EAST/WEST FRAMETALE NARRATIVES

A study of frame tale collections from India, Persia, the Middle East, and Western Europe from the 5th century C.E. through the 17th century. We will trace the development of short story/novella from their oral traditions and written reworkings, studying such texts as 1001 Nights, Kalila wa-Dimnah, Scholar’s Guide, and the works of Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Cervantes, and María de Zayas. This is a Global Core course. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Patricia E. Grieve (peg1@columbia.edu), with the subject heading Application: E/W Frametale Narratives. In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Applicants will be notified of decisions within a week.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia E Grieve
  CULPA: 15 Info
• 4 points

Justice Now

This lecture course, accompanied by its weekly recitation, examines the meaning of justice by exploring theoretical questions, ideas, and debates associated with contemporary movements that have shaped political discourse in the United States over the past decade.

The course begins with John Rawls’s seminal work
A Theory of Justice
and a set of critiques from feminist and communitarian philosophers that direct our attention to specific contexts and identities that are relevant to any attempt to envision a just society. From there, the course turns to a study of social justice in three areas: economics, the environment, and race, with a corresponding focus on such contemporary movements as democratic socialism, environmentalism, and Black Lives Matter. Each of these units offers competing perspectives from liberal, communitarian, and post-Marxist philosophers, as well as critical theorists, which will enable students to consider the philosophical dimensions of these issues, their connections with one another, and the approaches of movements that are now working to address them. A final unit on praxis explores strategies that movements use to build solidarity and achieve change, ranging from voting to literature and the arts. Throughout each unit, students will have the opportunity to explore not only philosophical ideas, but also stories, images, sounds, and other cultural works that are being created by activists. The course will include guest speakers from the movements being studied, and will also feature class outings.

Justice Now serves as a bridge from the Columbia Core Curriculum to contemporary social justice issues and the work of the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights. As such, the course builds on the texts and ideas that students encounter in Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, and will also include some analysis of music and visual art. Prior completion of Core courses is not necessary, as students will be provided with relevant background material in lectures and recitation meetings.

• MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Larry Jackson
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR SEM-COMP LIT & SOCIETY

SEN SEM IN COMP LIT & SOCIETY

Prerequisites: CPLS UN3900 The senior seminar is a capstone course required of all CLS/MedHum majors and CLS concentrations. Only ICLS students may register. The seminar provides students the opportunity to discuss selected topics in comparative literature and society and medical humanities in a cross-disciplinary, multilingual, and global perspective. Students undertake individual research projects while participating in directed readings and critical dialogues about theory and research methodologies, which may culminate in the senior thesis. Students review work in progress and share results through weekly oral reports and written reports.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Bruno Bosteels
  Wikipedia h-index: 21 Info
• Instructor: Irina Kalinka
  Info
• 3 points

WORLD PHILOLOGY

Philology, broadly defined as the practice of making sense of texts, is a fundamental human activity that has been repeatedly institutionalized in widely separated places and times. In the wake of the formation of the modern academic disciplines in the nineteenth century and their global spread, it became difficult to understand the power and glory of older western philology, and its striking parallels with other pre- and early modern forms of scholarship around the globe. This class seeks to create a new comparative framework for understanding how earlier generations made sense of the texts that they valued, and how their practices provide still-vital models for us at a time of upheaval in the format and media of texts and in our scholarly approaches to them. Students will encounter key fields of philology—textual criticism, lexicography, grammar, and, above all, commentary—not in the abstract but as instantiated in relation to four foundational works—the Confucian Analects, the Ramaya?a of Valmiki, the Aeneid, and the Tale of Genji—and the scholarly traditions that grew up around them. We are never alone when we grapple with the basic question of how to read texts whose meaning is unclear to us. Over the course of the semester, this class will foster a global understanding of the deep roots and strange parallels linking contemporary reading and interpretation to the practices of the past.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: David B Lurie
  CULPA: 17 Info
• 4 points

POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE

How is performance conceived and instrumentalized to fulfill an ideological design? How is ideology transmitted as performance? Centering on National Socialism and Communism, this course explores that and similar questions by examining the political, social, and cultural performances (of Hitler and Stalin, of race and progress, of postwar trials) in the Third Reich and the Soviet Union by engaging a broad range of primary materials (films, documentaries, plays, newsreels, mass spectacles, artifacts of fine art) and by reading widely in the literature of political philosophy and performance studies.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Hana Worthen
  Info
• 4 points

Critique of Political Theology: Ancient

The seminar offers a critique of Political Theology through exploratory and reflexive readings of ancient canonical texts considered as foundational in the traditions of Western philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. Texts and excerpts from Anaximander, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or the Renaissance musings of Etienne de La Boetie will be read alongside 20th century thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Pierre Clastres, Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean Pierre Vernant , Michel Foucault, Regina Schwartz, Jan Assmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig.

