Contacts | Program of Study | Program Requirements | Summary of Requirements | Grading | Honors | Advising | Courses

Department Website: http://complit.uchicago.edu

Program of Study

The major in Comparative Literature leads to a BA degree and is designed to attract students who wish to pursue interdisciplinary course work focused on the study of literature, textual artifacts, and translation, written in various languages and in various parts of the world.

Some students come to the University of Chicago with a strong background in languages other than English and want to work in two or more literatures (one of which can be English). Some students have a strong interest in literary theory and wish to address poetics, study of genre or translation, and/or questions of transnational circulation and production of knowledge that go beyond the boundaries of national literature offered in other literature departments. Or, some students wish to pursue in-depth study of the interrelationship of literature, culture, and other arts and fields of knowledge, as well as issues that transcend the traditional demarcations of literary history and area studies. 

Our students work with the Director of Undergraduate Studies to design a plan of course work that will suit their individual goals while taking advantage of the rich offerings of the University.

Program Requirements

Students interested in majoring in Comparative Literature should review the following guidelines and consult with the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Comparative Literature. These guidelines are to assist students in developing a balanced and cohesive plan of study which would be most accommodating and beneficial to the student’s academic development. 

The major includes seven courses in the major and supportive fields of study, selected in consultation with the Director of Undergraduate Studies; one foundational course in comparative methodology; two courses in Comparative Literature, offered by the department; and a yearlong BA Seminar that serves as a capstone to the major.

Students work with the Director of Undergraduate Studies to identify a primary field (four courses) and a secondary field (three courses) of study. A student wishing to work in two literatures might choose two literatures as the primary and secondary fields (note: only the second literature can be English). The secondary field might be another national literature or area studies (e.g., East European Studies), another discipline (e.g., mathematics, history, film, performance studies, music), or literary theory.

Study abroad offers an attractive means of fulfilling various aims of this program. More than half of the major requirements must be satisfied by courses bearing University of Chicago numbers.

Summary of Requirements

Three language courses in a single language at the intermediate level or above300
Four courses in a literature other than English, one of which can be in a closely related field400
Three courses in a secondary field, which can be literature in another language (including English), another discipline (e.g., mathematics, performance studies, music), or literary theory300
CMLT 20109Comparative Literature - Theory and Practice100
Two 20000-level courses in literary theory, methods, or special topics in Comparative Literature200
Total Units1300

Foreign Language Requirement

The Comparative Literature major requires three language courses in a single language at the intermediate level or above. Students who come in with high or native proficiency in a language other than English may instead substitute three courses in a second language (other than English) at any level.

A student can provide proof of high language proficiency in two ways:

  1. A student may pass one of the Chicago Language Center's Office of Language Assessment Academic Reading Comprehension Assessments (ARCA) in a foreign language, if available for the relevant language; for more information, visit languageassessment.uchicago.edu/arca. Note: On occasion, faculty may need to provide language examination in the case that no ARCA test is available.
  2. A student can demonstrate high proficiency on the basis of the student's formal schooling experience in a country outside the United States at the high school (secondary) level. Students should write a brief description of their schooling and submit it, along with a transcript showing at least two years of high school study in the relevant language, to the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Comparative Literature.

Though all majors must demonstrate proficiency in a single language through at least the second-year sequence in a foreign language (or by providing proof that they enter the program with high proficiency in either of the two ways noted above), they are encouraged to continue their language study beyond the minimum required for the major. The Department of Comparative Literature works closely with the University of Chicago Language Center and helps students achieve their individual goals in language acquisition by suggesting programs of study that would best add to their language expertise and desired proficiency goals.

BA Project

The BA capstone project is to be completed in the student's last year of study. The project should be approved by the Director of Undergraduate Studies and supervised by a faculty member of the student's choice in Comparative Literature. It may be co-advised by a faculty member from another department. Students must complete their formal application to the major by spring of third year and should identify a faculty advisor at that time.

One obvious choice for a BA project is a substantial essay in comparative or interdisciplinary literary study. This option should not, however, rule out other possibilities. Alternative examples are a translation from a foreign literature with accompanying commentary, or a written project based on research done abroad in another language and culture relating to comparative interests. Students are urged to base their project on comparative concepts and to make use of the language proficiency that they will develop as they meet the program's requirements.

NB: This program may accept a BA paper or project used to satisfy the same requirement in another major if certain conditions are met and with approval from both program chairs. Students should consult with the chairs by the earliest BA proposal deadline (or by the end of third year, when neither program publishes a deadline). A consent form, to be signed by both chairs, is available from the College adviser. It must be completed and returned to the College adviser by the end of Autumn Quarter of the student's year of graduation.

Participation in the Program

Students should express their interest in the major as early as possible. The first step is to meet with the Director of Undergraduate Studies to consult about a program of study. Applicants must submit an application form which consists of a list of completed courses and a list of courses in which they are currently registered. Special mention should be made of language courses or other language training that affirms a student's level of language proficiency. Each proposal will be evaluated on the basis of the interest of the student and his or her achievement in the languages needed to meet the goals of the intended course of study. Students will be notified by email of their acceptance to the program. Finally, students will need to formalize their declaration through my.uchicago.edu with the assistance of the College adviser.

Grading

All courses to be used in the major must be taken for a quality grade of B– or higher.

Honors

To be eligible for honors in Comparative Literature, students must earn an overall cumulative GPA of 3.25 or higher, and a GPA of 3.5 or higher in the major. They must also complete a BA thesis or project that is judged exceptional in intellectual and/or creative merit by the first and second readers.

Advising

Students must consult on an ongoing basis with the Director of Undergraduate Studies for selection and approval of course work for the major. Students need to regularly provide documentation of any course approvals for the major to their College adviser for the necessary processing. Further advice and counseling will be available from the preceptor of the BA Seminar and from the faculty member who supervises the student's BA project. 

Comparative Literature Courses

CMLT 14920. Comparative Media Poetics: Horror. 100 Units.

Cinema, videogames, and VR: all moving-image media, which have at times exerted multi-directional aesthetic influences on each other. This course will investigate the raw materials and basic forms at the disposal of artists working in and across these media, with a special focus on horror as a genre. Along with fundamental questions regarding the social, psychological, and political uses (and abuses) of horror as a genre, this course will also look at how horror works across a variety of media. In what way do the possibilities available to game developers differ from those available to filmmakers, and vice versa? How are space, time, and action presented and segmented differently across moving images (cinema), interactive moving images (games), and fully-immersive virtual environments (VR)? How do techniques ranging from psychological identification to jump scares work in each medium, and what aesthetic effects are open to one that are not open to the other? Course materials will include horror cinema, horror games (video and otherwise), VR experiences, and written horror literature.

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 14920, MAAD 14920

CMLT 20109. Comparative Literature - Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

This course introduces methods of study in Comparative Literature. We will take up interdisciplinary approaches, including translation and critical theory. Students will develop and deepen their skills in close reading and the comparative analysis of text and art forms.

Instructor(s): Anna Elena Torres     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: Completed Humanities, or Civilization Core requirement. The course is designed for the second-year students and above.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 28918

CMLT 20124. The Bible Throughout History: From the Dead Sea Scrolls to King James. 100 Units.

While the collection of ancient texts found in modern Bibles appears fixed and is read by many people as a source of edification or theological insight, it has not always been this way. Though absent from most Bibles, there is an entire body of literature commonly known as "rewritten bible": early translations, retellings, or entirely new stories with familiar names and faces that update, retcon, or subvert their "biblical" sources. How might we understand these ancient forms of fan fiction? The class will introduce this corpus (including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and its sources, production, and historical contexts. We will confront significant problems in understanding religious texts: how is it that some texts become authoritative while other very similar texts do not? Who gets to retell foundational religious narratives, and within what social or political constraints? What does it mean to relate to sacred texts as artistic prompts or imperfect points of departure? Can a biblical text be rewritten for an entirely different religious tradition? We will consider similar questions for contemporary religious practice, asking: how did rewriting the Bible get started, and has it stopped?

Instructor(s): Doren Snoek     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 29908, RLST 20124, JWSC 20924, MDVL 20124, FNDL 20124

CMLT 20230. Iconology East and West. 100 Units.

