Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Islands, both a part of and apart from the main, offer ready-made laboratories for linguistic, biological and political investigation; islandness as such encourages national literature, philosophy, and vacation. Our seminar focuses on fictional islands as well as Canadian ice floes, Hormuz (Persia), Maine islets, and urban Venice. Aristotle, Plato, Darwin, Melville, Hesiod, Homer, Rabelais, More, Shakespeare, and Flaherty (director).

Explores how (post)colonial writers from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East and writers from (former) imperial powers have reconfigured one another's literatures. Rethinks concepts of world literature and cultural negotiation.

This course provides graduate students with the necessary tools to survive and thrive in graduate school and beyond, in a variety of careers. Sessions on applying for fellowships, public speaking, using the Harvard libraries, and writing and publishing, as well as making the transition from coursework to teaching.

This course explores the emergence of new cartographies, maps, and itineraries in a period of increased interest in world travels, philology, and translation. We start from ancient and medieval "cartographic" texts and authors (both European and non-European) and move to Renaissance texts and maps. How does the "spatial turn" and the visualization of knowledge-key to digital humanities today-help us deepen our understanding of early modernity? We will discuss European, Arab, and New World maps, texts and authors, among which Petrarch, Margery Kempe, Columbus, Waldseemuller, Tomas More, Sebastian Munster, Vespucci, Ibn Fadlan, Tasso, Montaigne, Boccaccio, and Catalina de Erauso.

Does exile enable or stifle artistic creativity? How does the experience of exile shape the attitude towards local and global culture? The course examines forms of diasporic conscience in literature and visual arts focusing on the issues of estrangement and nostalgia, comparative modernities and exilic devices, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, immigrant aesthetic and conceptions of freedom. Special topic include America through the eyes of exile, text and image in the writing of the diaspora, reconsideration of the critical theory from the perspective of exile. Works by Nabokov, Brodsky, Cortazar, Borges, Arendt, Pamuk, Rushdie, Kis, Kafka.

Explores contradictions of the modern experience in literature, philosophy, arts and architecture. Topics for 2010: nostalgia and modernization, public freedom and cross-cultural memory, archeology and the creative mapping of the urban space, culture and politics. Special attention to the relationship between critical theory and creative practice. Reading from Benjamin, Simmel, Shklovsky, Nabokov, Kafka, Arendt, Certeau, Lyotard, Derrida.

Explores approaches to transculturation in the production and evaluation of literature in light of new understandings of human and textual border-crossings. Topics include the ethics of dividing cultural products along ethnic, linguistic, and national lines on the one hand and classifying phenomena as global on the other, and the ramifications of cross-cultural comparison. We also examine the relationship between creative production and such topics as empire, travel/diaspora, translingualism, and literary reconfiguration.

Explores urban imagination and modernity through different art forms: literature, architecture, cinema, photography, and painting. Topics include: modernity and nostalgia, monuments and ruins, cultural archaeology and urban mapping, public and domestic spaces, memory, freedom and new technologies. Works by Baudelaire, Benjamin, Simmel, Kafka, Arendt, Nabokov, Brodsky, Pamuk, Debord. Focus for 2014: Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, Moscow, Istanbul and Passaic, NJ.

Studies of selected narratives (fictional, psychoanalytic, historical, sacred) as semiotic structures, rhetorical gambits, cultural phenomena and processes of cognition. Readings by Jakobson, Barthes, Bakhtin, Iser, Lukacs, Foucault and others.

Analysis of the failure of models and testing of limits in reflection about change, as well as the dialogue among literary, theological, socio-political, artistic, and philosophical discourses. Topics include authority, freedom, equality, sentiment, reason, fanaticism, tolerance. Readings include works from St. Augustine, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Proust, Koselleck, Rorty, Beauvoir, Sartre, Kofman, Beckett. The seminar will design and develop a General Education course on these themes for undergraduates; it will also contain an arts component.

Considers language difference both as a literary theme and as a potent cause of war in the political arena. Historical foci include Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Africa. Literary issues include translation, heteroglossia, cinematography, and multilingualism. Works of literature include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dove.

Investigates major landmarks in the development of allegorization and allegorical literary composition in European tradition. Starting with pseudo-Herakleitos and his allegorical hermeneutics of the Homeric epics, this seminar will study different theoretical explorations and literary manifestations of allegorical discourse from antiquity to modernity from ancient Greek rhetoric to Prudentius to Byzantine literature to Dante to the Romantics to C. P. Cavafy to Benjamin and de Man. Topics to be addressed include: personification, ambiguity, hermeneutic double-tonguedness (amphoteroglosia), the interplay between allegory and other tropes and discursive modes (metaphor, metonymy, symbol, parody, satire).

