Department of Comparative Literature

CMLT 30030. Short Russian Novels. 100 Units.

A sprawling, digressive epic like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace may come first to mind when you think of the classic Russian novel. But Russian authors of the nineteenth century also produced short novels distinguished by their intellectual intensity and tight formal structure. An outlet for political speech under censorship or a passionate cry for recognition of the "spiteful man," the Russian novella lay bare the injustices of late Russian imperial society. It also performed acute psychological analysis of the lovesick and brokenhearted. We will read novellas by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as the unjustly neglected Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who was one of the most popular authors of the 1870s in Russia. In seminar-style discussion, we will examine critical approaches to the novella form, the historical and cultural context of the period with a comparative look at European literature, and the "accursed questions" at the heart of the works themselves. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC). This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 30030, REES 30030, ENGL 20030, CMLT 20030, FNDL 20030, REES 20030

CMLT 30123. Orientalism. 100 Units.

In 1978, Edward Said transformed "Orientalism" from a somewhat innocent term for a fascination with the cultures of the Orient into a label for a "discursive formation" that systematically objectified, essentialized, and distorted the non-West in the service of Western ideology and power. His intervention provoked a number of responses: some critiqued the critique, on empirical or theoretical grounds; some extended his analysis, which was based primarily on the Middle East, to other "Orients"; some argued that his critique did not go far enough. We will examine Said's Orientalism, some important precursors in the critique of Orientalist knowledge, and a selection of responses to Said's work, with a focus on theoretical questions. Why do the overarching structures of knowledge change so slowly when it comes to the non-West, and why, at the same time, does "knowledge" about the non-West appear so compromised when we examine it a century or so after it is produced? What are the rules of the "discursive formation" Said claimed to have identified? On what basis can a critique of an entire "way of knowing" be justified and undertaken? How does Orientalism reframe the Baconian cliché that "knowledge is power"? In the end, what is the epistemic and political status of "knowledge of the non-West"?

Instructor(s): Andrew Ollett     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 20123, SALC 30123, CMLT 20123

CMLT 30210. Narrative Doubles. 100 Units.

Dostoevsky's early novel "The Double" leads the readers on a descent into the madness of the main character as his double takes over his life. From uncanny usurpers to empathic gateways into alternative identities, in this course doubles teach us about our selves. We will consider how narratives conceptualize the human self and its reality, and how they conjure alternatives. We also ask about the political power of these alternative selves and doubling temporalities - from subversive possibilities to dystopian political nostalgias.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 20210, CMLT 20210, REES 30210

CMLT 31222. Aeschylus' Oresteia: drama and democracy. 100 Units.

Ancient Greek drama in the 5th c. BCE both maps and reckons with the constitutive tensions in the polis between residual (but still influential) aristocratic norms and practices and the newly dominant (but still evolving) democratic ethos and ideals- its practices institutionalized in the assembly, the magistracies, and the courts. Aeschylus's Oresteia represents and contributes to that debate, as it explores (among other things) the fortunes of the house of Atreus, the making of the polis, gender trouble, questions of kinship, revenge and its impasses, institutions of justice. This trilogy helps us understand crucial aspects of the society that produced it and also invites us to reflect on the ways ancient literature informs how we think about ourselves and our predicaments now-political, familial, and existential. And the Oresteia further invites us to think about the uses and possibilities of theater, then and now. No knowledge of Greek is required for this course, but there will be assignment options for those who wish to do the reading in Greek. This course will meet twice weekly for 3 hours during the 1st five weeks of the quarter, from March 24 to April 23.

Instructor(s): Laura Slatkin     Terms Offered: Spring. Spring 2025
Prerequisite(s): Instructor’s consent is required for undergraduates. No knowledge of Greek is required for this course, but there will be assignment options for those who wish to do the reading in Greek. Requirements: weekly readings; response paper for each class meeting (as of 1/13, posted on Canvas); 15 min. oral report; final paper.
Note(s): This course will meet two times per week for 3 hours, during the 1st five weeks of the quarter, from March 24 to April 23.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 31222, GREK 24714, GREK 34717, FNDL 21222

CMLT 31305. Traveling Stories: Short Stories from Around the World. 100 Units.

For various reasons, short stories have been among the most popular genres in literature. They have also been among the most translated. In this class we will read short stories from all over the world, and from various time periods. From early fables from collections like the Sanskrit Pañcatantra and Arabian Nights we will discuss how translation played a role in the transmission of these tales across linguistic traditions. Entering the modern period, we will discuss how short stories confront questions of Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Gender, Sexuality, Religion, the Climate Crisis etc. We will be guided in our inquiry by classic theorists of the genre like Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James and Vladimir Popp. Authors to be read include well known figures like Lev Tolstoy, María de Zayas, Anton Chekhov and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as lesser known figures such as Manto, Stefan Grabiński, Ambai, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, Premchand, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Chaso. All readings in English.

Instructor(s): Jackson Cyril     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 21305

CMLT 31388. Hittite and Hollywood. 100 Units.

The Hollywood film studios were established in the same years that the Hittite language was deciphered, and so began two genre-building projects that have barely interacted. What do the ancient annals of the king's military exploits have in common with Westerns like Stagecoach and The Searchers? Can we read the story of a murdered Hittite prince-who would have been the future pharaoh of Egypt-as a film noir, like The Maltese Falcon? Is a mythological text about a missing deity a better example of Hollywood film style than the musical Singin' in the Rain? In the first course in the history of the world to compare Late Bronze Age Hittite texts and classic Hollywood genre films, we will endeavor to understand what makes a genre recognizable across time, culture, and medium. Topics we will explore include storytelling through text and image, reception, literary and film style, adaptations, and what makes a "classic". We will dive into Hittite texts in translation, watch Hollywood films, and consult literary and film theory.

Instructor(s): Naomi Harris     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 21380, CMLT 21388

CMLT 31505. Mourning and Struggle in African, Native American, and Palestinian Narratives. 100 Units.

In this course, we will explore themes spanning three diverse bodies of literature and film, identifying points of connection and difference between expressions of sorrow and resistance in African, Native American, and Palestinian works. We focus on portrayals of mourning and examine how in response to catastrophic experiences and histories of colonialism, writers and filmmakers narrate loss and trauma. We will investigate how these authors renegotiate their identities, how they fashion national and political imaginaries, and how they envision alternative futures. Together, we will analyze source materials related to the themes of violence, memory, gender, and race. Through our weekly assignments and discussions, we will seek to determine the tropes and aesthetic tools that ignite modes of storytelling, and to answer: how do writers and artists employ aesthetic form to portray catastrophes? How might expressions of grief also be mobilized for resistance and struggle? Our class will be organized into three modules, touching upon African, Native American, and Palestinian prose, poetry, and film alongside theoretical works in memory and trauma studies. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to develop their own complex evaluations of these narratives-and recognize how comparisons through artistic expression can be a powerful tool for amplifying a multiplicity of stories about mourning and defiance.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Kraver     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 31500, NEHC 21500, GLST 21500, NEHC 31500, CMLT 21505, RDIN 21500

CMLT 32400-32500. History of International Cinema I-II.

This sequence is required of students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies. Taking these courses in sequence is strongly recommended but not required.

CMLT 32501. Vico's New Science. 100 Units.

This course offers a close reading of Giambattista Vico's masterpiece, "The New Science" (1744) - a work that sets out to refute "all opinions hitherto held about the principles of humanity." Vico, who is acknowledged as the most resolute scourge of any form of rationalism, breathed new life into rhetoric, imagination, poetry, metaphor, history, and philology in order to promote in his readers that originary "wonder" and "pathos" which sets human beings on the search for truth. However, Vico argues, the truths that are most available and interesting to us are the ones humanity "authored" by means of its culture and history-creating activities. For this reason the study of myth and folklore as well as archeology, anthropology, and ethnology must all play a role in the rediscovery of man. "The New Science" builds an "alternative philosophy" for a new age and reads like a "novel of formation" recounting the (hi)story of the entire human race and our divine ancestors. In Vico, a prophetic spirit, one recognizes the fulfillment of the Renaissance, the spokesperson of a particular Enlightenment, the precursor of the Kantian revolution, and the forefather of the philosophy of history (Herder, Hegel, and Marx). "The New Science" remained a strong source of inspiration in the twentieth century (Cassirer, Gadamer, Berlin, Joyce, Beckett, etc.) and may prove relevant in disclosing our own responsibilities in postmodernity.

Instructor(s): Rocco Rubini     Terms Offered: Course not taught in 2025-26
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21408, CMLT 22501, ITAL 22900, ITAL 32900

CMLT 32688. Race, Gender and Capitalism: Deconstructing and Demystifying Disney. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 22688

CMLT 32700. Diasporic Literature and Modern Islam in the Imperial Core. 100 Units.

The 19th century enslaved scholar Omar Ibn Said opens his autobiography with the words: "I cannot write my life." This seminar takes this starting point -the thick of chattel slavery, mercantile capitalism, and colonial violence - to investigate literary productions by racialized others dispersed in and by the so-called era of modernity. We will complicate what constitutes the modernity and how Islam, perhaps more than any other tradition, has been configured as its inverse. We will read works ranging from poetry, novels, short stories, comics, & memoirs as they relate to encounters & engagements particularly with Islam as a religious tradition, colonialism, industrialization, & nationalism, even as global understandings of tradition, genre, & form are being contested & rapidly changing. In addition to primary sources, we will theoretically situate these works within larger discussions of racecraft, oral transmission & culture, "folk" vs. "high" literature, Orientalism, politics, gender, sexuality, & identity. We will look at this is articulated in diasporic literary forms written within -and sometimes for- the imperial core. Through in-class discussions, readings, & a final paper, students will strengthen their global literacy, demonstrate knowledge of global historical trends, analyze the shifting and even contradictory interpretations of the role of religion in racial formations, all while identifying, critiquing & assessing these key course themes.

Instructor(s): Samah Choudhury     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 32700, RLST 26717, ISLM 36717, GLST 22710, AASR 36717, RDIN 22700, CMLT 22705

CMLT 33301. Balkan Folklore. 100 Units.

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments, and a living epic tradition. This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political, and anthropological perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition firsthand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, "Balkan Dance."

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 30568, ANTH 35908, NEHC 20568, CMLT 23301, ANTH 25908, REES 29009, REES 39009

CMLT 33401. The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise. 100 Units.

How and why do national identities provoke the deep emotional attachments that they do? In this course we try to understand these emotional attachments by examining the narrative of loss and redemption through which most nations in the Balkans retell their Ottoman past. We begin by considering the mythic temporality of the Romantic national narrative while focusing on specific national literary texts where the national past is retold through the formula of original wholeness, foreign invasion, Passion, and Salvation. We then proceed to unpack the structural role of the different elements of that narrative. With the help of Žižek's theory of the subject as constituted by trauma, we think about the national fixation on the trauma of loss, and the role of trauma in the formation of national consciousness. Specific theme inquiries involve the figure of the Janissary as self and other, brotherhood and fratricide, and the writing of the national trauma on the individual physical body. Special attention is given to the general aesthetic of victimhood, the casting of the victimized national self as the object of the "other's perverse desire." With the help of Freud, Žižek and Kant we consider the transformation of national victimhood into the sublimity of the national self. The main primary texts include Petar Njegoš' Mountain Wreath (Serbia and Montenegro), Ismail Kadare's The Castle (Albania), Anton Donchev's Time of Parting (Bulgaria).

