Course Catalog

Home>Academic Catalog 2025-2026>

Course Catalog

LITERATURE & THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION (CL3060)

Approaches Western political discourses through major texts of 19th-century literature. Provides an introduction to socialism, anarchism, liberalism, and communism, and relates them to questions of literary production, arguing that the literary and the political imaginations are intimately related. Literary texts studied include fiction by Zola, Gaskell, Dickens, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, and Conrad, and poetry by French and British writers.

KAFKA AND WORLD LITERATURE (CL3063)

Kafka’s work has left indelible traces in the pages of today’s most important novelists, in the West and beyond. In this course we consider the meaning – and when relevant, the burden – of his global legacy. Assigned readings include “The Metamorphosis”, The Trial and other seminal works by Kafka alongside an assortment of Kafka-inflected fictions from around the world.

MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE (CL3066)

This course introduces students to the modern literature of the Arab world through works by canonical or established writers in addition to contemporary work. Primary texts are read in addition to a variety of historical, critical, and other materials, with modern Arabic literature presented as a case study in world literature, translation studies, comparative modernisms, or comparative literary history.

THE AESTHETICS OF CRIME FICTION (CL3069)

Traumatic reaction in the aftermath of WWI, the rapid evolution of cinema and photography, emerging trends of psychoanalytic thought, all contributed to a disturbing, often volatile, re-examination of the aesthetics of literature in the wake of a culture of ruin characterizing early 20th century Europe. Trends in mass consumption, such as the popularity of crime fiction and its existential outgrowth film noir, are largely rooted in this struggle to come to terms with cultural transitions taking place between the two wars. This course will examine the origins and aesthetics of crime fiction and film, notably, the evolution of film noir and the série noire, and other developments in Europe and America just before and after WWII. Students will analyze some of the canonical writers whose works influenced a second generation of crime fiction writers as well as the works of film directors who presided over these crucial moments of transition.

INTERMEDIATE ANCIENT GREEK II (CL3070)

This course builds on the skills acquired in Intermediate Ancient Greek I. Students read longer, more difficult texts and train basic methods of classical philology and literary criticism, e.g., metrical and stylistic analysis, textual criticism, use of scholarly commentaries and dictionaries, recognizing levels of style and characteristic generic features.

ULYSSES, MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND NOW (CL3073)

Reads Joyce's Ulysses in depth, and within modern history and modernist culture. Considers contemporary contexts and the theoretical corpus to which the novel has given rise. Explore relationships between artistic creativity and the imagination of new political and social possibilities.
Taking Joyce's novel as a model, students build intellectual and creative responses to the difficulties and opportunities of late capitalism.

QUEENS, FAIRIES & HAGS: ROMANCE OF MEDIEVAL GENDER (CL3075)

This course is a quest for understanding of the conventions of medieval romance, a genre of predilection for establishing codified, recognizable normative femininities and masculinities through the lens of gender, sexuality and feminist and queer theory. We will explore medieval texts and the social contexts of their production and reception, the aspirations and contradictions of the idealized, and the heteronormative world of knighthood and courtly love.

MODERN SEXUALITIES IN THE PROCESS OF WRITING (CL3076)

Considers a range of literary writing in which experimental prose and challenging depictions of sex have together defined a particularly subversive force. Reads these works against the development of particularly modern arieties of sexual identity and sexual behavior. Includes works by Genet, Nabokov, Orton, Bataille, Kathy Acker, Nella Larsen, among others.

BRECHT & FILM (CL3080)

We examine Brecht's application of his theories and plays to his work in German and Hollywood cinema. We consider his collaborations with Fritz Lang, Charles Laughton, G.W. Pabst, Lotte Eisner and others. We also analyze his influence on later filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Hans Jurgen Syberberg and R.W. Fassbinder and his contributions to film theory.

PROUST & THE ARTS (CL3082)

This course deals with one of the greatest novelists, and one of the major novels, of all time: Marcel Proust, and his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. We will read in detail the first two volumes of his novel, Swann’s Way, and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. In addition, we will read extracts from the remainder of the novel that pertain to our chief topics in the course. Proust’s views on time and memory, on love and impossibility, on expectation and disappointment, on knowledge and jealousy, on permanence and the intermittences of the human heart and personality, will all be discussed. Proust had a vast knowledge of visual art, and draws upon paintings to illustrate his aesthetic; he was also deeply knowledgeable about music which plays a key role in Swann’s Way through the composer Vinteuil. We shall consider the paintings that are important in the novel and listen to the music that influenced Proust. Study trips will form a part of this course: to Paris museums and buildings where Proust will himself have seen the art he presents; to the Musée Carnavalet where Proust’s bedroom is housed; and to more recent museums such as the Musée d’Orsay which houses much of the painting of Proust’s period (and the period about which he writes). If possible, a trip will be taken to Illiers (now renamed Illiers-Combray), which was the model for Combray where the first book of the novel is set.