Global Arc

A study of the relation between the writing of poetry and the question of modernity as a theoretical and cultural problem. The course will take into account the various experimental movements that opted for poetry as their primary medium (imagism, dadaism, surrealism, futurism), as well as the work of certain poets who have indelibly marked the 20th century's poetic landscape (Yeats, Brecht, Neruda, Cavafy, and others). Students are expected to know at least one of the foreign languages involved well enough to read the original texts. One three-hour seminar.

Literature, art, computer code, social media, news, music and video games--copyright underpins almost everything we read or hear. But it is not an old idea. Why was it invented? For whose benefit? What is a "work" or an "author"? Is copyright still relevant, or is a new framework needed? From Balzac and Dickens to Facebook, from Bizet to Broadway musicals, this new course invites students to think about the philosophical and cultural issues raised by copyright in the past and present--and for the future. Taught jointly by a professor of Comparative Literature and a practicing intellectual property lawyer; for students in all disciplines.

Poetry can be seen as a mode of reflection on history and, very often, as an act of resistance to it. This course will examine works written in Europe, Latin America and the US during the 20th and 21st centuries in different languages and historical contexts. We will explore their oppositional and also their liberatory effects: their ability to evoke their times, to disrupt our usual understandings while offering new political, artistic and ethical perspectives. The course will pay special attention to the work of René Char and Paul Celan, as ideal points of focus for questions of language and resistance.

Societal and political themes - such as class struggle, race/race relations, national/cultural identity, the rights of workers, gender and sexuality - are inextricable from the novel, as the form that seeks to encapsulate the experience of life in the modern world. But although every novel is political, some novels are deliberately so. This seminar will discuss notable novels that engage with political themes as well as the political implications of the novel as a genre. We will also be screening major works of what we might call "political cinema" to complement and enhance our discussion of these political narratives.