Also listed as Slavic 131:1

This seminar serves as an introduction to upper-division coursework in Comparative Literature, and it takes up an important question as a way to begin exploring what comparative literary study is.  How do American poets, from about 1950 to the present, attempt formally and thematically to engage ethics and politics?

What is meant when we say someone or something “sounds American”? Can a person sound like a certain gender, social class, sexuality, or race? How would we possibly define that sound? And what might it mean to think of a culture by the ways it sounds and listens, instead of how it looks or sees?

Women Artists and Collective Art Labor: Producing/Performing Diversity

The notion of ‘mystical’ experience of the Divine, of Nature, or of Beauty plays an important role in the history of many cultures. In this course we will discuss the basic ideas of mystical theology from the so-called Western traditions. We will read and discuss key texts, analyze the ways in which they talk about about the Divine and about the possibilities to “see” or “experience” it. Based on this, we will look into traditions of art and literature where these notions of “seeing” or “experiencing” the Divine are reflected.

This course examines the ways in which literature and film have depicted travel as a form of study, from the 19th century Grand Tour to the institutionalized concept of “Study Abroad” on US campuses today.  We will focus on depictions of travel, how new senses of self emerge within new linguistic and cultural contexts, and will also consider a few examples of the influence that foreign writers have had on 20th century American literature in translation.

Leaving Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Since antiquity, poets have been representing and reflecting on nonhuman “nature.”  What does nature offer the poet? And how has that changed over the course of history?

The creation of the universe. The mind wandering. Monsters in the dark. Fates foretold. Miraculous happenings. Travels to mysterious lands. These are the fantastic depths and distances of our literary imagination, extending to the ends of our perception and beyond. The imagination relates to our fundamental power as writers and readers to create images both in order to assist in our understanding of the world and to provide us with the power to shape our reality. Fantasy thus becomes an important tool for understanding.

“Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day.”

—Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound”

The concept of point of view seems familiar enough — after all, everyone seems to have one. But as a key technique of literary experimentation and innovation, point of view becomes something radically unfamiliar. In this course we will draw on Francophone, Anglophone and Persian literary modernisms in order to study — and develop our own arguments about — the different ways author structure point of view. What kinds of possibilities and limitations are associated with the first-person point of view, or the third-person point of view? Is there such a thing as a collective point of view?