A good king who’s promised to find the cause of a plague killing his city winds up with himself as a prime suspect. A man working his way up the corporate ladder lets his bosses use him in exchange for promotions, but falls in love with the wrong woman. A teenage vampire slayer falls for an older man only to find out that the perfect happiness she gives him has transformed him into the creature she is sworn to kill. How do these simple plots grow into fully formed stories that capture audiences through the ages?

A Mini-Course and Residency with Christopher Bollas at the Townsend Center for the Humanities

In this seminar we will explore developments in the field of translation studies that have taken it beyond the once common metaphors of fidelity and betrayal, of being faithful or unfaithful to the “original.” We’ll focus on (mis)translations as symptomatic of the poetic and political dynamics of the negotiations between cultures in a particular historical moment. We’ll discuss a variety of approaches to the theory of translation, from system theory to postcolonial and globalization studies, both by reading critically and by theorizing from the translation practice itself.

In this course we will read novels drawn from the British, American and Chinese traditions that experiment intensively with the representation of other minds, asking how these novelists sustain uncertainty as to the comprehension of fictional minds.

What are the promises that come to us through the media, new and old, and how do they deliver or disappoint? How do they mediate the “changes in the air” we experience around key cultural issues, such as gender and sexuality, race, labor and class, political engagement and social change? What place do our media practices have in shaping a better world, and how do they make a difference in our own ways of knowing and naming what we feel and experience?

NB  The meetings for this class will follow the Law School schedule.  The first class will meet on Tuesday, Aug. 21.  The last class will meet on Tuesday, Nov. 20.

Romanticism was once defined as a turn toward “nature” in response to the industrialization marking Western Europe’s transition to modern capitalism in the early nineteenth century.  Rather than simply resurrecting the idea of the Romantic poets as “nature” poets, we will carefully examine Romantic figures of reflection and grounding, dispersal and dwelling, while also searching for alternatives to the curative role often assigned both “nature” and “poetry” in environmentalist criticism.  Topics will include: the gendering of “nature”; the persistence of commoning practices within industria

The “Carmina Burana” are the most important collection of Medieval Latin (non-religious) lyrical poetry from the High Middle Ages. The carefully redacted anthology contains moral-satirical poems attacking greed, corruption and hypocrisy; erotic love poems revolving around the fraught issue of sexual desire; and a third group with poems (apparently) written by a rebellious group of poets, the “Vagantes” who adopt the personae of hypocrites, false beggars, and outlaws.

This course serves as an introduction to the field of Comparative Literature. In the first half of the semester, we will take up the question, “What is literature?” Readings will include Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Tzevtan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, and others. In the second half of the semester we will ask “What is Comparative Literature?” Readings from Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, Catherine Gallagher, Jonathan Culler, and Pascale Casanova.