Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Trends and debates in the comparative study of mystical literature. Primary works by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors from the Middle Ages through the 16th century. Also modern authors (Borges, Eliot) and literary theorists (DeCerteau).

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).

Notions of "love" and "freedom" have persistently informed works of literature, visual art, and music since antiquity, exhibiting a complex variety of meanings, functions and values. The aim of this course is to investigate exemplary works that highlight some of the major tensions and questions related to distinct formulations of these two key terms. In reviewing a broad range of material, attention is paid throughout to specific historical, social, and cultural differences.

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.

The course examines relationship between verbal and visual communication in public realm through the analysis of literature, film, photography, architecture and public art. Focus on the new public media and on aesthetic and politics of the visual culture.

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.

Explores theories of intertextuality developed by Kristeva, Jauss, Bloom, Gilbert and Gubar, Genette, and others, and asks why the debates they have provoked have had such resonance in contemporary literary studies. Literary texts include Catullus, Shakespeare, Keats, Henry James, Christa Wolf, Dai Sijie, and others. Attention to such questions as influence, imitation, allusion, quotation, and pastiche.

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.

The cultural interactions in premodern Spain between Muslims, Christians and Jews shaped the literary history of Arabic, Hebrew and the Ibero-Romance vernaculars. Our seminar examines selected scholarly debates on the comparative study of these literatures.

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.

The radical changes following the emergence of the modern nation state in the Middle East have been most graphically illustrated in the novel. This course examines the trope of the family in flux in narrating the destabilization of traditional social structures, shifting loyalties, and conflicting articulations of identity. The course interrogates the F. Jameson and A. Ahmad debates on `thirdworld' and `national allegory' in reading selected novels of the post WWII period to the present, from Turkey, Iran, Israel, and the Arab World. Authors include Naguib Mahfuz, Mohamed Shukri, Hanan Shaykh, Sahar Khalifa, Amos Oz, Elif Shafak, and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi.

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.

The course examines narratives of journey, exile, and displacement in modern Arabic literature that trespass geographical, political and linguistic boundaries, and create new literary spaces that define and reshape modern Arab identities. Theoretical readings will include Pratt, Said, Rushdie and Kaplan.

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 major European philosophical and aesthetic discourses on irony as well as literary manipulations of the trope from Greek antiquity to postmodernism.

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.

Examines the relationship between urban experience and debates on modernity/postmodernity in art, architecture and social theory. Topics: nostalgia and modernization, cultural archeology and architecture of transition, memorial, museum and public art, national identity and cosmopolitan imagination, metropolis and megapolis.

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.

Examines creative and critical discourse from and about the African, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Jewish, and Korean diasporas. Explores the relationship between diaspora and constructions of artistic and cultural identities, transculturation, translation, and multilingualism.

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.

How can we think of comparative literature prior to the rise of aesthetics and "Weltliteratur" in the eighteenth century? From antiquity to early modernity, literary traditions were shaped by the rules of rhetoric, imitation, emulation, and translation. We will discuss works from Greek and Latin antiquity; the Latin, Hebrew, Arab, Persian, and Byzantine Middle Ages; and the revival of rhetoric, imitation, and translation in early modernity. Authors include Sappho, Aristotle, Cicero, Lucretius, Hermogenes, St. Jerome, Martianus Capella, Al-Farabi, Averroes, Leonardo Bruni, Isotta Nogarola, Helisenne de Crenne, Joachim Du Bellay, Gaspara Stampa, Jan Kochanowski.

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.

Explores the impact of classical literature and culture on the formation of modern critical theory. Topics include: construction of power; trafficability of art; ritual theory; sexuality; gender studies; irony; orality and literacy.

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).

An investigation into the discipline of comparative literature - its histories, current trends, and future possibilities. Focus on literary and cultural theory in comparative context. Also introduces such related fields as comparative arts and philology, the civic, digital, environmental, and medical humanities, translation studies, and world literature. Special attention to how best to negotiate comparative literature study in today's academy.

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

A graded, supervised course of reading and research to be conducted by a person approved by the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

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 introduction to various disciplinary methodologies and forms of literary and cultural analysis through the study of works from different languages, periods, genres, and media. Open to concentrators only.

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.

A continuation of Literature 98a, focusing on the student's special field of study. 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.

A continuation of Literature 99a, including preparation for the oral examinations. 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.

Examines theories of translation from various periods (Dryden, Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, de Man, among others). Also looks closely at specific translated texts (e.g., various English translations of The Thousand and One Nights), and considers such topics as the notion of "unequal languages," the problem of cultural translation, translation post-9/11, and the possibility of untranslatability. Final project involves an original translation and commentary.

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.

Explores relationships among literature, gender, and revolution in China, Cuba, Iran, Japan, Korea, and Russia from the late 19th century to the present. Readings by Butler, Chukovskaya, Danishvar, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Mikiso Hane, Kim Ilyop, Loynaz, Marruz, Pleck, Qiu Jin, Scott, Tamura Toshiko among others.

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.

Why study the French Enlightenment today and how? How do discussions of principle play out in real-world events? Analysis of works from the eighteenth century juxtaposed with novels, plays, media events, operas, photography and films of the 20th-21st centuries; debates in literature, philosophy and the arts about cultural differences, universality, and the search for belief and confidence in a society undergoing dramatic change. Topics include the reworking of issues urgent then as now: equality, justice, freedom, tolerance, torture, human rights, the relation of the personal to the political, the role of opinion and the media in ethical interpretation.

