>> Graduate-level CPLS courses
CPLS W4400: New World Novella.
A. Mac Adam. MW 2:40pm-3:55pm, location to be announced.
The novella in the New World during the 19th and 20th centuries: a comparative reading of novellas from Latin America and North America. The course seeks to define the novella as a literary genre and show that it is the interface between literature and ideas, that it is a forum where the intellectual concerns of an age find artistic expression. While all novellas are obsessed with historical issues, the New World novella is especially concerned with the problematic relationships among the peoples of this hemisphere. Though race is far from the only subject addressed by the texts in the course, it constitutes a recurring theme throughout the readings. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS W4411: Poetry and Decolonization.
L. C. Mehta. R 2:00pm-4:00pm, Komoda Seminar Room, HB1-7 Heyman Center.
The course looks at poets writing in languages including English, French, Bengali, and Spanish whose work is caught up in the struggle for independence from colonial rule and, later, with the formation of a post-colonial literary voice. Poetry written outside Europe in the first half of the twentieth century confronts issues such as national and racial identity, place and displacement, and decolonization and freedom from linguistic and political oppression. We will read, among others, the two leading poets of négritude, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, in relation to movements in Caribbean, African, and American literature including the Harlem Renaissance (Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nicolas Guillén); Latin American poets including Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz; English-language poets including W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and Derek Walcott; and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. The course will evolve a theoretical framework within which to address the comparative and interdisciplinary issues raised by the poems. Though class discussions will be in English, ICLS students (students taking the course for credit in Comparative Literature and Society) are required to read in at least one other language. Please contact Prof. Mehta at lcm8 at columbia.edu for more information. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS G6150: Transatlantic Narratives of Slavery (Three session mini-seminar).
K. Anyidoho. Mondays, March 10, 17, and 24th, 10:00am-1:00pm, Komoda Seminar Room, HB1-7 Heyman Center.
The year 2007 is being marked as the bi-centennial anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade Act by Britain. A range of commemorative events being held globally have drawn attention to and provoked intense debate, once more, over what has been described as ‘the single most traumatic body of experience in all our known history’. Of even greater import, the past decade or so has also seen the publication of several significant scholarly and creative texts on the subject of slavery. This is a 3-part seminar for graduate and upper level undergraduate students, focusing on three fairly recent narratives of African slavery that take us back and forth across the Atlantic, carefully linking the Diaspora to Continental Africa in an intricate pattern of cross-fertilizations. Three texts of special significance provide compelling testimony of the many ways in which even a brutal historical experience may be redeemed and made more enlightening by the transforming power of the creative imagination. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS G6180: Bilingualism in (North) Indian Literary Culture and its Social Meanings (Three session mini-seminar).
F. Orsini. Mondays, March 31, April 7 and 14th, 6:00pm-8:00pm, Komoda Seminar Room, HB1-7 Heyman Center.
Everybody agrees that India was (and still is) a multilingual society, and this diversity has been a defining component of its literary culture. Too often scholars pay lip service to India’s linguistic diversity, but most approaches center on single literary traditions. What kinds of reading practices and social theory might help us to approach India’s precolonial literary world, one that had not yet been subjected to nationalist reductions of linguistic and cultural difference?
Intertextuality of course offers a method for reading within and between texts, but what kind of social and socio-literary contexts underpin the various intertextual combinations we encounter? These sessions will try to arrive at a more nuanced and grounded appreciation of bilingualism and multilingualism in the 15th to 19th centuries through an analysis of four different sets of texts written in Hindavi, Hindi, Urdu, Persian or some mixture of these. Aside from closely reading the texts we will discuss the critical discourses around them. Secondary readings in English will also be assigned on various topics that intersect with the themes of the seminar, such as translation theory, colonial epistemology, nationalism, and communalist readings of India’s literary past. [Link to registrar listing]
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>> Undergraduate-level ICLS courses
CPLS V3900: Introduction to Comparative Literature and Society.
C. Alonso. T 2:10pm-4:00pm, location to be announced. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS W3935: Art and War.
C. Fusco. W 2:10pm-4:00pm, 406 Hamilton. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS V3991: Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature and Society.
H. Dabashi. W 11:00am-12:50pm, 401 Hamilton. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS V3995: Senior Thesis in Comparative Literature and Society.
[Link to registrar listing]
CPLS BC3125: Opera as Literature. (Barnard College)
J. Crapotta. MW 11:00am-12:15, location to be announced. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS BC3140: The New Europe in Literature. (Barnard College)
E. Grimm. TR 4:10pm-5:25pm, location to be announced. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS BC3155: Epic Travel: Text to Road Movie. (Barnard College)
P. Usher. TR 9:10am-10:25am, location to be announced. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS V3950: Colloquium in Literary Theory. (Barnard College)
Information to be announced. [Link to registrar listing]
CPLS BC3997: Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature. (Barnard College)
E. Grimm. F 12:10pm-2:00pm, location to be announced. [Link to registrar listing]
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