This is the first semester of a year-long Modern Greek Language course designed for students with no previous knowledge of the language. We will study grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in order to learn Greek as it is written and spoken today. Students will practice the skills of speaking, reading, and writing throughout the semester. In addition to our study of the language, we will watch a few Greek films in order to learn about Greek culture and history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

At first glance, translation may seem straightforward—merely transferring words from one language to another. Yet, beneath this surface simplicity lies a labyrinth of challenges: How do we translate idioms unique to one language, or convey rhythm and rhyme, or handle culturally specific humor and slang? When we read a work in translation, are we truly engaging with any “original,” or are we encountering something entirely different?

An introduction to problems of the comparative study of literature and culture. Emphasis on principles of comparative methods and analysis with focus on selected literary, critical, and theoretical texts from antiquity to the present. Readings in English.

In this course, students will discuss and analyze the American children’s animated TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) as a literary and artistic work. The show centers on a 12-year-old boy who is both the reincarnation of a global peacekeeper called the “Avatar” and the sole survivor of the genocide of his people.

What is historical trauma? How does it shape communities and individual lives, including those born generations after a traumatic event? How does trauma reconfigure notions of time, history, and narrative? Considering that trauma undermines memory, how have writers and filmmakers created aesthetic forms that grapple with knowledge in the wake of a traumatic event? At the same time, how have states instrumentalized and standardized trauma narratives with the aim of creating a coherent national identity?

"Physically, New York and Los Angeles spread across the map and encompass multiple neighborhoods and communities, seemingly facilitating our ability to explore, access, and find new connections within the concrete jungle of the metropolis. 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.

"In this course, we will analyze and compare a series of plays, novels, and films titled after objects: Plautus’s Pot of Gold and Rope, Goldoni’s The Fan, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, Henry James' The Golden Bowl, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Yukio Mishima’s The Magic Pillow (1950), Eugene Ionesco’s Les chaises (1952), Jean Genet’s The Screens (1962) Melvonna Ballenger’s Rain (1978), and Raul Castillo’s Knives and Other Sharp Objects (2009). What is the relationship between language and objects? How does literature become material?

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.

In this seminar we will engage in close and repeated reading of Tolstoy's novel, paying attention to its treatment in criticism and to its refraction in later work by Chekhov and Nabokov. Students should expect to read Anna Karenina at least twice as well as scholarly articles and fiction by other authors (including Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark). Members of the seminar will lead at least one discussion and write three to four five to eight page papers. No exams. Active participation in discussion is essential.

This course takes its title from a book by Edward Said, a critic and comparativist. In this study, Said acknowledges Sigmund Freud’s Eurocentrism but lays stress on “his work’s power to instigate new thought, as well as to illuminate new situations that he himself might never have dreamed of.” We’ll follow Said’s lead as we work to understand Freud’s engagements with the world beyond Europe and as we see how this world has taken up and transformed psychoanalysis.