Iconology is the study of images across media and cultures. It is also associated with philosophical reflections on the nature of images and their relation to language-the interplay between the "icon" and the "logos." A plausible translation of this compound word into Chinese would describe it as "Words in Pictures, Pictures in Words":  诗中有画,画中有诗. This seminar will explore the relations of word and image in poetics, semiotics, and aesthetics with a particular emphasis on how texts and pictures have been understood in the Anglo-European-American and Chinese theoretical traditions. The interplay of painting and poetry, speech and spectacle, audition and vision will be considered across a variety of media, particularly the textual and graphic arts. The aims of the course will be 1) to critique the simplistic oppositions between "East" and "West" that have bedevilled intercultural and intermedial comparative studies; 2) to identify common principles, zones of interaction and translation that make this a vital area of study. (Theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): WJT Mitchell     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Enrollment in the course will be with the consent of instructor; it is open to students at all levels, but enrollment will be limited to 15. Students should send a one page statement of their interest to W. J. T. Mitchell (wjtm@uchicago.edu)
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20230, ARTV 30033, CMLT 30230, ARTH 20033, ARTH 30033, ENGL 30230, ARTV 20033

CMLT 20711. Jewish Graphic Narrative: Between Memory and Caricature. 100 Units.

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of "graphic novels" aimed at adult readers concerning Jewish society, history, and religion. This course explores the history of comics through the lens of its Jewish creators and Jewish themes, and the history of Jewish culture and society through the lens of graphic storytelling. We learn to interpret this complex art form that combines words and hand-drawn images, translating temporal progression into a spatial form. Reading American, European, and Israeli narratives, our discussions will focus on autobiographical and journalistic accounts of uprooting, immigration, conflict, and loss. We will ask: how do Jewish graphic novelists grapple with the history of racist caricature? What is the relationship between graphic narrative and memory culture? Authors whose work we will study include: Art Spiegelman, Rutu Modan, Lianna Finck, Joann Sfar, Joe Sacco, R. Crumb

Instructor(s): Na'ama Rokem     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): JWSC 20701, RLST 26062, SIGN 26062, NEHC 26062

CMLT 21090. Reading Transnational Early Modern Race through Gender. 100 Units.

Is race an anachronistic expression in Renaissance Europe? What are the stakes for studies of race in premodern periods? How did early modern race operate differently from contemporary racialized epistemologies and in what ways are we continuously influenced by the premodern times? This course tackles these questions by foregrounding two vocabularies in the early modern racial paradigm: gender and transnational constructions. We will read primary texts set and produced both in Renaissance Europe and its colonies in Africa, Americas, and Asia, and ask: how did the structural relationship of race and gender work in tandem with, or against each other? What roles did transnational and transcultural exchanges such as Christian missions, colonization, commerce, and slave trade play in the ideations of race? We will pay close attention to fictionalized female characters and women writers, ranging from the desired white beauties in Shakespeare's Othello and Cervantes's The Bagnios of Algiers, to Nahua (Mexico) and Visayan (the Philippines) women in The Florentine Codex and The Boxer Codex, to the spiritual diaries of indigenous and black nuns in the Colonial Spanish America, to Aphra Behn's depiction of Oroonoko's execution in Surinam, and finally to the unwritten disposable lives of enslaved black women in the Atlantic slave trade.

Instructor(s): Yunning Zhang      Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 31090, GLST 21090, RDIN 21090, SPAN 22090, GNSE 23166

CMLT 21600. Comparative Fairy Tales. 100 Units.

How do we account for the allure of fairy tales? For some, fairy tales count as sacred tales meant to enchant rather than edify. For others, they are cautionary tales, replete with obvious moral lessons. For the purposes of the course, we will assume that these critics are correct in their contention that fairy tales contain essential underlying meanings. We will conduct our own readings of fairy tales from the German Brothers Grimm, the Norwegians, Asbjørnsen and Moe and the Dane, Hans Christian Andersen, relying on our own critical skills as well as selected secondary readings.

Instructor(s): Kimberly Kenny     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HUMA 28400, GRMN 28500, NORW 28500

CMLT 22001. Bringing up the Novel in Bohemia. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): REES 28007, FNDL 22203

CMLT 22210. Decolonization and Culture. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the various theories of militant or "fighting" cultures engendered by global struggles for decolonization throughout the twentieth century. Beginning with the global upswell of revolutionary movements at the end of World War I, intellectuals and artists from the colonial world began to enlist poetry, novels, art, music and other cultural forms in the struggle for decolonization. At the same that culture was instrumentalized for larger political struggles, meanwhile, "culture" itself was increasingly understood as a distinct site of struggle: The decolonization of culture was part and parcel of the decolonization of peoples. This course traces this evolving global discourse linking culture and decolonization across the twentieth century, exploring how writers and activists from the colonial world articulated a new cultural agenda within the context of broader programs of social transformation. Throughout we will contend with key questions and dilemmas faced by culture producers in the age of decolonization: What is the role of artists in a revolution? How does culture serve as a staging-ground larger political and ideological conflicts? What are the promises and pitfalls of treating decolonization as a metaphor? To answer these and other related questions, we will draw on case studies from the Harlem Renaissance, the Proletarian Literature movement, Haitian and Latin American Indigenist movements, Négritude, and Third Worldism.

Instructor(s): Noah Hansen      Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 22210

CMLT 22400-22500. History of International Cinema I-II.

This sequence is required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies. Taking these courses in sequence is strongly recommended but not required.

CMLT 22400. History of International Cinema I: Silent Era. 100 Units.

This course provides a survey of the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural, and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. Especially important for our examination will be the exchange of film techniques, practices, and cultures in an international context. We will also pursue questions related to the historiography of the cinema, and examine early attempts to theorize and account for the cinema as an artistic and social phenomenon.

Instructor(s): Allyson Field     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 is required. Course is required for students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): For students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies, the entire History of International Cinema three-course sequence must be taken.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 32400, MAAD 18500, ARTH 38500, ARTH 28500, MAPH 33600, CMST 48500, CMST 28500, ARTV 20002, ENGL 29300, ENGL 48700

CMLT 22500. History of International Cinema II: Sound Era to 1960. 100 Units.

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

Instructor(s): James Lastra     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required. Required of students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 48600, CMLT 32500, ENGL 29600, REES 45005, ARTH 38600, REES 25005, CMST 28600, MAAD 18600, ENGL 48900, ARTV 20003, ARTH 28600, MAPH 33700

CMLT 22410. Proust: The first volume. 100 Units.

This course will undertake in-depth readings of the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. While we will use a translation, any student who can read the French is strongly encouraged to do so (alongside the English, to facilitate class discussion). By doing close readings, we will explore the famous Proustian world, its textual and cultural complexities, the literary style it inaugurates, as well as the belle époque it depicts. The course will thus consider social, literary, historical, and critical approaches to this seminal text.

Instructor(s): Françoise Meltzer     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): The course is intended for graduate students, but advanced undergraduates (third or fourth years) can take the course with the permission of the instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 32410, DVPR 42410, CMLT 42410, RLST 28410, FREN 22410

CMLT 22668. Suffering and Justice. 100 Units.

What is suffering, and what is its relationship to justice? This course explores the construction and circulation of understandings of suffering and justice through literary and aesthetic representations, the law, non-governmental organizations, and intellectual discourses. We will consider how local and transnational contexts shape understandings of suffering and the various attempts to respond to it (through, for instance, human rights advocacy, revolutionary politics, humanitarianism, and bearing witness). Readings will include works by Rigoberta Menchú, Antjie Krog, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Ariel Dorfman, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martha Nussbaum, Elaine Scarry, Didier Fassin, and Paul Farmer.

Instructor(s): Nory Peters     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 32668, HMRT 22668

CMLT 22715. Antisocial Modernism: Troubled Subjects in 20th-Century East Asian Literature and Film and Beyond. 100 Units.

