COLT 0510A. Best-sellers.

Study of seven novels published within the last decade that have enjoyed broad success with reading publics in different places. What pleasures of thought and imagination do we derive from these books, and how can we express clearly our responses? What is the appeal of these best-sellers first to their home audience, then to readers in other social environments and cultures? How may we reshape our own horizons of thought in order to appreciate them? Students will be encouraged to develop their skills of literary analysis, interpretation, and critical discussion. Two lectures and one discussion section per week. Several short papers, quizzes, and a final exam.

COLT 0510B. Caribbean Re-writes.

Through close readings of canonical European texts and rewritings of them in the twentieth-century Caribbean, we explore the literary possibilities and political implications of writing the old in a new language. Readings include Columbus's diaries alongside Carpentier's The Harp and the Shadow (Cuba); Shakespeare's Tempest with that of Aimé Cesaire (Martinique); and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights alongside novels by Jean Rhys (Dominica) and Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe).

COLT 0510C. The World of Lyric Poetry.

Lyric poetry is the prime mode for conveying emotion in many cultures, from ancient times to the present day. This course will survey the variety of forms and themes from the earliest texts from Greece, Rome, China and Japan, then the glories of the Renaissance and the Tang Dynasty, then move to the challenges for lyric expression in the modern world. Enrollment limited to 19 first year studens.

COLT 0510D. Poetry and Music.

Explores the collaboration between poets and composers in the twentieth century. It will primarily focus on Modern Greek composers (Hadjidakis, Theodorakis, Lagios and others) and their collaboration with numerous poets (Garcia Lorca, Gatsos, Eluard, Elytis, Neruda, Ritsos and others). These works will also be examined in depth from a literary and theoretical perspective. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

COLT 0510F. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, The Men and the Myths.

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro are among the twentieth century’s most iconic figures, thanks to their roles in the Cuban Revolution and in anti-imperialist struggles across the globe. They are also among the most divisive, eliciting passionate disapproval among some and strong admiration among others. In this seminar, we will read Guevara and Castro’s speeches and writings alongside literary, visual and cinematic representations of them, paying particular attention to the ways in which their lives and deaths have generated distinct interpretations, in Cuba and beyond. Open only to first-year students.

COLT 0510G. "The Grand Tour; or a Room with a View": Italy in the Imagination of Others.

Italy has for many decades been the place to which people traveled in order to both encounter something quite alien to their own identities and yet a place where they were supposed to find themselves, indeed to construct their proper selves. This course introduces students to some of the most important texts that describe this "grand tour." We will read texts (both literary and travelogues by Goethe, De Stael, Henry James, Hawthorne, Freud, among others, as well as view films (such as "A Room With a View:) - all in order to determine the ways in which Italy "means" for the cultural imagination of Western civilization. For first year students only.

COLT 0510I. Virgil and Milton.

We will read the Aeneid and Paradise Lost with interpretive patience. The study of fate, character, and poetics will be wedded to investigations of beauty, wonder, and nationhood. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

COLT 0510K. The 1001 Nights.

Explores the origins, performance, reception, adaptation, and translation of the 1001 Nights, one of the most beloved and influential story collections in world literature. We will spend the semester in the company of genies, princes, liars, slaves, mass murderers, orientalists, and Walt Disney, and will consider the Nights in the context of its various literary, artistic, and cinematic afterlives.

COLT 0510L. What is Tragedy?.

Introduction to tragedy. Readings may include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hegel, Chekhov, Chan-wook Park, and Jia Zhangke. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

COLT 0510M. Early Modern Selves: From Soliloquy to Self-Portrait.

We will study the early modern self through its manifestation in the soliloquy (Shakespeare), philosophical treatise (Descartes), early modern poetry, and self-portraiture (Rembrandt). After examining Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech and other Shakespearean soliloquies as moments in which characters represent themselves in speech, we will turn to Descartes' view of man’s essence as his thinking nature. We will then read metaphysical poetry to understand the influence of religion on the early modern self. Readings include Hamlet, Richard II and III, Taming of the Shrew, Discourse on Method, Meditations, and poetry by John Donne.

COLT 0510N. Shakespeare (ENGL 0310A).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0310A.

COLT 0510O. Twentieth-Century Experiments.

In this course, we will read some of the most experimental and adventurous literature of the 20th century. Instead of understanding texts as mirrors of social reality, we will consider them as laboratories—spaces for testing out, working through, or mixing up new ideas, categories, and ways of seeing and feeling. We will pay special attention to 20th-century international avant-garde movements, including Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, and we will explore the relation of the literary avant-garde to the avant-garde in painting, cinema, and music.

COLT 0510P. Reading the Renaissance.

How do these works figure the renaissance as a cultural formation? Petrarch, Rime Sparse; Boccaccio, Decameron; Castiglione, Book of the Courtier; Erasmus, Praise of Folly; Thomas More, Utopia; Machiavelli, Prince, Mandragola; Wyatt and Ronsard (poems), Spenser, Faerie Queen and Shepheardes Calender, Cervantes, Don Quixote.

COLT 0510Q. How Poems See (ENGL 0100Q).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0100Q.

COLT 0510R. War and the Arts: Guantanamo, Twenty Years On.

In January 2002, the first captives in the so-called “War on Terror” were flown to the Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for indefinite periods of detention that for some lasted over twenty years. More than a century earlier, in 1901, the Platt Amendment was signed into U.S. law, enabling the lease “in perpetuity” that gives the U.S. military exclusive use of the forty-square mile naval station, despite the Cuban government’s objection. Participants in this seminar will assess the legal and political arguments that have structured “Guantánamo” as an exceptional space, of grave concern to human rights advocates and scholars. At the same time, however, and drawing on poetry, art and memoirs by detainees and military personnel at the base and by Cubans living near its border, we will consider an alternative Guantánamo of sympathies, solidarities and shared space.

COLT 0610A. The Far Side of the Old World: Perspectives on Chinese Culture.

A survey of traditional Chinese culture focusing on the major literary and artistic achievements of six major periods in Chinese history, including philosophical texts, poetry, various forms of the fine arts, and vernacular fiction and drama. A broad range of primary materials will give the student greater insight and appreciation of Chinese culture in general and also provide a foundation for further study of East Asia in other disciplines.

COLT 0610C. Banned Books.

An examination of literary censorship in which we read various texts forbidden for putatively violating social, religious, and political norms in particular historical and cultural contexts. We also analyze the secondary literature surrounding the banning of these ostensibly "dangerous" texts in order to theorize questions and assumptions about the power of art and the ironies generated by these debates.

COLT 0610D. Rites of Passage.

Examines a seemingly universal theme-coming of age-by focusing on texts from disparate periods and cultures. Proposes that notions of "growing up" are profoundly inflected by issues of class, gender and race, and that the literary representation of these matters changes drastically over time. Texts from the Middle Ages to the present; authors drawn from Chrétien de Troyes, Quevedo, Prévost, Balzac, Brontë, Twain, Faulkner, Vesaas, Rhys, Satrapi and Foer. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

COLT 0610E. Crisis and Identity in Mexico, 1519-1968.

Examines four moments of crisis/critical moments for the forging of Mexican identity: the “Conquest” as viewed from both sides; the hegemonic 17th century; the Mexican Revolution as represented by diverse stakeholders; the "Mex-hippies" of the 1960s. We especially explore how key literary, historical, and essayistic writings have dealt with Mexico's past and present, with trauma and transformation. Readings include works by Carlos Fuentes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and the indigenous Nican Mopohua on the Virgin of Guadalupe. All in English. No prerequisites.

COLT 0610G. Literature and the American Presidency.

We are accustomed to engaging the American presidency as a public office approached through the prism of government, political science, and the like. This course studies the presidency through a literary lens, focusing on four presidents and three literary genres: epistolography (J. Adams and Jefferson), biography (Washington) and literary analysis (Lincoln). We will also study on video the inaugurals and farewells of more recent presidents and, finally, examine non-traditional literary forms, such as pamphlets, songs, posters, broadsides, graphics, newspapers, magazines, and original documents from various presidential elections.

COLT 0610H. Renaissance Epic.

Explores Renaissance attempts to renew, parody, and question the classical epic tradition. The study of poetics, narrative, and imagination will be wedded to investigations of beauty, wonder, and nationhood. Authors will include Ariosto, Tasso, Ercilla, Spenser, Camões, du Bartas, and Milton.

COLT 0610I. Introduction to Cultural Studies.

We live in a cultural saturated with information. The messages we register, the meanings we deduce, and the knowledge upon which we ground our actions and choices require critical examination if we are to engage as thoughtful actors in our personal and civic lives. This class will encourage students to reflect on their initial impressions of and reactions to various media and will give them critical tools to examine how formal and thematic strategies work to shape and elicit our sympathies, our desires, our fears, and our beliefs. Focusing primarily on visual and written texts drawn from popular culture--video, print, film, and Web sources--students will practice their analytical skills by evaluating these texts in classroom discussions, several short writing assignments, and one longer essay. Reading the work of several cultural theorists, students will learn to analyze persuasive argumentation through an attention to rhetorical and framing devices and to recognize and decipher visual cues, enabling them to interpret texts and images and to produce coherent critical positions of their own. This class will prepare participants for college courses that require them to process knowledge and not simply acquire information.

COLT 0610L. Murder Ink: Narratives of Crime, Discovery, and Identity.

Examines the narrative of detection, beginning with the great dramatic whodunit (and mystery of identity) Oedipus Rex. Literary texts which follow a trail of knowledge, whether to establish a fact (who killed Laius?) or reveal an identity (who is Oedipus?) follow in Sophocles' footsteps. We read Sophocles' intellectual children. Readings include: Hamlet, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Woman in White, and other classic novels and plays. We also analyse seminal films of the genre, including Laura and Vertigo. Will include the twentieth-century detective story, with particular attention to women writers and the genre of the female private eye.

COLT 0610N. Being There: Bearing Witness in Modern Times (ENGL 0710F).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0710F.

COLT 0610O. The Death of the Subject in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature.

Examines the condition of the subject in Western novels and plays written after 1945. Traditional markers of identity in works of literature are being eroded by globalization, split families, the invasion of science in genetics, and increased mobility. Signs of this crisis include loss of agency and individuality, various pathologies including schizophrenia, and the replacement of humans with clones. We will investigate the intricacies of the derailment of the subject and how literary form is affected in novels by Beckett, Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq, Chuck Palahniuk, and in plays by Caryl Churchill.

COLT 0610P. Stories and Storytelling.

An introduction to stories, how they are constructed, and how they are told. We will explore the role of storytellers in the creation of a story, the idea of “plot,” the forms that stories take, and the category of fiction itself—in essence, how and why stories are made, and made up. Our discussion will range from topics such as fictional forms, the acts of reading and of telling, the role of memory, and the invention of self, to questions of time and duration. Texts examined will be drawn from a variety of genres, periods, and cultures.

COLT 0610Q. Before Wikipedia.

How did humans organize knowledge before Wikipedia? This course explores the fascinating history of encyclopedic texts, archives, and databases in various cultural contexts. We consider issues of book history, the classification of knowledge, and the obsession to collect, compile, and document everything knowable and unknowable in both real and fictional encyclopedias.

COLT 0610S. Literature and Knowledge.

What is knowledge? How do we know what we know? We will read literary texts concerned with these questions to consider how knowledge relates to power, and how deception, stupidity, and mystification force us to question what we know. Readings include Austen, Hawthorne, Melville, Flaubert, James, and Schnitzler.

COLT 0610T. Chinese Empire and Literature.

This course explores ancient and modern approaches to empire and imperialism, focusing on China from the Qin (221-206 BCE) establishment of unified empire through the Qing (1644-1911 CE) confrontation with the British and other European empires. Emphasis will be placed on the relation between imperial expansion and literary production, and the role of Chinese and non-Chinese literature in representing China’s multilingual and multiethnic past. Texts include China’s most famous work of historical literature, Sima Qian’s Shiji; poems, short stories, tomb sculptures, contemporary film; as well as critical essays on empire, colonization, and cross-cultural heritage.

COLT 0610U. Altered Cinema: The Cultural Politics of Film Revision (MCM 0901R).

Interested students must register for MCM 0901R.

COLT 0610V. Claims of Fiction (ENGL 0150X).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0150X.

COLT 0610W. Getting Emotional: Passionate Theories (ENGL 0500Q).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0500Q.

COLT 0610Y. Women’s Writing in the Arab World.

This course examines Arab women’s writing through the lenses of both Arabic and Western feminist theory and criticism. Beginning with a survey of pre-modern female literary personae in Arabic (the elegist, the mystic, the singing slave), we will then examine major figures in the early modern feminist movement, modernist poetry, autobiography, film, and the novel. No Arabic required; supplemental Arabic section may be offered at the discretion of the professor. Texts by Etel Adnan, Salwa Bakr, Hoda Barakat, Assia Djebar, Nazik al-Mala’ika, Alifa Rifaat, Hanan al-Shaykh, Miral al-Tahawy, Fadwa Tuqan, Adania Shibli. Films by Moufida Tlatli, Annemarie Jacir.

COLT 0610Z. Intersections of Race and Culture in the West.

This course will introduce students to ways in which knowledge, power and race have been interrelated in understandings of culture and in the writing and reception of literature. Beginning in antiquity, we will trace a history of political, ethnic, and social groups’ perceptions and categorizations of each other and of shifts in the definitions of “race” and “culture” as concepts. We will then consider changing ideas of alliance, belonging and power, in the context of contemporary American and global politics. The course will draw from readings across various languages, and from the work and lectures of several guest speakers.

COLT 0611B. Global Detective Fiction.

Though often marginalized as unserious or lowly “genre fiction,” the detective plot has interested and influenced literary figures ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon to Tzvetan Todorov and Frederic Jameson. In this course, we examine both the origins and the afterlives of the detective plot in fiction from around the world. We focus especially on the figure of the detective as reader and the commentaries detective fiction offers on reading itself. After beginning with “classics” by Poe, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Chandler, we move on to examine select novels and stories from Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa. At the end of the course, students will write a 10 to 15-page research paper on a topic of their choosing OR a detective story (or other creative project developed in consultation with the professor) of their own authorship.

COLT 0611C. Literature and Judgment.

Investigates the intersections between acts of literature and acts of judgment, between language and the law. How is literature to be judged, when is it "good" or "bad"? Does literature lie, and if so, does it matter? Does it hide a crime? And, in turn: does literature provide its own particular kind of judgment, one that may make evident the very fictional status of the law? Readings span from the Bible to contemporary post-colonial readings (Rousseau, Tolstoy, Zola, Freud, Kafka, Arendt, Benjamin, Henry James, Primo Levi, Coetzee, Sadegh Hedayat).

COLT 0611D. Third World Literature and Thought 1950-1970.

This course offers an introduction to Third-Worldist thought and literature, focusing on the shifting relationship between the Soviet Union, anticolonial nationalist movements, and leftist internationalist currents during the years 1955-1973. How did literature contribute to the formation of the Third-Worldist project, and how did the Third-Worldist project inform the writing of literature? We will approach these questions by examining the role of conferences, print periodicals, and supranational organizations like the Afro-Asian Writers Association in shaping new understandings of the politicized function of literature. At the same time, we will pay close attention to the aesthetic categories and literary forms that mediated a powerful sense of solidarity between far-flung revolutionary actors.

COLT 0611E. Banned Books.

When are reading and writing dangerous activities? Who gets to decide? And what are the consequences, for individuals and societies? In this seminar, we will explore works of fiction, poetry, autobiography and children’s literature that have been banned, redacted or put on trial in the modern period; and think critically about the ideas of decency, protection and security that underlie such censorship. As we consider the role book bans play in public life today, we will explore anti-censorship practices in the arts, journalism, law and grassroots advocacy.

COLT 0710A. Women's Words: Writing in Medieval Europe and Japan.

An introduction to women poets, dramatists, and prose writers from medieval court cultures, with an emphasis on what these authors show us about their educational, social, moral/spiritual environment and civilization. What did the pen or writing brush enable them to express and achieve? How were they able to negotiate the gaps between a male classical literary language and their own vernacular speech? Readings may include works by Christine de Pizan, Dhuoda, Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen, Hrotsvitha, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Marie de France, Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shonagon, and Trotula plus shorter texts written by both men and women. Instructor permission required.

COLT 0710B. Very Short Poetry: From Tanka to Twitter.

Though implicit and explicit claims have been made for the novel as a universal form, the novel does not match the very short poem in terms of ubiquity across history and cultures. Reading a set of very short poems each week, we will move across ages and continents, from Greek and Latin epigrams to the Japanese “haiku” and its precursors, from the early modern sonnet to experiments with poetic constraints in the computer age. Primary sources will be juxtaposed to touchstones of theory, neat ideas, and provocative essays. All readings available in translation as well as in the original.

COLT 0710C. Introduction to Scandinavian Literature.

An introduction to major works of Scandinavian writers, painters and filmmakers over the past 150 years. Figures include Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Strindberg, Munch, Hamsun, Josephson, Södergran, Lagerkvist, Vesaas, Cronqvist, Bergman, August and Vinterberg, as well as children's books by Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson.

COLT 0710D. Inventing the Renaissance.

The invention of the Renaissance as a cultural formation and as a part of the western cultural imaginary. We will consider the so-called "discovery of man," humanism and the recovery of the classical past, the production of scriptural identity or the "bibliographic ego," courtiership, the formation of the early modern state and the discovery of the "new world" through readings of major English and continental writers of the period.

COLT 0710E. Japanese Literature and Society: Historical Survey of Japanese Literature.

A reading of the major literary monuments, from early waka to Genji to the fiction of Ōe Kenzaburō. Surveys Japanese literary production from the 8th century to the present, examining the formation of literary genres, aesthetic values, and reading habits of successive eras in the context of political, social, and cultural development. No prerequisites.

COLT 0710F. Latin America: The French Connection.

Raises questions of intertexuality between French and Latin American literature, focusing on how each represents the other. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, questions aesthetic categories of the real, the surreal and the marvelous/magical real; and literary responses to World War II and the Dirty War, the 1968 student protests in Paris and Mexico City, feminist movements, and globalization.

COLT 0710H. Mexican lettres, 1519-1968.

The course approaches the history of ideas in Mexico by examining four critical moments/moments of crisis in the country's development. We focus on the issues and burdens of the past as conceptualized in historical, essayistic, and literary writings of the Conquest, the Baroque, the Mexican Revolution, and the iconoclastic 1960s. In English.

COLT 0710I. New Worlds: Reading Spaces and Places in Colonial Latin America.

An interdisciplinary journey-combining history, literature, art, film, architecture, cartography-through representations of the many worlds that comprised the colonial Hispanic New World. We traverse the paradisiacal Antilles, the U.S. Southwest, Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, Lima, Potosí. We read European, indigenous, and Creole writers, including: Columbus, Las Casas, Bernal Díaz, Aztec poets, Guaman Poma, Sor Juana. In English. Excellent preparation for study abroad in Latin America. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

COLT 0710L. Storytelling: Verbal Art as Performance.

This course offers a comparative selection of oral and written folktales from Arabic, Chinese, African, North American, and European traditions in translation in order to study the formation and reception of storytelling in different socio-cultural contexts (Western and non-Western, contemporary and traditional). We will consider storytelling and associated performance practice in the light of a variety of theoretical disciplines (e.g., rhetoric, folklore, sociolinguistics, performance studies, literary criticism, narratology). There will be lectures, presentations, and videorecordings.

COLT 0710N. A Comparative Introduction to the Literatures of the Americas.

Considers the common links between the diverse literatures of North and South America, approached in relation to one another rather than to Eurocentric paradigms. Focuses on the treatment of such topics as the representation of the past and the self, the role of memory and the imagination, the nature of literary language, and the questions of alienation, colonialism and post-colonialism, communication versus silence, and fiction versus history in the works of selected writers from North and Latin America, including García-Márquez, Faulkner, Cortázar, Allende, Lispector, Morrison, Doctorow, Rosa, and DeLillo. Enrollment limited to 15 first year students.