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 30573, REES 29013, HIST 34005, CMLT 23401, NEHC 20573, REES 39013, HIST 24005

CMLT 33425. Helen of Troy Through The Centuries. 100 Units.

Helen of Troy has been a source of fascination for ancient and modern writers alike, serving as a symbol of unattainable beauty and destructive femininity. This course explores the various portrayals of Helen throughout Greco-Roman poetry (epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy) and prose (historiography, oratory), as well as contemporary literature and film. Taking into account the conventions and historical context of each genre we will examine her character as it relates to questions of gender, sexual power, agency, identity, embodiment and social structures. All readings will be in English and include but are not limited to selections from Homer, Euripides, Gorgias, Ovid, Seferis, Marlowe, and Walcott.

Instructor(s): C. Filippaki     Terms Offered: Autumn. 25-26
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 23425, GNSE 33425, CMLT 23425, CLCV 23425, CLAS 33425

CMLT 33709. The New Socialist Realism. 100 Units.

Taking the astonishing fiction of Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) as a starting point this course asks: how have realist fictions in general and socialist realism in particular been used to transform material and ideological realities? Can realism be revolutionary? Can it be dictated by the state? Grounded in historical context, our reading will venture into the afterlife and future of socialist realism. As philosophers across the world reinterpreted Platonov and other Soviet and socialist authors, what appeared to be gaps in intellectual and literary history now seem to be continuities of influence across borders. Reading Shklovsky, Lukács, Jameson, Timofeeva, Malabou and others, this course traces the new and transnational socialist realism. Topics include ideology, gender, community, colonialism and decolonization.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This is a new graduate and upper-level undergraduate seminar
Equivalent Course(s): REES 33709

CMLT 33723. Musical Selfhood. 100 Units.

What sort of subject is the musical self? Within the already brief historical moment of subjectivity in its Western modern shape that is no more than a few hundred years old, an even briefer moment is associated with the idea of a musical subject, a subject or self entirely made up of music. This idea seems of one piece with the idea that music can be pure - or, as it was called at the time, absolute - that it can fully be an end in itself. What does this even mean - that music could be its own end, and that a self could entirely consist of it?

Instructor(s): Florian Klinger     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Discussion in English, readings in English or German. Undergraduates by permission only.
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 33722, GRMN 33723

CMLT 33819. Narratology of Tears: Goethe, Sterne, and the Sentimental Novel. 100 Units.

This seminar will, with a certain intensity of focus, examine two masterpieces of the "sentimental" mode: Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) and Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774). Since these novels are both generically self-reflective and, each in its own way, boldly experimental, they are well-suited for an analysis oriented toward the theory of narrative. Comparisons will be drawn to passages in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-8) and Rousseau's Julie, ou La nouvelle Heloise (1761). We will also take a forward look at Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' Liaisons dangereuses (1782), which may be considered the destruction of the form. In addition to fundamental contributions to narratology, works by Roland Barthes (Fragments of a Lover's Discourse), Albrecht Koschorke (Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts), and James Chandler (An Archeology of Sympathy. The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema) will be important points of reference. As always, Schiller's Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung will prove indispensable.

Instructor(s): David Wellbery     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 33819, GRMN 33819

CMLT 34723. Philosophical Anthropology: Origins of the Human. 100 Units.

What makes us human? What is our place in the cosmos? What common condition unites us as a species across race, gender, and ethnicity? In this course, we will explore these questions through the lens of twentieth-century German thinkers who placed the human being at the center of philosophical inquiry. Seeking an alternative to both religious and scientific accounts, the philosophers Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, and Helmut Plessner developed new conceptions of the human that sought to do justice to both our spiritual and our biological being. We will take an historical approach to this intellectual movement, considering how philosophers such as Herder, Kant, and Nietzsche laid the groundwork for a reevaluation of who we are. In the conviction that literature also plays a vital role in formulating a philosophical anthropology, we will also consider several poets, in particular Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. All texts will be read in English translation.

Instructor(s): Simon Friedland     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 24723, GRMN 24723, GRMN 34723

CMLT 35325. Nietzsche as Critic. 100 Units.

Friedrich Nietzsche was as much a critic (of literature, art, music, culture) as he was a philosopher, and the purpose of this seminar is to bring out the conception of criticism that unfolds across his work. Doing so will require some comparisons: with the Enlightenment (Lessing) and Romantic (esp. the Schlegel brothers) conceptions of criticism, but also with notions of criticism advanced, for example, by the New Critics, by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and in contemporary work on aesthetics. Our main focus, however, will be on pertinent writings by Nietzsche, including the early essay on "Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense," Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, relevant aphorisms from Human, All Too Human, Dawn, Joyful Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and Twilight of the Idols, concluding with Case of Wagner. The topic of criticism in Nietzsche is not separable, of course, from the core themes of Nietzsche's work and the seminar may therefore be considered as one avenue of approach to Nietzsche's overall achievement. Major positions in the boundless secondary literature on Nietzsche will be considered. This course is open to graduate students. Advanced undergraduate students with a special interest in the topic may be admitted after consultation with the instructor.

Instructor(s): David Wellbery     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 35325, GRMN 35325

CMLT 35550. Machiavelli: Politics and Theater. 100 Units.

Arguably the most debated political theorist of all time due to The Prince, Machiavelli genuinely aspired to be remembered for his creative prowess. He explored various literary genres, such as short stories, dialogues, satirical poetry, letter writing, and, notably, theater, where he demonstrated mastery with The Mandrake, an exemplary Renaissance comedy. This course aims to reintegrate these two aspects of Machiavelli: the serious politician and the facetious performer, a Janus-faced figure who serves as a precursor of both Hobbes and Montaigne. We will revive the image of this "Renaissance man," and, through him, shed light on his era and fellow humanists by restoring their intellectual unity of prescription and laughter. Indeed, we will discover that Machiavelli encourages us not to take things, including him and ourselves, too seriously! Taught in English.

Instructor(s): Rocco Rubini     Terms Offered: Course not taught in 2025-26
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 29305, ITAL 25550, TAPS 28481, TAPS 38481, CMLT 25550, ITAL 35550

CMLT 35713. Toward a Critique of Avarice. 100 Units.

With the help of Freud, Marx, Lacan, Foucault, Agamben (among others) along with some highpoints of the European literary canon, we propose to develop a "critique of avarice," a project to be sharply distinguished from the moralistic indignation at greed. Our historical and theoretical reflections on avarice open out on to a number of domains and modes of inquiry: from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, from the study of political economy to theories of biopolitics, and finally to the "Jewish question" in relation to all of this. The core text and touchstone of the seminar will be Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which the tensions, ambiguities, disavowals, hatreds, projections, and repressions associated with the "avarice complex" are magisterially staged and played out. Attention will also be given to the subsequent history of the figure of Shylock as well as to the capacities for mercy and forgiveness that were posited as the ideal opposites of avarice and usury. One of the goals of the seminar is to interrogate this very opposition.

Instructor(s): E. Santner, M. Dolar     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 35713, CDIN 35713

CMLT 35801. Machiavelli and Machiavellism. 100 Units.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to Machiavelli's The Prince in light of his vast and varied literary corpus and European reception. The course includes discussion of Machiavelli as playwright ("The Mandrake"), fiction writer ("Belfagor," "The Golden Ass"), and historian ("Discourses," "Florentine Histories"). We will also closely investigate the emergence of myths surrounding Machiavelli (Machiavellism and anti-Machiavellism) in Italy (Guicciardini, Botero, Boccalini), France (Bodin and Gentillet), Spain (Ribadeneyra), and Northern Europe (Hobbes, Grotius, Spinoza) during the Counter Reformation and beyond.

Instructor(s): Rocco Rubini     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 2025-26
Note(s): Course conducted in English. Those seeking Italian credit will do all work in Italian.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 25801, ITAL 23000, FNDL 21603, ITAL 33001

CMLT 35810. Childhood and Fairy Tale in Bachelard, Benjamin, and Agamben. 100 Units.

'The child' is a complex and fascinating notion that plays a crucial role in the writings of some of the major twentieth-century thinkers. The child is often linked to 'fairy tale,' as if one concept couldn't exist without the other. What constitutes a fairy tale, what is the difference between fairy tale, myth, and allegory, and who is the real narrator and listener of fairy tales are questions that can only be addressed through a second, fundamental query: What is 'the child'? What does 'the child' represent? What role does the imagination play in the formation of 'the child'? These issues are especially significant in the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben. Readings will include: Bachelard, "Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos"; Bachelard, "Air and Dreams. An Essay on the Imagination of Movement"; Bachelard, "The Flame of a Candle"; Benjamin, One-Way Street; Benjamin, "The Fireside Saga"; Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900"; Benjamin "Goethe's Elective Affinities,"; Benjamin, "The Storyteller"; Agamben, "Infancy and History"; Agamben, "Profanations"; Agamben, "Pulcinella or Entertainment for Children"; Agamben, "Pinocchio". We will also read an ample selection of classic fairy tales from Giambattista Basile ("The Tale of Tales"), the seventeenth-century French conteuses, The Brothers Grimm, Clemens Brentano, and Collodi's "Pinocchio." Taught in English.

Instructor(s): Armando Maggi     Terms Offered: Course not taught in 2025-26
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 25800, CMLT 25810, ITAL 35800

CMLT 35902. Virgil, The Aeneid. 100 Units.

A close literary analysis of one of the most celebrated works of European literature. While the text, in its many dimensions, will offer more than adequate material for classroom analysis and discussion, attention will also be directed to the extraordinary reception of this epic, from Virgil's times to ours.

Instructor(s): G. Most
Equivalent Course(s): CLAS 44512, SCTH 35902, ENGL 35902

CMLT 35993. The Sublime. 100 Units.

The sublime has traditionally been thought to have had a merely marginal place in ancient Greek and Latin aesthetics and literary theory; but some scholars have recently argued that it was instead more central, and it is difficult not to apply this category to many ancient literary works. However the explicit category of the sublime did not become central to European aesthetics until the 17th century and then continued until the 19th century to play a central role in discussions not only of art and literature, but also of religion, politics, and other fields. By the middle of the 19th century the wave of interest in the sublime seems to have subsided, but in the past forty years this concept has returned to play an important role in aesthetic theories. The seminar will consider the odd history of the sublime, examining central texts from ancient (Longinus), early modern (Boileau), and modern aesthetics (certainly Burke, Kant, Schiller, and Hegel; perhaps also, depending on students' interest and preparation, Tieck, Schlegel, Schelling, Solger, and Jean Paul) as well as some more recent discussions (again depending on student preferences, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Adorno, Zizek). It will also ask whether the concept of the sublime can still play an important role today, or, if not, then what has taken its place. We will deal primarily with theories of the sublime but also to some extent with works of art. Open to undergraduates with consent.

Instructor(s): Glenn Most     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CLAS 35521, SCTH 35993, CLCV 25521

CMLT 35997. Three Comedies of Sexual Revolution. 100 Units.

