Professor Bhattacharjee

Ancient Greek and Sanskrit literatures are replete with stories of lust, intrigue, sex, deceit, and seduction. Some stories tell us about the terrifying consequences of taboo desires (Oedipus and Jocasta, Ahalyā and Indra), some narrate transgender experiences (Tiresias, Śikhaṇḍī), while some show us passionate women rising up to an unjust patriarchal system (Medea, Lysistrata, Draupadī). Many of these stories betray how the relationship of women to sexuality and reproduction evoked both fascination and anxiety in the collective male psyche of the ancients, as illustrated through figurations of monstrous women like the Sphinx and the demoness Śūrpaṇakhā. In this course, we will discuss some of these stories (and watch their film adaptations) to investigate how the ancients represented their desires, fears, and sexual fantasies in literature and philosophy. Some of our guiding questions will be: in what way do these texts reflect the ideological underpinnings of ancient Greek and Indian society? What does a comparative literary critique of antiquities make possible that a single culture within a singular context does not? What do we learn from these texts about male anxieties around female sexuality? How have these texts informed modern theoretical interventions in psychoanalysis and feminism (Freud, Irigaray, Cavarero, Butler)? Beginning with Hesiod’s cosmogonic myths, we will examine Plato’s Symposium, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, alongside Kālidāsa’s The Recognition of Śakuntalā, the famous erotic treatise Kāma Sūtra, and hymns from the Ṛgveda. We shall conduct a group excursion to the MET Museum to study vase paintings from Greece and erotic sculptures from India. The films we watch will include Pasolini’s Medea (1969), Peter Brook’s Mahabharata (1989), and Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)—the latter about a gay Oedipus figure who murders his mother and sleeps with his father! Our aim will be to investigate how the ancients, even in their alterity, distance, and discontinuity from us, can reanimate our current conversations around desire and its transgressions—especially in the context of the #MeToo movement, feminist sex wars, moral policing, and cancel culture.

Professor Rautenbach

In 1978,  the cultural critic Susan Sontag wrote that “everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Her words take on renewed resonance in the era of COVID-19, when fears of contagion have calcified national borders. Not only does our freedom of movement depend on documentation of our “citizenship of the well,” but we have also seen certain national, regional, ethnic or racial identifiers become conflated with a “citizenship of the sick.” With a special focus on case studies from Africa, this class aims to deepen our understanding of how various elements of rhetoric – metaphors, analogies, myths, misinformation, conspiracy theories, memes,  (in)convenient truths, taboos, prejudices, and urban legends –  take root in the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that pandemics create. How do emerging infectious diseases come to fit existing belief systems, and how does  language shape the course of infection?  We  will delve into depictions of a range of epidemics, both historical (influenza; tuberculosis; cancer; syphilis; malaria;  HIV/AIDS; COVID-19), and fictional: Karel Čapek’s “white plague,” a form of leprosy that kills people over 45;  Steven Soderbergh’s  viral pandemic in Contagion (2012), inspired by the SARS outbreak of 2002-2004; Ilze Hugo’s “The Joke,” a laughter epidemic based on a mass psychogenic illness that took hold of  Tanganyika in the 1960s – and which, in Hugo’s version, morphs into mass hallucination. We will consider the various channels by which metaphors and myths about these plagues are transmitted: radio, television, newspapers, magazines, tabloids, “truther” websites, social media, and word of mouth, and study archival materials to better understand their characteristics. Texts may include fiction by Phaswane Mpe, Namwali Serpell, Yaa Gyasi and Ilze Hugo; journalism by Nikole Hannah-Brown and Rian Malan, and films by Amr Salama and David France. With the aid of critical theoretical texts– by Friedrich Nietszche, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe and others – we will ask: What are the metaphors that animate our understanding of disease? How is disease used – by fiction writers, among others – as a metaphor? How do we understand human bodies as a battleground in the interactions of structures of power and control? What makes emerging epidemics vulnerable to misinformation? How are facts established in an atmosphere of paranoia and flux, and what is the role of the writer or artist in this situation? What are some of the entrenched belief systems that inform vaccine hesitancy and “medical apartheid” – itself a metaphor? Can we separate illness from metaphor, contagion from rhetoric?

Professor Gorelick

This course explores feminist poetics in film and poetry spanning from the 1960s to the present. How do feminist experiments with form in language and film enact radical critical work that questions and destabilizes violent societal structures, from patriarchy to capitalism to racism? How can women’s experiences, woven through linguistic and cinematic vocabularies, build the groundwork for forceful political activity? Audre Lorde writes: “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (“Poetry is Not a Luxury”). Taking Lorde’s radical poetics, and her strong statement of poetry as a vector of social change, as a point of departure, we will investigate what feminist film and poetry do, what worlds and visions of liberation they make possible. Moving thematically, this course brings poetry and film into dialogue, grouped around themes engaged by experimental feminist artwork. For example, focusing on revolutionary feminisms, we will look at Lizzie Borden’s radical feminist sci-fi film Born in Flames (1983) in dialogue with Diane di Prima’s groundbreaking book of poems and handbook for the revolution, Revolutionary Letters (1968). Studying Black feminist practices of reclaiming history, we will watch Cheryl Dunye’s masterful film Watermelon Woman (1997), which tells the story of a queer documentarian’s discovery of an under-researched Black actress of Hollywood’s 1930s, and examine Saidiya Hartman’s “poetics of history,” at work in her recent book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), which imbues the lives of Black women in early-20th-century New York with life and vibrancy through an archival and literary practice. Each week we will delve into a new theme, reading poetry, watching film, and spending time with other texts, including manifestos and theoretical writing. Some of the poets we will read include Adrienne Rich, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Alice Notley, and Lara Mimosa Montes, while filmmakers include Agnès Varda, Sara Gómez, Chick Strand, and Barbara Hammer, among others.

Professor Smith & Professor Bajter

From manifestos to revolutionary and collective art practices, this course explores early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in Russia and Latin America. The first decades of the century saw revolutions in technology and the arts, with various new forms and media interacting with and influencing each other. Transiting from Moscow to São Paolo and Lima, Petrograd to Mexico City and Buenos Aires, we will analyze and discuss the new forms art took—handmade books and magazines, film, painting and printmaking, new utopian languages, poetry—from a comparative perspective. How did the developing technology enter into the creation of art and poetry? What influence, if any, did the political revolutions of the time have on creative life, and vice versa? What points of comparison can we find between the work being made in these distant corners of the globe? What does it mean for art and writing to be revolutionary? Paying close attention to historical and political contexts of each “avant-gardist moment,” we will interrogate the very notion of “avant-garde,” including how the concept shifts over the course of the twentieth century, expanding into neo-avant-garde movements and beyond. We will end the course by reflecting on what might be considered avant-garde today (in either form or concept), in relation to both earlier and more recent trends and developments in media, technology, and artistic production. Authors and artists discussed and read will include: El Lissitzky, D.A. Siqueiros, Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Xul Solar, Kazimir Malevich, Elena Guro, and others.

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