CPLT 502a / EMST 502a, Always Compare!  Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran

This course interrogates the conceptual frameworks and challenges of cross-cultural comparison. The discipline of comparative literature has its roots in comparative anthropology, linguistics, history, and religion—which are themselves imbricated in the long history of colonialism and in Eurocentric philosophies of history that describe Western cultures as superior to, and superseding, all others. In this course, we move across all these disciplines to ask why, and under what conditions, cross-cultural comparison can still be illuminating in our day and age. We introduce and model innovative new forms of comparative study that are currently reshaping and expanding our field and the humanities more broadly.
W 11:45am-1pm

CPLT 503a / ANTH 553a / GMAN 553a / SOCY 661a, Karl Marx's Capital  Paul North

A careful reading of Karl Marx's classic critique of capitalism, Capital volume 1, a work of philosophy, political economy, and critical social theory that has had a significant global readership for over 150 years. Selected readings also from Capital volumes 2 and 3.
MW 11:35am-12:25pm

CPLT 504a, Proseminar in Translation Studies  Serena Bassi

This graduate proseminar combines a historically minded introduction to Translation Studies as a field with a survey of its interdisciplinary possibilities. The proseminar is composed of several units (Histories of Translation; Geographies of Translation; Scandals of Translation), each with a different approach or set of concerns, affording the students multiple points of entry to the field. The Translation Studies coordinator provides the intellectual through-line from week to week, while incorporating a number of guest lectures by Yale faculty and other invited speakers to expose students to current research and practice in different disciplines. The capstone project is a conference paper-length contribution of original academic research. Additional assignments throughout the term include active participation in and contributions to intellectual programming in the Translation Initiative.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 507a / ER&M 647a / SPAN 780a, Biopolitics in the Carceral Archipelago: The Case of the Philippines  Aurelie Vialette

This seminar examines the racial, ethical, political, environmental, and social implications of the penal colonization process in the Philippines. We analyze archival documents (manuscripts) from the Philippines and engage with theoretical and historical texts on prison labor, racial capitalism, ecocriticism, indigenous studies, carceral studies, gender studies, and law and the humanities. Overseas incarceration was a method employed by empires to dispose of criminals, the poor, sex workers, and vagrants. In the Philippines (a Spanish colony until 1898), the dispossession of indigenous people of their land and the implication of intensive farming were also consequences of the colonial project. We see that labor and procreation were crucial to the project of using prisoners to build the colonial structure and strengthen the Spanish presence in the archipelago. We discover the centrality of this transnational and transhistorical approach to understanding the contemporary treatment of imprisoned people. Spanish reading knowledge is required.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 510a or b / GMAN 604a or b, The Mortality of the Soul: From Aristotle to Heidegger  Martin Hagglund

This course explores fundamental philosophical questions of the relation between matter and form, life and spirit, necessity and freedom, by proceeding from Aristotle’s analysis of the soul in De Anima and his notion of practical agency in the Nicomachean Ethics. We study Aristotle in conjunction with seminal works by contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers (Korsgaard, Nussbaum, Brague, and McDowell). We in turn pursue the implications of Aristotle’s notion of life by engaging with contemporary philosophical discussions of death that take their point of departure in Epicurus (Nagel, Williams, Scheffler). We conclude by analyzing Heidegger’s notion of constitutive mortality, in order to make explicit what is implicit in the form of the soul in Aristotle.
HTBA

CPLT 515a, Proseminar in Comparative Literature  Rudiger Campe

Introductory proseminar for all first- and second-year students in comparative literature (and other interested graduate students). An introduction to key problems in the discipline of comparative literature, its disciplinary history, and its major theoretical and methodological debates (including philology; Marxist, structuralist, and poststructuralist approaches; world literature; translation). Emphasis on wide reading and intense discussion, in lieu of term paper. Graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory. Offered every other year.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 551b, World Literature in Theory and Practice  Samuel Hodgkin