This course aims at an in-depth examination of the "dark side" of modernism through closing readings of various kinds of outsiders, misfits, and sociopaths in literature and film, with a focus on but not limited to East Asia and the 20th Century. If being "social" amounts above all to an acknowledgement of the plurality of human lives and an acquiescence to live together with others, what then does it mean to reject such a fundamental premise? In this course, we will investigate a variety of fictional characters who cannot or will not conform with the implicit conventions of communal life-criminals, lunatics, or simply people who find themselves struggling to sympathize with the feelings of others, etc. In tackling the aforementioned questions, our inquiry will be guided by a range of distinct methodological approaches such as moral philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Readings may include works by Lu Xun, Ma-Xu Weibang, Yi Sang, Kinugasa Teinosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kōbō, Murakami Haruki, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett, Gaston Leroux, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Jarman. All readings will be in English.

Instructor(s): J. Hou     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Not offered in 2023-24.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 22715

CMLT 23301. Balkan Folklore. 100 Units.

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments, and a living epic tradition. This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political, and anthropological perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition firsthand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, "Balkan Dance."

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 33301, NEHC 30568, REES 29009, ANTH 25908, REES 39009, ANTH 35908, NEHC 20568

CMLT 23310. Baudelaire. 100 Units.

This course will consider the major poems of Baudelaire as well as the chaotic political landscape that he inhabited.

Instructor(s): Françoise Meltzer
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 43300, RLIT 43500, FREN 43300

CMLT 23324. The Human Form in Contemporary Art. 100 Units.

In a present where humanity faces planetary challenges with an unprecedented urgency, the human form - what Marx calls our "genus-being" (Gattungswesen) - has become a focus for artistic production of all sorts. The thesis of the class is this: Contemporary art is an actualization of the human form that doesn't presuppose the form, doesn't take it for granted, but instead troubles the form and poses it as a question. The class considers presentations of the form in performance art (Tino Sehgal, Anne Imhof, Wu Tsang), sculpture (Kara Walker, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cecilia Vicuña), writing (Friederike Mayröcker, Layli Long Soldier, Tracie Morris), sound (Maria Chavez, Christina Kubisch, Samson Young), and painting (Michael Armitage, Tammy Nguyen, Mark Bradford). The class contextualizes these artists with theoretical work by Sylvia Wynter, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Jane Bennett, Achille Mbembe, Eva Horn, and Emanuele Coccia. Readings and discussion in English.

Instructor(s): Florian Klinger     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 23324, GRMN 23324, MUSI 23324

CMLT 23401. The Burden of History: A Nation and Its Lost Paradise. 100 Units.

What makes it possible for the imagined communities called nations to command the emotional attachments that they do? This course considers some possible answers to Benedict Anderson's question on the basis of material from the Balkans. We will examine the transformation of the scenario of paradise, loss, and redemption into a template for a national identity narrative through which South East European nations retell their Ottoman past. With the help of Žižek's theory of the subject as constituted by trauma and Kant's notion of the sublime, we will contemplate the national fixation on the trauma of loss and the dynamic between victimhood and sublimity.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 39013, NEHC 20573, REES 29013, CMLT 33401, NEHC 30573, HIST 34005, HIST 24005

CMLT 23411. Ecological Identities: Reading and Writing 'You' in the Anthropocene. 100 Units.

As our bodies acquire plastics and carcinogens, and as our minds become more entangled with images and digitized knowledge, what it means to be a human in nature will change-has changed. Climate change challenges us to realize how ecological processes and interspecies relations structure bodies, minds, collectives, and 'corporate persons' in real, material ways. Our senses of personhood and collective loyalties shift along with our material milieus. In this course, we will read and write these emergent ecological identities into view. We ask who, or what, are these (in)human agents and how can we locate a sense of self within such fluid boundaries? What role does narrative and metaphor-aesthetic forms, devices, mediums- play in locating the person and its ethical responsibilities? How can we make visible communities of bodies bonded through shared nonhuman bodies of water, air, toxic accumulation, conglomerates, and technologies. We will engage with questions of gender, race, class, regional, and planetary affiliations, to reorient our inherited, traditional borders and boundaries of identity, and broach the question of what it might mean to be a human-to be 'You'-in the Anthropocene. Our readings and writings must likewise cross traditional boundaries of genre, discipline, time-period, and place: environmental history, film, critical theory, speculative fiction, multimedia pieces, visual art, geography, juridical theory, theoretical biology, essays, and poetry.

Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 23411

CMLT 23421. Transcontinental Romanticism. 100 Units.

In 1836, at the age of 26, Margaret Fuller began teaching the great works of German Romanticism to students at Amos Alcott's radically progressive Temple School in Boston. Fuller's passion for the German Romantics and their propagation in America is representative of the profound importance that the "American Transcendentalists" (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller) attributed to German literature and its potential to shape American culture and values. In this course, we will explore the elective affinities between German Romanticism and its American counterpart, tracing the ways in which the two traditions mutually illuminate each other. Each unit will pair one major German and one major American text or artwork. Themes / pairings include: gender and mythology in Novalis' fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Fuller's fairy tales; spiritual landscapes in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the Hudson River School; slavery and abolition in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience;" exemplarity and individualism in Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Nietzsche's "Schopenhauer as Educator."

Instructor(s): Simon Friedland     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 23421, ENGL 23421

CMLT 23823. Melancholy: Readings in Medieval Christian Literature. 100 Units.

The idea of melancholy, a persistent affective orientation toward sadness and/or despair, is ubiquitous in Christian writings from the Middle Ages. This course considers the nature and function of melancholy and possible remedies in Christian discourses, and in so doing it provides a survey of medieval Christian literature. Readings may be drawn from authors such as Boethius, Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, Marguerite Porete, Dante, and Christine de Pizan. Special attention will be given to the role of literary form in Christian writing, competing accounts of despair and hope, and the relationship of Christianity to non-Christian discourses. There are no language prerequisites, though reading groups may be formed if sufficient students posses relevant language skills.

Instructor(s): M. Vanderpoel     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MDVL 23823, RLST 23823

CMLT 24017. Fact and Fiction: Hoaxes and Misunderstandings. 100 Units.

This course will focus on fictional texts that readers have misrecognized as factual accounts, as well as the less frequent case of factual texts misidentified as fictional. Students will study the rhetorical strategies or historical and cultural circumstances responsible for these "errors of pragmatic framing" (O. Caïra) by investigating the contexts governing the production or reception of works such as Apuleius' The Golden Ass, Les Lettres d'une religieuse portugaise, Denis Diderot's La Religieuse, Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Marbot: A Biography, and Orson Welles' adaptation of The War of the Worlds, among others.

Equivalent Course(s): FREN 34017, FREN 24017, CMLT 34017

CMLT 24223. Parrhesia: Fearless Speech from Socrates to Greta von Thunberg. 100 Units.

The course will examine the long history of parrhesia, the Greek term for free and fearless speech, from ancient Athens to its current renaissance through the rediscovery by Michel Foucault. Focusing on the relation of truth and discourse, the course will consider not only the extraction of truth as a form of subjection to disciplinary power but also acts of telling truth to power as a practice of self- formation and exercise of freedom. Parrhesia implies a relation between the human self and the act of truth-telling that is suffused with interesting political, philosophical, and ethical possibilities, which students will be encouraged to explore. The course will begin by reviewing Foucault's final lectures on parrhesia and "the courage of truth." It will then examine some of the ancient Greek and Christian texts that Foucault analyzed. It will go on to consider early modern instances of parrhesia (e.g. Galileo and Descartes) and will conclude by surveying relatively recent versions (e.g. Greta von Thunberg and James Comey, JD'85), including contemporary feminist and queer practices of parrhesia. Lectures and discussions in English. No prerequisites.

Instructor(s): Christopher Wild     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 34223, GRMN 34223, DEMS 24223, PARR 24223, RLST 24223, CMLT 34223, GRMN 24223

CMLT 24256. Récits et mémoire des catastrophes naturelles. 100 Units.

Ce cours propose d'interroger, dans une perspective diachronique et comparatiste, les enjeux de la mise en récit et de l'artification des « catastrophes naturelles ». On se demandera, par exemple, quelles formes de rationalisation, quels rapports à la temporalité implique le choix du récit, de l'image, du spectacle et de tel ou tel média (architecture, peinture, film, bande dessinée….). L'hypothèse de travail majeure du cours est que l'artification des catastrophes est inséparable de stratégies mémorielles et d'enjeux politiques. La réflexion se portera sur quelques mémoires (avec des extraits de Boccace, Montaigne, Samuel Pepys) et représentations fictionnelles des épidémies. La comparaison entre Le Journal de l'année de Peste de Defoe et la Peste de Camus amènera à s'interroger sur l'usage de la première personne dans les fictions de la peste.

