Comparative Literature

An examination of Nabokov's major accomplishments as a Russian/American novelist in the context of the Russian literary tradition and the cultural climate of emigration. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course will explore the crucial connections between migration, language, and translation. Drawing on texts from a range of genres and disciplines - from memoir and fiction to scholarly work in translation studies, migration studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology - we will focus on how language and translation affect the lives of those who move through and settle in other cultures, and how, in turn, human mobility affects language and modes of belonging.

A survey (in English) of three influential schools of 20th-century Russian literary criticism: the major Russian formalists (1920s); Mikhail Bakhtin (1920s-70s), and the cultural semiotics of Yury Lotman and his "Tartu School" (1960s-80s). The course will include both primary and secondary texts; major essays will be read in conjunction with sample literature that illustrates the critical approach. Two 90-minute seminars.

The course is primarily about War and Peace, framed by some earlier and later fiction and by Tolstoy's essays on art and religion. Tolstoy's radical ideas on narrative have a counterpart in his radical ideas on history, causation, and the formation of a moral self. Together, these concepts offer an alternative to "The Russian Idea," associated with Dostoevsky and marked by mysticism, apocalypse, and the crisis moment. To refute this idea, Tolstoy redefined the tasks of novelistic prose. Seminar.

Approaches to the connections between literature and nationality, focusing either on literatures outside the Anglo-American experience or on the theoretical issues involved in articulating nationality through literature. Two 90-minute seminars.

An examination of the central texts and abiding issues of the theory of cinema. Properties of the shot as a unit of film construction and its relationship to the space of reality are analyzed. Different kinds of film structures and their theoretical underpinnings are studied.

This seminar situates cultural production in Ba`thist Syria (1970-present)--in terms of its conditions of creation, circulation and reception--within a broader framework, namely, the history of modern Syria. Through an exploration of historical debates in the scholarly literature on politics, aesthetics and culture, students will both contextualize and comment upon ongoing discussions surrounding contemporary Syria. The course engages with a wide range of media, from literature and drama to television and film. All readings are in English, although those with interests/abilities in French or Arabic will be encouraged to exercise them.

A seminar examining the ways in which filmmakers have used one of the other arts as part of the self-definition of cinema as an autonomous art. One or two such interactions will be the focus of the course, and will vary by term (e.g., painting, architecture, poetry, narrative fiction).

Courses offered under this rubric will investigate ethical questions in literature. Topics will range from a critical study of the textual forms these questions take to a historical study of an issue traditionally debated by both literature and ethics (responsibility, rhetoric, justice, violence, oppression). Two lectures, one preceptorial.

In conjunction with University College London, this topic course addresses a range of topics, including the role of class, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality in the social dynamics of London life. Students will be considering works that represent the city in terms of the longing for kinds of relation that the city promises but may withhold. We will consider London as a city of neighborhoods, a national and imperial metropolis, a postcolonial and global city. By attending to our texts in their historical contexts and in relation to one another, we will be exploring writing about London that is as restless as the city itself.

Discussion, exploration, and refinement of critical skills in teaching literature. Topics covered include: setting goals for the classroom, starting and facilitating discussion, and grading. Wider professional issues, such as developing a statement of teaching philosophy, the appropriate use of technology in the classroom, designing syllabi, using translations, and preparing a teaching dossier, will be discussed.

The origin and development of tragedy, the Greek theater, and the history of our texts. The course involves the reading and analysis of selected tragedies, with an emphasis on the language, meter, and interpretation of the plays. Lectures and report.

The course examines in their entirety mostly short texts that advance solutions to the intellectual problems preoccupying major German religious thinkers, writers, and philosophers, viz. justification, selfhood, theodicy, play, contingency, asceticism, estrangement, malaise, authenticity.

Course topics vary from year to year.

This course focuses on the way literature, film, but also cultural events and spaces (circus, zoo, museum) present animals as objects of admiration and subjects of performance. We consider the fascination that animals inspire in humans, which might lead to question the distinction between "us" and "them". What is at stake, what are the consequences, for us and for them, when animals are seen or shown as an elusive Other who still beckons a closer encounter? How does the poetic power of language, or the evocative nature of images, affect their agency and our empathy, and eventually our mutual relationship?

Chance and contingency were long thought to lie outside the realm of knowledge. Then there arose new means for measuring probabilities of the most varied kinds. This seminar will explore the conditions and occurrence of that shift, as well as its consequences, as they are reflected in a few literary and philosophical works.

The purpose of the course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course focuses on theories that emphasize the role of formal elements in producing meaningful discursive and social effects. Works of Russian formalists and French (post)-structuralists are discussed in connection with psychoanalytic and anthropological theories of formation.

Critical, historical, and analytic studies of music, language, and drama in the European operatic tradition are studied.

A study of development, form, and content in Tudor and Stuart drama.

This course provides a general introduction to the theory and methods of comparative literature, with an emphasis on issues of interdisciplinarity. We consider the relationship of comparative literature to fields of study extending beyond the literary: aesthetics; semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism. The aim is to discover within and among these diverse and formidable fields some promising avenues for comparative literary research.

In this interdisciplinary class, students of race and gender read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

Treatment of either the works of an individual writer or a broad topic, such as the impact on literature of other forms of intellectual or artistic activity, including philosophy, the visual arts, history, and psychology.

An interdisciplinary seminar devoted to the study of aspects of the post-classical Greek literary and cultural tradition, including modern Greek literature, and its relation to classical literature and civilization.

Analysis of works of one of Russia's most important contemporary writers. Focus on major novels, including "Pushkin House," the first Russian postmodernist novel. We explore his wide-ranging concerns, such as psychology; philosophy; science; other arts (including jazz and cinema); people's relationship to other biological species; integrity and societal and psychological obstacles to it. We examine him as a Petersburg writer. Focus also on his relationship to time, history, and other writers; his place in Russian and Soviet literature and culture.

The expansion of race theory from the Americas into the global scene invites a cross-cultural approach to the fluidity of identity. This seminar investigates fiction and film from the African American, Jewish American, LGBTQ, and Israeli-Palestinian contexts to broadly explore how society constructs and deconstructs race, ethnicity, and gender. It focuses on representations of passing and reverse passing as well as doubled/split identities for a wide-ranging, comparative discussion of the political and the psychological dynamics of identity and selfhood.