| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 60A | WORLD LITERATURE | NEWMAN, JANE O | People call movies like Avatar (dir. James Cameron) (2009) “epics.” Do post-modern movies like Avatar mimic the ancient Greek poet Homer’s pre-modern epic, the Odyssey? What can we learn about any nation’s interests and concerns today from its engagement with the masterpieces of either its own tradition or with other traditions from a different time and place? How do the world’s literatures circulate around the globe? In Comparative Literature 60A, we read some of the greatest texts of World Literature – from the ancient Greek, Argentine, English, French-Caribbean, German, Irish, Nigerian, Persian, and U.S. traditions – in dialogue with one another as a way of answering these questions. Texts include the poems of the 14th century Persian poet and mystic Hafiz in various translations and as they were read by the 19th century German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; the Persian poet Firdowsi’s 10th century epic, the Shahnameh, and its afterlife in miniature illustrations, oral recitations in coffee houses, and re-significations as Iran’s national epic; the British medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales as they have been taken up by the contemporary British-Nigerian rapper and performance artist Patience Agbabi (b. 1965); the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’ Antigone (442 b.c.e.) as it is retold in Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa play (1986); Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 b.c.e.) as it dialogues with Irish playwright Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990 /1991) and the U.S poet Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty One Love Poems” (1974-76); Euripides’ Bacchae (405 b.c.e.) in conversation with Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973), and Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611) in dialogue with French Caribbean writer Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) and as it was performed by inmates at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange, Kentucky, in 2005. - These dialogues will help us understand the many ways that the traditions we study can have multiple afterlives across traditions and around the world. Comparative Literature 60A is the first quarter of the “World Literature” track in the Comp. Lit. major, but the course is open to all students. It fulfills the GE IV and VIII campus-wide requirements. Requirements for this course include: Doing the assigned readings, watching the lecture videos, watching two movies and short film clips, quizzes, Discussion Board posts on the readings, and Workshop Exercises on the readings. There is no midterm or final in this course. |
| COM LIT 101W | TRANSLATION STUDIES | WOLPE, S. | Literary translation is not the transparent inter-lingual transfer of ideas out of one language into another. Rather, it is always conditioned by assumptions, values and codes proper to both the source- and the target-language, and often relies upon the hierarchies of power and prestige that structure both the discourses and realities of gender, race, class, sexuality, and national identity. This course will introduce students to theories and practice of literary translation as well as challenges that contemporary translators face today in a variety of cultural and political context. Students will develop a critical vocabulary for discussing translation in multiple linguistic traditions and an understanding of challenges of literary translation. Students will also complete a final translation project. Working knowledge of another language is required. |
| COM LIT 143 | IRANIAN CULTURE | RAHIMIEH, N. | We will begin by exploring the Iranian concept of culture, farhang, whose origins can be traced to Middle Persian and pre-Islamic times. While we will examine the transformations the concept has undergone, we will focus on two decisive junctures: the Constitutional Revolution 1905-11 and the 1979 revolution, also known as the Islamic Revolution. The Constitutional Revolution was informed by Iran’s encounters with the world beyond its borders and an accompanying awareness of the need to modernize the country and its educational and cultural institutions. Refashioning Iran into a modern nation required a revaluation and overhaul of indigenous forms of cultural expression, but not without generating critiques such as that of the Iranian writer and intellectual, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad’s Westitis, which likened the uncritical adoption of Western norms to a disease. The 1979 revolution ushered in a radical shift toward Islam and Shi’ism as a means of restoring Iran’s cultural identity. We will study the effect of these two moments of rupture and reform through essays, short stories, poems, documentaries, film, and music videos to tease out gaps as well as continuities that continue to shape Iran’s self-representations in the domain of culture. |
| COM LIT 160 | DOCUMENTARY CINEMA | ABBAS, A. | When factoids are taken for facts, when ‘reality’ as in reality TV has become a game show, and when an unadorned fact is becoming as rare as ‘an orchid in the land of technology’, what becomes of documentary? Are we witnessing its demise? Not quite; but at the same time, documentary in the age of social media and ‘fake news’ cannot retain its old form or employ its old strategy of confronting the factitious with the factual. If documentary, like translation, is inadvertently a betrayal, then documentary may have to start with the fact of betrayal, with the betrayal of fact. The course will consist of 3 inter-related parts: a/ Classic Documentary (Flaherty’s ‘Nanook of the North’, Vertov’s ‘Man With a Movie Camara’ , Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’); b/ Crisis in Documentary ( Antonioni’s ‘Blowup’, Lou He’s ‘Suzhou River’, Jia Zhangke’s ‘Still Life’); and c/ Documentary Today ( Moore’s ‘Bowling for Columbine’, Oppenheimer’s ‘Act of Killing’, Welles’s ‘F for Fake’). Through discussions of films and writing, the course will trace how mutations in the documentary form point to a world increasingly impervious to factual explanation. |
