For the past several decades the American songwriter and singer Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize in Literature, 2016) has transformed our notion of how songs work. He has exploded traditional song forms, expanding the range of popular song, and reinventing our understanding of the human voice. Along the way, he has recalibrated the relationship between “high” culture and “low” culture by integrating into his writing everything from the European classics to rural American blues. In this seminar we will use Dylan’s remarkable work to reflect on the relationship between poetry and song.

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.

As we watch and discuss Greek films from the postwar period through the economic crisis of the twenty-first century, we will consider how Greek filmmakers have forged an aesthetics and ethics of resistance to the violence of modernity. In the aftermath of the World War and the Greek Civil War that followed in its wake, Greek filmmakers responded to the country’s physical, moral, and economic collapse. They borrowed from Italian Neorealism as they sought to represent the social realities of a devastated Greece and the culture of reconstruction.

It’s been said that poetry is what is untranslatable, yet one poem often translates another, and many of us only read one another’s languages in translation. As a catch-all concept for whatever resists being captured in human terms, “Nature” can also be thought of as a language only ever encountered in translation.

In this course we will read a number of literary texts set in colonized territories. Dating primarily from the turn of the twentieth century to the period of widespread decolonization a half-century later, these texts represent a variety of forms and genres and emerge out of a number of different cultural situations and geographic locations. Some of the authors to be considered are firmly enshrined in the canon of modern European literature, while others write as colonized or postcolonial subjects engaging with European histories of exoticist representation.

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.

What do demons want? Why do spirits possess? How do humans and vampires interact? And when do the dead come back to life or remain in a limbo? In this course we will address the appearance of fantastic creatures in literature from across time, place, and language, and explore various theoretical modalities to contend with cultural representations of the supernatural.

In this course we will self-reflexively explore the genre of the academic or campus novel in its historical development and contemporary permutations. How have campus novels evolved and what can they tell us about our own anxieties and desires for academic experience? What would it mean to imagine our own lives as part of a fictitious universe? We will read novels that focus on the experience of students and/or teachers on American college or university campuses, with detours into texts that deal with student life in Ireland, Russia and France.