This course focuses on contemporary novels written by Indigenous authors of New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific Islands, the United States, and Canada with an emphasis on how Indigenous aesthetics, epistemologies, and histories influence the novel form. Each of the texts in this course draws upon Indigenous literary canons, languages, and practices, while addressing problems related to colonization, such as ecological destruction, militarization, displacement, and genocide.

[Note: This course is “Co-Listed” as Comparative Literature 202B and as Critical Theory 290]

Paul Celan’s poetry has often been characterized as the most groundbreaking in European poetic art since 1945; likewise as the poetry—perhaps as the body of work across all the arts—most crucial to the “after Auschwitz” debates that shadow countless artists, critics, and philosophers (though none more consequentially, none more controversially, than Celan and Theodor W. Adorno).

What is realism? How have ideas of realism changed over time and across media, from photography and documentary—where the idea of the “document” takes multiple forms—to avant-garde/modernist poetry, novels and experimental films? This course explores the fraught nexus of questions of realism and media, with special attention to how these inflect problems of  gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity.

[Note: This seminar emphasizes the importance of 19th and, especially, 20th-century poetry and poetics in the development of Frankfurt School aesthetics, criticism, and theory; it likewise considers more recent dialogues between later 20th and  21st-century poetry/poetics and Frankfurt-oriented criticism.  The seminar is, in addition, co-listed as a Critical Theory 205 core-course offering for students in the Program in Critical Theory's "Designated Emphasis" course of study.  Whether enrolled through Comparative Literature, or through the Critical Theory Program, students are w

This course introduces students to key theories and methods in comparative literature. As we study a range of critical frameworks, we’ll read “contrapuntally,” pairing old with new approaches and foundational with ongoing debates in the field. We’ll begin by reading selections from Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) alongside J.

Supported by a Graduate Diversity Grant, this one-unit course-- designed for and led by graduate students in Comparative Literature—aims to serve a number of purposes. Ideally, it will support conversation and community-formation across cohorts; enable graduate students to share and develop their academic work in a supportive environment; connect students with professional development resources; and facilitate discussions about the grounds on which Comparative Literature has taken shape, and what comparative work means for us today.