Global Arc

This course follows the development of modern Hebrew prose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How was Hebrew refashioned from a liturgical to a modern literary language capable of narrating novels and conveying contemporary dialogue? Who were the revolutionary writers who accomplished this feat and what ideological struggles accompanied it? We will begin with the haskala (Jewish enlightenment), continue with the tehiya (revival) and early writing in the yishuv (Jewish community in pre-State Palestine), and conclude with dor ha-medina (the "independence generation") and maturation of modern Hebrew. Reading knowledge of Hebrew required.

This course explores Cervantes' seminal text from literary, historical, philosophical, medical and visual perspectives.

In this seminar we will read major works by the three philosophers whose formulations of thinking and experience continue to provide the basis for modern critical and theoretical thought. We will elucidate these works both individually and in their historical and conceptual relationship to each other considering their extension to the major disciplines whose bases they transformed (epistemology, aesthetic theory, moral philosophy, political and economic theory, and historiography, among others) and the basis of their own conception in specific discursive and, thus, literary forms.

What is "passing" and why is it such a persistent obsession of great literature and film? Why does the act of changing one's identity fascinate, excite, and repel us? At once a universal phenomenon and the most intensely personal of experiences, passing is a site where history, culture, law and society collide with individual identity and desire. This course examines narratives from the African-American, Jewish-American, and LGBTQ contexts in order to explore the idea of passing through the lenses of race, ethnicity, and gender. We will consider both the promise and the limits of comparison in working in and between these multiple frames.

The age-old relationship between literature and war is fundamentally a problem of ethics. This course is centrally concerned with ethics and aesthetics: the ethics of war, the aesthetics of war literature and film, and the ethics of making art about war. It explores the triangulation of warfare, literature, and ethics in the 20th-21st centuries, approaching this relationship through multiple thematic frames and genres (poetry, fiction, film, photography, and critical essays), with texts drawn from a diverse array of world cultures. Topics include total war, memory and trauma, translation, partition, war and comics, and virtual warfare.

Theory and philosophy of formal educational practice with specific attention to ethical questions and political implications. How have ideals and practices of education changed over time, especially with the unprecedented emergence of common or universal public education in the last two centuries? How is learning braided with power and desire; with nations and subjectivities; with class, race and gender; with colonial structures; with the reproduction of norms, and challenges to them? This course is not a survey of all educational philosophies, but a selection of critical writings that we will study intensively in the classroom.

This seminar will investigate how literary authors use language both to create a sense of "the real" and to question what "the real" may be. Looking closely at forms of description and narration including verbal tense, figural patterns (such as repetition, simile and metonymy), vocabulary, voice, irony, and grammatical construction and syntax, we will study some of extraordinarily complex ways fictions generically termed "realist" bring about an "effect" or apprehension of the real we could not otherwise perceive, including its relation to temporality, causality, historicity and historical reflection in general.

As Hegel, most discursive philosophers, and every poet demonstrate, "sense" is a uniquely complex, necessarily temporal thing, as divorced from organic replication and animal mimicry as curiosity and history from transmissible illness or the concept of violence from violence itself. In this course we study primary modes of signification- from acts of indirection and association Freud called "detours" to "formal" delineations and transpositions of "content"--in which literary, cognitive and aesthetic sense are made. Works by Diderot, Kant, Lessing, Hegel, Wordsworth, Saussure, Freud among those we read. Open to all undergrad and grad students.

This course studies literature dealing with contemporary regimes of violence and forced migration in the Americas. Focusing on the passage from the Cold War to the War on Drugs, it analyzes the history of the current "migration crisis" in relation to structural adjustments, regimes of accumulation, border patrolling, and immigrant incarceration. Working with poetry, narrative, essays, and film, it explores the ways in which artistic interventions and cultural imagination have become crucial spaces for creating systems of legibility and resistance that reflect on the migrant experience and the historicity of multiple injustices.

This course examines the unique status of "justice" as an idea whose very conception depends on its inherent relation to practice. Beginning with Plato, we explore why attempts to define the idea of "justice" result in theories of the polis or State, why ethical conceptions of justice require conceptions of freedom, and why conceptions of freedom require aesthetic and linguistic articulation. The aim of the course is to approach these critical issues gradually, through careful readings and discussion of ancient to modern texts, incl. Plato, Locke, Kant, Schiller, Kleist, Hegel, Adorno, Rawls, Derrida