Courses previously offered, Spring 2009




	Undergraduate-level joint courses
	Graduate-level joint courses

ATTENTION STUDENTS: Please be aware that information on courses offered by other departments is subject to change, and that you should check with the Directory of Classes and with the individual departments to confirm course availability, times and locations.

>> Undergraduate-level joint courses

CLCZ W4030 Postwar Czech Literature [in English]. 3 pts.
C. Harwood. TuTh 2:40p - 3:55p, location to be announced.
A survey of postwar Czech fiction and drama. Knowledge of Czech not necessary. Parallel reading lists available in translation and in the original. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEA W4101 Literary and Cultural Theory East and West. 3 pts.
L. Liu. Tu 2:10p - 4:00p, location to be announced.
Major paradigms of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Students generate critical contexts for analyzing East Asian Literature and culture in a comparative framework. Issues discussed include feminist criticism, film theory, post-colonialism, social theory, post modernism, and issues of national ethnic identity. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3208 Modern Comparative Fiction: New Literary Histories. 3 pts.
L. Kucukalic. Th 1:10pm-2:25pm, location to be announced.
This class will examine how modern writers from around the world make use of innovative literary elements and narrative methods in order to re-conceptualize "history" and personal identity. In their fictions and histories, our chosen authors reinvent traditional notions of linear time and the discrete self, rewriting in the process the conventions of realistic representation. Whether their characters transcend several lifetimes (Woolf, Eliade, and Grass), travel in time to kill their own predecessors (Barjavel), reach different realms of existence (Kundera, Karahasan, Jabra), or find dreams to be truer than life (Murakami and Dick), their narratives allow us a fresh approach to the ways we perceive and record history, personal and national identity, and our sense of the past, present, and future. Students will therefore examine the relationship between form and idea, and reason and emotion in these works of modern world literature. We will trace how, in the modern novel, literature serves as a means to reconstruct memory and identity, face loss, and negotiate the quasi-objectivity of the twentieth century. New Literary Histories will provide material for discussion of why these stories were written, a chance to discuss narrative theory and the structure of the novel, as well as consider issues relating to historiography and ontology. Tentative reading list includes: Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Gunter Grass, The Flounder; Haruki Murakami, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Dzevad Karahasan, Sarajevo, Exodus of a City; Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The Journals of Sarab Affan; Gabriel Garcia Marques, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children; Rene Barjavel, Future Times Three; Philip K. Dick, Valis; and Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3390 Hardy and Zola (Seminar). 4 pts.
M. Cohen. W 11:00a - 12:50p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. In stating that "men are but phenomena and the conditions of phenomena," Emile Zola began the manifesto by which French naturalism would break away from what had until then been thought of as novelistic realism. Writing in England at the same time, Thomas Hardy similarly crafted a fictional world in which a man's - or a woman's - interaction with the physical environment would form the novel's primary source of meaning and regenerative - or degenerative - value. In the twenty urban novels that constitute Zola's Rougon-Maquart family saga and in the imagined rural geography of Hardy's Wessex novels, the difficulties of representing work shift the late 19th c novel's attention away from courtship and domestic relations and toward formal principles of determinism and tragedy. Readings include L'Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Application instructions (deadline to apply: Wednesday, November 12). [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3721 The Novel and Global Capitalism. 4 pts.
W. Jin. Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm, location to be announced.
“Cowboy capitalism” is arguably the most powerful symbol America has created for itself. For some, the rise of the American variant of corporate capitalism during the Great Depression of 1873-96 constituted “a far more effective and radical departure from the dominant British regime of market capitalism than the variant that emerged at about the same time in Germany” (Arrighi 287). The transnational expansion of this new kind of capitalism after WWII ushered in an era of American dominance in global political economy. To understand the unprecedented levels of criticism to which the American “cowboy capitalism” and its financial component have been subjected recently, it is important that we study its history. This course charts a short history of cultural perceptions of American capitalism through an exploration of twentieth-century American novels and other narratives. We will discuss how these novels comment on the various issues surrounding “cowboy capitalism,” including upward mobility, social inequality, the circulation of money on national and global scales, etc. The list of primary readings will include Frank Norris’s The Pit, L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Aryn Rand’s essays on capitalism, Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, William Gaddis’ JR, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of the Lion, and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. We will read these texts in conjunction with introductions to the history of American capitalism in the twentieth-century and selected criticisms of the cultural logic of American/transnational capitalism. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3750 The Originators and the Modernist Vortex. 4 pts.