This seminar will discuss three comedies of sexual revolution from three different times and places. Aristophanes's Assemblywomen recounts how under the leadership of the able Praxagora the women of Athens take over the Assembly and legislate a new regime in which private property is replaced by communism and sexual equity is achieved in favor of the old and unattractive at the expense of the young and attractive. Machiavelli's Mandragola dramatizes the tricks by which young Callimaco manages with the aid of the trickster parasite Ligurio to have sex with Lucrezia, the beautiful young wife of the elderly lawyer Nicomaco, with the consent of both her and her husband, ushering in a new regime in which all are satisfied. In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure Angelo the interim duke of Vienna institutes a repressive sexual regime in which the brothels are closed and extramarital sex is a capital crime. What might we learn about sexual relations from these diverse plays? Why are they comedies?

Instructor(s): Nathan Tarcov & Glenn Most      Terms Offered: Spring. Spring 2024
Prerequisite(s): Undergraduates need the Instructor's permission to register.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 35997, FNDL 21772, PLSC 35997, SCTH 35997, CLAS 37623, PLSC 25997, CLCV 27623, SCTH 25823, GNSE 25997, CMLT 25823

CMLT 36002. Gramsci. 100 Units.

In this course we read selections from Antonio Gramsci's Letters and Prison Notebooks side by side with their sources. Gramsci's influential interpretations of the Italian Renaissance, Risorgimento, and Fascism are reviewed testi alla mano with the aim of reassessing some major turning points in Italian intellectual history. Readings and notions introduced include, for the Renaissance, Petrarch (the cosmopolitan intellectual), Savonarola (the disarmed prophet), Machiavelli (the modern prince), and Guicciardini (the particulare; for Italys long Risorgimento, Vico (living philology), Cuoco (passive revolution), Manzoni (questione della lingua), Gioberti (clericalism), and De Sanctis (the Man of Guicciardini); and Croce (the anti-Croce) and Pirandello (theater and national-popular literature), for Italy's twentieth century.

Instructor(s): R. Rubini     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 2025-26
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 36000, CMLT 26002, ITAL 26000, FNDL 26206

CMLT 36012. 19th Century French Poetry in Translation: Tradition and Revolution. 100 Units.

A study of modern French lyric poetry: Tradition and Revolution, Poetry and Politics, the seedbed of Modernism. Desbordes-Valmore, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire. Texts will be read in English with reference to the French originals. Close reading, references to poetry in English, and focus on problems in translation. Students with French should read the poems in the original. Class discussion to be conducted in English; critical essays to be written in English. An extra weekly session will be scheduled for discussion in French, for French-speakers.

Instructor(s): Rosanna Warren
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 26019, FREN 36019, SCTH 26012, ENGL 36012, SCTH 36012

CMLT 36015. The New Criticism. 100 Units.

n examination of primary works of The New Criticism, British and American. We will consider the theoretical variety and different critical practices of these loosely allied critics, who were often not allies at all. Authors to be studied: I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Kenneth Burke, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, Yvor Winters, R. P. Blackmur, William Empson.

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 43250, SCTH 36015

CMLT 36088. The Scientist in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. 100 Units.

The nineteenth century saw both the professionalization of science and the specialization of its practitioners. In this age of "human empire" produced by industrialization, new technologies offered humanity unprecedented dominion over the natural world, and the "scientist," a term coined in 1834, marked the advent of the idea of a vocation dedicated to that mastery. Moreover, by the end of the century, the natural philosophers and polymaths of earlier ages had given way to chemists, physicists, biologists, and statisticians, whose scope of study was necessarily both deeper and narrower. These developments produced a new social and political positioning for the scientist - an expert, an authority, a wielder of power. This class explores how nineteenth-century fiction writers, from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe to Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, engaged with these emerging and transforming conceptualizations of the scientist figure. We will pair our literary explorations with non-fiction readings texts by thinkers and scientists such as Humphry Davy, Karl Pearson, Claude Bernard, William Whewell, and Max Weber ("Science as Vocation") about what the scientist should be and science should do. Additionally, we'll consider how this literary genealogy influences both our fictional portrayal of science to this day as well as our perceptions of it - from our contemporary distrust of expertise to our fear of the scientist playing god.

Instructor(s): Anastasia Klimchynskaya     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 36088, CHSS 36088

CMLT 36180. Caring for the Earth: Nature and Ecology Before Modernity. 100 Units.

What do we mean by nature, and how do humans relate to it? A recent French translation of Virgil's "Georgics" was titled anew: "Le souci de la terre" ("care for the earth") What does it mean to care? Is care disinterested, or does it serve a purpose? What logics of dominion or obligation shape it? This course traces ideas of nature and care from Antiquity to early modernity. How did humans conceive of their place in the world? How did they understand its resources and their impact? From the commons to enclosures, from caretaking to exploitation, from interpreting nature to organizing it (aménagement), we will question linear narratives of progress (humans caring more) and degradation (humans caring less). Focusing on France and French texts while engaging classical and theological sources, we will also consider exploration and exploitation beyond France. We will examine how religious ideas, canonical texts, and philosophical concepts have shaped discourses on nature, as well as the relevance of contemporary ecological terms. Attending closely to the multiple ways in which human beings variously have articulated their relationship to nature or the environment permits us to ask, instead of assume, what might be the conditions and practices of care incumbent upon human beings today.

Instructor(s): Daisy Delogu, Pauline Goul     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 26180, CEGU 36180, CMLT 26180, CLCV 26181, MDVL 26180, FREN 26180, CLAS 36181, CEGU 26180, FREN 36180

CMLT 36200. Early-Modern Aesthetics and French Classicism. 100 Units.

Though "aesthetic" philosophy first developed as an autonomous field in the mid-eighteenth century, it has important roots in earlier seventeenth-century debates concerning literature and the arts. In the wake of Cartesian rationalism, could reasoned method be reconciled with non-rational creativity, or decorous order with the unruly "sublime"? Just what kind of "truth" was revealed by poetry or painting? We will consider the relation between literature and other media (including music, opera, and the visual arts) and gauge the impact of French classical criticism on the broader European scene, considering its reception and contestation in Britain, Italy, Spain and Germany. Among the authors considered will be Descartes, Pascal, Boileau, Molière, Félibien, Du Bos, Addison, Hutcheson, Vico, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Herder.

Instructor(s): L. Norman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Reading knowledge of French
Note(s): Course conducted in English but students taking course for French credit must do all written work in French.
Equivalent Course(s): REMS 36210, FREN 36200

CMLT 36319. The Sublime: Theory and History of an Aesthetic Category. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the aesthetic category of the sublime, combining a rich theoretical discussion with analysis of literary and visual texts. The starting point is Pseudo Longinus' "On the Sublime," the first text in the history of aesthetics to focus on reception and subjective response. After a close reading of this text and a careful examination of its recent interpretations, the course will first deal with key moments in the long and complex modern theoretical debate on the sublime, with special focus on the Italian Renaissance and Torquato Tasso, French classicism and Boileau, the British Enlightenment and Burke. In parallel with this historical overview, the course will examine concrete examples of the sublime in the arts, especially the poetry of Leopardi and Baudelaire, and the parallel theme of landscape, especially in visual arts. The last part of the course will focus on contemporary philosophical and aesthetic debate on the sublime, in particular on Fredric Jameson's notion of the hysterical sublime, Slavoj Zizek's reflection on trash sublime; and on parallels with visual arts: Italian arte povera, Bill Viola's videos inspired by Italian Renaissance paintings, Anselm Kiefer's paintings, Mario Martone's movie on Leopardi, and Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," which recovers the theme of apocalypsis reinforced by Wagner's sublime music.

Instructor(s): M. Fusillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 36319

CMLT 36523. Motherless Tongue:" Introduction to Transnational Writing in German. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to contemporary authors writing in German whose texts explore cross-pollinations between languages and cultures. Discussions will center around topics such as: identity; cosmopolitanism; memory; cultural hybridity and alterity; hospitality; guests and hosts; storytelling; migration; what are transnational German Studies? Authors include: the Japanese writer Yoko Tawada who lives in Berlin and writes in Japanese and German; the Romanian-born author Herta Müller (Nobel Prize in 2009); the Black British author Sharon Dodua Otoo who resides in Berlin and writes in German and English; the Ukrainian-German writer Katja Petrowskaja; the Turkish-born writer Feridun Zaimoglu; and others. Course conducted in English with an LxC option for interested students.

Instructor(s): Margareta Ingrid Christian     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 26523, CMLT 26523, GRMN 36523

CMLT 36602. Materiality and Socialist Cinema. 100 Units.

What constitutes the materiality of film? How do we understand the "material world" in relation to cinema, and how does the film camera mediate it? What does the process of mediation look like when the goal of cinema is not solely to represent but also change the world? This course will pair theoretical readings on new materialist approaches to cinema with select case studies drawn from Chinese and Soviet revolutionary cinema. Our primary aim is twofold: to introduce students to the "material turn" in cinema and media studies, and to reflect on what the specific fields of Soviet and Chinese Film Studies bring to the discussion. We will look closely at works by socialist filmmakers in the twentieth century who argued that cinema had a special role to play in mediating and transforming the material world. How does socialist cinema seek to orient its viewer to a particular relationship to objects? How does it treat the human relationship to the environment? How does it regard the material of film and the process of filmmaking itself? Ultimately, the course will familiarize students with diverse understandings of materiality and materialism and with key figures and works in global socialist cinema. Readings and screenings will range from the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s to Chinese revolutionary cinema of the early 1970s, and conclude with recent documentary and video experiments that engage with their legacies.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss and Paola Iovene     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 36611, REES 26600, CMST 36611, EALC 26611, CMLT 26602, REES 36600, CMST 26611

CMLT 36680. Literary Games: Oulipo and Onward. 100 Units.

Does constraint foster creativity? Can wordplay carry political meaning? Is formal innovation divorced from lyrical expression? How do experimental literary movements respond to their sociopolitical moments and local contexts, and how do they transform when they travel across geographical and linguistic borders? We will consider these questions via the work of the longest-lived French literary group, the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature), examining its origins as a quasi-secret society in 1960 and its expansion into an internationally visible and multilingual collective (with members from Italy, Spain, Argentina, and the US). We will investigate debates about inspiration and authorship, copying and plagiarism, collective creation, multilingualism, constraint and translation, and the viability of the lyric subject. While considering antecedents (Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Roussel), our readings will explore several generations of Oulipians (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Michèle Métail, Anne Garréta, Frédéric Forte), and conclude with some very contemporary Oulipo-inspired writing from around the world (Christian Bök, Urayoán Noel, Mónica de la Torre, K. Silem Mohammed). Alongside critical essays, students will carry out short experiments with constraint and procedure, as well as translation exercises; and they will have the opportunity for dialogue with acclaimed writers and scholars who will visit our seminar.

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin and Alison James     Terms Offered: Course not taught in 2025-26
Prerequisite(s):
Note(s): Students who are taking the class for French credit will complete some readings and writings in French and participate in a weekly discussion section in French.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 36680, ENGL 26680, FREN 26680, ENGL 36680, CMLT 26680

CMLT 36701. Marsilio Ficino's "On Love" 100 Units.

