We tend to think of epic as long and serious, full of noble characters at war with vengeful gods and impossible monsters. It takes place in a “masculine” world, glorifying great men engaged in lofty battles. The subject matter is weighty, following the fate of a single hero who ensures the triumph of a chosen people by destroying all obstacles, human, divine, or monstrous, that stand in the way of that nationalistic destiny.

People today don’t have enough poetry in their heads, and everyone should be able to recite one or two of their favorite poems. In addition to its purely personal benefits, knowing some poetry by heart has practical applications: in a tough job interview, you can impress the prospective boss by reciting just the right line, say, from Dylan Thomas: “do not go gentle into that good night/rage rage against the dying of the light.” Or at a party sometime, you’ll be able to show off with a bit of T.S. Eliot: “in the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.”

In many ways Shakespeare is the literary inventor of modernity. His plays depict the psychological, political, economic, and social upheavals that mark the transition from the pre-modern world to a world that is recognizably our own. But he is also the most international of all writers. This course will explore Shakespeare’s extraordinary literary originality by studying his most influential plays in an international context. We will locate Shakespeare in the culture of his period by reading his plays in dialogue with masterworks from across Renaissance Europe.

This is a senior seminar devoted to the study of two modernist authors: the Irish writer James Joyce and the Argentinian Roberto Arlt.

This course is a senior seminar focusing on reading and understanding Japanese animation, or anime, as a medium from its earliest forms to contemporary works. We will think through  issues of digital culture, seriality, and the relation between anime and cinema; limited and full animation; cultural disaster and the post-war; bodies and sexuality, and queer/yaoi and otaku culture, as well as anime’s place within contemporary media theory.  We will view works by Miyazaki Hayao, Kon Satoshi, Anno Hideaki, Oshii Mamoru, and many others.

This course examines responses of the cinematic image to historical events concerning Greece from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. The course relies on the viewing of a series of films which are contextualized by a list of readings.

The selection of films includes:

• Films which interpret history
• Films which reflect history
• Films made to influence history
• Films that photograph history

On a broader scale, this course also aims:

Modern Indian literature is as linguistically diverse and culturally complex as India itself. It comprises writing in the numerous modern Indian languages as well as in English, the latter widely accepted today as a local lingua franca as well as the language connecting India to the wider global arena. While both literature and oral story-telling have existed in India for millennia, the novel is a modern genre, imported and adapted during the heyday of nineteenth-century British colonialism.

Course Description: Seminar-lecture mix.

In this course we will read a number of seminal texts from one of the most innovative, multi-dimensional, aesthetically complex, and lasting literary traditions in the European Middle Ages: the literature on love (or, as often, but misleadingly labeled, on “courtly love”). Exploring this rich tradition via different genres, we will read vernacular and Latin love lyrics (e.g. Troubadour poetry, German Minnesang and Carmina Buarana), vernacular romances (e.g.

This course will explore the biblical tradition in Western literature by a series of close readings of selected biblical texts in conjunction with a series of novels written in different languages from the eighteenth century to the twentieth that make central use of these biblical sources. One underlying concern of the course will be the nature of intertextuality, that is, how writers confront and transform their literary antecedents, and how a literary tradition articulates itself through a process of restless allusion.