P. Violi. Th 6:10pm - 8:00pm, location to be announced.
This course will concentrate on the development of the modernist vortex by American and British poets in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The work of W. B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, Ford Maddox Hueffer, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Hilda.Doolittle, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, E.E.Cummings, et al, will be studied, along with their interaction with European, namely French and Italian, contemporaries and predecessors. Readings will also include “The War Poets” (Owen, Sassoon, Thomas) and, for contrast, some of The Georgians. However, the focus will be on close readings of representative poems that arose out of a seeming welter of artistic movements—Realism, Symbolism, Imagism, Futurism, Dada, and new approaches to Classical and Asian poetry—and the revolutionary influence the authors had on poetry in general for the rest of the century. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3792 Comparative Literature Seminar: the 18th-Century Comparative Novel (Seminar). 4 pts.
J. Davidson. Tu 2:10p - 4:00p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Readings in the eighteenth-century European novel. Style, narratology, the "rise" of realism and the history of novel criticism will all figure in our discussions. Readings by Defoe, Richardson, Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, Austen and others. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3925 Topics in medieval literature: Medieval animals. 4 pts.
S. Crane. Th 11:00a - 12:50p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor Medieval writers often turn to (other) animals when commenting on human culture. Beast fables picture and critique human social behavior; stories of metamorphosis explore humanity's kinship and difference from animals; and bestiaries present the natural world as a moral instruction book. Besides this emphasis on the human, medieval writing expresses ideas about animal nature--animals' capacities for reason, emotion, sin, and learning--that contrast intriguingly with our contemporary ideas. The goal of the seminar is to refine our understanding of what medieval animal literature says about human culture, what it says about the difference between humans and animals, and what it says about the identity and mentality of animals. The reading list sets a range of later medieval writing about animals in dialogue with emerging theoretical discourses on animals in philosophy and cultural studies. Medieval texts may include the lays and beast fables of Marie de France, Bonaventure's Life of St. Francis, The Book of Beasts, Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and Nun's Priest's Tale, and romances of the Knight of the Lion and Knight of the Swan. Critical writing on animals by Augustine, Aquinas, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, Eco, Singer, and others will prepare us to think about how the animal question might be theorized in medieval studies. To further link medieval and contemporary understandings of animals, each seminar participant will report to the class on an influential contemporary work such as The Omnivore's Dilemma(Michael Pollan), The Golden Compass(Philip Pullman), The Lion King(Walt Disney Productions), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?(Philip K. Dick), Dominion(Matthew Scully), Animals in Translation(Grandin), and The Companion Species Manifesto(Haraway). A few of the many possibilities for the research paper are metamorphosis and body hopping; the hermeneutics of beast fables; animal language and communication; exemplary and helpful animals; totemism (descent from animals, self-representation through animals, animals in heraldry); theological and philosophical views of animals in medieval and modern traditions; animal-human alliances in warfare and hunting; Adam's naming of the animals (Genesis 2:18-20 and its commentaries); and scientific thought about animals in the bestiaries. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3940: The Comparative Modern Novel (Seminar): Kafka. 4 pts.
M. Strand. M 11:00a - 12:50p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. A close reading of the major stories and parables of Kafka. Those wishing to be admitted should submit a short letter in which they state their reasons for wanting to take the class. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3970: Modernism and the City. 4 pts.
V. Rosner. W 2:10pm - 4:00pm, location to be announced.
For the Victorians, the city was a wellspring of iniquity, a cistern of crime, filth, disease, and poverty. Its dark corners offered shelter to a catalogue of villains, while also concealing from the public gaze the innocent suffering of the young and the old. In the early years of twentieth century, however, the city metamorphosed for many from a den of evil to a space of change, a machine driving the nation into the future. Quite literally, as cars and airplanes were seen more frequently in and above the street, the potential for increased speed transformed the experience of time in city. Yet many individuals found these emerging urban rhythms alienating and disturbing. For some, the city threatened to warp the texture of life, and render reality ghostly and perplexing. Distinct illnesses of soul, mind, and body seemingly caused by city life were described by psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers. For women in particular, city spaces opened up a new world of freedom and possibilities for movement, but at the same time they presented new dangers to personal safety. This course will examine visions of the modern European city, as seen through the eyes of its architects, painters, writers, filmmakers, and social critics in the period 1890-1930. We will concentrate on London, with occasional side-trips to Paris, Vienna, Dublin, and Berlin. Though focused on literature, this course is interdisciplinary in its design, drawing on perspectives from architecture, literature, sociology, urban planning, and the visual arts. Selected writers: Arthur Conan Doyle, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, Sophie Treadwell, and Virginia Woolf. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3977 Seminar in Literature and Culture: Literature and Torture, From Athens to Abu Ghraib. 4 pts.