“World literature studies” has emerged over the past generation at institutions across the U.S. as a pedagogical alternative to comparative literature, although whether it constitutes a real conceptual challenge to the discipline or a mere rebranding remains to be seen. In scholarship, the phrase “world literature” originally stood for the effort to make Western comparative literature less Eurocentric, but it is used by its advocates and critics to refer to a bewildering array of incompatible methods and objects of study, from world systems theory to translation and reception studies and the stakes of the concept of a world as such. This seminar prepares participants to enter an academic and publishing sphere in which the idea of world literature is everywhere, but its meaning is an object of general contestation. Theorists discussed include Apter, Brouillette, Casanova, Cheah, Damrosch, Even-Zohar, Goethe, Gorky, Herder, Mahler, Moretti, Orsini, Pollock, Spivak, and the Warwick Research Collective. Literary case studies include Ismailov, Kadare, Pavic, and a range of literary anthologies from the past two centuries. Over the course of the semester, students work together to trace their chosen writers and literary movements through a variety of reception and translation contexts.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 552a / MDVL 619a / NELC 619a, The Medieval Court  Shawkat Toorawa

What are the features of the medieval court? To answer this, we look at courts in Western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic world, and East Asia to learn about courtly culture, court poetry, and court society. Readings include van Berkel et al., Crisis and Continuity in the Caliphate of al-Muqtadir; Castiglione, Book of the Courtier; Duinden, Vienna and Versailles; Elias, The Court Society; Maguire, Byzantine Court Culture; Miner, Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry; al-Washshā, al-Muwashshā. Knowledge of French desirable.
HTBA

CPLT 557a / FILM 655a / GMAN 555a, Habit and Habitation: On Walter Benjamin’s Media Aesthetics and Philosophy of Technology  Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

In recent years, Walter Benjamin has become one of the most quoted media theorists. His philosophy of technology is not as widely known as the concept of aura he developed in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. The contemporary relevance of his philosophy of technology lies in the fact that Benjamin establishes a connection between technology and different forms of habitation and between the latter and the concept of habit (Gewohnheit), which is etymologically related to the concept of habitation (Wohnen). This enables a comparison of Benjamin’s approach with the philosophies of technology developed by Heidegger, Deleuze/Guattari, and Simondon, all of whom associate technology with the shaping of environments and the problem of poesis. In our seminar, we reconstruct Benjamin’s media anthropology of technology through a close reading of his diaries and essays and compare it to philosophies of technology very much being discussed today.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 566a / FILM 632a / GMAN 532a, Paper: Material and Medium  Austen Hinkley

Paper is one of the most ubiquitous and indispensable media of the modern era.  Although we are (still) surrounded by it, paper tends to recede into the background, working best when we do not notice it at all. This course sets out to challenge our understanding of paper as a neutral or passive bearer of inscriptions by foregrounding its material quality. Our focus will rest in equal parts on the media history of paper and on paper works of art – among them many literary texts – that reflect or take advantage of their medium. Studying materials and histories from the early modern period to the present, we will uncover paper’s status as a commodity bound up in a complex web of economic processes, as an instrument of political power, as a gendered and racialized object, and as a material that can be cut, shuffled, and even eaten. Ultimately, we will investigate the ways in which paper is still central to our lives, even in the age of tablets and PDFs. Readings will include Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, Robert Walser’s “Microscripts,” and M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong!” The class will make several visits to the Beinecke Library for hands-on work with paper materials.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 582b / ENGL 6545b / FREN 802b / MDVL 502b, Chaucer and Translation  Ardis Butterfield

An exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400), brilliant writer and translator. Using modern postcolonial as well as medieval theories of translation, memory, and bilingualism, we investigate how texts in French, Latin, and Italian are transformed, cited, and reinvented in his writings. Some key questions include: What happens to language under the pressure of crosslingual reading practices? What happens to the notion of translation in a multilingual culture? How are ideas of literary history affected by understanding Chaucer’s English in relation to the other more prestigious language worlds in which his poetry was enmeshed? Texts include material in French, Middle English, Latin, and Italian. Proficiency in any one or more of these languages is welcome, but every effort is made to use texts available in modern English translation, so as to include as wide a participation as possible in the course. Formerly ENGL 545.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 597b / ENGL 6768b, The Birth of Aesthetics  Jonathan Kramnick

This is a course on the emergence of aesthetic theory in Enlightenment and Romantic era Europe. We'll examine how a new language of art and nature focused on the experience of the beholder and track evolving categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque in key texts of philosophy and literature. We'll connect ideas of aesthetic judgment and autonomy to central institutions and ideologies of the modern era, including the public sphere, secularism, the private subject, racial capitalism, and the market. Readings begin with empirical philosophies of perception and early accounts of the aesthetic in Locke, Addison, Hutcheson, Pope, Hume, and Burke and continue through the watershed moment of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kant, and Schiller. The seminar ends with a consideration of aesthetic theory in the long contemporary period of Adorno, Scarry, Rancière, and Ngai. Previously ENGL 768.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 605b / ENGL 5805b, Edward Said as Public Intellectual  Robyn Creswell

This seminar focuses on Edward Said’s reflections on the role and responsibilities of the intellectual, paying particular attention to his writings on Palestine, the politics and culture of the Arab world, and the discourse of expertise. We also examine the reception of Said’s ideas and example among Arab thinkers. Texts include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, After the Last Sky, Representations of the Intellectual, and numerous essays. Previously ENGL 905.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 612a / EALL 588a / EAST 616a / RSEE 605a / RUSS 605a, Socialist '80s: Aesthetics of Reform in China and the Soviet Union  Jinyi Chu

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of the complex cultural and political paradigms of late socialism from a transnational perspective by focusing on the literature, cinema, and popular culture of the Soviet Union and China in 1980s. How were intellectual and everyday life in the Soviet Union and China distinct from and similar to that of the West of the same era? How do we parse “the cultural logic of late socialism?” What can today’s America learn from it? Examining two major socialist cultures together in a global context, this course queries the ethnographic, ideological, and socio-economic constituents of late socialism. Students analyze cultural materials in the context of Soviet and Chinese history. Along the way, we explore themes of identity, nationalism, globalization, capitalism, and the Cold War. Students with knowledge of Russian and Chinese are encouraged to read in original. All readings are available in English.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 614b / FILM 770b / GMAN 594b, East German Literature and Film  Katie Trumpener

The German Democratic Republic (1949–89) was a political and aesthetic experiment that failed, buffeted by external pressures and eroded by internal contradictions. For forty years, in fact, its most ambitious literary texts and films (some suppressed, others widely popular) explored such contradictions, often in a vigilant, Brechtian spirit of irony and dialectics. This course examines key texts both as aesthetic experiments and as critiques of the country’s emerging cultural institutions and state censorship, recurrent political debates, and pressing social issues. Texts by Brecht, Uwe Johnson, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Johannes Bobrowski, Franz Fühmann, Wolf Biermann, Thomas Brasch, Christoph Hein; films by Slatan Dudow, Kurt Maetzig, Konrad Wolf, Heiner Carow, Frank Beyer, Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp. Knowledge of German desirable but not crucial; all texts available in English.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 622a / AMST 622a and AMST 623b, Working Group on Globalization and Culture  Michael Denning

A continuing yearlong collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory.” The group, drawing on several disciplines, meets regularly to discuss common readings, develop collective and individual research projects, and present that research publicly. The general theme for the working group is globalization and culture, with three principal aspects: (1) the globalization of cultural industries and goods, and its consequences for patterns of everyday life as well as for forms of fiction, film, broadcasting, and music; (2) the trajectories of social movements and their relation to patterns of migration, the rise of global cities, the transformation of labor processes, and forms of ethnic, class, and gender conflict; (3) the emergence of and debates within transnational social and cultural theory. The specific focus, projects, and directions of the working group are determined by the interests, expertise, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change. The working group is open to doctoral students in their second year and beyond. Graduate students interested in participating should contact michael.denning@yale.edu.
M 12pm-2:15pm