COLT 0710P. Women and Writing in Medieval France and Japan.

An introduction to women poets and prose writers from early court cultures, with emphasis on what these authors show us about their social environment and civilization. What did the pen or writing brush enable them to express and achive? How were they able to negotiate the gaps between a male classical literary language and their own vernacular speech? What kinds of literary approaches and conventions were perfected by them? How did they view their personal social status? What educational, moral, and spiritual concerns did they voice? Readings: works by Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shônagon, Heloise, Marie de France, Christin de Pizan, plus shorter texts written by both men and women between 700 and 1450 C.E.

COLT 0710Q. The Odyssey in Literature and Film.

Examines reincarnations of the Homeric figure of Odysseus in contemporary literatures and film as modernist figure, postcolonial subject, and existentialist hero. How is the Odysseus myth altered from culture to culture (Greece, Rome, Ireland, the Caribbean)? How is it re-visioned in different historical periods and from different perspectives (feminist, marxist, postcolonial) and genres (epic, poetry, the novel, film, drama)? Major authors include Homer, Virgil, Tennyson, Joyce, Kazantzakis, Cavafy, Seferis, Atwood, Walcott; criticism by Bakhtin, Edith Hall, Adorno, Derrida. Films include works by Angelopoulos, the Coen brothers; Singer’s Usual Suspects, Mendes’ James Bond offering Skyfall, and Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey.

COLT 0710S. Words and Images: A Survey of Japanese Literature.

This survey course on Japanese literature will introduce works ranging from the 7th century AD to the present. This course will provide a historical survey of classic and modern texts, while paying attention to the close relationship Japanese literature has had with visual culture from the calligraphic poems of the Heian period to the postwar influence of manga upon literature.

COLT 0710U. Leaves of Words: A Survey of Japanese Literature.

While Zen, sushi and animé have become commonplaces in contemporary American parlance, Japanese literature and culture remain static enigmas, conjuring up visions of stolid-faced samurai, cherry blossoms, and post-modern dystopias. In this survey of Japanese literary works from the 8th century to the present, we will examine the development of canons of literature, both poetry and prose, and aesthetics in specific social contexts in Japanese cultural history. Also, we will consider their re-evaluations in subsequent eras, raising questions about the stability and continuity of such traditions. In addition to readings, we will briefly look at film, manga and anime.

COLT 0710V. The Arab World Writes Itself: Contemporary Arabic Literature.

In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said paraphrases Marx, and suggests that Orientalist attitudes towards the Middle East have produced a discourse in which the East must always be spoken for, and not allowed to represent itself. Said's argument has become even more relevant in the past decade, given the growing interest in the Middle East as a region in the US, coupled with a dearth of spaces where voices from the region can offer their own narratives. Designed as an introductory course to contemporary Arabic Literature, this course includes a variety of readings in translation and films from across the Arab world; it foregoes an intense exploration of one national literature for a more varied survey of the textual output of several countries. We will attempt to situate each literature within its national context and within the larger pan-Arab, regional and international context while being sensitive to the political, geographical, and historical foces that have influenced these texts, including the rise of Arab nationalism and the independence struggles of the mid-twentieth century, and immigration. We will also examine--and hopefully question--some of the discursive themes and conceptual frames that have been traditionally used to think about contemporary Arabic literature. Enrollment limited to 20.

COLT 0710W. Cultures of Colonialism: Palestine/Israel.

Examines the history and literary production of the Israeli-Palestinian colonial encounter from 1948 to the present. Aims to delineate the deep links between domestic culture and colonialism in Israel-Palestine by raising questions about statehood, dispossession, and exclusion in the imaginaries of both peoples and by examining novels in relation to the ethical and political imperatives of settler-colonial dynamics. Authors include: David Grossman, Emile Habibi, Jabra I. Jabra, Sahar Khalifah, Kanafani, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua. Sophomore seminar. Enrollment limited to 20 sophomores.

COLT 0710X. Fan Fiction.

What is imitation (sincerest form of flattery) to literary canons? Vergil’s Aeneid appropriated Aeneas from the Iliad, Joyce’s Ulysses modernized the Odyssey. Admiration as a source of inspiration is a major force in the evolution of fiction. ”Fan Fiction” explores intriguing characters in greater detail and new contexts, allowing them new lives in contemporary imagination. This course presents pairs or sets of works that are explicitly linked by the intimate relation of imitation. Classic readings will be paired with their mostly contemporary updates, including Pride and Prejudice/Murder at Pemberley, Heart of Darkness/State of Wonder, and Monkey/Tripmaster Monkey.

COLT 0710Z. Comedy from Athens to Hollywood.

This course will look at ancient comedy from its birth in Athens and Rome through Renaissance incarnations to the 19th and 20th century, including novels and films as well as plays. We will survey the main topics of comedy, from Aristophanes' focus on the absurdities of daily and political life in Athens to the Roman codification of a genre of everyman in love and in trouble. We will also examine how later writers and filmmakers use both traditions to give comedy its subversive power of social commentary.

COLT 0711A. Epics of India (CLAS 0820).

Interested students must register for CLAS 0820.

COLT 0711B. Ishiguro, Amongst Others (ENGL 0710L).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0710L.

COLT 0711C. Postcolonial Tales of Transition (ENGL 0710E).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0710E.

COLT 0711D. Comparative Approaches to the Literatures of Brazil and the United States (POBS 0850).

Interested students must register for POBS 0850.

COLT 0711E. Reading and Writing African Gender.

In this course, we will examine ways that gender and literary genre figure in postcolonial African writing, and in its reception. We will closely read novels by four significant women authors: Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Zoe Wicomb (South Africa), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria). We will also read short, lesser-known texts, such as Richard Rive's “Riva” and Binyavanga Wainaina's “The Missing Chapter,” that question boundaries of gender, genre, and sexuality.

COLT 0711F. Arabic Literature: The Qur'an to Darwish.

The course offers an introduction to Arabic literature from ancient Arabian poetry to contemporary Palestinian novels. Topics include desert poetry, the Qur’an, medieval Muslim court literature, popular literature, Arabic literary theory, and the emergence of modern Western genres, with a focus on Palestinian literature as a test-case. We will engage first-hand with Imru’ al-Qays’ Qifa Nabki, al-Jahiz’s Books of Misers, Ibn Hazm’s theories about love, Mahmoud Darwish’s I Come from There, and Emile Habiby’s The Pessoptimist. All readings are in English.

COLT 0711G. The Realist Novel (Europe, America, Latin America).

How did the 19th-century novel shift from at times idealistic descriptions of domestic life to realist representations of individual, psychological, social, and political “reality”? In this course on the realist novel, we will address how literary realism attempted a description of the world “as it was”: what were the social and political questions the realist novel took up? How did it conceive gender and sexuality, and how did it account for issues of social inequality, colonialism, and other types of bourgeois ideology? What national projects did non-European novels engage in, particularly in Latin America and the United States?

COLT 0711H. The Arabic Novel.

This course offers students both a foundation in the “classics” of Arabic fiction and a foray into recent experimentations with form and langauge. We’ll spend the first half of the semester with Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, tracing his evolution from Victor Hugo-esque chronicler of life in Cairo to Faulknerian experimentalist. We’ll then examine the works of authors who deem themselves “post-Mahfouzian,” including Gamal al-Ghitani, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, and Hanan al-Shaykh. Students will emerge with a transnational, inclusive understanding of the Middle East glimpsed through the region's literature. No Arabic necessary; students with Arabic may read in the original.

COLT 0711J. The Art of Revolution in Latin America.

This course considers the role of the arts—visual, literature, music, film, and performance—in Latin American social movements. We will study the work of artists and activists in the Mexican Revolution, Cuban Revolution, Nicaraguan Revolution, South American dictatorship resistances, and contemporary social movements such as the Chilean student movement and narco-trafficking. We will trace the use of the arts in organizing, social critique, collective action, and propaganda, and how they have shaped ideology and culture in Latin America and beyond.

COLT 0711K. Arab Voices beyond the Middle East: Cultural Encounters in Europe and the Americas.

This course introduces students to literature by Arabs writing outside of their country of origin and in relation to a new cultural landscape, in the US, Britain, Canada, and Brazil. We will explore, through poems, short stories, novels, films, and music, the themes of exile, assimilation, gender, sexuality and war in transnational and transcultural contexts. Authors include: Rawi Haje, Etel Adnan, Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Sueif, and Saad Elkhadem.

COLT 0711L. The Quran and its Readers.

Like the Bible, the Quran has had a monumental impact upon world literature. Its narratives and imagery permeate the textual, visual, and auditory landscapes of many societies in the Islamic world and beyond. In this course, we approach the Quran through the works of some of its most interesting readers, including Jami, Dante, Rumi, Hafez, Goethe, and Rushdie. All readings are in English.

COLT 0711M. Off the Beaten Path: A Survey of Modern Japanese Literature (EAST 0800).

Interested students must register for EAST 0800.

COLT 0711O. Off the Beaten Path: The Diversity of Modern Japanese Literature.

An introduction to major and minor works of Japanese literature produced during the Japanese Empire and in post-WWII Japan. Canonical writers include Tanizaki Junichiro, Higuchi Ichiyo and Kawabata Yasunari, as well as contemporary novelists Ogawa Yoko, Murata Sayaka and others, including women, queers, revolutionaries and Japan-resident Koreans. Close reading skills will be emphasized, as well as an understanding of how literature has generated knowledge about race, ethnicity, gender, class and their intersections.

COLT 0711Q. Writing Love in Korean Literature.

This course looks at literature to explore how intimacy, passion and commitment have been socially sanctioned and redefined in Korea. From Yi Dynasty tales to modern-day webtoons, we will explore the roles different genres have played in the generation of forms of human affect that are themselves intimately tied to Korea's tumultuous history. What does it mean to love, and to write about love, under the conditions of Neo-Confucianism, empire, war, national division, authoritarianism, and the neoliberal marketplace? No prerequisites.

COLT 0711R. Writing and Resistance in Indigenous America (1500–1700).

Material extraction, forced religious conversion, and physical brutality were but a few of the oppressive acts imposed on the Indigenous populations of the Americas by Western colonialism. However, those under Iberian and British Rule—in Peru, Mexico and New England—found ways to resist and negotiate the terms of domination by adopting, and therefore adapting, European forms and norms. This class takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines historiography, literature, and art, to analyze the mechanisms of Indigenous resistance within the developing structures of colonialism: race, religion, geography, and gender. We will read a variety of texts that originate from Aztec, Inca, Algonquian, Spanish, Brazilian, and British contexts. All readings available in English, but students are welcome to read any in the original language.

COLT 0810A. Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Poetry.

Various responses to ancient Greek myths by poets in the Western tradition, especially modern Greek. Considers how poets since 1800 have approached, rewritten, or subverted the classical version of myths, such as those of Eurydice, Helen, Orpheus, Persephone, Penelope, and Ulysses. Emphasizes the challenges posed by the past, issues of cultural and political context, and questions of gender. Readings in English.

COLT 0810C. Arthurian Tales and Romances of the Middle Ages.

Why did stories of King Arthur, his knights, and their ladies fascinate writers and audiences throughout Europe? What can Arthurian quests, marvels, and love adventures tell us about successive pre-modern societies that shaped them? What are our responses to their cultural beliefs and forms of playful make-believe? Readings (in modern translation) of medieval Latin, French, English, Welsh, and German texts.

COLT 0810D. City (B)Lights.

Interdisciplinary explorations of the modern urban experience featuring social sciences, literature and film. Convergences and differences in the presentation of urban life in literature, film, the visual arts, urban planning, and social sciences, including sociology, political economy, urban ecology. City populations, bureaucracy, power groups, alienation, urban crowds, the city as site of the surreal, are central themes. Against the background of classic European urban images, American cities and literary works will be brought to the foreground.

COLT 0810E. Confession, Autobiography, Testimony.

Does writing a life give it coherence and veracity, or create a fiction? What is the relationship between first-person narrative and truth, and between authorship and authority? How does the form of a first-person text -- a religious confession, a personal journal, a political denunciation, a collective memoir -- affect the telling? Must the reader of such an account be "you" to the teller's "I", and how does the intimacy of this relationship shape the experience of reading? In this course, we test the limits of self-narration against ethical and physical limits, reading first-person narratives that purport to be non-fictional. We will read accounts of different experiences -- social and sexual transgression, suffering and perpetrating violence, slavery -- and explore both the possibilities and duplicities of writing as "I".

COLT 0810F. Desire and the Marketplace.

Studies love and desire as the interplay between men, women, and money in mercantilized societies, in seventeenth century Japan, eighteenth century England, nineteenth century France, and twentieth century Africa. Novels featuring female protagonists by Saikaku, Defoe, Flaubert, Emecheta and Bâ, readings in economic and feminist theory, and visual art--Japanese woodcuts, Hogarth, nineteenth century French painting, West African arts.

COLT 0810G. Equity Law Literature Philosophy.

Justice, rigorously applied, yields injustice. This paradox haunted Western aspirations toward legal and political justice from antiquity to the Renaissance. It necessitated the formulation of a complementary principle, equity, whose job it was to correct or supplement the law in cases where the strict application of it would lead to unfairness. In England, equity was enforced by a separate system of law, and it was a weighty, ambiguous term of great emotional force, with a particular appeal to Shakespeare. After its decline, Dickens and Kafka wrote two of the greatest literary works set in a world without equity.

COLT 0810H. How Not to Be a Hero.

One of Shakespeare’s greatest plays is about a character who was an irredeemable failure: Coriolanus. What can failure teach us? What kind of strength does a language of failure possess? We will read the ancient sources themselves (Livy, Lucian, Plutarch), and modern adaptations of these stories (Bertolt Brecht, T. S. Eliot, Günter Grass). We will also look at other “exemplary” failures who inspired Shakespeare and later literature, including Lucullus and Timon.

COLT 0810I. Tales and Talemakers of the Non-Western World.

Examines many forms of storytelling in Asia, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Arabian Nights Entertainments to works of history and fiction in China and Japan. The material is intended to follow the evolution of non-western narratives from mythological, historical and fictional sources in a variety of cultural contexts. Topics will include myth and ritual, the problem of epic, tales of love and the fantastic, etc.

COLT 0810J. The Colonial and Postcolonial Marvelous.

A celebration and critique of the marvelous in South American and related literatures (U.S., Caribbean). We follow the marvelous from European exoticizing of the New World during the colonial period to its postcolonial incarnations in 'magical realism' and beyond. We attend particularly to the politics and marketing of the marvelous, in writers including Borges, Chamoiseau, Columbus, García Márquez, Fuguet. Reading in English or Spanish.

COLT 0810L. The Pursuit of Happiness.

This course will study the emergence of the modern concept of happiness from the ancient ideal of the "good life" to the notion of "pursuit of happiness" as an "inalienable right." We will trace the development of this concept in the early modern period and read representations of the search for happiness in a variety of literary, philosophical, and political texts (including the American and the Haitian Declarations of Independence and the French Declaration of Rights). Readings will include oriental and fairly tales, novels, and essays (by Mme d'Aulnoy, Mme du Chatelet, Montesquieu, Johnson, Fielding, Voltaire, and Rousseau, among others). Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

COLT 0810M. Uncanny Tales: Narratives of Repetition and Interruption.

What makes stories creepy? Close readings of short narratives with special attention to how formal and thematic elements interact to produce the effects of uncertainty, anxiety and incoherence peculiar to "the uncanny." Topics include: the representation of the self in images of the arts; the representation of speech; instabilities of identity and spatial and temporal boundaries; doubles, monsters, automata and hybrids. Texts selected from: Walpole, Shelley, Hoffmann, Kleist, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Wilde, Cortazar, Kafka, Lovecraft.

COLT 0810O. Civilization and Its Discontents.

Investigates the age-old tension between order and chaos as a central dynamic in the making and interpretation of literature. Texts will be drawn from drama, fiction and poetry from Antiquity to the present. Authors include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Beckett, Prevost, Bronte, Faulkner, Morrison, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, and Rich.

COLT 0810P. Moderns and Primitives.

Modernism has been called a 'Renaissance of the Archaic'. We will read from the major works of Anglo-American modernism (Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Pound), focusing on their attitudes toward the primitive and the archaic. In addition, we will examine anthropological theories from the Victorian period to Durkheim, explore primitivism in modernist music and painting, and read about recent controversies surrounding modernism and primitivism.

COLT 0810U. Lovers, Slaves, Kings and Knaves: Major Plays in Western Literature.

This course will introduce students to representative tragedies and comedies, focusing in particular upon their development as literary genres; continuities and variations of character, plot, and theme; stage and performance conventions; and the classical tradition. Readings will include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Racine, Eilde, Ibsen, and Vogel.

COLT 0810X. European Renaissances.

Just what is the European renaissance and when and how did it happen and who decided? Let's look at the renaissances of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Giotto, of Erasmu, and Thomas More and Holbein, of Machiavelli and Castiglione and Raphael. Are these renaissances intellectual, aesthetic, visual, rhetorical? Did they happen in the fourteenth century, the fifteenth, the sixteenth? Or in the nineteenth when they were first clearly described?

COLT 0810Z. Myth and Literature.

Authors throughout the ages have been fascinated by ancient mythology and have incorporated elements of it into their texts, often modifying commenting on or even destroying the original myth in the process. This course will investigate the values, dangers and limitations of myth-making/using in literature. Primary texts will include major works by Milton, Goethe, Kleist, Racine and Kafka. Texts will be supplemented by secondary readings and multimedia elements. Students will learn to question and engage critically with the historical, cultural, literary and scientific frontiers that separate myth and reality. Assignments will include two short papers and a final paper.

COLT 0811A. Introduction to Modernism: Past, Future, Exile, Home (ENGL 0700F).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0700F.

COLT 0811C. Belonging and Displacement: Cross-Cultural Identities (POBS 0810).

Interested students must register for POBS 0810.

COLT 0811F. Writing War (ENGL 0100M).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0100M.

COLT 0811G. Literature, Trauma, and War (ENGL 0500L).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0500L.

COLT 0811H. Monuments and Monsters: Greek Literature and Archaeology.

Surveys Greek archaeology from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period, and reads Greek literature roughly contemporary with the archaeological period surveyed, with an emphasis on epic and drama. No previous knowledge or prerequisites needed.

COLT 0811I. Classical Mythology and the Western Tradition.

Reads classical texts that expound the fundamental mythological stories and elements of the Western tradition, then will read selected texts from the Renaissance through the twentieth century that utilize these myths. Ancient texts covered will include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Later texts will include Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, Milton's "Lycidas," and lyric poetry by Keats, Shelley, Browning, Swinburne, Rilke, Auden, and Yeats. This course is suitable for anyone wishing to understand the classical background to Western literature.

COLT 0811M. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Travel and Transport in Modern Literature and the Arts.

This course studies how new modes of transportation and the experiences they enabled stood as symbols of both the fears and joys of rapid modernization in 19th- and 20th-century literature, film, and visual art. How did the speeding locomotive, the plane's aerial view, and the personal freedom of the automobile transform the ways people traversed space, experienced time, traded, and came into contact with one another? In formal terms, how did these experiences inspire innovations in the media we examine by Whitman, Kipling, Baudelaire, Marinetti, Brecht, Woolf, Huxley, Stein, Ruttman, Wegman, Picabia, Duchamp and others? No prerequisites.

COLT 0811N. Poetics of Madness: Aspects of Literary Insanity.

