Fall 2023 Undergraduate Courses

COLIT-UA 160

Classical Literature and Philosophy: The Ancient Presence in Modern Thought

Prof. Bianchi

Since the end of the 18th century, Ancient Greek philosophy and literature has enjoyed a fascinating resurgence in Western thought. In this class our aim is to read a range of difficult texts from both antiquity and modernity slowly and carefully, examining closely a series of important philosophical conjunctions. By examining these scenes of reception, both the ancient text and the modern shed light upon one another – why do certain ancient texts come to illustrate and illuminate modern philosophy, and how do modern concerns come to re-animate the ancient texts? In the course of our readings we will become familiar with various philosophical and theoretical paradigms: Hegelian dialectic, Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, Freudian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, postcolonial critique, feminist analysis, as well as a variety of classical Greek literary and philosophical texts. The conjunctions will include Sophocles and Hegel; the Presocratics and Nietzsche; Sophocles and Freud; Plato and Derrida; Aeschylus and Said. 

COLIT-UA.200

Junior Theory Seminar: Temporal Disorders

Prof. Porter

This seminar explores major theories of time in modern literature and culture. Topics include the temporalities of capitalism and socialism; formalist and structuralist accounts of time in narrative; photographic and cinematic time; carcerality and queer time; amateurism and the modernist “moment”; slow violence and the concept of “deep time.” 

COLIT-UA.400

Senior Seminar Honors Thesis Course

Prof. Vatulescu

This seminar, limited to senior Comparative Literature majors engaged in writing a Senior Honors Thesis, is designed to be a writing workshop. Students will articulate a thesis topic, research it, write, read, and critique their own (and each other's) work-in-progress. There will be research and writing workshops in collaboration with the library and the Writing Center. One chapter of the thesis (20-25 pages) and a detailed outline (prospectus) and bibliography for the entire thesis are due at the end of the semester. The final thesis (40-60 pages) is due in mid-March. Permission of the DUS is required to enroll in the course.

 

COLIT-UA.551

Topics in Latin American Lit: Images of Drugs and Violence

Prof. Lopez Seaone

This course seeks to study literary and artistic responses to the pervasive presence of drugs and drug related violence in contemporary Latin America. It is no secret that in the last 40 years the working of the narco-machine has boosted the imagination of many artists, writers and film-makers, leading to the current boom of narco-genres in a variety of mediums (narco-novelas, narco-corridos, narco-installations, and so on and so forth). Our aim will be to situate these interventions in their historical context to gain a better understanding of their cultural significance and possible political effect. In other words, we will discuss if narco-narratives and other drug-related cultural artifacts have the potential of enhancing our ability to critically assess the complex phenomenon they are reacting to.

COLIT-UA.852

Photography as Writing as Photography

Prof. Brito

Drawing from specific translation issues found in Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, in Flaubert’s Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, and his correspondence, and in Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, we will examine the latter’s appropriation of Baudelairean and Flaubertian tropes, as well as Walker Evans’ attempt to incorporate similar tropes and methods in his photographic style. We will develop a sustained comparison between these two major modernist minds, Evans and Pessoa: between “transcendence” in photography and  “describing the common with singularity”. If the Book of Disquiet has been praised as a collection of photographs of Lisbon (in a sense, a photo album), Evan’s photo-books, for instance, American Photographs, have been described as collections of poems, as “lyric documentary”. We will compare both projects as attempts at a challenge (introduced by Flaubert) not usually conceived of as a translation problem, but which we will treat as such. Namely: how to translate light onto a sheet of paper? How to write with photographic precision? How to photograph ordinary life transparently, with Baudelairean verve? How to make it visible, to mimic light, through writing?Readings will include texts and visual examples from from Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Arbus, Szarkowski, Tagg, Alpers, and, among others, from Evans’ own writings and lectures, his attempts at translating Cendrars, and at translating himself from Baudelaire.