CPLT 648b / EMST 718b, European Drama I: From the Greek Polis to the French Revolution  Rudiger Campe and Katie Trumpener

This seminar is designed as a graduate-level survey of European drama from antiquity to 1800. Our emphasis is on historically-informed discussion of primary texts; on mapping key epochs in dramatic history (including Greek tragedy and comedy, Elizabethan/ Jacobean; Spanish “Golden Age”; French neo-classicism; German Storm and Stress) in relationship to one another, across time, languages, and cultures; and on changing performance practices and conceptions of theater. Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes; Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim; Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Congreve; Lope de Vega, Calderon; Racine, Corneille, Moliere, Goldoni, Marivaux, Beaumarchais; Goethe, Schiller. Short classic texts by Aristotle, Nietzsche, Goethe, Bulgakov, Goldman, Leroy Ladurie, Barthes, Kott, alongside contemporary theater critics and historians.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 657a / PORT 652a, Clarice Lispector: The Short Stories  Kenneth David Jackson

This course is a seminar on the complete short stories of Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), a master of the genre and one of the major authors of twentieth-century Brazil known for existentialism, mysticism, and feminism.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 665b / ENGL 5865b / WGSS 665b, African Feminism and African Women Writers  Helen Yitah

This course looks at how major African women writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Nawal El Saadawi, Grace Ogot, and Chimamanda Adichie have represented African feminist concerns and aesthetics in their works. We explore some of their interrogation of sexism and patriarchal social structures, the thematization of gender relations, a rethinking of marginality, and the presentation of alternative frames of reference for (re)defining female subjectivities and identities by reading selected works through the lens of African feminist thought, including Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s stiwanism, Catherine Acholonu’s motherism, Obioma Nnaemeka’s nego-feminism, and Mary Kolawole’s and Chikwenye Ogunyemi’s versions of womanism.
W 9:25am-11:15am

CPLT 666b / EMST 565b / GMAN 665b, Birth of the Political: Early Modern and Twentieth Century  Rudiger Campe

Early modern European works on colonial war, sovereignty, and politics, sixteenth to seventeenth centuries (by Sepúlveda, Grotius, Machiavelli, Lipsius [neo-Stoicism], Hobbes) are read in conjunction with twentieth century debates from the inter-war period to circa 1968 (by Schmitt, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Oestreich, Foucault, authors who refer back to the modern early works and have importantly shaped our modern understanding of “the political” and, with it, the notion of the “early modern”). The course is interested in critically tracing the echoes regarding “the political” between early modernity and our own times.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 689a / E&RS 629a / RSEE 613a / RUSS 613a / SLAV 613a, Art and Resistance in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine  Andrei Kureichyk

This interdisciplinary seminar is devoted to the study of protest art as part of the struggle of society against authoritarianism and totalitarianism. It focuses on the example of the Soviet and post-Soviet transformation of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. The period under discussion begins after the death of Stalin in 1953 and ends with the art of protest against the modern post-Soviet dictatorships of Alexander Lukashenka in Belarus and Vladimir Putin in Russia, the protest art of the Ukrainian Maidan, and the anti-war movement of artists against the Russian-Ukrainian war. The course begins by looking at the influence of the “Khrushchev Thaw” on literature and cinema, which opened the way for protest art to a wide Soviet audience. We explore different approaches to protest art in conditions of political unfreedom: “nonconformism,” “dissidence,” “mimicry,” “rebellion.” The course investigates the existential conflict of artistic freedom and the political machine of authoritarianism. These themes are explored at different levels through specific examples from the works and biographies of artists. Students immerse themselves in works of different genres: films, songs, performances, plays, and literary works.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 705a / ITAL 781a, The Decameron  Millicent Marcus

