Spring 2022 Undergraduate Courses

COLIT-UA.116

Intro to CL: Crisis, Comparison, Critique

Prof. Paul

Comparative literature has long aspired to analyze literary texts, aesthetic objects, and cultural phenomena through larger philosophical and theoretical lenses, while remaining attentive to forms of linguistic, political, and historic difference. Moving between national and disciplinary boundaries, comparatists aim to reconsider the value of core notions in literary studies, such as style, genre, text, author, technique, medium, translation, public, work, and world. This course revisits the possibility of comparison in an age of local and global crisis, closed borders, economic collapse, environmental catastrophes, revived nationalisms and fundamentalisms. How does literature index, respond, resist or become complicit in such events on the individual and collective level? Tracing the shared roots of crisis and critique, we will consider the poetics and politics of comparison by discussing plays, poems, novels, stories, and films from antiquity to present. Critical perspectives will be introduced through short readings in philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, critical theory, poststructuralist and postcolonial studies. Course requirements include two papers, a final, and an in-class exam.

COLIT-UA.141

Pandemic Reading

Prof. Sanders

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has brought to the fore, once again, how literature and the arts are able to respond to worldwide disease outbreaks. Reading selected works of world literature from the Middle Ages to the present, we will pay particular attention to how authors, filmmakers, and other artists have devised artworks that address the devastation of the plague, HIV-AIDS, and coronavirus, as well as how these pandemics challenge resources of artistic representation.  Works include Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Albert Camus’s The Plague, David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, as well as films by Derek Jarman and Ai Weiwei. These will be supplemented by relevant historical and theoretical works. 

 

COLIT-UA.200

Junior Theory Seminar: Modernity

Prof. Iampolski

Modernity is a product of Enlightenment that dramatically changed the face of the Western culture by proclaiming the autonomy and supremacy of human Reason. This new attitude allowed an unprecedented development of science and became a basis for many fundamental achievements of the Western civilization. However the same attitude has created a lot of contradictions that define modernity. The course is designed to analyze the antinomies of the culture of modernity. We will start with a founding document of European rationalism - philosophical statements by Descartes and will see how the cult of Reason and the great western political principles (equality of rights, the rule of law) related to the dominance of Reason are paradoxically responsible for new kinds of violence and social exclusion.

The following subjects will be discussed:

- Individual and masses in modern society;

- Violence and modern war;

- Totalitarianism;

- Mechanization of life, alienation, machines;

- The emergence of subjectivity and the "loss of experience";

- Market, capitalism;

- The growing role of the State;

- Nations and nationalism, and many others.

COLIT-UA.300

Topics in Film & Literature: Human and Animal in Chinese Literature and Film

Prof. Foley

In the West, the relationship between human and animal has long proven a productive point of philosophical inquiry. How has this relationship been articulated in China? This course aims to examine this question through literature, both classical and modern. The course will begin with a brief overview of animality as it was conceived in classical culture, which will help us interrogate the notion of “the animal” as a category while providing an important literary and philosophical background for our modern investigations. Shifting to the twentieth century, we will then examine several works from the New Culture movement that arose after the fall of the Qing dynasty. How did animals figure in the literary reconstruction of human life and society in a new, modern world? The majority of the course, however, will focus on the post-Mao era, during which time many writers have drawn upon a paradigm of human-animal to explore a variety of questions. Are animals merely a foil for representations of the human, or can the relationship between human and animal in literature illuminate something about what it means to be human in a postsocialist society? To what extent, furthermore, might animality in literature interrogate anthropocentric worldviews and allow for a fundamental reconceptualization of life in contemporary China? Our examination of literature will also be supplemented by a variety of both secondary scholarship and theoretical writings. These are meant to encourage us to push the boundaries of our interpretations to hopefully arrive at new and creative understandings of what, if anything, representations of humanity and animality can signify in a Chinese cultural context.

 

COLIT-UA.302

The Nobel Prize and the Politics of Postcolonial/World Literature Teaching

Grad Adjunct Prof. Nadira

Alfred Nobel’s final will and testament stipulated that his eponymous annual Prizes would recognize and reward individuals who had “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind,” and that the Literature prize each year should go to the writer who — regardless of language, nationality, or genre — had “produced the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Whatever Nobel himself may have meant by this in 1895, fierce public debates about who should or shouldn’t have won as well as the jury’s own evolving interpretations of the terms “benefit,” “humankind,” or “idealistic” — and, for that matter, “literature” — over more than a century of the Prize’s existence reflect tensions endemic to the writing, reading, and circulation of literature in the era of globalization. In this course, the poetics and politics of the Nobel Prize will guide our engagement with the theoretical and practical difficulties of conceptualizing world literature, particularly in the wake of anti/postcolonial responses to imperial and capitalist globalization. Topics of discussion include: dueling cartographic imaginaries, the stakes of national claims to cultural property, the rise of the novel, the politics of cultural prizes, issues of translation and circulation, and the hegemony of English as a global language. Primary readings will be drawn from the oeuvres of selected Nobel laureates who have grappled with the competing ethical claims of universality and particular civilizational affiliations. We will complement these with criticism and nonfiction by the laureates, including their Nobel lectures, as well as other critical and theoretical texts that provide insight into the literary and political milieux in which these works were created and consecrated. 

 

COLIT-UA.550

Translation as Metaphor: An Introduction to Translation Theory and Practice

Grad Adjunct Prof. Tursi

What does it mean to translate? The meanings and etymologies of the word across different languages point to acts as wide-ranging as “to carry across,” “to introduce,” “to transform,” “to turn,” “to understand.” In French, the phrase “traduire en justice” means to prosecute someone. The very origins of the word, from the Greek metapherein, point, aptly, to a process of “metamorphosis” or “metaphorization.” In this course, we will explore the ways the protean nature of this term is thematized in works of literature and conceptualized in works of theory in ways that bear on the broader cultural and political implications of what it means to translate between different languages or even within a single one. Each of the week’s novels or poems will serve as a springboard to explore the more theoretical questions of the secondary readings. On the literary side, we will read tales of espionage, judicial prosecution, border-crossing, split identity, code-switching, and cannibalistic infanticide. On the theoretical one, we will explore themes of incomprehension, over-hearing, linguistic discrimination, appropriation, justice, and hospitality. The course will also include an optional workshop component, in which students with knowledge of a language other than English will have an opportunity to translate a passage from one of the week’s readings. 

 

Courses taught by Comp Lit Faculty Originating in Other Departments

Note: these courses do count as core courses toward the Major or Minor

 

Marx, Nietzsche, & Freud

Prof. Ronell

COLIT-UA.240.002 / GERM-UA.240

This course aims to engage curious minds in new and lasting ways that help one analyze history, literature, science, law, social collapse, ghostly returns and intersubjective relationships. The course takes off from the works of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. These works have defined our world in crucial ways. Their abiding influence on our every move, though often stealth, will become clear during the course of our readings. It is more necessary than ever to encounter these blockbuster texts, intellectually meaningful to this day and still programming our existential perspectives. The course offers introductory but also wide-ranging and probing materials. We shall analyze outstanding passages by these breakout writers and look at works that have come under their influence, grappling with them in fascinating ways—including the contributions of Jacques "deconstruction" Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Kathy Acker, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, and many other contemporary players.

Sponsored by Dept of German | Contact Lindsay A O'Connor

 

Topics in 20th Century Literature: Rilke: Finding Happiness in Love, Life, and Literature 

Prof. Baer

COLIT-UA.972 / GERM-UA.298

How to be happy, given life’s difficulties? Should happiness even be our goal? The poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1907-11; published 1929) call on us “to love the questions” rather than resolve challenges as quickly as they arise. Different from conceptions of happiness that equate it with optimization of personal performance, the great works of literature and philosophy neither gloss over nor accept obstacles but seek another path. In the seminar we read Rilke and several of his global contemporaries, including Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, W.E.B. DuBois, Edith Wharton, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sui Sin Far, Djuna Barnes and others to learn how to stay with life’s unavoidable difficulties so that we may live and love more deeply and authentically.

Sponsored by Dept of German | Contact Lindsay A O'Connor

 

Texts and Ideas: The Body in Philosophy

Prof. Bianchi

CORE UA.400

What is a body, and how has the body been understood in the history of Western thought? In one sense a body is the most natural and self-evident thing in the world, in another it is the object of the most intense scrutiny, subject to various techniques whose aim is fashioning and discipline. Philosophy has often elevated soul, spirit, or mind at the expense of the body; but in more recent thought the body has come to center stage. We trace this devaluation of the body in the Western tradition and examine some of the ways it has returned in 20th and 21st century philosophical thought. How has the body been constituted in relation to what it is opposed to—mind/spirit/soul? How and why have conceptions of the body changed in Western history? How does the body appear as an entity both natural and technological? How do bodies come to bear psychical, social, political and philosophical significance insofar as they are sexed, gendered, raced, abled and disabled, desiring and desired, both subjected to and perhaps also produced by social norms? How are bodies understood through, and fashioned by, modern human practices and institutions such as scientific classification, imprisonment, schooling, military training, and medicine?  How might new scientific and philosophical paradigms alter our ideas about the body and its relationship to its environment and world? Reading include Plato’s Phaedo, Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, Descartes’ Meditations, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Young’s Throwing Like a Girl, and works by Elaine Scarry, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Dorian Sagan, and Eli Clare.

DUS Approved Courses Originating In Other Departments

Note: these courses do NOT count as core courses toward the Major or Minor

 

South Asian Literature

Prof. Ilieva

COLIT-UA.717 / MEIS-UA.717

Offers advanced undergraduates a window on a rich and culturally varied area of the world, as well as an understanding of aspects of South Asian history and society as represented in translations of modern prose writing (short stories and novels). | Offers advanced undergraduates a window on a rich and culturally varied area of the world, as well as an understanding of aspects of South Asian history and society as represented in translations of modern prose writing (short stories and novels).

Sponsored by EAS

 

Topics: Dialectics

Prof. Weatherby

COLIT-UA.792 / GERM-UA.283 

This course is an introduction to the dialectical tradition, which conceived of thought as dynamic and critical rather than static and representational. The course dwells at equal length on the modern dialectic's origins in the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, its elaboration as critical economic thought in the work of Karl Marx, and its use as the basis of a critical theory by Theodor W. Adorno. Other authors to be considered may include but are not limited to György Lukács, Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Richard Lewontin, and Sylvia Wynter.

Sponsored by the Department of German

 

Pandemic Literature (in English)

Prof. Pearce

COLIT-UA.852 / SPAN-UA.461

In the year 1348, at a time when many Christian residents of Spain blamed the bubonic plague that was raging all around them on their Jewish neighbors, a Jewish physician, Abraham Caslari, living in Barcelona offered a scientific explanation for the spread of disease, concluding that “no learned man could doubt that these are true pestilential fevers with terrestrial causes.” In other words, Dr. Caslari wanted to make clear that there were natural causes for the plague rather than human or divine ones. But this very small episode is emblematic of many different kinds of writing that occur in the wake of the spread of disease: people seek to explain what is happening around them with both science and fantasy. In this course we will read literary responses in a wide range of genres and forms (poetry, polemic, satire, sci-fi, chronicle, etc.) to different pandemics that have affected Spain, beginning with the bubonic plague outbreak in 1348, through the Covid-19 pandemic of today. We will also read texts that respond to the spread of smallpox and other European diseases in the New World, early modern and modern Spanish rabies and cholera epidemics, and the “Spanish” flu.

Sponsored by Department of Spanish and Portugese | Contact: ​​Lourdes Dávila

 

The Passions of Elena Ferrante

Prof. Albaum

COLOT-UA.852 / ITAL-UA.300

Close reading of novels, interviews, and essays by Ferrante. Engaging with Sianne Ngai, Elspeth Probyn, Lauren Berlant and others, we consider the political and aesthetic implications of ugly and opaque emotions like irritation, envy, disgust, and shame. We also study major influences, both writers Ferrante cites frequently in interviews—Adriana Cavarero, Carla Lonzi, Luisa Muraro, and Elsa Morante—as well as those she tends to refrain from naming—Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann.

Sponsored by the Department of Italian Studies | Julie Canziani:  jc10496@nyu.edu

 

Dante's Divine Comedy in Context

Prof. Ardizzone

COLIT-UA.866 / ITAL-UA.269 

The Divine Comedy, is a very long poem traditionally judged to be one of the most important in Western culture. At the center of the poem is the human being, his condition in the after life and his punishment or reward. Taken literally, the theme is the state of the souls after the death. But allegorically, the true subject is moral life and thus the torments of the sins themselves or the enjoyment of a happy and saintly life. Since the beginning of its circulation the Divine Comedy has been seen as a text to be read in context, that is in light of the cultural tradition Dante was channelling and interpreting. The course proposes to contextualize the reading of Dante’s Commedia considering the entire corpus of Dante’s works. We read Vita nuova (The New Life)  and a selection of Dante’s  prose works: Banquet, On Vernacular Speech, the Monarchy. Attention is given to the context in which Dante lived and wrote, we focus not just on the Commedia but also on the culture that the Commedia inherits and on the circumstances in which the Poet operated. Readings include fragments of Aristotle (Ethics and Politics), Augustine( Confessions), Plato’s Timeus (Chalcidius). We consider the Commedia in the context of social history, rhetoric, poetry and poetics, literature, art, music, politics and economy, ancient and medieval science, philosophy and jurisprudence.

