Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.
This course examines what it means to be Caribbean, or of Caribbean descent, in the diaspora- either the United States, England, and France due to their stake in colonizing the Caribbean in the quest for imperial power and modernity, and how Caribbean culture has been defined in historical and contemporary contexts through a survey of Caribbean diasporic literature. In this course students will learn how legacies of colonialism and modernity affect Caribbean populations and how they negotiate empire, identity, language, culture, and notions of home.
This course is an introduction to contemporary Chinese cinemas in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. From postwar musicals and pan-Asian blockbusters, to new wave avant-garde films and experimental documentaries, the diversity of Chinese cinemas reflects cinema's relations to global capitalism, Asia's democratization movements, financial crises, and the arrival of (post)socialism. Creating urban nomads, songstresses, daydreamers, travelers, and terrorists, Chinese cinemas put on full display the forces of globalization in shaping the aesthetics and politics of film. Selections broadly include popular commercial films to rare art house productions.
This course will focus on a major intellectual controversy of the 17th and 18th centuries known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Through close readings of seminal texts we will address issues pertaining to the historical significance of the Quarrel, its sociopolitical implications, and the role it played in the cultural and scientific evolution of early modern Europe. We will approach the Quarrel as a critical moment in the prehistory of modernity that resulted in a redefinition of concepts such as mimesis and originality, tradition and innovation, decline and progress.
The age-old relationship between literature and war is fundamentally a problem of ethics. This course is centrally concerned with ethics and aesthetics: the ethics of war, the aesthetics of war literature and film, and the ethics of making art about war. It explores the triangulation of warfare, literature, and ethics in the 20th-21st centuries, approaching this relationship through multiple thematic frames and genres (poetry, fiction, film, photography, and critical essays), with texts drawn from a diverse array of world cultures. Topics include total war, memory and trauma, translation, partition, war and comics, and virtual warfare.
Why have so many masters of verbal art relied on the stylistics and epistemologies of jazz musicians for the communication of experience and disruption of conventional concepts? We'll draw on musical recordings, live in-class performances by guest jazz artists, poetry, fiction, and recent debates in jazz studies, critical theory and Black studies. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students of literature and/or music are welcomed, but proficiency in both disciplines is NOT required. We will develop together techniques of close reading and listening. Optional performance component for music instrumentalists and vocalists.
Students will choose, early in the semester, one author to focus on in fiction, poetry, or drama, with the goal of arriving at a 20-25 page sample of the author's work. All work will be translated into English and discussed in a workshop format. Weekly readings will focus on the comparison of pre-existing translations as well as commentaries on the art and practice of literary translation.
Inter-disciplinary class on early modern Amsterdam (1550-1720) when the city was at the center of the global economy and leading cultural center; home of Rembrandt and Spinoza (Descartes was nearby) and original figures like playwrights Bredero and Vondel, the ethicist engraver Coornhert, the political economist de la Court brothers and English traveling theater. We go from art to poetry, drama, philosophy and medicine. Spring Break is in Amsterdam with museum visits, guest talks and participation in recreation of traveling theater from the period.
The course aims to trace the origins of the first person in the Western literary tradition through the lens of confession, both as discourse and sacrament. By examining a series of texts that date from the late 12th century till the late 14th century, the course will consider how authors staged (oftentimes false) confessions in a bid to test the relation between the first person and truth as well as to claim a novel authority for fiction. By pairing medieval literary and theological texts with contemporary criticism, the course will try to understand how this period paved the way for our understanding of the first person and its discourses.
This course aims to explore different forms that the question of liberation has taken in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 1960s, it studies different philosophical concepts and poetic figures that have shaped the language of feminist struggles (intersectionality, care and the commons, reproductive justice, "feminicidal" violence, social reproduction). Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Verónica Gago, Raquel Gutiérrez, Audre Lorde, Bety Ruth Lozano, Cristina Rivera Garza, among others.