An in-depth study of Boccaccio’s text as a journey in genre in which the writer surveys all the storytelling possibilities available to him in the current repertory of short narrative fiction—ranging from ennobling example to flamboyant fabliaux, including hagiography, aphorisms, romances, anecdotes, tragedies, and practical jokes—and self-consciously manipulates those forms to create a new literary space of astonishing variety, vitality, and subversive power. In the relationship between the elaborate frame-story and the embedded tales, theoretical issues of considerable contemporary interest emerge—questions of gendered discourse, narratology, structural pastiche, and reader response among them. The Decameron is read in Italian or in English. Close attention is paid to linguistic usage and rhetorical techniques in this foundational text of the vernacular prose tradition.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 707b / AFAM 707b / MHHR 707b, What Is An Archive?  Melissa Barton

This graduate seminar seeks to answer the question in the course’s title by looking closely at professional archival descriptive practices and broader, looser uses of the term in cultural and literary studies, art history, history, and beyond. By looking at these distinct but curiously, even suspiciously, concurrent genealogies, we seek to explain why the term “archive” has become so demonstrably popular, in multiple senses of the word, even as archival practice has become more professionalized and specialized. Put differently, many humanistic fields have undergone “archival turns” in recent decades, and many cultural and performance theorists, critics, and historians have advanced arguments about “the archive” as a monolithic concept, perhaps “the archives” as an abstract location where the work begins (e.g., “I’ve been in the archives”), or perhaps “my archive” as the group of texts I interpret and cite. Meanwhile, professional archivists regularly publish tweets, articles, and blog posts asking them to stop it. This course hopes to ponder and maybe even find a way toward an answer to the question: What is up with this? We explore archives in theory and practice, as both figurative and literal, both concrete and abstract, repositories for “primary” inquiry into the past. We consider theories of archives from humanities fields and the archival profession (including the emerging subfield “critical archival studies”), and we discuss how archives are made, how they are used, how they are made usable, what may be assumed or elided in the making and use of archives, and the popularity of, and tensions around, “the archive” as a concept. Topics and keywords include: what is primary or original? What is order or process? What is a trace, and how is it made distinct from the great mass of human traces? What does it mean to collect, to curate? What is an archival silence, and what might be comparable notions of archival noise? What does it mean to recover or discover? In addition to readings, students complete two assignments: a provenance research assignment and a descriptive project in the form of a survey of an existing collection at Yale or a subject guide to a collection or group of collections.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

CPLT 734a / FREN 930a, Fiction and the Archives  Alice Kaplan

What can be learned about 20th-century French literature from literary archives? This course investigates fiction by Proust, Céline, Guilloux, Sartre, Sarraute, Wittig, studying finished books in the light of manuscripts, letters, and historical sources. An exploration in particular of the idea of the "genesis" of a literary work. A number of classes will take place in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Conducted in English.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 754a / ENGL 915a, Western and Postcolonial Marxist Cultural Theory  Joe Cleary

An introduction to classic twentieth-century Western and postcolonial Marxist theorists and texts focusing on historical and intellectual exchange between these critical formations. Reading theoretical works in conjunction with some selected literary texts, the course tracks how key Marxian concepts such as capital and class consciousness, modes of production, praxis and class struggles, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation have been developed across these traditions and considers how these concepts have been used to rethink literary and other cultural forms and their ongoing transformation in a changing world system. Writers discussed may include G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Perry Anderson, Giovanni Arrighi, Cornel West, and others. The object of the seminar is to provide students with a solid intellectual foundation in these still-developing hermeneutic traditions.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 822b / AMST 623b, Working Group on Globalization and Culture  Michael Denning

