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We live in an image-saturated world. How do we make sense of the moving image and its powerful roles in shaping culture and mediating our relationship with the world? This course will equip students with the tools to understand and decipher film language. It introduces and interrogates the basic notions, technologies, terminologies, and theories of film analysis. We will study visual and compositional elements, like mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound. Films we discuss will include different geographies, genres, major directors, schools, and film movements. Through writing, students will learn to analyze films with accurate, medium-specific vocabulary, develop informed and nuanced arguments, and critically reflect on the position of the viewer.

What do Frankenstein and Things Fall Apart have in common? What lies behind the fantastical stories of Aladdin? Do we have to like Garcia Marquez and Shakespeare? These texts and authors re-imagine the human experience at its most intriguing level. In this course, we will discuss human rights, intimacy, joy, isolation, and other controversies at the heart of these books. Throughout the semester, students will learn how to articulate an informed and nuanced position on these issues via formal practices in analytical readings, drafting, peer review, and self-editing. Actual selection of readings may vary depending on the instructor's focus.

In 2015, Japan's SoftBank Robotics Corporation announced the world's first robot with feelings. Many people were excited, many more disturbed. If robots are simply, as the dictionary suggests, machines designed to function in the place of a living agent, then what is so disturbing about them? Since robots are designed to replace human labor (first economic, and now also emotional), do they represent a threat as much as they do an aid? What happens when robots exceed their purpose, and become more humanlike? How do robots read, write, and feel? How do the activities of coding and writing, or decoding and reading differ? Students will be equipped with the vocabulary and writing strategies to rigorously analyze, compare, and debate the meaning of robots in the human imagination from different epochs, countries, languages, and media. In doing so, they will write in a variety of registers about works such as the play R.U.R. by Karel Capek, who invented the term robot. Other materials may include philosophical texts, fiction, videogames, films, graphic novels, and hip-hop concept albums.

Race is a ubiquitous yet under-discussed subject in America. Typically debates on race and skin color flare up around incidents such as the latest police killings of black folks or the profiling of South Asian, Arab, or Latino-looking people at security checkpoints. This course offers opportunities to write about race and skin color outside of intimidating accusations of racism. Writing is not just a classroom subject but a tool to create realities and worlds. While improving your writing skills and participating in civic debates, you will have the opportunity to scrutinize your own assumptions on physicality. We will read fiction, blogs, journal and newspaper articles and watch feature films and documentaries. Writing assignments will include reading reflections, responses, summaries, critiques, and analytical and argumentative essays.

Explore the culinary tradition and culture of Russia in broad historical, geopolitical and socioeconomic context through the lens of Russian folklore, short stories of Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov, works of contemporary Russian-American writers, visual art, and international film. The literary journey will take you from the lavish tables of the 18th century aristocracy to the hardship and austerity of GULAG prison, to the colorful and savory regional fare of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, to the fridge and pantry staples in the everyday life of Russian family. Your writing assignments will help you develop critical thinking and argumentative skills, precision and clarity of expression, ability to write with discipline, creativity, and sense of style.

In this course, we will work with poems of varied styles and traditions. You will learn to understand poetry through analytical writing and through the composition of your own poems.

In this course, we will learn how to write criticism for a popular audience—in other words, how to write the kinds of book/film/music/art/fashion reviews you can read in magazines, newspapers, and digital media. We’ll talk about what makes for a good work of criticism (even if it might be a negative review) and about the pleasures of reading and writing criticism. In assignments, you’ll apply what we’ve learned by writing and revising your own reviews, often on topics of your own choice.

In this course, students will explore animal welfare, behavior, and conservation through East European cinema. We will discuss wildlife, companion, and farm animals in conjunction with human cultures, history, politics, and geography of Eastern Europe. The course will cover various animal species in fiction films, documentaries, and animation from the region. We might compare them with films from other parts of the world. We will also analyze film production techniques e.g., light, shots, angles, and moving camera shots. Each student will write film reviews, come up with a good research question, put together an annotated bibliography, and compose a research paper. The course includes field trips to the Cornell museum and barns. All movies are subtitled and available for streaming to be watched at home.

In this class, students will learn about animal welfare and conservation through international films. We will discuss wildlife, companion, farm, and lab animals in conjunction with human cultures, politics, and geography. The course will cover various animal species in fiction films, documentaries, and animated movies. In some motion pictures, animals will be central, in other more peripheral. Students will learn how to compose a film review, assess sources, and write a critical essay. The class includes guest speakers and a field trip to Cornell Teaching & Research Barns. All films are digital for students to watch in their free time.

Eastern Europe has contributed unique films to the global cinema. In this class, students will watch, discuss, and write about a variety of movies: Oscar winners and lesser-known films, thrillers and comedies. Our films come from Poland, Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan etc. In addition to learning film terminology, students will have the opportunity to become acquainted with the cultures, history, and geography of Eastern Europe. They will write film reviews, do research on the topic of their choice, and write a research assignment. All class films are available for streaming through Blackboard for students to watch them in their free time.

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies-photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

Punk Culture-comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts-represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary.

This course explores the human dimension of climate change, arguably the most significant crisis ever to confront humanity. The focus of this course will be narratives--the stories we tell ourselves as humans about the past, present and future in literature, art, science writing, and philosophy. We will address issues such as deep time; energy transitions; guilt and hope; justice and the future. No prior knowledge of atmospheric science or literary studies required. The course is open to anyone interested in thinking about the wicked problem that is climate change from various perspectives.

Take your love for literature, film and media into uncharted waters. This course explores cutting-edge debates in the humanities today through the prism of in the transnational, multilingual discipline of Comparative Literature. Attending closely to selected philosophical and literary works as well as film and visual culture we will survey new questions arising from, translation studies, literary and political theory, world literature, gender and sexuality studies, environmental humanities, and media studies. Authors, artists, texts and directors may include, Gilgamesh, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Judith Butler, Mahasweta Devi, Raymond Williams, Teju Cole, Ai WeiWei, Abderrahmane Sissako, and others. Topics may include: postcolonial theory, translation, BIPOC studies, gender and sexuality studies, environmental studies, and media studies. Writing assignments will include a range of forms, genres, and media that help us hone our analytical, critical, and creative understanding, reflection, and expression.

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers. We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chavez, and Carmen Maria Machado.

Co-taught by professors in Comparative Literature and Astronomy, this course will introduce students to the fundamentals of astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies. We will experiment with what it means to engage with astrophysics concepts both inside and outside of the disciplinary framework of astronomy-for example, in genres like film, afrofuturist science fiction, and critical theory. Do astronomy concepts lose coherence outside of their scientific contexts, or do they acquire a different kind of sense? Why are humanities scholars everlastingly drawn toward the stars? In particular, what do artists and theoreticians of color gain from turning toward cosmological reflection? Texts will include works by authors like Octavia Butler and Dionne Brand, theorists like Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, and others. Astronomy concepts will include the electromagnetic spectrum, stellar evolution, and general relativity.

Science fiction is not merely a literary genre but a whole way of being, thinking, and acting in the modern world. This course explores classic and contemporary science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hunger Games alongside a rich array of fiction and films from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Our discussions will position these works vis-?is seminal thinkers, ranging from Plato to Descartes and Donna Haraway to Paul Crutzen, who ask the same questions as science fiction does about our selves, our world, and our future.

Literature has long been understood as a window into the human condition, with nature serving as its mere backdrop. How would our relationship with literature change if we reversed this hierarchy? In an age when human activity has irreversibly transformed all four elements of nature -- air, water, earth, and fire - how do we rediscover the active role that the elements have always played in the constitution of the literary imagination? Through a journey with texts from six continents, this course offers a new model of world literature, one predicated not on social actors and cultural forces alone but on the configurations, flows, and disruptions of the elements. In the process, it addresses the place and work of literature in an increasingly threatened planet.

