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.

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

INTRO TO COMP LIT & SOCIETY

Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics may include: oral, print, and visual culture; epic, novel, and nation; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; sex and gender transformation; the human/inhuman; writing trauma; urban imaginaries; world literature; medical humanities. Open only to students who have applied for and declared a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medical Humanities.

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Tadas Bugnevicius
  Info
• Instructor: Rishi K Goyal
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

BASIC CONCEPTS-POST-FREUD THGT

This course examines psychoanalytic movements that are viewed either as post-Freudian in theory or as emerging after Freuds time. The course begins by considering the ways Freuds cultural and historical surround, as well as the wartime diaspora of the European psychoanalytic community, shaped Freudian and post-Freudian thought. It then focuses on significant schools and theories of psychoanalysis that were developed from the mid 20th century to the present. Through readings of key texts and selected case studies, it explores theorists challenges to classical thought and technique, and their reconfigurations, modernizations, and total rejections of central Freudian ideas. The course concludes by looking at contemporary theorists moves to integrate notions of culture, concepts of trauma, and findings from neuroscience and attachment research into the psychoanalytic frame.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Karen Seeley
  CULPA: 9 Info
• 4 points

Sex and Psychoanalysis

Sex has always been a powerful and enigmatic force. Freud made it the centerpiece of psychoanalysis. Though many are familiar with his work on sexuality, few are aware of the development, elaboration and repudiation (in some instances) of these early ideas over the last century.

This course aims at presenting the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking on sex. We will examine a vast array of concepts in a modern context including desire, longing, genders, sexual fantasies, sexual orientations, BDSM, masturbation and polyamory among others. These presentations will also be enriched by an attention to the historical and cultural aspects of sexuality.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Tiziano Colibazzi
  Info
• 3 points

Abolition Medicine: Medical Racisms and

In 1935, WEB Dubois wrote about abolition democracy: an idea based not only on breaking down unjust systems, but on building up new, antiracist social structures. Scholar activists like Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and Mariame Kaba have long contended that the abolition of slavery was but one first step in ongoing abolitionist practices dismantling racialized systems of policing, surveillance and incarceration. The possibilities of prison and police abolition have recently come into the mainstream national consciousness during the 2020 resurgence of nationwide Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests. As we collectively imagine what nonpunitive and supportive community reinvestment in employment, education, childcare, mental health, and housing might look like, medicine must be a part of these conversations. Indeed, if racist violence is a public health emergency, and we are trying to bring forth a “public health approach to public safety” – what are medicine’s responsibilities to these social and institutional reinventions?

Medicine has a long and fraught history of racial violence. It was, after all, medicine and pseudoscientific inquiry that helped establish what we know as the racial categorizations of today: ways of separating human beings based on things like skin color and hair texture that were used (and often continue to be used) to justify the enslavement, exclusion, or genocide of one group of people by another. Additionally, the history of the professionalization of U.S. medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations as well as and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion, with a solidification of the identity of “physician” around upper middle class white masculinity. Indeed, the 1910 Flexner Report, whose aim was to make consistent training across the country’s medical schools, was explicit in its racism. From practices of eugenic sterilization, to histories of experimentation upon bodies of color, medicine is unfortunately built upon racist, sexist and able-ist practices.

This course is built on the premise that a socially just practice of medicine is a bioethical imperative. Such a practice cannot be achieved, however, without examining medicine’s histories of racism, as well as learning from and building upon histories of anti-racist health practice. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to learning about histories of medical racism: from eugenics and racist experiment

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Sayantani T Dasgupta
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

