Global Arc

The short story and other forms of brief imaginative prose as they have developed in English and the European languages during the 19th and 20th centuries. The seminar discussions will examine selected works of such authors as Chekhov, Lawrence, Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Borges, Nabokov, W. C. Williams, Welty, Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Tournier, and Barthelme. One lecture, one two-hour seminar.

In an effort to encompass the variety of responses to what is arguably the most traumatic event of modern Western experience, the Holocaust is explored as transmitted through documents, testimony, memoirs, creative writing, historiography, and cinema. In this study of works, reflecting diverse languages, cultures, genres, and points of view, the course focuses on issues of bearing witness, collective vs. individual memory, and the nature of radical evil. One three-hour seminar, plus weekly film showings.

This course is an introduction to contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literature and visual arts. Placing special emphasis on the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, it analyzes different genres and artistic styles that emerge with new forms of imagining the relations between culture and politics, from the 1960s to the present.

This course aims at reading and analysis of some of the most iconic texts of the Middle Ages including the Mediterranean. In addition to providing a fascinating group of texts for us to discuss, `Rethinking Medieval Cultures' will reveal the many dynamic perspectives at issue during this foundational period of Western civilization. Issues of power - political, religious, amorous and supernatural - attitudes toward sex and gender, slavery, class and dreams are some of the topics voiced in our readings.

This course will offer a comparative approach to the cultural production of contemporary Greece, investigating the "Greek crisis" through literature and film of the past decade, as well as writings drawn from history, anthropology, political science, and economics, contemporary news sources, political and cultural blogs, and even the fast-changing landscape of Athenian graffiti. Students will face the comparatist's challenge of encountering not only an unfamiliar literature as it unfolds in a time of crisis, but also an unfamiliar culture, history, and society, mediated not just by linguistic translation but by market forces and media spin.

Study of a selected theme or topic in comparative literature. Subjects will range from historical and cultural questions (literature and politics, the literature of the avant-garde) to the study of specific literary themes or topics (feminine autobiography, the grotesque in literature).

An exploration of the cultural meanings of the Gothic mode through a study of its characteristic elements, its origins in 18th-century English and German culture and thought, its development across Western national traditions, and its persistence in contemporary culture, including film, electronic media, clothing, social behavior, and belief systems, as well as literature. Films, artifacts, websites, and electronic publications will supplement readings. One three-hour seminar.

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.

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.