Instructor(s): Françoise Lavocat     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Taught in French.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 34256, FREN 34256, FREN 24256

CMLT 24405. Kieslowski's French Cinema. 100 Units.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique catapulted the Polish director to the international scene. His subsequent French triptych Blue, White, Red turned out to be his last works that altered his image and legacy to affirm his status as an auteur and a representative of the transnational cinema. We discuss how in his virtual universe of parallel histories and repeated chances, captured with visually and aurally dazzling artistry, the possibility of reconstituting one's identity, triggered by tragic loss and betrayal, reveals an ever-ambiguous reality. By focusing on the filmmaker's dissolution of the thing-world, often portrayed on the verge of vague abstraction of (in)audibility or (un)transparency, this course bridges his cinema with the larger concepts of postmodern subjectivity and possibility of metaphysics. The course concludes with the filmmaker's contribution to world cinema. All along, we read selections from Kieślowski's and Piesiewicz's screen scripts, Kieślowski's own writings and interviews, as well as from the abundant criticism of his French movies. All materials are in English.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 24405, REES 31002, REES 21002, FNDL 25312, CMST 34405

CMLT 24419. Kafka: Acrobatics of Reading. 100 Units.

In a universe determined by power such as Kafka's - patriarchal, legal, governmental, colonial power, but also physical constraints such as gravity and entropy - everything depends on one's ability or inability to perform. Against such determination, Kafka's texts work as exercises in self-empowerment and -disempowerment, acts that constitute their power to perform through their very performance. Taking Kafka's short prose as a test case, the course investigates the relationship between two things: First, the acrobatics performed in and by the texts that not only feature a cast of tightrope walkers, hunger artists, bucket riders, and other performers, but can more generally be read as a series of kinetic experiments involving plot, description, imagery, sound, and grammar. Second, the acrobatics it takes us, the audience, to engage these texts-demanding a similar artistry of performance that includes casting highly flexible, improbable, and often risky readerly strategies in response. From the short prose, the course broadens its focus to include the longer texts and the diary, as well as excerpts from the fragments Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle. Readings and discussion in English.

Instructor(s): Florian Klinger     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 24419, FNDL 24419

CMLT 24425. Invasion Culture: Russia Through its Wars. 100 Units.

A look at contemporary culture through Russia's invasions, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Broadly, this course explores how war determines cultural life. How do the policies and tactics of war, and the art and literature of wartime, convey ideas about power and the state, traditional vs. modern values, civilizational mission vs. cultural pluralism? Beyond Russian literature and film, we consider voices from Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Chechnya, Syria, Belarus, and Ukraine, asking, How are Russia's wars fought in the domain of culture?

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 34425, REES 24425

CMLT 24510. Kawaii (cuteness) culture in Japan and the world. 100 Units.

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as "cute" or "adorable") has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today's conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called "Pink Globalization". With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24511, ENGL 24510, MAAD 14510

CMLT 24655. Forgeries and Flippancies: Literary "Fakes" 100 Units.

This is a course on fakes, forgeries, hoaxes, and all manner of intentional anachronisms designed to forge fake pasts, with a particular emphasis on how invented texts and artifacts might impact contemporary society and the "post-truth" world. By engaging in weekly case-studies around four central authors (Samuel Constantine Rafinesque, Pierre Louys, James Macpherson, Thomas Carlyle), students will learn to describe and categorize different kinds of such "flippancies" and to articulate their political weight across time. Examples include invented poems from Ancient Greece, spurious Native American epics, forged ancient Scottish epics, and the like. Our study of the main texts will be accompanied by a look at other forgeries that have played a not so fake role in the course of history (such as the Donation of Constantine). This course is appropriate to undergraduates of all levels interested in critical theory, the study of premodern cultures in a political dimension, as well as contemporary debates about cultural appropriation.

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 24655

CMLT 24715. On Dialogue: Introduction to a Genre. 100 Units.

The figure of Socrates is famous for engaging Athenians in dialogue, but what was so important and effective about this mode of exchange? How did Socrates' dialogue work as a philosophical exercise? Why was the dialogue suited to mediate between gods, Socrates, and citizens? In this class, we will take a philosophical and historical approach to the genre of dialogue, analyzing key moments in the genre and related texts to trace the relationships between the mode of dialogue, the role of the divinity, the obligations of the citizen, and the formation of the subject. Starting from the dialogue of Socrates, we will read from classical antiquity into the Christian context, with attention to the creative transformations of the genre and the changing notions of subject, god, and citizen. In the final turn, we will return to two canonical texts of modern philosophy, the Dialogues by David Hume and Dialogues by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to examine how modern philosophical texts deploy the mode of dialogue, invoke the classical and Christian modes, and transform the genre again.

Instructor(s): Maureen Kelly     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course counts as a general literature course or pre-20th century literature course for CRWR students.
Equivalent Course(s): CLCV 24722, RLST 24715

CMLT 24723. Philosophical Anthropology: Origins of the Human. 100 Units.

What makes us human? What is our place in the cosmos? What common condition unites us as a species across race, gender, and ethnicity? In this course, we will explore these questions through the lens of twentieth-century German thinkers who placed the human being at the center of philosophical inquiry. Seeking an alternative to both religious and scientific accounts, the philosophers Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, and Helmut Plessner developed new conceptions of the human that sought to do justice to both our spiritual and our biological being. We will take an historical approach to this intellectual movement, considering how philosophers such as Herder, Kant, and Nietzsche laid the groundwork for a reevaluation of who we are. In the conviction that literature also plays a vital role in formulating a philosophical anthropology, we will also consider several poets, in particular Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. All texts will be read in English translation.

Instructor(s): Simon Friedland     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 34723, GRMN 24723, CMLT 34723

CMLT 25105. In the Beginning": Origin, Style, and Transformation in the King James Version Matrix. 100 Units.

The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible (KJV) set off a series of events and texts dedicated to the great influence of this literary classic-a vernacular English Bible from 1611. What is it about the KJV that has so obsessed readers and writers? How has it become part of and affected world literature? Are there competing ways of conceiving the biblical text in English literature? In this course, we will trace some of the KJV's thematic and stylistic influences in global Anglophone literature; sometimes we will deal with direct allusion and rewriting, and other times we will study the possibilities of more tenuous links. In parallel to this work, we will problematize the KJV's astounding centrality by: examining some pre-KJV literature and alternative early-modern and 20th century translations (particularly as these intersect with Jewish tradition); attending to subversive and postcolonial literary uses of the translation; and close-reading the political and ideological motivations behind certain forms of critical adulation. Texts examined may include works by authors such as George Peele, William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Zora Neale Hurston, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

Instructor(s): Chloe Blackshear     Terms Offered: Spring

CMLT 25424. Spiritual Exercises: Giving Form to Thought and Life from Plato to Descartes. 100 Units.

This course will examine the tradition of spiritual exercises from antiquity to the early modern period. Spiritual exercises were at the core of classical paideia, the regimen of self-formation designed and promoted by ancient philosophers, orators, and other pedagogues. As Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault have demonstrated, ancient philosophy first and foremost has to be understood as a "way of life," as a set of techniques and practices for shaping the self according to wisdom. It was not until philosophy's critical turn with Kant that it shed its practical dimension and became a "theoretical" discipline. Early Christianity, stylizing itself as the "true philosophy," eagerly adopted the ancient spiritual exercises and retooled them for its salvational ends. Throughout the middle ages and early modern period spiritual exercises and meditative techniques informed a host of religious, cultural, and artistic practices and media such as prayer and devotional reading, religious art and poetry, but also theatrical performances and musical works. We will focus on individual exercises like the meditation, the examination of conscience, the discernment of spirits, the application of senses, prosoche (attention), consolation, contemplation, etc., and discuss authors such as Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, John Cassian, Augustine, Bonaventure, Ignatius, Descartes, and others.

Equivalent Course(s): COGS 22017, CLAS 35423, CLCV 25423, FNDL 25424, CMLT 35424, GRMN 25424, RLST 25424, GRMN 35424, RLVC 35424

CMLT 25823. Three Comedies of Sexual Revolution. 100 Units.