J. Slaughter. W 11:00a - 12:50p, location to be announced.
Every decade or so, citizens of Western democracies re-discover that their governments torture in their name. Indeed, the current public debate about torture shows a surprising lack of familiarity with the history and literature of torture in the Western tradition—proceeding as if torture (and the ethical and political issues around its use) is something altogether new in a post-9/11 world. However, in the Anglo-European tradition, torture has been practiced, and the morality and efficacy of that practice challenged, since at least Aristotle; contemporary popular culture (in TV shows like 24) and legalistic arguments advocating the use of “coercive interrogation” have simplified the problem of torture by reducing it to a simple narrative device. Torture, practiced under the pretext of seeking confessions, is a profoundly anti-narrative activity; studying literary, filmic, and visual representations of torture--along with legal, polemical, governmental, and theoretical materials--this course will examine the narrative consequences and literary implications of torture. Likely authors: Arias, Aristophanes, Auden, Bandele, Coetzee, Danticat, Dorfman, Duras, Hama Tuma, Kafka, Lartegúy, Machiavelli, Mirbeau, Orphée, Pinter, Rivabella, Valenzuela. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W3980 Topics in Comparative Literature: Narratives from Underground. 4 pts.
D. Martinsen. T 9:00am - 10:50am, location to be announced.
This seminar will study twentieth-century narratives whose authors utilize strategies developed by Dostoevsky as he created the highly self-conscious, first-person paradoxalist narrator of his Notes from Underground. Starting with a close reading of Dostoevsky’s Notes, we will examine narrative structures and identify strategies that differentiate authors from their narrators. Syllabus will include works such as Yuri Olesha’s Envy, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, Albert Camus’s The Fall, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Students will vote on the final work from among such choices as Sadeq Hedayat’s Blind Owl, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, and Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W4122 The Renaissance in Europe II: Figuring Eros. 3 pts.
A. Prescott. TuTh 4:10p - 5:25p, location to be announced.
How did Renaissance writers imagine Eros? What obstacles does he meet? How does he relate to other kinds of love? To loss and to wit? Readings include Plato, Ovid, and Petrarch for background, then Stampa, Ariosto, Rabelais, Labé, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Rabelais, Wyatt, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W4640 Revolution in/and Caribbean Literature. 3 pts.
F. Negron-Muntaner. Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm, location to be announced.
Although a geographically small area, the Caribbean has produced major social movements, and two globally influential revolutions: the Haitian Revolution (1791) and the Cuban Revolution (1959). It has also produced literature and poetic discourse that has sought to revolutionize social analysis and language itself. In this course, we will examine texts that reflect on revolution and/or attempt to revolutionize by writers and musicians, including Aime Cesaire, CLR James, Alejo Carpentier, Frantz Fanon, Michelle Cliff, V.S. Naipaul, Bob Marley, and Maryse Conde, among others. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W4930 Transpacific Approaches American Literature. 3 pts.
W. Jin. MW 4:10pm - 5:25pm, location to be announced.
Toward the end of the 19th-century, Robert Wilson Shufeldt, who became known as the opener of Korea in 1882, enthusiastically declared that the Pacific was the “ocean bride of America.” His was not alone in harboring this sentiment. This course is designed to explore the role of the Asia Pacific in the American literary and cultural imagination. We will seek to generate new readings of some important texts in American literature since the mid-nineteenth century by placing them in the context of U.S. entanglements with the markets, peoples, and cultures lying across the Pacific. We will also consider how transpacific approaches to American literature contribute to theories of translation and circulation, the capitalist world-system, and minority cultural production. More importantly, by focusing on social, political, and cultural networks that link the U.S. with Asia, this course offers a preliminary survey of the emerging filed of Transpacific American Studies, which complements and complicates what has been conventionally known as Transatlanticism. Literary readings include Herman Melville, Jack London, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, Alex Kuo, Amitav Ghosh; theoretical readings include Said, Lye, Dirlik, Derrida, Benjamin, Arrighi, Liu, Wallerstein, Frank, etc. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN W4935 Transnational Modernisms. 3 pts.
V. Rosner. Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm, location to be announced.
This course investigates the transnationalism of modernist literature. We will discuss works by writers whose modernist practices originate outside of the U.S. and western Europe as well as exploring the transnational affiliations and imaginations of writers traditionally associated with Anglo-American modernism. We will consider issues such as the internationalism of the avant-garde (including Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism); antiwar and antifascist organizing (WWI and the Spanish Civil War); the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude; and cosmopolitanism. Writers discussed will include Mulk Raj Anand, Aimé Césaire, Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, E. M. Forster, Nella Larsen, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Wilfred Owen, and Rabindranath Tagore. [Link to registrar listing]