Could a meter have a meaning? Could there be a reason for a rhyme? And what is lost and gained in translation? We'll consider such questions in this introduction to poetry. We'll see how poems are put together and we'll learn how to figure them out. Poets may include Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Hayden, Frank O'Hara, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Anna Akhmatova. All reading is in English.

The primary work of the course is researching and writing articles about poetry on Wikipedia. The course follows two related tracks: studying poetry and learning how to make it accessible to others. Verse analysis and research and writing skills will be emphasized. The semester project is one substantially edited Wikipedia article. As a background to our work, we will consider Wikipedia in the context of both the history of encyclopedias and the digital humanities. A particular focus of our reading and writing will be under-represented poets and poems. The goals of the course are to write about poetry with a broad audience in mind and to contribute to the world's body of knowledge about poetry.

This undergraduate course introduces the formal and topical innovations that African cinema has experienced since its inception in the 1960s. Sections will explore, among others, Nollywood, sci-fi, and ideological cinema. Films include: Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako, Mohamed Camara's Dakan, Djibril Diop Mambety's Touki-Bouki, Cheikh Oumar Sissoko's Finzan, Anne-Laure Folly's Women with Open Eyes, Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart.

In this course we will use the Game of Thrones series as a way of familiarizing ourselves with different tools of cultural analysis and approaches in literary theory (such as narratology, psychoanalysis, media studies, queer theory, disability studies, animal studies etc.). A strong emphasis will be placed on the different media avatars of the series: novels, TV series, graphic novels, spin-offs, fan fiction, blogs, fan art, etc.

Where do we get our images of poets, and of poetry? Along with the images we find in poems themselves, how do poetry and poets figure in fiction and film, in music and popular culture? How do such figures inform both the images we find in poems and poetry's own image? What is poetry's relation to other genres, discourses, and disciplines, to self and language, history and politics? Exploring such issues in verse and prose, in fiction, film, and other media, including among others Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Parra, and Bola?the course will arc toward such impactful contemporaries as Cathy Park Hong, Claudia Rankine, Layla Long Soldier, Kendrick Lamar, Ilya Kaminsky, Jenny Xie, the website-based Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and AI-generated poetry.

This course will explore how in the body of world literature, film and music humans have construed, narrated, imagined the end of time and of the world and sometimes its new beginning. Spanning from ancient epic through colonial narratives to twentieth century works and contemporary science fiction, we will inquire, through our reading: what is a world? How does the labor of the imagination construct a world or the world and deconstruct or undo worlds? Readings will range widely across time and world space and include authors such as St John of Patmos, Messiaen, Columbus, Beckett, Gibson, Marquez, Murakami, Alexievich, Liu.

Why don’t we tell it straight? Narratives and media today are “out of line.” No longer primarily sequential or episodic, stories branch out, jump back and forth, tie themselves into loops, provide alternative versions. What was once the terrain of the experimental is now true for many popular culture texts. In this course, we will explore a range of texts, films, and TV shows that are “out of line.” While our focus will be on popular culture—from TV shows like Westworld to films like Nolan’s Inception or Kwan and Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once—we will also build a framework of narrative theory and take our inspiration from experimental literary texts such as those by Calvino, Perec, or Borges.

This course explores Asian speculative literary fiction and cinema including early mythological influences, science fiction, and contemporary discourses of technoscientific progress. Students will examine the historical development of the broad genres in their specific contexts; the conceptual relations between realism, science, fantasy, and speculation; and ultimately, question past and future understandings of “Asia” as speculative.

Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them.

An introduction to media studies from a global, “planetary,” comparatist perspective, at the intersection of languages, cultures, discourses, disciplines, and materials representing a range of contexts and approaches world-wide, this course will explore the historical and theoretical foundations of the current landscape of media economies and ecologies, and the ways that landscape continues to be shaped by contemporary developments in technology, culture, and politics. Among our topics and concerns will be the persistence of questions of genre in cinema, television, video, the film industry, journalism and digital media, the emergence and evolution of social media platforms and streaming services, and the increasing cultural, social, economic, and political impacts and implications of AI.

Contemporary World Cinema offers an introduction to some of the most acclaimed international films of the 21st century. We will consider narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental films from multiple national and transnational contexts. We will examine both dominant and alternative forms of storytelling, how funding institutions, festivals, and awards shape the global circulation of films, how genres get transformed internationally, and how films intervene in how we think about specific social issues and political contexts. Specific films and case studies may vary from year to year.

Throughout Western history, the nature of melancholy (aka depression, its modern counterpart) has both inspired and baffled philosophers, doctors, artists, and writers. Compared to other ailments, affects, or conditions, this mysterious sadness has provoked a proliferation of concepts, theories, therapies, and artworks. This seminar offers a comparative survey of discourses on melancholy/depression and their related ideological, social, aesthetic, and scientific issues, from the Ancient Greeks onwards. We will focus on the ways in which melancholy/depression has been theorized in medicine, theology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, ethnography, philosophy, and ecology; on how its shifting forms are related to issues of politics, society, culture, race, and gender; and on the many modes through which it has been file and expressed in literature, visual art, music, and today's social media.

How is the memory of the Holocaust kept alive by means of the literary and visual imagination? Within the historical context of the Holocaust and how and why it occurred, we shall examine major and widely read Holocaust narratives that have shaped the way we understand and respond to the Holocaust. We also study ethical and psychological issues about how and why people behave in dire circumstances. We shall begin with first-person reminiscences-Wiesel's Night , Levi's Survival at Auschwitz, and The Diary of Anne Frank-before turning to realistic fictions such as Kineally's Schindler's List (and Spielberg's film), Kertesz's Fateless, Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Ozick's The Shawl. We shall also read the Kafkaesque parable of Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegelman's Maus books as well as W.G, Sebald's Austerlitz. We shall conclude with several episodes of the acclaimed 2009-2017 French TV series A French Village.

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, Thinking Media offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

This course raises profound theoretical questions about embodiment, agency, power, and race in virtual spaces. How do digital identities in their intersection with something called race, interact with physical bodies and material conditions? What are the possibilities and limitations of digital technologies in creating emancipatory futures for raced life? In tackling these questions, the interdisciplinary course explores key dimensions of digital feminism, including activism and advocacy, community building, critique of digital culture, criticism of techno-capitalism, call for inclusive design, artistic and cultural productions.

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the The Story of Sinuhe and The Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the Travels of Ibn Battuta, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, and The Arabian Nights. We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

Language is a skin, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.

Literary forms were developed millennia ago in Egypt and Mesopotamia to teach, inspire admiration, produce consent, generate awe or pity, and move people to action. Students will read in English translation how such writing communicated with the living, the dead and the divine. Course readings include epics (such as those of Gilgamesh and Sinuhe), wisdom/proverbial literature, Hammurabi’s law code, propaganda, magic spells, correspondence, philosophical musings, and love poetry. Reading and discussing these works will enrich students in terms of cultural and historical awareness, but also reveal common rhetorical devices that have remained useful, entertaining and inspiring to this day. The instructor assumes no familiarity with the history or languages of the ancient world. The only prerequisites are openness and curiosity.

What do comparatists do when we approach our objects of study? What enables or justifies comparison across different languages, different genres, different media, and different disciplines? Does all comparison assume a common ground of some kind (whether historical, formal, conceptual, or ideological), or is comparison inherently ungrounded, provocative, or political? We will explore these questions through examination of a wide range of comparative projects, from those often cited as foundational to the discipline and their most important critics to contemporary comparative projects that are reshaping the discipline and expanding it in new directions.

