maximalism: Scale in Literature, the Arts, & MediaWhat happens when the sizes and proportions of aesthetic artefacts are changed? Are such quantitative shifts merely superficial in character or do they cause substantial and qualitative alterations of the phenomena concerned. The seminar discusses concrete case studies drawn from a broad spectrum of disciplines in the humanities and provides an opportunity to examine how individual artifacts and their social circulation respond to scaling. Moreover, an attempt is made to compare process of scaling in the major arts and media and thus to establish scaling as a new perspective in the analysis of culture more generally.
- GER 521/COM 512: Topics in German Intellectual History: Hans Blumenberg and 20th Century ThoughtHans Blumenberg has long been recognized as a cultural theorist of major significance, and yet confusion still persists as to the developmental arc of his career and a number of its governing themes. Focusing on his literary theoretical texts, along with cultural and media theoretical as well as properly philosophical ones, this seminar explores Blumenberg's dialogue with, among others, Arendt, Cassirer, Goethe, Husserl, and Valéry. We will also discuss Blumenberg's reflections on such related issues as rhetoric, small forms, the novel, secularization, and modernity.
- HIN 303/URD 303/COM 395: Topics in Hindi/Urdu: Literature and the EnvironmentWe will explore representations of place and environment across a range of time periods, genres, and perspectives in Hindi and Urdu literature. Our sources will include short stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from novels, travelogues, and diaries. Questions and themes such as human-animal connections; urbanization, industrialization, and ecological degradation; and intersections of culture, timescale, affect and place, will be among some of the prevailing issues addressed. Students will engage in close critical reflection on issues and perspectives.
- HUM 233/EAS 233/COM 233: East Asian Humanities I: The Classical FoundationsAn introduction to the literature, art, religion and philosophy of China, Japan and Korea from antiquity to ca. 1400. 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.
- ITA 314/COM 387: Risorgimento, Opera, FilmThis 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.
- NES 569/COM 575: Classical Arabic PoetryIntroduces students to the major Arabic poets and poems from pre-Islamic times to the Mamluks. Goals: Increase the ease with which students read classical Arabic poetry, learn how to scan Arabic meters, and expand knowledge of styles, genres and development. Students prepare assigned poems and put together brief biographical sketch of poets.
- SLA 368/HUM 368/GHP 368/COM 388: Literature and MedicineThis course will examine themes that are paramount in our lives as individuals, communities, and societies' illness and healing, caregiving, epidemics, the distinction between normal and pathological. Our reflections on ethics will feature stories and storytelling as an entry point. Why do doctors and patients need stories? How does storytelling illuminate medicine as a system of representation? What rhetorical devices are embedded in the way we conceive of sickness, well-being, and the medical institutions? We will address these questions and will explore the overlaps between medicine and storytelling within texts from all over the world.
- SLA 411/RES 411/ENG 441/COM 456: Selected Topics in Russian Literature and Culture: Crosscultural Links between Russian and American Literature & CultureMajor American cultural figures have found inspiration in Russian literary masterpieces. The course explores connections between (1) three Russian writers - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, & Chekhov -. & (2) the multiplicity of ways in which twentieth and twenty-first-century Americans, in their own works, have incorporated, responded to, & reimagined these Russian creations. The main focus is on prose. Some attention to film and drama. We examine dimensions of the works which highlight ethical and societal dilemmas human beings face, the 'big questions' of life, and questions of what makes for a meaningful life.
- SLA 509/COM 505: Photographic Modernisms: Russia and the WestThis course traces the history of the photographic medium from the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839 to socially engaged documentary photography of the 1930s and beyond, questioning the notion of photography as a modernist artistic and documentary medium in Russia and the West. Central issues in the course are the role of authorship in photography and in the hybrid photo-textual spaces of print media, photography's politicization and instrumentation, and photography as a reflection of a shifting modernist vision.
- SLA 510/COM 507: History of Emotions: Russia and the WestDo feelings have history? How do they influence history? Do "natural" emotions exist? How do political regimes control the emotional sincerity of their subjects? What is the role of literature in cultivating certain emotional modes? How do people interpret and express their emotions in different periods? In this course, we apply these and similar questions to the emotional history of Russian culture considered within western contexts and theoretical frameworks offered by scholars of emotions. We also try to "resurrect" a number of emotions which played an important role in Russian cultural history.
- SPA 376/MED 376/COM 366: The 'Other' in CervantesWhen the name Miguel de Cervantes is mentioned, readers tend to think of the character Don Quijote-his idealism or madness. But beyond that, the book stages daring critiques of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, class, and human nature. Such Cervantine works as the 'Persiles' and the 'Novelas ejemplares', as well as his theater offer equally challenging responses to the hegemonic structures of the Spanish empire. By means of these texts and their historical and philosophical contexts, this course will examine Cervantes' questioning of many of the contested social and political structures in place during the turbulent times in which he lived.
- SPA 538/COM 546: Seminar in Golden-Age Literature: The Library, the Ruin and the Labyrinth in the Hispanic BaroqueThe aesthetic production of the Baroque period is frequently figured by the Library, the Ruin, and the Labyrinth-three architectural structures that collectively offer a negative progression from an image of an ordered, encyclopedic knowledge (the library), to a disordered, decayed structure that was formerly whole (the ruin), to the epistemological and existential quandry (the labyrinth). Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Baltazar Gracián offer abundant aesthetic representations of all three environments. They are paired with key theoretical concepts by Davidson, Deleuze, Buci-Glucksmann and Wigley.
- SPA 548/COM 548: Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: Psychoanalysis for Cultural CriticsSince the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, psychoanalytic theory has emerged as a key tool for analyzing culture. This seminar will examine how psychoanalysis has been a model for various forms of criticism - literary, artistic, architectural, filmic, sociological, anthropological - and how these tools have been applied to understand Latin American culture in the 20th century, with special emphasis on Mexico and Cuba. We will discuss how psychoanalytic theory has been used to read the work of architects (Luis Barragán), filmmakers (Luis Buñuel), artists (Remedios Varo), and writers (Octavio Paz).
- THR 308/AMS 307/COM 385/ENG 260: Metatheater, Then and NowIn 1963, Lionel Abel invented the term "metatheater" to discuss self-referential, anti-illusionist devices -- introduced, as he thought, by some Renaissance playwrights -- which had become ubiquitous in the theater of his day. "Very meta!" was soon used to describe almost every play ever written. But some plays are more "meta" than others and the methods and motives of their authors vary considerably. This seminar will spend six weeks focused on Greek, Renaissance, and Modern examples of the genre before turning to contemporary American playwrights who have found new and often jaw-dropping uses for metatheatrics.
- TRA 200/COM 209/HUM 209: Thinking Translation: Language Transfer and Cultural CommunicationTranslation 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.
- TRA 400/COM 409/HUM 400: Translation, Migration, CultureThis 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.