CLGR W4207 Aesthetics Under Siege: the Frankfurt School. 3 pts.
A. Huyssen. TuTh 2:40p - 3:55p, 516 Hamilton Hall.
Study of the aesthetic theories of the Frankfurt School and related critics in their historical context. Works by Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács, Krakauer, and Habermas. [Link to registrar listing]

CLIA V3660 Mafia Movies : From Sicily to the Sopranos. 3 pts.
N. Moe. M 6:10p - 10:00pm, location to be announced.
Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the US and Italy. Readings include novels, historical studies, and film criticism. [Link to registrar listing]

CLIA W4790 Italo Calvino: Italian Literature in a Global Context. 3 pts.
A. Malaguti. MW 2:40p - 3:55p, location to be announced.
The course investigates Italo Calvino's fiction in the global perspective it deserves. Far before globalization, Calvino always conceived literature in an international perspective. While thinking and writing in Italian -- and making the Italian language as modern and functional as possible, closely responding to contemporary reality -- he always thought of literature as going beyond national boundaries and proposing ethical models across historical times. It is not by chance that almost at the same time Calvino wrote his first novel and a thesis on Joseph Conrad (another writer crossing national boundaries). Calvino's writing develops in a tight dialogue with the European literary tradition (Conrad and Voltaire are clear examples), but also with contemporary writers to whose solicitations Calvino may respond (Vargas Llosa) or whose works clearly exemplify Calvino's reception (Oz, Pamuk). In our times, Calvino stands as an example of a writer who is aware of the internationalization of literature and of the ethical contents it conveys. This course will introduce undergraduates and graduates not only to the intertextual connections of a major author of the twentieth century, but also to a project of literature that, contrarily to what is usually professed about Calvino's supposed "post-modernity", still proposes social and ethical models. [Link to registrar listing]

CLLN W4108 Language History. 3 pts.
A. Timberlake. MW 6:10p - 7:25p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: CLLN W3101 Language, like all components of culture, is structured and conventional yet can nevertheless change over time. This course examines how language changes, firstly as a self-contained system that changes organically and autonomously, and secondly, as contextualized habits that change in time, in space, and in communities. [Link to registrar listing]

