What happens when we create a community of readers in a comparative literary dialogue around the works of one author? What happens if we delve deeply together into the intricacies of Virginia Woolf’s inimitable language, the translucency of her images, the development of her modernist literary voice across multiple works?

Recently, efforts have been made by the Greek government to curb femicide in Greece by proposing to institute it in the penal code as a distinct crime. h the words of the press, " Greek prosecutors will not only prosecute for murder but (will also) take aggravating circumstances into account". This proposal is a result of campaigns by various women's groups in an effort to reduce domestic violence. From January to October of 2021, twelve women have found violent death in the hands of their husbands or partners.

This course will consider how modern lyric poetry in the United States is significantly shaped and re-shaped by the work of poets, critics, and philosophers of art and society who ask whether “lyric” poetry, in its very form, can help make special contributions towards the goal of creating a more ethnically and racially robust democracy.  Especially for the poets, but also for the critics and philosophers whom we'll read, that vision of American democracy requires (among other things) emphatic recognition of and decisive attention to the diversity and equality of American cultures.

From the first century CE to the present, Ovid’s myth-encylopedic Metamorphoses has been an astonishingly fertile resource for myth-makers of all stripes (theorists, artists, philosophers). This class will focus on an array of stories that illustrate various permutations of desire: of men for women, women for men, men for men, women for women.

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: Consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

Text:  A Manual of Modern Greek by Anne Farmakides,Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-30003019-8

In this introduction to the discipline of comparative literature, we will compare figures of writing--marks, traces, signs of passage--in various examples of world literature and literary theory. Taking our cue from Shakespeare’s phrase, we will explore circuits of partial transfers and translation in various material practices of inscription, citation, dissemination, erasure and preservation.

This course considers the shared experiences of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and refugees--groups that are not necessarily considered together--by mapping histories and ongoing practices of exclusion, displacement, and surveillance in the United States as narrated in works by Native American, African American, Latinx and Asian American writers.

Physically, New York and Los Angeles spread across the map and encompass multiple neighborhoods and communities, seemingly facilitating our ability to access, explore, and find new connections. Socially and economically, both cities have been figured as distinctly “American” dreamscapes—places of refuge and freedom, success, and self-invention—that hinge on the promise that the American city works like an open circuit, enabling unrestricted movement and mobility to and for everyone who visits or decides to make it home.