This seminar is devoted to an investigation of the concept of Global South in the imagination of colonizers, explorers, and creative writers beginning in the 19th century  and reaching today’s novelists, poets, filmmakers, and social critics.  To approach the idea of “South,” we’ll focus in particular on the representation of that southernmost frontier of the Americas known as the Patagonia and then consider, within the heart of Europe, the shaping of the Italian South known as the mezzogiorno.

In this course, we will read a number of texts that offer striking representations of bodies formed by a wide variety of colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial contexts.  Our readings will allow us to consider a series of interrelated questions: how do these texts engage with and/or contest practices of racist classification and exoticist representation?  In what ways do their authors foreground bodies as texts upon which are written histories of political and cultural violence?  What links can be traced between bodies, language, and narrative?  How do bodies serve to authenticate and/or t

A semester-long seminar devoted to the works of Vladimir Nabokov.  (Works originally written in Russian will be read in English with the possibility of an additional time for discussion of the Russian texts).  Focus will be on Nabokov’s place in the Russian and American literary traditions, the nexus between sexual desire and interpretation, Nabokov and close reading, applied Nabokov studies.  While our focus will be mostly on Nabokov’s novels, we will also devote some time to his short stories, criticism and, perhaps, letters.   Members of the seminar will write a final paper, make one or

An introduction to Renaissance humanism, focusing on the work of Petrarch, Bruni, Salutati, Valla, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, Ascham, Elyot, Lipsius, and Shakespeare. In addition, we will read some of the classics of Renaissance scholarship (Burckhardt, Kristeller, Baron, Garin, Trinkaus, Greenblatt, Cave and Greene), as well as more recent work in the field.

The poets known as the troubadour flourished in the South of France during the twelfth century; however, their poems had a vibrant afterlife, circulating in a variety of forms, both musical and textual, and shaping the development of subsequent European literatures.

This seminar is designed as an introduction to graduate study in Comparative Literature. The readings and discussions consider theoretical models central to the discipline and their influential critiques. We begin with genealogies (origins) of the discipline, questions of reality and representation, and move on to consider the era of disciplinary revision/crisis, “high” theory and New Criticism, psychoanalysis and queer theory, theories of temporality and phenomenology, and postcolonial criticism, ending with  more recent works on affect and new media.

We will focus on the short fiction, parables, and letters of Kafka – as well as The Trial –  in addition to theoretical discussions of Kafka’s works by Theodor Adorno , Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Georg Lukács, Gershom Scholem, and Jacques Derrida.  We will ask in what way Kafka’s work poses philosophical questions for his time, focusing on historical progress, authority, and the bodily form of human life.  We will engage in close readings of Kafka’s work to find out in what ways philosophical questions are posed in his writing, and how fiction becomes part of philosophical inquiry.

This course focuses on the examination of female deviance from the accepted standards of society in terms of attitude and behavior. This course examines representations of deviance and the violation of the norms (social, cultural, gender, biological) by central female characters in 19thand 20th century Modern Greek fiction. By accepting these literary texts as cultural texts, and by placing them in their historical context, this course also examines how these powerful, polysemic characters are associated not only with literal but also with mythological levels of meaning.

Enrollment in this seminar is limited exclusively to Comparative Literature students who will be writing an Honors Thesis during the 2012-2013 academic year. Although this seminar is optional rather than required for Comparative Literature Honors Thesis students (i.e., students who will be taking Comparative Literature CL H195 in 2012-2013, in which they will write an Honors Thesis under the direction of a faculty advisor), the seminar is nonetheless designed to help provide students with a strong background and training in what their Honors Thesis will entail.

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures.  The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works.  The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored.  The Celtic texts that will be read are the IrishSecond Battle of Mag Tuired and The Táin, and in Welsh, the tales of Lludd and Llefelys and Math; the Norse text