This course surveys a wide range of literary texts with a view to tracing the long process of transition from pre-modern to modern conceptions of madness on the one hand, and to identifying the symbolic logic and discursive modalities that underlie its respective representations on the other. Spanning several centuries of artistic preoccupation with the alienated mind, these texts will serve as points of reference in a focused exploration of the relationship between insanity and literature, as it has been shaped by social dynamics, cultural norms, philosophical ideas, and medical theories. Authors include Euripides, Erasmus, Shelley, Dostoyevsky, Stevenson, and Woolf.

COLT 0811Q. Mediterranean Cities.

Athens, Istanbul, Alexandria: three iconic cities of the Levant that will serve as points of reference in a focused exploration of East Mediterranean history and culture. Reads and discusses a number of texts that span several decades and a wide range of styles and genres – from realism to postmodernism and from autobiography to thriller – but exhibit a common interest in the urban landscape and its relationship to basic aspects of human existence: identity and ideology, memory and desire, isolation and connection, hope and fear, life and death. Authors include Theotokas, Seferis, Taktsis, Durrell, Mahfouz, Kharrat, Tanpinar, Shafak, Altun.

COLT 0811T. Statelessness and Global Media: Citizens, Foreigners, Aliens (MCM 0901K).

Interested students must register for MCM 0901K.

COLT 0811W. The Myth of Venice in Literature: Memory, Desire and Death.

This course will explore the myth of Venice in literature: focusing on the topos of Venice in the genre of travel writing, we will study the theme of liberty and decadence associated with Venice’s theatrical and political culture. Readings will include Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, excerpts from De Brosses’s Travels through Italy, Goldoni’s Memoirs, Rousseau’s Confessions, and Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie. We will also study the influence of these accounts on the Romantic poets (Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Musset), and modernity (Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Donna Leone’s Death at the Fenice).

COLT 0811Y. Great Jewish Books (JUDS 0681).

Interested students must register for JUDS 0681.

COLT 0811Z. Islands in the Western Imaginary: Paradise, Periphery, Prison.

Paradise, periphery, or prison? The representation of the island has been described as imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. Examines the fascination with islands in the western cultural imaginary. Selective readings from literature, film and historical texts focus on ways in which island spaces have been represented in diverse social, national, imperial contexts as well as the effect of such projections on the native islanders, their visitors and often subjugators. Authors may include Homer, Plato, Marco Polo, Mandeville, Darwin, Defoe, Tournier, Kincaid, Kafka, Durrell, Seferis; theoretical works drawn from critical geography, postcolonialism, and the field of island studies.

COLT 0812A. Hamlet Post-Hamlet.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is perhaps the most widely read, performed, adapted, parodied and imitated literary text of the western tradition. In this seminar we will begin by reading/re-reading the play before turning to a number of appropriations of Shakespeare, both in the west and non-west, in order to address social and aesthetic issues including questions of meaning and interpretation, intertextuality and cultural translation. First Year Seminar. Enrollment limited to 19.

COLT 0812B. What is Colonialism? Archives, Texts and Images.

Through a close reading of a variety of texts and images from 16th-19th century we will study the transformation of lands and people into appropriable objects and the formation of political regimes in and through different colonial projects. We will follow the encoding of slavery in literary works, in the corpus of laws, in travelers’ visual renditions and in the bodies of people. We will use the archive as a source and a site for the production of knowledge. Students will create small textual and visual archives around different topics, and will use them in writing their final work.

COLT 0812D. Mythology of India (CLAS 0850).

Interested students must register for CLAS 0850.

COLT 0812E. God and Poetry (JUDS 0820).

Interested students must register for JUDS 0820.

COLT 0812G. The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in History, Literature, Film.

An examination of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the lens of cultural production. The course will explore the history of the conflict, from the 1947 partition of Palestine to the second Intifada in 2005, through major literary works and films juxtaposed with cultural and historical texts. We will discuss the way that literature and film provide us with humanistic and counterhegemonic narratives, interrogating issues such as nationalism, ethnicity, gender, colonialism, collective trauma and cultural resistance. Exploring the tension between historic and aesthetic production, we will look at how literary and cinematic works challenge, re-imagine and supplement political accounts of the conflict.

COLT 0812K. Film Classics: The Greeks on the Silver Screen (MGRK 0810).

Interested students must register for MGRK 0810.

COLT 0812M. Hamlet Post-Hamlet (ENGL 0150Z).

Interested students must register for ENGL 0150Z.

COLT 0812N. Film Classics: The Greeks on the Silver Screen (MGRK 0810).

Interested students must register for MGRK 0810.

COLT 0812O. Reading Art in Literature.

This course will explore the role of art objects in poetry and prose from East Asia and the west. How are objects represented in literature, and how does the language of art inform texts? Authors from antiquity to today have described works of art in their texts to reveal essential aspects of their cultures: heroic destiny, fatal struggles between life and art, and glimpses of the sublime. Readings include ekphrasis from antiquity, poetry from East Asia and the west, and fiction by Wilde, Balzac, Hawthorne, selections from The Tale of Genji and The Dream of the Red Chamber, and others.

COLT 0812P. Banned Books of Middle East.

From Danish cartoons and fatwas to student protests and the stabbing of a Nobel laureate, in this course we will study several literary scandals that have rocked the Middle East since the mid-twentieth century. Our focus will be not only on the content and form of the texts themselves, but also on the historical, political, social, and cultural circumstances in which literature comes to have meaning for particular social and religious communities. Texts by Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, Salman Rushdie, Ahmed Naji, Mohammed Choukri, Magdy al-Shafee, Susan Abulhawa.

COLT 0812Q. Film Classics: Greeks on the Silver Screen (MGRK 0810).

Interested students must register for MGRK 0810.

COLT 0812R. Reimagining the Americas: Latinx and Indigenous Stories of Migration.

This course explores migration stories that reimagine the territory known today as the Americas, Abya Yala, Turtle Island, and Ixachitlān. It brings together narrators who call into question the idea of the nation and the mechanism of borders. What role does language play in community building as Native peoples face diasporas and become transnational networks? How is mobility bringing forth new forms of storytelling? By engaging with poetry, essays, films and artwork from Indigenous and Latinx writers, class discussions will try to understand Abya Yala in its full complexity. We will pay particular attention to how our course materials depict the environment as they address questions of land ownership, settler colonialism and ties to homelands. Readings will be provided in English and include Leslie Marmon Silko, Yásnaya Aguilar Gil, Natalie Díaz and Yuri Herrera.

COLT 0812S. Non-human Rights and Wrongs.

“Even the creature has rights,” says Campion in HBO's Raised by Wolves. Our course will ask after the past, present and future of rights, including interpreting literature, television and film to imagine who (or what) might one day possess them. Only persons have rights, but the essence of personhood flickers and blurs like a phantom, somehow common to corporations, human beings, boats and cities, among other "things." Like ghost-hunting lawyers we'll trace the word "person" from the Ancient Greek theater mask (prosopon) through Christianity's thought of the Trinity (God as "one substance, three persons") up to contemporary legal cases regarding animal rights such as the 'monkey selfie' case. Key authors include: Kafka, Cixous, Plato, Shelley, Chevillard, Zizioulas. Media screened includes: Blade Runner 2049, Solaris, Caprica. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

COLT 0812T. Hideous Monsters of the Mind: Monster Literature, Monster Theory, and American Identities.

What do ancient beliefs about headless men and giants have in common with rap music and free love? Strangely enough, a single word has been used to refer to each: “monster.” In this course, we examine how monsters from European literary and intellectual traditions are translated into American culture. We begin with a survey of pre-modern traditions: the “Monstrous Races” described by Pliny the Elder, the prodigies of Aristotle and Cicero, and the biological/medical tradition that was extrapolated from a hybrid reading of Hippocrates and Macrobius. After following these traditions in Medieval and Early Modern writing, the bulk of the course reads from key moments in American history where resurrected monsters policed (and infiltrated) the boundaries of emerging American notions of identity and difference: from white supremacist pseudoscience to black abolitionism, and from “freak shows” to postmodern performance art.

COLT 0812U. Beyond Yellowness: Representations of Race and Ethnicity in East Asia.

What do race and ethnicity mean to regions outside Europe and North America? How did the perceptions of different physiological and cultural features define premodern and modern East Asia? Since when and for what reasons did some people, whom Marco Polo considered “white,” become racially Asian or yellow in literary and cinematic representations? This survey course will demystify East Asian homogeneity and discuss how various literary, cinematic, and critical works from antiquity up to the modern era present notions and issues related to race and ethnicity in the region now known as East Asia. The reading material will include excerpts from The Zuo Tradition, The Travels of Marco Polo, Bai Juyi, Min Jin Lee, Orientalism, and others. The course will be taught in English, and no prior knowledge of Asian cultures or languages is required.

COLT 0812W. The Epic Tradition: from Homer to Milton.

This course will engage with the epic tradition from its origins in the ancient eastern Mediterranean to the early modern period. Epic, as the earliest genre and example of ancient literature in the Western canon, is foundational to our ideas of literature and our myths of society, national identity, and aspirational achievement. In this course we will read Gilgamesh, the earliest Near Eastern epic, the Iliad, the Aeneid, and selections from the Odyssey, the epics that formed the cores of ancient Greek and Roman literature, as well as medieval and early modern epics (Inferno, Paradise Lost) that draw on these rich and influential traditions.

COLT 0812X. Culture, Climate, and the Anthropocene’s Others.

Using the theoretical framework of the Anthropocene, this course considers a wide array of aesthetic codes—from Ovidian elegy and Shakespearean tragicomedy to zombie narrative and postcolonial ghost stories—to investigate how distinct cultural forms contest, recast, and, at times, reinstate the (often-hierarchical) boundaries between human and nature, human and animal, and human and human. Through a sampling of poetry, narrative, and film, we will explore the uneven terrain of the Anthropocene, in which the feedback loops of race, class, gender, and other forms of social difference, along with geography itself, continue to separate humans, even as evidence mounts for the inseparability of humans from the rest of the planet, including its nonhuman inhabitants. Course materials will be provided in English and include works from Ishirō Honda, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Tommy Orange, J.M. Coetzee, and Bong Joon-Ho, among others.

COLT 0812Y. Love and Longing across the Indian Subcontinent.

The Indian subcontinent is home to several languages and contains one of the most strikingly diverse and vibrant bodies of literature spanning several centuries and a wide geographic landscape. The aim of this course is to introduce you to primary texts such as poems and narrative works in various languages (in translation) that provide a glimpse into the types of love—romantic, devotional, filial, platonic among others—and the theories and prescriptive texts that accompany them. From ancient sensual Sanskrit and Tamil Sangam love poems to multilingual Bhakti verses, Marathi abhangs and Kannada vacanas; from Urdu and Persian ghazals to Indian cinema, this course combines literary texts with visual materials and performance arts to acquaint you with the various moods and expressions of love in the subcontinent and demonstrate the symbiotic and inextricably intertwined relationship between various media in the region.

COLT 1001A. Troubled Origins: Accounting for Oneself (Nietzsche to Eribon).

What does it mean to account for one’s life by accounting for one’s origins? Nietzsche, for one, expressed the “uniqueness” of his existence “in the form of a riddle”: “As my father I have already died, as my mother I still live and grow old.” We will study literary and philosophical attempts at catching up with one’s troubled origins, including Nietzsche’s _Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is_ (self-interpretation); Freud’s “Selbstdarstellung” (self-portraiture); Kafka’s "Letter to Father" (paternal confessions); Derrida’s _Monolingualism of the Other_ (native languages and lost origins); Eribon’s _Returning to Reims_ (“class closet”). Undergraduates from diverse fields welcome.

COLT 1020. What Is Friendship?.

Friendship is one of the most significant yet highly vexing experiences of our human existence. What does it mean to have or to be a friend? How do friendship and romantic love relate? Why are writers as different as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Derrida so intensely drawn to the statement attributed to Aristotle: “Oh my friends, there are no friends”? Why does Heidegger’s notion of “Being-With” invoke an ear that listens for the voice of the friend? To what extent is intimate friendship always also an experience of anticipated mourning, in which a friend imagines himself crying over the death of another? Is an enemy a fallen friend? This course will trace key concepts of friendship through the Western tradition, spending quality time with a number of highly influential writers and thinkers, both ancient and modern. All students welcome.

COLT 1021. Literature and Photography: Writing and Thinking with Light.

"I didn't draw any people," Kafka once wrote, "I told a story. Those are pictures, only pictures...one takes photographs of things in order to forget them. My stories are a way of closing my eyes." Kafka's sentences invite us to reflect upon the relationship between literature, photography, and philosophical thought—from the first heliograph in 1826 and the inception of the daguerreotype in 1839 to the digital image of today. Taking as our point of departure the relation of literature and "light-writing," we will address selected issues in the historical and conceptual interaction among word, image, and critical thought. Our wager: texts and photographic images share a common relationship to time, desire, death, mourning, and politics. Writers may include Kafka, Proust, Benjamin, Kracauer, Barthes, Heidegger, and Derrida. Images by photographers including August Sander and Andrew Moore. Students from diverse fields welcome.

COLT 1210. Introduction to the Theory of Literature.

An historical introduction to problems of literary theory from the classical to the postmodern. Issues to be examined include mimesis, rhetoric, hermeneutics, history, psychoanalysis, formalisms and ideological criticism (questions of race, gender, sexuality, postcolonialism). Primarily for advanced undergraduates. Lectures, discussions; several short papers.

COLT 1310B. Classics of Indian Literature (CLAS 1160).

Interested students must register for CLAS 1160.

COLT 1310C. Twentieth-Century Western Theatre and Performance (TAPS 1250).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1250.

COLT 1310D. Between Gods and Beasts: The Renaissance Ovid (ENGL 1360S).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1360S.

COLT 1310E. A Classical Islamic Education: Readings in Arabic Literature.

This seminar introduces students to the essential texts of a classical education in the Arabic-Islamic world. What works of poetry, literary criticism, belletristic prose, biography, geography, history, and other disciplines were considered staples of a well-rounded education in medieval Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, or Fez? Emphasis will be placed on close and patient readings of primary sources. At least three years of Arabic required.

COLT 1310G. Silk Road Fictions.

The course introduces students to cross-cultural comparative work, and to critical issues in East-West studies in particular. We will base our conversations on a set of texts related to the interconnected histories and hybrid cultures of the ancient Afro-Eurasian Silk Roads. Readings will include ancient travel accounts (e.g., the Chinese novel Journey to the West, Marco Polo); modern fiction and film (e.g., Inoue Yasushi, Wole Soyinka); and modern critical approaches to the study of linguistic and literary-cultural contact (e.g., Lydia Liu, Emily Apter, Mikhail Bakhtin, Edward Said). Topics will include bilingual texts, loanwords, race and heritage, Orientalism. No prior knowledge of the topic is expected and all texts will be available in English.

COLT 1310H. Classics of Indian Literature (CLAS 1160).

Interested students must register for CLAS 1160.

COLT 1310I. Modern African Literature (ENGL1710J).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1710J.

COLT 1310J. The Arab Renaissance.

Explores the 19th-century Arabic cultural renaissance known as the Nahda. Topics include intellectual encounters between Europe and the Middle East, the birth of the Arabic novel, and the rise of Islamic modernism. We will read selections from the works of Shidyaq, Tahtawi, Zaydan, Shawqi, Bustani, and others, alongside historiographical and theoretical texts. At least three years of Arabic required.

COLT 1310K. History of the Romance Languages (FREN 1020B).

Interested students must register for FREN 1020B.

COLT 1310L. Political Commitment in Modern Arabic Literature.

This course will explore the history of and debates surrounding political consciousness and commitment in modern Arabic literature. We will trace the diverse literary strategies by which authors, living under difficult political circumstances, expressed their criticisms and envisioned social and political justice. Beginning in the mid-20th century and continuing to the present, we will read and discuss landmark works of Arabic fiction in translation, and the debates that surround them. Authors include: Etel Adnan, Sonallah Ibrahim, Sahar Khalifeh, Tayeb Salih, and Hasan Blasim.

COLT 1310N. Global Modernism and Crisis.

The early twentieth century was marked by a proliferation of crises in politics, the economy, language, indeed in the very fabric of society. This interdisciplinary course will insist on the global dimension of crisis, analyzing how modernist artists in the metropolis and the periphery represented this situation in different, yet overlapping ways. We will also examine how modernist works provide unique ways of thinking about what is lost in a moment of crisis and what potential may arise out of it. Authors will include: Eliot, Huidobro, Dos Passos, Woolf, Galvão, Arlt and Faulkner.

COLT 1310P. Silk Road Fictions (EAST 1310).

Interested students must register for EAST 1310.

COLT 1310R. From "Wild Beast" to "True Born Prince": Native Resistance in Native and Anglo-American Literature.

How does Wampanoag war leader, Metacom, go from “a Salvage and a wild Beast” in 1677 to a “true born prince” in 1814? Coaxing Anglo-America’s violent Native history into a positive national epic has made this collective amnesia an American commonplace. In this course, we first concentrate on contemporary accounts of three early conflicts between Native peoples and settlers: the second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622-’32), “King Philip’s War” (1675-’76), and Tecumseh’s War (1810-’13). The second half of the course will turn to the Removal Era, a high point in American literature’s obsession with the “fate” of indigenous peoples. This is also the time of James Fenimore Cooper’s and Washington Irving’s contributions to that narrative, both of whom we will read. Accompanying them, however, will be Native retellings of those same conflicts (e.g. William Apess, George Stiggins, E. Pauline Johnson, and others’).

COLT 1310S. The Jewelers of the Ummah: The Jewish Muslim World is Not History (HMAN 1975U).

Interested students must register for HMAN 1975U.

COLT 1310U. History of Romance Languages (FREN 1020B)..

Interested students must register for FREN 1020B.

COLT 1310V. Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World.

We will study the Jewish Muslim world and the role of different imperial and colonial technologies (e.g., granting and denying citizenship, art, the museum, the archive) which brought it to its end, thus normalizing the dissociation of Jews from Muslims. We will ask what remains when a world is being destroyed, what continues to be transmitted and what can still be reclaimed. Students will be invited to experiment with different modes of accounting for imperial destruction, countering the amnesia it produces, and reclaiming corporeal memory through objects and craft making. The Maghreb will be our point of departure, but students are invited to explore other imperial geographies in their presentations. The seminar draws on Azoulay’s new book The Jewelers of the Ummah and engages with texts by Franz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Sylvia Wynter etc.

COLT 1330M. Transatlantic Surrealisms (FREN 1330E).

Interested students must register for FREN 1330E.

COLT 1410A. All the World's a Stage: Seventeenth-Century Drama.

Readings of representative English and continental plays of the 17th century including Shakespeare, Jonson, Corneille, Molière, Tasso, Calderon, and others. How do dramatists represent and negotiate oppositions between art and nature, imagination and reason, myth and history, freedom and fate through dramatic form and metaphor? Why is the stage such a powerful metaphor for the world?

COLT 1410B. Chinese Opera: Aesthetics and Politics of the Performing Body.

Explores traditional Chinese drama, which has always been a music theater, from the perspective of contemporary cultural theory, and in a comparative and interdisciplinary context. Analyzing classical plays in relation to their staging in today's regional operas, this course will first examine the dialectics of "prettiness and artistry" in traditional Chinese theater aesthetics and its implications in gender politics. It will then move on to investigate issues of cross-dressing and erotic desire in Chinese drama of the late imperial period in comparison with that of early modern England. Lastly, the ramifications of Chinese opera as a national imagination in modern cultural politics, as embodied in the playM. Butterfly,the film Farewell My Concubine,and the Beijing opera version ofTurandot, will be addressed.

COLT 1410C. Chinese Theatre in the Mao Years.