 

Courses taught by Comp Lit faculty originating in other departments

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

 

Texts and Ideas: Topics—Ugly Feelings in Latin America

CORE-UA 400

Prof. Lopez-Seoane

What feelings make us blush, lower our eyes, or feel ashamed, personally and collectively? The answer to this question, of course, changes depending on the culture where it is formulated. We explore ugly feelings, unholy emotions, and improper sentiments as they have been experienced and presented in Latin American culture at large, allowing us to analyze how labels like “horrific”, “pornographic,” and “melodramatic” have been mobilized to debase certain emotions and practices, and to shame cultural expressions and entire communities. Reading include both works that have received less critical attention as well as major Latin America writers such as Manuel Puig, Reinaldo Arenas, and Horacio Quiroga, renowned artists such as Zillia Sánchez, Pedro Centeno Valenilla and Carlos Motta, and canonical contemporary films from Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil.

 

Topics: Psychoanalysis & Philosophy

Prof. Ronell

COLIT-UA 224 / GERM-UA 244

This course offers a slow and steady probe into positions taken by rival camps—philosophy and psychoanalysis as they conduct raids into each other’s territories with various attitudes of defiance, resistance, and furtive takeaways. Each discursive empire reverts to literary example and relies on poetry to score points for its side. | We shall look at case studies beginning with Lacan and Derrida’s dispute over Edgar Allen Poe’s crucial story of power, loss, the Power Queen and “Idiot” King, destination and phallus as they are positioned in The Purloined Letter. We shall also analyze selected works of Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott and others with a view to phenomenological protocols of reading. I am still improvising on the trajectory, which will be modified and customized according to students’ levels of reading knowledge and experience with texts that require guided tours rigorously plotted. We may take a serious look at Hamlet  in psychoanalysis and philosophy, ending with Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Lacanian takes on Shakespeare.

*Sponsored by Department of German | Contact Lindsay A O'Connor (lindsay.oconnor@nyu.edu)

 

Topics in Modern Middle Eastern Culture: Translation

Prof. Halim

COLIT-UA 798 / MEIS-UA 798.002

The Mediterranean, historically the translational space par excellence, yields a superabundance of approaches to, angles on, sites of, and research questions about translation. The yoking together of “translation” and “the Mediterranean” in the title of the course throws into relief synergies we will address this semester through a mélange that includes theoretical, critical, literary, and cinematic texts. The course also includes two workshop sessions and possible guest lectures (TBC). *Sponsored by the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

 

Courses Originating In Other Departments

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

 

Italian Romanticism: Inventing a Nation (Seminar)

Prof. Luisa Ardizzone

COLIT-UA 173 / ITAL-UA 172

The course is in English. Italian Romanticism was the expression of a culture that was both literary and philosophical as well as scientific and technical. It was the product of a society in which elements of revolt, conservation, and tradition coexisted. Romanticism is the result of a great cultural change that enhances the value of the history transmitted by Giambattista Vico. It inherits the teachings of French philosophers like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and grafts them on its own tradition, as testified not only by the Lombard and pragmatic Enlightenment of intellectuals such as Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, and Carlo Cattaneo, but also by the Neapolitan illuminists as the legal scholar Gaetano Filangieri and the economist Ferdinando Galiani. The most visible effect of this culture was the creation of Italian unity, which transformed a country divided into different states with different traditions and laws into a nation, created a Parliament, and assigned to a part of its citizens the right to vote—a right which, though limited, marked the beginning of a new era. The creation of Rome as the new Capital of the new Realm and the emergence of new social classes are all aspects that European Enlightenment and the French Revolution favor together with the Napoleonic era. In Milan, this era led to the creation of the Cisalpine Republic, whose presidency will be that of Napoleon himself and the vice-presidency of the enlightened aristocratic Francesco Melzi d’Eril. A Lombard primacy was thus established that the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria had certainly favored, as well as the corrosive criticism of the nobility made by Parini. This played an important role in the formation of a new social awareness and conscience. In this culture, the word is conceived in conjunction with the action it must carry out, where rhetoric has a social and political purpose, and where technique enters to improve society. Here sentiment feeds on great reforming ideals, often conflicting ideologies, and the turmoil of reforms. Intellectuals and poets of bourgeois or noble extraction, and women of the nobility but also of humble origin, participate in such movement. The course traces a sort of map of Romanticism, its background and origin, as it first manifests itself in the work of Ugo Foscolo, The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, in his lyric poetry, in his inaugural oration pronounced in Pavia. We will then read a selection of Manzoni’s romance, The Betrothed, and theoretical texts, followed by the reading of several Cantos by Leopardi and selections from The Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry, Operette morali, and Zibaldone. We will then read selections from Ippolito Nievo’s novel, Memories of an Italian, and from the correspondence and writings of Cristina di Belgioioso and Enrichetta Caracciolo. The course will also introduce some of the debates in which these poets participated, among them the one promoted by the Swiss-French Madame de Stael. Topics to be discussed include the secret societies, the contrasts between republican and monarchical ideology, the conversations of the post-revolutionary Parisian salons, and those of Milan and Naples, the activity of literary-political magazines and newspapers, their contribution in the creation of the movement. The participation of women like Jessie White Mario, Clara Maffei, Cristina di Belgioso, Enrichetta Cattaneo and others in the movement and their active collaboration in the creation of the nation is one of the contents of the course. The course will be given in English and is conceived as a seminar. 

