Courses

Spring 2024
'Modern' Poetry and Poetics: Baudelaire to the 'Present' (LA)
Subject associations
COM 422 / FRE 422 / GER 422

Designed for both undergraduates and graduate students, this course will focus on reading major "modern" poets and writings on poetics, in French, German, English and Spanish, with additional readings in theory of modernity, poetry, and the arts written by several of the poets we read. These include: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Garcia Lorca, Borges, Bishop and Ashbery. Secondary readings will include essays by major theorists and critics who consider the larger questions of representation, temporality, visuality, and language underlying poetic practice.

Instructors
Claudia Joan Brodsky
Spring 2024
Acting, Being, Doing, and Making: Introduction to Performance Studies (LA)
Subject associations
THR 300 / COM 359 / ENG 373 / ANT 359

A hands-on approach to this interdisciplinary field. We will apply key readings in performance theory to space and time-based events, at sites ranging from theatre, experimental art, and film, to community celebrations, sport events, and restaurant dining. We will observe people's behavior in everyday life as performance and discuss the "self" through the performativity of one's gender, race, class, ability, and more. We will also practice ethnographic methods to collect stories to adapt for performance and address the role of the participant-observer, thinking about ethics and the social responsibilities of this work.

Instructors
Rhaisa Williams
Spring 2024
Advanced Creative Writing (Literary Translation) (LA)
Subject associations
CWR 306 / COM 356 / TRA 314

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.

Instructors
Ilya Kaminsky
Spring 2024
Arts of Mimesis (LA)
Subject associations
COM 333 / PHI 422

Few concepts in the theory of art and literature have been as long-lived, as influential and yet as obscure as mimesis. In what sense does mimesis imply likeness, artifice, making or performance? To what degree is it a natural or human phenomenon? What, finally, is the role of the production and recognition of mimesis in understanding? We'll discuss some ancient, medieval, and modern approaches to these questions, studying works of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. The arts to be considered include poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance.

Instructors
Daniel Heller-Roazen
Spring 2024
Charged (En)counters: Poetics and Politics of the Hemispheric Americas (CD or LA)
Subject associations
LAS 307 / ENG 257 / COM 381 / SPA 313

The poetries of Latin American nations and the United States, like the histories of the American hemisphere, are in many ways intertwined and wrapped up in the legacies and continuities of imperialism and displacement. This course offers an exploration of the ways in which Latin American and U.S. literatures intersect, especially at pivotal moments of hemispheric political history: (1) the "Good Neighbor" era, (2) inter-American Cold War, (3) US military invasions, (4) second-wave neoliberalism, (5) present day. We pay particular attention to Latin American and Latinx writers, cultivating a South-to-North comparative approach.

Instructors
Olivia M. Lott
Spring 2024
Conflict and Culture (EM or LA)
Subject associations
COM 437 / HUM 438

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 frames and genres (poetry, fiction, film, photography, and essays), with texts drawn from a diverse array of world cultures. Topics include total war, memory and trauma, translation, partition, war and comics, monsters, and virtual warfare.

Instructors
Lital Levy
Spring 2024
Contemporary Critical Theories: Novel Theories
Subject associations
COM 535 / ENG 528

Narratology and theory of the novel, related but distinct traditions in literary theory, have in the twenty-first century moved away from their respective formalist/structuralist and literary historical roots, and converged in the post-print era on questions of ethics. This seminar offers an opportunity to explore the new ethical narratologies alongside recent theories of the ethics of the novel.

Instructors
April Alliston
Spring 2024
Creative Writing (Literary Translation) (LA)
Subject associations
CWR 206 / TRA 206 / COM 215

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.

Instructors
Ilya Kaminsky
Spring 2024
Decadence: Empire, Sexuality, Aesthetics (LA)
Subject associations
COM 319 / ECS 325

The foreigner, the pervert, the outcast: the imaginary of literary decadence is fixated on figures at the margins of the social order, who are valorized and exalted. This course investigates the aesthetics of abjection in late 19th., early 20th c. (English, French, German) literary and visual culture as it develops in response to European empire. Core themes include: "late" or "decadent" antiquities; decadence and orientalism; Jewish decadence; and how these interact with the catalog of haunting female figures that populate these imaginaries. Class trips include visits to both the Neue Galerie in NYC and Firestone's Special Collections.

Instructors
Peter Makhlouf
Spring 2024
East Asian Humanities II: Traditions and Transformations (EM)
Subject associations
HUM 234 / EAS 234 / COM 234

Second in the two-semester sequence on East Asian literary humanities, this course begins in the seventeenth century and covers a range of themes in the history, literature, and culture of Japan, Korea, and China until the contemporary period. Looking into the narratives of modernity, colonialism, urban culture, and war and disaster, we will see East Asia as a space for encounters, contestations, cultural currents and countercurrents. No knowledge of East Asian languages or history is required and first-year students are welcome to take the course.

Instructors
Ksenia Chizhova
Xiaoyu Xia