A continuing yearlong collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory.” The group, drawing on several disciplines, meets regularly to discuss common readings, develop collective and individual research projects, and present that research publicly. The general theme for the working group is globalization and culture, with three principal aspects: (1) the globalization of cultural industries and goods, and its consequences for patterns of everyday life as well as for forms of fiction, film, broadcasting, and music; (2) the trajectories of social movements and their relation to patterns of migration, the rise of global cities, the transformation of labor processes, and forms of ethnic, class, and gender conflict; (3) the emergence of and debates within transnational social and cultural theory. The specific focus, projects, and directions of the working group are determined by the interests, expertise, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change. There are a small number of openings for second-year graduate students. Students interested in participating should contact michael.denning@yale.edu.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 889a / AFST 889a / ENGL 889a, Postcolonial Ecologies  Cajetan Iheka

This seminar examines the intersections of postcolonialism and ecocriticism as well as the tensions between these conceptual nodes, with readings drawn from across the global South. Topics of discussion include colonialism, development, resource extraction, globalization, ecological degradation, nonhuman agency, and indigenous cosmologies. The course is concerned with the narrative strategies affording the illumination of environmental ideas. We begin by engaging with the questions of postcolonial and world literature and return to these throughout the semester as we read primary texts, drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. We consider African ecologies in their complexity from colonial through post-colonial times. In the unit on the Caribbean, we take up the transformations of the landscape from slavery, through colonialism, and the contemporary era. Turning to Asian spaces, the seminar explores changes brought about by modernity and globalization as well as the effects on both humans and nonhumans. Readings include the writings of Zakes Mda, Aminatta Forna, Helon Habila, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Ishimure Michiko, and Amitav Ghosh. The course prepares students to respond to key issues in postcolonial ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, analyze the work of the major thinkers in the fields, and examine literary texts and other cultural productions from a postcolonial perspective. Course participants have the option of selecting from a variety of final projects. Students can craft an original essay that analyzes primary text from a postcolonial and/or ecocritical perspective. Such work should aim at producing new insight on a theoretical concept and/or the cultural text. They can also produce an undergraduate syllabus for a course at the intersection of postcolonialism and environmentalism or write a review essay discussing three recent monographs focused on postcolonial ecocriticism.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 895a / SPAN 865a, Translation in Latin American and Latinx Literature  Staff

Involving languages, cultures, nations, and publishing markets of varying power, translation is a highly charged zone where hierarchies may be established, reinforced, or toppled. This graduate seminar offers an overview of how translation has functioned, in site-specific fashion, as theoretical program and experimental mode within “original” Latin American and the US Latinx literatures. We examine texts from much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that engage translation (interlinguistic, intralinguistic, intersemiotic) as trope, form, or material apparatus. These featured works include pseudotranslations, unreliable self-translations, transcreations, translingual texts, and fictions with translator-protagonists. We read these materials alongside essential theory and criticism that surface distinctly Latin(x) American itineraries for translation and that provide students with an analytical toolbox for attending to translation in original and unoriginal writing alike. This course is taught in English, with materials provided in the original Spanish or Portuguese when available.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

CPLT 909b, Joyce and Proust  Marta Figlerowicz

This course is devoted mostly to the close reading of Joyce’s Ulysses and parts of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. We read Proust in translation, but special guidance is given for students who can read French.
M 9:25am-11:15am

CPLT 913a / FILM 690a / SPAN 691, Radical Cinemas of Latin America  Moira Fradinger

An introductory overview of Latin American cinema, with an emphasis on post-World War II films produced in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Examination of each film in its historical and aesthetic aspects, and in light of questions concerning national cinema and “third cinema.” Examples from both pre-1945 and contemporary films. Conducted in English; knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese helpful but not required.
M 7pm-11pm, W 7pm-8:50pm