This course is first of all a close reading of Marsilio Ficino's seminal book On Love (first Latin edition De amore 1484; Ficino's own Italian translation 1544). Ficino's philosophical masterpiece is the foundation of the Renaissance view of love from a Neo-Platonic perspective. It is impossible to overemphasize its influence on European culture. On Love is not just a radically new interpretation of Plato's Symposium. It is the book through which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe read the love experience. Our course will analyze its multiple classical sources and its spiritual connotations. During our close reading of Ficino's text, we will show how European writers and philosophers appropriated specific parts of this Renaissance masterpiece. In particular, we will read extensive excerpts from some important love treatises, such as Castiglione's The Courtier (Il cortigiano), Leone Ebreo's Dialogues on Love, Tullia d'Aragona's On the Infinity of Love, but also selections from a variety of European poets, such as Michelangelo's canzoniere, Maurice Scève's Délie, and Fray Luis de León's Poesía.

Instructor(s): A. Maggi     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 2025-26
Note(s): Course taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 26701, ITAL 23900, ITAL 33900, FNDL 21103

CMLT 36702. Arabic into Hebrew: Translation and Cultural Change during the Middle Ages. 100 Units.

Religions, like all cultural phenomena, are akin to organic beings: they change, grow and adapt, absorb and assimilate what they encounter, become transformed constantly in relation to challenges and opportunities - and sometimes react against them. This course will focus on one example of religious-cultural-philosophical adaptation and change through a study of the medieval translation of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works into Hebrew during the 12th-15th centuries. We will focus on the translations themselves and translation technique, but principally on what was translated and why, when and where, by whom and for whom. All this with an added emphasis on the result: how did Judaism and Jewish culture change through translation - in all its forms - during the high middle ages.

Instructor(s): James T. Robinson     Terms Offered: Autumn. Not offered 2025–26
Note(s): This course meets the HS or CS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): JWSC 26702, RLST 26702, MDVL 26702, CMLT 26702, RLVC 36702, NEHC 26702, NEHC 36702, HIJD 36702, HREL 36702, ISLM 36702

CMLT 36770. Literary Polysystems in Spain: Literature, Language, and Place. 100 Units.

The Iberian Peninsula boasts a rich and diverse cultural heritage that has persisted through history and remains vibrant today, despite the homogenizing forces of globalization. In the case of Spain, the coexistence of various languages and literatures offers an extraordinary laboratory for cultural inquiry, where what some may regard as challenges, peculiarities, or mere curiosities are, in fact, thriving cultural communities -or systems, more accurately described as polysystems. These communities provide valuable insights into contemporary global dynamics and the complex tensions surrounding language, writing, and identity. In this course we will explore the emergence and development of literary traditions in Asturian, Basque, Catalan, and Galician, and will also have the opportunity to engage in dialogue with some contemporary writers in those languages.

Instructor(s): Jaume Subirana     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Taught in Spanish. Includes required readings in Spanish and English, with supplementary materials in Basque, Galician, and Catalan, along with their translations.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 25770, CATA 36770, SPAN 36770, CATA 26770, SPAN 26770

CMLT 36855. Queer Theory. 100 Units.

This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term "queer" and explore the contours of the field's major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory's emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory's relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory's secularity.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 36855, ENGL 26855, GNSE 20130, CMLT 26855, RLST 26885, RLVC 36855, GNSE 36855

CMLT 36912. Strangers to Ourselves: Emigre Literature and Film from Russia and Southeast Europe. 100 Units.

Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 29010, CMLT 26912, REES 39010

CMLT 37621. Philosophical Aesthetics: Heidegger and Adorno. 100 Units.

Two major positions in German philosophical aesthetics of the 20th century will be considered in detail: 1) the ontological-hermeneutic theory advanced by Martin Heidegger; 2) the dialectical-critical theory developed by Theodor W. Adorno. Primary readings will be Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art and selections from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. In addition, selected shorter pieces by the two authors will be studied, with a special emphasis on their work on lyric poetry. The seminar will also consider contributions by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Helmut Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Georg Lukács. The course seeks to develop an understanding of the conceptual foundation of each of the two philosophical positions. Particular topics to be considered: a) the nature of artistic presentation (Darstellung); b) the nature of artistic truth; c) the historical character of art; d) the political significance of art; e) the relation of art to philosophy.

Instructor(s): David Wellbery     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Undergrads must receive consent.
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 27621, GRMN 37621, CMLT 27621, SCTH 37621, SCTH 27621

CMLT 37652. Broken Mirrors: Writing the Other from Herodotus to the Jewish/Christian. 100 Units.

How are Others represented in Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian canons? Is the Other purely a mirror of the self who represents it? Or do self and Other interact? Can we trace and compare patterns of representation and taxonomies for human difference across cultures, genres, regions, periods, and sciences? How can we develop new critical frameworks and concepts for this task, if we refuse to take for granted the categories and conventions of today's academic disciplines? What might this new approach to the Other help us to learn, or unlearn, about the making of "the West"? In order to answer those questions, our course will survey the most influential literary models of the Other, from Herodotus to the early medieval "Life of Jesus" polemic tradition. Beyond developing a new framework for exploring and connecting these diverse sources, it has three historical aims. First, to interrogate the limits of modern anthropology as the institutionalized site for writing and knowing the Other. Second, to reveal the centrality of the figure of the Jew in the prehistory of anthropology, where it plays a neglected but crucial role in the European history of human difference in general. Finally, to expose the premodern roots of "scientific" categories-"primitive," "civilized," "Oriental," "Aryan," "Semite," etc.-where racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural differences still intersect today.

Instructor(s): James Adam Redfield     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): HIJD 37652, JWSC 26603, CLCV 21922, CLAS 31922, HREL 37652, RLST 27652

CMLT 37660. Animals and Jewish Literature. 100 Units.

This course explores the representation of animality in Jewish literature and visual art. We will explore questions of animal ethics and ecological entanglement across a range of secular and religious genres, from folklore and poetry to Hasidic tales and rabbinic narrative. Writers will include Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Celan; artists will include Soutine, Chagall, Sarah Shor, and more. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.

Instructor(s): Anna Elena Torres     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): JWSC 27660, RLVC 37660, RLST 27660, CMLT 27660, ENGL 27660, ENGL 37660, HIJD 37660

CMLT 38005. Arabfuturism: Other Worlds and Worlding Otherwise. 100 Units.

Interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst territorial, existential, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, Arabfuturism-like its sister projects of Afrofuturism/s, Sinofuturism, and Indigenous Futurism-speaks to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. These projects function as a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and biopolitics that theorize other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counter-futures disrupt the logics of the past, present, and assumed future to not only "write alternative histories but also articulate counterfuturisms as imaginaries of times-to-come" (Parikka, 55). Beyond the toll of US-backed "forever wars," recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Tunisian Jasmine Revolution that catapulted the Arab Spring across Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon. While moments of catastrophe, crisis, and collapse may seem antithetical to imaginaries of the future, the capacity to dream or speculate is essential to undoing to sites of epistemic and ontological violence, while also charting possible paths forwards. Moreover, speculative acts of world-building can realize the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination that empower us to envision entirely new archeologies of the future.

Instructor(s): Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Graduate consent only
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 38005, CMLT 28005, NEHC 28005, ENGL 38005, ENGL 28005, RLST 27885, AASR 37885, ISLM 37885

CMLT 38123. Friedrich Hölderlin: Poetic Media and Prophecy. 100 Units.

The landscapes of southwest Germany and ancient Greece figure prominently in Friedrich Hölderlin's poetic thinking and writing. What allows his poems to bridge and interlace both worlds - often in the span of a single sentence - is his understanding of nature, which is deeply informed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's retour à la nature ("return to nature"). It is through nature that the modern self can not only access the unspoiled culture of the Greeks but also commune with the divine - whether in the form of the ancient pantheon or a more Christian version of transcendence. Paradoxically, nature is mediated in a variety of ways; whether through the elemental media of water, air, earth, fire, and light, travel accounts, maps, and more generally written and printed texts. Our seminar will examine - through close readings of some of Hölderlin's most famous and challenging poems - how the deployed poetic media structure aesthetic experience and afford travel to distant times and places. All texts will be read in English translation, but a reading knowledge of German is going to be helpful.

Instructor(s): Christopher Wild     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 38123, GRMN 38123

CMLT 38410. Ecrire le "Printemps arabe" au Maghreb : témoignages et perspectives littéraires. 100 Units.

Fin 2010, l'immolation de Mohamed Bouazizi, un vendeur ambulant tunisien, déclenche un soulèvement populaire qui s'étend rapidement au reste du monde arabe, entraînant notamment la chute des régimes en Tunisie et en Egypte et une série de reconfigurations d'ordre politique et socio-économique. Si les pays du Maghreb ont vécu ces soulèvements et leurs conséquences de manières différentes, les écrivains maghrébins ont été particulièrement sensibles à l'élan et à la promesse de changement portés par la rue. Ceci étant, et à l'image de l'appellation « Printemps arabe », à la fois utilisée et récusée, les dynamiques et les résultats des protestations ont fait l'objet de nombreux débats. En s'appuyant sur ce contexte historique, ce cours s'intéresse aux différentes modalités d'écriture des soulèvements au Maghreb à travers divers genres littéraires, du témoignage à la fiction, en passant par l'essai, la nouvelle ou encore la poésie. En étudiant un corpus de textes francophones issus de la Tunisie (Meddeb, Bekri, Ben Mhenni), de l'Algérie (Daoud, Tamzali, Sebbar) et du Maroc (Ben Jelloun, Elalamy, Terrab), nous nous intéresserons à la représentation de la révolte populaire dans ses dimensions socio-politique et culturelle mais aussi à des questions clés telles que les formes d'engagement des écrivains, leurs approches et choix esthétiques et le rapport entre la dynamique des soulèvements et la construction narrative ou poétique des textes.

Instructor(s): Khalid Lyamlahy     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): FREN 20500 or 20503.
Note(s): Readings and discussions in French.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 38410, CMLT 28410, FREN 28410

CMLT 38500. Journey to the West II. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 28500, CHIN 31306, RLIT 49200, CHIN 21306

CMLT 38600. Neoclassical Aesthetics: Transnational Approaches. 100 Units.

Though "aesthetic" philosophy first developed as an autonomous field in the mid-eighteenth century, it has important roots in earlier eighteenth- and seventeenth-century debates concerning literature and the arts. In the wake of Cartesian rationalism, could reasoned method be reconciled with non-rational creativity, or decorous order with the unruly "sublime"? Just what kind of "truth" was revealed by poetry or painting? What is the value of the Greco-Roman models versus authorial innovation? We will consider the relation between literature and other media (particularly opera and the visual arts) and read French texts in dialogue with other, and often contending, national trends (British, German, Italian). Readings will include Descartes, Pascal, Perrault, Félibien, Dryden, Du Bos, Addison, Vico, Montesquieu, Staël, and A.W. Schlegel.

Instructor(s): Larry Norman     Terms Offered: Course not taught in 2025-26
Prerequisite(s): Reading knowledge of French is required. Undergrads permitted with consent of instructor.
Note(s): Taught in English. Students seeking FREN credit must complete all readings and written work in French.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 37000, ARTH 48301, FREN 37000

CMLT 38633. Monkeys, Elephants, and Cows: Animals in Indian Literatures and Cultures. 100 Units.

