Global Arc

"How was your day?" "Tell me about yourself." Such commonplace prompts draw out "everyday stories" of real, unremarkable life. But what counts as real life or unremarkable life, and what happens when it gets into literature, too? What parts of reality do everyday stories suppress or show up? Drawing on writers from Roland Barthes to Christopher Isherwood to Virginia Woolf, this course looks at novels, stories, diaries, and essays that present versions or theories of everyday life. Students will also be invited to experiment with their own stories or non-stories of the everyday.

This course is devoted to different varieties of modern fantastic fiction. Our readings will include a tale told by a dead dreamer or his double, a counterfactual history, an animal fable, a hybrid science fiction-detective novel, and several surreal political satires. We will discuss the literary conventions that govern fiction ranging from the banally implausible to the studiedly outrageous, and address the particular cultural contexts that produce and sustain these works.

This course explores oral traditions and oral literary genres (in English translation) of the Balkan and East European world, both past and present. Topics include traditional rituals (life-cycle and seasonal) and the music and song associated with them, contemporary forms of traditional and popular culture, and oral traditional narrative: prose (folktale and legend) and poetry (epic and ballad). Discussion and analysis will focus on the roles and meanings of Balkan and East European oral traditions as forms of expressive culture.

A class in both drama and theater. Students will read a range of dramatic comedies, from pre-modern to modern times, including the work of such playwrights as Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, and Ionesco. One day a week there will be a lecture on the play, while in the next class students will observe actors performing scenes from the play so as to demonstrate different interpretive approaches. Topics of interest will include the relation between stage and page, the nature of laughter, the place of comedy in the history of culture, and the varying styles in which comedies have been both written and performed.

This course is an introduction to the study of contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts with a transatlantic perspective. Placing special emphasis on the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, the course will analyze different genres and artistic styles that emerge with new forms of imagining the political from the 1960s to the present. Readings will include critical texts on minor literatures, transatlantic connections, new social movements as well as literature dealing with situationism, romance reportagem, indigenous movements, testimonio, zapatism and contemporary global mobilizations.

African literature and films have been a vital (but often unacknowledged) stream in and stimulant to the global traffic in invention. Nigerian literature is one of the great literatures of the 20th century. Ethiopian literature is one of the oldest in the world. South Africans have won more Nobel Prizes for Literature in the past forty years than authors from any other country. Senegalese films include some of the finest films ever made. In this course, we will study the richness and diversity of foundational African texts (some in translation), while foregrounding questions of aesthetics, style, humor, and epistemology.

Many assume that pre-twentieth-century Africa has no history. Rather, it has so much history that communicating all its richness can be a challenge. In this class, therefore, we focus on particular instances that speak to the tremendous diversity of the period from 300 to 1500 in Africa - its political systems, religious communities, and dynamics of cultural and economic conversation. We also address Africa's interconnectedness within and to the rest of the world as a vital part of the global middle ages. Primary sources include letters, treatises, and chronicles but also maps, archeological layouts, frescos, inscriptions, and rock art.

What does it mean to talk like an animal? Why and how do writers attempt such tricks? This course has as its focus a particular type of fiction, that of the speaking animal. We will examine the long-term development of this genre in novels, novellas, television and the occasional lyric, paying particular attention to the tension between the fantastic premise of the animal autobiography and a set of realistic concerns about the natural world. We will also take into account man's changing relationship with animals, a menagerie of privileged bookish beasts, and the repertory of stylistic strategies on which these writers draw.

This interdisciplinary course examines Jewish-Muslim interaction in the spheres of written culture, kinship, shared culinary practices and living spaces, neighborhoods, musical customs, and overlapping religious practices. It considers these relations in Spain, Egypt, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and modern France. Historic contexts include the amazing medieval world of the Cairo Geniza and Islamic Spain; colonialism and modernity in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Mediterranean; and the present-day aftermath of Jewish emigration from the region. This is a rich history with many paths, as viewed through the prism of culture.

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