This course focuses on two major issues: policing traditional theater and "model revolutionary drama" as "a new proletarian culture." The course will begin with a study of Mao Zedong's ideas on literature and art in the light of contemporary cultural theory. It will then look at examples of the "new opera" and "new history play," examining them in relation to a complex of censorship issues concerning the exercise of political power in administering human life and the body, literature and drama as political representation, and the hermeneutics of censorship.

COLT 1410D. Dramatic Literature and Theoretical Practice in Eighteenth-Century England.

An introduction to the dramatic literature of 18th-century England in the context of contemporary theatrical conventions and innovations. Plays read alongside treatises on acting techniques, stage design, and contemporary theatrical pamphlet-debates. The sociopolitical contexts of the London patent theaters and the coexistent "illegitimate" entertainments are explored, as well as the influential effects of Continental theatrical theory and innovation.

COLT 1410E. Japanese Theatre: from Dengaku to De Sade.

Surveys traditional Japanese theatre from the lofty medieval Nō drama to the more popular genres of Jōruri (puppet theatre) and Kabuki in the Edo period (1600-1868). Through playscripts, related secondary criticism, videotapes, and films, we will examine the function of spectacle and theatre, the problem of representation or mimesis, the notion of audience, and the relation of text to performance. Concludes with more recent examples of Japanese drama and performance.

COLT 1410F. Medieval Drama.

How drama developed in northwestern Europe between the tenth and early sixteenth century-from liturgical tropes and miracle plays to mystery cycles and morality plays, from popular feasts and minstrel performances to fool's plays, farces, and other secular comedies. Emphasis on the cultural context and social functions of dramatic games and performances in premodern Europe.

COLT 1410K. European Early Modern Drama.

An introduction to early modern drama in the French, Italian, Spanish, and English traditions. The goal is to explore a wide range of imaginative impulses in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Readings will include plays by Corneille, Racine, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Molière.

COLT 1410L. Philosophy and Tragedy.

Explores the intersection of philosophy and tragedy in western literature. Readings may include Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

COLT 1410M. Shakespeare and Philosophy.

Explores the relationship between Shakespeare and philosophy. Readings include philosophers who have written about Shakespeare (Hegel, Nietzsche, Cavell, and others), as well as philosophers who may illuminate interpretive problems in Shakespeare (Plato, Seneca, Spinoza, and others).

COLT 1410N. Found in Translation: The Adaptation of Literature to Film in Japan.

Contrasting the demands of the text versus the screen, we will read eight to ten works of modern Japanese literature and view the film versions of each in order to discuss the problem of translation from one medium to another. Possible works for inclusion are Rashomon, Harp of Burma, Woman in the Dunes, and The Makioka Sisters. Finally, we will consider manga (the graphic novel) and its adaptation into anime.

COLT 1410O. Shakespeare and.

Canon formation and disciplinary divisions have deformed the way in which we read Shakespeare. Frequently presented as a post-romantic singular "author," cut off from the sources, texts and genres on which he drew and the collaborators with whom he worked, Shakespeare looks, reads and performs differently in relation to the rich contexts in which the plays were produced and through which they are produced today. We will read plays and other materials with attention to formal and historical questions including genre, the Shakespearean text, gender, sexuality, status, degree, and nation.

COLT 1410P. Shakespeare.

We will read a number of Shakespeare's plays from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter's Tale in relation to the sources, analogues, and genres (classical, continental and English) on which he drew. We will consider both formal and historical questions. Issues to be addressed include genre, the Shakespearean text, gender, sexuality, status, degree, and nation. Some attention to what has come to be called "global" Shakespeare. Written work to include a mid-term and two papers.

COLT 1410S. Classical Tragedy.

This course will read the great Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and some Senecan tragedy. We will then read Renaissance and later tragedies that use the classical world as a setting, such as Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and tragedies that rewrite classical themes, including O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra.

COLT 1410T. Tragedy from Sophocles to The Wire.

Explores tragedy from Athens to Baltimore. Readings will include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hegel, Chekhov, Jia Zhangke, Chan-Wook Park, Marx, Trotsky, and the deindustrialized American city. Open to juniors and seniors. Instructor permission required.

COLT 1410U. Shakespeare in Perspective.

We study Shakespeare together with selections from other writers or thinkers, including those who have written about Shakespeare (e.g. Nietzsche, Emerson, Coleridge), and those who can illuminate interpretive problems in Shakespeare (e.g. Plato, Melville).

COLT 1410V. Russian Theatre and Drama (TAPS 1430).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1430.

COLT 1410Y. Shakespeare and Embodiment (ENGL 1360Z).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1360Z.

COLT 1411B. Theater and Revolution.

This class explores how theater and dramatic literature question and shape our understanding of “revolution” as a radical turn, incisive rupture, and profound shift in the way we perceive and organize our social and cultural life. How does drama accompany revolutionary movements, and how do revolutions compel political theater to transform itself? Readings include Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Büchner’s Danton’s Death, Brecht’s Life of Galileo, and Parks’s The America Play. We will analyze plays and performances, write our own dramatic scenes, and discuss key concepts of theater theory and practice.

COLT 1411D. Antigones.

As one of the most revised and interpreted works around the globe, Sophocles’ Antigone invites a comparison of adaptations across cultural contexts. This course examines how the play’s exploration of citizenship, law, gender, family, and resistance to authority has shaped philosophical conceptions of tragedy and speaks to contemporary political issues. We will consider reimaginings of Antigone under apartheid laws in South Africa, the Mexican drug war, and in the age of ISIS. The class is designed as a workshop where students will study versions of Antigone (theoretical texts, dramatic literature, poetry, visual art) and engage in adaptation, translation, and performance.

COLT 1411E. Race and Gender in Early Modern Theater.

In this course, we will cover a selection of Early Modern tragedies from various literary traditions (English, French, Italian, Spanish), to critically discuss and analyze dramatic representations of gender and race as portrayed on the Early Modern stage. Considering moments of renegotiation, critique, and resistance towards dominant hierarchies, we will give especial attention to marginalized characters, and/or to characters who are explicitly gendered or racialized in the plays in which they appear. We will accompany our reading of primary-source texts with selections from contemporary critical theory on gender and race, which will provide an important springboard for intersectional analysis.

COLT 1420A. The Tale of Genji and its Legacy.

The Tale of Genji (circa 1000 CE), authored by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman of the Heian court, has been canonized over the centuries as the greatest work of Japanese literature. No work in the Japanese tradition has exerted as much literary influence as this mammoth work of prose fiction detailing the private lives of Genji, the brilliant son of the emperor, those with whom he consorts, and his descendents. We will read Genji in its entirety, along with antecedent works, other texts of the period, works influenced by Murasaki's opus, other historical materials, and secondary commentary. There are no prerequisites for this course and it is open to all undergraduates.

COLT 1420B. A Mirror for the Romantic: The Tale of Genji and The Story of the Stone.

In East Asian Buddhist culture, the mirror is a symbol of the mind in both its intellectual and emotional aspects. These masterworks detail the lives and loves of Prince Genji, cynosure of the medieval Japanese court, and Jia Baoyu, the last hope of an influential Chinese clan during the reign of Manchus. We examine both works as well as the sources of Genji and literary aesthetics of the Tang dynasty.

COLT 1420E. The Nineteenth-Century Novel (ENGL 1561I).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1561I.

COLT 1420F. Fantastic and Existentialist Literatures of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Jorge Luis Borges proclaimed that South American writers can "wield all themes" without superstition, with irreverence. This course examines the ways in which 20th century writers from Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil appropriated European fantastic and existentialist fictions, taking them in new directions. Readings, in English or original languages, include Borges, Cortázar, Onetti, Lispector. Prerequisite: previous college literature course(s).

COLT 1420G. Fictions of the Caribbean.

The Caribbean has inspired conflicting cultural and political claims, and a wealth of visual images. We will rethink the formation, representation and self-presentation of the Caribbean countries, steering our explorations through postcolonial and postmodern theory to questions of appropriation, language and identity. Readings from Columbus and Shakespeare to Danticat, Santos Febres and Kincaid; essays by Glissant, James Benítez Rojo and others.

COLT 1420K. Masterworks of Chinese Fiction.

Focuses on three acknowledged classics of Chinese fiction-Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and The Dream of the Red Chamber-works which demonstrate the range of the genre as they represent historical, fantastical, and sociopsychological subjects. Topics include the role of fiction in Chinese society, the masterworks as mirrors of Chinese culture from the 14th through 18th centuries, and the comparative theory of the novel.

COLT 1420L. Modern Japanese Fiction.

Narrative fiction from the Meiji Period (1868-1912) to the present in the context of modern Japanese cultural and intellectual history. In addition to more canonical writers such as Natsume Sōseki and Mori ōgai, examines the legacy of women writers such as Higuchi Ichiyō and Enchi Fumiko; proletariat writers such as Hayama Yoshiki, Kobayashi Takiji, and Hayashi Fumiko; and more contemporary mass-audience writers such as Yoshimoto Banana and Yamada Eimi.

COLT 1420N. Postcolonial Faulkner.

How is it that Faulkner became one of the most influential North American authors in the Third World? To answer this, we read Faulkner's "The Bear" against two of his citational novels, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. We then turn toward a number of Faulknerian novels from the Arab world and Latin America. We discuss theoretical texts that describe the legacies of various colonialisms.

COLT 1420O. Proust, Joyce and Faulkner.

A reading of three major Modernist authors, with a focus on the following issues: role of the artist, representation of consciousness, weight of the past. Texts include substantial portions of Proust's Recherche, Joyce's Portrait and Ulysses, Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! Prior background in these authors desirable, especially Ulysses.

COLT 1420Q. The Bildungsroman.

Readings of novels in the Bildungsroman tradition and the theoretical questions of the genre: the historicity and constitution of the self; problems of the representation of a life; the category of the unity of a life as a factor of identity; notions of progress, development and completion. Considerations of the successes and failures of this model. Readings to be selected from Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Sterne, Goethe, Novalis, Flaubert, Musil, Kerouac.

COLT 1420S. The Captivity Narrative.

Because the captivity narrative implies both a feminized subject and a writing subject, it provides a link among political, social, and literary phenomena common to all modern Western cultures. Examines various novels consumed by members of such cultures (including gothic romances, Bildungs romanen, boys books, girls books, ethnographic journeys, and prison diaries) as versions of the captivity narrative.

COLT 1420T. The Fiction of Relationship.

Explores the manifold ways in which narrative literature sheds light on the relationships that we have in life, both knowingly and unknowingly. The novel form, with its possibilities of multiple voices and perspectives, captures the interplay between self and other that marks all lives. Authors include Laclos, Melville, Brontë, Kafka, Woolf, Faulkner, Borges, Burroughs, Vesaas, Morrison, and Coetzee.

COLT 1420U. The South: Literatures of the U.S. South and South America.

For Jorge Luis Borges, in his story of the same title, the South is a spectral region, hovering between imagination and reality. The literatures of the U.S. South and South America enact his notion of the South. We examine the remarkable similarities between the two literatures-similarities that result from literary influence and from social, cultural, and historical circumstances. Prerequisites: previous upper-level literature course(s), relevant to your studies at Brown. Instructor permission is required and will be given after second class.

COLT 1420V. Visionary Fictions.

Visionary and apocalyptic writing, subversive of modes of perception and understanding as well as of political doctrines and systems, from Blake and Novalis to mid-nineteenth century French writers (Nerval, Rimbaud, Lautréamont), Surrealism and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

COLT 1420X. The European Novel From Goethe to Proust.

Readings of major European novels of the 19th century as literary reflections on philosophical questions such as aesthetic and ethical judgment, subjectivity, mimesis, memory and the novel itself as a genre. Authors include Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert and Proust. Selections from Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukács and Benjamin.

COLT 1420Y. Gigantic Fictions.

Terms such as ‘epic,’ ‘mammoth,’ ‘gigantic,’ and even ‘loose, baggy monsters’ have been coined to describe examples of literary discourse that inordinately exceed the normative boundaries of fiction. How are we to understand these narratives? What is the relation between literary gigantism and mimesis? How do 'gigantic fictions' threaten to break their literary bounds? What holds these mammoth narratives together? What impels authors to elect such a grand scope for literary representation? We explore these questions and others through close reading of several works deemed to be among the most gargantuan from authors such as Rabelais, Murasaki Shikibu, Tolstoy and Joyce.

COLT 1421F. Esthers of the Diaspora: Female Jewish Voices from Latin America (POBS 1500H).

Interested students must register for POBS 1500H.

COLT 1421G. Dickens and Others (ENGL 1511G).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1511G.

COLT 1421I. The Paternalistic Thriller and Other Studies in Colonial Fiction.

The impact of colonialism on European fiction from the rise of empire to its decline and fall, focusing on authors who wrote from direct contact with the peoples of Africa and Asia, such as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Isak Dinesen. Topics will include romantic images of conquest, imperial ideology in literature, differing attitudes towards acculturation, and the changing symbolism of exotic settings.

COLT 1421K. Faulkner (ENGL 1710G).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1710G.

COLT 1421L. "Terrible Beauty": Literature and the Terrorist Imaginary (ENGL 1760I).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1760I.

COLT 1421M. Conrad and Naipaul: The Supremacy of the Visible? (ENGL 1761T).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1761T.

COLT 1421N. Kafka's Writing (GRMN 1340M).

Interested students must register for GRMN 1340M.

COLT 1421O. W. G. Sebald and Some Interlocutors (ENGL 1761Q).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1761Q.

COLT 1421Q. Word and Image: Ekphrasis, the Iconic Narrative, and the Graphic Novel.

An examination of the tradition of illustrated narratives from the pre-modern to the modern periods: the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana, the early eleventh-century Japanese Genji Monogatari, the medieval English Canterbury Tales, the late eighteenth century Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as well as the contemporary graphic novel Persepolis and examples of Japanese manga. Discussion will focus on the nature of iconography and symbolism; the historical privileging of text over image; the significance of parallel visual and verbal representation and its implications for culturally-specific theories of reading. Instructor permission required.

COLT 1421R. The European Novel from Richardson to Goethe.

This course studies the rise of the novel in eighteenth-century England, France, and Germany, focusing on the development of epistolary fiction, but with side-glances at the picaresque and sentimental tradition. Texts to be read include Richardson's Pamela, Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews, Rousseau's Julie, Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses, perhaps Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, perhaps Sade's Justine, and definitely Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

COLT 1421S. The Poetics of Confession (ENGL 1561J).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1561J.

COLT 1421T. Mediterranean Fictions: On Debts, Crises, and the Ends of Europe.

Sun-drenched, seductive, and timeless, the Mediterranean is an appealing location from which to ponder Europe’s debt to this cradle of western civilization. Recently, the region’s economic debt crisis has crystallized thoughts that, beginning here, a peaceful, unified Europe will come undone or be rehabilitated. The word ‘crisis’ itself hinges on a making a crucial decision, often in marking the turning point of a disease. This course examines representations of this moment through literature and film—but also in history, anthropology, journalism, and art—and in the context of other pivotal twentieth-century Mediterranean texts that marked, and anticipated, seismic shifts on the continent.

COLT 1421U. Words Like Daggers: The Epistolary Novel.

Letters as novels, novels in letters: this course traces the development of the epistolary novel, as it was cultivated in Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Through focused discussions of seminal, as much as fascinating, specimens of the genre, we will study the major impact that epistolary fiction had on the stylistic and conceptual evolution of the novel in general, also exploring its interactions with a range of established or shifting social structures, gender roles, discursive practices, and modes of consciousness. Authors include Montesquieu, Laclos, Goethe, Hölderlin, Stoker, Foscolo, Tabucchi, Alexandrou, and Galanaki.

COLT 1421V. Modernisms North and South: Ulysses in Dublin, Paris, and Buenos Aires.

James Joyce’s Ulysses (Ireland, 1922), André Breton’s Nadja (Paris, 1928), and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Argentina, 1963): key texts of modernism, the avant-garde, and post-modernism, from different moments and outpost of literary modernity, but in intimate conversation with one another about the place of the human in art, and of art in politics. Join Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, Nadja, Horacio Oliveira, and a cast of minor characters on a journey through the hearts, minds, memories, and nervous systems of various modern metropoles.

COLT 1421W. Blast from the Past: The Historical Novel.

Focuses on a popular literary genre known as the historical novel. We will discuss its defining characteristics, cultural meanings, and basic differences from other types of fiction. We will also explore larger theoretical issues that are intricately related to the development and scope of the genre: the representation of the past and its relationship to the present; the creative integration of the gaps between factual history and lived experience; and finally the complex interaction between authenticity and fictionality, exemplarity and specificity, temporality and detachment. Authors include Flaubert, Yourcenar, Kadare, Pamuk, Calvino, Lampedusa, Roidis, and Galanaki.

COLT 1421X. Fairy Tales and Culture (FREN 1330A).

Interested students must register for FREN 1330A.

COLT 1422A. The Twilight Zone: Classics of Horror Fiction.

This course discusses a number of seminal works – from Gothic novels to ghost stories and vampire epics – that exploit the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind: fear. Why are authors and readers fanatically drawn to something as disturbing as horror, supernatural or not? How do the gruesome or the macabre become sources of intellectual excitement and aesthetic gratification? How can texts whose intended effect is to shock and distress compel us to confront suppressed instincts, challenge deep-rooted certainties, or reflect on things and ideas that we generally prefer to ignore? Are you brave enough to find out?

COLT 1422B. Family Fictions in the Enlightenment.

This course will study the changing representation of the family in the literature, art and culture of Enlightenment Europe. We will analyze the critique of traditional models of the family and the construction of an ideal of domesticity based on new concepts of childhood, education and marriage. We will read stories of “domestic misfortunes” as well as proposals for alternative solutions to “ill husbandry.” Readings will include novels, plays, theoretical texts and visual documents (paintings and caricatures).

COLT 1422D. Short Forms: Major Works in a Minor Key (HISP 1330Q).

Interested students must register for HISP 1330Q.

COLT 1422E. The 19th-Century Novel: Transatlantic Perspectives.

What happened when the novel crossed the Atlantic? After its rise in Europe in the mid 18th century, the novel quickly spread and became a dominant literary genre both in the U.S. and in Latin America. In this course we will read key 19th-century novels in the European tradition; we will then discuss how this (by no means homogenous) European genre was assimilated and modified across the Atlantic. What did writers in Brazil and in the U.S. do with the genre, and how did they transform it according to national specificities? We will focus on English, French, American, and Brazilian novels.

COLT 1422F. Short Forms: Major Works in a Minor Key (HISP 1330Q).

Interested students must register for HISP 1330Q.

COLT 1422H. Mediterranean Fictions: On Debts, Crises, and the Ends of Europe (MGRK 1230).

Interested students must register for MGRK 1230.

COLT 1422L. The Modernist Novel: Alienation and Narration.

This course will examine how the modernist novel is not only about alienation—estrangement from others, the meaninglessness of existence, the divorce of private self from public life—but also incorporates alienation into its narrative structures. Through the close analysis of novels by European and Latin American authors (Kafka, Camus, Woolf, Onetti, Rulfo and Di Benedetto), we will consider alienation from a variety of angles: as a formal problem for narrative; as an existential situation; an experience of history and the past; and as a condition related to the uneven global economy.

COLT 1422M. Reading the Short Story.

This course invites students to explore the pleasurable challenges of close reading within the context of a compressed form, the modern short story. Select works from the nineteenth century on wards—many of them masterpieces, some hidden gems from around the world—will help us question what we think they mean and how we know this. We will develop practices and techniques for articulating such quandaries even as we observe how sociocultural themes, theories of interpretation, and literary movements intertwine with expressions of the self and the politics of identity.
No prerequisites. Open to all undergraduates.

COLT 1422N. Peasant-Boom-Slum: The Latin American Novel.

