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
CLEA W4101 Literary and Cultural Theory East and West. 3 pts.
L. Liu. Th 2:10p – 4:00p, location to be announced.
Introduction to the major paradigms of contemporary literary and cultural theory and methods for understanding and analyzing East Asian literature and culture within comparative frameworks. The course covers wide-ranging topics including text and context, genre, writing and orality, narrative theory, media and visual culture, cultural translation, feminism, social and national identity, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3208 Modern Comparative Fiction. 3 pts.
B. Robbins. TuTh 10:35a – 11:50a, location to be announced.
The near-contemporary fiction of the second half of the 20th century, sometimes described as postmodern, seeks like its predecessors to mesh the novelistic intimacies of life and love with some response to the world-historical events of its time: World War II, the Holocaust, the collapse of the European empires, and so on. Authors will include some of the following: Beckett, Salih, Calvino, Duras, Grass, Lessing, Kundera, Pynchon, Rushdie, Kincaid, and Ondaatje. Requirements: Regular attendance at lectures; two papers, 4-5 pages each, topics to be assigned (each paper worth 33% of grade); final exam (33% of grade).
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3220 Science Fiction. 3 pts.
L. Kucukalic. TuTh 1:10p – 2:25p, location to be announced.
This course will offer a historical survey of canonical science fiction novels and short stories from the turn of the century, through the "pulp fiction" period of the 1920s-1940s, the Golden Age era of the 1950s, the New Wave works of the 1960s and the 1970s, the Cyberpunk movement of the 1980s, to the current writings at the turn of the 21st century (probably best described as a hybrid between mainstream and science fiction literature). Science fiction has a broad reach in popular culture and is often considered a field that includes "Star Trek" as well as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." In this course, we will focus on literary science fiction, not the broader media output rooted in the genre. The authors to be studied include: H. G. Wells, A. E. Van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, James Blish, Thomas Disch, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The course will feature a comparison between Russian and American science fiction and an overview of theoretical approaches. Students will apply these critical approaches to the novels and stories read throughout the semester. The students' final grade will be based upon three short papers, a midterm, a final exam, participation, and a brief class presentation.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3244 Studies in Medieval Literature II: Chivalry and Love. 3 pts.
S. Crane. TuTh 4:10p – 5:25p, location to be announced.
The Middle Ages introduced two durable ideals into the social life of western Europe. This course studies the development and interrelation of chivalry and romantic love, as these ideals are expounded in the literature of aristocratic courts in England and France. Readings include romances of Tristan and Lancelot, the Arthurian lays of Marie de France, and Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Two seven-page papers on assigned topics, midterm, and final examination.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3792 Realism at the Global Scale. 4 pts.
B. Robbins. Th 2:10p – 4:00 p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Critic James Wood, in a review of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, objects to such features as "a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN) ... a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992, and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time." "A parody," he says, "would go like this. If a character is introduced in London (call him Toby Aknotuby, i.e. "To be or not to be"-ha!), then we will swiftly be told that Toby has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt: an anagram of Toby, of course) who, like Toby, has the very same curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell's Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell's Angels group, devoted only to the fanatical study of very late Wordsworth), and that their mad left-wing aunt, Delilah, was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and has not spoken a word since." Wood is suggesting that large, multi-plotted, ambitious novels like Smith's are not realistic. One answer to him might go as follows: such novels are in fact trying to be realistic, but realistic at the global scale- realistic about a world in which much that happens in any one place is determined over the horizon, in some very different and distant place that the characters here may never visit or even know about and yet that the author does not have the luxury of ignoring. In short, they are attempting to follow E. M. Forster's advice, "only connect," and doing so in a new and strenuous way. This is the proposition that will guide the seminar. Readings will include works by Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Junot Diaz, and Orhan Pamuk, among others. Requirements: 1) weekly reading journal, 1 to 2 pages double-spaced, on the novel to be discussed that day, hard copy submitted in class; 2) a paper of 10-12 pages, topic to be negotiated, due after the end of classes; 3) regular attendance and oral participation.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W3950 Topics in Theory: Subject of Desire—Law, Literature, Film. 4 pts.
