The "Berkeley Connect in Comparative Literature" course works to make stronger connections among our undergraduates, graduate students, and professors–and with the larger campus and its various communities.

The "Berkeley Connect in Comparative Literature" course works to make stronger connections among our undergraduates, graduate students, and professors–and with the larger campus and its various communities.

This course is designed as a comparative study of "post-Yugoslav literature,” a term that is increasingly used in reference to a diverse, transnational, and multilingual body of works produced over the last twenty five years by the people (and their descendants) who once lived in a common, socialist state of the former Yugoslavia. Today these authors live and write in various forms of exilic displacement, scattered throughout Yugoslavia’s successor states and around the world.

How does one rest in a world that is itself unmoored or ungrounded? What would it be to keep time with a world essentially transient and perpetually changing? How can one keep faith with faithless creatures and fugitive phenomena?

This course will examine literature and the visual arts alongside and through the rapidly growing field of virtual technologies, emphasizing their medial relationships to literary artwork. Assigned texts will be read alongside and compared to recent adaptations of texts in their various new mediations. This course will also integrate texts and theory drawing from art history, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, cognitive studies, and literary criticism with innovative technologies where such disparate ideas might generate new critical modes and analytical methods.

What do we do when we dream? Why do we dream, and what are we to do with our dreams in the morning? Dreams are our hopes and ambitions, but also delusions, fears, and hidden desires. They can furnish us with important messages from our gods, or reveal to us premonitions of the future. Inspiration, whether poetic or scientific, is often said to come from dreams, and we might often call a real-world calamity a nightmare— although a terrifying nightmare can certainly feel like the greatest calamity of all.

In this course we pull out the guts of stories to try and understand how storytellers craft works that grip us. In the process we examine classic attempts to say what makes good storytelling and put to the test the idea that any story has certain “rules” that make it successful. 

Imagine that you are reading a book and, at some point in the story, you learn that what you are reading is actually the translation of a work written in an ancient language by an author from a faraway land. How would this affect your relation to the book? Would you now consider the story more interesting and valuable? Or would you start suspecting that the translator may have made changes and additions to the story? Would you be worried—or perhaps excited—about the possibility that the text may have alternative interpretations?

The recent apparition of bibliotherapists—medical practitioners who prescribe books to their ailing patients—elicits an important question: what if literature as medicine were more than simply a metaphor? In this course, we will look to and beyond the possibility of literature as a “cure” by analyzing how an array of novels, memoirs, short stories, and photographs from widespread historical and linguistic traditions both construct their own knowledge about certain medical diagnoses and destabilize the presumed mastery of empirical scientific knowledge.