This course is devoted to a study of the concept of Global South, first as a theoretical question belonging to geopolitics and, second, as a project sustained first by colonizers, explorers, and later by creative writers.  To approach the idea of “South,” we’ll focus in particular on the representation of the South in the literatures of the Americas and, by way of contrast, the European South (specifically, the case of Italy).

This course will examine the culture of medieval Germany in a European context through representative examples of its most important literary genres, romance and poetry. The courtly romance and poetry emerged in the last third of the twelfth century in France. It became popular throughout Europe and its influence has been constant in the western literary tradition ever since. The primary goal of the course will be to acquire a general understanding of the poetics, the rhetoric, and the ideological motifs of these texts.

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.

In this class we will take a close and multi-faceted look at books written primarily for children, a category of literature that remains rather under-examined, despite its popularity, persistence, and influence.

We will pursue an introduction to Freud’s basic works on the unconscious, dreams, the death drive, sexuality, and symptoms, by considering  the narrative, figurative, and argumentative dimensions of his case studies, his readings on literary and visual art, and his Interpretation of Dreams.   Freud referred to his theory of drives as his own “poetry” and often approached the case study as a story-teller.  Does the literary dimension of Freud’s work contribute to the controversy over whether his claims are ultimately justifiable?

This seminar will be devoted to a careful rereading of Nabokov’s most famous novel. We will consider the critical and ethical debates that have arisen around the book, and we will look at the novel’s transposition to the screen (Nabokov’s screenplay, Kubrick’s classic and Lyne’s recent treatment). We will examine the novel’s relationship to the genre of pornography and to notions of a discursive “body.” The novel will serve us as a focus for an investigation of critical methodologies and their usefulness when applied to a resolutely self-conscious text.

This course is concerned with works of fiction written before or after the seven-year military dictatorship of 1967, a regime marked by various degrees of censorship. These works examine the relationship between established structures (social, historical, religious) and modern worldviews that reflect multiple levels of reality and multiple belief systems. In these novels, whether written before or after the Greek totalitarian regime, the vision of the future is prophetic and frequently apocalyptic.

The purpose of this course is to expand the repertoire of questions and analytical tools you bring to your reading, to sharpen your linguistic sensibilities, and to consider in what sense literature is an avenue for understanding cultural dimensions of medical practice, medical ethics, health and illness, and the body-mind relationship. We will be considering questions like the following:

How does the practice of medicine reflect cultural mythologies, beliefs, habits of mind, manners, use of language?

[Note:  Enrollment in this seminar is limited exclusively to Comparative Literature students who will be writing an Honors Thesis during the 2014-2015 academic year (or very soon thereafter), and who have both the required overall and in-the-major GPA.  Instructor’s approval is required; please check with the Comparative Literature Department’s Undergraduate Advisor, Anna del Rosario.]

In recent years, many of the most celebrated and widely-read authors of postcolonial literature have produced novels that engage with a variety of sub-genres within the field of crime fiction, including the “hardboiled” detective novel, the roman noir, and the serial killer novel. What might account for this literary turn toward the dystopian, toward texts constructed around mysteries and often marked by shocking descriptions of extreme violence?