Among the many attempts to prove that William Shakespeare was not really William Shakespeare but someone else, there is a little book entitled “Shakespeare fu un italiano”: Shakespeare was an Italian. This course will argue no such thing. Rather, we will explore the various ways in which Shakespeare was touched by and touched Italy, a country he only knew through books and second hand report.

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, “courtly love”).  Exploring this rich tradition via different genres, we will read vernacular and Latin lyrics (e.g. Troubadour poetry, German Minnesang and Carmina Burana); vernacular romances (e.g.

Responding to the growing international circulation of literature in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Goethe declared, “The epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” The term “world literature,” however, remains elusive and critics continue to grapple with David Damrosch’s question of, “which literature, whose world?” Gayatri Spivak has argued for the urgency of the active inclusion of the literatures of the Global South within the framework of world literature.

How do literary and filmic texts disclose and simultaneously keep their secrets? This course examines the role of secrets in producing and blocking narrative movement, and in releasing and withholding meaning.

[PLEASE NOTE: This “introduction or gateway to the advanced study at the core of the comparative literature major” is expressly designed for students in, entering, or intending to enter the Comparative Literature Department’s major and/or students majoring in other literature departments, or in closely related areas within the humanities.  This seminar is UNSUITABLE FOR STUDENTS OUTSIDE THE COMPARATIVE LITERATURE MAJOR AND/OR CLOSELY RELATED LITERARY/HUMANITIES MAJORS due to the seminar’s intense literary and literary-critical specificity; it is

Bob Dylan has named the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as one of his major sources of inspiration.   In this seminar we will explore the connections between these two important writers.  First we will read carefully through the poetry and letters of Rimbaud, one of the most original and powerful of modern poets.

People today do not 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 some time, you’ll be able to show off with a bit of T.S.

If the proliferation of floral print and crop tops or the planned remake of Point Break weren’t convincing enough, this fall’s fashion week paid homage to Sassy (beloved periodical of nineties teens), and the men’s magazine GQjoined the growing number of headlines in national newspapers and periodicals declaring that “we are likely entering a prolonged period of ’90s monomania.”

A good ghost story is never just about an apparition. It’s about the society that created that ghost, and what such a society fears: race relations, changing gender roles, disease, technology, foreignness.  Indeed, the thing that makes gothic writing so compelling, says Edith Wharton, is its ability to both explore and obscure the “unspeakable” — that real-life social anxiety hiding in the symbolic backdrop of the paranormal tale.