The literary and artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century was the most radical expression of European modernism in literature and art. We will be focusing on the four most forceful and creative of the literary movements to have swept through Europe between the 1910’s and the 1930’s: Italian and Russian futurism, dada in Zurich and Paris, Soviet constructivism, and French surrealism. We will be reading (and sometimes performing!) avant-garde poetry, literary manifestoes, short performance texts, experimental fiction and memoirs.

Among the many attempts to prove that William Shakespeare was not really William Shakespeare but someone else, there is a little book entitled “Shakespeare fu un italiano”: Shakespeare was an Italian. This course will argue no such thing. Rather, we will explore the various ways in which Shakespeare was touched by and touched Italy, a country he only knew through books and second hand report.

In this course we will read a number of seminal texts from one of the most innovative, multi-dimensional, aesthetically complex, and lasting literary traditions in the European Middle Ages: the literature on love (or, as often, but misleadingly labeled, “courtly love”).  Exploring this rich tradition via different genres, we will read vernacular and Latin lyrics (e.g. Troubadour poetry, German Minnesang and Carmina Burana); vernacular romances (e.g.

Responding to the growing international circulation of literature in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Goethe declared, “The epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” The term “world literature,” however, remains elusive and critics continue to grapple with David Damrosch’s question of, “which literature, whose world?” Gayatri Spivak has argued for the urgency of the active inclusion of the literatures of the Global South within the framework of world literature.

How do literary and filmic texts disclose and simultaneously keep their secrets? This course examines the role of secrets in producing and blocking narrative movement, and in releasing and withholding meaning.

[PLEASE NOTE: This “introduction or gateway to the advanced study at the core of the comparative literature major” is expressly designed for students in, entering, or intending to enter the Comparative Literature Department’s major and/or students majoring in other literature departments, or in closely related areas within the humanities.  This seminar is UNSUITABLE FOR STUDENTS OUTSIDE THE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE MAJOR AND/OR CLOSELY RELATED LITERARY/HUMANITIES MAJORS due to the seminar’s intense literary and literary-critical specificity; it is

Bob Dylan has named the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as one of his major sources of inspiration.   In this seminar we will explore the connections between these two important writers.  First we will read carefully through the poetry and letters of Rimbaud, one of the most original and powerful of modern poets.

People today do not have enough poetry in their heads, and everyone should be able to recite one or two of their favorite poems. In addition to its purely personal benefits, knowing some poetry by heart has practical applications: in a tough job interview, you can impress the prospective boss by reciting just the right line, say, from Dylan Thomas: “do not go gentle into that good night/rage rage against the dying of the light.” Or at a party some time, you’ll be able to show off with a bit of T.S.

In the opening section of his work Poetics, Aristotle moves from a brief discussion of means of representation to a focus on objects of representation that persists throughout his text. Although Aristotle’s theory of mimesis would be considered by many as a blueprint for fashioning narrative fiction through this focus on the objects and human actions that language allegedly refers to, this course examines how many 20th-century modernist literary projects appear at odds with Aristotle’s theory, while seeking to build narrative art on the basis of altogether new aesthetic premises.