Gender, as Judith Butler famously argued, is a performance—a daily enactment of “boy” or “girl” so deeply ingrained that we rarely recognize it as such. But what happens to this gender drama in a language that is intensely gendered? Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, is what Israeli poet Yona Wallach called a “sex maniac”—a language where not only nouns, verbs, and pronouns but also numbers, forms of address, and adverbs carry masculine or feminine inflections.

Berkeley Connect is a mentoring program that helps students build intellectual community. The sections in Comparative Literature introduce students to the techniques of reading taught in Comparative Literature and introduce students to the wider campus. We talk about such concerns as when to attend office hours or how to write to faculty about getting off the wait list for courses.

In this course, we will consider the relationship between colonialism and surrealism over the first half of the twentieth century. We will discuss the ways in which surrealism and related avant-garde movements responded to the devastation of the two World Wars, and we will think about how avant-garde artists and writers engaged with colonial fantasies of difference as they sought to give form to the irrational and the dreamlike.

"Do magazines culture?" Rajat Neogy, the founder of Transition magazine, once asked. African literary magazines don’t just shape literary culture, they also offer rebellious responses to political and social movements. This course traces African magazines that have been influential to Black literature and art in the 20th and 21st century.

Bob Dylan is the most influential post-War American songwriter and winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature. He is also a figure who has redrawn the boundaries between “high culture” and “popular culture,” and reshaped our understanding of the relationship between verse and song. In this course, we will use Dylan’s work as a touchstone to think about how songs are like poems, and how they are not like poems. We will study theories of poetry and song, from the Middle Ages through the Romantic period, and up to the twentieth-century Avant-Garde.

What do we know, or think we know, about sexuality (ours, that of others, sexuality in general)? What concepts enable us to think about it? Do we ever find ourselves in contexts where what we think we know suddenly seems insufficient? Is what we think we know about sexuality adequate to understand other moments in time and other cultures? Novels can tell us stories in which the sexuality of various characters is a prominent feature, or even the central problem of the novel. Novels can be built in many different ways, and can tell their stories in many different ways.

Drawing on fiction, autobiography, poetry, the short story, theatre, cinema, embedded journalism, and cultural criticism, our course will be exploring a series of creative responses to the long arc of the Russian revolution, which stretched from the Revolution of 1905 to World War I, the Revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, and the establishment of the Soviet Union, the first communist state in history. The course will be driven by three overarching questions: What is a revolution? Is a revolution an event, a series of events, or a process?

From Louis Bonaparte’s 1798 conquest of Egypt to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), colonialism has been a determining force in the shaping of Arab modernity. For almost two centuries, the Arab region has undergone a major restructuring along the nation-state model after the dismantling of the Ottoman empire and the peripheral integration into global capitalism.