This seminar will discuss three comedies of sexual revolution from three different times and places. Aristophanes's Assemblywomen recounts how under the leadership of the able Praxagora the women of Athens take over the Assembly and legislate a new regime in which private property is replaced by communism and sexual equity is achieved in favor of the old and unattractive at the expense of the young and attractive. Machiavelli's Mandragola dramatizes the tricks by which young Callimaco manages with the aid of the trickster parasite Ligurio to have sex with Lucrezia, the beautiful young wife of the elderly lawyer Nicomaco, with the consent of both her and her husband, ushering in a new regime in which all are satisfied. In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure Angelo the interim duke of Vienna institutes a repressive sexual regime in which the brothels are closed and extramarital sex is a capital crime. What might we learn about sexual relations from these diverse plays? Why are they comedies?

Instructor(s): Glenn Most & Nathan Tarcov     Terms Offered: Spring. Spring 2024
Prerequisite(s): Undergraduates need the Instructor's permission to register.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 25997, GNSE 35997, SCTH 25823, CLCV 27623, PLSC 35997, CMLT 35997, SCTH 35997, CLAS 37623, FNDL 21772, PLSC 25997

CMLT 25999. Realism: Art or Metaphysics? 100 Units.

Besides its historical role as the first capital-letter avant-garde in painting and literature, Realism is making a return in many current artistic and, for that matter, cultural and journalistic contexts. But whether one examines its entanglement with reputed adversaries like Romanticism and Idealism, its origins in ancient and medieval metaphysics, or its strange side career as a label for amoral pragmatism in political theory and practice, the many-sidedness of realism makes pinning it down quite a challenge. Is there any common thread binding Plato and Courbet, Virginia Woolf and García Marquez, Catherine Opie and Ai Weiwei? Can there be a realism of dreams and desire, such as one might find in Freud? And is realism a revolutionary venture, or a consolidating surveillance of social types? What role do new technologies and forms of spectatorship, from oil painting to photography, the printed book to streaming media, play in its rise and evolution? Readings in art history, fiction, and philosophy will alternate with film screenings and gallery visits.

Instructor(s): Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich      Terms Offered: Autumn. Autumn
Prerequisite(s): No Consent Required
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 35010, ARTH 39609, ARTH 29609, SCTH 25010, KNOW 35010, CMLT 35999, KNOW 25010

CMLT 26040. Theater in East and Central Europe: Between Power and Powerlessness. 100 Units.

National independence movements, revolutions, authoritarian regimes, and the decline of empire: playwrights in East and Central Europe wrote major works of world literature in response to these events - and sometimes in prescient anticipation of them. This seminar introduces students to the plays that, from Chekhov to Havel, shaped the fates of nations. Topics include: the avant-garde, theater of the absurd, acting methods, performance art, and documentary theater.

Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 35214, REES 34404, TAPS 25214, REES 24404

CMLT 26105. Queering God. 100 Units.

Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking? Is God queer? What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies. We will analyze the ways that contemporary artists, activists, and scholars are using theology to reimagine gender and experiment with new relational forms. Our readings will include a variety of genres: memoir, letters, scriptural interpretation, and a novel. There will be no presumption of previous acquaintance with any of the readings or topics discussed, or indeed with any academic theology or queer theory at all.

Instructor(s): Olivia Bustion     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12124, RLST 26105

CMLT 26113. Queer South Asia. 100 Units.

This course explores representations of queerness, same-sex love, sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literary texts translated from South Asian languages as well as films, geographically ranging from India and Pakistan to Sri Lanka. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we will examine questions of history and continuity (recurrent themes and images); form and genre (differences of representation in mythological narratives, poetry, biography, fiction, erotic/legal/medical treatises); the relationship of gender to sexuality (differences and similarities between representations of male-male and female-female relations); queerness as a site for exploring other differences, such as caste or religious difference; and questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 23145, HMRT 26113, SALC 26113, CRES 26115

CMLT 26269. Religious Authority in Comparative Perspective. 100 Units.

When somebody tells us about the nature of God or the gods, about what such beings want from us, about our experiences before this life or our destinies after it-why should we believe them? With equal and opposite force, why shouldn't we believe them? Are the standards of acceptable belief entirely independent of what we're told by religious authorities, or is it impossible to arrive at any such standards without presuming something we've been told? When confronted with diverse claims about the divine, should we try to ascertain which ones are true, should we combine or harmonize them in some way, or should we dismiss the entire conversation as wrongheaded? In this course, we'll think through these questions with the help of influential texts drawn from the Buddhist, Hindu, Platonic, and classical Chinese traditions.

Instructor(s): Stephen C. Walker     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course meets the CS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26269, DVPR 36269

CMLT 26311. Worlding Otherwise: Speculative Fiction, Film, Theory. 100 Units.

Worlding Otherwise: Speculative Fiction, Film, Theory This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. Speculative works frequently reimagine the past and present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. We will also consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to studying subgenres-such as Afrofuturism-we will explore speculative fiction as a critical mode of reading that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining.

Instructor(s): Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 26312, GNSE 26311

CMLT 26328. The Werewolf in Literature. 100 Units.

Human transformation into animals (and into wolves in particular) is a recurring trope in many cultures' storytelling. Authors have used the story device to explore the nature of humans and animals, human fear and vulnerability, psychological problems and mental illness, gender and sexuality, social/racial hierarchy, marginalization, and identity, and our own capacity for violence and savagery. In this course we will examine werewolves in literature and film from several cultures (French, English, German, Finnish, Blackfoot, Japanese) in English translation, primarily from the late 20th century onward. We will focus on how the aforementioned themes are used and developed in each work and the overarching patterns of werewolf stories.

Instructor(s): David Delbar     Terms Offered: Spring

CMLT 26523. Motherless Tongue:" Introduction to Transnational Writing in German. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to contemporary authors writing in German whose texts explore cross-pollinations between languages and cultures. Discussions will center around topics such as: identity; cosmopolitanism; memory; cultural hybridity and alterity; hospitality; guests and hosts; storytelling; migration; what are transnational German Studies? Authors include: the Japanese writer Yoko Tawada who lives in Berlin and writes in Japanese and German; the Romanian-born author Herta Müller (Nobel Prize in 2009); the Black British author Sharon Dodua Otoo who resides in Berlin and writes in German and English; the Ukrainian-German writer Katja Petrowskaja; the Turkish-born writer Feridun Zaimoglu; and others. Course conducted in English with an LxC option for interested students.

Instructor(s): Margareta Ingrid Christian     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 26523, GRMN 36523, CMLT 36523

CMLT 26624. Ekphrasis. 100 Units.

What happens when a text gives voice to a previously mute art work? Ekphrasis - the verbal representation of visual art - continues to be a central concern of word and image studies today. The understanding of ekphrasis as an often hostile paragone between word and image exists alongside notions of a more reciprocal model involving a dialogue or "encounter" between visual and verbal cultures. The affective dimension of the relationship -- ekphrastic hope, ekphrastic fear -- has also been prominent in recent scholarship, as well as attention to the "queerness" of ekphrasis. Drawing on literary works and theories from a range of periods and national traditions, the course will examine stations in the long history of ekphrasis. Why are certain literary genres such as the novel or the sonnet privileged sites for ekphrasis? How can art history inform our understanding of such encounters, and to what extent can we say that it is a discipline based in ekphrasis? What can we learn from current work on description, intermediality, narrative theory, and translation theory? Readings from Homer, Philostratus, Lessing, Goethe, Keats, A.W. Schlegel, Kleist, Sebald, Genette, among others.

Instructor(s): Catriona MacLeod     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 26624, GRMN 36624, ENGL 26624, ARTH 36624, CMLT 36624, ARTH 26624, ENGL 36624

CMLT 26802. Epic Religion: From the Ramayana to Game of Thrones. 100 Units.

What can epic literature and media teach us about religion? In this introductory seminar, students explore answers to this question, focusing on the ways epics dramatize the human relationship to divinity. We read the epics through the relationships of its central characters-humans, heroes, and gods. By following the winding quests and gory battles of these narratives, students examine how epics present various forms of human-divine relationships-transactional, intimate, inspirational, and manipulative. We employ a comparative approach to the genre; our readings originate in different world regions and historical periods-from ancient India and Greece to West Africa, England, and the contemporary US. We will read these texts closely and examine how they reflect particular views of the human condition within religious worldviews. Considering the contexts of post-colonization, nationalism, and globalization, we analyze how mass media-comic books, TV series, films, and social media-shape and spread those views to new popular audiences.

