Reading & Composition

This course will consider the contemporary and queer fate of scenes of ritual found in Ancient Greek literature and visual culture. How does modern queer literature rewrite scenes of ancient ritual in order to generate alternative ways of thinking about kinship, mourning, and healing? How does queer cinema and performance deviate from and rework key themes of ritual? How does the performance of ritual provide the conditions for us to recognize certain lives as grievable, certain relations as kinship, and certain bodies as human? The course will focus on literature, film, and theory from Ancient and Modern Greek contexts, as well as European and North American ones, in order to question continuities, translations, and ruptures in ritual and its contexts. Placing literature and film in conversation with scholarship from the disciplines of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and history, the course will emphasize the skills of close reading and argumentation within a comparative framework.

This is a writing-intensive R1B course with a research component. A substantial amount of time will be devoted to writing workshops and instruction. Students will be required to write papers with revisions.