“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.” - Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

The island is a territory of the imagination that cuts across linguistic and cultural boundaries: a fantasy land of conquest, domination, punishment, and the place of new beginnings outside all that we know. Furthermore, certain islands are defined and expressed, paradoxically enough, through movements, flows, transits, and migrations. In this course we will think together about what makes the island such a rich territory and a site of multiple (and often times contradictory!) expressions. Through a selection (by

The postwar psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott said: “Home is where we start from.” If home is where we start from, where are we going? Somewhere else? Somewhere better? What constitutes a home anyway? Is home a feeling? A place? A mother? A memory? And if we are leaving home, who stays home? And what do we carry with us from home as we go out into the world? Working comparatively across a range of media and texts from different genres, time periods, and national traditions, this course explores this question of home and why there is no place like it.

The postwar psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott said: “Home is where we start from.” If home is where we start from, where are we going? Somewhere else? Somewhere better? What constitutes a home anyway? Is home a feeling? A place? A mother? A memory? And if we are leaving home, who stays home? And what do we carry with us from home as we go out into the world? Working comparatively across a range of media and texts from different genres, time periods, and national traditions, this course explores this question of home and why there is no place like it.

Many of the literary texts we study today come to us incomplete. Perhaps the author passed away before the work was finished, or perhaps we know the text only through scraps of parchment used in the binding of a different manuscript. Still other texts consciously position themselves as fragments, even if this move is but an artifice on the part of the author. Though the precise type of fragmentation may vary, all these texts pose similar interpretive challenges to their readers. How can we productively engage with a text that is or that claims to be incomplete?

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

Today Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf are considered two of the most brilliant and inventive writers of the 20th century, challenging and redefining the form of the novel and continuing to speak to us a century later. In this seminar we will read a large selection of their works, looking at their aesthetic innovations with novelistic form as well as the philosophical, social, and historical questions they raise.

In fiction and theory as in reality, it is impossible to really escape notions of eating. Whether characters gather around a table in a realist text, whether representations of forbidden fruit appear and subvert themselves in symbolic texts, or whether a text turns its eye to the “consumption” of language itself, eating and being eaten are as quietly omnipresent in writing as they are in our own lives.

In this course we will focus on the intersections of voice, movement, music, and lyrics within mediatized popular culture performance. We will examine how film, youtube, mobile phone, animation, and music video re-construct, translate, and transform the bodies, images, sounds, and texts of performers through media techniques. Central to this study is the foregrounding of women performers from different cultures from the 20th and 21st centuries.

In this course we will examine how the interdisciplinarity of animation creates immersive worlds in which viewers participate through mediated multi-sensory stimulation from screens. A special focus of this course is on comparative animation cultures, which reflect the aesthetic, social, spiritual, and technological politics of each case study through the special conditions and techniques used in the animation. We will explore animation from Japan, China, Iran, Israel, and the United States.