Despite being associated with peasants and agricultural goods, Latin America has become the most urbanized region in the world. In this course, we will analyze novels that attempt to make sense of Latin American society in relation to this chaotic and rapid historical transformation. Beginning with nineteenth-century writers who called on civilization to conquer the barbaric countryside, we move to the so-called “Boom” novels of the twentieth century that ambiguously questioned the authoritarian and destructive impulses of this modernizing project, and conclude with contemporary authors who reflect on the utter collapse of modernization. In these novels, we will see that the topic of the city and the countryside becomes a powerful framework for imagining and thinking through issues of indigeneity, gender, industrialization, memory and dictatorship. Authors: Borges, Arlt, Galvão, Rulfo, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Arguedas, Lispector, Bolaño and Aira.

COLT 1430A. Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Poetry.

Various responses to ancient Greek myths by poets in the Western tradition, especially modern Greek poets. Considers how the classical version of myths, such as those of Helen, Oedipus, Orpheus, Persephon, Penelope, and Ulysses, are approached, rewritten, or subverted in poetry since 1800. Emphasizes the challenges posed by the past, issues of cultural and political context, and on questions of gender. Readings in English.

COLT 1430B. Art and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature.

In this course we will cover a selection of Classical, Medieval and Early Modern works from various linguistic traditions (English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), which feature literary representations of art, especially via scenes that are ekphrastic in nature (the description of Achilles’s shield in Homer’s Iliad, for instance), and via textual moments that use exemplary ekphrastic scenes as a point of departure for larger commentaries on: the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the reception of works of art along with their attendant sociocultural impact. Taking moments of renegotiation, critique, and resistance towards dominant hierarchies as a helpful framework, along with texts that explicitly situate themselves against the exemplary model from which they are drawing, we will give special attention to race and gender by examining the artistic representation of marginalized bodies that are explicitly gendered or racialized in the literary texts in which they appear. We will also look at race and gender in select works from Medieval and Early Modern artists.

COLT 1430C. Classical Japanese Poetry.

A historical study of various poetic forms of waka or Japanese poetry from the 8th-century anthology, the Man'yōshū, to the advent of modern verse, including jiyūshi or free verse, in the latter part of the 19th century. Focuses on the relationship of poetry to religion, the political implications of waka, and the dominant aesthetic governing poetic conventions in different periods.

COLT 1430D. Critical Approaches to Chinese Poetry.

Examination of works of Chinese poetry of several forms and periods in the context of Chinese poetic criticism. Knowledge of Chinese not required, but provisions for working with original texts will be made for students of Chinese language.

COLT 1430H. Poetry, Art, and Beauty.

What does it mean to be beautiful in classical and European literature and the arts? How do poems and works of visual art embody beauty? How is the idea of beauty defined by thinkers from Plato to Benjamin and Danto? Works include Sappho, Plato, Aristotle, Catullus, Horace, Petrarch, Kant, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Rilke, Benjamin, Stevens. Works of art considered range from the Lascaux caves through renaissance classical painters like Giotto and Raphael to contemporary installations.

COLT 1430I. Poetry of Europe: Montale, Celan, Hill.

The fifty years between the Second World War and the formation of the European Union was a period in which the meaning of "Europe" was placed under great strain. The class will examine the strains and debates about Europe within the lyric poetry of several literary traditions. It will take the form of close historical, formal, and critical readings of three books of poems in their entirety: Montale's The Storm and Others (1956), Celan's No-One's Rose (1963), and Hill's Canaan (1997). Enrollment limited to 25.

COLT 1430J. Readings in Poetry and Poetics.

Concentrated readings of Hölderlin, Shelley, Baudelaire, and Yeats in conjunction with theoretical texts by Heidegger, Derrida, De Man, and Benjamin. Texts include poetry, essays, novels, and dramas of the poets in a critical and philosophical context. Focuses on the relationship between figurative and expository language, the limits of commentary, and the concept of criticism as repetition and translation. French or German required. Frequent writing and oral presentations.

COLT 1430K. The Classical Tradition in English Poetry.

We will read a number of famous short poems from antiquity in conjunction with the major English writers who later translated, imitated, and reworked them. We will pay special attention to the question of creative innovation. We will read Horace, Theocritus, Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Tennyson, and others.

COLT 1430L. Voices of Romanticism.

Readings of lyric poetry in the European Romantic tradition. Focus on problems of lyric subjectivity and representation, and the rhetoric of "voice." Emphasis on formal features of poetry. The course will be based on close reading and frequent writing assignments. Readings from Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Novalis, Hugo, Nerval, Lamartine, Baudelaire and others. Knowledge of French or German required, or by permission.

COLT 1430N. The Albatross and the Nightingale: Nineteenth-Century Poetry.

Readings in French, German, British and American poetry of the nineteenth century. Texts selected from: Hölderlin, Mörike, Heine, Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire, Keats, Hardy, Dickinson, Poe and others. Focus on close reading, and rhetorical and formal elements of poetry. Frequent writing assignments.

COLT 1430O. The Poetry of Childhood.

Selected readings from among Rousseau, Blake, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Freud, Yeats, Char.

COLT 1430Q. Poetry and the Sublime (GRMN 1440C).

Interested students must register for GRMN 1440C.

COLT 1430S. Latin American Death Trip (LITR 1230K).

Interested students must register for LITR 1230K.

COLT 1430T. Leaves of Words: Japanese Poetry and Poetics.

A historical study of various poetic forms of Japanese poetry (waka) from the 8th-century anthology, the Man'yoshu, to the advent of modern verse, including jiyushi or free verse, in the latter part of the 19th century into the 20th century. Focusses on the relationship of poetry to society, religion, the political implications of waka, and the dominant aesthetic modes governing poetic conventions in different periods.

COLT 1430U. Measures of Poetry: A Workshop.

Rhythm, intonation and their written forms measure poetic matter. This workshop introduces prosody through exercises in theory and practice: the line; metrical and stanzaic form; rhyme; music and performance; free verse; language writing; and the task of translation (form). Even monkeys, Darwin wrote, express strong feelings in different tones. Enrollment limited to 20.

COLT 1431B. Modern Arabic Poetry.

An advanced course with readings in modernist Arabic poetry, beginning with the so-called neo-classical poets and proceeding through Romanticism and Modernism, from Egypt to Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and beyond. We will examine such recurring themes as love, loss, and longing; war, exile, and homeland; cultural heritage (turath) and creative innovation (ibda‘); gender and genre. All readings in Arabic; at least three years Arabic language study (or equivalent) required for enrollment.

COLT 1431C. Poets, Poetry, and Politics.

The award of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan ignited a lively debate about who is, and who is not, a poet. Historically, who were deemed poets, what was their function? What do their poems do and how do they work? Do they foment revolution or “make nothing happen,” as Auden once wrote? How does the poet aspire to a unique, individual voice even as he or she may (be seen to) best represent a constituency? This course relates the poetic act to political action and interrogates the commonly aired contention that politics makes for bad poetry.

COLT 1431D. Reading Modernist Poetry.

The period between 1880 and 1950, generally known as the age of Modernism, saw profound changes at every level of Western society, including politics, war, religion, and art. In this course, we will examine how various poets in Europe and beyond responded to and helped shape these changes through their art. Emphasis will be on reading for form as well as theme and socio-historical context, and on poetry as performance. Authors may include Yeats, H.D., Hughes, Rilke, Lasker-Schüler, Celan, Apollinaire, Césaire, Montale, Ungaretti, Blok, Akhmatova, Lorca, and Neruda. Knowledge of at least one non-English language highly recommended.

COLT 1431E. Loss in Modern Arabic Literature.

This course examines the literary expression of and response to various forms of loss, including military defeat, diaspora, and prison confinement in Arabic poems, short stories, and novellas from the 20th century through the post-Arab Spring. We explore how texts reimagine social and political geographies through diverse poetic and narrative techniques to enrich our understanding of the region and of central debates in its literary tradition. Though the topics may seem quite grim, we will find that many of the readings render forms of loss into aesthetics of beauty or empowerment. No knowledge of Arabic necessary.

COLT 1431F. Reading Modernist Poetry.

The period between 1880 and 1950, generally known as the age of Modernism, saw profound changes at every level of Western society, including politics, war, religion, and art. In this course, we will examine how various poets in Europe and beyond responded to and helped shape these changes through their art. Emphasis will be on reading for form as well as theme and socio-historical context, and on poetry as performance. Authors may include Yeats, H.D., Hughes, Rilke, Lasker-Schüler, Celan, Apollinaire, Césaire, Montale, Ungaretti, Blok, Akhmatova, Lorca, and Neruda. Knowledge of at least one non-English language highly recommended.

COLT 1431H. Women Writing Epic (CLAS 1930F).

Interested students must register for CLAS 1930F.

COLT 1431I. Ovid's Metamorphoses (CLAS 1120X)..

Interested students must register for CLAS 1120X.

COLT 1431J. Anti Poetry.

Hating on poetry is a time-honored tradition. From Plato to the Dadaists, thinkers and writers across the world have questioned the reigning poetics, or the value of poetry altogether. This course examines a range of theoretical arguments about the value and nature of poetry from the premodern period to the present. At the same time, we will closely read materials from literary projects that have explored the permissible limits of the poetic, defined themselves against poetry, or have been accused of failing to meet the standards of poetry. Focusing on case studies like the Latin American anti-poetry movement, the Arabic prose poem and the work of the LANGUAGE poets, we will familiarize ourselves with debates in lyric theory and a variety of poetic traditions.

COLT 1440B. Killer Love: Passion and Crime in Fiction and Film.

Discusses textual and cinematic representations of criminal passion and its ambiguous relationship to religious, moral, and social norms. We will focus on extreme forms of intimacy both as a thematic choice of cultural production and as a symbolic medium of communication. Why is it that art so often explores unsanctioned emotions and deviant behaviors? What is at stake when narratives capitalize on violent manifestations of desire? In what ways is the semantics of excessive love related to conceptions of subjectivity, sociability, and sexuality? What role does it play in the creative process itself?

COLT 1440F. 1948 Photo Album: From Palestine To Israel.

Why do we name the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" as we do? The purpose of this class is to use photographs – alongside historical and literary documents--to question the framework of a "national conflict" and study its emergence as a given, unquestioned and axiomatic scheme for any historical narrative of that period. Reading archival material and post-colonial and photography theories, each week we shall study one photograph taken in 1948, reconstructing the photography event as well as its myriad relations among the protagonists involved and its after life as an archived image, to include photographed persons, photographers, editors, journalists, politicians, and more.

COLT 1440H. The Literature and Cinema of Global Organized Crime (SLAV 1500).

Interested students must register for SLAV 1500.

COLT 1440K. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Contested Narratives (UNIV 1001).

Interested students must register for UNIV 1001.

COLT 1440M. Lyric Genre-Benders.

In this course, we will ask what constitutes poetic language and how to identify the lyric as a genre. Are there discernible traits that lyric poems share, or is poetry, like pornography, something we recognize only when we see it? We will have a special focus on how genre is related to gender, and consider the historical precedent of poetry calling readers to its defense. Discussion will revolve around essays on lyric theory both classic and contemporary, prose poems by Baudelaire and Davis, fragments by Sappho, and finally, poems by Basho, Dickinson, Rankine, and more.

COLT 1440P. Nationalism and Transnationalism in Film and Fiction.

Reports of the demise of nationalism always seem greatly exaggerated. How are notions of transnationalism dependent on rewriting the nation? This course revisits films of world cinema acclaimed for their national cachet from a transnational perspective and in dialogue with their literary intertexts. We will study these films’ fictional narration, cinematic articulation, and critical reception and consider how they signify in multinational networks of funding, distribution, production, conception, and critical reception. Students will analyze the political, ethical, and artistic stakes of confronting difference as both a located and universal stance or commodity. Films and texts chosen from across the globe.

COLT 1440Q. Stranger Things: The German Novella (GRMN 1440X).

Interested students must register for GRMN 1440X.

COLT 1440S. Images d’une guerre sans nom: the Algerian War in Literature and Film (FREN 1410R).

Interested students must register for FREN 1410R.

COLT 1440T. Cinema's Bodies.

The course explores the cinematic construction of bodies, female, male, animal and others. They are not standing alone as they are framed, cut, exposed, veiled, enlarged, distorted and gendered. The body is screened at the screen and composed into an imaginary image of beauty, death, sex, work. Cinematic devices like close-up, camera angle, light etc. transform bodies into the body of the film and its specific style, from which they can't be subtracted. This leads to the question of the spectator’s body as screen for the filmic body and the many theoretical explorations to the embodied visions cinema entails and stimulates.

COLT 1440U. The Listener (Literature, Theory, Film).

Listening is not only the supposedly peaceful, welcoming activity that verges on mere receptive passivity. Listening or not listening also has to do with the exercise of power and this is the reason why we have a responsibility as listeners. In order to explore what could be described as the politics of listening, we will follow multiple paths that will lead us from the strategies of listening in concert venues to the medical practice of auscultation and the generalization of surveillance techniques. Our seminar will interweave readings in literature or theory (Kafka, Nietzsche, Calvino, Foucault, Chekhov, Freud, Deleuze. . .) and screenings of selected filmic scenes.

COLT 1440X. Shéhérazades : Depicting the "Orientale" in Modern French Culture.

Centered around the storied figure of Shéhérazade, this course explores literary and visual representations of “oriental” women in France from the 18th century to the contemporary period. Structured in a chronological and thematic manner, the course confronts students with highly influential orientalist depictions of women (including Voltaire, Loti, and Delacroix), as well as postcolonial and feminist responses to orientalism. Primary sources will be supplemented with theoretical readings from Edward Said, Fatima Mernissi and Joan Scott among others, in order to question the evolution and relevance of “orientalism” in France today and articulate the enduringly complex relation between imperialism and gender.

COLT 1440Z. Poets on Poetry.

How do poets think about poetry? How might their ideas differ from those of professional theorists and critics? In this course we will look at the variety of ways in which poets throughout history have written about their craft, from essays and letters, to poems, translations, and writing guides. In addition to discussing issues surrounding the theory, composition, and ethics of poetry, students will write poems of their own, according to the "rules" of famous poets like Edgar Allan Poe and John Keats. Authors may include Celan, Gander, Hayes, Horace, Lorde, Montale, Moore, Neruda, Pound, Shelley, Swensen.

COLT 1441. Colonialisms on Trial.

Inspired by the movie Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako) in which capitalism is put on trial, this seminar asks: How can we draw from the study of and opposition to colonialism the law that one should enact against it? In the name of what colonialism ought to be rejected? Can we imagine justice, freedom, or rights beyond Western liberal values? The seminar explores how colonialism has been put on trial by generations of anti-colonial activists and thinkers such as Abd el-Kader or Fanon. Putting colonialisms on trial means also putting history itself on trial alongside archives, reparations, museums, the subterranean, capital, religion, and the very notion of a court in its globalized liberal hegemonic form. A laboratory for collective investigation, this seminar will draw on our respective works. This dialogue will engage students in researching their own traces of colonialism’s violence.

COLT 1610B. Irony.

A study of the trope of irony and its evaluation, especially in the Romantic tradition. Focuses on the epistemological implications of irony and the role it plays in contemporary criticism. Readings from Plato, Hegel, Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Lukács, Booth, White, De Man.

COLT 1610C. Japanese Aesthetics and Poetics.

Focuses on the historical development of aesthetic values and their relation to social culture, religion, and national identity in Japan from the Nara period to the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the literary arts. Readings from Fujiwara Teika, Zeami Motokiyo, Sen no Rikyū, Okakura Tenshin, and others. A background in critical theory/philosophy and in East Asian studies helpful.

COLT 1610D. Theory of Lyric Poetry.

Through readings of recent critical discussions of the lyric genre, we will explore general methodological problems of literary theory. Discussions include: the role of form, structure and tropes in analyzing poetry; problems of subjectivity and voice; the relation between poetry and history; the function of reading: and the problematic "objectivity" of criticism. Readings from Hölderlin, Shelley, Baudelaire, Yeats, Jakobson, Benveniste, Riffaterre, Jauss, Johnson, De Man.

COLT 1610E. Aesthetics and Politics (ENGL 1900E).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1900E.

COLT 1610F. New Theories for a Baroque Stage (TAPS 1280N).

Interested students must register for TAPS 1280N.

COLT 1610G. Mihail Bakhtin (RUSS 1895).

Interested students must register for RUSS 1895.

COLT 1610I. Getting Emotional: Passionate Theories (ENGL 1560W).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1560W.

COLT 1610J. Holocaust Literature (JUDS 1820).

Interested students must register for JUDS 1820.

COLT 1610K. Literature and Multilingualism (GRMN 1340N).

Interested students must register for GRMN 1340N.

COLT 1610L. What is Reading?.

The answers to this question will be read—deciphered—in the many “reading scenes” found throughout the history of literature or philosophy. In Plato’s Phaedrus, reading thus appears caught in a network of desire and power: the dominant role—the erases (“lover”) who writes and teaches—and the passive or submissive position—the eromenos (“beloved”) who reads and learns—are constantly permutated and destabilized. Hobbes’ Leviathan, Melville’s Moby Dick and Billy Budd, Goethe’s and Valéry’s Faust will lead us to question what we do when we read and reflect upon what could be called a politics of reading.

COLT 1610M. Twentieth-Century Russian Approaches to Literature: Bakhtin and the Russian Formalists (SLAV 1890).

Interested students must register for SLAV 1890.

COLT 1610N. Ecological Thought.

This course will serve as an introduction to the new interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. Discussing an exciting range of texts and films—from Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Arundati Roy to Ridley Scott and Werner Herzog—we will investigate how literary and cinematic works make ecological crisis perceptible. The following topics will be central to our discussions: garbology (especially hoarding, collecting, and the relation between trash and modern poetry); “slow violence” and postcolonial environmentalism; queer ecology; biopolitics; the representation of non-human animals; the effects of 24/7 consumerism; and the political uses of ecological nostalgia, disgust, grief, and wonder.

COLT 1610P. Holocaust Literature (JUDS 1820).

Interested students must register for JUDS 1820.

COLT 1610Q. Gender Theory and Politics in France (FREN 1420C).

Interested students must register for FREN 1420C.

COLT 1610R. Visions of Liberation: African Decolonization Now?.

If, as many African thinkers contend, the acquisition of formal national independence did not signify liberation, it is necessary to imagine decolonization now. In “Visions of Liberation,” we will examine ideas, particularly those of Césaire and Fanon, that have shaped decolonial thinking in Africa. What is the contemporary relevance of notions of freedom imagined by thinkers of the early and mid-twentieth century? How have postcolonial and post-apartheid writers conceived of freedom? What does it mean to call Mali a “postcolony” or “neocolony,” or to state that South Africa is not postcolonial? Previous knowledge of the topic is not required.

COLT 1610U. Gender, Sexuality, and Culture in the Modern Middle East.

An introduction to women’s and gender studies in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Arabic literature and film. We will begin by laying critical foundations for discussing gender issues in the Middle East, with readings on Orientalism, the harem, and the veil. Other units include: pre-modern female literary personae, gender and revolution, women writing war, feminism and class, colonialism and culture.

COLT 1610V. The Promise of Being: Heidegger for Beginners.

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is,” Martin Heidegger writes, “that we are still not thinking.” Our undergraduate seminar will study, slowly and carefully, some of Heidegger’s most fascinating and challenging paths of thinking, especially as they relate to questions of Being and our being-in-the-world. We will encounter his unique engagements with art and literature, his critique of modern technology, his reflections on what it means to “dwell” somewhere, his views on finitude and death, and his notion of being “on the way” toward language. No previous familiarity with Heidegger is assumed; curious students from diverse fields welcome.

COLT 1610W. Whites, White Jews and Us: Radical Black, Arab & Jewish Thinkers.