CLLN W4376 Phonetics and Phonology. 3 pts.
A. Timberlake. MW 2:40p - 3:55p, 411 Hamilton Hall.
Prerequisites: CLLN W3101 An investigation of the sounds of human language, from the perspective of phonetics (articulation and acoustics, including computer-aided acoustic analysis) and phonology (the distribution and function of sounds in individual languages). [Link to registrar listing]

CLME W3922 Text and Territory. 3 pts.
N. Kenderian. M 2:10p - 4:00p, location to be announced.
The concept of "nation" and ongoing "national" struggles still remain potent, despite or perhaps because of unbound globalization. We will consider "nation" in relation to "state" and "diaspora," weighing its implications for literary nation-formation with readings in Armenian Diaspora literature. Theoretical readings from Renan, Bhabha, Anderson, Chatterjee, Tölölyan among others. Primary texts from Shahnour, Vorpuni, V. Oshagan and Beledian in translation. [Link to registrar listing]

CLME W4200 Themes in the Arabic Novel. 3 pts.
N. Radwan. MW 1:10p - 2:25p, location to be announced.
A critical reading of a selection of Arabic novels thematically connected by their representation of displacement defined as the physical dislocation of people (as refugees, immigrants, migrants, exiles, or expatriates). The lectures and class discussions will focus on the interactions between this theme and the textual strategies and discourse by which the notions of identity, community, native culture, and homeland are themselves constructed, displaced, and re-constructed in these novels. [Link to registrar listing]

CLME W4304 Politics of World Art History: The Case of Armenian Medieval Art. 3 pts.
V. Azatyan. MW 4:10pm - 5:25pm, location to be announced.
A contextual and methodological exploration of the histories of art history utilizing the specific case of representation of Armenian medieval art in art history survey texts from the nineteenth century to the present. The course is theoretical and interdisciplinary and touches upon the issues of nationalism, orientalism, imperialism, cultural politics, educational policies, art historical methodology and politcs. [Link to registrar listing]

CLSL V1330 Violent Muse of the Twentieth Century: Representations of Violence in Balkan and Russian Literature. 3 pts.
A. Kokobobo. MW 4:10p - 5:25p, location to be announced.
This course examines literary representations of violence in twentieth century Russian and Balkan literature. Within a text, the balance between gore and philosophy, naturalistic details and sparse descriptions can shape our reaction to and cognition of violence. We will look at depictions of different types of violence (including violence resulting from mass-extermination campaigns like the Soviet gulag, violence in warfare, sexual violence, absurdist violence etc.), and consider how literary devices negotiate with violence. Readings include works by Ivo Andric, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleksander Blok, Andrei Platonov, Varlam Shalamov, Vladimir Sorokin, and others. [Link to registrar listing]

CLSL W4995 Central European Jewish Writers. 3 pts.
I. Sanders. TuTh 6:10p - 7:25p, location to be announced.
Examines prose and poetry by writers generally less accessible to the American student written in the major Central European languages: German, Hungarian, Czech, and Polish. The problematics of assimilation, the search for identity, political commitment and disillusionment are major themes, along with the defining experience of the century: the Holocaust; but because these writers are often more removed from their Jewishness, their perspective on these events and issues may be different. The influence of Franz Kafka on Central European writers, the post-Communist Jewish revival, defining the Jewish voice in an otherwise disparate body of works. [Link to registrar listing]

CLSW W3610 Scandinavian Writing Since The Sixties. 3 pts.
V. Moberg. F 12:00pm - 2:30pm, location to be announced.
This course will examine the literature of the five Nordic nations (through English translations) from the 1960s to the present-a period marked by a flourishing experimentation (e.g., new political poetry, documentarism, satires of bureaucracy, and political-historical fiction) as well as a reaffirmation of traditional forms (epics of generations of welfare-state citizens, psychological dramas, and poems of elegant imagery, word play, and symbolism). Writers read will include Peter Høeg and Inger Christiansen from Denmark; Gerd. Brantenberg, Torbjørg Wassmo, and Knut Faldbakken from Norway; Kerstin Ekman, P. O. Enquist, Göran Palm, P. C. Jersild, Tomas Tranströmer, Kristina Lugn, Lars Norén, Sara Lidman, and Anna-Karin Palm from Sweden; Märta Tikkanen from Finland; and Hrafnhildur Hagalin from Iceland. [Link to registrar listing]

WMST W4300 Gender & Genre in African Literature. 4 pts.
J. Slaughter. T 4:10pm-6:00pm, location to be announced.
Gender and literary genre are both socially and culturally contingent categories, and historically there seem to be some general affinities between particular genres of literature (e.g., epic, novel, tragedy, epistolary fiction, memoir, Bildungsroman, parables, the sentimental novel) and gender. This course will explore the intersections of gender and genre in African literature from the past half century. We will consider not only the construction, transformation, and invention of gender roles from the colonial to the postcolonial periods as they have been represented in African literature, but also the ways in which gender itself becomes associated with, and finds expression in, particular story forms. In each of the texts we will read, questions of gender identity are central: what does it mean to be a woman or a man (or something else) in colonial society, in the decolonization struggle, under a dictatorship, in the era of globalization? Along with African and Africanist theoretical writings on gender, we will read literary texts from across the continent. Likely authors: Achebe, Adichie, Aidoo, Bâ, ben Jelloun, Dangarembga, Djebar, Emecheta, Farah, Liking, Macgoye, Magona, Mda, Sembène, Soyinka, Vera, Wicomb, and popular market literature. To apply for the seminar, please send an email to professor Slaughter (jrs272@columbia.edu) responding to the following prompts: 1) What is your interest in the course? 2) What relevant background do you have? 3) What do you hope to get from the course? 4) Characterize your class participation in a discussion-based seminar. [Link to registrar listing]

>> Graduate-level joint courses

CLAN G4143 Cultures of Accusations. 3 pts.
R. Morris. Tu 4:10-6pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLEN G4995 Reading Lacan. 3 pts.
M. Jaanus. Tu 2:10pm - 4:00pm, location to be announced.
This semester we will study selections from the late Lacan: Seminar XX Encore (On feminine sexuality) and beyond to Seminars XXI The non-dupes err/The names of the father (Les non-dupes errent/Le nom-du-père), XX R.S.I. and XXIII Sinthome together with essays by Jacques-Alain Miller and Badiou and modern and postmodern novels and short stories. Emphasis on the relevance of Lacan’s thought to literature and culture, and to questions of neuroscience, capitalism, democracy, and happiness. Undergraduates are welcome to enroll in the course; if they cannot do so automatically, they should see Michael Mallick in the Columbia English Dept. (602 Philosophy Hall) for an approval slip to take to the registrar. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN G6128 The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy. 3 pts.
K. Eden. W 4:10-6pm.
Taking as its point of departure the recovery by Renaissance humanists of key ancient texts, including letter collections, rhetorical manuals and school exercises, this seminar will explore early modern reading and writing practices for a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy. Writers featured will range from Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian to Petrarch, Erasmus and Montaigne. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN G6300 Black Radicalism and the Archive. 3 pts.
B. Edwards. W 2:10-4pm.
This seminar will focus on theorizing the particular contours of radical knowledge production among African diasporic intellectuals in the twentieth century. We will read key works of African, Caribbean, and African American cultural and political movements, with particular attention to the relations between politics and poesis, and the ways that the exigencies of anticolonialism, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism have provoked methodological innovation in interdisciplinary work. We will focus especially on the implications of black radicalism for theories of the archive; to this end, we will not only read current scholarship on the issue, but also take advantage of recent acquisitions of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, including the papers of C.L.R. James, Hubert Harrison, and Amiri Baraka. Participants will be expected to pursue original archival research in their work for the seminar. Readings may include work W.E.B. Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, C.L.R. James, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, and Sylvia Wynter; and secondary scholarship by Cedric Robinson, David Scott, Robert Hill, Nikhil Pal Singh, Stuart Hall, Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, and Joy James. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN G6550 Theory, Religion, Culture. 3 pts.
G. Viswanathan. W 4:10-6pm.
This seminar takes a close look at the religious turn in critical theory. Despite what the secularization thesis says, religion has not declined in contemporary life and continues to exert influence, at times leading to situations of conflict but at other times refocusing attention on the terms by which identity and selfhood are imagined. How does one reconcile religious sensibility with the demands of multiculturalism and pluralism? How does religion constitute subjects and conceptualize their relation to and responsibilities in the world? These are pressing questions in the work of theorists from Derrida and Levinas to Caputo and Vattimo, who have taken up the challenge of understanding the place of religion in a world that presumably renders it irrelevant. This course will explore various theoretical approaches to religion in modernity and include readings on topics such as: religious subjectivity and the politics of belief; the place of imagination in the evolution of religions; theories of secularism; religion, postcolonialism, and postmodernism; world religions, heterodoxy, and alternative spiritual movements. Readings will include works by Weber, Derrida, C. Taylor, M. Taylor, Levinas, Caputo, Vattimo, Asad, Viswanathan, among others. [Link to registrar listing]

