This course introduces students to key theories and methods in comparative literature. As we study a range of critical frameworks, we’ll read “contrapuntally,” pairing old with new approaches and foundational with ongoing debates in the field. We’ll begin by reading selections from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) alongside J.

How do nonlinguistic forms of meaning making (semiosis) relate to language, and what kinds of interest do literary writers show in these non-linguistic practices in different times and places? In this seminar we will take up the case of music-making as a semiotic practice and investigate what different kinds of literary interest in music might consist of.

How is that a poetic form, genre, or modality--lyric poetry, which, in its innumerable modern versions, is often said to have started somewhere within mid-late 18th century Romanticism, and which continues exerting influence into and across 20th-21st century successive artistic movements/periods known as modernism, avant-gardism, and postmodernism, as well as today's "post-postmodernist" situations--has kept generating such interest, attention, passion, controversy?

What is meant when we say someone or something “sounds American”? Can a person sound like a certain gender, social class, sexuality, or race? How would we possibly define that sound? And what might it mean to think of a culture by the ways it sounds and listens, instead of how it looks or sees? This course will explore these questions and others by studying podcasts, poems, songs, novels, and the changing forms of sonic technologies like microphones, radios, mp3s, turntables, and more.

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.

This course approaches the North and Central American landscapes as cultural and geographical spaces that are crisscrossed with borders, both seen and unseen. Focusing on Latinx border crossings and the U.S.-Mexico border(lands), we’ll explore a tangle of themes and questions: How do borders function as physical and ideological boundaries that construct and reinforce difference, prompting us to view the Americas in terms like insiders vs. outsiders, citizens vs. immigrants, here vs. there, place vs. non-place, or humans vs. migrants, laborers, or refugees?