Inspired by Houria Bouteldja’s book White, Jews and Us, which we will read in class, we will read authors who are engaged with generations of (forced) displacement and concomitant fraught cartographies. The class will proceed along lines drawn by two questions: (a) what makes these texts radical and how does their radicalness opens paths of refusal, care and repair of and in shared worlds; (b) how do these authors engage with identities made and remade by displacement and catastrophe, and how imagination, fabulation, remembrance and reclamation of never-completely-lost worlds are mobilized to question these identities, borders and injustices they produce. We will read texts by Ella Shohat, Houria Bouteldja, Saidiya Hartman, Susan Slymovics, Anarkata, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Lital Levy and others.

COLT 1610Y. Of Friends and Enemies.

“And so will believe in our stellar friendship, though we should have to be terrestrial enemies to one another,” Nietzsche says. How are friendship and enmity construed in the Western traditions? What are the philosophical and ethical implications of dividing one’s personal, cultural, and political world into friends and enemies? What is the elusive relation between friendship and community, hospitality, war, and mourning? We will scrutinize the history and theory of friendship and enmity through close readings of writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Schmitt, Blanchot, Nancy, and Derrida. Students from diverse fields welcome.

COLT 1710A. Introduction to Literary Translation.

This is a workshop course introducing the history and theory of literary translation, with demonstrations and exercises translating poetry and prose. All languages welcome, but students must be proficient to the level of reading literature in the original language. Foreign language through 0600 or permission of the instructor.

COLT 1710B. Advanced Translation (LITR 1010F).

Interested students must register for LITR 1010F.

COLT 1710C. Literary Translation Workshop.

The primary focus of this course is the practice of literary translation as an art. Using the workshop format, each student will complete a project by the end of the semester. Examples and theoretical texts will illuminate the historical, ethical, cultural, political, and aesthetic values that underlie every translation, keeping an eye towards opening up the field beyond inherited practices to consider the contemporary implications of our choices, intentions, and purposes in translation. Open to all levels. Heritage speakers are welcome, collaboration is permitted, and an open-spirited approach to this developing and fascinating practice is strongly recommended.

COLT 1710D. Exercises in Literary Translation.

Exercises and investigations in the history, theory, and practice of literary translation. Students pursue individual projects for translation workshops. Common exercises draw on Shakespeare translation, from classic translations in Europe to unique examples like Nyerere’s Swahili Caesar and current projects like Shakespeare in Modern English or The Chinese Shakespeare. Prerequisite: one foreign-language course in literature at 1000-level (or equivalent).

COLT 1810A. Onnade: The Woman's Hand in Classical Japanese and Medieval Western Literature.

A consideration of various genres of women's writing from 700 to 1450 C.E. focusing on such issues as literary conventions, the relationship to the vernacular, the role of religion in education, and questions of gender and social class. Writers may include Berthgyth, Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, Héloïse, Marie de France, the comtessa de Dia, Ladu Nijō, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pisan, and various anonymous women.

COLT 1810B. Aesthetics in the Colonial Frame.

Draws together works from a wide range of contexts and genres-Enlightenment philosophy, romantic travel literature, Arabic novels and poems-to compose a conversation about aesthetics in the colonial context of Egypt. Senior Seminar.

COLT 1810C. City (B)Lights.

Interdisciplinary explorations of the modern urban experience featuring social sciences, literature and film. Convergences and differences in the presentation of urban life in literature, film, the visual arts, urban planning, and social sciences. City populations, bureaucracy, power groups, alienation, urban crowds, the city as site of the surreal, are central themes. Against the background of classic European urban images, American cities and literary works are foregrounded.

COLT 1810E. Dwellers Amid the Clouds: the Literature of the Court.

A survey of three court traditions-Heian Japan, medieval Iceland, and early modern England-in which the relationship between the literary genres and the specific social context from which they emerge is highlighted in the form of particular literary conventions. Topics include the question of patronage, the function of particular literature as shibboleth, the idea of spectacle and play, the politics of literature, and the trope of irony as courtly emblem.

COLT 1810F. Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany.

Some of the most intractable questions of contemporary philosophy were vigorously debated in eighteenth-century Germany. What are the limit of reason? Does its supposed neutrality and universality mask its own set of prejudices? Are there any universally valid claims in truth or ethics? How, why, should Christian, Jew, and Muslim tolerate their differences? We will read literary and philosophical works by Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, Kant, Lessing, and Mendelssohn.

COLT 1810G. Fiction and History.

How the historical fiction that has flourished over the past four decades challenges the notions of objectivity and totalization, while providing alternative viewpoints for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the past. Authors considered include Grass, Doctorow, Delillo, García-Márquez, Allende, Danticat and Gordimer. Theoretical texts by White, LaCapra, Benjamin, Ricoeur, and Chartier. Films such as The Official Story and Europa, Europa will be viewed and incorporated into the discussions. Prerequisite: two previous courses in literature. Enrollment limited to 19. Instructor permission required.

COLT 1810H. Tales of Two Cities: Havana - Miami, San Juan - New York.

In this course we will compare representations of Havana and San Juan in contemporary fiction and film to literary inscriptions of Cuban Miami and Puerto Rican New York. We will explore mapping the city as mapping identity and city-writing as reconstruction and creation, viewing through the eyes of children, tourists, and urban detectives. Authors include Antonio José Ponte, Roberto G. Fernández, Mayra Santos Febres and Ernesto Quiñones. Good preparation for study abroad on the Brown-in-Cuba program. Not open to first year students.

COLT 1810I. Gates of Asia.

An exploration of the growth of European knowledge of Asia from the rise of the Mongol empire through the Great Game and its aftermath. Primary sources include three kinds of accounts provided by travelers who set their hearts on Asian exploration: personal narratives, official reports and dispatches, and scholarly studies of the exotic cultures. Enrollment limited to 20.

COLT 1810J. History and Aesthetic Form.

In this course, we will examine the co-articulation of theories of history with theories of language and aesthetics. Focus will be on the interdependence between an emerging interest in history and the origin of language, and approaches to literary history, genre definition, and general aesthetic categories. Readings to be selected from Vice, Rousseau, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Negel, Novalis, Lukacs, Adorno, Derrida and De Man.

COLT 1810L. Housing Problems.

Examines architectural figures and problems of containment and construction in a variety of literary and theoretical texts. We will consider how images of buildings structure texts and outline spaces for subjectivity. Themes include the gothic, haunted houses, foundations, ruins, walls, and doors. Texts selected from Descartes, Derrida, Goethe, Hegel, Austen, Coleridge, Poe, Baudelaire, Melville, Hawthorne, Kafka, Tschumi and Borges.

COLT 1810M. Image and Text: the Reconstitution of Narrative.

An examination of the tradition of illustrated narratives in several premodern cultures: the early 11th-century Japanese Genji Monogatari, the medieval English Canterbury Tales, and the ancient Indian epic the Māhābharata. Discussion focuses on the nature of iconography and symbolism; the historical privileging of text over image; the significance of parallel visual and verbal representation and its implications for culturally-specific theories of reading. Seminar.

COLT 1810N. Freud: Writer and Reader.

A broad survey of Freud's writings, with particular emphasis on psychoanalysis' relevance to literary theory and cultural analysis. Readings include Freud's major works, as well as secondary sources focused on applications to literary studies.

COLT 1810O. Latin American Literature in Dialogue with France.

Complicates the question of influence in Latin American literary and intellectual self-fashioning, specifically with regard to France. Explores the productivity and perplexity of this relationship through romanticism and articulations of the real (as realism, surrealism and magical realism). Approaching the twenty-first century, considers Latin American perspectives on French theories of feminism, postmodernism and globalization.

COLT 1810P. Literature and Medicine.

The purpose of this course is to examine a number of central issues in medicine-disease, pain, trauma, madness, the image of the physician-- from the distinct perspectives of the sciences and the arts. Texts will be drawn from authors such as Sophocles, Hawthorne, Gilman, Tolstoy, Kafka, Anderson, O'Neill, Hemingway, Ionesco, Verghese, Barker, Sacks, Foucault, Sontag, Scarry, Gawande and others. Open enrollment course: lecture + section.

COLT 1810Q. Literature and Money in the Age of Paper.

Focuses on the complex and highly ambivalent relationship between literature and money in nineteenth-century European literature. Works by Poe, Balzac, Dickens, Baudelaire, Stevenson, Hardy, and Zola. Relevant philosophical writing by Smith, Marx, Nietzsche, and Derrida.

COLT 1810S. Literature and the City.

Literature's obsession with the modern city, in 19th- and 20th-century American, English, and French fiction and poetry, in writers such as Blake, Whitman, Balzac, Dickens, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eliot, Williams, Bellow, Morrison. Opportunities for work in other literatures and genres, e.g., in Germany, Brecht.

COLT 1810T. Literature and the Culture of Capitalism.

This course will examine the literary responses to capitalism in terms of five organizing tropes: regionalism, urbanization, consumerism, aestheticism, and modernism. Our investigation will begin sometime in the early 19th-century with the moment that consolidated conditions favorable for industrialization and conclude in the first decade of the 20th-century with literary modernism and the collapse of the cultural myths of progressive enlightenment and democracy. Readings include texts by Wordsworth, Malthus, Sue, Mayhew, Marx, H. Rider Haggard, Stowe, Carroll, Zola, Wilde, Stoker, Freud. Three papers and a final essay.

COLT 1810U. Angela's Ashes and What Went Before: Irish Immigration and Literary Creation.

Readings in the major works of Joyce, Beckett and Farrell, without forgetting Jonathan Swift and William Butler Yeats.

COLT 1810V. Marx and Modern Literature.

A contrastive and integrative study of the range of Marx's writings and works by writers such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Woolf, and Stevens. Examines Marx's leading concepts in philosophy, history, economics, ideology, and aesthetics in relation to the particularities of literary forms. One or two short papers and a longer final study of a literary work chosen from the student's major field. Enrollment limited to 30.

COLT 1810X. Mirror for the Romantic: The Tale of the Gengi and The Story of the Stone.

In East Asian Buddhist culture, the mirror is a symbol of the mind in both its intellectual and emotional aspects. These masterworks detail the lives and loves of Prince Genji, cynosure of the medieval Japanese court and Jia Baoyu, the last hope of an influential Chinese clan during the reign of Manchus. We examine both works as well as the sources of Genji and literary aesthetics of the Tang dynasty. Prerequisites: COLT 0710, RELS 0040 (0088) or 0100 (0006), or permission of the instructor.

COLT 1810Y. Modern Japanese Women Writers.

An examination of women's writing from the Meiji Period (1868-1912) to the present. Readings include works from such writers as Higuchi Ichiyo, Miyamoto Yuriko, Enchi Fumiko, and Tsushima Yūko. Topics include the relation of 'woman' to the modern, the legacy/construction of the past, the implications of joryū bungaku (women's literature), and the problem of resistance and subversion.

COLT 1810Z. Nietzsche.

Intensive and extensive reading of Nietzsche and some of the reception that has made him so prominent in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Topics include Nietzsche's aesthetics, theory of history, the concept of the eternal return, European decadence, misogyny and anti-semitism. Texts will be selected from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno, Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, de Man, Kofman, Lacoue-Labarthe, Foucault, Hamacher, Ronell, etc.

COLT 1811B. Postcolonial Theory and Fiction.

There is hardly a place in the contemporary world which has not somehow been touched by the histories and consequences of colonialism. What does it mean, then, to speak about the postcolonial? Should the postcolonial be seen as a new periodization in the study of world literatures, a recent trend in critical theory, or another type of minority discourse involving previously colonized peoples?

COLT 1811D. Reading Revolution, Representations of Cuba, 1959-The Present.

Considers the cultural and ideological impact of the Cuban revolution inside and outside Cuba. Starting in the 1960s, reads Latin American "boom" novels, European theorists and U.S. civil rights activists. Moving to today, addresses post-Soviet Cuba's literary production and the impact of new technologies on culture, as well as political change under Raúl Castro. Fiction, film and essays by Castro, Sartre, García Márquez, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Fernando Pérez and others. Excellent preparation for the Brown-in-Cuba program.

COLT 1811F. The "Tenth Muse" Phenomenon.

The texts and contexts of women writing in English, Spanish and French, during the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries. Often dubbed "Tenth Muses," these first early modern women writers to gain public prominence wrote iconoclastic texts and/or epitomized socially sanctioned scripts for women. Authors include: Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Sor Juana, Mme de Lafayette, Maria de Zayas.

COLT 1811H. The Idea of Beauty.

What does it mean to be beautiful in classical and European literature? How is beauty defined by thinkers from Plato to Benjamin? Readings from the classical, medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods are brought into question by works concerning the problems of aesthetics. Works by Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Racine, Tolstoy and others in addition to readings from the history of aesthetics from Kant through the present.

COLT 1811I. The Nordic Legacy: Ibsen, Strindberg, Munch and Bergman.

This course examines the work of four major Scandinavian artists. As key figures in the development of modern theater, painting and film, these four figures share a number of common concerns: challenging the pieties of bourgeois mores; reconceiving the relations between the sexes; moving from the social to the metaphysical; undermining the unitary view of the self; and forging an artistic "language" through which the in-dwelling power of the psyche can be revealed.

COLT 1811J. The Paternalistic Thiller and other Studies in Colonial Fiction.

The impact of colonialism on European fiction from the rise of empire to its decline and fall, focusing on authors who wrote from direct contact with the peoples of Africa and Asia, such as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Isak Dinesen. Topics will include romantic images of conquest, imperial ideology in literature, differing attitudes towards acculturation, and the changing symbolism of exotic settings.

COLT 1811L. Travel, Tourism, Trafficking through the Ages.

Why go away to find ourselves? How does the self constitute itself “elsewhere”? This course considers the genre of travel writing and its theory: how are roots, routes, and rootlessness treated in diverse racial, spiritual, sexual, national, and imperial encounters. Today, when cosmopolitan tourists, intellectuals, or exotic and erotic adventurers share the same beach as downtrodden, abject refugees and their traffickers, what are the cultural, ethical and political implications of leisurely seeking out (self-) discovery, disappearing authenticity, and commodified otherness? Readings include Herodotus, Equiano, Chatwin, Kingsley, Montagu, Darwin, Twain, Miller, Durrell, Baldwin, Phillips, Iyer, Houellebecq, Woolf, Thompson, Theroux, Baudrillard

COLT 1811N. Persons and Portraits: Self in Early Modern Europe.

Challenges the presumed supremacy of the "modern subject," the sovereign rational mind personified by Descartes. Rival theories of self in Machiavelli, Luther, Montaigne, Hobbes, Pascal, and Spinoza are explored alongside the richly embodied "persons" pictured in painting (Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez), conduct literature (Castiglione, La Rochefoucauld), drama (Milton, Molière, Calderón), psychological fiction (La Fayette), and satiric prose (La Bruyére).

COLT 1811O. Modernism: From Paris to Athens, 1900s - 1950s.

The course examines Modernism as it developed in major European cities. Apart from focusing on major venues of modernism (Zurich, Berlin, Paris) it centers on marginal geographical spaces with specific emphasis on Athens, Greece. It further explores the rise of such movements as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism and proceeds to explore the reaction of Greek modernists to these movements.

COLT 1811Q. Poisonous or Prophetic?.

Wright's Native Son, Burrough's Naked Lunch, Derrida's Specters of Marx, and Rimbaud.

COLT 1811S. Philosophy and Literature of German Romanticism.

A fateful collaboration between philosophy and literature was centered in Germany roughly between 1788 (Schiller's 'Gods of Greece') and 1807 (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit). A survey of the major literature of this period, organized thematically, will serve as an introduction to this complex phenomenon. Authors include (in translation) Fichte, Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schelling, Schiller, and Tieck.

COLT 1811T. Levantine Cities: Alexandria, Istanbul, Athens.

Explores the literary and filmic imagination of three Eastern Mediterranean cities, Alexandria, Istanbul, and Athens. It examines the history, culture and politics of these cities and the ways in which they emerge in literature, film, poetry and travelogues. How is the city defined in these works? How are social tensions addressed, such as those between Greeks and Turks and Arabs or between Christians, Muslims and Jews? How are thematic and historical issues resolved, such as those involving antiquity and modernity, tradition and modernization, colonialism and nationalism, religion and secularism? How are these cities defined in the works of western writers? Enrollment limited to 30.

COLT 1811U. Literature and the Arts.

Readings in the apparitions and articulations of the arts in fiction, philosophy, criticism and poetry. Focus on the interaction between language and other media, the figure of the artist, problems of expression and performance. Readings from Diderot, Hegel, Balzac, Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Poe, Nietzsche, Wagner and Mann.

COLT 1811W. Visual Obsessions: Japanese Film, Fiction, and Modernity.

The pervasiveness of visual obsessions in contemporary Japanese culture prompts us to rethink the impact of modernity in terms of visuality. Through the examination of a wide range of filmic, literary, and visual art forms produced in Japan from the 1920s to the 2000s, this course explores the question of visuality as a historically and technologically conditioned way of seeing. The issues to be considered in this class include: the construction of "Japanese" aesthetics, orientalism, ocularcentrism, the problems of interiority and the subject, the relation between habit and the everyday, and cultural nationalism. This course will introduce important theoretical concepts about vision and modernity, asking students to interrogate these concepts through the close examination of specific Japanese texts and films discussed in class. Writers, filmmakers, and visual artists include: Tanizaki Jun'ichirô, Edogawa Rampo, Abé Kôbô, Karatani Kôjin, Ozu Yasujirô, Kurosawa Akira, Ichikawa Kon, Suzuki Seijun, and Murakami Takashi.

COLT 1811X. Marx and his Critics.

This course will focus on a close study of the work of Karl Marx and its legacy for critical theory. The first part of the course will be dedicated to a reading of Marx's most important texts, with special emphasis given to his theories of economy, of ideology, alienation and fetishism. The second part will be dedicated to a reading of some of Marx's most important readers: Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser, Zizek and Derrida. Instructor's permission required.

COLT 1811Y. Genius and Melancholia in the Renaissance.

Explores Renaissance accounts of genius, genial inspiration, and melancholia, and their accompanying ideas of intellection and immortality. Primary materials include Dürer, Montaigne, Rabelais, Ficino, Ariosto, Erasmus, Saint Teresa, and Luther. Secondary or contemporary texts include Warburg, Panofsky, Saxl, Klibansky, Wind, Benjamin, Kierkegaard, and Sebald.

COLT 1811Z. Literature and the American Presidency.

We shall read widely in writings by, and about, selected American presidents, but also focus on the ways in which presidents have used literature as a dictional source in their own writing and thinking. We will attend also to the relationship of culture to power as evidenced in other textual media, such as film.

COLT 1812A. Literatures of Immigration.

Why do people migrate? How do literary genres, including poetry, fiction, autobiography and memoir, characterize immigrant experiences? How is the experience of "coming from somewhere else" similar and different for each subsequent generation of immigrants? How does literature indicate the impacts of migration on the culture, politics and economics of the countries of immigration and emigration? How do literatures of immigration imagine the past, present and future of networks and communities of immigrants? Focusing on twentieth-century literary texts and the socio-historical context of mass migration, the first half of the course examines immigration literature in the U.S., the second half of the course explores literatures of immigration beyond the U.S., and the course concludes with an inquiry into immigration in our presently globalizing age.

COLT 1812B. Aesthetics and Politics (ENGL 1900E).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1900E.

COLT 1812C. The Ethics of Romanticism (ENGL 1560Y).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1560Y.

COLT 1812F. Violence and Representation.

Traces diverse genealogies from which to theorize violence and its relation to aesthetics. We will identify a disciplinary philology for “violence” as a signifier within visual culture, art practice and literature; historicize key transitions in varied invocations of violence in representation; study texts (photography, film, novel, installation) that create a space where violence can be discussed as both everyday and extraordinary. Some issues to be considered: representability in moments of historical crisis (war, colonialism, genocide); the efficacy of genres and artistic movements in representing violence (tragedy, surrealism, theater of cruelty); and the violence of representation (surveillance, spectatorship, voyeurism).

