The genre of autobiography is often assumed to offer faithful mimetic representations of individual life stories. In the West, it is generally thought to be characterized by a post-enlightenment sense of interiority or self-reflexion, considered a requirement of the genre. Through a survey of the genre’s central critical texts and examples of life-writing from both the Western and Arabic literary traditions this course will examine the biases we have when reading texts that offer a different portrait of selfhood than that found in the Western canon.

This seminar is devoted to an investigation of the concept of Global South in the imagination of colonizers, explorers, and creative writers beginning in the 19th century  and reaching today’s novelists, poets, filmmakers, and social critics.  To approach the idea of “South,” we’ll focus in particular on the representation of that southernmost frontier of the Americas known as the Patagonia and then consider, within the heart of Europe, the shaping of the Italian South known as the mezzogiorno.

In this course, we will read a number of texts that offer striking representations of bodies formed by a wide variety of colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial contexts.  Our readings will allow us to consider a series of interrelated questions: how do these texts engage with and/or contest practices of racist classification and exoticist representation?  In what ways do their authors foreground bodies as texts upon which are written histories of political and cultural violence?  What links can be traced between bodies, language, and narrative?  How do bodies serve to authenticate and/or t

A semester-long seminar devoted to the works of Vladimir Nabokov.  (Works originally written in Russian will be read in English with the possibility of an additional time for discussion of the Russian texts).  Focus will be on Nabokov’s place in the Russian and American literary traditions, the nexus between sexual desire and interpretation, Nabokov and close reading, applied Nabokov studies.  While our focus will be mostly on Nabokov’s novels, we will also devote some time to his short stories, criticism and, perhaps, letters.   Members of the seminar will write a final paper, make one or

An introduction to Renaissance humanism, focusing on the work of Petrarch, Bruni, Salutati, Valla, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, Ascham, Elyot, Lipsius, and Shakespeare. In addition, we will read some of the classics of Renaissance scholarship (Burckhardt, Kristeller, Baron, Garin, Trinkaus, Greenblatt, Cave and Greene), as well as more recent work in the field.

The poets known as the troubadour flourished in the South of France during the twelfth century; however, their poems had a vibrant afterlife, circulating in a variety of forms, both musical and textual, and shaping the development of subsequent European literatures.

This seminar is designed as an introduction to graduate study in Comparative Literature. The readings and discussions consider theoretical models central to the discipline and their influential critiques. We begin with genealogies (origins) of the discipline, questions of reality and representation, and move on to consider the era of disciplinary revision/crisis, “high” theory and New Criticism, psychoanalysis and queer theory, theories of temporality and phenomenology, and postcolonial criticism, ending with  more recent works on affect and new media.

The course involves practical engagement in literary translation.   Each member of the group will have a translation project for the semester, which can be poetry or prose, in any genre, from any language, and from any historical period.  Every week two of the participants will circulate specimens of the their projects, and we will spend the afternoon discussing their work, raising questions and proposing solutions in a collaborative spirit.   The course is conceived in the conviction that the process of translation is central to literary studies.  There is no other activity that compels th

How are we to understand “East” and “West” as objects of study, as discursive constructs that have apparently congealed into self-evident geographical realities?

We will study this dilemma in two ways:

(a) as a theoretical problem, starting with the problem of crosscultural comparison, before examining the history of East/West literary studies beginning with the birth of comparative philology and linguistics in the late 18th century and ending with more recent polemics on world literature in the wake of Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, and world-systems theory

and

The history of Western literary theory is often told in terms of the concept of mimesis. But there is another, equally powerful, anti-mimetic strand to this history, and that is the critique of mimesis as a form of idolatry. In this course, we will explore this critique from the prohibition against images in the Hebrew bible up through modern attacks on mimesis as inherently ideological.  Our main literary texts in the first half of the semester will be taken from Reformation England, when there was a fierce debate about the harmful power of images and the necessity of iconoclasm.