K. Lamb. T 11:00a – 12:50p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course takes as its focus the emergence of new styles of sexual self-description and experience in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using literature, law, and film as points of entry to these historical shifts, we will consider how different forms of representation propagate and contest the frequently contradictory views of humans as inescapably subject to -- and yet articulate brokers and narrators of -- their own desires. Formal analysis of novels, short stories, plays, and films will be combined with an introduction to major theoretical, critical, and legal texts on sexuality. Possible writers, directors, and theorists whose works we will discuss include: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Herman Melville, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Musil, Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, Lillian Hellman, Pedro Almodóvar, John Cameron Mitchell, John Greyson, Sigmund Freud, Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Michael Warner.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W4015 Textual Analysis: Vernacular Paleography. 3 pts.
C. Baswell. MW 9:10a – 10:50a, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Lecture). This course will survey the history of the manuscript book from the Carolingians to the early years of printing (9th -15th century). Students will study the questions that have driven the field of paleography since its inception, and the canonical history of the main scripts used in Western Europe during the later Middle Ages. We will consider the manuscript book as a physical artifact, in a codicological approach; and we will look at the production of books in their social and political settings. Students will develop practical skills in reading and transcription, and will begin to recognize the features that allow localization and dating of manuscripts. We will use original materials from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library whenever possible. Students will be expected to have a basic knowledge of Latin.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN W4822 19th Century European Fiction: Country and City in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel. 3 pts.
M. Cohen. TuTh 1:10p – 2:25p, location to be announced.
A survey of touchstone nineteenth-century European novels, this class will explore the relationship of the realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams's phrase "knowable communities," how do fictions of the city and fictions of the country represent youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism? Readings include Balzac's Père Goriot, Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Austen's Persuasion, Dickens' Oliver Twist, Eliot's Middlemarch, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLFR W3830 Cultural Studies: French Film. 3 pts.
P. Watts. TuTh 2:40p – 3:55p & Th 4:10p – 5:25p (Film Screenings in English), location to be announced.
A study of landmarks of French cinema from its origins to the 1970s. We will pay particular attention to the relation between cinema and social and political events in France. We will study films by Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Rene Clair, Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLIA V3660 Mafia Movies: From Sicily to the Sopranos. 3 pts.
N. Moe. W 6:10p – 10:00p, location to be announced.
Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings include novels, historical studies, and film criticism. Readings and discussion in English. Optional readings in Italian. [Link to registrar listing]
CLPL W4120 The Polish Short Story in a Comparative Context. 3 pts.
A. Frajlich-Zajac. M 4:10p – 6:00p, location to be announced.
The course examines the beginnings of the Polish short story in the 19th century and its development through the late 20th century, including exemplary works of major Polish writers of each period. It is also a consideration of the short story form--its generic features, its theoretical premises, and the way these respond to the stylistic and philosophical imperatives of successive periods. [Link to registrar listing]
CLRS V3119 Novel in the US/USSR 1925-1940. 3 pts.
K. Holt. TuTh 2:40p – 3:55p, location to be announced.
Using novels as our primary sources, we will examine the massive social upheavals experienced in the US and USSR during the onslaught of the Great Depression and the rise of High Stalinism. The syllabus includes texts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Yuri Olesha, William Faulkner, Andrei Platonov, John Dos Passos, Valentine Kataev, John Steinbeck, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Richard Wright, as well as supplementary readings in history and literary theory. All readings in English.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLRS W4155 History of Russian & Soviet Cinema. 3 pts.
C. Nepomnyashchy. TuTh 6:10p – 7:25p, location to be announced.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLSW W3260 Scandinavia in Drama/Film. 3 pts.
V. Moberg. F 12:00p – 2:30p, Deutsches Haus.
A review and analysis of outstanding Scandinavian contributions to drama and film, from the beginnings of the Danish theatre in the 1700s, through Ibsen and Strindberg in the 19th century, up to recent cinematic works. Taught in English. One course offered each semester. Students with knowledge of Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish are encouraged to read the texts in the original.
[Link to registrar listing]
Back to Top
>> Graduate-level joint courses
CLAN G4143 Cultures of Accusation. 3 pts.