CLEN G6910 Theater and Philosophy. 3 pts.
M. Puchner. M 2:10-4pm.
This course focuses on philosophical reflections on the theater, as well as dramatic dialogues, the theater of ideas, and theatricality in philosophical works. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Shaw, Burke, Stoppard, Murdoch, Badiou. [Link to registrar listing]

CLFR G8730 Lévi-Strauss on Trial. 3 pts.
V. Debaene. Th 4:10-6pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLGR W4207 Aesthetics Under Siege: the Frankfurt School. (in English) 3 pts.
A. Huyssen. TuTh 2:40p - 3:55p, 516 Hamilton Hall.
Study of the aesthetic theories of the Frankfurt School and related critics in their historical context. Works by Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács, Krakauer, and Habermas. [Link to registrar listing]

CLGR G4740 Enlightenment and Religion. (in English) 3 pts.
D. von Mücke. W 2:10-4pm.
Recent research in the area of eighteenth-century studies has come to the conclusion that the historical period known as the Enlightenment cannot be adequately understood merely in its opposition to religion as a form of irrationality and superstition. Quite to the contrary, the discussion of religion constitutes an important aspect of an Enlightenment philosophy of culture. In this course we shall read prominent texts by Enlightenment philosophers addressing religion. We shall analyze how philosophers and critics committed to the Enlightenment viewed religion critically, but also how they pursued models for religious tolerance, how they dealt with religion as an integral part of any historical culture, and how they viewed the tensions between different belief systems, between professed creed and ethical systems, between dogma and practice, between institutional religion and privately held beliefs. Students who can do so, are encouraged to read the primary texts in their original languages, but class discussion will be held in English. [Link to registrar listing]

CLHS G8420 The Hermeneutic Tradition. 3 pts.
P. Force. Tu 4:10-6pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLIA W4790 Italian Literature in a Global Context. 3 pts.
A. Malaguti. MW 2:40-3:55pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLME W4200 Themes in the Arabic Novel. (in English) 3 pts.
N. Radwan. MW 1:10pm-2:25pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLME G4224 Islam in Modern Arabic Literature. 3 pts.
R 11am-12:50pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLME W4304 The Politics of World Art History: The Case of Armenian Medieval Art. 3 pts.
V. Azatyan. MW 4:10-6pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLME G4444 Secularism and Its Critics. 3 pts.
M. Allan. Tu 11am-12:50pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLME G6320 Classical Arabic Literature. (Arabic proficiency required) 3 pts.
N. Radwan. W 4:10-6pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLRS W4017 Chekhov. 3 pts.
C. Popkin. TR 2:40-3:55pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLSL G4015 Discovery of Language. 3 pts.
M. Holquist. M 4:10-6pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLSL W4995 Central European Jewish Writers. 3 pts.
I. Sanders. TuTh 6:10-7:25pm.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLSW W4270 Scandinavian Folklore and Folklife. 3 pts.
H. P. Larsen. TuTh 9:10-10:25am.
[Link to registrar listing]

CLYD G4200 America in Yiddish, Yiddish in America. (in English) 3 pts.
A. Quint. W 11am-12:50pm.
[Link to registrar listing]