The Creative Self: Autofiction, Psychoan

Creative Self: Autofict P

Fictional autobiography, or autofiction, forces us to question our assumptions about the links
between creativity, truth, and authenticity. Can one invent, or create, one’s own story? It is possible
to write the truth of our selves, by creating it? Intriguingly, a process much like autofictional writing
is at the heart of modern psychoanalytic technique — and research in neuroscience increasingly
suggests that the human brain’s potential to morph and adapt might be instrumental to human
mentation as we know it. Might it be possible, then, to invent our way to a healthier narrative, to a
different life of the mind, or even, perhaps, to a different neural life?
This course explores creativity and self-alteration broadly in three parallel but distinct domains:
autofiction, object-relations psychoanalysis and neuroscience. At one level, this is a course about the
theories of creativity revealed and implied by the peculiar art-form of autofictional writing, by
contemporary psychotherapeutic techniques, and by discoveries pertaining to neural plasticity. At
another level, this is a course about interdisciplinary itself. We will seek to understand when and how
these three disciplines can be used together to create a rich and multilayered understanding of the
problem of human creativity, without resorting to simplistic mergers and crude forms of
reductionism. Literary readings to include Wilfred Bion, Christine Brooke-Rose, Marguerite Duras,
Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, Luisa Passerini and others.

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

The Narratology of Modernity

We have a consciousness of ourselves as placed specially in history, in an epoch which is essentially different from all that has come before: the modern. In respect of having such a discourse about ourselves, minimally, it may be true. Since at least the seventeenth century, intellectuals have been elaborating histories of modernity’s origin and theories of its distinction. This course does not attempt to adjudicate what is the true or best theory of the modern, but rather inquires into the discursive and historical conditions for telling narratives about modernity’s advent and constructing theories of its nature, and their aporiai. Topics will vary but may include the advent of “history” as a genre and non-Western “historical” genres; providential time, the saeculum, and prophecy; the dialectic of break and period; the delimiting of non-modernities, such as the primitive/traditional, the feudal, and the postmodern; the search for narrative agents, such as the nation, the state, and the class; schemes of the ontological disunity of modernity; modernism, the avant-garde, and the aesthetic forms of historicity; capitalism, socialism, and revolution; philosophy’s claim to historical diagnosis and the therapeutic refusal thereof; the desire for and attempts to construct anti-historical forms of narration and their limits.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Adam Leeds
  h-index: 2 Info
• 3 points

Contradictions of Care: From Intimacy to

CONTRADICTIONS OF CARE

Care is central to the interpersonal claim that is made by the other. It is a response that recognizes and satisfies a need. Care can be motivated by pain and sorrow, but also by desire and the desire for recognition. But while care is a fundamental aspect of healing, it can also be a demand that extracts obligations and liabilities. Care is an ambiguous concept that always already contains or is determined by its oppositions; we will begin by analyzing the concept of care itself, drawing on resources from the history and philosophy of medicine as well as literary sources. Ideals of care that many of us have for our loved ones are difficult to render at scale, and are often in tension with the for-profit motivations behind the development of medications, the administration of healthcare services, and the distribution of goods. We will consider the sorts of compromises that are made every day through readings in literature, history, political science and philosophy and also through first-person experience in the form of a practicum that that will run parallel to the course.

• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Arden A Hegele
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

Technology and Justice

Technological inventions have consistently spawned corresponding utopian visions of total social improvement, followed closely by dystopian fears and moral panics. The current advances in digital technologies are no different. Producing the full range of reactions all at once – from celebrations of “networked protests” to wild accusations of “fake news” to dire warnings against the proliferation of “AI plagiarism” – responses to today’s media environments proclaim the end of politics as we know it ... for better or worse. Through close reading and discussion of key texts of political and media theory, this course will show that such media developments and corresponding discourses of political crises are never completely “new” but can be historically and intellectually situated in much longer struggles over the ideals that should structure our communities. The digital age certainly did not “invent” white supremacy, isolated individualism, segregated information landscapes, or deliberate and manipulative misreporting, for example. Together we will question both triumphant digital utopianism and fatalist assumptions of ubiquitous manipulation, and instead engage in more complex readings of the ways technology, oppression, and struggles for justice are related.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Irina Kalinka
  Info
• 3 points

INTRO TO COMP LIT & SOC-GRAD

Please note: This course is required for ICLS graduate students, and priority will be given to these students. Generally the course fills with ICLS students each semester. Students MAY NOT register themselves for this course. Contact the ICLS office for more information at icls.columbia@gmail.com. This course was formerly numbered as G4900. This course introduces beginning graduate students to the changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, paying special attention to the range of interdisciplinary methods in comparative scholarship. Students are expected to have preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Our objective is to broaden the theoretical foundation of comparative studies to negotiate a conversation between literary studies and social sciences. Weekly readings are devoted to intellectual inquiries that demonstrate strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from a multiplicity of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, architecture, political theory, philosophy, art history, and media studies. Whenever possible, we will invite faculty from the above disciplines and fields to visit our class and share their perspectives on assigned readings. Students are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities and explore fields and disciplines outside their primary focus of study and specific discipline.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 4 points

The Hybrid Voice: Comparative Diasporas

COMP DIASPORAS & TRANSLATION

A seminar on the theory and practice of translation from the perspective of comparative diaspora studies, drawing on the key scholarship on diaspora that has emerged over the past two decades focusing on the central issue of language in relation to migration, uprooting, and imagined community. Rather than foregrounding a single case study, the syllabus is organized around the proposition that any consideration of diaspora requires a consideration of comparative and overlapping diasporas, and as a consequence a confrontation with multilingualism, creolization and the problem of translation. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to a practicum, in which we will conduct an intensive workshop around the translation projects of the student participants.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• 3 points

RACE/RACISM/ANTIRACISM: STUDIES IN GLOBA

RACE/RACISM/ANTIRACISM: G

Recent protests against racial violence erupting across the United States have demanded that the United States address systemic injustice entrenched in its national history. The Black Lives Matter movement has extended still further, inciting communities across the globe to raise their voices against discrimination and inequality.

 

Rather than viewing the United States— and the north Atlantic, more generally— through an exceptionalist lens, this seminar draws on the strong transnational resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement and the compelling responses of global communities across distinct demographics and colonial histories to decenter the historical origins of race thinking and provincialize its conceptual centrality as a first step in understanding its reach and relevance as a global signifier of “difference” today.

 

How might we develop critical studies of race and racism that are truly global and extend beyond the historical experience of the North Atlantic, and North America in particular? Might we consider the concept history of race, commonly associated with the Atlantic World and plantation slavery as a form of historical difference proximate to other practices of social hierarchy and distinction across the modern world? How can scholarship that addresses questions of black vitality, fugitivity and Afropessimism engage productively and rigorously with questions of colonial servitude and postcolonial sovereignty that emanates from anticaste thought, ideas of Islamic universality, Pan-Africanism and its afterlives, or heterodox Marxisms?

 

An exercise in comparative thinking, this seminar will function as an interstitial home for intellectual engagements in both the Global South and North, excavating linkages between injustices perpetrated through divisions of race, caste, and minority status, as well as the conceptual innovations born from struggles against them.

 

We are explicitly focused on the relationship between worldmaking and concept formation. Questions of historical comparison and conceptual convergence are important. So, too the forms of sociopolitical solidarity and political utopias that have arisen as a consequence of struggles against enslavement and imperialism.

 

Every seminar session will open with a twenty-minute discussion about political and social historical contexts. However, this is a course focused on the close and careful reading of ideas and

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

LAW AND VIOLENCE: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

LAW/VIOLENCE: CRITICAL PE

Law is often considered to be the opposite of violence: Promising to deliver us from the cycles of violence preceding its arrival, it sets its task as the establishment of a normative order that sanctions arbitrary and illegitimate uses of violence, derives its legitimacy from our consent, and guarantees formal equality to everyone under its rule. Various critics have challenged this conventional understanding of law, however, and examined the numerous ways in which law finds itself entangled with the very violence that it aims to combat. They have pointed out how the enforcement of law often entails the use of coercion and force, that legal decisions involve legitimations of state violence, and that the provision of rights often goes hand in hand with the entrenchment of social inequality and domination.

 

Taking Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” as a focal point, this course examines a wide range of critical perspectives on the relationship between law and violence. Following our study of Benjamin, we turn to the deconstructionist perspectives represented by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. Then we move to the biopolitical critique developed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. Following these continental perspectives, we turn to the American scene and read the criticisms developed by Robert Cover as well as Critical Legal Studies (e.g., Duncan Kennedy, Roberto Unger) and Critical Race Theory (e.g., Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams). In the final section, we examine three thinkers who strive to chart a path beyond the impasses we studied and navigate the aporias arising from law’s entanglement with violence (albeit in very different ways): Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Christoph Menke.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ayten Gundogdu
  CULPA: 20 h-index: 8 Info
• 4 points