Candidates for the doctoral degree in Comparative Literature may pursue advanced studies under the individual supervision of these instructors.

This seminar provides an introduction to literary studies in a global age. How do writers refract and transform the world around them, and the world beyond their borders? How do they celebrate or challenge their society's values and rethink their literary heritage? Writers in every culture have mobilized the resources of poetic language and literary form to delight and instruct their readers, while critics and theorists have sought to understand how writers achieve their effects. Through close reading of a range of compelling works, accompanied by major critical and theoretical statements, we will explore the relations of literature to society and theory to literature, focusing on a set of interconnected themes: travel and self-discovery, empires and their aftermath, and the politics of language and of cultural memory.

An individualized course of study designed by junior concentrators in Comparative Literature to explore specific interests and fields, and ordinarily directed by a member of the Tutorial Board. Open to concentrators only.

An individualized course of study for senior concentrators in Comparative Literature that focuses on the senior thesis project. Open to concentrators only.

What is theory? What is the difference between literary, critical and cultural theory? What is the relation between theory and reading? This course introduces students to various concepts of theory (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Balibar, Adorno, Benjamin, Freud, Saussure, Cixous, Kristeva, Butler and others). Focuses on theoretical texts and will bring in literary texts where necessary.

How does one give meaning to life? Examines how great writers grapple with this question from the early days of Christianity to the digital age. Texts by Saint Augustine, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevksy, Nietzsche, Gide, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Scorsese, and others. Special attention will be paid to how writers read and rewrite each other across centuries and borders. Cross-Listed with French.

Examines how the 1001 Nights, popularly known in the West as the Arabian Nights, is transformed and adapted for different media and genres. Focuses on a variety of films, (e.g., The Thief of Baghdad, Chu Chin Chow, Aladdin), illustrations/images (e.g., Dore, Chagall, Matisse), musical and balletic renditions (e.g., Rimsky-Korsakov, Fokine), translations (e.g., Galland, Lane, Burton, Haddawy), and re-tellings of stories (e.g., Poe, Barth, Mahfouz, Sebbar, Zimmerman). Also considers the role of the 1001 Nights in contemporary popular culture.

Since 9/11, there has been an explosion of work about the Arab-American experience. This course will explore that experience as expressed in various cultural forms-fiction, film, comedy acts, graphic novels, memoirs, art installations, and new media. We will pay particular attention to contemporary works, although we will also consider the work of early 20th-century Arab-American writers. Topics include mapping the exilic experience, translation and bilingualism, and the semiotics of food. No knowledge of Arabic is required.

This course examines literary, theatrical, and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare's plays in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Students learn how artists, including Shakespeare, have used creative production of the past to understand and address concrete issues and problems of the present, including political scandal and persecution, imperial domination, and racial and ethnic biases and oppression. We also explore the continued vitality worldwide of theater and the arts, as well as their constant transformations throughout time and space.

This course examines the history of drama in Europe, the Middle East, China, and the New World with a focus on early modernity. How can we approach dramatic texts? How does drama relate to representation and performance? How is drama from past centuries translated and staged in a globalized world? We will explore genres such as comedy, tragedy, commedia dell'arte, opera, shadow and puppet theater. Authors include: Muhammad Ibn Daniyal, Gil Vicente, Fernando de Rojas, Machiavelli, Sperone Speroni, Valeria Miani, Monteverdi, Corneille, Racine, Cervantes, Calderon de la Barca, Sor Juana, Louise Genevieve Gillot de Sainctonge, Kong Shangren.

This course explores major books from the Renaissance/early modern period (14th-17th centuries). It focuses on texts that were revolutionary when first published or/and that (still) have an impact on us now. We will discover fourteenth-century Persian poets and sonnets from sixteenth-century Poland and seventeenth-century Mexico; proto-feminist texts in France, the rise of theater in Italy, subversive short stories in Spain, utopian visions in Francis Bacon, and the limits of the human in Erasmus and Montaigne. Authors include Jahan Malek Khatun, Calderon, Petrarch, Sor Juana, Kochanowski, Machiavelli, Veronica Franco, Beccadelli, Boccaccio, Madeleine de l'Aubespine, Cervantes, and Christine de Pizan.