Non-human animals are ubiquitous in India's literary and visual cultures, whether as characters in epics, fables and moral tale; as objects of study by court scholars and painters; as pets and hunting companions; as part of the Hindu pantheon (such as the elephant-headed god Ganapathi, or the monkey god Hanuman) or as symbols and metaphors. This course explores the complex interactions among human and non-human animals and the realms of animals/mortals/immortals through examples from India's literatures, Indian painting and film - across times, places, spaces and religious traditions. It will conclude with contemporary debates on animal activism and provide a non-Western entry point into the field of animal studies. Naisargi Dave's Indifference will be a key text for us throughout the quarter.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 28633, SALC 28633

CMLT 38800. The (Auto)Biography of a Nation: Francesco De Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. 100 Units.

At its core, this course examines the making and legacy of Francesco De Sanctis's History of Italian Literature (1870-71), a work that distinguished literary critic René Wellek defined as "the finest history of any literature ever written" and "an active instrument of aesthetic evolution." We will read the History in the larger context of De Sanctis's corpus, including his vast epistolary exchanges, autobiographical writings, and so-called Critical Essays in order to detail his reform of Hegelian aesthetics, his redefinition of the intellectual's task after the perceived exhaustion of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic moments, and his campaign against the bent toward erudition, philology, and antiquarianism in 19th-century European scholarship. We will compare De Sanctis's methodology to that of his scholarly models in France (Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred Mézières) and Germany (Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Georg Voigt) to explore De Sanctis's claim that literary criticisms - not just literary cultures - are "national." In the second part of the course, we assess Benedetto Croce's appropriation of De Sanctis in his Aesthetics (1902), arguably the last, vastly influential work in its genre and we conclude with Antonio Gramsci's use of De Sanctis for the regeneration of a literary savvy Marxism or philosophy of praxis.

Instructor(s): R. Rubini     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 2025-26
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 37700, KNOW 37700, KNOW 27700, CMLT 28800, ITAL 27700

CMLT 38810. Empire, Slavery & Salvation: Writing Difference in the Colonial Americas. 100 Units.

This course explores portrayals of human difference in literature, travel writing, painting, and autobiography from Spain, England, and the Americas. Students will become versed in debates surrounding the emergence of human distinctions based on religion, race, and ethnicity in the early modern era. Understanding these debates and the history surrounding them is crucial to participating in informed discussion, research, and activism regarding issues of race, empire, and colonialism across time and space.

Instructor(s): Larissa Brewer-García     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): The course will be conducted in English, but advanced reading knowledge of Spanish is necessary.
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 38810, LACS 38810

CMLT 38830. Psychoanalysis: Freud and Beyond. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and by Freud's readers. We will explore Freud's various models of the psyche, his interventions into the theory of sexuality, and his writings on religion by tracking the development of key concepts like transference, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, melancholia, the unconscious, and the death drive, among others. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions? Readers of Freud whom we will encounter may include Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler, Spillers, Edelman, Dean, and Musser.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 38830, CMLT 28830, GNSE 28830, GNSE 38830, RLST 28830

CMLT 38888. Mosquitos and Morphine: A Seminar in the Global Medical Humanities. 100 Units.

This course examines well-being and illness from transnational, decolonial and intersectional perspectives. Together, we will explore the various ways in which fiction and film can help challenge and expand our notions of what it means to be sick or healthy in complex circumstances. Some guiding threads: To what extent is illness an intensely personal experience, and to what extent does it draw in those around us - family members, friends, partners, medical practitioners, legal counsel? What renewed valences do concepts of autonomy, care and responsibility take when overshadowed by the spectre of disease? How might we ethically and productively relate the medical humanities to broader entangled concerns such as migration (both legal and clandestine), gender, class, race, community, queerness and neocolonialism? Beyond the justified responses of fear and anger, what are other ways to relate to death and mortality - ways that are infused with creativity and resilience? How does human "health" relate to planetary and interspecies well-being?

Instructor(s): Nikhita Obeegadoo     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): For students seeking French credit, FREN 20500 or equivalent.
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 38888, FREN 28888, FREN 38888, RDIN 28888, HLTH 28888, GNSE 28888, CMLT 28888, GNSE 38888

CMLT 38990. La Princesse de Clèves and the Genesis of the Modern Novel. 100 Units.

Madame de La Fayette's 1678 novel represents a turning point in the international development of the psychological novel and historical fiction. Set in a Renaissance past of courtly international intrigue, the novel plumbs its characters' interiorized struggles with erotic desire, marriage, and adultery, forging a path for later novelists such as Flaubert, George Eliot, and Tolstoy. We will examine debates about its literary form and moral impact, as well as around gender and women's writing, placing the novel in a transnational context (Spanish, Italian, and English romances, drama, and moral philosophy) and its later reception, including film adaptations and its role in heated contemporary controversies around the place of the humanities in society. Students are encouraged to undertake individual comparative research projects in relation to the novel. Course taught in English but reading ability in French required.

Instructor(s): Larry Norman      Terms Offered: Course not taught in 2025-26
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor required for undergrads; those seeking FREN credit must have completed at least one French literature course, 21700 or higher.
Note(s): All work in French for students seeking FREN credit; written work may be in English for others.
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 29405, CMLT 28990, FREN 28900, FREN 38900

CMLT 38995. Queer Love Poetry. 100 Units.

This course examines the long history of queer love poetry, from the ancient world to postmodernism. Its readings are particularly interested in how modernists claimed literary lineages of queer poetics, queered social practices and communal literary spaces, and reinvented verse forms to reflect queer eros. We will study works from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Greek, and several other languages. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.

Instructor(s): Anna Elena Torres     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28995, GNSE 20155, CMLT 28995, ENGL 28995, ENGL 38995, JWSC 28995, GNSE 30155, RLVC 38995

CMLT 39023. Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest. 100 Units.

Aware of being observed. And judged. Inferior... Abject… Angry... Proud… This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the "West," as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the "Rest," as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other's standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself-self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization-and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 33609, HIST 23609, REES 29023, REES 39023, NEHC 39023, CMLT 29023, NEHC 29023

CMLT 39024. States of Surveillance. 100 Units.

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance - the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 29024, REES 39024, REES 29024

CMLT 39045. Dostoevsky and Critical Theory. 100 Units.

The tormented, obsessed, and sadistic characters of Dostoevsky's novels posed a challenge to positivism and reason too scandalous and compelling to be ignored. The novels inspired some of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the fields of religion, philosophy, psychology and literary theory. We will read two of Dostoevsky's philosophically challenging novels alongside works by these critics and philosophers, including Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Levinas. While exploring their ideas about faith and unbelief, madness and reason, violence and torture, society and history, we will also inquire into the relationships among literature, philosophy and biography and examine the processes of influence and adaptation.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 29045, RLST 28207, REES 29045, REES 39045

CMLT 39300. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): REES 30018, ENGL 48902, REES 20018, FNDL 27101, ENGL 28902, CMLT 29300

CMLT 39800. Revolutionary Erotics. 100 Units.

This seminar will explore revolutionary erotics as both a modality and site of revolutionary thought and action. We will engage erotics and desire expansively as strategies for sensuous and affective agitation and political resistance, probing topics such spirituality and erotics, as well as erotics and its publics and politics. We will think about how erotics and desire have been central to revolutionary art and politics from anti-imperial and anti-fascist struggles to anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and queer worldbuilding, from revolutionary love to terrorist drag, and from the US to Yugoslavia and Iran. The seminar asks, how has the erotic excited revolutionary action-- challenging at once the taboo and commodity fetish-and how can erotics can help us reimagine agitation today? The Berlin-based seminar will include studio visits with renown contemporary artists, a guided visit of the Gropiusbau's current show: Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Punk, a performance by CHEAP collective, and a series of events and performances surrounding art week. Studio visits will include meetings with Berlin-based artists such as AA Bronson- co-founder of General Idea, Sophie Jung, Piotr Nathan, and Hito Steyerl. While in Berlin students will also have time to explore their own research-based art project in consultation with the instructors, relevant archives, and museums. They will have an opportunity to present their work during the final class review and critique.

Instructor(s): Leah Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): We invite applications for the inaugural Gray Seminar, Revolutionary Erotics, which will be held September 8-26 in Berlin, Germany and sporadically over fall quarter at the Gray Center. The course will be listed in fall as a graduate seminar (parented in Comparative Literature). The course will be for graduate and MA students in the arts and humanities division with priority given to DOVA, TAPS, Music and Comparative Literature. The course is by application only and flight, housing, and excursions in Berlin will be covered for all admitted students. If you would like to apply, please send a short paragraph introducing yourself and describing your practice and why the course topic and the opportunity to work in Berlin would be fruitful for your research and art practice. Please include a short description of a research-based work that you would like to produce during the 3-week seminar. You may include a few sample works from your portfolio. The Gray Seminar Berlin is a collaborative art seminar, bringing together scholarship, research and praxis for PhD, MA students, and exceptional undergraduates working in visual arts, performance, music, literature and film for a 3-week intensive term in September with professors from the University of Chicago and local artists. The 2025 program will be led by Professor Leah Feldman and Berlin-based artist collective Slavs and Tatars. It will consist of theory seminars, artists studio visits, consultations for research at local archives and museums, and supervision for a final research-based project, which will be presented at a showcase at Slavs and Tatar’s gallery Pickle Bar. Seminar meetings will be held in The Pickle Bar, located in the Moabit neighborhood in Berlin. Dates: September 8-26
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 39800, ARTV 30098, MUSI 39800

CMLT 39821. Goethe's Faust: Myth and Modernity. 100 Units.

In this seminar we shall undertake an intensive study of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, with close textual study of the entirety of Part I and Act 5 of Part II. We will begin by casting a brief look at the earliest versions of the Faust myth, the so-called Faust Chapbook of 1587 and Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus composed 1589-92, premiered 1592), and we will have an eye on later versions such as those of Paul Valéry and Thomas Mann. Some consideration will be devoted to the question of modern "myth" and the Faust myth will be compared to that of Don Juan in particular. Our major task, however, will be to develop a close reading and interpretation of Goethe's text, which ranks as one of the supreme achievements of the European literary tradition. The interpretive issues at the center of our inquiry will include: a) the theory of (modern) tragedy; b) desire and subjectivity; c) Faust in relation to post-Kantian philosophy; d) the theme of time and the "moment." In addition to major works of scholarship, we shall touch on interpretations of the play by Schelling and Kierkegaard. Command of German will be helpful, but students may also refer to an English translation. (Recommended English version: Faust I & II, translated by Stuart Atkins, introduction by David E. Wellbery, Princeton Classics, 2014. Recommended German version: Faust I und II, hrsg. Albrecht Schöne, 2 vols. Text + commentary. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 2017.)

Instructor(s): David Wellbery     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 39821, SCTH 39821

CMLT 39850. Shamanic Literature. 100 Units.