Sponsored by the Department of Italian Studies

 

The Unquiet Dead

Prof. Borenstein

RUSSN-UA.870 / COLIT-UA.866

Human life and artistic narrative can both be presumed to share one crucial defining feature: each always comes to an end. This course explores the persistent connections between various forms of storytelling (particularly fiction, poetry, film, and television) and imagined scenarios for life after death. While many of the most famous afterlife genres have strong roots in folklore (stories of vampires, ghosts, and zombies), one also finds stories that do not fit such conventional classifications. We will pay particular attention to the phenomenon of the posthumous narrator, a storytelling device that is deployed more often than many might think. As we examine a large variety of narratives that make use of these "afterlife" devices, our goal will not be simply to provide a typology, or to show the evolution of a particular character type over time. Rather, we will ask ourselves about the nature of the fascination with the "unquiet dead" (the dead who cannot or will not rest). How do tales of the unquiet dead affect the very nature of narration (which usually assumes a final stopping point)? What is the political and ideological potential for the deployment of the unquiet dead in popular and elite storytelling? In particular, we will examine the possible connections to socioeconomic anxieties (zombies and haunted houses), cultural and sexual purity (vampires), and collective guilt (ghost stories, and the perennial American trope of the desecrated Indian burial site). We will also be looking at the roles that race and gender play in the imagination of undead "monsters." Finally, we will pay close attention to the problem of the sovereign corpse: the body of the leader left in state to both reassure and haunt the body politic (Lenin will be our primary example). Though we will pay particular attention to the Slavic world (as the source of some of the most compelling tales of the unquiet dead), our primary sources will come from a wide range of times and linguistic traditions, including folk tales, novels, short stories, films, and television episodes. We will also read a number of critical works that will help illuminate the material.

Sponsored by the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies | Contact Leydi Rofman <leydi.ortiz@nyu.edu>

 

Modern Hebrew Literature in Translation: Modernism, Nationalism, Revival

Prof. Henig 

COLIT-UA.951 / HBRJD-UA.76

Exploring a rich variety of literary prose fiction, this course focuses on the emergence of modernism in Hebrew literature at the turn of the 20th century. Ever since the 19th century Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Hebrew literature has played a major role in the processes of permutation and transition within Jewish society, articulating new modes of thinking on matters such as body, identity, sexuality and language. In both its themes and aesthetics, Hebrew literature not only reflected these processes, but in fact created and shaped the public sphere within which these new ideas emerged. Identifying literature as an institution of the modern, intertwined with the rise of nationalism, this course examines the coincidence, as well as the discrepancy, between modernist poetics and the nationalist imagination. It asks how literature constructs national consciousness and whether, and in what ways, it ever exceeds it. Our weekly sessions will be dedicated to reading diverse texts (short stories, essays, novels and literary theory) and tackling some of the recurring issues they raise, including gender and sexuality, ideology, secularization and immigration. We will acquire methodologies of literary analysis, pay attention to rhetoric and style and practice close reading. No prior knowledge of Hebrew is required. All texts are available in English translation.

Sponsored by the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies | Contact: Maeve Kozlark-Bustell <maeve@nyu.edu>

 

Korean Sci-Fi and Global Economy: Genre and Religion

Prof. Oh

COLIT-UA.972 / EAST-UA.951

This course explores the theme of parallel worlds in Korean science-fiction and how it reflects the uncertainty of Korea’s regional position in the global economy. As a genre, science-fiction is constituted of its own set of rules, and the recent sci-fi boom in Korean literature shows interesting variations of the genre while hinting at certain economic processes involved in the global market as well as world literature. Tracing the forking paths of different voices in short stories, novels, films, and TV dramas, we will examine the nonlinear logic of time and space that corresponds to multiple possibilities yet reproduces homogeneous rules to restrict radical alterities. By bringing together interdisciplinary discourses and cultural artifacts, the course will tackle regional boundaries and disciplinary divisions at once. Topics will include the bordering principles of parallel worlds, the transitory nature of the transhuman, robot industries, and discourses of the future. Readings will also include non-Korean writers, such as Ted Chiang, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jorge Luis Borges, for comparative analysis.

Sponsored by EAS | Contact Victoria Juste: vej206@nyu.edu