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.

Topic TBD

Topic TBD

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

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.

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 Statue of Liberty with welcome torch always raised. The Hollywood sign against golden California hills. Subways and freeways running like arteries above and below ground, offering to transport us around and across the city. Many iconic images of New York City and Los Angeles construct U.S. urban centers as a space of endless movement and possibility. 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.

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.