This course explores the multifarious entanglements between shamanism-as a religious phenomenon, as an anthropological imaginary, and as a mode of existence-and global modernity. How did shamanism as a concept emerge in the age of colonial expansion and ethnological racialization, how did it affect modernity's understanding of human history, and how do shamanic (dis)articulations of historicity, personhood, sexuality, trauma, translation, and the "nature/culture divide" intervene in modernity's politics? In contemplating these questions, we will consider a variety of "shamanic" artworks ranging from shamanic liturgies to travelogues, music recordings, film, performance art, contemporary literature, and beyond. We will attend both to the spiritual worlds of the "original" shamans of Northeast Asia (through texts from the Evenki, Khakas, Manchu, Tuvan, and other Siberian languages) and to a much broader corpora of (Anglophone, Chinese, German, Greco-Roman, Indigeneous American, Japanese, Tibetan, etc.) works that can be generatively thought of as shamanic in some way. In doing so, we will reflect on the limitations and powers possessed by the figure of the shaman in various broader contexts, both in the history of ideas and in the contemporary world.

Instructor(s): E.Meng     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): All assigned readings will be in English, but the ability to read in a variety of languages will likely prove beneficial. Open to MAPH students.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 19850, CMLT 29850

CMLT 40010. Ruins. 100 Units.

Ruins" will cover texts and images, from Thucydides to WWII, via the Reformation. We will include films (e.g. Rossellini's "Germany Year Zero"), art (e.g. H. Robert, Piranesi) archaeology, and the museum (Soane). On ruins writing, we will read Thucydides, Pausanias from within antiquity, the Enlightenment responses to the destruction and archaeological rediscovery of Pompeii, Diderot, Simmel, Freud on the mind as levels of ruins (Rome) and the analysis as reconstructive archaeologist as well as on the novel Gradiva and the Acropolis, the Romantic obsession with ruins, and the firebombing in WWII. We will also consider the photographing of ruins, and passages from the best-known works on photography (Benjamin, Sontag, Ritchen, Fried, Azoulay). The goal is to see how ruin gazing, and its depictions (textual, imagistic, photographic, etc.) change from the ancients (Greek and Roman), to the Romantic use of ruins as a source of (pleasurable) melancholy, to the technological "advances" in targeting and decimating civilian populations that describe the Second Word War.

Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 40010, RLIT 40010, ARTH 40010

CMLT 40100. Islamic Love Poetry. 100 Units.

The focus of this course is classical Islamic love poetry, Arabic and Persian love lyric will be covered, as well as some Ottoman love lyric (at least in translation). In the past we have incorporated Urdu, Punjabi, Bangla, Bosnian, and Turkish traditions, and-for comparative and historical purposes-Hebrew poetry from medieval Andalus. Because none of us are proficient in the all these languages, students who are proficient a given language are asked to provide a guide (including text, translation, explanation of key vocabulary, etc.) for selected poems from in that language. Each member of the class will be asked to present one poem guide, in addition to a final assignment. Among the poets commonly included in the course are Ibn Zaydun, Ibn al-Farid, Ibn al-`Arabi, Rumi, Hafiz, Baba Fighani, Na'ili, Mir Dard, Bulleh Shah, and Ghalib.

Equivalent Course(s): RLIT 40300, NEHC 40600, ISLM 40100

CMLT 40203. Biopolitics & Posthumanism. 100 Units.

Much has been written about the possibility (or impossibility) of creating an integrated political schema that incorporates living status, not species boundary, as the salient distinction between person and thing. In this course, we will explore how biopolitical and posthumanistic scholars like Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Jane Bennett, Cary Wolfe, and Donna Haraway have acknowledged (and advocated transcending) the anthropocentric ümwelt, to borrow Jakob von Üexküll's influential term. In parallel with our theoretical readings, we will explore how actual legal systems have incorporated the nonhuman, with a particular focus on Anglo-American and transnational law. Our goal is to develop our own sense of an applied biopolitics-whether to our own research, to future legislation and jurisprudence, or both.

Instructor(s): Nicolette I. Bruner     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course fulfills part of the KNOW Core Seminar requirement to be eligible to apply for the SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship. No instructor consent is required, but registration is not final until after the 1st week in order to give Ph.D. students priority.
Equivalent Course(s): CHSS 40203, KNOW 40203, ENGL 40203

CMLT 41219. Interpretation: Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

his seminar will be conducted on two tracks. On the one hand, we will study major contributions to hermeneutic theory (including positions that understand themselves as anti-hermeneutic). Contributions to be considered include works by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, E.D. Hirsch, Manfred Frank, Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida. At the same time, the seminar will include a practical component in which we will collectively develop interpretations of works by Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Peter Hebel, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville. English translations of the assigned readings will be provided. (This course is restricted to students in Ph.D. programs.)

Instructor(s): David Wellbery     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 41219, GRMN 41219, FREN 41219, SCTH 41219

CMLT 41410. The Literary Life of Things in China. 100 Units.

This course investigates traditional literary strategies in China through which objects are depicted and animated. Our emphasis will be on reading in primary sources, but we'll also draw on secondary sources from anthropology, the history of material culture, literary theory, and art history, both from within and outside China studies. Each week will introduce some basic genre and key literary works while also foregrounding certain conceptual issues. Students will select a case study to work on throughut the quarter, which will become their final research paper and which will also help orient their shorter class presentations. The choice of subject for the case study is quite open, so that each student can pursue a project that relates to his or her own central interests. It might be a cultural biography of a real object or class of objects; it might be a study of how objects are deployed in a novel or play, encyclopedia or connoisseurship manual, but there are many other possibilities.

Instructor(s): J. Zeitlin     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 41400

CMLT 41815. Writing the Algerian War of Independence. 100 Units.

This course aims to examine the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) in the work of Algerian and French writers. It will consider a corpus of testimonial texts, novels, and poetry in relation to the memory of the war, its traumatic experiences, and various forms of anticolonial struggle and insurgency. We will analyse the narrative, discursive, and poetic strategies used by authors to explore individual and collective memories and elaborate a politics of resistance and transformation in the Algerian context. Studied authors include Maïssa Bey, Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, Mouloud Feraoun, Jean Sénac, Laurent Mauvignier, and Joseph Andras.

Instructor(s): Khalid Lyamlahy     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): All readings and in-class discussions will be in English. Students will have the option to write either in English or in French.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 41815, NEHC 41815

CMLT 42103. Hemispheric Studies. 100 Units.

This course examines Hemispheric Studies approaches to the literatures and cultures of the Americas, which combines a commitment to comparatism with attention to the specificities of local contexts ranging from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to North America. Theories drawn from American Studies, Canadian Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Studies, and U.S. Latinx Studies will be explored in relation to literature written primarily but not exclusively in the 20th and 21st centuries by writers residing throughout the Americas. We'll examine recent, innovative studies being published by contemporary scholars working with Hemispheric methods across several fields. We'll also consider the politics of academic field formation, debating the theories and uses of a method that takes the American hemisphere as its primary frame yet does not take the U.S. as the default point of departure; and the conceptual and political limitations of such an approach. No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 42103, SPAN 42103, LACS 42103

CMLT 42311. The World in Ruins. 100 Units.

In this course we will not limit ourselves to the traditional view of 'ruins' as remains of ancient or modern buildings. Our course will involve a variety of different artifacts (literary texts, paintings, films, philosophical tracts, etc.) from different cultural moments, in order to attain a clearer understanding of our notion of ruins, decay, and decadence. We will first examine 'ruins' in classical cultures, focusing on Plutarch's short treatise On the Obsolescence of Oracles. We will investigate the 'discovery' of ruins in the Renaissance through Petrarch's Letters on Familiar Matters, his canzoniere, and his epic poem Africa, Francesco Colonna's verbal/visual Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream), and Joaquim De Bellay's The Antiquities of Rome. 17th-century approach to ruins and decay will focus on Benjamin's texts (Origins of the German Tragic Drama among others), Agamben's response to Benjamin in Man Without Content, and European poetry and paintings. After an analysis of Piranesi's famous etchings Vedute di Roma, we will approach Romanticism through Leopardi's and Hölderlin's works. There will be a screening of Pasolini's The Walls of Sana'a (1970), which will open our discussion of the concepts of decay and annihilation in modern times. We will read Curzio Malaparte's novel The Skin and W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, César Aira's Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, and the recent Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.

Instructor(s): A. Maggi     Terms Offered: Course not offered in 2025-26
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 26210, ITAL 36210, CMLT 26211

CMLT 42503. Renaissance Humanism. 100 Units.

Humanism in the Renaissance was an ambitious project to repair what idealists saw as a fallen, broken world by reviving the lost arts of antiquity. Their systematic transformation of literature, education, art, religion, architecture, and science dramatically reshaped European culture, mixing ancient and medieval and producing the foundations of modern thought and society. Readings focus on primary sources: Petrarch, Poggio, Ficino, Pico, Castiglione, and Machiavelli, with a historiographical review of major modern treatments of the topic. We will discuss the history of the book, cultural and intellectual history, and academic writing skills especially planning the dissertation as a book and writing and submitting articles to journals.

Instructor(s): A. Palmer     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Upper-level undergraduates with consent of instructor. Students with Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, or German will have the opportunity to use them.
Equivalent Course(s): CLAS 42514, ITAL 42503, HIST 42503

CMLT 42918. Exploratory Translation. 100 Units.

Translation is one of the central mechanisms of literary creativity across the world. This course will offer opportunities to think through both the theory and practice of this art form and means of cultural transmission, focusing on the problems of translation of and by poets in a variety of languages: it will emphasize precisely the genre most easily "lost in translation," as the truism goes. Topics to be discussed will include semantic and grammatical interference, loss and gain, the production of difference, pidgin, translationese, bilingualism, self-translation, code-switching, translation as metaphor, foreignization vs. nativization, and distinct histories of translation. Alongside seminar sessions for discussion of readings, workshop sessions patterned on Creative Writing pedagogy will offer students a chance to try their hands at a range of tactics of translation. We also hope to invite a few poets and translators to engage in dialogues about the art (these visits conditioned on funding that we are currently seeking). The course therefore engages with such fields as linguistics, literary study, creative writing, psychology, and anthropology. Its thematic and methodological implications reach across the humanities and social sciences.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone, Haun Saussy     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 42918, CRWR 42918, ENGL 42918, RLLT 42918, SCTH 42918

CMLT 43121. Translation Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how "world histories" may be hidden within "word histories," as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own.

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 51503, ENGL 43121, CRWR 43121

CMLT 43200. Fictions of the Indian Ocean. 100 Units.

This course will explore contemporary fiction, film, music and theory emerging from the Indian Ocean world - its oceans, its archipelagoes, and its bordering regions. Examples of potential texts include La mémoire délavée (2023) by Nathacha Appanah, Le Silence des Chagos (2005) by Shenaz Patel and The Dragonfly Sea (2020) by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. We will be in conversation with decolonial theory, the environmental humanities, critical race and caste studies, and gender studies, among others.

Instructor(s): Nikhita Obeegadoo     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor required.
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 42200, RDIN 42200

CMLT 43301. Comparative Mystical Literature: Islamic, Jewish and Christian. 100 Units.

The mysticisms of the three monotheistic faiths share many features that invite comparison. All three deal with sacred texts that overlap in instances, and all three responded in different ways to the philosophical mysticisms inherited from Classical antiquity. While there are a number of influences, both direct and indirect, among these traditions, there are far more instances of similar structural motifs shared by the three. This course is designed to explore the history and structural dynamics of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticisms through the careful reading of primary sources across the traditions. The Class will be limited to 20 students on a first-come, first-serve basis. Each student will be expected to demonstrate reading competence in the language of one of the mystical traditions (e. g., Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Latin, or one of the Christian vernaculars).