CPLT 933a / ENGL 928a / FILM 751a, British Cinema  Katie Trumpener

Key films and topics in British cinema. Special attention to the provincial origins of British cinema; overlaps between filmic, literary, and visual modernism; attempts to build on the British literary and dramatic tradition; cinema’s role in the war effort and in redefining national identity; postwar auteur and experimental filmmaking; “heritage” films and alternative approaches to tradition. Accompanying readings in British film theorists, film sociology (including Mass Observation), and cultural studies accounts of film spectatorship and memories. Films by Mitchell and Kenyon, Maurice Elvey, Anthony Asquith, Len Lye, John Grierson, Alfred Hitchcock, Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphrey Jennings, Michael Powell, Carol Reed, David Lean, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Stanley Kubrick, Laura Mulvey, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway, Michael Winterbottom, Patrick Keiller, Steve McQueen.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm, M 7pm-10pm

CPLT 953b / EALL 823b / EAST 623b, Topics in Sinophone and Chinese Studies  Jing Tsu

This recurring graduate research seminar and symposium examines different areas, periods, genres, and conceptual frameworks in Chinese and Sinophone studies. The topic this year is 1950s–2020. Prerequisite: reading fluency in modern and semi-classical Chinese. Enrollment is restricted; no auditors.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

CPLT 965a / ER&M 681 / SPAN 904a, Latin American Political Thought I: Neocolonial, Anticolonial, Decolonial: 1800–1930  Moira Fradinger

This seminar consists of two parts. The first part is taught in the fall and the second one in the spring. The year-long plan introduces students to two centuries of Latin American political thought in the form of social and literary essays produced since the times of independence. It studies how Latin American writers and politicians have theorized the political/cultural heritage of the colony. The fall seminar starts with the Haitian constitution and contemporary Haitian authors who assess the legacy of the Haitian revolution. It ends with the anarchist movements and socialist thought of the turn of the twentieth century. The second part (spring) starts with the 1930s and the rise of populism and ends with writings on current indigenous movements across the region. The fall engages nineteenth-century debates over “American identity” that were foundational to the newly constituted nation-states (authors include Bolívar, Lastarria, Alamán, Martí, Sarmiento, Echeverría, Hostos, Montalvo,Burgos, Rodó, da Cunha, Mariategui, Gonzalez Prada, Zapata). The spring explores twentieth-century debates over cultural independence, the movement of “indigenismo,” mestizaje, transculturation and heterogeneity, the Caribbean movement of “negritude,” the metaphor of “cannibalism” to account for the cultural politics of the region, concepts such as “internal colonialism” and “motley society,” and the polemics over the region’s capitalist modernity and postmodernity (authors include  Ortiz, Moreno Fraginals, Lezama Lima, Vasconcelos, Reyes, de Andrade, Antenor Orrego, Zapata, J.L. Borges, J.M. Arguedas, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Caio Prado Júnior, Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, C.L.R. James, Fanon, Léon Damas, Paulo Freire, Angel Rama, Retamar, Edmundo O’Gorman, Antonio Candido, Darcy Ribeiro, Pablo González Casanova, León-Portilla, R. Kusch, René Zavaleta Mercado, A. Quijano, Rita Segato, Bolívar Echeverría, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Viveiros de Castro). Weekly sessions are conducted in Spanish, and most of the readings are Spanish, French, and Portuguese materials (with a few Anglo-Caribbean sources). Students are provided with English translations if they prefer and are allowed to write their papers in English.
T 7pm-8:50pm

CPLT 985a / AFST 969a / FREN 969a, Islands, Oceans, Deserts  Jill Jarvis

This seminar brings together literary and theoretical works that chart planetary relations and connections beyond the paradigm of francophonie. Comparative focus on the poetics and politics of spaces shaped by intersecting routes of colonization and forced migrations: islands (Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Martinique), oceans (Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic), and deserts (Sahara, Sonoran). Prerequisite: reading knowledge of French; knowledge of Arabic and Spanish invited. Conducted in English.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm