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 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
- T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Tadas Bugnevicius
Info -
Instructor:
Rishi K Goyal
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
Life at the End of Life: Palliative Care
Life at the End of Life (LATEOL) is a seminar designed to provide opportunities for readings and reflections on the experience of volunteer service work. Students will learn how to critically reflect on their experiences working with patients in the context of questions raised in the texts read in the seminar. Students will develop the skills necessary to critically reflect on the significance of emotional care as a medical practitioner, as well as form a deeper understanding of the role of palliative care and comfort care in a life cycle of care.
The fieldwork component of the course is met by the student’s continued direct service work during the course itself. Students participating in the seminar will volunteer
weekly at Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center
. Through this, students will provide emotional support and assistance, and serve as a consistent presence for someone experiencing chronic illness, disability, or the end of life. At the core of this framework is the patient; however, it is important to consider the impact this volunteer service will have on the student and Columbia. Therefore, the following specific goals and objectives are outlined to benefit each individual and group involved in this service relationship.
- R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Ashley Moyse
Info - 4 points
Narratives for Living: Planetarity
Narratives for Living:Pla
Is it possible to read literature in such a way as to be coherent with the requirements for the environmental disaster that seems to be upon us? This course will attempt to answer this question through 4 novels dealing with planetarity and climate change. This is a restricted course by interview only. ICLS students will read the Bengali and/or French texts in the original. Students are required to write a 1 page response to the text to be read the next day by midnight the previous day. Class discussions will be constructed on these responses. There will be a colloquium at the end of the semester, requiring oral presentation of a research paper that will engage the entire class.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Gayatri C Spivak
CULPA: 8 Wikipedia Info - 3 points
SENIOR THESIS IN COMP LIT/SOC
This year-long, three-credit course is mandatory for students who will be writing their Senior Thesis in Comparative Literature and Society or in Medical Humanities. Students who wish to be considered for Departmental honors are required to submit a Senior Thesis. The thesis is a rigorous research work of approximately 40 pages, and it will include citations and a bibliographical apparatus. It may be written in English or, with the permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies, in another language relevant to the students scholarly interests. Although modeled after an independent study, in which core elements of the structure, direction, and pace of the work are decided together by the student and their faculty thesis supervisor, students are nonetheless expected to complete certain major steps in the research and writing process according to the timeline outlined by the ICLS DUS.
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Instructor:
Tadas Bugnevicius
Info - 1.5 points
Transnational Feminisms-China and Beyond
Transntl Feminism-China/B
This is an interdisciplinary seminar for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to explore transnational feminisms, gender politics in China, and the movement of feminist (and anti-feminist) ideas across borders. We will read some translations of primary works by Chinese writers, as well as feminist scholarship in English to gain insight into the following areas: social movements; gender, race, ethnicity and class; global capitalism and inequalities; sexualities; identities; digital activism; nationalisms; marriage and families; and the politics of reproduction. Although the course has no formal prerequisites, it assumes some basic knowledge about Chinese history and intersectional approaches to gender. If you have never taken a course on China before,please ask me for guidance on whether or not the course is suitable for you.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Leta Hong Fincher
CULPA: 1 Wikipedia h-index: 6 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.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Adele Tutter
Info - 4 points
Advanced Freud Seminar
This seminar will concentrate on close readings of four key texts:
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Mourning and Melancholia; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
;
and
one
additional text to be chosen by the class
. These texts are chosen in part to not overlap with those covered in CLPS GU4200. Key supplemental readings will explore aspects of the text’s historical, cultural and intellectual context, contemporary reception, and influence on psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and beyond.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
- 3 points
Visionary Medicine: Racial Justice, Heal
VSNRY MED:RCL,JSTC,HLTH&S
In Fall 2014, medical students across the U.S. staged die-ins as part of the nationwide #blacklivesmatter protests. The intention was to create a shocking visual spectacle, laying on the line “white coats for black lives.” The images were all over social media: students of all colors, dressed in lab coats, lying prone against eerily clean tile floors, stethoscopes in pockets, hands and around necks. One prone student held a sign reading, “Racism is Real.” These medical students’ collective protests not only created visual spectacle, but produced a dynamic speculative fiction. What would it mean if instead of Michael Brown or Eric Garner or Freddie Gray, these other, more seemingly elite bodies were subjected to police violence? In another viral image, a group of African American male medical students from Harvard posed wearing hoodies beneath their white coats, making clear that the bodies of some future doctors could perhaps be more easily targeted for state-sanctioned brutality. “They tried to bury us,” read a sign held by one of the students, “they didn’t realize we were seeds.” Both medicine and racial justice are acts of speculation; their practices are inextricable from the practice of imagining. By imagining new cures, new discoveries and new futures for human beings in the face of illness, medicine is necessarily always committing acts of speculation. By imagining ourselves into a more racially just future, by simply imagining ourselves any sort of future in the face of racist erasure, social justice activists are similarly involved in creating speculative fictions. This course begins with the premise that racial justice is the bioethical imperative of our time. It will explore the space of science fiction as a methodology of imagining such just futures, embracing the work of Asian- and Afroturism, Cosmos Latinos and Indigenous Imaginaries. We will explore issues including Biocolonialism, Alien/nation, Transnational Labor and Reproduction, the Borderlands and Other Diasporic Spaces. This course will be seminar-style and will make central learner participation and presentation. The seminar will be inter-disciplinary, drawing from science and speculative fictions, cultural studies, gender studies, narrative medicine, disability studies, and bioethics. Ultimately, the course aims to connect the work of science and speculative fiction with on the ground action and organizing.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Sayantani T Dasgupta
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
The Poetics of Social Forms: The Legacy
Fredric Jameson was the foremost Marxist thinker of the United States in the post-War period. His dialectical presentation of European thought set the terms of reception and debate of many of the European figures, ideas, and approaches that instigated a tumultuous rethinking of the humanities in U.S. academia from the 70s to the 90s. Amid that reception, he developed his own enormously influential approach to criticize the modern and postmodern cultural logics of capitalism and late capitalism. Although his oeuvre sprawls, it spirals through a series of themes: ideology and mass culture, narrative and History, the triad of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, periodization and cultural revolution, temporality and Utopia. This seminar charts one path through his prodigious theorizing.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Adam Leeds
h-index: 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.
