This course is a senior seminar focusing on  theoretical readings of Japanese animation, or anime, as a medium from its earliest forms to contemporary works. We will think through the impetus and methods for the critical study of popular cultural forms such as anime.

The purpose of this course is to present a broad selection of modern Greek short stories, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the last quarter of the twentieth, with a great range and variety in their style and focus. They range thematically, among others, from “ethographic fiction”, where customs and community loom large in the story, to the alienation of the individual and the anonymity of the urban space, to the psychological impact of the savagery of war, to idiosyncratic flights of individual imagination and states of the mind.

The concept of space as it is applied to the fields of architecture, urbanism and geography can be understood as a barometer of the condition that we call “modernity.” Many spatial themes unique to modernity emerge in short fiction and novels; these themes overlap with developments in critical theory. This course will explore connections between the larger literary and cultural frameworks of the past century and the idea of space as it has been perceived, conceived and lived during this period.

In this course we will read major authors of the European Renaissance, working in a variety of national traditions and literary genres.

Often labelled as ‘courtly’ love, medieval love literature is of a rich, complex, and challenging variety: intellectuals write (in Latin) about the anxieties and traps related to falling in love; monks send their love poetry to nuns; French nobles negotiate power and dependency by writing abouth ‘their’ desire; professional singers create and perform highly dense literary fabrics about their unreachable lady; authors of romances explore the tensions between being a ruler and falling in love; mystics interpret (and write about) their religious experience as sensual love.

(Comparative Literature Majors can satisfy either their Period Requirement or the Classical Literature Requirement with this class)

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: Comparative Literature 112A or consent of the instructor. A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

Already in classical antiquity, writers were being expelled from their native countries – and this continues even today. But exile might be chosen and voluntary, or forced, it might be an inner or an outer exile. Modern literature, in particular, displays different aspects of exile, and the development of modernist literature is closely related to different forms of exile.

This class looks critically at the moments where philosophy intersects with narrative, myth, and figuration. Where does philosophy fall back on the imagination in order to explore its principles?  Conversely, how do writers and artists borrow from philosophic ideas to construct their imagined worlds?

This course has two major aims.  First, it will attempt to consider how the novel can work as an ambivalent form or as a form that induces ambivalence.  Second, it will explore the concept of ambivalence more widely through texts whose narrators, characters, and plots engage in the anxiety and melancholia of ambivalence.