What does it mean to live in the aftermath of slavery? How has the human history of slavery contributed to the production of natural values that we take for granted-such as community, property, citizenship, gender, individuality, and freedom? This course explores the history of enslavement throughout the human past, from the ancient world to the modern era. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between slavery and the construction of racial blackness. We will explore various institutionalized forms of servitude throughout time and space, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic worlds, from eunuchism to concubinage, from slavery in the Roman Empire to modern slavery and sex trafficking. Readings will be in English and will engage a variety of dynamic sources: theoretical, historiographical, anthropological, religious, legal, literary and multimedia.

In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.

More than thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the distance needed to view the twentieth-century state socialist project from a historical perspective-even as Cold War tropes are revived amid another major confrontation with Russia. In this course, we will analyze memoirs, oral histories, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the Balkans, the UK, and the United States.

Images of tattooed, inscribed, and marked bodies abound in popular media, from television series to blogs, from performance art to popular literature. When the body becomes a canvas or text, this raises crucial questions about the definition and the reading of individual bodies and their ties to different categories, such as gender, race, culture, and society. This course we will pay particular attention to the shifting meanings of body modification in different cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts. Course material will include texts, films, and artwork by Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Lalla Essaydi, Peter Greenaway, Zhang Huan, Franz Kafka, Claude Levi-Strauss, Mirta Kupferminc, Christopher Nolan, Renata Salecl, Hortense Spillers, Qiu Zhijie, and others, as well as television series, internet forums, and other popular culture formats.

This course will take as its point of departure writings by recent first generation Latinx immigrants to the USA, supplementing these cultural materials with points of view from immigrants in earlier times and immigrants to other geographical locations. Our goal in this discussion-based course is to develop a more historically grounded, culturally sensitive, and nuanced view of the challenges that new immigrants face when adjusting to life in a new country. We will read works by authors like Cabeza de Vaca, Héctor Tobar, Reyna Grande, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Carmelita Tropicana, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and Zygmunt Baumann. Students will write short papers/projects for each module of the course.

This course provides an introduction to the theory of trauma, along with literary, artistic and clinical works that engage with traumatic experience. We will explore the enigmatic notion of an experience of catastrophe that is both deferred and repeated, that escapes immediate comprehension but insists on testimonial recognition. How does trauma require us to rethink our notions of history, memory, subjectivity, and language? Who speaks from the site of trauma, and how can we learn to listen its new forms of address? We begin with Freud's foundational studies and their reception across the 20th and 21st centuries, then examine a range of global responses reformulating individual and collective trauma in its social, historical and political contexts. Materials include theoretical, artistic, testimonial expression in various media.

This course examines how philosophical, architectural, filmic, and literary practices shape our understanding of place and space, engaging with theories of mapping, spatiality, and the built environment. Does dwelling on this earth imply building? Is thinking itself an architectural act? What would it mean to undo this 'will to architecture'? What is the relation of the act to the environment? What does the situation of 'things and locations' mean for the possibilities of politics and thought? We will examine poetic and philosophical dimensions of place and site; modernity, nihilism, and its critique; belonging, the uncanny, and the stranger; utopia, dystopia, and the global built environment through readings, films, and artistic practices from figures and groups including Archigram, Bachelard, Badiou, Massimo Cacciari, Derrida, Heidegger, Isozaki Arata, Jameson, Karatani, Kiarostami, Henri Lefebvre, WG Sebald, Wallace Stevens, Superstudio, Manfredo Tafuri, Tarkovsky, Raymond Williams, and more.

Today, the legacy of the Middle Ages can be found everywhere, from the game of chess to Game of Thrones, the parliament to the university, the Crusades to the Vikings, the nostalgia for tradition to the very concept of modernity. This course explores the function of the medieval past through the lens of modern visual culture, as part of an emerging field known as “Medievalism.” Along with readings of classic theories of Medievalism (Huizinga, Balázs, Panofsky, Bazin, McLuhan, Eco), screenings will put auteur films (Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Bergman’s Seventh Seal, Kurosawa’s Ran) in dialogue with popular culture (from Monthy Python to A Knight’s Tale) in order to raise the question of a Global Middle Ages.

This seminar explores the concept of the subject in modern thought, interrogating its development since Nietzsche and its centrality to contemporary theory. We will examine theories of the subject from literary, genealogical, psychoanalytic, and political perspectives, focusing on post-1968 debates. Central to the seminar is understanding how the figure of the subject has shaped modernity and its ongoing crisis in thought today. Students will engage with key thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and others, exploring themes like political subjectivity, aesthetics, religion, and the literary. Our discussions will focus on the subject's historical evolution as a concept, its relation to social and political structures, its connection to truth and authenticity, and its engagement with its others-unconscious, the death drive, and the 'others' of Eurocentric modernity.

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of blood in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood? In the course of trying to answer this and other questions of blood, we will read plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Kyd, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calder?e la Barca. Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

Global Cinema and Media offers a survey of international film and media history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film and media's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films and video will be accompanied by readings in film and media theory and history.

How have income inequality and climate change, two of the most urgent issues of our time, come to shape the contemporary imagination? What might a poetics of economies or ecologies, or an economical or ecological poetics, look like? What metaphors and semantic fields, networks, and webs of discursive and rhetorical choices, inform discourses of economy and ecology? How might economical and ecological tropes help us rethink poetics, and vice-versa? What are their protocols and conventions, constraints and regulations, possibilities and limitations? What tensions, and what imaginary solutions to real problems, do we find among them? Ranging across a variety of national and international contexts, this course will explore how such concerns figure in contemporary non-fiction, poetry, fiction, film, and electronic and digital media.

This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film. We will examine how Korean literature and performance traditions have transformed over time, with attention given to how these traditions speak to local and global audiences following the Korean Wave. The course concludes with recent developments in Korean popular music, including K-pop bands and K-hip-hop. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is necessary.

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

The rapidly growing literature of the Korean diaspora is one of the most significant developments in Korean literature since the 20th century. As Korean literature has circulated as world literature, it has become more widely recognized in the Anglophone world through translation and through narratives written by Korean American authors. This course will explore Korean American literature and creative transpacific exchanges between Korea and the US, addressing issues of identity, language, place, migration, race discrimination, citizenship, and the ways in which storytelling shapes community. We will examine the vibrant dialogue between works of fiction and poetry across the Pacific, reading the work of Korean American authors alongside the writing of Korean authors working in the Korean language. Increasingly, Korean American writers are creating narratives that remember and reconfigure Korean history and Korea’s relationship to the US, and we will explore narratives and poetry that offer new perspectives on the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, and American imperialism such as Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered, and Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korea is required.

In this course, we will read some of the most influential examples of a genre at the intersection of literature and history: the memoir of the revolutionary. Along the way, we will consider some of the fictional works (e.g. by Turgenev, Dostoevsky) that have been important in this nonfictional tradition, as well as poetry produced by the revolutionary currents we discuss. As we study the autobiographies of Russian, American, and German leftist political figures like Piotr Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Ernst Toller, and Angela Davis, we will consider the literary methods these writers use to intertwine their own life stories with political history. How is life-writing a form of revolutionary self-fashioning? How have literary movements intersected with revolutionary writings? With special attention to the questions of gender, ethnicity, and race.

How does the state draw political power from nature? What is the relationship between the environment and national and/or imperial identity? How does the environment resist political control, or support human resistance? This course will explore these questions from the perspective of Russian and Soviet culture. Analyzing literature, art, and film in historical context, we will consider the environment as worker and victim, refuge and rebel, commodity and national(ist) emblem, exploring the degrees of agency it is granted in different artistic depictions. With special attention to the history of Russian imperialism and Soviet “internal colonization” and to non-Russian writers and artists of the Russian Empire and USSR, including Indigenous writers. All readings will be in English.

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Shortly after the 2016 election, The New Yorker published an article entitled “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming.” This course examines what the Frankfurt School knew by introducing students to Critical Theory, juxtaposing its roots in the 19th century (i.e., Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud) with its most prominent manifestation in the 20th century, the Frankfurt School (e.g., Kracauer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) alongside disparate voices (Arendt) and radical continuations (Davis, Zuboff, Weeks) as they engage with politics, society, culture, and literature (e.g. Brecht and Kafka). Established in 1920s and continued in exile in the US during WWII, the interdisciplinary circle of scholars comprising the Frankfurt School played a pivotal role in the intellectual developments of post-war American and European social, political, and aesthetic theory: from analyses of authoritarianism and democracy to critiques of capitalism, the entertainment industry, commodity fetishism, and mass society. This introduction to Critical Theory explores both the prescience of these diverse thinkers for today’s world (“what they knew”) as well as what they perhaps could not anticipate in the 21st century (e.g., developments in technology, economy, political orders), and thus how to critically address these changes today.

“My existence is a scandal,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, summing up in an epigram his carefully cultivated style of perversity and paradox. Through their celebration of “art for art’s sake” and all that was considered exquisite, ironic, or obscene, the Decadent aesthetes of the late-nineteenth century sought to free the pleasures of language, beauty, spirituality, and sexual desire from their more conventional moral strictures. We will focus on the literature of the period, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, and especially Wilde, and we will also consider related developments in aesthetic philosophy, painting, music, theater, architecture, fashion, and design, including music by Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss and artworks by James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Moreau.

The pleasure of the text, Roland Barthes writes, is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas-for my body does not have the same ideas I do. What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies? Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas? In the context of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st-century, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on erotic desire and cinema? We will focus especially on relatively recent metacinematic work, moviemaking about moviemaking, by such directors as Pedro Almod?, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell.

This course examines the historic diversity of the modern Middle East, exploring histories of inter-communal contact and conflict. We begin by investigating the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and the impact of its dissolution. We will focus our attention on commercial centers that fostered inter-communal relations, as well as investigating sites of strife and cases of minority repression. We will read histories, memoirs, and fiction, and view films that help us better understand inter-communal relations, tensions, and conflict. We will also interrogate the terms for exploring a range distinctions among majority and minority populations including: religious difference (Muslims, Christians, and Jews); divisions of religious rite (Sunni and Shi'a); entho-linguistic minorities (Armenians and Kurds); national identities (Israelis and Palestinians); cultures of origin (Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi Jews). We will explore how these divisions inform urgent current conflicts: the civil war in Syria and the refugee crisis; the civil war in Iraq and the campaign by ISIS against minorities; as well as tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

This class examines modern articulations of identity by and about two distinct Jewish diasporas: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Sephardic Jews trace their origins to the Iberian Peninsula prior to the end of the 15th century. Mizrahim are Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa until the mid-20th century, and their descendants. We will explore Sephardic and Mizrahi identities in works of fiction, memoirs, essays, poetry and films produced from the mid-twentieth century to the present. We will trace routes of migration across generations, paying particular attention to how texts construct identity in relation to language and place. Works will be drawn from wide geographic distribution including the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and produced in Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Ladino, and Spanish.

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors. Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives. As unbound energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life. Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology. Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Readings in French and Francophone philosophy and theory, from the 16th century to today. Themes may vary each offering, but can include questions of: death and finitude, gender, existence, affect, literature, art, and aesthetic, humanism and posthumanism, ecology, responsibility, ethics politics, violence, slavery, education, capitalism,and colonialsim.Texts from numerous authors, such as: Montaigne, Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze, Rousseau, Fanon, Pascal, De Beauvoir, Blanchot, Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Debord, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Levinas, Cixous, Mbembe, Descartes, Badiou, Latour, Althusser, Weil, and others.

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

The modern field of translation studies overlaps most closely with literary studies, but it intersects also with fields such as linguistics and politics. The intense work in translation studies in the last half century follows a long history of thinking about translation. The activity of translation has been viewed as betrayal, as an inferior form of literary production, as extending the life of the literary work, as a creative process equal to the original. In this course we will examine various approaches to the translation of literary texts, both prose and verse. We will read texts by theorists and by translators. We will also read and analyze translations of literary works, with a focus on classics of Russian literature. Practical translation work will illuminate theoretical readings. The modern field of translation studies overlaps most closely with literary studies, but it intersects also with fields such as linguistics and politics. The intense work in translation studies in the last few decades follows a long history of thinking about translation. The activity of translation has been viewed over many centuries as betrayal, as an inferior form of literary production, as extending the life of the literary work, as a creative process equal to the original. In this course we will examine various approaches to the translation of literary texts, both prose and verse. We will read texts by theorists and by translators, possibly including Cicero, Schleiermacher, Nabokov, Jakobson, Nida, Toury, Appiah, Derrida, Venuti, Bassnett, and others. We will also read and analyze translations of literary works, with a focus on classics of Russian literature. Practical translation work will illuminate theoretical readings.

The Second World War and the Occupation of France by German forces had a traumatic impact on the nation's identity. We will examine the way France has tried to deal with this conflicted period through a series of films that each deal, directly or indirectly with the major questions posed by history to French memory of the Occupation. What was the role of collaboration, resistance, anti-Semitism, of writers and intellectuals during this traumtic period? How has film helped to define and re-shape the ways in which France has come to terms with its conflicted past?

Ever since the creation of the concept of a culturally and geographically stable center in China, people have been intentionally excluded from that center. Disgraced officials are sent to far-flung provinces, loyalists to past regimes hide out across China’s borders, and dissidents have their entry visas revoked, making it impossible for them to return home. The experiences of these people, and the poems and stories they write, tell us a great deal about what it means and how it feels to be included and excluded. What is the difference between the way China looks from the inside and the way it looks from the outside? Who has the power to decide who gets to live in China, and how and why do they use it? What is the relationship between our identities and our homes? Texts studied will range from 300 BCE to the present; all will be read and discussed in English. (LL)

This upper-division literature course that explores poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on female poets who dialogue with, and reinvent how and what we understand to be the canon. Over the course of the semester, we will study a collection of voices from the poetic world, with diverse arrangements of form, method and style. Our engagement with contemporary female voices will draw from the modern and contemporary American, British, Spanish and Latin American literary traditions. The aim of our readings will be to contemplate what language is and how it functions - what language does, what it creates, how it works/acts/performs on us; how we, reciprocally, might work/act/perform and create things with it.

This course provides an introduction to meter and rhyme and to the study of meter and rhyme Verse readings will be short poems written in English, with a particular focus on Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poems of Housman and Dickinson. Critical texts will include writings about prosody from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Non-Anglophone verse systems, particularly Russian, will be considered for a comparative perspective.

Fictions of dictatorship, as termed by scholar Lucy Burns, denote both the narratives and spectacles produced by authoritarian governments and the performances, events, and cultural objects that work against these states of exception. This course will critically examine histories of dictatorships, through both documentary & creative forms (i.e. novels, memoirs, and performance) and with a geographic focus on Asia and Latin America, in order to understand authoritarian returns in our present historical moment.

How can we think modern lyric on a world scale? This seminar will attempt to articulate two world systems and one world republic: the idea of the modern capitalist world system as a dynamic political- economic entity consisting of centers and peripheries in Immanuel Wallerstein's sense, the modern imperial discursive world system that codified a hierarchy of human difference and finally the modern world republic of letters centered in 19th century Paris and for the purposes of this seminar, on Baudelaire's creation of modern lyric. We will ask: how have poets crafted their lyric modernity partly through a poetic engagement with those dimensions of European modernism and aestheticism that touch upon the civilizational and racial difference that fix them in their imperial peripheries? Poets may include Cavafy, Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott, Miraji, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes.

Vladimir Nabokov's legacy at Cornell is not limited to the world-famous literary works he produced here. The university's natural and built environments also provided powerful material for his lifelong pursuit of butterflies within their geo- and biodiverse ecosystems. In this project-oriented course on the writer-lepidopterist, we will read his words, look at his drawings, study his collections of insects and plants, and develop our own modes of engaging with place and planet through a lively science-art practice.

For critical theory, the nation and nationalism have always been vexed issues. How to consider the relation of the nation and capital? Is the nation merely an institution that serves to ideologically ground the labour market? Is it merely an apparatus to regulate and segment the bearers and guardians of labour power, and guide them to the sphere of exchange? Is it a real reflection of division amongst peoples? Is it an ancient entity, on par with the state, which persists into the modern era? And what should be the clarification of how the nation functions within the cycle of reproduction, in which capitalism must interact with elements exterior to its own cyclical movement in order to guarantee its social basis and persistence? In taking up the long history of theorizations of the nation and nationalism in the general orbit of contemporary theory, we will attempt to gain a holistic theoretical assessment of the limits and possibilities of this field of criticism.

COML 4190 and COML 4200 may be taken independently of each other. Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

COML 4190 and COML 4200 may be taken independently of each other. Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

This workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.

Seminar on the essential features and qualities of culture and how it impacts human endeavors. Because understanding culture necessarily requires interaction across multiple areas of study, this interdisciplinary seminar will be based on discussions of recent research at the interface of cognitive science and the humanities. Topics may include: animal cultures, the evolution of language, the symbolic revolution, knowledge acquisitions, play, rituals and the arts.

Stories of transformation have been central to literary traditions for thousands of years, but these tales of shape-shifting took on a special life in the English Renaissance, when Ovid's Metamorphoses surged in popularity. This course will explore the fundamental connection between literary creativity and unstable identities - whether these narratives of metamorphosis show humans turning to beasts, trees, or stones, men changing into women, or inanimate objects coming to life and taking human form. Class readings draw on examples from Ovid, Shakespeare, and other Renaissance poets, as well as the re-imagining of these fantasies in modern science fiction and make-over shows. What do these stories of metamorphosis tell us about what it means to be human - or not?

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, NGOs, and nonprofits working on human rights, public health, and environmental and land rights in the US and abroad. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, critical design thinking, and strategic storytelling, students collaborate on projects with the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Health Access Connect (Uganda), NYS 4-H, and SOOFA Ranch (GA). Consulting on partners' ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO's Human-Centered Design Thinking and Stanford's Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as UX, tactical media, and activist organizing developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

This seminar offers a relatively comprehensive survey of the thought and political theory of Alain Badiou, from his engagement in Althusser’s circle, to his political participation in May ’68 and its aftermath, the experience of the UCFML and its successor, L’organisation politique, and his vast body of philosophical and political writing from the 1990s onwards. In direct readings from the whole of Badiou’s body of work, we will trace key concepts such as the void, ontology as mathematics, the figure of the subject and its retrospective convocation, the event, fidelity, the suture, and more, explore the relationship of Badiou’s work to figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Deleuze, and others, along with examinations of Badiou’s longtime collaborators Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel.

As a philosophical approach to culture and society emerging out of European contexts, critical theory has traditionally excluded questions about the history of racial difference. Yet critical theory’s insights into processes of subject formation, social relations, mass culture, and general emancipatory drive continue to inform and be of value to scholars of race concerned with the everyday production and transmission of ideas about normative humanity. At the same time, in their engagement with theory's blindspots, scholars of race demonstrate the racialized histories, contexts, and assumptions that make up that for which "theory" cannot account, as well as that from which it has unquestioningly emerged. This course explores contemporary critical scholarship on race, as defined by its relationship to anti-positivist epistemologies, theories of the subject, critiques of traditional ontology and aesthetics, and engagement with the Black radical tradition, environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, and more. Some familiarity with key figures and ideas in postcolonial theory and Black studies is desirable though not absolutely necessary. Readings may include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Rizvana Bradley, David Marriott, Rei Terada, Nahum Dmitri Chandler, Fred Moten, and others.

Continental philosophy fuels contemporary media theory. The connection runs so deep, critics have accused media theorists of producing nothing intellectually new. From Edmund Husserl's phenomenological experiments to Heidegger's reflections on technology and time, to Derrida's suspicions of immediacy, a clear philosophical lineage shapes the way media theory thinks about history, subjectivity, and experience. Through engagements with media theory and the inheritance that informs it, we explore the genealogy of thought on media and experience, reflecting on the technological shifts that could not have been anticipated by early 20th century philosophers: social media, and the digital's current saturation of all levels of human communication. We also explore those areas of thought that the Eurocentricism and presumed universality of Western philosophy rendered invisible or unthinkable: the relationship between media and race, media and gender and sexuality, geopolitical and cultural differences.

We experience our world (and the histories of our world) increasingly as a conglomerate of spaces of and for containment. These enclosed spaces are multiple, and their strategies of who and how they imprison are profoundly unequal. How does theory, or rather, different theoretical approaches, deal with structures and experiences of captivity? What captive figures are being used, how are they theorized, and what ways of escaping, opening up, or destroying spaces of captivity are envisioned? In this course, we will draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches to scrutinize an array of figures of captivity, such as the camp, the prison, the campus, the closet, the hold, the enclosure, the frame, the panopticon, the trap, the globe, the screen, for a comparative assessment. We will focus on captivity and its avatars in theory but also reflect on what makes theory itself captive, even complicit in imagining and structuring our reality by way of containment.

Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? At a time when reality appears dystopian, many are quick to dismiss utopian visions as naive or irresponsible. In this seminar, we take on the critical and imaginative task of considering what utopias can tell us about our pasts, presents, and possible futures. We encounter two centuries of utopias in which communes have displaced the family, mutual aid has taken the place of capitalist individualism, and sexuality is no longer linked to property rights. While these speculative times and places seek to overcome capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the climate crisis, they remain haunted by these figures. Our treatment of utopias in theory and literature therefore includes a range of ambivalent affects and genres, from critical and ambiguous utopias to philosophical treatises and manifestos.

This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. The Rhetoric of Temporality, Semiology and Rhetoric, The Resistance to Theory, Autobiography as De-Facement, Shelley Disfigured, Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist, Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate.

This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology.

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

This course will begin with some of the earliest theoretical works on personal and historical trauma and pass through several traditions of interpretation (French, American, etc.). Then we will move to more recent attempts to rethink the theory of trauma as it crosses cultural and linguistic borders outside of Europe and the US. Among other questions we will consider the relations among personal, collective, and political trauma and address the imperatives and challenges of thinking trauma in a global context.

The premodern world played a crucial role in the formation of postmodern theory. ‘Biblical exegesis’, ‘negative theology’, ‘inner experience’, and other premodern concepts and practices were taken up by postmodern authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, and Robert Musil. Each week we will read one modern author in dialogue with one premodern author, such as Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, among many others. The aim of our comparisons will be to interrogate the legacy of what Bruce Holsinger calls the “premodern condition.”

The work of Louis Althusser remains a central and canonical reference for contemporary theory, but also a historical reference of major importance for its intellectual history. Althusser not only taught or mentored an extraordinary range of intellectual figures in France (Badiou, Balibar, Derrida, Foucault, Macherey, Ranciere, etc), his basic concepts circulated through crucial social debates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (humanism and anti-humanism, the articulation of modes of production, societies structured in domination). In his later years, Althusser's thought acknowledged surprisingly divergent filiations (Heidegger, Derrida) from the expected Marxian and psychoanalytic references, and his legacy became central to the foundations of Cultural Studies. This seminar will examine a wide range of developments and destinies for the theoretical legacies of Althusser and his close collaborators.

The driving dialectic in post-colonial studies has been the colonizer/colonized, or the Third World vs. the West. But slowly the field is letting go of this arrested dialectic and in its place various triangulations are emerging: e.g. transnationalism, world literature, the global novel, and global south literary studies. Starting with a walk through the emerging theoretical concepts of world/global/transnational literature, we will primarily focus on a global south reading of African literature (itself a contested term), and perennial questions around language and translation. Specifically we will look at how writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, V.S. Naipul, NoViolet Bulawayo, and MG Vassanji challenge the post-colonial discourse and how a global south reading provides an uncomfortable conversation with transnational and world literature theories and concepts.

This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice?

“Staffage” is a term in the history of landscape painting. It refers to little figures who populate the scene, invariably dwarfed by their surroundings. The few critics who noticed them assigned them various roles: to illustrate “the benefits which nature affords to creatures living in the region” (Goethe, 1800); or, alternatively, “to lend the landscape its specific poetic character” (Fernow, 1806). From landscape, staffage migrated into archaeological documentation and architectural illustration. Here, tiny figures gain additional roles: to convey the scale of the monuments depicted, and the societies that inhabit them. Our study of staffage alternates between close looking at a wide range of pictures, and readings from the historical and theoretical literatures on the aesthetics and politics of landscape painting.

One of the main justifications for work in the humanities hinges upon the importance of representation: We claim that we are telling better stories about some of the complex issues that face us today and that such stories can and will impact the fate of our planet and of humanity-politically, ethically, epistemologically, materially. But how do we narrate, represent, or theorize such complex networks and constellations-global circulations of peoples, objects, and labor information networks, large-scale social, economic, and political crises, vectors of contagion, or climate change and environmental degradation? In this seminar, we will bring together different types of texts and media as well as a range of theoretical approaches in order to critically investigate the forms that represent global networks as well as the possibilities for forging connections across the planet (and beyond). Possible texts include: Galloway's and Thacker's The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Chirbes's On the Edge, Mezzadra's and Neilson's Border as Method, Chen Qiufan's The Waste Tide, Morton's Hyperobjects, Cloud Atlas (film and novel), Lowe's Intimacies of Four Continents, Bellott's Sexual Dependency (film), Nancy's Globalization, Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, Sch?ing's The Swarm, Wu Mingyi's Man with Compound Eyes.

Judith Butler is one of today’s foremost theorists and cultural critics. Even though they are known, above all, for their work in gender studies and queer theory, their theoretical thought ranges widely. It also draws on a wide range of theoretical traditions, literary and filmic works, and political events. In this course, we will read widely from Butler’s work (from Gender Trouble to Who’s Afraid of Gender), as well as reading some of the key texts that Butler draws on. We will develop a critical understanding of Butler’s strategies for reading and writing to hone our own critical and theoretical skills.

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by literature and the sciences. Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry's textual environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How does contemporary poetry resist, engage, respond to, sound out that noise? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal cultural, economic, historical, philosophical, political developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a wide range of works that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions of personal and collective identity and language in contexts at once local and global. Poets include Armantrout, Bernstein, Collins, Espada, Gander, Fitterman, Goldsmith, Hong, Osman, Place, Rich, Smith, and Waldrop.

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the age of digital media and A.I.? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? Moving among a range of genres and sub-genres, poetry, fiction, film, and multimedia, websites and streaming services, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media, and the increasingly pervasive role of A.I., in contemporary culture and politics.

The environmental humanities pose a radically different set of questions to texts, materials, and contexts that were previously approached in terms of human intentions and actions alone. This seminar explores the theoretical and methodological potentials of this rapidly emerging and constantly evolving field from the interdisciplinary, comparative perspective that it also axiomatically demands. Together we will discuss seminal works that tackle four foundational concepts imperative for reframing the traditional concerns of the humanities under the sign of anthropogenic planetary change -- scale, form, matter/ energy, and distribution. The seminar will develop ways to configure these focal points to the theoretical and practical concerns of various disciplinary approaches and, especially, to participants' individual interests and research projects.

Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester. A letter grade is awarded on completion of the second semester, COML 4940.

Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester.

The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.

In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.

How can we think modern lyric on a world scale? This seminar will attempt to articulate two world systems and one world republic: the idea of the modern capitalist world system as a dynamic political- economic entity consisting of centers and peripheries in Immanuel Wallerstein's sense, the modern imperial discursive world system that codified a hierarchy of human difference and finally the modern world republic of letters centered in 19th century Paris and for the purposes of this seminar, on Baudelaire's creation of modern lyric. We will ask: how have poets crafted their lyric modernity partly through a poetic engagement with those dimensions of European modernism and aestheticism that touch upon the civilizational and racial difference that fix them in their imperial peripheries? Poets may include Cavafy, Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott, Miraji, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes.

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should enroll online in the instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should enroll online in the instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

This course will explore the ways in which Michel Foucault's oeuvre transitions from a concern with sovereignty to a preoccupation with biopolitics. Foucault's early work (one understands that there is no absolute Foucaultian division into sovereignty and biopolitics), such as Madness and Civilization, attends to the structure, the construction and the force of the institution - the birth of asylum, the prison, while his later career takes up the question of, for want of a better term, political efficiency. That is, Foucault offers a critique of sovereignty insofar as sovereignty is inefficient (neither the sovereign nor sovereign power can be everywhere; certainly not everywhere it needs or wants to be; ubiquity is impossible, even/especially for a project such as sovereignty) while biopower is not. Biopower marks this recognition; in place of sovereignty biopower devolves to the individual subject the right, always an intensely political phenomenon, to make decisions about everyday decisions - decisions about health, sexuality, lifestyle. In tracing the foucaultian trajectory from sovereignty to biopower we will read the major foucaultian texts - Madness and Civilization, Birth of the Prison, History of Sexuality as well as the various seminars where Foucault works out important issues.

All decolonization, wrote Frantz Fanon, is successful at the level of description. With a focus on the difference between description and critique and on the uneven relation between the academic project underlying the subfield of postcolonial studies and histories of colonialism and aspirations to decolonization across the twentieth century, this seminar will offer a retrospective survey on the assemblage of texts that has come under the name Postcolonial Theory and inquire into its purchase on this present with particular emphasis on questions of indigeneity and environmental crisis. Authors may include: Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Wynter, David Scott, Leela Gandhi, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Jason Moore, Glenn Coulthard, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rob Nixon.

This workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.

This seminar offers a relatively comprehensive survey of the thought and political theory of Alain Badiou, from his engagement in Althusser’s circle, to his political participation in May ’68 and its aftermath, the experience of the UCFML and its successor, L’organisation politique, and his vast body of philosophical and political writing from the 1990s onwards. In direct readings from the whole of Badiou’s body of work, we will trace key concepts such as the void, ontology as mathematics, the figure of the subject and its retrospective convocation, the event, fidelity, the suture, and more, explore the relationship of Badiou’s work to figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Heidegger, Deleuze, and others, along with examinations of Badiou’s longtime collaborators Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel.

Structured around guest and public lectures by field members and beyond, the proseminar provides a common experience for students and facilitates the exchange of approaches to theoretical problems and methodological orientations. Thus, the course introduces students to the work and methods that animate their faculty's original contributions to their respective fields while offering them a forum to ask said faculty how to navigate the various stages of research and publication processes.