R. Morris. T 2:10p – 4:00 p, location to be announced.
This course examines the politics and practices of collective accusation in comparative perspective. It treats these phenomena in their relation to processes of political and economic transition, to discourses of crisis, and to the practices of rule by which the idea of exception is made the grounds for extreme claims on and for the social body usually, but not exclusively, enacted through forms of expulsion. We will consider the various theoretical perspectives through which forms of collective accusation have been addressed, focusing on psychoanalytic, structural functional, and poststructuralist readings. In doing so, we will also investigate the difference and possible continuities between the forms and logics of accusation that operate in totalitarian as well as liberal regimes. Course readings will include both literary and critical texts.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN G6028 Topics in Medieval Literature: Medieval Animals. 3 pts.
S. Crane. Th 11:00a – 12:50a, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Seminar). The intellectual and political turbulence around the animal question in our own time provides new vantage points from which to consider how animals figure in medieval writing. This course organizes medieval readings around theoretical readings stemming from three major arenas of contemporary thought on animals. First, in philosophical critiques, the inadequacy of defining humanness as difference from animality is argued in Derrida’s reinterpretation of Adam’s naming of the animals, and in wider critiques of the compulsion to differentiate when conceiving human-animal relations. Second, environmental studies urge the pervasive importance of animals (their labor, skills, skins, and protein) in a wide range of technologies such as warmaking, bookmaking, hunting, and fashion. Third, philosophers take contending positions on ethical responsibility in the utilitarian tradition, in the differently oriented traditions of duties and contracts, and in recent emphasis on the neighbor: do humans have ethical relationships to other animals, or is the conjunction unthinkable? Medieval theologians align themselves with the latter position, while medieval vernacular writing sometimes anticipates contemporary thought in its awareness of animal suffering and its location of animals inside the ethical circle. Medieval literary texts may include beast fables, bestiaries, lives of St. Cuthbert and St. Francis, and romances of the Knight of the Lion and Knight of the Swan. Theoretical readings may include works of Augustine, Aquinas, Foucault, Levinas, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Singer, and Eco. In conjunction, the readings will inform our discussion of how the animal question might be theorized in medieval studies. Course requirements include weekly postings on the seminar’s shared readings, a workshop presentation of a research project, and a research paper of about 25 pages.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN G6537 Embodiment: Ancient, Medieval, Postmodern. 3 pts.
P. Dailey M 4:10p – 6:00p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course explores how the body, the senses, interiority, and materiality are constructed in ancient and medieval literary, philosophical, and religious texts and how they are connected with hermeneutic and cognitive practices. Texts from antiquity include Aristotle, Paul, Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Theodore of Mopsuestia; texts from the Middle Ages include the Old English Body and Soul and The Ruin, Old English riddles, William of St. Thierry, Rudolf von Biberach, Guigo II, Marguerite d'Oingt, Hadewijch, Ida of Louvain, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St. Victor, Richard of St. Victor, and Bonaventure. The course will also look at how medieval readings of embodiment dialogue with, are commesurate to, or differ from readings of materiality and embodiment in Hegel, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas Derrida, Nancy, Lyotard, Negri, Agamben, and Butler. What kind of "radical" materialities do we find in the post-Marxist thinkers like Negri, or of Agamben? Given the tendency in the wave of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) to think of embodiment as a kind of radical interpentetration of world and body, what differences do we find in the revision to phenomenology evidenced by thinkers such as Lyotard, Derrida, and Nancy? How do the "materialities" in medieval mystical texts and their theological counterparts compare?
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN G6550 Cultural Studies: Trauma, Terror, and Performance. 3 pts.
M. Hirsch. W 4:10p – 6:00p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructors. (Seminar). This course explores the interconnections between trauma, terror, memory, and performance through three major 20th and 21st c. events - the Holocaust, Argentina's 'Dirty War,' and the United States's post 9/11 "war on terror " - and the theoretical questions they raise. Do they each have their own unique structure and idiom, or can we think about individual and collective trauma through a trans-local, cosmopolitan lens? Topics include: the performance of state power and state sponsored terror; the individual and collective nature of trauma; the effects of gender, race and power on trauma and memory; embodied practices such as testimony and witnessing, their use in literature, museums, pedagogy, and performance, and their archivization; the relation of torture and truth; the social role of sites of memory and memorialization (Auschwitz, Club Atlético, Ground Zero, Guantanamo, etc.); theaters of justice such as trials, tribunals and truth commissions; performances of protest and resistance. This course draws from classic and recent readings at the juncture of trauma, memory, and performance studies. To build on the paradigms suggested by the Holocaust, Argentina's 'Dirty War,' and the U.S. after 9/11, students will be encouraged to extend the topics explored in class to other sites. Please note that this is a consortium course which will alternate meetings at Columbia and NYU. Students need to figure travel time into their plans. We plan to meet on Wednesdays from 4 -6:30. During the semester, several evening talks and seminars will be organized in conjunction with the course, both at Columbia and NYU.