Equivalent Course(s): HIJD 43301, HCHR 43302, ISLM 43301, RLIT 43303

CMLT 43995. Comparative Issues in Monotheistic Mystical Traditions. 100 Units.

The mysticisms of the three monotheistic faiths share many features that invite comparison. All three deal with sacred texts that overlap in instances, and all three responded in different ways to the philosophical mysticisms inherited from Classical antiquity. While there are a number of influences, both direct and indirect, among these traditions, there are far more instances of similar structural motifs shared by the three. This course is designed to explore the history and structural dynamics of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticisms through the careful reading of primary sources across the traditions.

Equivalent Course(s): HIJD 43995, HCHR 43995, RLIT 43995, ISLM 43995

CMLT 44000. Cultura visual y esclavitud en Iberoamérica. 100 Units.

La esclavitud en las Américas no fue únicamente un sistema de organización socio-económica fundamentado en el trabajo coactivo. Este también conllevó la gestación de complejas y heterogéneas formas de producción cultural. En el contexto del moderno sistema de la plantación, ello en parte implicó una inédita articulación filosófica de las relaciones entre poder, raza y cuerpo, sofisticadas formas sincréticas de musicalidad y religiosidad populares, así como la producción de numerosas representaciones artísticas en las que se simbolizaron las conflictivas y a veces insólitas relaciones entre amos y esclavos. En este seminario nos enfocaremos en una serie de artefactos en los que se dramatiza puntualmente la intersección entre cultural visual y dominación esclavista en el mundo iberoamericano, prestándole especial atención a sus encuadres transatlánticos y a sus relaciones con los proyectos de constitución nacional en el siglo XIX. Nuestro objetivo es identificar el lugar de lo visual al interior de las cultura de la esclavitud --las lógicas de sus funcionamientos-- a partir del reconocimiento de algunas de sus zonas menos estudiadas. Examinaremos una selección de expresiones relativas a la "alta" pintura, las dimensiones visuales de los reglamentos de esclavos, ciertas modalidades performáticas de las prácticas evangélicas y del teatro popular, y la dialéctica de lo visible y lo invisible en narrativas de esclavos y en algunas producciones efímeras de la cultura material.

Instructor(s): Agnes Lugo-Ortiz     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Taught in Spanish. Open to advanced undergraduates with consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): SPAN 44000, LACS 44000

CMLT 44410. Practices of Classicism in the French Seventeenth Century. 100 Units.

This seminar has two goals. One is to combine the text-based tradition of French literary studies with the image-based, comparative tradition of art history-and, in so doing, to change the taxonomies of both. The other is to re-evaluate French Classicism by attending to practices of reading, writing, performing, looking and making. The seminar's breadth is designed to appeal to all graduate students interested in the theory and history of aesthetics, and the interleaving of visual and literary evidence. Looking will be no less important than reading, as we will conduct sessions with original objects in the Art Institute and in Regenstein Special Collections. Authors studied will include Corneille, Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, and Descartes; among the artists, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, La Tour, and Callot. Critical readings will range from Leo Spitzer to Louis Marin and Foucault. The seminar will be conducted in English; all primary texts will be made available in both English translation and, for those with reading knowledge, in the French original. This seminar will travel to Paris during exam week (March 13-21, 2020); airfare and lodging covered by university. Consent of instructors required.

Instructor(s): Larry Norman and Richard Neer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 34420, ARTH 45885, TAPS 44420, CDIN 44420

CMLT 44788. Getting the 90s We Deserve. 100 Units.

The aim of this seminar is to help its members recover visions, texts, sounds, concepts, moods and utopian impulses from the 1990s that can help us to see our way out of our current situation, that help us to imagine different worlds. Through a series of readings, viewings, listenings, and conversations, we will engage in an ongoing collaborative project that will culminate with a collectively composed and designed performance and publication at the end of the quarter. Two areas of thematic focus will be 1) the nature and effects of the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War on political situations ranging in scale from the intimate and personal to the global and geopolitical and 2) the emergence of a new queer politics in response to the AIDS crisis and the corresponding emergence of queer theory. Our course title is inspired by a 1999 essay by Douglas Crimp, in which he argued for a return to Andy Warhol's films and art through the methods and concepts offered by cultural studies and queer theory, instead of the ones that a conservative art history had theretofore presented. Crimp's retrospective look at the gender and sexually transgressive underground film and theater scene of the 1960s in order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of cultural, visual and queer studies motivates our desire to get more out of the 1990s for our troubled present.

Instructor(s): Jonathan Flatley     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24788, ENGL 24788, ARTV 30478, CMLT 24788, ENGL 44788, GNSE 44788, ARTV 20478

CMLT 45602. Zionism and Culture, 1881 to the Present. 100 Units.

This course investigates the shifting relations between Hebrew/Israeli literature and culture and Zionism as a political project, ideology, myth, and power structure. We will investigate multiple forms of cultural articulation, from built environment, to popular culture, to culture as a set of practices that govern everyday life, while devoting special attention to poetry - an institution valorized by classical secularist Zionism yet one often seen as standing in tension with Zionism's contemporary religious-nationalist forms. What role has Hebrew culture played within the Zionist project, as bearer, expression, reflection, or refraction of nationalist ideology or myth? What are the relationships between culture's putative forms of autonomy and forms of dissent, resistance, or alternative political vision in Israel and Palestine? How might this connect to Mizrachi and other 'minority' identities, and the roles of Palestinians as cultural producers within Israeli frames? What is to be learned about secular nationalism, Jewish secularism, post-secularism, religiosity, and political theology particularly in an era of what seems to be the rising hegemony of expressly religious Zionism.

Instructor(s): Na'ama Rokem and Kenneth Moss     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): No prerequisites. Undergraduates must receive faculty consent.
Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 45602, NEHC 45602, HIST 45602

CMLT 46100. Beyond the Blanks of History: When Women of Color Reclaim the Narrative. 100 Units.

History" is skewed and incomplete. It leaves out as much as it reveals. As they relegate past suffering to oblivion, historical omissions perpetuate the violence that they seek to hide. And this violence is often felt on multiple levels by women of color who find themselves imbricated within (neo)colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative, classist and ableist societal structures. In this course, we will situate ourselves at the intersection of literature, history and gender studies. We will explore the following questions together: Faced with the blind spots of history, how can literature function as an alternative archive that draws attention to the invisibilized stories of women of color? Simultaneously, how does literature sensitize us to the impossibility of fully knowing the past, no matter how hard we try? Course material may include theoretical texts, fiction, poetry, songs, podcasts, film, graphic novels and social media material. Potential examples include Saidiya Hartman's "Venus in Two Acts" (2008), Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King (2022), Gaiutra Bahadur's Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013), Nathacha Appanah's La Mémoire Délavée (2023), Lia Brozgal's Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 (2022), Marie Clements' Bones of Crows (2022), and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine's poetry.

Instructor(s): Nikhita Obeegadoo     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Advanced undergraduates with appropriate experience in the subject may petition for admission.
Note(s): Taught in English. All course material will be available in English, though students are encouraged to engage with original materials. Work may be submitted in English, French or Spanish.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 46000, GNSE 46001, RDIN 46000

CMLT 46202. Performance Theory: Action, Affect, Archive. 100 Units.

This seminar offers a critical introduction to performance theory organized around three conceptual clusters: a) action, acting, and forms of production or play, in theories from classical (Aristotle) through modern (Hegel, Brecht, Artaud), to contemporary (Richard Schechner, Philip Zarilli, others); b) affect, and its intersections with emotion and feeling: in addition to contemporary theories of affect and emotion we will read earlier modern texts that anticipate recent debates (Diderot, Freud) and their current interpreters (Joseph Roach, Erin Hurley and others), as well as those writing about the absence of affect and the performance of failure (Sara Bailes etc); and c) archives and related institutions and theories of recording performance, including the formation of audiences (Susan Bennett) and evaluating print and other media recording ephemeral acts, including the work of theorists of memory (Pierre Nora) and remains (Rebecca Schneider; Mark Fleishman), theatre historians (Rose Bank, Ellen Mackay etc) and tensions between archive and repertoire (Diana Taylor).(20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Loren Kruger     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Note: This course is intended only for those who have completed their undergraduate degree.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 38346, ENGL 46202, TAPS 46202

CMLT 46677. American Jewish Literature. 100 Units.

Is there an American Jewish literature? At the heart of this question is a reckoning with what constitutes American Jewish experience. Literary expression has played an outsized role in the way that American Jews view themselves, exploring a vocabulary and an idiom of immigration and religion, of ethnic identity and of political consciousness. In this class we will study a selection of the fiction, poetry, essays and films of American Jewish experience with an eye towards the varieties of American-Jewish experience and the role of literature in forging that experience.

Instructor(s): Sheila Jelen     Terms Offered: Autumn. Not offered 2025–26
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): HIJD 46677, RLVC 46677, AMER 46677, AMER 26677, CMLT 26677, RLST 26677, JWSC 26677

CMLT 46905. Performance Theory. 100 Units.

This course offers a critical introduction to theories of performance and performativity across a transnational scope. We will read theories of performance that explore the relationship between text, body and audience alongside the history of performative theory and its afterlives in queer and affect theory. Drawing on comparative literary method, this course presents texts both within and beyond the Euro-American canon, across languages, and across disciplines to consider how empire and post-coloniality, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality shape performances and the publics that they address. We will think about the relationship between performance and politics and how performance as both an aesthetic genre and theoretical concept shapes the relationship between text, language, and embodied experience and explore the role of the spectator and their participatory function in the making of performances.

Instructor(s): Leah Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 46905, GNSE 46905, TAPS 46900

CMLT 47101. History of Criticism: Dante to Hegel. 100 Units.

This course pursues the claim that the distinctly modern notion of "criticism" can be traced to the confluence of the biblical hermeneutics (in Spinoza, Luther, and the translators of the King James Bible), aesthetics (in Winkelmann, Burke, Kant, and Hegel), and the emergence of the figure of the literary critic (in Sydney, Addison, Johnson, and Goethe). Key concepts link these: the emergence of the vernacular (Dante, and again the KJB translators); "literature" as a national and a world phenomenon (Johnson, Goethe); and revisionist articulations of form and beauty and, with these, the category of the sublime (Longinus, Burke, Kant.) The authority of "judgment" in relation to criticism, with particular reference to newly reconfigured and still intersecting institutions (religious, political, individual, etc.) will be an overarching theme throughout the course.

Instructor(s): Richard Rosengarten     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students. Undergraduates must petition to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 47100

CMLT 47201. History of Criticism: 16th-19th Centuries. 100 Units.

The second of a two-course sequence that offers a survey of major historical moments in the theory of interpretation. The course will pursue the thesis that the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries are dominated by three cardinal moments in the sociology of modern knowledge: the emergence of the figure of "the critic"; the articulation of "aesthetics" as an independent mode of thought; and the establishment of historical-critical methodology as prerequisite to understanding, and in turn properly interpreting, the Bible. Prerequisite: completion of the first course in the sequence. Required of Ph.D. students taking the RLVC 1 exam.

Instructor(s): Richard Rosengarten     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 47200

CMLT 48017. Phaedras Compared: Adaptation, Gender, Tragic Form. 100 Units.