The course will explore modern Anglophone dramas of major playwrights in diverse areas of the English-speaking world. Through an attention to both similar historical experiences under colonialism as well as differences of race, gender, ethnicity and culture, we will explore the works of leading Irish, African, Caribbean and U.S. playwrights like Brian Friel, Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, Derek Walcott and Ntozake Shange. The seminar will be organized around two principal issues: the use of music, dance, ritual, carnival and other popular performance idioms to transform the received genre of Western literary drama; themes of empire, colony and postcolony in the making of the modern world. This course seeks to open a window to the most exciting and engaging developments in English-language theatre in the contemporary world.

Focuses on the effect of the environment in film. Reads films grouped according to environmental themes (humans, nature and animals, water, consumption, pollution, climate change) side by side with critical articles. Pays special attention to the relation between space, place and the planet, ecology and technology, globalization and urbanization, postcolonialism, race, gender and class.

Examines major twentieth-century novels through the lens of "crisis" understood traditionally as a decisive moment, but experienced catastrophically in the twentieth century as a state of being. Authors include Rilke, Conrad, Joyce, Musil, Breton, Barnes, Valle-Inclan, Schulz, Levi.

This course focuses on transformations of colonial and post-colonial spaces in North Africa that include Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria by way of fiction, film, critical and cultural theory. Explores shifting relations between North Africa and France but also Italy and Spain with special attention to concepts of nation, community, migration, transnationalism and translation. Readings and viewings of works by Bowles, Camus, Choukri, Cixous, Djebar, Genet, Lakous, Maalouf, Memmi, Taia and others.

A comparative examination of literary, philosophical and theoretical works that deal with music and the phenomenon of the voice. Topics include: the role of the voice in myth; verbal and musical form; musical meaning and expression; reading, hearing and listening; music and psychoanalysis; evanescence and silence; narrative voice and responsibility.

It has been argued that the poetic "I" in premodern literatures is not a vehicle for self-representation, but an archetype of the human. The course will examine this thesis against the rise of autobiographical writing in medieval and early modern Europe. Readings include spiritual autobiographies (Augustine, Kempe, Teresa of Avila), letter collections, maqama literature, troubadour lyric, Hispano-Jewish poetry, pilgrimage narratives, medieval allegories, Dante and the picaresque novel. Theoretical perspectives by Spitzer, Lejeune, Zumthor and DeCerteau.

What is a Jewish language? What is Jewish literature? General topics are alphabetization, translation, oral tradition and diaspora. Languages worldwide include Hebrew as well as Judeo-Spanish, -Aramaic, -Arabic, -French, -Greek, -Italian, -Persian, -Spanish, -Malayalam, Yiddish, and other secular Jewish languages. Readings usually include love stories, medical and philosophic texts, and writings on science, travel, and music. Guest scholars visit most weeks. No language requirement.

This course will is look at the universal language of images through masterpieces of film and literature, comparing films with works of literature that address similar topics, configuring them as temporal arts turned spatial through the use of a magical mechanism. How do verbal and visual images capture time on film and on the page? We will explore questions of memory and oblivion, war and peace, desire and loss, in films by Martin Scorcese, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wong Kar Wai, Volker Schlondorff, Michael Gondry, and others, and in works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Woolf, Calvino, and Pamuk.

A close reading of select works by E.T.A. Hoffmann and his reception in the work of Balzac focuses on Realism's indebtedness to the imaginative realms of the fantastic and the grotesque. Topics: music and inspiration; societal decadence and caricature; magic and the uncanny; experience, observation and expression.

How do visual representation and narrative figuration contribute to construct urban identity? Explores the urban imagination in different artforms: architecture, cinema, literature, photography, and painting. Topics to be mapped out include: cities and modernity, metrophilia and metrophobia, the museum and cultural archaeology, the ruin and the construction site, interior space and public sphere, technology and virtual cities. We will focus on the European city, as we travel through Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Naples, and Rome

Does love have a history? The course explores the literary history of love poetry in Europe and the Middle East from the Middle Ages through the 17th century. Reading selections from Latin and Romance love lyric (Provencal, Galician-Portuguese, French, Catalan, Spanish, the `jarchas'), Arabic and Hebrew muwashshahat, the Italian dolce stil novo, Sufi and Christian mystical poetry, the Petrarchan sonnet and its heirs (Portugal, England, Spain), Dante's Vita Nuova and erotic narrative verse (Juan Ruiz, Ibn Hazm, `Roman de la Rose'). Discussions framed by overview of premodern theories of love and recent scholarly debates on the origins of amour courtois.