Global Arc

This course examines how political repression has shaped the literature and culture of the modern Mediterranean. Each week we focus on a national space (Albania, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria), approaching work from that space in terms of its aesthetic, political, and cultural significance. Through close, historicized, and comparative readings of these texts, we explore the relationship between literature and politics; translation and identity; and representations of state power, authoritarian rule, and struggles for liberation.

This course examines how Arab writers have used the craft of fiction to address major social and political issues such as displacement, labor migration, war, social repression, and dictatorship. The course covers novels from Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon, Palestine, Morocco, and Iraq. Topics covered include the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian struggle, Islamic fundamentalism, and Iraq under the Baathist regime. The course will also look more broadly at experiences of exile and migration and the postcolonial world as reflected in modern Arabic writing. All readings are in English translation.

Post-2000 Israeli cinema offers powerful representations of the local and global forces shaping life in contemporary Israeli society. In this course, through analysis of twelve recent cinematic masterpieces, you'll develop your own vision for a film. We'll discuss both artistic choices and social questions including Israeli women's rights, Arab-Jewish relations, and religious-secular tensions. Weekly assignments culminate in your original screenplay exploring an aspect of contemporary Israeli society. Class time is split between synchronous discussions and asynchronous practicum activities. All films and texts are in English translation.

In our seminar we will read seminal romantic and realist works, exploring the intersections and interactions between them that have proven formative to their internal development and that of their main genres, poetry and prose. Key critical, theoretical, and philosophical considerations of the textual and conceptual issues they raise will also be discussed, with a view to understanding the textual dimensions of the literary history that precedes them and that they continue to produce. Works by Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, among others.

An investigation of the literary, medical and philosophical treatment of women in medieval and early modern Europe. We will consider works by both female and male authors, thus enabling us to compare ways in which women saw themselves with the ways in which they were seen by men. The cult of women as well as misandry and misogyny, and debates centering around such crucial matters as childbirth, witchcraft and the evil eye will be explored. Among the authors we will consider are Hildegard von Bingen, Christine de Pizan, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Aphra Behn, Veronica Franco, and William Shakespeare.

The course aims to trace the origins of the first person in the Western literary tradition through the lens of confession, both as discourse and sacrament. By examining a series of texts that date from the late 12th century till the late 14th century, the course will consider how authors staged (oftentimes false) confessions in a bid to test the relation between the first person and truth as well as to claim a novel authority for fiction. By pairing medieval literary and theological texts with contemporary criticism, the course will try to understand how this period paved the way for our understanding of the first person and its discourses.

In this seminar we will explore the dark side of the Enlightenment, sometimes also called, The Age of Reason. The English, German, French and American fictions we will read are shockingly willing to challenge all our pieties and inhibitions, particular with respect to the most intimate and the most sacred relations of our lives. How it is possible, we will ask, that the age that brought us liberty, equality, and fraternity also brought us such gleefully conspicuous cruelty, terror, and vice? How is it possible that philosophical texts both expose and indulge such qualities?

Literary texts from two or more national cultures will be viewed in a historical perspective of a specific period (the Renaissance or the Enlightenment) or a significant event (the French Revolution or World War I) or a social phenomenon (the Industrial Revolution). The mutual relationship between the image of the world created by writers and the impact of writers upon the world they reflect.

Relationships between conceptions of literary form and developments in intellectual history, spanning different genres and cultural traditions. Some examples: modernism in the context of 20th-century ideological conditions; the rise of the novel traced through philosophies of the 18th and 19th centuries.

This course invites students to consider not just what poems mean but how they mean¿and how that ¿how¿ complicates, challenges, obscures, enlivens, or collides with the task of translation. We will look at forms of poetry that challenge the limits of the translatable, as well as radical translation methods that expand our notion of what translation is. Examples include poems written in made-up languages; unstable texts; homophonic and visual translation; erasure poetics; and multilingual poems. Exploring the places where poetry and translation meet (or diverge), we will put traditional concepts of originality and derivation to the test.