In this course we will read novels drawn from the British, American and Chinese traditions that experiment intensively with the representation of other minds, asking how these novelists sustain uncertainty as to the comprehension of fictional minds.

What are the promises that come to us through the media, new and old, and how do they deliver or disappoint? How do they mediate the “changes in the air” we experience around key cultural issues, such as gender and sexuality, race, labor and class, political engagement and social change? What place do our media practices have in shaping a better world, and how do they make a difference in our own ways of knowing and naming what we feel and experience?

NB  The meetings for this class will follow the Law School schedule.  The first class will meet on Tuesday, Aug. 21.  The last class will meet on Tuesday, Nov. 20.

Romanticism was once defined as a turn toward “nature” in response to the industrialization marking Western Europe’s transition to modern capitalism in the early nineteenth century.  Rather than simply resurrecting the idea of the Romantic poets as “nature” poets, we will carefully examine Romantic figures of reflection and grounding, dispersal and dwelling, while also searching for alternatives to the curative role often assigned both “nature” and “poetry” in environmentalist criticism.  Topics will include: the gendering of “nature”; the persistence of commoning practices within industria

The “Carmina Burana” are the most important collection of Medieval Latin (non-religious) lyrical poetry from the High Middle Ages. The carefully redacted anthology contains moral-satirical poems attacking greed, corruption and hypocrisy; erotic love poems revolving around the fraught issue of sexual desire; and a third group with poems (apparently) written by a rebellious group of poets, the “Vagantes” who adopt the personae of hypocrites, false beggars, and outlaws.

This course serves as an introduction to the field of Comparative Literature. In the first half of the semester, we will take up the question, “What is literature?” Readings will include Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Tzevtan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, and others. In the second half of the semester we will ask “What is Comparative Literature?” Readings from Erich Auerbach, Edward Said, Catherine Gallagher, Jonathan Culler, and Pascale Casanova.

With the pre-Islamic ode’s evocation of the past figured through the space of the abandoned campsite, place is a central organizing trope from the earliest poems of the Arabic literary canon onward. The Meccan surahs of the Qur’an are inextricably linked to the landscape of the desert.  As the modern novel rises in Egypt, the pastoral and narratives of urban dystopia are connected to larger frames of nationalist and ideological discourse. The rapid urbanization brought by the oil industry catalyzes new novelistic forms from Libya to the Gulf.

In this seminar we will read, discuss, and analyze Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. We will read the entire novel and focus on a selection of short passages for close readings each week. Students should have read as much of the novel as possible by the beginning of the semester.