Key questions: How do we – and want does it mean to – read ancient texts in our contemporary world? Can engagement with ancient canons (both political and theological) be both non-anachronistic and critical? Must critique be secular? Or Gnostic? Can the political be separated from the theological? What can formations of ancient theo-political imagination teach us about the prospects and limits of ours?

We will try to show that ancient formations of theopolitical imagination have never been completely eradicated in the course of modern secularization—a concept we will have to use cautiously and critically. We will look for traces of the theopolitical in contemporary political discourse and imagination and examine the possibility whether a “theological unconscious” might still be widely at work today. And as we will proceed from Sophocles and Anaximander to the New Testament, we will try to redraw the line between polytheism or paganism and monotheism in theopolitical terms. In this context, we will examine the following statement—the oneness of God in the ancient texts was no less desired and no more secured than the oneness of the modern state—and explore its premises and consequences.     

This seminar will bring together graduate students from Brown and Columbia universities—sponsored by the Kogut Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society respectively—in a joint seminar that will run parallel and occasionally together on zoom, with professors Gourgouris and Ophir visiting each other’s classes in situ twice each during the term. Brown students will be welcome to sit as virtual guests at Professor’s Gourgouris’ seminar at Columbia, and Columbia students will be welcome as virtual guests to Professor Ophir’s seminar at Brown.

We aim that students&rsqu

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Stathis Gourgouris
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

A Comprehensive Introduction to Sigmund

CORE CONCEPTS-FREUD'S THINKING

This course offers a comprehensive understanding of the origins, foundations and evolution of Freud’s psychoanalytic theorizing during the four decades following 1895. Via close readings of his texts, with neither worship nor condescension, we will situate the development of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind within historical context, and explore its applications to education, society, culture, and the humanities.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• 3 points

QUEER THEORY & PSYCHOANALYSIS

It is practically impossible to imagine queer theory without psychoanalysis. Not only does Queer Theory depend on psychoanalysis for conceptualizing sex and sexuality, but even related terms such as desire, relationality, and the body, require rich and substantial psychological elaboration. And yet, in spite of its centrality, there is an abiding resistance to psychoanalysis on the grounds that it focuses too much on the individual, and on the individual mind, and in so doing, fails to grasp the structural dimension of sex, sexuality and identity. If Freud epitomizes the psychological view, and Foucault represents the constructed view, then we could think of Queer Theory as perennially torn between these competing and irreconcilable positions. With all of the theoretical baggage the concept of the individual entails, would it be better for Queer Theory to leave psychoanalysis behind, or are there ways to rethink individuality along more radical lines? Is the individual subject really an obstacle to radical theory or its prerequisite? How do we think about the relationship between Queer Theory and psychoanalysis? While there are extreme positions on either side of this debate, how can we craft a third way that acknowledges the importance of subjectivity while also recognizing the limitations of traditional psychoanalysis?

This course introduces the complicated relationship between Queer Theory and psychoanalysis by familiarizing students with the clinical concepts at the core of contemporary critical theory. We will focus specifically on the topics of: sexuality, perversion, trauma, identity, relationality, narcissism, gender and attachment in order to explore how these concepts work today. Delving into theoretical writing by Foucault, Bersani, Edelman, Berlant, Butler, Dean and Preciado, as well as clinical writing by contemporary psychoanalysts, Benvenuto, Gonzalez, Corbett, Laplanche and Gherovici, we will redefine queer formulations by transforming their clinical meaning. In addition to offering a comprehensive outline of how psychoanalysis and Queer Theory relate, this course will expose students to a wide range of contemporary clinical thinking in order to facilitate a deeper engagement with the practical,
lived
dimension of psychoanalysis.

• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Gila Ashtor
  Info
• 3 points

Digital Psychoanalysis

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown, psychoanalysts suddenly were displaced from the sanctuary of their clinical consulting rooms. Those who wished to continue seeing patients --including many who previously had condemned virtual analysis--were compelled to adopt remote modes of treatment. Some analysts opted to continue treating patients through phone sessions. Others shifted to tele-psychoanalysis, and without warning, precedent, or training, relocated their practices to cyberspace. This course examines the rapid proliferation of digitized therapeutics in the wake of the pandemic, and the challenges this radical shift poses to the hallowed tradition of in-person analytic practice. It explores the performativity, relationality, and pathologies of the ‘digital self’ that emerges through lived experience in social media environments. Since these forms of self, relationship, and pathology shape analysts as well as patients, this course looks at their impact on digital therapeutic interaction and intersubjectivity. This course also looks at transference, countertransference, resistance and the unconscious, and at cross-racial and cross-cultural dynamics, in online treatments. Finally, the course considers whether tele-psychoanalysis, with its disembodiment, physical absence, and sensory constriction, is a mere simulacrum of in-person clinical encounters, or whether it broadens and enriches the analytic field. This course draws on pre- and post-COVID literatures on digital psychoanalysis, and on my current research on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis during the pandemic.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Karen Seeley
  CULPA: 9 Info
• 3 points

The Mind Between Literature and the Brai

Mind Between Lit and Brai

What — to paraphrase Catherine Malabou — should literary studies
do
with neuroscience? How should critics and theorists approach the wealth of research about the neural bases of cognition? Should empirical findings about the brain supplant or complement interpretative and speculative theories of the psyche in the literary critic’s toolkit? Is the psyche and its “inner life” still a meaningful level of analysis for literary scholars? 
The field of “cognitive literary studies,” as the heterogeneous body of work drawing from research psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience is known, has steadily grown in stature over the last few decades, in lockstep with the burgeoning prominence of neuroscience in popular culture and within the academy. Some of its exponents argue that the rise of neuroscience must imply the decline of psychoanalysis and other “folk” psychologies. Others point to the constraints of reproducibility and of the empirical method as insur-mountable handicaps for the study of complex cultural objects such as literature.  
In this seminar, we will consider the literary experience as a whole — from the act of reading and comprehension, to the affective impact of reading and even the lifelong permanence in one’s memory and imagination of what Eve Sedgwick called “phantasy books” — and ask which parts of the experience can be fruitfully elucidated by reference to empirical knowledge about neural processes. Individual classes will focus on neuro-phenomenology, neuro-psychoanalysis, neuro-aesthetics, the neuroscience of reading, theory of mind, affect studies and critical theory.  
We complement these theoretical explorations with a small archive of twentieth-century writing (by Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, W.G. Sebald and Sarah Kane) that questions and subverts our assumptions about the representation of mental life in literary work.  
The course has no pre-requisites and it is open to undergraduate and graduate students. 

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Valerio Amoretti
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory:

Contemp Crit Theory:State

This seminar uses an open rubric of “topics in contemporary critical theory” to engage a wide range of current concepts, approaches, strands, and debates residing at the crux of social and cultural critique in the intersections of social and political theory, anthropology, literary and cultural studies. Located on these crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences, contemporary critical theory—in the broad sense used here—draws on several traditions of intellectual thought, including (post-)Marxism, ideology critique, critical ethnography, psychoanalytic theory, critical race theory, feminist and postcolonial/decolonial critique. The seminar traces such lines of inquiry in order to explore the links between knowledge, power, subjectivity, and the political. Special attention is given to the relationship between thought and praxis in various contemporary sociopolitical contexts.

Specific focus this time is the broader problem of democracy in contemporary societies, both in their national and their global dimensions. This is especially trenchant with the migration/refugee crisis in Europe, the problem of open/closed borders worldwide, and the security crisis in the aftermath of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The volume and intensity of human mobility from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe remains dramatically steady, despite the overall restrictions in mobility following the pandemic conditions worldwide and the resurgence of extreme nationalism. During the last decade refugee statelessness has evolved into a quasi-permanent liminal condition of being within the political body of ‘Western’ societies, especially in so called border countries of the European periphery. The continuous expansion and multiplication of internment camps in countries such as Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. has created different states of existence within national territories, raising a wide range of issues that concern statehood, political rights, the right to equal treatment and access to public goods (i.e., health, education, safety, representation etc.).

