Photographing the Anthropocene: Nature,
PHOTOGRAPHING THE ANTHROP
This course will start by exploring techniques photographers have used over the past century to respond to the natural world’s beauty and complexity. During the second half of the term, we will examine how contemporary photographers are depicting shrinking natural landscapes, environmental destruction, and global warming and why some artists are beginning to question human centrality in the sentient world.
Augmented by literary texts by scientists, poets, artists, and ecologists, we will explore how close-looking might inform an artist’s practice regarding the living environment - its bounty - and its degradation. Readings include texts by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Masanobu Fukuoka, Robert Macfarlane, Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Akira Hasegawa, and others. Calling on a canon of photographic works from around the globe, students will study book-length photographic essays whose makers have seen art as a form of praise of the natural world and those who investigate the relationship between art and environmental activism. Anna Atkins; Susan Derges; Meghann Riepenhoff; Masahisa Fukase; Pedro David; Stephen Gill; Ron Jude; Dornith Doherty; David Maisel, Zhao Renhui; Mandy Barker; Pablo Lopez Luz are some of the artists whose works we will study.
Students will produce a semester-long photographic project that engages with the natural world or explores an ecological theme.
- M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Diana Matar
Info - 4 points
Translating the Animal
TRANSLATING THE ANIMAL
Through readings in language philosophy, translation studies, and critical animal studies,
Translating the Animal
explores how translation, language, and reason have historically worked together to maintain speciesism, preventing human animals from perceiving their commonalities with, and attunement to, sentient nonhuman beings.
- W 9 a.m.-10:50 a.m.
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Instructor:
Hana Worthen
Info - 4 points
Nazism in Performance
NAZISM IN PERFORMANCE
Explores the cultivation of national and transnational performances as a significant force of National Socialism, at the same time as challenging the notion of "Nazi Theatre" as monolithic formation. The core of the course inquires into the dialectical analysis of artistic creations in diverse art genres, while working towards an understanding of the social dramaturgy of such events as staging the Führer and the racialized body of the priveleged people. Nazism did not harbor ideologies without benefits for the allied nations. Thus, the dynamic performance of transnationalism among the "brothers in arms" will be included as well, in order to elucidate how works of art crossing into the Third Reich were reimagined, sometimes in ways challenging to the presumed values of the state stage. Permission of instructor given at first class meeting.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Hana Worthen
Info - 4 points
TOPICS COMPARATIVE LIT
LITERATURE AND HORROR
The objective of this class is to examine a given topic and relate it to a number of literary texts. Students will examine a variety of literary genres and to an equally wide variety of cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts.
- TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Monica F Cohen
CULPA: 8
Info
- 3 points
DERRIDA & LITERATURE
Jacques Derrida was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and his impact on literary studies was enormously significant. The objective of this course is to take stock of Derrida’s contribution to literature, and to do so by assessing the intricate relations he establishes between literature, philosophy, economic and political theory, gender studies, translation studies, postcolonial theory, and theology. The course is divided into six parts. Part 1 introduces Derrida’s approach to ‘deconstruction,’ particularly as regards his engagement with the fundamental concepts of Western thought and the importance he confers upon the notion of ‘writing’ itself. Part 2 examines Derrida’s autobiographical texts wherein he positions himself as a subject for deconstruction, interrogating his own gender, his sense of being an organic, creaturely life-form, the relationship he has to his own language, and the matter of his identity as French, but also as Algerian, and Jewish. While the majority of the Derrida texts we will be reading are excerpts from larger works or short essays and interviews, in this section we will read a full-length text –
Monolingualism of the Other
– so that we can trace Derrida’s train of thought from beginning to end. In Part 3 we will use an interview conducted by Derek Attridge, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” as a template for thinking about Derrida’s relation to literature, and in Part 4 we will read our second full-length text by Derrida, namely
Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money
, an in-depth analysis of a prose poem by the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Part 5 considers an aspect of Derrida’s work that reveals the extent of his embrace of provisional, in-between positions for thought in general, and for literary texts in particular, namely translation. For deconstruction is keenly invested in words beginning with ‘trans’: transposition, transplant, trans-valuation, and indeed trans-gender. Translation provides Derrida with a scenario whereby crossings and transits can be imagined – for literary texts, and for identities that wish to remain un-determined by fixed poles or normative values. The course finishes with an assessment of Derrida’s reflections on death, mourning, and the matter of leaving a legacy. In Part 6, we therefore read more of the essay “Living On,” and also Derrida’s final interview, “Learning to Live, F
- TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Brian D O'Keeffe
CULPA: 28
Info
- 3 points
Borders and Bodies
Gender&Sexuality in Liter
This course is a cross-cultural exploration of the construction of gender through significant landmarks in contemporary literature, from feminist and queer theory perspectives. The course will focus on a range of novels, short stories, essays and poetry written in the twentieth- and the twenty-first century from or about the United States, Europe and the MENA region. Through an examination of these works, alongside seminal works of feminist and queer theory (Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, etc.) we will ask: is it possible to write about a similar issue as represented across texts from different geographical and cultural zones, and how do you do so ethically without either erasing difference or exaggerating it? How do these texts (critical and creative) dismantle the ways we have been taught to evaluate canonical, male-dominated literary histories? Authors will include Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Hanan al-Shaykh, Nawal El Saadawi and Abdellah Taïa.
- MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Melanie Heydari
Info - 4 points
Global Kafka: The Writer's dialogue with
GLOBAL KAFKA
Emines the writer’s view of foreign cultures and animals, his response to empires and states, reflections on bureaucracy or personal relationships, with an emphasis on Kafka’s international legacy and influence. Discussions of his followers in American or world literature. Major novels such as The Trial, The Castle and Amerika as well as short stories are covered and rediscovered in this course.
ADVANCED WORKSHOP TRANSLA
Maurice Blanchot once described translators as the “hidden masters of culture.” Indeed, though our labor and craft often go unrecognized in the age of Google Translate, translators play an essential role as tastemakers, bridge-builders, advocates, and diplomats, not to mention the most intimate readers and re-writers of literature. In this workshop, we will explore translation as a praxis of writing, reading, and revision. Together, we will also interrogate translation's complex and often fraught role in cultural production. What ethical questions does translation raise? Who gets to translate, and what gets translated? What is the place of the translator in the text? What can translation teach us about language, literature, and ourselves? Readings will include selections from translation theory, method texts, and literary translations across genres, from poetry and prose to essay and memoir. Students will workshop original translations into English and complete brief writing and translation exercises throughout.
The Arabic Novel
The novel in Arabic literature has often been the place where every attempt to look within ends up involving the need to contend with or measure the self against the European, the dominant culture. This took various forms. From early moments of easy-going and confident cosmopolitan travellers, such as Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, to later author, such as Tayeb Salih, mapping the existential fault lines between west and east. For this reason, and as well as being a modern phenomenon, the Arabic novel has also been a tool for translation, for bridging gaps and exposing what al-Shidyaq—the man credited with being the father of the modern Arabic novel, and himself a great translator—called ‘disjunction’. We will begin with his satirical, deeply inventive and erudite novel, published in 1855, Leg Over Leg. It is a book with an insatiable appetite for definitions and comparisons, with Words that had been lost or fell out of use (the author had an abiding interest in dictionaries that anticipates Jorge Louis Borges) and with locating and often subverting moments of connection and disconnection. We will then follow along a trajectory to the present, where we will read, in English translation, novels written in Arabic, from Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Morocco and Palestine. We will read them chronologically, starting with Leg Over Leg (1855) and finishing with Minor Detail, a novel that was only published last year. Obviously, this does not claim to be a comprehensive survey; for that we would need several years and even then, we would fall short. Instead, the hope is that it will be a thrilling journey through some of the most facinating fiction ever written. Obviously, this does not claim to be a comprehensive survey; for that we would need several years and even then, we would fall short. Instead, the hope is that it will be a thrilling journey through some of the most fascinating fiction ever written.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Hisham Matar
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
MAD LOVE
The history of irrational love as embodied in literary and non-literary texts throughout the Western tradition. Readings include the Bible, Greek, Roman, Medieval, and modern texts.
- MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Alfred Mac Adam
CULPA: 40
Info
- 3 points
SENIOR SEMINAR IN COMP LI
Designed for students writing a senior thesis and doing advanced research on two central literary fields in the students major. The course of study and reading material will be determined by the instructor(s) in consultation with students(s).
TRAGIC BODIES II: SURFACES, MATERIALITIE
This course is conceived as an advanced seminar (i.e., upper-level
undergraduate and graduate) that addresses in more depth the themes of the lecture
course Tragic Bodies (BC 3160). It explores how dramatic enactment represents
boundaries and edges and thus skin, coverings, masking, and dress-up in relation to
gender and sexuality as well as race and class. The skin's tragedy most often is its
vulnerabilities – its othering and debasement, its tendency to be denigrated or willfully
cast off. This course will focus on these bodily edges, surfaces, and coverings, as well as
touching, proximity, and affect in ancient and modern drama as well as in film. In more
depth and more expansively than the lecture course, the seminar treats the three canonical
Greek writers of tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) as unifying threads and
features modern re-envisionings of their dramas that challenge gender, racial, and human
conventions. The course will also feature ground-breaking work on aesthetics, affect and
the senses, materialities, and the post-human in order to craft with the students activist
engagements with embodiment.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Nancy Worman
CULPA: 23
Wikipedia
Info
- 4 points