Sometimes that thing called “reality” is just too much to face. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed. Other times, we struggle to represent or grasp what it is that grounds us, the earth around us, the difference between reality and fantasy, poem, or dream. A dream or a poem can seem to present a reality more true than any photograph. Or taking a photo without looking through the viewfinder can grasp a bit of the real beyond our limited view...

In this course we will read select writings by Greek women authors whose literary works reflect, in a direct or indirect manner, moments of crisis in Greek history, society, and/or in Greek literary culture. As the Greek state emerged out of its scattered contact with European Enlightenment, the ideological and cultural construction of Greece as a nation emerging from the Ottoman Empire, included also attempts to envision a new Greek society of the European type.

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the

In this course we will read a number of literary texts set in colonized territories, largely though not entirely under French domination.

In this course, we will use the complex notion of the archive to analyze and compare a wide range of texts: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and novels by Sebald, Saramago, Murakami, Roth, and Morrison. What is an archive? How does it reflect the relationship between memory and forgetting, preservation and destruction? What does it mean to conceive of the literary tradition as an archive? How does the archive help us understand the relation between literature and politics, literature and psychoanalysis?

What makes American history, and why would we want to—need to—remake it? This course explores literary and visual materials produced in the post-Civil Rights U.S. by artists and writers who ponder this question and approach history like a raw material that demands to be refashioned and constantly problematized.

What happens when catastrophic or traumatic or painful events–war, or exile, or forcefully moving from one country to another—happened to your parents or grandparents, and not to you, but you hear about them over the dinner table, or at odd moments, or sometimes in the silences between their words?

In his “Defense of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In this course, we’ll take Shelley’s claim as a point of departure and proceed to ask how poets have claimed, criticized, contested, and been coopted by power. Our focus will be on poetry from Romanticism to the present, but we will also have occasion to address older poetic forms and practices. What can the persistence of these forms and practices tell us about poetry’s own power, its force?

Since at least the Second World War, Hollywood cinema—with its recognizable stars and formulaic plot lines—has dominated the global film industry. Moviegoers across six continents now arrive at theatres with expectations shaped by big-budget American studios. Yet during the same years that saw “Hollywood” increasingly become a synonym for “film,” another approach to cinema quietly extended its reach across the globe.