| COM LIT 200B | THRY OF TRANSLATION | NEWMAN, J. | Comparative Literature, with its proclivity for crossing borders of all sorts—linguistic, medium-specific, and theoretical—has long emphasized the centrality of translation as a concept and practice crucial to the field. Indeed, there could be no “comparative” literature without the implicit attempt to bridge, or to “translate,” the space between languages, cultures, nationalities, theories, and traditions. It is in terms of this in-between of textual studies in other media across a wide range of languages and cultures that scholars of Comparative Literature have been occupied by the inherently intercultural and trans-medial questions of translation theory and methodology. Post-colonial theorists, students of cultural studies, and practitioners of interdisciplinary approaches to problematizing race, class, and gender all agree that studying both literal and figurative translation – in its successful iterations and in its failures – is central to what they do. Literary translation—and the translation of literature—is, finally, both a major field in itself and a highly politicized activity in our fraught world. This seminar will examine some of the fundamental questions about the practice, art, and politics of translation on an intra- and international stage as part of the work that Comparative Literature does. We will begin by reviewing selections of several recent historiographic accounts of theoretical approaches that have been important for Comp. Lit. (possible candidates for discussion: Marxism, post-structuralism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Subaltern Studies, World Literature) as a way of initiating a discussion about where and what each of us understands the field to be. We will then turn to the history of translation theory, historical and recent problematizations of the use of translations in Comparative Literature as a discipline and the often minoritized place of translation studies in the field, as well as to feminist and post-colonial approaches to the ethics of the often asymmetrical practice of translating, tracking, as we do so, how the chronologies of which these texts give an account intersect with those of the first part of the course. Issues to be addressed will include theories of authorship and the cultural authority of ‘originals’ and translated texts and the challenges of creating ‘domesticating’ or ‘foreignizing’ translations that render original and translation visible or invisible in both the texts themselves and in the marketplace of ideas and material goods. The application of psychoanalytic theory to translation studies, the refusal of translation evident in the recent turn to Untranslatability Studies, and the challenges of translation in war zones and in domestic surveillance will form the final part of the course. A series of translation exercises will keep us honest about how the theory maps onto our practice. Students may fulfill one of the Comparative Literature language requirements by enrolling in this class and completing a translation project (with supervision from additional faculty when the translations are from languages other than French and German); the translation must be accompanied by a substantive preface that engages the theoretical materials covered in the course to satisfy the requirement. Seminar options include such a project or a research paper. Pro-seminar options include two translation exercises and a short essay that embeds the student’s translating practice in the materials covered in the course. The pro-seminar option will not fulfill a Comparative Literature language requirement. |
| COM LIT 210 | QUANTUM IMAGE | ABBAS, A. | The world according to quantum mechanics seems perversely weird and counter-intuitive. A particle can be in two places or positions at the same time, a phenomenon called superposition. A cat can be both alive and dead until someone observes it: observation determines, not just informs us, about what happens. Light behaves both like a particle and a wave, while ‘entanglement’ shows that two particles can be interconnected in such a way that measuring the state of one would determine the state of the other, no matter how far apart they may be. What this seminar calls the quantum image alludes to how the strange world that quantum mechanics uncovers through mathematics has parallels with the world that modern art and literature discern through re-thinking the image. Benjamin suggested that the best way of experiencing the world of modern physics would be to read Kafka. In this course, Barad’s important work will provide intellectual context, which will be followed by seminars on Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’, Deleuze’s ‘time image’, and Flusser’s ‘technical image’. Specifically, we will discuss Benjamin on Kafka, on storytelling, and on history as the most problematic form of storytelling, only graspable in an image that flashes up at a moment of danger. Deleuze like Benjamin sees history as volatile and indeterminate. The ‘time image’ interrupts time-as-chronology, and studies ‘Brownian movement’, aberrant movement, and ‘the powers of the false’ in new forms of movie-making. Flusser’s seminal work tracks the effects of changes in media on historical life. His timely analysis of the ‘technical image’ demonstrates, among other things, the unbearable lightness of social media. There are no pre-requisites for this course. |
| COM LIT 210 | DERRIDA & ENDS | TERADA, R. | This course hopes to provide a space for an open reading of Derrida's early writing, especially "The Ends of Man" (1972) and _Of Grammatology_ (1967), for the implications of what he states to be its object of study: "nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism, in the process of imposing itself upon the world" (_Of Grammatology_ p. 3). "The Ends of Man" concludes with a question about who could possibly be raising this question of systemic ethnocentrism and from where. Taking that question as an actual and yet possibly self-serving one, what happens if you read the work from its vantage? Seeking to enable both an introduction to the early terms of deconstruction insofar as they are necessary to the class's interests, and a set of revaluations based on the terms of your current work in formation, this course aims to make it possible for each member to access, construct, and detail assessments of Derrida and the debates surrounding his early work for the question above where it meets their own research. Seminar requirements will emphasize ongoing writing and note-taking and a synthetic shorter paper or presentation. |
| COM LIT 210 | POLITICS OF SPACE: PERFORMANCE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD | KATRAK, K | This seminar examines the performance space as a site of struggle of the various physical, social and psychic forces in postcolonial society. The course focuses on the colonial and postcolonial performance space--be it the street, the home, the shrine, the museum, the archeological site, the ritual site, the burial ground, the prison, the national theater or even the national state as a site of intense political theater. We explore the State's contestations particularly of outdoor performance spaces for performance. We connect the power of outdoor sites such as in Jay Pather’s site-specific work in South Africa where contemporary struggles for democracy continue to unfold. We also explore contemporary avenues of cyber space communication for performance and political action. Our study includes postcolonial dramatic texts and theoretical readings. |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | ABBAS, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | AHMAD, A. | |
| COM LIT 292 | TEACHING PRACTICUM | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | FARBMAN, H. |