Instructor(s): Andrew Kunze     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 26802, RLST 26802, SALC 26802

CMLT 26855. Queer Theory. 100 Units.

This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term "queer" and explore the contours of the field's major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory's emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory's relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory's secularity.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 36855, RLST 26885, GNSE 20130, RLVC 36855, CMLT 36855, ENGL 36855, ENGL 26855

CMLT 26912. Strangers to Ourselves: Emigre Literature and Film from Russia and Southeast Europe. 100 Units.

Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht.

Instructor(s): A. Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 39010, CMLT 36912, REES 29010

CMLT 27512. Dream of the Red Chamber: Forgetting About the Author. 100 Units.

The great Chinese-Manchu novel _Honglou meng_ (ca. 1750) has been assigned one major author, Cao Xueqin, whose life has been the subject of much investigation. But before 1922 little was known about Cao, and interpreters of the novel were forced to make headway solely on the basis of textual clues. The so-called "Three Commentators" edition (_Sanjia ping Shitou ji_) shows these readers at their creative, polemical, and far-fetched best. We will be reading the first 80 chapters of the novel and discussing its reception in the first 130 years of its published existence (1792-1922), with special attention to hermeneutical strategies and claims of authorial purpose. Familiarity with classical Chinese required.

Instructor(s): Haun Saussy     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Familiarity with classical Chinese required.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 37512, EALC 37512, FNDL 27512, EALC 27512, CMLT 37512

CMLT 27517. Metaphysics, Morbidity, & Modernity: Mann's The Magic Mountain. 100 Units.

Our main task in this course is to explore in detail one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. But this novel is also a window onto the entirety of modern European thought, and it provides, at the same time, a telling perspective of the crisis of European culture prior to and following on World War I. It is, in Thomas Mann's formulation, a time-novel: a novel about its time, but also a novel about human being in time. For anyone interested in the configuration of European intellectual life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mann's great (and challenging) novel is indispensible reading. Lectures will relate Mann's novel to its great European counterparts (e.g., Proust, Joyce, Musil), to the traditions of European thought from Voltaire to Georg Lukacs, from Schopenhauer to Heidegger, from Marx to Max Weber.

Instructor(s): David Wellbery      Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 27517, GRMN 27517, SIGN 26086

CMLT 27610. Brave Old Worlds: Russian Jewish Culture. 100 Units.

This course will examine the worlds of Russian Yiddish culture, with a focus on its radical and Revolutionary forms. Materials will include folklore and ethnography, poetry and visual art, and political history of Bundist and anarchist movements. Literature and theory will include the work of Dovid Bergelson, S. An-sky, Lilya Brik, Moyshe Kulbak, Peretz Markish, Gennady Estraikh, Anna Shternshis, Yevgeniy Fiks, Nina Gourianova, and others. All texts will be in translation.

Instructor(s): Anna Elena Torres     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Study Abroad

CMLT 27621. Philosophical Aesthetics: Heidegger and Adorno. 100 Units.

Two major positions in German philosophical aesthetics of the 20th century will be considered in detail: 1) the ontological-hermeneutic theory advanced by Martin Heidegger; 2) the dialectical-critical theory developed by Theodor W. Adorno. Primary readings will be Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art and selections from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. In addition, selected shorter pieces by the two authors will be studied, with a special emphasis on their work on lyric poetry. The seminar will also consider contributions by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Helmut Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Georg Lukács. The course seeks to develop an understanding of the conceptual foundation of each of the two philosophical positions. Particular topics to be considered: a) the nature of artistic presentation (Darstellung); b) the nature of artistic truth; c) the historical character of art; d) the political significance of art; e) the relation of art to philosophy.

Instructor(s): David Wellbery     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Undergrads must receive consent.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 37621, GRMN 27621, GRMN 37621, CMLT 37621, SCTH 27621

CMLT 27721. Race and Religion: Theorizing Blackness and Jewishness. 100 Units.

Founded on ideals of universalism, pluralism and secularism, France and the United States are fraught with contradictions when it comes to race and religion. Which religions are accepted? Which religions are suspect? Is it minority that defines the difference-or only particular kinds of minority, such as race? To untangle the intersections of race and religion, we will examine Blackness and Jewishness as they are represented in political polemic, fiction, memoir and philosophy from the 1960s to the present. This course introduces students to the foundational concepts for the critical study of race and religion through exploring the constructions of Black and Jewish identity. We will examine the contradictions of secular politics and culture in France and the United States, and discuss how religion, race, and intersecting categories such as gender and sexuality, can become tools of critique. Readings include works by thinkers such as Césaire, Fanon, Memmi, Levinas and Foucault, along with literary classics by Nella Larsen and Sarah Kofman, and contemporary critical essays by Judith Butler, Christina Sharpe and Talal Asad. Throughout this course, we will examine how the concepts of race and religion are key components of the political, philosophical and ethical projects of these authors. No prerequisite knowledge of critical theory, or this historical period, is expected.

Instructor(s): Kirsten Collins     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 23916, FREN 27721, CRES 27721, GNSE 27721, JWSC 27721, RLST 27721, GLST 27721

CMLT 28000. Racine: Phedre/Text/Sources/Translations. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 29401, FREN 23201

CMLT 28013. Love, Desire, and Sexuality in Islamic Texts and Contexts. 100 Units.

What separates love from lust? How do our erotic desires and sexual practices intersect with our beliefs? This interdisciplinary class explores these questions in conversation with foundational thinkers from the Islamic tradition alongside insights from feminist and queer theory. We will delve into questions on the relationship between romantic, familial, and divine love; gender, sexuality, and the body; and Orientalism and the politics of reading desire cross-culturally. Exploring a diverse set of primary sources that range from the Qur'ān to Rūmī's Masnāvī to contemporary Bollywood, we will encounter different representations of love, desire, and sexuality in religious and philosophical discourses, literary representations, and visual media. We will examine not only how these representations reflect different historical norms, but also how and to what extent texts and images can inform or impact the norms of their contexts as well. No prerequisite knowledge of the topics or time periods discussed is needed, and students will have the opportunity over the course of the class to develop a project that relates our content to their own interests.

Instructor(s): Allison Kanner-Botan     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 23135, MDVL 28013, RLST 28013, SALC 28013, NEHC 29018

CMLT 28024. Ficción del siglo XX, tradición y canon: la narrativa en catalán. 100 Units.

El curso ofrece una introducción al concepto de 'tradición' y a sus mecanismos de funcionamiento, y analiza su relación con la creación literaria contemporánea a partir del estudio de tres obras fundamentales de la narrativa catalana del siglo XX: "El quadern gris" de Pla, "Mirall trencat" de Mercè Rodoreda y "Estremida memòria" de Jesús Moncada. Estas obras de géneros distintos -diario y relato- serán puestas en relación con la ficción contemporánea universal: leeremos los textos de Pla a la luz de la tradición diarista contemporánea, de Woolf o Nin a Walser, Pavese, Gombrowicz, Torga, Ribeyro o Piglia; la novela de Rodoreda, desde el conocimiento de las técnicas experimentales del modernism; y la de Moncada, a través de los universos ficcionales de Faulkner, Bassani, Carpentier, o García Márquez, y de la novela clásica de aventuras de Dumas y Verne. El propósito es contribuir no sólo a clarificar un concepto esencial en las humanidades, como es el de 'tradición', sino a situar en el contexto literario de la ficción internacional tres autores de lengua catalana que han devenido clásicos por su éxito comercial y académico, por el elevado número de traducciones que han merecido, y por su ascendiente en autores posteriores. Estudiaremos el proceso creativo de la ficción contemporánea y sus lazos con la tradición a través de un enfoque comparatista que tiene en cuenta cuestiones como la tensión entre literaturas de lenguas minoritarias y literaturas dominantes.