COLT 1812H. "Women's Literary Make-up": Mirrors, Maquillage and the Tenth Muse.

Focuses on the problem of creative inspiration for women writers and how the pursuit of aesthetic perfection, both somatic and literary as well as their interrelation, becomes a recurring motif in women's writing from various traditions. Readings will include fiction and poetry from the English, Japanese, and Arab traditions, both modern and pre-modern. This is an undergraduate seminar open to juniors and seniors. Prerequisite: coursework in literature and at least one course in gender studies/women's studies. Instructor permission required.

COLT 1812I. Collective Struggles and Cultural Politics in the Global South.

Traces the historical and ideological mapping of the North-South axis and the regional mythologies informed by racism, empire and nationalism. We will examine the ways in which imagined geographical hierarchies continue to shape cultural and political struggles and the vectors of globalization. Along with readings on imperial histories, liberal and neoliberal political economies, and postcolonialism this class seeks to establish connections between resistant narratives and collective struggles in the Global South. We will discuss political philosophies of Marx, Gramsci, Arendt, Fanon, Harvey and Schwarz, as well as the works of Achebe, Hurston, Kincaid, Rushdie, Roy, Sembene, and Wright. First year students require instructor permission.

COLT 1812J. Poetry and Ethics.

If history is, as Charles Olson claims, a "form of attention" and we are all participants in a collective reality relative to our capacity for language use, what ethical issues come to bear on what the poet chooses to attend to--not only as subject matter but as form? Can poetic language be sufficiently responsive to the challenge of empathy? Is there an ethics of attention? Guided by philosophical texts, we shall investigate ethical possibilities in a range of world poetries.

COLT 1812K. European Intellectual and Cultural History: Exploring the Modern, 1880-1914 (HIST 1220).

Interested students must register for HIST 1220.

COLT 1812M. Erotic Desire in the Premodern Mediterranean (CLAS 1750L).

Interested students must register for CLAS 1750L.

COLT 1812N. Culture and Anarchy (ENGL 1511I).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1511I.

COLT 1812O. Lying, Cheating, and Stealing (ENGL 1760V).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1760V.

COLT 1812P. Essaying the Essay (CLAS 1120J).

Interested students must register for CLAS 1120J.

COLT 1812S. Violence and the Multiple Responses of Medieval France.

Examines violence and its representations from a variety of perspectives: literary, historical, psychological, etc. Different literary forms (11th - 13th) introduce conflicts between competing value systems, problems raised by militant religion, vendettas and the pursuit of justice. Across the gamut of appetites and emotions, violence takes a variety of shapes, producing broken hearts and broken heads. The beautiful seductiveness of violence, despite its horrors, is frequently transformed into artistic and literary expression, from the highest forms of Western tradition to the cheap exploitations of pulp fiction. What can the Middle Ages teach us about violence, yesterday and today? Not open to first year students.

COLT 1812T. On Being Bored (ENGL 1511L).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1511L.

COLT 1812U. Queer Relations: Aesthetics and Sexuality (ENGL 1900R).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1900R.

COLT 1812V. War, Anti-War, Postwar: Culture and Contestation in the Americas.

This course addresses the relationship among language, war and the arts from the mid-twentieth century on. Even as armies engage in combat around the globe, the term "war" legitimates a much broader spectrum of situations, lending them the structure of organized hostility and the moral opposition of right to wrong. From the "Cold War" to the "War on Terror", to Argentina's "Dirty War" and Cuba's "War on Imperialism", literature, cinema, visual arts and community-based projects have responded to real and rhetorical declarations of "war." Drawing from U.S. and Latin American contexts, we will explore a range of responses and challenges.

COLT 1812W. Love, Adultery, and Sexuality (RUSS 1450).

Interested students must register for RUSS 1450.

COLT 1812X. Literature and History: Russian Historical Imagination in the European Context (RUSS 1600).

Interested students must register for RUSS 1600.

COLT 1812Y. Central Europe: An Idea and its Literature (SLAV 1790).

Interested students must register for SLAV 1790.

COLT 1813B. Dying God (CLAS 1930B).

Interested students must register for CLAS 1930B.

COLT 1813C. Erotic Desire in the Premodern Mediterranean (CLAS 1750L).

Interested students must register for CLAS 1750L.

COLT 1813D. Issues in World Literature (ENGL 1761Y).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1761Y.

COLT 1813E. Chinese Women, Gender and Feminism from Historical and Transnational Perspectives (EAST 1950B).

Interested students must register for EAST 1950B.

COLT 1813F. Communication Culture and Literary Politics (MCM 1503Q).

Interested students must register for MCM 1503Q.

COLT 1813H. God, Sex and Grammar: Literary Ethics in Medieval Europe.

What does it mean to read and write ethically? While modern culture values intellectual property, many medieval texts celebrated what we call plagiarism. On the other hand, medieval thinkers saw serious consequences in literature, which could lead authors and readers to heaven or hell. But then as now, ethics were rarely clear-cut, subject to forces as diverse as religion, sexual desire, capitalism, and even language itself. Reading some of the great authors of the period, as well as modern critical reflections, we will explore the ethical dimension of literary production in the medieval world and in our own society.

COLT 1813I. The Colonial and the Postcolonial Marvelous.

A celebration and critique of the marvelous--as the strange, wondrous, magical, or unreal--as it has been wielded in Spanish American and related literatures (French Caribbean, Brazilian). We follow the marvelous from European exoticizing of the New World during the colonial period to its postcolonial incarnations in "magical realism" and beyond. We attend particularly to the political, ideological, social, and commercial implications of the marvelous in writers including Carpentier, Chamoiseau, Columbus, Esquivel, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and García Márquez. Readings in English, though you may read texts in the original French, Spanish, or Portuguese.

COLT 1813K. The Problem of the Vernacular.

It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Under what conditions do dialects, vernaculars, creoles, and slangs become mediums for literary and artistic expression? How have writers in different cultures managed the relationship between their "official" national languages and their more intimate mother tongues? This course explores this problem in a variety of literary traditions, including Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Scots, Latin and the Romance vernaculars, and a variety of other languages.

COLT 1813M. Making a List.

The list is one of the most ancient and enduring figures of rhetoric and one of the most versatile means of organizing literary works. From the catalogues of Homeric epic to the postmodern fables of Borges to new digital media, from medieval encyclopedism to Renaissance copia, from the descriptive realism of novels to modernist techniques of collage, the simple list has produced an astonishing variety of effects in a wide range of genres and authors. We will read widely in this course, from many periods, literatures, authors, and genres.

COLT 1813N. Early Modern Women's Writing.

Interested in women writers, feminism? If so, it's vital to understand their early modern origins. This course explores the rich feminist tradition enacted in the often edgy texts of women writing on the cusp of modernity. We study writers from England, France, Latin America, North America, and Spain, focusing on self-fashioning, gender and sexuality, love and marriage, imagined worlds, religion, eccentricity, and writing and fame. Authors include Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mme de Lafayette, María de Zayas. Enrollment limited to 20. Texts and class in English.

COLT 1813O. Adventures of the Avant-Garde.

In the early years of the twentieth century, a series of artistic movements rippled across the Western hemisphere, exploding conceptions of art and culture while reconfiguring international relations. Explores those movements, from their predecessors (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé), through overlapping –isms (Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Vorticism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism), to avatars in the Americas. In keeping with the avant-garde's cross-pollinating spirit, we study texts from a variety of traditions, forms, and genres: from poetry through prose to manifestoes, from painting and photography to film, music, and dance, touching on questions of translation and translatability between languages, cultures, and art-forms. Enrollment limited to 25.

COLT 1813P. Captive Imaginations: Writing Prison in the Middle Ages.

Many great works of the Middle Ages were written in prison or about the experience of imprisonment. Reading some of these masterpieces, we will discover why the medieval prison was such a fruitful space for poetic creation, and how the perspective of incarcerated writers helped to shape a diversity of literary traditions. Topics will include fortune and free will, sexual and cultural difference, and the construction of the individual. We will also explore the nature of medieval systems of captivity, which differed greatly from those of modern society. Selected authors: Boethius, Mas'ud Sa'd Salman, Juan Ruiz, Chaucer, François Villon.

COLT 1813Q. Literature and Judgement.

There exists a close but complex relationship between the acts of making literature and making judgments. This course will explore some of these relationships and ask, for instance: how does judgment weigh upon the literary act? how do literary considerations bear on our making judgments? what criteria are called forth in both of these moments? Texts treated will be literary, critical-analytical, legal, and cinematic, and include such authors as Arendt, Benjamin, Derrida, Freud, Henry James, Kafka, Kant, Primo Levi, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Verga.

COLT 1813R. The Ekphrastic Mode in Contemporary Literature (ENGL 1762B).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1762B.

COLT 1813V. The Cash Nexus: Economy and Literature.

At a time when human existence is grounded with unprecedented conviction in a rigid set of utilitarian principles and materialistic values, the relationship between literature and various modes of economic exchange presents itself as a richly rewarding field of research. The texts we will focus on offer rare insights into the ways monetary factors affect personal identity, interpersonal relationships, and social life in general. These works reflect a diachronic tension between human interactions and financial transactions that will be the basis of our critical engagement with a series of issues and questions that are more pertinent today than ever before.

COLT 1813X. Getting Emotional: Passionate Theories (ENGL 1560W).

Interested students must register for ENGL 1560W.

COLT 1813Z. Soil: The Earth and Environmental Writing.

Why do people fight over soil? In an increasingly urbanized world, how have the ways we talk about soil, earth, and land shifted? In this class, we will explore the politics and aesthetics of writing about soil in its particular relations to ecology, homeland, geography, and race. Readings include Homer’s Odyssey, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and ecological criticism from ancient China to Rachel Carson and Ramachandra Guha and beyond. Limited to 20.

COLT 1814A. Fashion and Power (GNSS 1960Y).

Interested students must register for GNSS 1960Y.

COLT 1814D. East-West Encounters: Politics and Fictions of Orientalism.

We will explore the myth of the East that develops in Europe during the Enlightenment in the wake of the extremely popular and influential translations of The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla) in the early eighteenth century. We will focus on narratives of the encounter between East and West, on the discovery and construction of the Oriental “Other,” and on its representation in the literary and visual culture of the Enlightenment. Particular attention will be paid to the figure of Shahrazad and the theme of the harem. We will study some modern versions of the Arabian Nights.

COLT 1814F. Erotic Desire in the Premodern Mediterranean (CLAS 1750L).

Interested students must register for CLAS 1750L.

COLT 1814G. Political Commitment in Arabic Literature.

This course will explore the history of and debates surrounding political consciousness and commitment in modern Arabic literature from the mid-20th century to the present. Through close readings of mainly novels, novellas, and short stories, we will ask how, why, and with what consequences Arab authors have challenged political realities with literary expression. We will trace the diverse strategies by which authors articulated their criticisms and envisioned justice grounded in their political context. Topics and themes will include socialist realism, resistance literature, alienation, self-criticism, and responses to colonialism and censorship. No knowledge of Arabic required.

COLT 1814L. Apartheid in Post-Apartheid South African Literature.

In this course, we explore the political stances that contemporary South African writing articulates towards the apartheid regime. We bring particular attention to the textual emergence of queer subjectivities. During apartheid (1948-1994), South Africa became a global symbol of racial injustice, and several South African writers became famous for their anti-apartheid literary production. Since 1994, critics have looked for new frames in which to analyze a “new” literature. In the search for “newness,” however, we may forget to consider how the “old”–apartheid–reappears in post-apartheid literature. Authors include Zackie Achmat, K. Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe, and Zoe Wicomb.

COLT 1814M. Postcolonial Literature + Thought in the Middle East and North Africa.

This course examines postcolonial literature and thought in the ME and North Africa through literature, theory and film. During the early and mid-20th century, anticolonial movements transformed the region’s cultural landscape, igniting new intellectual circles and literary scenes. We will study these movements as a launching ground for regional culture, interrogating local anti-colonial thought in works by writers such as Memmi and Fanon, and examining its evolution from the 1960’s-1990’s in work from Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Morocco and Palestine. How did intellectuals and artists articulate issues like national liberation, Westernization, radical culture, feminism, Marxism and Orientalism?

COLT 1814Q. Species Matters: Animals in Literature, Film, and Theory.

Nonhuman animals constitute the limit against which humans define themselves; at the same time, they challenge such boundaries. Thinking about animals, then, always also means exploring our own humanity. In this course, we will draw on the vast archive of literature, philosophy, and art that engages animals in order to reconsider what and how these representations mean. Considering our complex relationships with other animals, we will address questions of ontology, aesthetics, and ethics: What makes an animal? Can animals be represented? How should animal suffering affect us?

COLT 1814R. Reflections from Damaged Life: Freud, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida (GRMN 1891).

Interested students must register for GRMN 1891.

COLT 1814S. The Balkans, Europe's Other?: Literature, Film, History.

Introduces the modern Balkans through a critical examination of literary and visual, historiographic and political, narratives. The course considers the contestation over a shared historical past and interreligious geographic space through common and divergent master narratives, motifs, myths, and recurring discourses. It also examines the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political relation to Europe. Do the Balkans constitute a traumatized, “balkanized,” self-colonized, abject modernity at Europe’s edges, its inner alterity? Given the acclaim achieved by Balkan filmmakers since 1989, the course also asks how Balkan artists, caught in-between nationalism, Orientalism, Eurocentrism and globalization, assert agency and subjectivity and captivate our imaginations.

COLT 1814T. Maghrebi Fiction and Psychoanalysis.

Recent fiction from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya) in both French and Arabic has been preoccupied with mothers and fathers, gestation and regeneration, inheritance and transmission, filled with figures for desires and origins blocked or diverted. In this course, we will read Maghrebi literature together with works of psychoanalytic theory, focusing in particular on uncertain origins and aborted futures, geographies of the North African landscape and of the soul. Texts by Achaari, Berrada, Chraïbi, Djebar, Kateb, al-Koni, Mustaghanimi, Wattar; Deleuze & Guattari, Fanon, Freud, Jameson, Jung, Lacan. Students of French or Arabic invited to read in the original.

COLT 1814U. Politics of Reading.

What do we do when we read? And do we even do something, or, as Blanchot suggests, do we rather let be? While being true to Michel de Certeau’s plea for a “politics of reading” and an “autonomy of the reader”, we will question its binary logic (active vs. passive): 1. by looking closely at the (de)construction of a “sovereign reader” in Hobbes’ Leviathan; 2. by analyzing the reading imperative—“Read!”—as it is staged in Plato’s and, above all, in Sade’s erotics; 3. by taking seriously Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical intuition that one should “read what was never written”.

COLT 1814Y. Posthumanism and the Ends of Man.

Have we ever been human? As mechanical implants, virtual extensions, and organic interdependencies challenge self-contained conceptualizations of human being, posthumanist theories invite us to rethink our self-understanding. In this course, we will explore the human as a fluid category in perpetual motion. Focusing on female and gender nonconforming bodies, which have traditionally been situated at the limits of the human, we will analyze the critical potential of hybrids, androids, and cyborgs. Readings among others by Ovid, the Brothers Grimm, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Han Kang, and Octavia Butler; films will include Metropolis, Mad Max: Fury Road, and the series West World.

COLT 1815A. Apocalypse.

The End of the World is central to the Abrahamic faiths. From the Jewish sources, through Christian and Islamic tradition und until the present day, the idea of the End of World is decisive for the understanding of major events in history, such as the birth of Islam or Modernity. Through readings across the religious and the secular traditions starting with the Torah and ending with Steve Bannon and ISIS.

COLT 1815F. Memory, Commemoration, Testimony.

In this course we will study problems of remembering and forgetting in a variety of texts including poetry, philosophy, psychoanalysis, memoirs, public monuments, memory studies and trauma theory. We will explore the roles of language and representation in dealing with the past, the temporality of the self, the operation of the unconscious, the memorial and the monument. We will also look at the politics of memory in relation to the cultural traumas of slavery, the Holocaust, Viet Nam and 9/11. Readings from Rousseau, Hegel, Wordsworth, Proust, Derrida and de Man; Freud, Caruth, Saidiya Hartman, Segalen; Arendt and Reznikoff.

COLT 1815G. Repetition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud (GRMN 1200D).

Interested students must register for GRMN 1200D.

COLT 1815I. Torn Halves of Modernism.

This course analyzes the constitutive contradictions of modernist works from a global perspective. We will address, for instance, tensions between the periphery and the metropolis, city and countryside, realism and modernism, aesthetic autonomy, commodification and political commitment. We will also examine these questions across various media: novels, poetry, photography, architecture and film. Readings include works by Dos Passos, Faulkner, Döblin, Manuel Maples Arce, Roberto Arlt, Patrícia Galvão.

COLT 1815O. Modern Greece in the World (MGRK 1240).

Interested students must register for MGRK 1240.

COLT 1815P. The Coming Apocalypse: Between the Earth and the World (HMAN 1974L).

Interested students must register for HMAN 1974L.

COLT 1815R. Germans and Jews (GRMN 1340Y).

Interested students must register for GRMN 1340Y.

COLT 1815T. Narratives of Disability in Greek and Latin Literature (CLAS 1070)..

Interested students must register for CLAS 1070.

COLT 1815U. Encountering Monsters in Comparative Literature.

What is a monster? What happens when one encounters a monster? This literature-based seminar considers monsters in different literary traditions, including ancient epic, folktale, poetry, theory, science fiction, and cinema. Monstrous figures from different cultural traditions, places, eras, genres, and forms will guide us through various representations of monstrosity—a concept which both invites and defies definition. We will ask: What cultural and imaginative needs do monsters fill? How do monsters help us think about identity politics, and the cultural production of ideas of self and other? To what extent are monsters tools of ideological oppression, and to what extent are monsters liberatory figures that offer conceptual alternatives to systems of oppression and violence?

COLT 1815V. "Blitzlesen", or Fascism and Speed-reading: Deleuze, Cixous, Heidegger.

Today everyone, it seems, is a lightning reader, or "Blitzleser". Rather than feel guilty about this, our course will ask: what would it mean to speed-read responsibly? Reading is, like democracy, always a matter of counting, of deciding which frequencies count (whether of letters, words, motifs etc.). Speed-reading risks overloading democracy with too much information and too many dots to connect, feeding paranoiac narratives in the style of QAnon or indeed Nazism itself. How to speed-read like a democrat? Our eyes will dart from Deleuze's claim that Cixous invented stroboscopic literature – difficult literature which only becomes readable when one reads quickly – to fascism's obsession with speed, which led Hannah Arendt to claim fascism desires "only a movement that is constantly kept in motion." Key authors include: Bernhard, Woolf, Martinetti, Deleuze, Guattari, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger. Media: The Lighthouse, Speed Racer.

COLT 1815W. How to Do Things with Modernism (HMAN 1976F).

Interested students must register for HMAN 1976F.

COLT 1815Z. Between Word and Image: The Twentieth-Century Arab Avantgarde.

What is the Arab avantgarde, and why is visuality its main project? How do experimental works of art and literature question dominant historical and political narratives? This seminar explores form-agitating literary and artistic works that emerged from major Arab cities in the twentieth century. It examines the role of the metaphorical and literal image as a new mode of storytelling, as an act of witnessing and documenting. Throughout the course, we will also touch on themes of memory and nostalgia, postcolonial nationalism, freedom and commitment, exile and return, as we navigate the complexities and developments of Arab cultural modernisms. Most primary texts will be read in Arabic with English translations offered when available. At least three years of Arabic (or equivalent) are required for enrollment.

COLT 1970. Individual Independent Study.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

COLT 1980. Group Independent Study.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Please see the registration staff for the correct section number to use when registering for this course.

