Spring 2024 Undergraduate Courses

Prof. Mangalagiri

Is comparison a useful critical lens through which to understand our present world? This course questions the meanings and uses of “comparison” – an intellectual practice that seemingly issues a connective drive – in a world rife with divisions, inequity, exploitation, and extraction. Against what are often considered the Eurocentric origins of “comparison” as an analytic category, we will explore what the task of world-ing comparison could entail in terms of both shaping an intellectual practice capacious enough to grasp the totality of the world, and, at the same time, specific enough to attend to the particular demands of differently lived conditions. In so doing, the course will provide a theoretical foundation to key debates in Comparative Literature, including on disciplinarity, commensurability, translatability, relationality, and the value of literature in a rapidly evolving mediascape. Critical perspectives from postcolonial, Global South, and world literary theories (Glissant, Melas, Menon, Cheah) among others, will be placed in conversation with literary texts (Kafka, Borges, Lahiri, Xi Xi) in order to probe the capacity of comparison – and of literature – to transform “world” from a noun into an active verb, from an object of inquiry into a powerful practice of meaning-making.

Prof. Apter

Translation Theory: Comparative Approaches and Case Studies is a required course for the undergraduate minor in Translation Studies but is open to all students. The aim is to introduce students to some key texts and issues in the history of translation theory that help us situate translation in an expanded field of comparative literary studies, cross-cultural analysis, world-making, epistemological borders, ecologies of language, politics and media theory.   We will consider 1) The figure of the translator/interpreter/mediator as a go-between or suspected traitor in key literary works 2) A brief history of translation theory 3) Translational afterlife: questions of survival and cultural memory. 4) Debates in translation studies around the politics of difference and untranslatability in World Literature. 5) The politics of translation in relation to questions of nationalism, cultural appropriation, linguistic apartheid, accent tests (linguistic passporting), and outlaw dialects 6) The emerging field of linguistic ecology, with a focus on vocabularies of nature, planet, cosmos, ecocide and extraction.  And  7) Translation studies in the era of AI, machine translation, and computational humanities (what is a unit of translatability?  How are concepts of what a language is changing?  Are memes a new media language?   Can algorithms be considered a language?

Prof. Paul

Literature in many accounts owes its genesis to secrecy, not to say obscurity. This course will trace how a certain public way of writing about the self emerged around the French revolution. Autobiography and lyric poetry were soon followed by new developments in the personal and critical essay forms. The latter part of the course will turn to twentieth century developments in theoretical, poetic, and narrative forms, that index, extend, and fragment ways of writing about and beyond selfhood. Analogies with film, new media, and contemporary digital practices of concealment and exposure will be welcome.

Prof. Halim

What is at stake in such ethnic identifications of writers as Arab, Arab-American, Anglo-Egyptian, British, American, Middle Eastern? How do we parse the abiding legacy of Orientalism in stereotypes about Middle Eastern émigrés? What risks of complicity might come with identities hyphenated across sides divided by imperialism and neo-colonialism? As comparatists, how do we relate the linguistic choices in Middle Eastern Anglophone texts to earlier debates in the Indian and sub-Saharan African contexts? If we view Middle Eastern Anglophone writers as mediators, how do we relate that view to translation, whether in a broad cultural sense or linguistically, be it translational strategies adopted in the texts to be read (say, “Arabglish”) or the actual practice of literary translation? Are there certain genres that have been privileged over others by émigrés from the Middle East, and if so, how would we explain this? How do we relate some of the themes of Middle Eastern Anglophone literature to the literature written in the languages of the region? How has the movement of protest in the Arab world in 2011 impacted Anglophone Arab texts, and what resonances of the migrant crisis do they bear? Attending to a range of theoretical and critical texts, we will discuss several genres, including poetry, essay, short story, memoir, creative nonfiction, and film. The primary sources are by diasporic writers originally from Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, and Palestine, among others.

Prof. Brito

Privacy is dead. What follows? To understand this question it matters to investigate how privacy dies, what it is (was?), and whether a life without public attention is worth living. Our sense of self is largely inseparable from public attention (in a broad sense), shaped as it is by mutual recognition and social pressures. Rationality itself appears to ensue from social practices. What happens to subjectivity, however, in the state of being under constant surveillance or in constant social performance? What counts as rational in a form of life indifferent to privacy? To put it differently: is a life rich in intimacy still intelligible? Is privacy dead? What does it even look like in a post-photographic era? (Can it be observed, can it be captured?) In this course we will examine examples from lusophone writers and artists whose work pursues a physiognomy of privacy combined with modes of reluctance about (or even horror of) public attention. We will discuss them in reference to recent philosophical positions on selfhood, subjectivity, and self-creation. Readings include texts, interviews and visual examples from Machado de Assis, Fernando Pessoa, Clarice Lispector, Paula Rêgo, Lourdes Castro, Jorge Molder, Patrícia Almeida, Cláudia Varejão, and others. 

Prof. Vatulescu

How does art capture, hold, and train our attention? How have artists, thinkers, spiritual masters, philosophers, and scientists understood attention across time and cultures? Today, attention and attention disorders have captured scientific and popular thought. Turning their “attention to attention” like never before, scientists have identified a variety of attentional capacities and modes as well as a contemporary addiction to “narrow-focus attention.” Predating modern science, literature, music, and the visual arts excelled at describing human attention and complexly engaging it. This course plumbs the rich offerings of many traditions, including writing by Buddhaghosa, Epictetus, Josef Czapski, Linda Hogan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kobayashi Issa, Hisham Matar, Marcel Proust, Wislawa Szymborska, Virginia Woolf; visual arts by Paul Cezanne, TAWLST, and others; and music by Tibetan monastic communities, American jazz artists, and an international community of experimentalists. These will be paired with readings from cognitive studies, psychology, philosophy, and environmental and disability studies, to help bridge the art/science divide and offer a more multifaceted understanding of the many forms of attention that one might cultivate and practice.