| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 10 | PIRATES | JOHNSON, A. | In The City of God, Saint Augustine recounts the following exchange between Alexander the Great and a pirate he captured. “What gives you the right to disrupt the sea-lanes by force?” asks Alexander. To which the pirate boldly replied, “What gives you the right to disrupt the whole world by force? I use a small ship, so I’m called a thief; you use a great fleet, so you’re called an emperor.” In this class we’ll explore popular depictions of pirates (in movies such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series and literature) and compare these with historical narratives of piracy. We will also, as St. Augustine’s anecdote suggests, inquire into how piracy gets defined and what it might tell us about the dividing line between legality and illegality, relations of force, and the fantasies and practices of opposition to dominant social structures. While our main focus will be on piracy in the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th and 18th centuries, we will also discuss contemporary forms of piracy such as the Somali pirates and internet piracy. |
| COM LIT 10 | COMICS | AMIRAN, E. | Comics talk to adults in the language of childhood; they fight crime with magical thinking; they showcase unmentionable desires and energies under flimsy disguises; they defend propriety (and property) with violence. In this course, we will consider how comics use fantasy to work through social, psychological, and ideological issues. One of our main arguments will be that comics address social topics like immigration, sexual identity, racism, and the cold war under cover of personal issues, such as eating disorders, paranoia and narcissism, separation anxiety, and OCD, so that in comics you can’t separate psychological from social and political arguments. Readings and viewings may include McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Foster’s Tarzan, Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants, Hanks’s Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle and Stardust the Super Wizard, Price’s White Boy, Jackie Ormes’s Torchy, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Essential Marvel Team-Up Vol. 1, and contemporary comics. Superheroes like Spiderman and Wonder Woman will be considered alongside anti-heroes like Katchor’s Julius Knipl or El Chapulín Colorado. We will view films that animate comics, including classic Bugs Bunny and Popeye shorts. Students will help select recent comics for the course. |
| COM LIT 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | DIMENDBERG, E. | This class will explore varied models and practices of cultural criticism with an eye towards identifying the skills and knowledge necessary for analyzing cultural objects such as works of literature and visual art, music, film, and architecture. We will juxtapose claims that criticism should aspire to scientific objectivity and identify deep structures and patterns of culture alongside views that it is itself a species of artistic activity dependent upon subjective response. The roles of description, aesthetic and normative judgments, advocacy, political critique, and regulative ideals will be considered, as will modes of criticism (academic, journalistic, literary, online) and changing models of the critic as commentator on the passing scene, engaged tastemaker, preserver of values, and agent of social transformation. We will closely analyze a few paradigmatic works in different media and read writings by critics and philosophers, such as Rousseau, Herder, Diderot, Stendhal, Pater, Jakobson, Arnold, Baudelaire, Levi-Strauss, Freud, Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, Paglia, Sontag, Barthes, Brookner, Stewart, Marx, Lukacs, Jameson, Hall, MacDonald, Spitzer, Burke, Frye, Trilling, Kael, Orwell, Hebdige, Williams, James, West, Baldwin, Steiner, and Scott as instances of the fundamentally pluralistic enterprise of cultural criticism. A take-home midterm and final research paper will enable students to analyze cultural works of their own selection. Instructor: Edward Dimendberg |
| COM LIT 105 | ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM AND INDIGENOUS ECOCRITICISM | CARROLL, A. | This course examines environmental racism specifically as it effects Indigenous peoples, communities, and territories in North America. One of the earliest examples of environmental racism in the US is the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which forcibly removed southeastern tribes to western lands that were dry, barren, or otherwise incapable of sustaining Native people’s lives. Since World War II, the US military has located its most dangerous military facilities near Indian reservations, and Native people suffer from the fallout of nuclear weapons testing. Extractive resource economies such as oil drilling, coal and uranium mining, and hydroelectric damming disproportionately affect Native peoples whose water and air become polluted and whose lands become flooded. The US and multinational corporations dispose and illegally dump nuclear, toxic, medical, and otherwise hazardous waste materials on Indian reservations, threatening the safety, health, and lives of Indigenous people and non-human life forms. Students will explore the issue of environmental racism through the lens of Indigenous ecocriticism and environmentalisms. Course materials include documentary films and works of fiction, theory, criticism, and philosophy by Tewa, Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, Lakota, Seneca, Mohawk, and Anishinaabe authors. |
| COM LIT 132 | BEFORE & AFTER METOO | TERADA, R | Through film, theory, and literature, this course explores the challenge of sexual consent, especially M/F consent, and so of sexual assault and harassment and responses to them, from 1958 to present. The idea of "Before and After" does not mean to imply that after #MeToo, conditions improved. Rather, #MeToo is a chance to think about how sexual violence continues across various social transformations and intellectual attempts to grasp consent. The course's goal is not to raise consciousness, but to explore the gendered and raced relationship (or lack thereof) between understanding, unconsciousness, and violence. Texts may include Vicente Minnelli's film melodrama Some Came Running (1958); Barbara Loden's drama Wanda (1970); the experimental films Not a Pretty Picture (Martha Coolidge, 1976) and No Lies (Mitchell Block, 2007); Octavia Butler's science fiction Dawn (1987), Sophia Dimino-Foster's comic Sphincter (2015), materials from the #MeToo archive, and works of critical theory and psychoanalysis. The class will be a collaboration, with students participating in course organization and creation of assignments. |