This seminar places Racine's French neoclassical tragedy Phaedra within a wide-ranging series of adaptations of the ancient myth, from its Greek and Latin sources (Euripides, Seneca, Ovid) to twentieth-century and contemporary translations and stage adaptations (Ted Hughes, Sarah Kane), read along with a series of theoretical and critical texts. Particular attention will be paid to critical paradigms and approaches in the evolving fields of classical reception studies, theater and performance studies, and gender studies. Reading knowledge of French strongly preferred.

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 48017, CDIN 48017, FREN 48017, TAPS 48017, CLAS 48017

CMLT 48616. Hölderlin and the Greeks. 100 Units.

The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin submitted to the paradoxical double-bind of Johann Joachim Winckelmann's injunction that "the only way for us [Germans] to become great or - if this is possible - inimitable, is to imitate the ancients." As he wrote in his short essay "The standpoint from which we should consider antiquity," Hölderlin feared being crushed by the originary brilliance of his Greek models (as the Greeks themselves had been), and yet foresaw that modern European self-formation must endure the ordeal of its encounter with the Greek Other. The faculty of the imagination was instrumental to the mediated self-formation of this Bildung project, for imagination alone was capable of making Greece a living, vitalizing, presence on the page. Our seminar will therefore trace the work of poetic imagination in Hölderlin's texts: the spatiality and mediality of the written and printed page, and their relation to the temporal rhythms of lived experience. All texts will be read in English translation, but a reading knowledge of German and/or Greek would be desirable.

Equivalent Course(s): CLAS 48616, GRMN 48616

CMLT 48647. Trauma and Narrative. 100 Units.

This graduate seminar invites students to engage with literary trauma studies, a field that first emerged in the 1990s, and that has more recently been undergoing decolonization processes. Following calls by scholars such as Stef Craps in Postcolonial Witnessing (2013), we will examine foundational and current literary theory by questioning its validity and applicability across different cultural contexts and languages. We will read select fictional trauma narratives, in English translation or in the original language when possible. Readings will include select psychological and psychoanalytical theoretical literature from Judith L. Herman and Cathy Caruth to Bessel van der Kolk; (literary) theory by Ruth Leys, Lauren Berlant and Stef Craps, as well as fictional texts, largely from non-Euro-Anglo-American contexts. Students working on trauma-related literary projects are welcome to contribute materials in their respective research languages. We will end the course by bridging discussions of literary trauma studies with recent debates around a pedagogy of trauma, especially as applicable the context of higher education. Students need to be available for 2 synchronous online meetings per week.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 48647

CMLT 48852. Proust: first two volumes of La Recherche. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): Françoise Meltzer     Terms Offered: Autumn

CMLT 49002. Ekphrasis: Description, Vision and Imagination in Art and Religion. 100 Units.

This course explores the rich traditions of the description - ekphrasis -- from Greco-Roman antiquity to modernity. It tackles texts (both prose and verse) in order to establish the ramifications of a genre in the European tradition, and its applications in particular to visual culture and religion. There will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond these into questions of comparative literature, art (history) writing, religious imagination and ekphrasis in all periods or contexts, as well as into the use of images or films as themselves forms of descriptive response. The course is primarily intended for graduates but interested undergraduates are welcome. The course will be taught over 5 weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner and Francoise Meltzer     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Note: Consent of instructor required for undergraduates; email Professors Meltzer and Elsner a paragraph long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar. (CDI seminar enrollment is capped at 18 students.)
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 40401, DVPR 49002, CDIN 49002, RLVC 49002

CMLT 49003. Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human-from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge.

Instructor(s): Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Enrollment by consent only for graduate students. Grad students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): AASR 49003, CMLT 29003, ISLM 49003, KNOW 49003, RLST 29003, GNSE 49003, NEHC 29003, GNSE 29003, NEHC 49003, ANTH 49003, ANTH 29003

CMLT 49999. Graduate Comparative Literature Workshop. 100 Units.

Graduate writing workshop for Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature aimed at cultivating familiarity and fluency with various genres of writing in the academy-from seminar papers, conference presentations, and journal articles, to doctoral degree documents as well as fellowship and academic job market materials. Enrolled students will have the opportunity to share and individually workshop works-in-progress, while attending to the craft of producing creative, engaging, and persuasive scholarly writing. In addition to tackling the various stages of academic writing development, editing, and revision, we will address practical aspects of the writing process-such as writing habits, challenges, and technologies.

Instructor(s): Leah Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn

CMLT 50007. Michel Foucault: Les aveux de la chair. 100 Units.

The last volume of Foucault's history of sexuality has finally been published after more than a 30 year wait. In this volume Foucault moves from his previous focus on Greco-Roman culture to early Christianity, and his account culminates in an extensive discussion of Saint Augustine. This seminar will consist of a close reading of Les Aveux de la chair, supplemented by a few other texts from the later Foucault. We will also try to draw some general methodological and philosophical conclusions from our reading.

Instructor(s): A. Davidson     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Good reading knowledge of French and familiarity with the previous volumes of Foucault's "Histoire de la sexualité". All students interested in enrolling in this course should send an application to wweaver@uchicago.edu by 12/14/2018. Applications should be no longer than one page and should include name, email address, phone number, and department or committee. Applicants should briefly describe their background and explain their interest in, and their reasons for applying to, this course.
Equivalent Course(s): FREN 40007, DVPR 50007, PHIL 50007

CMLT 50101. Literary theories for comparatists. 100 Units.

This course provides an overview of different methods, approaches and themes in the study of literary texts and traditions from comparative perspectives. Topics covered will include literary history, textual criticism, translation (theory and practice), book history, genre theory (e.g. the novel), narratology, literature and colonialism, "world literature" and new philologies. We will discuss these different approaches against the intellectual historical background from which they have emerged but also with reference to the texts with which participating students are working for their various projects, and literary texts from any language, time and geography are welcome. While the course is organized primarily from a literary studies perspective, it will also be of interest to students of history, anthropology and other disciplines dealing with 'texts'.

Instructor(s): Sascha Ebeling     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course fulfills the 501 core requirement for Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 50101, GNSE 50102

CMLT 50104. Blood Libel: Damascus to Riyadh. 100 Units.

This course examines the Blood-Libel from the thirteenth-century to the present, with special focus upon the Damascus Affair of 1840 and its repercussions in the modern Middle Eastern and European contexts and in polemics today among Muslims, Christians and Jews. We will review cases and especially upon literary and artistic representations of ritual murder and sacrificial consumption alleged to have been carried out by Waldensians, Fraticelli, witches, and Jews, with special attention to the forms of redemptive, demonic, and symbolic logic that developed over the course of the centuries and culminated in the wake of the Damascus Affair. Each participant will be asked to translate and annotate a sample primary text, ideally one that has not yet been translated into English, and to use that work as well in connection with a final paper.

Instructor(s): M. Sells     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Willingness to work on a text from one of the following languages--Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Arabic, Modern Greek, or Turkish--at whatever level of proficiency one has attained. This course fulfills the autumn core requirement for first year PhDs in Comparative Literature
Equivalent Course(s): ISLM 41610

CMLT 50107. Literary Theory: Auerbach's Mimesis. 100 Units.

The focus of this seminar will be Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, a book often held up as foundational and paradigmatic for the discipline of comparative literature. Close reading of its twenty chapters together with excerpts from its objects of study (from Homer to Virginia Woolf) will be framed by readings and discussion on the contexts of its production, the history of its reception, the limitations that have been imputed to its presuppositions and biases, and the generative potentials and significances it might continue to make available to the current and future practice of literary comparison.

Terms Offered: Autumn

CMLT 50201. Pre-modern Critical Theory: Theory, Critique, and the Making of the Past. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to ancient, medieval, and early modern literary theory and to modern engagements with these theoretical interventions. We will explore how communities in the past imagined their practices of reading, writing, and interpretation-with especial emphasis on scriptural exegesis-but also what constituted a text, in the first place. How, indeed, were these practices foundational to the formation of communities and, in turn, to alterity? And what role do these literary theories and practices play in longer histories of "theory" and "critique." Staging dialogues between the past and the present, this course will ask what the political implications of designating an archive as "ancient," "archaic," "medieval," or "premodern" are in order to understand how and why the past is continually made and remade.

Instructor(s): Kris Trujillo     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course fulfills the winter core requirement for first-year Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 50201, ENGL 50201

CMLT 50204. Destruction of Images, Books & Artifacts in Europe and S. Asia. 100 Units.

The course offers a comparative perspective on European and South Asian iconoclasm. In the European tradition, iconoclasm was predominantly aimed at images, whereas in South Asian traditions it was also enacted upon books and buildings. The combination of these traditions will allow us to extend the usual understanding of iconoclasm as the destruction of images to a broader phenomenon of destruction of cultural artifacts and help question the theories of image as they have been independently developed in Europe and South Asia, and occasionally in conversation with one another. We will ask how and why, in the context of particular political imaginaries and material cultures, were certain objects singled out for iconoclasm? Also, who was considered to be entitled or authorized to commit their destruction? Through a choice of concrete examples of iconoclasm, we will query how religious and political motivations are defined, redefined, and intertwined in each particular case. We will approach the iconoclastic events in Europe and South Asia through the lenses of philology, history, and material culture. Class discussions will incorporate not only textual materials, but also the close collaborative study of images, objects, and film. Case studies will make use of objects in the Art Institute of Chicago and Special Collections at the University Library.

Equivalent Course(s): HREL 50204, RLVC 50204, CDIN 50204, SALC 50204, ARTH 40204

CMLT 53400. Salvage Poetics: Literature as Ethnography. 100 Units.

This interdisciplinary course will synthesize ethnographic and literary discourses to consider the ways in which the culture of the Jewish "shtetl," the small towns and villages in eastern Europe where Jewish culture thrived for nearly a millennium, has been represented in the United States after the Holocaust, from the 1940s to the present day. We will read a wide variety of materials within the field of anthropology as well as Jewish literatures and cultures to tease out the concept of "salvage poetics" or a literary poetics that has been forged in popular attempts to bridge dramatically different historical moments, different geographic locations, and different cultures across the abyss of the Holocaust.

Instructor(s): Sheila Jelen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students. Undergraduates may petition the instructor to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 53400, ANTH 53401, REES 43400, HIJD 53400, AASR 53400

CMLT 58613. Poetry of the Americas. 100 Units.

In what tangled ways does poetry transform through dialogue across linguistic and geographical distances, and through performance, translation, and collaboration? This seminar takes a comparative, hemispheric approach to 20th- and 21st-century poetries from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to Canada, with significant attention to Latinx poets. We will examine developments in poetic form, especially transformations of the epic and the lyric, in conjunction with questions of modernization, globalization, and colonialism, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. This course is held in tandem with Fall quarter events including Chicago's Lit & Luz Festival, which stages Mexican-U.S. artistic collaborations. Seminar members will have the opportunity for dialogue with poets and translators who visit our seminar and/or give poetry readings on campus. (No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required.) (Poetry, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 48613, ENGL 26813, SPAN 48613

CMLT 70000. Advanced Study: Comparative Literature. 100 Units.

Advanced Study: Comparative Literature

CMLT 75000. Advanced Research. 300.00 Units.

TBD

Terms Offered: Autumn