*Sponsored by the Department of Italian Studies | Contact Esmé Decoster (ed2258@nyu.edu)

 

Dante's Divine Comedy (Seminar)

Prof. Alison Cornish

COLIT-UA.270 / ITAL-UA 270|

This course is dedicated to a one-semester guided reading of the Divine Comedy in its entirety. The text will be read in facing-page translation for the benefit of those who know some Italian and those who do not. Lectures and discussion are in English. Students will learn about the historical, philosophical, and literary context of the poem as well as how to make sense of it in modern terms. Evaluation will be by means of bluebook midterm and final, testing knowledge of key terms, concepts, and passages, two short papers, and active participation in lectures and discussion. *taught in English

*Sponsored by the Department of Italian Studies | Contact Esmé Decoster (ed2258@nyu.edu)

 

Topics: Passion and Politics – From Outrage to Apathy in Modern Literature, Theory, and Film

Prof. Benjamin L. Robinson

COLIT-UA 202 / GERM-UA 202

Nothing is more common than getting worked up about politics. But what is it about politics that riles the passions – and what role do the passions play in shaping politics? Why are some expressions of emotion valorized in political culture, while others are dismissed as irrational, illegitimate, or pathological? Starting around the time of upheaval brought about by the French Revolution, this course will explore through the optic of literature and film the whole scale of political affect from the “righteous passion” of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas to the peculiar impassivity of Melville’s Bartleby. For passion in politics can express itself in moments of revolution, rebellion, or outrage, but equally in apparently more “passive” attitudes of disaffection, apathy, or depression. Discussion will be supplemented by readings in political theory from Hobbes to Butler. Literary texts may include Hölderlin, Kleist, Kafka, Melville, Jelinek, Coetzee, Lorde, Dangarembga; films by Chantal Akerman, Michael Haneke, Béla Tarr, and Claire Denis. *Taught in English

*Sponsored by the Department of German | Contact Lindsay O'Connor (lindsay.oconnor@nyu.edu)

 

Topics: Topics: The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility

Prof. Leif Weatherby

COLIT-UA 302 / GERM-UA 283

 It has been said that we live in "the culture of the copy." Content of all kinds, and even real-world events, are recorded and stored for playback at the tap of a button. Digital technologies conglomerate all media into a single interface from which we direct our lives, experience culture, and are conditioned by society and capital. This state of things was first thoroughly theorized in Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility." This course explores the aesthetics and politics of the technologized world through Benjamin's essay and beyond. We will read the essay many times over the course of the semester, as well as its sources (Karl Marx, Siegfried Kracauer, the avant-garde, Dada, fascism), its influences (Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Rosalind Krauss), and its potential continued relevance in the digital age (Max Bense's "information aesthetics," Friedrich Kittler's media theory, conceptual art, algorithmic literature and meme culture, Fredric Jameson's notion of postmodernism, Sianne Ngai's idea of "aesthetic categories"). Special attention will be given to recent advances in artificial intelligence (including GPT systems), which challenge the notion of "copy" and force us to ask whether machines can be creative. The goal of the course is to pair the depth Benjamin's thought with the aesthetic condition of digital capitalism today, to create a critical theory of the present.