| COM LIT 190W | MARXISM AND AFTER | JOHNSON, A. | This class is the capstone seminar for the Comparative Literature and European Studies majors. As such it is limited to seniors from those majors. The course’s main objective is to guide students in producing an original research paper (12-15 pages) that showcases knowledge and skills acquired in their major. Our theoretical framework will be Marxism and forms of analysis and critique that have developed out of Marxism; student research projects should be developed in dialogue with this framework. Finally, as a designated upper-division writing seminar, the course will devote substantial time to improving student writing; we will use Joseph Williams & Joseph Bizup’s Lessons in Clarity and Grace as our main resource for this purpose. |
| COM LIT 210 | MARXIST THEORIES OF FASCISM | AHMAD, A. | This course is being offered as an engagement with the history of our own present. Marxist theories of fascism arose alongside the rise—and further rise-- of fascism(s) across Europe and beyond, involving every tendency in Marxist thought, whether affiliated with political parties or not. The novelty, complexity and variety of forms of fascism were such that there were very varied attempts at conceptualisation and great— sometimes bitter—debates in every intellectual cluster and political party of a Marxist orientation. Theoretical work done between Mussolini’s March on Rome and the onset of the Second World War will engage us during the opening sessions of the course. A new period of such theorisations began during the War itself and became more consequential over time. Much of it was a retrospective attempt to comprehend the phenomenon of fascism in historical and structural terms, as for instance in theorisations ranging from Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942/44) to Poulantzas’ Fascism & Dictatorship (1970). By the early 1960s, Marxists of diverse persuasions— e.g., Michal Kalecki, Theodor Adorno—were perceiving the intractable persistence of fascism well after its formal defeat in the 1940s. Such theorisations about the past are ongoing but have now erupted all the more widely and urgently in response to the rise of new movements and governments of the Far Right across the globe, wherever race and religion have come to play a constitutive role in shaping subjectivities and political discourses. An outstanding feature of such theorisations is that they range from political economy to domains of culture, aesthetics, sociology and psychoanalysis. Fascism was not in the past and expressions of the Far Right today are not confined to Euro-American zones. Our readings will reflect this reality. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE POLITICS OF DECOLONIZATION IN AFRICAN LITERATURE | THIONG'O, N. | The politics of decolonization at the economic, Political, Cultural and Psychic levels affect the Globe today. Everywhere Statues, reminiscent of the old colonial order, are falling, accompanied by calls for decolonization of dominant images and institutions. Based on selected texts of mainly African Literature, the course examines the question and centrality of language in debates about decolonization. |
| COM LIT 210 | PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE BODY | MALABOU, C. | In this class, we will read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945). In this book, Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of “body schema”, a structure that maintains the body’s unity despite wounds, lesions, or amputations thanks to its “plasticity”. To affirm that the body schema is plastic means that it forms itself under the influence of experience and development and has a capacity to compensate and restore its integrity when impaired, hence the vivid sensation of the missing limb experiences by the amputated. Starting from there, and in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty, I will interrogate some of the most powerful understanding of substitution and replacement in contemporary philosophy (Derrida), psychoanalysis (Lacan, Fanon), neurology (Damasio, Ramachandran), artificial intelligence and “transhumanism”. We will focus on the issue of substitution, and question the relationship between body, integrity, and replacement in the age of regenerative medicine and new brain prostheses. |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | ABBAS, M. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | CHANDLER, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | THIONG'O, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | AHMAD, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | COX, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | KATRAK, K. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 290 | READING&CONFERENCE | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | CHANDLER, N. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | TERADA, R. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | SCHWAB, G. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | SCHLOSSMAN, B. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | BOLDING, S. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | NEWMAN, J. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | RAHIMIEH, N. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | JOHNSON, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | JARRATT, S. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | GOLDBERG, D. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | AMIRAN, E. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | COX, A. | |
| COM LIT 291 | GUIDED READING | ABBAS, M. |