Equivalent Course(s): CATA 38024, SPAN 28024, CMLT 38024, SPAN 38024, CATA 28024

CMLT 28102. Cervantes: The Exemplary Novels and Don Quixote, Part II. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 24311, CMLT 38102, FNDL 21808, REMS 34311, SPAN 34311

CMLT 28280. The Good Place and the Bad Place: Judgement, Punishment, and Living a Good Life. 100 Units.

Do you believe that you are a good person and, if so, why are you good? This course will investigate the connections between personal intentions to be a "good person" and the fear of punishment. What do we owe each other as ethical actors? Do the intentions of our actions matter or only the results of our actions? How can one be good in an increasingly complicated web of intersecting needs, social developments, and understandings of morality? This course will examine conceptions of hell, eternal punishment, and justice in a variety of religious traditions. In addition to reading authors such as Dante and John Milton, students will critically engage The Good Place, a sitcom which tackles deep questions of faith, morality, and the complexity of the human person. We will think through competing understandings of justice (retributive, distributive, and restorative) alongside our individual beliefs surrounding fairness and deservingness. No prior knowledge of religious studies or ethics is expected.

Instructor(s): Foster Pinkney     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28280, FNDL 28280

CMLT 28405. Religion in Anime and Japanese Pop Culture. 100 Units.

How does Spirited Away reflect teachings of Japanese Buddhism and Shinto? Or what about Neon Genesis Evangelion? What can pop culture tell us about religion? In this course, we will consider what Japanese religions are (and are not) by looking at their representations in popular cultural forms of past and present. Sources are drawn from a range of popular cultural forms including anime and manga, but also literature, artistic performances, visual arts, and live-action movies. The course covers foundational aspects of Japanese religious life through non-traditional sources like Bleach, The Tale of Genji, and Your Name. At the end of the course, students will be able to speak to the great diversity of religious practices and viewpoints in Japan, not only its centers but also its peripheries and minorities. Meanwhile, we will consider broader questions about the complex connections between religion and popular culture. No prior knowledge of Buddhism, Shinto, or Japanese history is expected.

Instructor(s): Bruce Winkelman     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28405, EALC 28405, MAAD 14805

CMLT 28447. It's the End of the World as We Know It: Apocalyptic Literature and Millenarian Movements. 100 Units.

The "end of the world" has been a matter of fascination for human beings for thousands of years. This course takes a cross-cultural approach to the study of texts and movements concerned with the end times, traditionally called "apocalyptic" and "Millenarian." We will focus on three major aspects of these movements: the historical and cultural circumstances in which they arose, the institutions and traditions that served as their foundations, and finally their theological and political principles, including how they dealt with failed expectations. We will cover a wide range of contexts, including Roman-occupied Judea during the first century CE, the Xhosaland of southern Africa in the mid 19th century, and the rise of QAnon in the 21st century United States. No prerequisite knowledge of the historical periods or religious traditions examined required.

Instructor(s): Marshall Cunningham     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28447, HIST 25219, JWSC 28447, GLST 28447

CMLT 28500. Journey to the West II. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): CHIN 21306, RLIT 49200, CHIN 31306, CMLT 38500

CMLT 28506. Jesus: From Scripture to the Silver Screen. 100 Units.

Jesus holds particular significance for believers all around the world. But how is he portrayed in modern films? How faithful are these depictions to the Bible? Do these portrayals push a certain kind of theological position? In this course, we will examine film adaptations of Jesus, including biopics, dramas, comedies, and musicals. As we watch everything from Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), we will compare these modern depictions to ancient texts and theology. During the course, students will become familiar with significant aspects of Jesus's life both in canonical and noncanonical Gospels, as well as to how those texts have been understood in the antiquity and today. After the class, students will be able to analyze critically portrayals of Jesus in order to understand why certain decisions are made and address pivotal questions about biblical interpretation, cinema and adaptation, and the ethical challenges of representing religious figures in media. No prior familiarity with biblical studies or film criticism is required.

Instructor(s): Richard Zaleski     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28506

CMLT 28705. Christian Iconography. 100 Units.

In Christian culture, visual images have for many centuries played a pivotal role in ritual, devotion, intellectual thought, and religious instruction. The most important aims of this course are that students understand images convey meaning in very unique ways and learn how to decode their visual messages. The study of iconography encompasses a variety of methods used to identify the subject matter of a pictorial image, describe its contents, and analyze its discursive strategies in view of its original cultural context. We will cover some of the most important themes visualized in the arts of Christianity by analyzing imagery spanning different periods, geographical regions, pictorial media, and artistic techniques. While special emphasis is placed on the intersections of art and literature, we will also examine pictorial themes that are independent of a specific textual basis. Alongside the study of Christian iconography, this course will address broader issues of visual inquiry, such as patronage, viewer response, emotions, and gender roles. In this course, students will acquire a 'visual literacy' that will enable them to explore all kinds of works of art fruitfully as primary sources in their own right. Students will be examined on the basis of an essay and one oral presentation of a work of art. Active participation in the classroom discussion is also a requirement.

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 28705, MDVL 28705, RLST 28705

CMLT 28870. Infinite Narrative: The Arabian Nights and its Global Refractions. 100 Units.

The Arabian Nights, or A Thousand and One Nights, has had a profound influence on global culture. A shaping force in the formation of European Orientalism and Romanticism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the work has since inspired a vast array of writers, filmmakers, and artists across the world. We will begin this course by studying the Nights as a product of the medieval Arabo-Islamic world, examining the major themes and formal features of the work. We will then investigate the translation and reception of the Nights in early modern Europe, before analyzing a selection of short stories, films, and novels based on or inspired by the Nights spanning the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. These will include stories by Edgar Allen Poe and Jorge Luis Borges; films by Masaki Kobayashi and Pier Paolo Pasolini; and novels by one or more of Naguib Mahfouz, Radwa Ashour, Salman Rushdie, and Isabel Allende. The primary texts will be supplemented with readings concerning narratology and the art of storytelling, the fantastic and magic realism, and contemporary debates about world literature. All texts will be read in translation, but students with knowledge of Arabic will be encouraged to participate in additional sessions devoted to reading parts of the Arabic texts in the original.

Instructor(s): Evelyn Richardson     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 20221, NEHC 28871

CMLT 28871. Horror, Abjection, and the Monstrous Feminine. 100 Units.

This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds-such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples' minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre's tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine-as both thematic and aesthetic tropes-to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials.

Instructor(s): Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): No prerequisites for undergraduate students Online consent required for graduate students
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 38871, GNSE 30137, GNSE 20137, ENGL 28871, CMLT 38871, MAAD 10871

CMLT 28872. Jews in Nazi Germany: Lion Feuchtwanger's novel The Oppermanns in historical context. 100 Units.

Recently republished in 2022, Lion Feuchtwanger's 1933 best-seller The Oppermanns depicts a Jewish family who grapple with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. Like many at the time, the Oppemanns think that the regime will be short-lived, but Feuchtwanger's prescient novel anticipates the entrenchment of Nazi power and the creeping curtailment of Jewish life in Germany with uncanny accuracy-from the thugs attacking individuals to the Ministry of Propaganda's demonization of Jewish Germans in mass media, via the enforced "Aryanization" of businesses required to employ non-Jewish managers. Discussion will focus on Feuchtwanger's nuanced portrayal of the distinct ways in which family members react to these assaults, supplemented by historical texts, including the analysis of Nazi language (1946) by Victor Klemperer, a Jewish-German survivor, and documents in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook.

Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 28872, ENGL 28872, JWSC 28872, GRMN 28872

CMLT 29003. Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human-from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge.

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Enrollment by Consent Only (for both grads and undergrads). Students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 29003, AASR 49003, CMLT 49003, NEHC 49003, NEHC 29003, KNOW 49003, GNSE 29003, RLST 29003, ISLM 49003, GNSE 49003, ANTH 49003

CMLT 29023. Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest. 100 Units.

Aware of being observed. And judged. Inferior... Abject… Angry... Proud… This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the "West," as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the "Rest," as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other's standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself-self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization-and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 23609, HIST 33609, REES 29023, NEHC 29023, REES 39023, NEHC 39023, CMLT 39023

CMLT 29024. States of Surveillance. 100 Units.

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance - the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 29024, CMLT 39024, REES 39024

CMLT 29026. Loyalties, Friendships, Loves. 100 Units.

