THIS COURSE explores three world cities located across the breadth of Asia and Europe, retracing the stories, myths, symbols and fantasies which Shanghai, St. Petersburg and Berlin have inspired. Does each of these cities have its own story? What were its cultural forms? How did these cities come to embody the thrills and challenges of modern life? Were they able to satisfy the hopes and aspirations of a large and diverse urban citizenry? How did urban culture and national history become intertwined?

Linguistic anthropologists think about language ideologies as representing, in the words of Paul Kroskrity, “the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group.” Arguably, readers and writers of novels form groups of this kind in different times and places. Occasionally novelists attempt to innovate regarding “the perception of language and discourse” that a novel communicates to readers. Flaubert might be one example of this.

In this course, we will explore the meanings or non-meanings of catastrophe and crisis—whether psychological or environmental—by considering a genre, Greek tragedy, that attempts to represent the unrepresentable. Two plays that have deeply influenced the modern imagination—Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae—will be our primary texts, along with works of reception by Sarah Kane, Wole Soyinka, and others.

In this seminar, offered jointly under the auspices of the Law School and the Department of Comparative Literature, we will examine some of the conceptual and thematic places where literature and law cross over into each other’s domain. The focus will be on novel reading - Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Pnin and Lolita - and on texts where crime, judgment and punishment assume particular procedural, narrative, moral or metafictive importance.

Cervantes' "Don Quixote" (1605-1615) is the first great European novel and the most influential novel ever written.  It is also one of the funniest and most moving.  In this seminar we will read and discuss as much of it as we can.  The instructor will provide context and historical background and will guide conversation among members of the group.

What can computation allow us to discover about literature and how might machine learning transform literary theory? Can we use algorithms to challenge gender norms and complicate ideas about race and authorship in novels and other narratives? And what can quantification tell us about the markers of poetic form, stylistic innovation, or literary prestige?

This seminar (which is cross-listed as Rhetoric 221 and Critical Theory 205) is not an introduction to Theodor W. Adorno’s work; rather, it will involve sustained reading and discussion of Adorno’s last major text, which he was still finishing at the time of his 1969 death: Aesthetic Theory (1970). We will be reading Robert Hullot-Kentor’s English translation of Ästhetische Theorie; though we will sometimes briefly consider the original German text, knowledge of German is not required (though it would of course prove very helpful).

So-called ‘mystical’ forms of thought and experience have played a major role in the history of modern philosophy and literature from Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer to Lukàcs, Heidegger, Bataille, Benjamin, and Derrida; and from Novalis to Musil, Kafka, Celan, Bachmann, Klossowski, and Cage (to name just a few). In this seminar we will read and discuss key texts written by some of the most significant medieval figures in this tradition.