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?

This course examines the concept of holiness in Western medieval and modern theatre and performance. We start with late medieval religious theatre, especially the genre of the mystery and passion plays, in which a unique blend of scriptural source materials, religious cultural context, and daily life was at the basis of a wide-scale theatrical endeavor.  We will then move to examine the renewed interest in the concept of “holy theatre” in modernism and nowadays.

In this course we will discuss dramatic works by Jewish and Israeli playwrights, authors, and performance artists, in which relations between gender, religion, and cultural identity are explored. By engaging with performance theory we shall discuss topics such as gender and ethnicity, feminism and religion, identity politics in historical and contemporary contexts, and performance as a vehicle for exploring self-identity.

In this course we will tell the story of European novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by beginning with two points of origin in the seventeenth century–Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. Topics will include: the interplay between fiction and desire, truth-telling and mimesis, romance and realism; the evolution of novelistic form in relation to revolutionary history; the privileging of plots of adultery, surveillance, and policing; the role of gender in defining the genre and the concept of “character”; the representation of first-p

This course will offer an overview of the fundamentals of irony and its theoretization from Socrates to the present day. We will examine the history of irony in all its permutations, as well as the various positions irony occupies within rhetoric, ontology, aesthetics, politics, and literary theory. Above all, we will ask the question of why the seemingly simple matter of irony proves to be such a tenacious problem in Western thought, and why it continues to be a topic of debate and controversy (including repeated calls for and announcements of its “end”) up to today.

In this course we will examine the various forms of ethical behavior in Modern Greek fiction which lead to valuations of “right (good) or wrong (bad)” actions, intensions, or decisions. We will distinguish the differences between ethics and morality and we will examine the philosophies, cultural or religious, that provide the ethical systems against which such actions are measured. What does the author intend to communicate to the reader as a result of such valuations? What are their political implications?

Gateway Course for work in the Comparative Literature Major.

Gateway Course for work in the Comparative Literature Major.

In this course we will explore the diversity of selected works of American literature, film, and music produced during the “long sixties” (1955-1975). Placing considerable emphasis on the relationship between artistic experimentation and the emancipatory social movements of the period, we will ask how innovative practices of language, image, and sound related to the more directly political actions associated with the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Movement, the Black and Red Power Movements, and the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements.