This course will examine a selection of travel narratives within the context of contemporary postcolonial theory and “mobility studies.” Throughout the course, we will be acquainting ourselves with recent theoretical work on travel, Orientalism, and mobility in both the early modern and modern periods.

We will read key texts from the history of German theater, focusing first on the period from the Baroque to the Sturm und Drang, then on a few significant post-1945 plays. We will do so with an eye to the history of affect and expression, especially in relation to questions of performance, theatricality and melodrama. This historical focus will help us to reflect also a consideration ofon the complexity of modernist and postmodernist imperatives to dispense with bourgeois forms of subjectivity—understood as hypostases of the self and ideals of mastery or continuity.

A study of Indo-European mythology as it is preserved in some of the earliest myth texts in Celtic, Norse, and Greek literatures. The meaning of myth will be examined and compared from culture to culture to see how this meaning may shed light on the ethos of each society as it is reflected in its literary works.  The role of oral tradition in the preservation of early myth will also be explored.

Humanities scholars increasingly feel pressure to justify the “usefulness” of their scholarship and pursue “pragmatic” ends. This course draws on a different tradition of use and pragmatism, namely the field of linguistic anthropology and its relationship to literature and the sociology of culture. Drawing from these fields, our course will strive to understand how literary texts can function as rich analytical archives of social practices and ritual.

In this course we will self-reflexively explore the genre of the academic or campus novel in its historical development and contemporary permutations. How have campus novels evolved and what can they tell us about our own anxieties and desires for academic experience? What would it mean to imagine our own lives as part of a fictitious universe? We will read novels that focus on the experience of students and/or teachers on American college or university campuses, with detours into texts that deal with student life in Ireland, Russia and France.

NOTE:  This is a writing intensive course.  No musical knowledge is required.  Only the willingness to listen and write.

"Music before everything. . .the rest is just literature," said the poet Paul Verlaine.

What about music seems to set it "before" the language arts?  Does it have to do with how difficult it is to write about sound?  Does music "mean" as literature does, or does literature always strive vainly to become a kind of music?

This course will examine three instances of dislocation of populations living in homelands from which they had to be forcibly separated for the sake of homogeneity: ethnic, political, cultural. The material will focus on the dynamics of traumatic ruptures, and on how the selected fiction and poetry reflect the emotional impact of such divisions and dislocations. These instances of forced mobilizations include the 1923 formal exchanges of population of the Greek minority from the newly dismantled Ottoman Empire and of the Turkish minority from Greece.

The Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) is one of international modernism’s greatest and—at least posthumously—most influential poets, known for twinned radical commitments: to artistic-aesthetic experimentation with lyric form; and to progressive and Left politics (a political commitment that eventuated in Vallejo’s intense, complex involvement with marxian theory and activism).

We will read a selection of  nineteenth-century French, British, and American novels, short stories, and poems (and one novel from the early twentieth century), along with a range of critical writings as we examine questions that were pressing then, and remain so now: what does it mean to think of people as equal? how do we imagine democracy? what does it mean to belong to a social world and to try to reform it? how are these questions built into literary works?

This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

Text:  A Manual of Modern Greek by Anne Farmakides,Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-30003019-8