Why study literature and culture? What is comparative literature? What approaches have been prominent in literary and cultural  studies historically and how can we continue to draw from them today?  Where are the humanities disciplines going in this new and strange era?

This senior seminar in Comparative Literature will be divided into two parts: in the first we will read a number of literary and philosophical texts that explore what differentiates plants from other living beings and what is specific to their ways of being in the world: their languages and morphologies, their modes of communication, community, temporality, mobility, and reproduction. We will seek to determine the forms of agency specific to plants. In the second part we will turn our attention to gardens as spaces defined by heightened plant-human interactions.  
 

The emphasis of this course is on a close reading of novels selected from within a turbulent political period, from the last twenty years of the nineteenth century through the decade of the 1980's. The fiction will be placed in its historical and political context. These novels, by both men and women authors, reflect, in the construction of their female main characters, the violent social changes brought about by the various wars, the chaos and disorder of the post-war years, as well as the social changes that enter, albeit slowly, with the political struggle for the rights of women.

In this course we will read a number of literary texts set in colonized territories. Dating primarily from the turn of the twentieth century to the period of widespread decolonization a half-century later, these texts represent a variety of forms and genres and emerge out of a number of different cultural situations and geographic locations (including Southeast Asia, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa).

This is a course in beginning Modern Greek, involving speaking, reading and writing.

Modern Greek is unique among languages in that it is the only modern language directly descended from Ancient Greek. In this course, the student studies reading, writing, pronunciation and use of contemporary spoken idiom, all within the historical and cultural context of the language. By the end of the course, the student should have a grammatical and linguistic foundation in Greek as it is spoken today.  In this course, there is also an emphasis and practice of oral language skills.

The question of what it means to live a good life has been of perennial concern to thinkers and artists across historical periods and national boundaries. Sometimes competing visions of what it means to do the right thing leads to intractable conflict. Sometimes the fantasy of attaining the good life (for instance, in the form of the American dream) keeps us attached to particular behaviors or social structures, including ones that may actually be harmful to us.

What makes American history, and why would we want to—need to—remake it? This course explores literary and visual materials produced in the post-Civil Rights U.S. by artists and writers who ponder this question and approach history like a raw material that demands to be refashioned and constantly problematized. What versions of American history have they remade, and what new versions and visions of history do they produce in the process? How has re-making history been used to gain a critical understanding of silences and omissions in the United States’ story?

In many ways Shakespeare is the literary inventor of modernity. His plays depict the psychological, political, economic, and social upheavals that mark the transition from the pre-modern world to a world that is recognizably our own. But he is also the most international of all writers. This course will explore Shakespeare’s extraordinary literary originality by studying his most influential plays in an international context. We will locate Shakespeare in the culture of his period by reading his plays in dialogue with masterworks from across Renaissance Europe.