Violence, understood as both verbal, psychological and physical acts, has always been a central part of theatre, and forms a strong current in European theatre also in the last hundred years. Reaching from verbal insults to systematic terror and torture, theatrical violence can also be directed towards the audience. The course will discuss different aspects of violence, how it can be understood and what its effects as well as its dramaturgical potential can be. An important dimension will be the ethical problems that violence confronts us with.

In 1914, the outbreak of the “Great War” marked the beginning of a bloody conflict that transformed the Western World. At the end of the war, empires had disappeared, brand new countries had been created, while after-war political and economic instability allowed for the development of future extremist ideologies. In Italy, the end of WWI resulted in expanded territorial borders, an impoverished economy and an unstable society.

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.

This course is devoted to a study of the concept of Global South, first as a theoretical question belonging to geopolitics and, second, as a project sustained first by colonizers, explorers, and later by creative writers.  To approach the idea of “South,” we’ll focus in particular on the representation of the South in the literatures of the Americas and, by way of contrast, the European South (specifically, the case of Italy).

This course will examine the culture of medieval Germany in a European context through representative examples of its most important literary genres, romance and poetry. The courtly romance and poetry emerged in the last third of the twelfth century in France. It became popular throughout Europe and its influence has been constant in the western literary tradition ever since. The primary goal of the course will be to acquire a general understanding of the poetics, the rhetoric, and the ideological motifs of these texts.

This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisites: Comparative Literature 112A or consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

In this class we will take a close and multi-faceted look at books written primarily for children, a category of literature that remains rather under-examined, despite its popularity, persistence, and influence.

Translation is everywhere.  But what is it, exactly?  The term is often used to indicate anything transferred, adapted, communicated, displaced or interpreted. What does it mean to be “lost in translation”?  What is the difference between a translator and an author?  In this class we will examine translation as a creative process that bears meaning from one language to another, and think about the wide variety of metaphors implied by the term.

When do you most often feel bored or distracted? In class? Reading dense theoretical texts? Scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed? Or when you’re alone and reflective? Both literature and popular culture have lamented these affective states as a result of our fragmented, media-saturated realities, in which political consciousness is withering and the stimulant market is thriving. This class would like to simply ask: are boredom and distraction always bad? Do the hegemonic structures in which we live leave us bored?

In this course, we will analyze drama, films, poems and novels that offer us entry points for thinking about the (all too) familiar yet surprisingly complex feeling of disappointment. Unlike the more sensational category of despair or the clinical category of depression, disappointment presents itself as something we can deal with because of its status as a frequent, even everyday occurrence. And yet disappointment can be great or minor, chronic or acute, existential or forgettable.