The study of sound–in relation to music, literature, media, and performance–has required scholars to reconceive their objects of study and, in many cases, the very grounds of interpretation. In this seminar we aim to build a shared vocabulary to consider how material encounters are interwoven with symbolic exchanges to produce that experience we commonly call sound. Perhaps because sound has so often been overlooked as fundamental to cultural life, it also has served repeatedly as the adhesive for community formations organized in opposition to dominant cultures.

This Senior Seminar will offer students an introductory overview of, as well as in-depth engagement with, the work in aesthetics, literary theory, and criticism developed by the Frankfurt School. The emphasis will be on Frankfurt School texts of philosophy, critical-theory, aesthetics, and criticism; but we’ll also read a fair number of literary artworks (or excerpts from them)--poetry, prose fiction (short stories; excerpts from novels); plays--putting them into dialogue with the seminar's assigned critical-theoretical and philosophical texts.

This course explores the history and literature of revolutionary Russia from the
middle of the nineteenth century to the Bolshevik revolution and the early years of
Soviet power. Our course will focus primarily on the relationship between and
revolution and the written word, examining works in multiple genres. From the
nineteenth century we will read the autobiographies of major nineteenth-century
revolutionaries such as the socialist Herzen and the anarchist Kropotkin as well as
Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, which influenced generations of

In this course, we will explore how twenty-first century literatures engage the archive of the Atlantic slave trade and its relationship to both the history of the United States and contemporary Black social life. How can the history of irredeemable losses be narrated and refigured? What forms of listening, of attention, do writers model as they engage with the archival materials that record the murder, violence against, and subjugation of African and Black people?

This class inquiries into how notions of time and subjectivity figure in different writing genres, literary traditions, and historical periods. In reading a diverse body of pre-modern and modern texts, we explore how time is constructed and articulated and how it is structured by narrative form and psychological content. We examine how diverse and competing temporalities underlie religious and secular worldviews and how they impact imaginaries of self and of society.

From antiquity to the present, writers and artists have addressed the question of how to lead a
good life, as well as addressing those obstacles—fate, the gods, our own divided psyches—that
have made it difficult for us to do so. They have also presented conflicting notions of what the
good life is, and what its relationship is to happiness and happenstance. In this course, we will
explore a range of ancient and modern takes on these questions. We will read texts by Homer,

The "Berkeley Connect in Comparative Literature" course works to make stronger connections among our undergraduates, graduate students, and professors–and with the larger campus and its various communities.

The "Berkeley Connect in Comparative Literature" course works to make stronger connections among our undergraduates, graduate students, and professors–and with the larger campus and its various communities.

For the past several decades the American songwriter and singer Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize in Literature, 2016) has transformed our notion of how songs work. He has exploded traditional song forms, expanding the range of popular song, and reinventing our understanding of the human voice. Along the way, he has recalibrated the relationship between “high” culture and “low” culture by integrating into his writing everything from the European classics to rural American blues. In this seminar we will use Dylan’s remarkable work to reflect on the relationship between poetry and song.

What are the resources novels marshal to produce knowledge of different kinds? How does the social location from which they emerge impact what they say, the knowledge they can hold. Along with six novels, we will pursue a set of readings from sociology and linguistic anthropology, as well as some key essays from the literature on critical sexuality studies and decolonial thinking. Among the concepts that will be of central concern for us will be point of view, forms of capital, cultural fields, and language ideologies.