This advanced seminar considers a range of Native North American textual production, including non-alphabetic texts, such as wampum and winter counts, and their intertextual representations in plays, novels, and films. An emphasis will be placed on Indigenous language texts, the materiality of texts and textiles, and forms of literacy and writing from pre-contact to the present. An 18- to 20-page research paper will be the culminating project, with smaller research-related assignments along the way.

What is "reality"? How does the idea of realism change over time and in different media, from literature to photography to film and digital media? What are the political stakes of defining a given perspective as “real”? How are ideas of reality gendered and inflected by racialized forms?

How can artistic practices facilitate the cure of an illness or affliction? When psychic pain (including grief, trauma, compulsive repetition, and psychopathological states) and somatic symptoms resist medical intervention, how do aesthetic experiences offer relief from suffering? When historical violence fractures lives, how does art remember what memory cannot in order to make survival possible?

In this course, we’ll study portraits of artists, “conversation pieces,” and experiments in collective self-portraiture. What does it mean to create a portrait in words or in moving images rather than through painting, drawing, sculpture, or photography? And why do conventional portraits, with their clear outlines and easily identifiable subjects, come to seem inadequate in so much fiction, poetry, autobiography, and film in the twentieth century?

Taking writing in the widest sense possible to include inscription, drawing, and the making and unmaking of traces, this class will focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings about and with plants, while also considering the metaphor of “plant writing” as something performed by plants themselves. We will consider the analogy between “close reading” and the slow work of observation and description necessary to such writing.

This course will study sexuality and gender in two very different historical periods--ancient Greece and 19th-century Europe. Sexuality will be defined as including sexual acts (e.g., sodomy, pederasty, masturbation); sexual identities (e.g., erastes and eromenos); and sexual systems (e.g., kinship structures, subcultures, political hierarchies). Readings and lectures will focus on situating queer sexualities relative to dominant organizations of sex and gender.

This course is the second semester of Modern Greek Language designed for students at the intermediate level. It emphasizes instruction in Modern Greek grammar and the skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Throughout the semester, we will encounter Modern Greek culture through art, film, and literature. Students are required to have completed the first semester of Modern Greek Language at UC Berkeley. Interested students who did not take the first semester of Modern Greek should contact the instructor in advance of the course in order to discuss enrollment.

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.

Physically, New York and Los Angeles spread across the map and encompass multiple neighborhoods and communities, seemingly facilitating our ability to explore, access, and find new connections within the concrete jungle of the metropolis. Socially and economically, both cities have been figured as distinctly “American” dreamscapes—places of refuge and freedom, success, and self-invention—that hinge on the promise that the American city works like an open circuit, enabling unrestricted movement and mobility to and for everyone who visits or decides to make it home.

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.