COLT 1990. Senior Thesis Preparation.

Special work or preparation of honors theses under the supervision of a member of the staff. Open to honors students and to others. Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

COLT 2450. Exchange Scholar Program.

COLT 2520A. City (B)Lights: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of the City.

Literary texts from the U.S., England, France, and Germany, together with substantial readings in the social sciences and selected works of art and cinema. Intended as a laboratory for interdisciplinary studies in an expansive educational spectrum for humanities Ph.Ds.

COLT 2520B. Dark and Cloudy Words: Metaphor and Poetry.

An examination of the philosophical significance of metaphor and its literary function in poetry ranging from makurakotoba in the Man' yōshū to kenningar in Skaldic poetry, to the use of the trope in a number of modern poets. Critical writings include works by Aristotle, Ki no Tsurayuki, Shelley, Christine Brooke-Rose, Max Black, Donald Davidson, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida.

COLT 2520C. Irony: Language and Failure.

A study in the trope of irony and the ways in which it complicates the possibility of understanding. Focus on Socratic irony, the dialogue, and Romantic irony. We will also consider the epistemological implications of irony and the role it plays in contemporary criticism. Readings from Plato, Quintillian, Diderot, Hegel, Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Lukács, Booth, De Man, Rorty and Derrida.

COLT 2520D. The Literature of the Americas.

Forsaking the dominant Eurocentrism in comparative literary studies, this seminar will search for the common links between the diverse literatures of North and Latin America, approached in relation to one another rather than to "Old World" models. Authors to be considered include Margaret Atwood, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, William Faulkner, Gabriel García-Márquez, Clarice Lispector, Machado de Assis, Toni Morrison and João Guimarães Rosa.

COLT 2520E. Dialectics of Word and Image.

Explores how proximities and interactions of text and image construct and complicate meaning. It brings together a constellation of theoretical and historical readings that have bearing on particular problems generated at the nexus of word and image. Readings by Horace, Abd al-Qahir Jurjani, Lévi-Strauss, Ricoeur, Derrida, Mitchell and others will anchor a cross-disciplinary investigation of European and non-European paradigms of the relationship between text and image in various literary and visual cultures since late antiquity. We will examine specific examples of the interaction between word and image in several Islamic manuscripts.

COLT 2520F. Theories of the Lyric.

Through readings of recent critical discussions of the lyric genre, we will explore more general methodological problems of literary theory. Questions to be raised include: the role of form, structure and tropes in analyzing poetry; problems of subjectivity and voice; the relation between poetry, history and politics; the function of reading; and the problematic "objectivity" of criticism. Readings from Jakobson, Benveniste, Jauss, Benjamin, Johnson, De Man, Lacoue-Labarthe, Agamben, Badiou and Derrida. Focus on poets Hölderlin, Baudelaire and Celan.

COLT 2540C. Romanticism and Cultural Property (ENGL 2560Y).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2560Y.

COLT 2540D. After Postmodernism: New Fictional Modes (ENGL 2760X).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2760X.

COLT 2540E. Political Romanticism (GRMN 2320E).

Interested students must register for GRMN 2320E.

COLT 2540F. Romanticism and Cultural Property (ENGL 2560Y).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2560Y.

COLT 2540M. Latin American Existential Literature (HISP 2520L).

Interested students must register for HISP 2520L.

COLT 2540N. Alexandrian Poetry (CLAS 2930A).

Interested students must register for CLAS 2930A.

COLT 2650A. Comparative Literature and Its Others.

Is there such a thing as comparative literacy? This course examines the history and practices of Comparative Literature as a major discipline, including its self conceptualizations, its relations with national literatures and with other disciplines, and its evolving methods of reading. Texts include literary as well as theoretical ones.

COLT 2650C. Romantic Theory: Theirs and Ours.

Recent criticism will serve as the point of departure for looking into the relation of literary criticism to its Romantic history. Emphasis on how "Romantic" problems inform contemporary criticism on such topics as periodization, literature and history, theory of symbol and allegory, and the relation between literature and philosophy. Texts will be selected from Benjamin, M.H. Abrahms, de Man, McGann, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Chase, et. al.; Fichte, Schelling, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Schlegel, Novalis.

COLT 2650D. Theory of Comparative Literature.

Designed to introduce students to some of the central theoretical issues that define the discipline of Comparative Literature through the study of twelve central texts in the field. We will begin with Erich Auerbach's foundational text Mimesis, and end with Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline. In between the authors to be read and analyzed will be Bakhtin, Lukacs, Barthes, Derrida, DeMan, Jameson, Greenblatt and others. Open to graduate students, and to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.

COLT 2650E. Theory of Lyric Poetry.

No description available.

COLT 2650F. Irony.

A study of the trope of irony and its evaluation, especially in the Romantic tradition. Focus on the epistemological implications of irony and the role it plays in the philosophical tradition and in contemporary criticism. Readings from Plato, Hegel, Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Lukács, Booth, De Man, Rorty and Derrida.

COLT 2650G. Literary Readings in Aesthetic Theory.

The seminar will examine not just the major themes but also the rhetorical complexities of a number of powerful texts in the history of aesthetic theory. Authors to be considered include Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Burke, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno. Literary texts will be considered in conjunction with these texts, sometimes by way of famous arguments or exchanges (e.g., Heidegger and Staiger on Mörike).

COLT 2650H. On the Sublime (GRMN 2660A).

Interested students must register for GRMN 2660A.

COLT 2650N. Hamlet: Appropriation, Mediation, Theory (ENGL 2360X).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2360X.

COLT 2650T. Foundations of Literary Theory (POBS 2600C).

Interested students must register for POBS 2600C.

COLT 2650U. Theory, Technics, Religion (ENGL 2901K).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2901K.

COLT 2650V. Italian Theory: In and Out (HMAN 2400U).

Interested students must register for HMAN 2400U.

COLT 2650W. Vision and Visualization in Literature: The Rhetoric of Enargeia (CLAS 2110K).

Interested students must register for CLAS 2110K.

COLT 2650X. Police, Strike, Justice: Revisiting Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" (GRMN 2662F).

Interested students must register for GRMN 2662F.

COLT 2650Y. Walter Benjamin Around 1921.

In 1921 Walter Benjamin was working simultaneously on three significant and interrelated essays: “Toward the Critique of Violence,” “The Task of the Translator,” and “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” The seminar will focus on this set of writings as providing insights into Benjamin’s criticism as a whole. After examining closely Benjamin’s essays on violence and on translation we will read Goethe’s novel and Benjamin’s study of it using the new translation and critical edition, Writings on Goethe (Stanford University Press), that will be appearing at the end of this year. Works will be read and discussed in English with attention to the German (seminar participants with knowledge of German are encouraged to read the texts in the original language).

COLT 2720A. Advanced Practicum in Literary Translation.

Readings in theory of translation, and in monuments of literary translation from Renaissance times to the present, will be assigned to students needing further background in these areas. Students will each complete two projects: (1) by mid-semester, a critical treatment of a published translation or a comparison of such translations; (2) for the final seminar presentation and paper, the student's own translation into English from some literary text in a language familiar to the student.

COLT 2720B. Theory and Practice of Literary Translation.

Readings in the history and theory of translation from the Renaissance to the present, along with selected major examples of literature in English translation. Students will write two papers: (1) an analysis of a theoretical issue in translation, with ample attention to the historical context of that issue; and (2) either a discussion of an important translation as a criticism of the original work; or a critical comparison of several translations of an original work; or an annotated translation into English of a literary text from a language familiar to the student.

COLT 2720C. Literary Translation.

Study and practice of translation as art and a potent form of literary criticism. Translation is an act of interpretation, which informs the language of the translator and the text as a whole: context, intent, and language. Discussion will include the impact of cultural difference, tone and time on translation, and the role of analytical as well as intuitive understanding of the original in the translator's endeavor.

COLT 2720D. Translation: Theory and Practice.

This seminar will address the theory and practice of translation, and their place in the Humanities. Essays by translators, authors and scholars will be drawn from a range of contexts, as will literary and historical texts. Each participating student will work on a substantial translation project over the course of the semester. The seminar is a requirement for students completing the Department of Comparative Literature's Graduate Certificate in Translation Studies. Open only to graduate students.

COLT 2820A. New Directions for Comparative Literature.

In this seminar we will read a number of recent critical and theoretical works (not limited to the humanities) which may fruitfully suggest new directions for literary studies. Our readings may include topics such as the new history of capitalism, sociological approaches to the modern choice architecture of emotions, recent philosophy of science, border studies and migration, decolonization, ecocriticism and public humanities. Participants will be expected to contribute to the syllabus according to their own research interests.

COLT 2820B. Fiction and History.

Focuses on how the historical fiction that has flourished over the past three decades challenges the notions of objectivity and totalization, while providing alternative viewpoints for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the past. Authors to be considered include E. L. Doctorow, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Günter Grass, José Saramago Isabel Allende, Lídia Jorge, Coover. Attention will also be paid to theoretical texts by Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Walter Benjamin, Linda Hutcheon, and Roger Chartier.

COLT 2820D. The "Tenth Muse" Phenomenon.

The texts and contexts of women writing in English, Spanish and French, during the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries. Often dubbed "Tenth Muses," these first early modern women writers to gain public prominence wrote iconoclastic texts and/or epitomized socially sanctioned scripts for women. Authors include: Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Sor Juana, Mme de Lafayette, Maria de Zayas.

COLT 2820E. What was Enlightenment?.

Emphasizes two of the Enlightenment's most durable artists-Mozart and Jane Austen-situating them in the context of other writers of their times (such as Kant, Casanova, and Adam Smith) and modern appropriations of their work (in criticism and performance). Sub-themes are desire, reason, education, and forms of otherness. Class hours include viewing time.

COLT 2820F. Latin America and Theory.

Explores the engagement of Latin American literature and criticism with non-Latin American bodies of literary and cultural theory (including poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism and cultural studies), addressing tensions between the autochthonous production of theoretical frameworks and their import from other contexts. Readings include the Latin American Subaltern Studies group, Revista de Crítica Cultural, Rama, García Canclini, Sarlo, Richard and current new media theorists. Open to graduate students and qualified seniors.

COLT 2820H. The Politics and Aesthetics of Masochism.

Masochism is defined as a, aestheticized positive, consensual investment in power relations. As such, it directly engages the relationship between politics and aesthetic forms, but as a sexualized relationship. Masochism articulates relations of gender in ways that seem to challenge traditional structures. Readings include novels and films, as well as theoretical engagements with masochism.

COLT 2820I. Literature and the State of Exception.

This course takes as its point of departure Walter Benjamin's famous diagnosis of modernity as a paradoxical condition under which the exception has become the rule. We will consider the aesthetic and political implications of such a state of exception in nineteenth- century literature. Authors include Baudelaire, DeQuincey, Arnold, Melville, Whitman, Benjamin, Derrida, Nancy and Agamben.

COLT 2820L. Moderns and Primitives.

Major writers, artists, and theorists of European modernism put a new emphasis on the status of primitive society and archaic pre-history. We will consider the works of Durkheim, Eliot, Joyce, Picasso, and others with reference to the anthropology and ethnography of their period, and to subsequent post-colonial critique and controversy.

COLT 2820M. Discourses of the Senses.

A comparative study of a variety of discourses dealing with the relation among the senses, the arts, and the problems of comparativity, interdisciplinarity, and intermediality. Topics will include ekphrasis, synaesthesia, mysticism and the theory of correspondence, the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the limits between media. Readings from Condillac, Lessing, Kant, Swedenborg, the German Romantics, Baudelaire, Wagner, Balzac, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Panofsky, Tschumi and others.

COLT 2820N. City (B)Lights.

Interdisciplinary explorations of the modern urban experience featuring social sciences, literature and film. Convergences and differences in the presentation of urban life in literature, film, the visual arts, urban planning, and social sciences, including sociology, political economy, urban ecology. City populations, bureaucracy, power groups, alienation, urban crowds, the city as site of the surreal, are central themes. Against the background of classic European urban images. American cities and literary works are foregrounded.

COLT 2820O. Jacques Derrida's of Grammatology.

This course is an introduction to the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. We will focus on his most important work, his "Grammatology", though a series of some of his essays will also be part of the readings. Other readings will include the works of authors crucial to Derrida's thought and to an understanding of the "Grammatology": Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Rousseau and Levi-Strauss.

COLT 2820P. Aesthetics and the Eighteenth Century Subject.

The debates about taste, judgment, beauty, sentiment, and sensation in the eighteenth century gave rise to the discourse of aesthetics as we know it today, but they also exerted a powerful influence on how knowledge, virtue, and subjectivity were imagined in the post-enlightenment period. In this course, we will examine some of the founding texts of aesthetic theory from the era (including Locke, Smith, Burke, Lessing, and Kant), and then turn to consider how aesthetic questions informed and were taken up by Goethe's narrative of subject-formation in his Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In English.

COLT 2820Q. Culture and Politics in Cuba and the Caribbean.

Complicating standard narratives about intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, explores writings whose relationship to the state is neither affirmative nor oppositional. Focusing on journals and on recent work in cultural theory, history, anthropology, and political science, addresses the evolution and potential of civil society; articulations of marginality; revisions of socialism and the Soviet legacy; and the mobility of theory. Spanish required.

COLT 2820R. Postcolonial Melancholia.

Figures of loss and defeat proliferate widely in the accounts of colonization, national liberation, and decolonization in South Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and the Americas. We will attend to the particularity of loss by juxtaposing readings in literature and postcolonial theory with readings on mourning and melancholia, drawn from a range of disciplines.

COLT 2820S. Poetry after Kant.

Begins with the intensive study of a selection of writings by Immanuel Kant focused especially on force and conflict in politics and aesthetics. This study, along with relevant readings from more recent work, will provide the basis for an approach to this topic in nineteenth-century poetry. Readings of Kant (Critique of Judgment, "Toward Eternal Peace," The Conflict of the Faculties), Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben and will lead to several "case studies" of nineteenth-century poetry, including works by Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold.

COLT 2820T. Universals.

Explores the status of universals in classical, Hellenistic, Scholastic, and Renaissance metaphysics. Also explores the literary implications of this philosophical problem. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Chrysippus, Augustine, Cicero, Seneca, Abelard, Avicenna, Aquinas, Scotus, Ficino, Cusanus, Pico, and Suárez.

COLT 2820U. Literature and Judgment.

Investigates the intersections between acts of literature and acts of judgment, between language and the law. How is literature to be judged, when is it "good" or "bad"? Does literature lie, and if so, does it matter? Does it hide a crime? And, in turn: does literature provide its own particular kind of judgment, one that may make evident the very fictional status of the law? Readings span from the Bible to contemporary post-colonial readings (Rousseau, Tolstoy, Zola, Freud, Kafka, Arendt, Benjamin, Henry James, Primo Levi, Coetzee, Sadegh Hedayat).

COLT 2820V. Nietzsche, Foucault, Latour (ENGL 2900K).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2900K.

COLT 2820W. Ethical Turns (ENGL 2900N).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2900N.

COLT 2820X. Things Not Entirely Possessed: Romanticism and History (ENGL 2561B).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2561B.

COLT 2821C. From Hegel to Nietzsche: Literature as/and Philosophy (GRMN 2660O).

Interested students must register for GRMN 2660O.

COLT 2821L. Postcoloniality and Globalism (ENGL 2900Z).

Interested students must register for ENGL 2900Z.

COLT 2821S. Historical Form.

This class explores comparative literary approaches to historical narrative, especially in the context of recent work in transnational studies. Questions to be considered will include: what are the implications of transnational and postcolonial historiography for the formal study of historical writing and knowledge? What are the aesthetic resources of non-European traditions for narrative analysis? What tropes and spatiotemporal frameworks do writers use to narrate the connected past?

COLT 2821Z. Objects of (and in) Animation (MCM 2120H).

Interested students must register for MCM 2120H.

COLT 2822A. War.

More than a century ago, the mass scale of modern industrial warfare seemed to mark a break in Western philosophy and literature. Innovative theoretical analyses and a new, self-conscious genre of “war poetry” emerged to engage with the consequences of the mass slaughter, concerned with such topics as nihilism, the limits of empathy, and the discontinuity of experience. These issues only intensified after the Second World War and have remained pressing. We will read representative texts from the First World War to the present, exploring such issues as the linguistic representation of war, the problem of visibility, and the civilian-military divide.

COLT 2822B. Introduction to Italian Studies (ITAL 2100).

Interested students must register for ITAL 2100.

COLT 2822C. What Is Called Thinking? On Critical Styles (GRMN 2661T).

Interested students must register for GRMN 2661T.

COLT 2822K. Virgil's Aeneid (LATN 2010E).

Interested student must register for LATN 2010E.

COLT 2822O. Literature and Philosophy: Case Studies of a Vexed Relationship (GRMN 2662Q).

Interested students must register for GRMN 2662Q).

COLT 2822R. Metals, Mining, and Jewelry: Making the World Anew (HMAN 2402D).

Interested students must register for HMAN 2402D.

COLT 2822T. Book-Objects (HISP 2351E).

Interested students must register for HISP 2351E.

COLT 2830C. Literature and the Arts.

An investigation of the discourse of the arts in the modern European tradition. Topics include the relation between the Ancients and the Moderns, evaluations of the possibilities and limitations of differing media, the role of language in discussions of the "other" arts, and conceptions of synaesthesia and correspondence. Texts selected from Perrault, Winckelmann, Lessing, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Hoffman, Baudelaire, and others.

COLT 2830F. Walter Benjamin and Modern Theory.

An intensive reading of selected essays by Walter Benjamin on language, literature, aesthetics, and politics will be paired up with the study of the interpretation and impact of this work on contemporary work in literary theory and philosophy. In addition to Benjamin, we will also read Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Samuel Weber, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Fenves. German and/or French helpful but not required. Open to graduate students only.

COLT 2830H. Cultural Translation: Theory and Practice.

Across a range of disciplines, "cultural translation" today stands for the dynamic interactions among cultures. Derived from cultural anthropology and linguistic translation, the metaphor of translation (already a metaphor: trans+latere, to bear across) is used increasingly to analyze how cultures are transmitted through the operations of colonial expansion, diaspora and immigration. Though cultural globalization is assumed to be a 20th century phenomenon, the result of an expansion and acceleration in the movement and exchange of ideas, commodities and capital, this seminar considers a longer historical frame for understanding cultural competition. Theoretical texts including Schleiermacher, Jakobson, Benjamin, Derrida, Spivak, and a "case study," Shakespeare.

COLT 2830I. Histories of the Early Modern Body.

This seminar considers the production of knowledge about the body in the early modern period. The institution of science and how the emerging "science" of the body was visualized; discourses of the erotic, the scientific and the religious; the body in varied cultural performances including the blason, devotional texts, erotica, drama etc. Texts include theoretical work on gender and sexuality. Open to graduate students only.

COLT 2830L. Economies of the Visual (The Reverse of Images).

In The Time-Image, Deleuze wrote: “Money is the reverse of all the images that the cinema shows and edits on the obverse, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film.” What are the implications of this sentence for the economy of images (what Susan Buck-Morss terms their iconomy)? From The Big Store (Marx Brothers) to Peter Jackson’s King Kong, we will trace various mobilizations of the gaze, leading from the proto-cinematographic elevators and escalators to the actual developments of eye-tracking technologies, allowing for an increasing commodification of the gaze itself.

COLT 2830P. The History of Wonder in Colonial Spanish American Lettres (HISP 2350H).

Interested students must register for HISP 2350H.

COLT 2830Q. Augustan Literature and Egypt (LATN 2090I)..

Interested students must register for LATN 2090I.

COLT 2980. Reading and Research.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

COLT 2990. Thesis Preparation.

For graduate students who have met the residency requirement and are continuing research on a full time basis.