This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film. We will examine how Korean literature and performance traditions have transformed over time, with attention given to how these traditions speak to local and global audiences following the Korean Wave. The course concludes with recent developments in Korean popular music, including K-pop bands and K-hip-hop. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is necessary.

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

As a philosophical approach to culture and society emerging out of European contexts, critical theory has traditionally excluded questions about the history of racial difference. Yet critical theory’s insights into processes of subject formation, social relations, mass culture, and general emancipatory drive continue to inform and be of value to scholars of race concerned with the everyday production and transmission of ideas about normative humanity. At the same time, in their engagement with theory's blindspots, scholars of race demonstrate the racialized histories, contexts, and assumptions that make up that for which "theory" cannot account, as well as that from which it has unquestioningly emerged. This course explores contemporary critical scholarship on race, as defined by its relationship to anti-positivist epistemologies, theories of the subject, critiques of traditional ontology and aesthetics, and engagement with the Black radical tradition, environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, and more. Some familiarity with key figures and ideas in postcolonial theory and Black studies is desirable though not absolutely necessary. Readings may include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Rizvana Bradley, David Marriott, Rei Terada, Nahum Dmitri Chandler, Fred Moten, and others.

Continental philosophy fuels contemporary media theory. The connection runs so deep, critics have accused media theorists of producing nothing intellectually new. From Edmund Husserl's phenomenological experiments to Heidegger's reflections on technology and time, to Derrida's suspicions of immediacy, a clear philosophical lineage shapes the way media theory thinks about history, subjectivity, and experience. Through engagements with media theory and the inheritance that informs it, we explore the genealogy of thought on media and experience, reflecting on the technological shifts that could not have been anticipated by early 20th century philosophers: social media, and the digital's current saturation of all levels of human communication. We also explore those areas of thought that the Eurocentricism and presumed universality of Western philosophy rendered invisible or unthinkable: the relationship between media and race, media and gender and sexuality, geopolitical and cultural differences.

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011). We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

We experience our world (and the histories of our world) increasingly as a conglomerate of spaces of and for containment. These enclosed spaces are multiple, and their strategies of who and how they imprison are profoundly unequal. How does theory, or rather, different theoretical approaches, deal with structures and experiences of captivity? What captive figures are being used, how are they theorized, and what ways of escaping, opening up, or destroying spaces of captivity are envisioned? In this course, we will draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches to scrutinize an array of figures of captivity, such as the camp, the prison, the campus, the closet, the hold, the enclosure, the frame, the panopticon, the trap, the globe, the screen, for a comparative assessment. We will focus on captivity and its avatars in theory but also reflect on what makes theory itself captive, even complicit in imagining and structuring our reality by way of containment.

This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. The Rhetoric of Temporality, Semiology and Rhetoric, The Resistance to Theory, Autobiography as De-Facement, Shelley Disfigured, Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist, Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate.

This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Herve Guibert, Pepe Espaliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.

This course will begin with some of the earliest theoretical works on personal and historical trauma and pass through several traditions of interpretation (French, American, etc.). Then we will move to more recent attempts to rethink the theory of trauma as it crosses cultural and linguistic borders outside of Europe and the US. Among other questions we will consider the relations among personal, collective, and political trauma and address the imperatives and challenges of thinking trauma in a global context.

The work of Louis Althusser remains a central and canonical reference for contemporary theory, but also a historical reference of major importance for its intellectual history. Althusser not only taught or mentored an extraordinary range of intellectual figures in France (Badiou, Balibar, Derrida, Foucault, Macherey, Ranciere, etc), his basic concepts circulated through crucial social debates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (humanism and anti-humanism, the articulation of modes of production, societies structured in domination). In his later years, Althusser's thought acknowledged surprisingly divergent filiations (Heidegger, Derrida) from the expected Marxian and psychoanalytic references, and his legacy became central to the foundations of Cultural Studies. This seminar will examine a wide range of developments and destinies for the theoretical legacies of Althusser and his close collaborators.

This course is intended to familiarize graduate students with the intellectual history, background, and development of Marxist theory in relation to the contemporary literary and cultural-theoretical landscape. As the broad field through which numerous other directions in theory and research were formed, a knowledge of the Marxist tradition remains an essential backdrop to later developments - the analysis of modes of production, the sociology of labour, the politics of class formation, the developments and trends of postcolonial studies, the modern and contemporary forms of social thought, numerous currents of political thought, and so on. This course therefore fills a need for graduate students to familiarize themselves not only with the work of Marx, but also with central debates in twentieth century and postwar social theory. Rather than examine the work of major figures of the history of socialism as a political tendency, we will focus on the history of theoretical research in the Marxist tradition, with the goal of preparing students to critically apprehend the intellectual history of the principal debates, the major figures, and developments of this tradition in a broad and inclusive sense.

What is illness? What is health? The human body seems to vacillate between these dichotomous versions of its existence. This seminar traces the cultural/historical developments/traditions that define illness, disease, well-being, treatment, cure and approaches to death. We will approach the topic at the intersections of medicine, philosophy, psychology and literature. Authors will include: Herodot, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Galen, von Bingen, Burton, Paracelsus, Kant, Novalis, Herder, Hegel, Stifter, Dostojevskij, Tolstoj, Nietzsche, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Freud, Foucault, Susan Sontag et al.

Some of the most powerful approaches to visual practices have come from outside or from the peripheries of the institution of art history and criticism. This seminar will analyze the interactions between academically sanctioned disciplines (such as iconography and connoisseurship) and innovations coming from philosophy, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, literary theory, mass media criticism, feminism, and Marxism. We will try especially to develop: (1) a general theory of "visual ideology" (the gender, social, racial, and class determinations on the production, consumption, and appropriation of visual artifacts under modern and postmodern conditions); and (2) contemporary theoretical practices that articulate these determinations. Examples will be drawn from the history of oil painting, architecture, city planning, photography, film, and other mass media.

You didn't see anything, a woman in a movie says to her dubious lover. No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don't understand. What is desire in a movie, and how do we know it when we see it or feel it? How do the images, sounds, and narratives of a cinematic event engage us erotically? How might we want to revise classic psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories of desire and cinema in light of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st century? We will focus especially on metacinematic work by Pedro Almod?, Olivier Assayas, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others.

This seminar will explore the both the intellectual grounding of and the nuts and bolts of feminist pedagogy. In what context did feminist pedagogy emerge and why? How have its practitioners variously defined it? What goals in teaching have they pursued? How might this work be useful to you as a teacher beginning or honing your teaching? Both theoretical and practical questions like these will be our subject.

To hone our skills in the analysis of topics in Asian studies, we will review critically a number of switchpoints that have produced conceptual difference in recent scholarly work. Asia scholars have laid claim to the historical, to modernity, coloniality, postcoloniality, religion, affect, temporality, race, capital, (mass) media, embodiment, the translocal, and the posthuman as the bases for producing conceptual difference. Each of these switchpoints has allowed for valuable interventions from Asian Studies into the humanities and social sciences. We will develop questions, criteria, and critiques to thoroughly test our tools of analysis and work toward yet other methods. Contemporary academia valorizes the production of conceptual difference. Thus, evaluation criteria routinely include originality and innovation. This is a valuable point of departure that allows us to ask, What kind of conceptual difference do we want to produce in our work? What kind of conceptual difference is intellectually rigorous? Asia as Question does not merely provide intellectual history but rather tests out—and creates—contemporary, critical approaches. As such, it interrogates especially notions of region and area; work on temporality; new ontologies; and current approaches to media ecologies. (SC)

This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology.

Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Ever since the creation of the concept of a culturally and geographically stable center in China, people have been intentionally excluded from that center. Disgraced officials are sent to far-flung provinces, loyalists to past regimes hide out across China’s borders, and dissidents have their entry visas revoked, making it impossible for them to return home. The experiences of these people, and the poems and stories they write, tell us a great deal about what it means and how it feels to be included and excluded. What is the difference between the way China looks from the inside and the way it looks from the outside? Who has the power to decide who gets to live in China, and how and why do they use it? What is the relationship between our identities and our homes? Texts studied will range from 300 BCE to the present; all will be read and discussed in English.

This course argues that modern literary strictures – such as market forces, censorship, and new media forms – are contiguous with and interpretable in the same way as more traditional literary strictures like meter, rhyme, and tonal regulation. It asks how we can come to a more thorough understanding of contemporary art by treating its sociological and political context as a source of generative restraint. Theoretical texts will range from Foucault to Vaclav Havel; primary texts will be drawn from contemporary Chinese fiction, poetry and film. All texts will be made available in English for non-Chinese speakers. (LL)

Contemporary theory has turned surface phenomena into the grounds and foundations for conceptual work: from moebius-strips to simulacra, from skin to screens, from folds to planes. But theory's superficial turn has led to radically different critical uses. What accounts for the pervasive fascination with surface imaginaries in theoretical thought? This course will engage us in a series of critical reflections on the deployment, as well as the folding and warping, of figures of superficiality, flatness, smoothness, transparence, and nakedness in contemporary theory, from deconstruction to biopolitics, from media studies to queer and transgender theory, from animal and environmental studies to phenomenology, from systems theory to aesthetics. Readings will include texts by Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Han, Didi-Huberman, Foucault, Lyotard, Nancy, Serres, Sloterdijk and others.

“Staffage” is a term in the history of landscape painting. It refers to little figures who populate the scene, invariably dwarfed by their surroundings. The few critics who noticed them assigned them various roles: to illustrate “the benefits which nature affords to creatures living in the region” (Goethe, 1800); or, alternatively, “to lend the landscape its specific poetic character” (Fernow, 1806). From landscape, staffage migrated into archaeological documentation and architectural illustration. Here, tiny figures gain additional roles: to convey the scale of the monuments depicted, and the societies that inhabit them. Our study of staffage alternates between close looking at a wide range of pictures, and readings from the historical and theoretical literature on the aesthetics and politics of landscape painting.

This seminar will offer a critical examination of the literature of perversion (sadism, masochism, fetishism), with readings drawn from major texts of the libertine or S/M traditions (Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Lautreamont, Reage, Flanagan), as well as recent works of philosophy that share with these writers an investment in what I will term writing the real. We will consider works of perversion not merely as literary or clinical cases, therefore, but as illuminating how the discourse of perversion, broadly understood, posits or constructs the real-its cases or modes of postulation or figuration. We will focus our attention on three modes of construction that purport to straddle the alleged gap between language and its real-figure, fetish, and formalization-considering in each case their relation to the problematic of the drive. In addition to the authors mentioned above, readings will include selections from Badiou, Freud, Deleuze, Ferenczi, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Meillassoux, Perniola, and Zizek.

The course will explore the philosophy, psychoanalysis, and politics of sound along the artistic interface of cinema, video, performance, and new media art. From analysis of synchronization of sound and image in the talking movie to its discruption in experimental music, video, new media and sound art, we will consider the prominence of sound and noise as carriers of gender, ethnic and cultural difference. We also will explore the theory of sound, from tracts on futurism, feminism, new music, and sampling, to more recent acoustic applications of eco-theory in which sound merges with discourses of water and environment. In addition to studying a wide range of artistic production in audio, sound, new media, and screen arts, we will discuss the dialogical impact of theoretical discussions of sound in psychoanalysis and aesthetics, as well as the phenomenal growth of digital acoustic horizons in the Pacific Rim.

How do narratives work? What kinds of social functions do stories perform? And how can the theory and analysis of narrative help us to grasp and shape power relations? The course will introduce the history of classical narrative theory, from Aristotle and Lessing to Todorov and Genette, but it will focus especially on new trends in queer, critical race, and feminist narrative theory, and on the uses of narrative form across disciplines and social spaces. You will be expected to write a few short responses to the readings, practice giving a formal conference-style oral presentation, and write a final essay based on the conference paper.

One of the main justifications for work in the humanities hinges upon the importance of representation: We claim that we are telling better stories about some of the complex issues that face us today and that such stories can and will impact the fate of our planet and of humanity-politically, ethically, epistemologically, materially. But how do we narrate, represent, or theorize such complex networks and constellations-global circulations of peoples, objects, and labor information networks, large-scale social, economic, and political crises, vectors of contagion, or climate change and environmental degradation? In this seminar, we will bring together different types of texts and media as well as a range of theoretical approaches in order to critically investigate the forms that represent global networks as well as the possibilities for forging connections across the planet (and beyond). Possible texts include: Galloway's and Thacker's The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Chirbes's On the Edge, Mezzadra's and Neilson's Border as Method, Chen Qiufan's The Waste Tide, Morton's Hyperobjects, Cloud Atlas (film and novel), Lowe's Intimacies of Four Continents, Bellott's Sexual Dependency (film), Nancy's Globalization, Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, Sch?ing's The Swarm, Wu Mingyi's Man with Compound Eyes.

Judith Butler is one of today’s foremost theorists and cultural critics. Even though they are known, above all, for their work in gender studies and queer theory, their theoretical thought ranges widely. It also draws on a wide range of theoretical traditions, literary and filmic works, and political events. In this course, we will read widely from Butler’s work (from Gender Trouble to Who’s Afraid of Gender), as well as reading some of the key texts that Butler draws on. We will develop a critical understanding of Butler’s strategies for reading and writing to hone our own critical and theoretical skills.

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by literature and the sciences. Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the age of digital media and A.I.? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? Moving among a range of genres and sub-genres, poetry, fiction, film, and multimedia, websites and streaming services, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media, and the increasingly pervasive role of A.I., in contemporary culture and politics.

What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry's environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a range of works from the past two decades that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions especially of language, aesthetics, and politics.

The environmental humanities pose a radically different set of questions to texts, materials, and contexts that were previously approached in terms of human intentions and actions alone. This seminar explores the theoretical and methodological potentials of this rapidly emerging and constantly evolving field from the interdisciplinary, comparative perspective that it also axiomatically demands. Together we will discuss seminal works that tackle four foundational concepts imperative for reframing the traditional concerns of the humanities under the sign of anthropogenic planetary change -- scale, form, matter/ energy, and distribution. The seminar will develop ways to configure these focal points to the theoretical and practical concerns of various disciplinary approaches and, especially, to participants' individual interests and research projects.

The course will consider the aesthetics and politics of touch in dialogue with critical, artistic experimentation. Emphasizing interactivity and immersion in art and theory, the course will discuss renewed critical emphasis on the legacy of phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Deleuze to affect theory) in dialogue with recent writings on global critical race and sexual theory (Glissant, Spillers, Mbembe, Ganguly, Lalu, Moten, Cardenas). Designed as an archive-based course, students will be invited to shape the second part of the syllabus around works featured in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and in the 2022 CCA Biennial on Futurities, Uncertain with the aim of staging a final text/exhibit/performance based on conceptual approaches to touch.

The comparative seminar explores pleasure and its relationship with neoliberalism. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and a historical trajectory, starting with the Ancient world through the contemporary. Our investigation of philosophical, literary, and filmic reflections on pleasure and neoliberalism will engage important concepts such as the market, subjectivity, race, gender, and queerness. We highlight and conceptualize how new/old media, literary, and other artistic productions facilitate the expression, the search for, and the achievement of pleasure. Through public speaking and deep attention to writing, you will refine your conceptual accounts of pleasure and neoliberalism and their mutual imbrication.