- R 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Valerio Amoretti
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
Wittgenstein in the Machine
This seminar explores the intersections between Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy and key developments in artificial intelligence. We will examine how Wittgenstein’s later philosophy challenges contemporary debates about the capabilities and limitations of machine intelligence. We will also learn how AI practitioners actively engage with Wittgenstein’s ideas, developing innovative methods in machine translation, semantic networks, or natural language processing (NLP) in general.
Motherhood and Technology: From Concept
This seminar will explore how technological innovations have radically transformed the experience of biological motherhood, from (pre-)conception to pregnancy and birth. The twenty-first century has seen rapid advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of new family and kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites. But while technology might seem to be the main driver of these changes, the revolution in motherhood is as much a product of transformation in other domains: ethics, social structures, aesthetics, and experience.
Together, we will work to understand how medical technologies have changed—and have been changed by—the experience of biological motherhood in a global context. We will encounter technologies for regulating and shaping biological motherhood: for instance, contraceptive devices, pregnancy tests, genetic editing tools, egg freezing and cryogenic storage for embryos, prenatal tests and scans, gestational surrogacy and its global commercial markets, and new frontiers of technology which enable novel forms of biological parentage (e.g. gestational parenthood for trans men; babies with the DNA of two fathers). At every turn, we will consider not only the positive and liberating affordances of such technologies, but also the (sometimes unexamined) burdens that trail their imbrication in the lives of mothers and parents.
The seminar will particularly suit students who are interested in the medical humanities, in pre-medical studies, in literary memoir, and in bioethics and critical theory.
- M 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Arden A Hegele
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
1001 Nights, Then and Now
This course explores the origins, performance, reception, adaptation, and translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
, one of the most beloved and inluential story collections in world literature. An authorless collage built up over centuries, it is an “ocean” of narratives that has much to teach us about how stories work, whether they must come to an end, and our apparently bottomless desire to hear them. In addition to reading the tales themselves and studying their themes and devices, we will delve into the very real history of this curious work and its eccentric interpreters, translators, and readers. Finally, we will consider how the Nights puts pressure on ideas of authorship and originality and enlarges our notion of what a book is – and might be.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Yasmine Seale
Info - 4 points
Gaslighting
In recent years, “gaslighting” has emerged with increasing popularity in memoirs and fictional accounts. Originally derived from a British play (1938) that was later turned into a film (1944), “gaslighting” refers to a dynamic that occurs between two individuals in which one person subtly distorts or manipulates the other person’s perception of reality. Although the term is often associated with extreme or deliberate forms of emotional abuse, contemporary writers use the word more expansively to describe any situation in which another person (or institution) tries to control my emotional experience. And while the phenomenon is predominantly associated with romantic relationships, it has recently been adapted to refer to medical experiences (medical gaslighting) as well, showing the immense appeal of a word that describes people’s encounters with self-loss. While some writers use “gaslighting” to describe confusing interpersonal dynamics, others have complained that the term is non-specific and functions too often as a shortcut that shirks emotional complexity. The enduring popularity of the term means that narrative accounts of “gaslighting” require renewed thoughtfulness, subtlety, and creativity. Drawing on concepts and language developed in psychoanalysis and critical theory, this course provides tools for writing boldly, carefully, and with precision, about intense psychological and interpersonal experiences.
As a writer who is also a practicing clinician and theorist, I will introduce topics that are central to understanding complex psychological phenomena, such as: dissociation, trauma, attachment theory and regulation. In addition to immersing ourselves in clinical material, we will also read work in queer and critical race theory that complicates our understanding of selfhood, emotional awareness, and society. These engagements with clinical and critical theory will be grounded in contemporary writing: Melissa Febos’,
Abandon Me
, Roxane Gay’s,
Hunger: A Memoir of (my) Body
, Amanda Montei’s,
Touched Out
, Paul B. Preciado,
Can the Monster Speak?,
and Micha Frazer-Carroll’s,
Mad World
. These books offer bracing and sophisticated attempts to represent complex emotional experience in new and unusual ways. Bringing a clinical perspective to bear on these texts will provide students with an enriched vocabulary for understanding themselves and their experiences.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Gila Ashtor
Info - 1.5 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.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Claudia Breger
CULPA: 2 Info - 4 points
S CONTEMP CRITICAL THOUGHT
- W 6:10 p.m.-8:45 p.m.
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Instructor:
Bernard E Harcourt
Info - 2 points