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.

From stumbling Oedipus to stammering Moses and stuttering Edward the Sixth, we consider how bodily and verbal paralysis informs literary and philosophical texts. Attention to cinema, sign language, visual arts, and the rise of disability studies in the arts.

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 explores the development of world cinema from the silent era to the present. What is "world cinema"? How is "the world" created in cinema? How does cinema respond to global topics and debates? What contact zones exist between world cinema and world literature? What are the theoretical limits and practical challenges of "world cinema?" Can we "translate" films from one culture to another? This course includes films by Dziga Vertov, Man Ray, Maya Deren, Fritz Lang, Satyajit Ray, Jean-Luc Godard, Samira Makhmalbaf, Woody Allen, Sofia Coppola, Pedro Almodovar, Nadia Labaki, Zacharias Kunuk, and Deepak Rauniyar.

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.

Modernism emphasized ruptures with the past and the uncertainty of historical knowledge; one consequence of this emphasis was a general turning away from the historical novel, seen as the most deluded form of nineteenth-century realism. This situation began to change around the time of World War II, when a growing number of novelists schooled in modernism began to write serious historical fiction. This course will explore the motives for such writing and the strategies of research, structure, style, dialogue, and characterization that once again made historical fiction a compelling enterprise, on the far side of the modernist critique of history. Readings in Borges, Yourcenar, Tolkien, Rhys, Endo, Mishima, Morrison, Calvino, Pamuk, and the Tibetan postmodernist Jamyang Norbu.

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 literature and rhetoric of kinship. Special attention to the incest taboo, orphanhood, the human-animal distinction, and social fictions of nationhood. Readings include texts by modern theorists of language as well as by Sophocles, Marguerite of Navarre, Elizabeth Tudor, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Racine, Schiller, Goethe, Melville, and Nabokov.

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.

An introduction to foundational narrative theories of fiction and cinema focuses on how those theories evolved from the 20th to the 21st century. Topics include the boundary between narrative and non-narrative, film adaptation, and the rise and fall of semiotics in narrative theory.

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.

By the numbers, the Jews should be no better known than the Quecha people of Peru. Yet their outsize role in the Western imagination has made the Jewish experience, and its literary expression, into a fascinating case study of the intersection of language, culture and identity. This course will provide background on literary genres rooted in the Jewish religious tradition, and examine 19th, 20th and 21st century works that refine, reject, and reinvent them, introducing students to the tumultuous history of modern Jewish culture. Authors include Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, S.Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Amos Oz, Saul Bellow, Etgar Keret and others.

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.

The role and relations of author, reader, and text in creating fictional worlds are problems as old as literature itself. This course will look at how literature addresses these conceptual issues throughout time, from poetry to novels and plays. Each session will pair literary and theoretical texts that address one of the major conceptual issues involved in the creation and reading of literature. Using perspectives provided by Plato, Eco, Foucault, Barthes, Hutcheon, and others, we will analyze the types of relations configured among Author - Reader - Text through works that range from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, T.S. Eliot's Waste Land and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire to short fictions by Jorge Luis Borges.

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.

This course will look into the oneiric literature, ranging from Apuleius and Shakespeare to Cao Xueqin, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, exploring these works through different dream theories, from the Romantics to Freud to the Surrealists and beyond. We will examine how dreams differ in time and space in different cultures to reveal shifting relations between dreams, memory, visions, reveries, magic, games, and theatre.

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.

Considers the classical conception of mania as a divine source of prophecy, ecstasy, poetic creation, and erotic desire; and traces how this madness unfolds in ancient tragedy and modern literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

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.

Genres, forms, and themes of oral traditions in poetry and prose. Theories of performance and composition. Comparative metrical and formulaic analysis. Students are free to select non-Greek traditions as their focus of research, such as medieval French lays, Indic fables, Gregorian Chant, early Italian opera, Apache female initiation songs, Latin prosimetrum narratives, etc.

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 introduces the rich tradition of Renaissance epic. Just as Renaissance artists pursued the beauty of classical forms, so too did Renaissance poets strive to create the perfect epic poem, a modern revival of a lost ancient genre. We will explore the creative tension between epic poets and their predecessors, and investigate the larger ethical questions the poems raise. What forms of heroism does epic envisage for men-- and for women? How does epic imagine our cultural enemies? What sacrifices must be made for the sake of a civilization? Authors include Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Camoes, Spenser, and Milton.

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.

Examines and compares the relation between politics and aesthetics in major texts by: Ranciere, Balibar, Nancy, Latour, Harman, Badiou, Meillassoux, Jane Bennett, Tim Morton and others. Focuses on politics of aesthetics in critical texts of the last two decades that link a politics of aesthetics to the reassessment of world(s), objects, sensation, matter while looking for a new type of realism. Deleuze, Ranciere, Nancy, Cixous, Latour, Stengers, Bennett, Graham, Badiou, Meillassoux, Morton will be paired with film, fiction, painting.

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.

This course examines selected works of two major modern writers, Franz Kafka and the South African Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, exploring their unique brands of literary realism, fantasy, and philosophical ethics and treatments of crises of identity, language, faith, authority and empire.

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

Comparative approaches to poetics and rhetoric. All readings for this course will be in English translations. Special arrangements for those who opt to read in the original languages. Selected texts include Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric.

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.