This cascade of interior frontiers has precipitated a huge debate on questions of citizenship and democratic institutions in the broadest sense. Moreover, dissent has grown across societies, regardless of identity parameters (class, race, gender, ethnicity, religion) and across the ideological spectrum. What now seems to be a permanent crisis of democracy is paradoxically what reveals democracy’s

• M 1:10 p.m.-3:40 p.m.
• Instructor: Stathis Gourgouris
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

EAST/WEST FRAMETALE NARRATIVES

Frametale narratives, the art of inserting stories within stories, in oral and written forms, originated in East and South Asia centuries ago; tales familiar to Europe, often called novellas, can trace their development from oral tales to transmitted Sanskrit and Pahlavi tales, as well as Arabic and Hebrew stories. Both Muslim Spain and Christian Spain served as the nexus between the East and Europe in the journey of translation and the creation of new works. Through readings and films, and employing the theoretical concepts of Homi Bhabha (liminality, hybridity, third space) and Etienne Balibar (frontiers and the nation), as well as selected readings of Fernand Braudel and others on the Mediterranean world, the course examines the structure, meaning, and function of ancient, medieval, and early modern frametale narratives, using as theoretical frame in three ways: 1) Theory and practice of frames. Frames are not neutral; they can be narrative seductions, guiding and even strongly manipulating how we read the stories that follow; they can be used to reflect the intersections of orality and literacy. In order to understand their enduring power, we also explore the idea of literary frames through some contemporary films. 2) The exploration in their cultural contexts of topics such as the literary figures of the anti-hero and the trickster, precursors to the picaresque, women in the courtroom, the conflict of chance and human agency, monstrous births as political prophecy, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish relations in medieval and early modern Mediterranean cultures, the sexual frankness of the novella form, and gender politics. 3) How are narratives formed? The course traces the development of the short tale/novella from its ancient Asian origins through the seventeenth century, when Cervantes literary experiments gave new life to the novella form, and the Spanish writer María de Zayas challenged Cervantes views on love and marriage in her own highly regarded collections of novellas; we move to the present with the study of three contemporary films. But before they became complex and entertaining narratives, many of the well known tales had their bare bones origins in joke books, laws and legal theories, conduct manuals, collections of aphorisms and other wise and pithy sayings, misogynist non-fiction writings, and Biblical stories. Although the works are available in English translations, lectures will refer to meanings in both English and the original languages; students who can read the original works in Span

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia E Grieve
  CULPA: 15 Info
• 3 points

Race, Caste and the University

B. R. Ambedkar is arguably one of Columbia University’s most illustrious alumni, and a democratic thinker and constitutional lawyer who had enormous impact in shaping India, the world’s largest democracy. As is well known, Ambedkar came to Columbia University in July 1913 to start a doctoral program in Political Science. He graduated in 1915 with a Masters degree, and got his doctorate from Columbia in 1927 after having studied with some of the great figures of interwar American thought including Edwin Seligman, James Shotwell, Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey.

This course follows the model of the Columbia University and Slavery course and draws extensively on the relevant holdings and resources of Columbia’s RBML, Rare Books and Manuscript Library Burke Library (Union Theological Seminar), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture among others to explore a set of relatively understudied links between Ambedkar, Columbia University, and the intellectual history of the interwar period. Themes include: the development of the disciplines at Columbia University and their relationship to new paradigms of social scientific study; the role of historical comparison between caste and race in producing new models of scholarship and political solidarity; links between figures such as Ambedkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, W. E. B. Du Bois and others who were shaped by the distinctive public and political culture of New York City, and more.    

This is a hybrid course which aims to create a finding aid for B. R. Ambedkar that traverses RBML private papers. Students will engage in a number of activities towards that purpose. They will attend multiple instructional sessions at the RBML to train students in using archives; they will make public presentations on their topics, which will be archived in video form; and students will produce digital essays on a variety of themes and topics related to the course. Students will work collaboratively in small groups and undertake focused archival research.  

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Anupama Rao
  CULPA: 28 Info
• 4 points