*Sponsored by the Department of German (contact: Lindsay O'Connor lindsay.oconnor@nyu.edu)

 

Socrates and His Critics

Prof. Renzi

COLIT-UA.701 / CLASS-UA 701

Despite having written nothing himself, Socrates is—if not the most influential—certainly one of the most influential intellectual figures in the Western tradition, for it is with Socrates that “philosophy” seems first to move from natural history to an explicit concern for human affairs. Indeed, so great is the magnitude of this change that we continue to term earlier thinkers “pre-Socratic philosophers.” His stature is marked again in the name given to a distinctive form of philosophical literature, the Socratic discourse, and an approach to philosophical inquiry and instruction, the Socratic method. In antiquity, his thought, importantly, inspired Plato, Xenophon, the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Cynics, beyond those thinkers stretching to influence in Rome and Judea...and four centuries before the presumed time of Jesus, Socrates had already suffered martyrdom for his idiosyncratic political, philosophical, and religious views. In modernity, his life both fascinates and repels the attention, notably, of Nietzsche; though criticisms of his mode of existence he had already endured in his own time at the hands of the comedian Aristophanes, among others.

*Sponsored by the Department of Classics | Contact Maura Pollard (map19@nyu.edu)

 

Shakespeare's Ancient World

Prof. Peter Meineck

COLIT-UA. 723 / CLASS-UA 293

Shakespeare’s plays and poetry are teeming with ancient mythological characters, classical historical figures, references to the teaching of ancient languages, ancient locations, and direct influences from Ovid, Virgil, Plutarch, Plautus, Terrence, and perhaps even Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. This class will examine the literary, material, cultural, and historical influences in the works of Shakespeare within the contexts of the ancient Mediterranean, the Elizabethan world, and their modern reception today around the world today. Shakespeare was one of the first working-class English people to receive a secondary education, which was steeped in the radical new subject of classics, and we will also examine what he learned in the new grammar school in Stratford-Upon-Avon. These ancient texts and artworks had been produced by people from all over the Mediterranean world including Africa, Greece, the Near and Middle East, Spain, and Italy, and those who created them reflected the multi-ethnic and cultural make-up of the region. The premise of this class is that these ancient works were always radical in some way and played an essential role in the creative process of Shakespeare and in the development of the Elizabethan theatre and beyond. We will be reading several plays in tandem with some of the texts and artworks they have been influenced by including Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and Othello, as well as several sonnets. We will also be examining the folkloric and mythic traditions of England and the performance techniques that were influenced by ideas about ancient drama. Students do not need any prior knowledge of the subject and will be required to sit a midterm, complete one paper and deliver a final report. The class is taught by Peter Meineck, Associate Professor of Classics in the Modern World at NYU and the founder of Aquila Theatre, a company that has specialized in Shakespeare and ancient drama for the past 30 years. He has published widely on classical drama and has directed and or produced over fifty professional stage productions throughout the world.

*Sponsored by the Department of Classics | Contact Maura Pollard (map19@nyu.edu)

 

Topics in Judaic Studies: Eros and Sexuality in Modern Jewish Literature

Prof. Roni Henig

COLIT-UA 800 / HBRJD-UA 177'

What’s love got to do with it? This is a question that has been debated by Jewish writers since the inception of modern Jewish literature. For decades, Jewish authors, artists, and intellectuals have negotiated the status of romantic and sexual love within Judaism, often as a troubling, at times alien, subject matter in the context of Jewishness and the Jewish tradition. With the rise of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literatures in particular, writers articulated new modes of conceiving desire, love, sex, and gender, especially as they related to Jewish society and politics, and these issues continue to be debated within the different avenues of Jewish culture today. This course is devoted to exploring the transforming status of eros and sexuality in Jewish culture by focusing on a diverse selection of literary works, alongside drama, film, and academic essays. Building on feminist and queer theory, our discussion will revolve around issues such as sexual politics and nationalism, love and religion, border-crossing, constructions of femininity and masculinity, and queer love. All materials are available in English translation.

*Sponsored by the Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies | Contact Jennifer Haynos (jbh9445@nyu.edu)

 

Topics in the Bible and Ancient Near East: The History, Politics, and Poetics of Bible Translation

Prof. Liane Feldman

This course engages the reality that the Bible pervades public media and discourse even where it is not named or acknowledged. The ultimate interest of the course is the Bible itself, how it is read (or not read, but still used) today in relation to the purposes and contexts of its writing in ancient times.

*Sponsored by the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies | Contact Aleyna Weitzner (adw464@nyu.edu)