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

This course is an invitation for us to think about literature as an ethical and political project, one that raises enduring questions about the uniqueness of the human being, the relation of the self to the other, and the possibility of human understanding across cultural, ethnic, racial and national boundaries.

Journalism has played an outsized role in Latin America's political and cultural life, whether as a form of witnessing, an instrument of analysis or a tool for resistance and revolt. This course will look at work from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring different approaches writers have taken, and highlighting a series of recurrent themes, foremost among them journalism's tangled relationship with power. We will mainly focus on print, but will also deal with film, TV, and photography.

This course focuses on the formation of cultural identity in the West from Antiquity to the early medieval period through the imagined and actual encounters of the Greco-Roman world with so-called "barbarians." We will examine the ways in which Greek and Roman epic, romance, philosophy, history, travelogues, and drama evaluated, misinterpreted, and sometimes appropriated foreign ways of life. Our readings will also include several texts originating in cultures distinct from the Greco-Roman world, but in crucial contact with it.