The Eastern European experience of surveillance under the police state is most often associated with the sense of betrayal, the invasion of the innermost spaces of intimacy and individual consciousness by the secret all-seeing eye. What is often overlooked, however, is the obverse side of fear - the fierce code of loyalty, the tenacity of friendship and love nurtured in the interstices of surveillance and resistance. How are love and friendship understood in such circumstances? Are they experienced in the same way as we understand them? This class will explore these emotional cultural scripts through an array of East, Central, South-East European literary and cinematic works.

Equivalent Course(s): REES 29026, REES 39026

CMLT 29045. Dostoevsky and Critical Theory. 100 Units.

The tormented, obsessed, and sadistic characters of Dostoevsky's novels posed a challenge to positivism and reason too scandalous and compelling to be ignored. The novels inspired some of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the fields of religion, philosophy, psychology and literary theory. We will read two of Dostoevsky's philosophically challenging novels alongside works by these critics and philosophers, including Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Levinas. While exploring their ideas about faith and unbelief, madness and reason, violence and torture, society and history, we will also inquire into the relationships among literature, philosophy and biography and examine the processes of influence and adaptation.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 39045, RLST 28207, REES 29045, CMLT 39045

CMLT 29071. Magic Nations. 100 Units.

As part of the post-colonial turn, magic realism is a hybrid mode of narration rejects, overcomes, and offers an alternative to the colonial, Enlightenment episteme. It mobilizes the imaginations and narrative modes of pre-colonial pasts in the articulation of new, post-colonial, often national, selves. In this course, we will unpack some captivating narratives from Southeast Europe in which the visions of the pre-modern mythic worlds emerge as the magic, transcendent core of the modern nations. We will indulge in the sheer enjoyment of the brilliance of these text while focusing on the paradoxes they embody - for example, the simultaneous rejection and reliance on the realist mode, the colonial worldview, and its civilizational hierarchies and models.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 29071, REES 39071

CMLT 29300. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): REES 30018, REES 20018, ENGL 48902, CMLT 39300, FNDL 27101, ENGL 28902

CMLT 29447. Autotheory/Autofiction. 100 Units.

A resurgence of contemporary life writing has been characterized by the terms "autotheory" and "autofiction." These terms point to ways in which contemporary life writing complicates narrative presentations of selfhood by inflecting autobiography through generically estranged kinds of writing, theory and fiction. Narrative exposition may be further complicated by issues of non-monolingualism and gender insecurity that invite non-narrative exploration within the presentation of a life project. In this course we will examine contemporary exemplars of autotheory and autofiction in light of exemplars from earlier phases of modernity. Readings will include: Fernando Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, Robert Glück, Lyn Hejinian, Clarice Lispector, Rachel Cusk, Cecilia Vicuña, Paul Preciado, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Raquel Salas-Rivera. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to discuss texts in French and Spanish in the original language.

Instructor(s): Mark Payne     Terms Offered: Autumn

CMLT 29590. Poetics of Science. 100 Units.

In 1959, C. P. Snow expressed his anxiety over the widening "gulf" between the literary and the scientific cultures of his time, attributing such a phenomenon to the pressure of industrialization and the application of advanced, systematic techniques to industry. Yet while science and literature started to submit themselves to growingly different logic, epistemology, and modes of production in the twentieth century, they became inextricably linked at the same time: contemporary scientific discoveries served as a major source of literary inspiration; scientists explored the possibilities of approaching their projects through literary strategies. In this course, we will read theories and practices by major poets, literary critics, and scientists during the twentieth century. Through analyzing how the tension described by Snow is rendered, problematized, and transformed, especially through the medium of poetry, we will study how poetry and science provide each other with new vocabularies, forms, and critical angles to address modern experience. While we will concentrate on endeavors by anglophone poets and scientists, we will also bring a few international cases (in translation) into discussion to establish a comparative perspective. Possible scientists include Henri Poincaré, Alfred North Whitehead, and Brian Rotman; possible poets and critics include I. A. Richards, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Laura Riding, Wallace Stevens, Muriel Rukeyser, and Lyn Hejinia

Instructor(s): Celia Xu     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course can fulfill the Poetry requirement for English majors.
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 29590, ENGL 29590

CMLT 29700. Reading Course. 100 Units.

Terms Offered: Autumn,Winter,Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Note(s): Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. Must be taken for a quality grade. This course does not satisfy distribution requirements for students who are majoring in CMLT unless an exception is made by the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

CMLT 29801. BA Project and Workshop: Comparative Literature. 100 Units.

This workshop begins in Autumn Quarter and continues through the middle of Spring Quarter. While the BA workshop meets in all three quarters, it counts as a one-quarter course credit. Students may register for the course in any of the three quarters of their fourth year. A grade for the course is assigned in the Spring Quarter, based partly on participation in the workshop and partly on the quality of the BA paper. Attendance at each class section required.

Instructor(s): Alia Breitwieser     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): Required of fourth-year students who are majoring in CMLT. Students should register for this course in the term where it best fits in their schedule.

CMLT 29943. Diasporic Narratives and Memories. 100 Units.

Of the many emigrant communities in Chicago, Belarusians are the only group that does not yet have its own museum. Our course takes this lack as an opportunity to provide training for students to create a grassroots community-driven initiative that empirically develops a conceptual foundation for a new type of multi-ethnic museum of emigration, one informed by the experiences of community members themselves and their relationship to the artifacts that define their identities and memories. This course allows students to actively participate in a museum creation project which takes as its point of departure not a nation-state narrative, but the everyday life of a multi-ethnic community with the goal of informing research, policy, and public discourse about emigration. We center our course around the material heritage of Belarussia and its dispersal in emigration. We analyze how a diasporic museum's main role is to collect, protect and curate the material legacy of the Belarussian community to ensure its future stability. The course participants collaborate with the Chicago Studies Program, the NGO Belarusians in Chicago, and the Chicago History Museum to study the role of artifacts in museums. The students conduct the field work about multi-ethnic Belarusian emigration to include experiences of Belarusian Jews, Belarusian Russians, Belarusian Lithuanians, Belarusian Tatars, and other groups from Belarus.

Instructor(s): Olga Solovieva and Bozena Shallcross
Equivalent Course(s): REES 29950, HIPS 26943, BPRO 29943, KNOW 29943, MAPH 39943, CRES 29943, CHST 29943

CMLT 29947. Autotheory/Autofiction. 100 Units.

A resurgence of contemporary life writing has been characterized by the terms "autotheory" and "autofiction." These terms point to ways in which contemporary life writing complicates narrative presentations of selfhood by inflecting autobiography through generically estranged kinds of writing, theory and fiction. Narrative exposition may be further complicated by issues of non-monolingualism and gender insecurity that invite non-narrative exploration within the presentation of a life project. In this course we will examine contemporary exemplars of autotheory and autofiction in light of exemplars from earlier phases of modernity. Readings will include: Fernando Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, Robert Glück, Lyn Hejinian, Clarice Lispector, Rachel Cusk, Cecilia Vicuña, Paul Preciado, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Raquel Salas-Rivera. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to discuss texts in French and Spanish in the original language.

Instructor(s): Mark Payne     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 29947

CMLT 29991. Affect at the Close: Climate Change, Capitalism, Creating Alternatives. 100 Units.

How does it feel to leave a world behind? Are we already trained in this experience as readers of fictions, who leave worlds behind whenever we put down a book? Can this experience of imperfectly moving on from one world to another, whether the real world or that of another fiction, teach us anything about ourselves as human beings navigating the epochal shifts of climate change and late-stage capitalism? What narrative strategies emphasize the affective and embodied dimensions of entering and exiting from their fictional worlds? We will start answering these questions by reading J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, and Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World. Other course texts will be determined by student interests. Secondary and theoretical material will be drawn from a range of writers including Georges Didi-Huberman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lauren Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mark Fisher, Kenneth Burke, Edward Said, Ursula Heise, Amitav Ghosh, and Ursula K. Le Guin. This is a theory-oriented course that does not require previous knowledge. Students will have the option of producing a creative final project instead of a paper.

Instructor(s): Claudio Sansone     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 29991


Contacts

Undergraduate Primary Contact

Director of Undergraduate Studies
Anna Elena Torres


Email

Administration

Department Administrator
Gaby Choi


Email