Application Instructions: To apply for the seminar, please send a paragraph stating your interest and preparation to Professor Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) by November 15.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN G6566 Studies in Modern Comparative Literature II: Theory, Religion and Culture. 3 pts.
G. Viswanathan, W 4:10p – 6:00p, location to be announced.
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.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN G6706 Media Theory. 3 pts.
K. Biers. W 2:10p – 4:00p, 612 Philosophy Hall.
Can theater be described as a medium? What is the relationship between theater and mechanically reproducible media? What is, or should be, the role of theater in an age of mass culture? European and American plays and films from the twentieth century, including works by Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Caryl Churchill, Susan Glaspell, Jerzy Grotowski, D.W. Griffith, Clifford Odets, and The Wooster Group. Theoretical readings by Walter Benjamin, Peter Brooks, Jürgen Habermas, Siefried Kracauer, Richard Sennett, and Samuel Weber. Article-length seminar paper and presentation required. Students will also be required to submit drafts of their final papers to workshop with the group during the final weeks of class.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLEN G6920 Perspectives on the Modern: Modernity, Terminable and Interminable. 3 pts.
S. Gourgouris. Th 2:10p – 4:00p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Seminar). Description pending.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLGR G6820 Theory & History of Media. 3 pts.
S. Andriopoulos. W 4:10p – 6:00 p, location to be announced.
This course will examine the theory and history of media.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLME G4106 Culture and Power in Iraqi Literature. 3 pts.
M. Al-Musawi. W 11:00a – 12:50p, location to be announced.
This course attempts to meet the increasing need to know Iraqi culture. Through a number of typical Iraqi texts since the Epic of Gilgamesh, the question of power relations and cultural dynamics will be a way to map out an intellectual itinerary of the most ancient civilization and its subsequent histories until the modern period.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLME G4227 The Islamic Context of the Arabian Nights since the Establishment of Baghdad. 3 pts.
M. Al-Musawi. Th 11:00a - 12:50p, location to be announced.
Prerequisites: No prior knowledge of Arabic language is required. This course questions the popular assumption that the tales of the Thousand and One Nights lack any Islamic content and that their fantastic or erotic dimensions are the only dynamic narrative components behind the vogue. This collection is read against a number of contemporaneous writings (in English translation), including al-Hamadan's Manama, to discuss issues that relate to market inspectorships, economy, social order, marginal groups like the mad, the use of public space including the hammed, and the position on fate, destiny, time, afterlife, sex and love. The course takes its starting point from classical Arabic narratives, poetry and epistolary art and follows up the growth of this repository as it conveys, reveals, or debates Islamic tenets and jurists' stand. The course aspires to provide students with a solid and wide range of information and knowledge on Islamic culture since the emergence of the Islamic center in Baghdad (b. 762). Students are expected to develop a critical method and insightful analysis in dealing with the text, its contemporaneous works from among the belletristic tradition and popular lore, its adaptations, and use and misuse in Arabic culture since the ninth century.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLME G6231 Studies in Modern Arabic Literature. 3 pts.
N. Radwan. M 4:10p - 6:00p, 403 Knox Hall.
This is a course designed to help students who are at the high intermediate and advanced level of reading in Arabic language to read modern Arabic literary works, in both poetry and prose. Class discussions will focus on the qualities and subtleties of these works that might be lost in translation.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLPS G4200 The Core Concepts of Freud’s Thinking. 4 pts.
J. Whitebook. T 2:10p - 4:00p, location to be announced.
The course will provide a systematic introduction to the basic thoughts of Sigmund Freud. It will follow the received convention and approach his work in terms of the three rather distinct periods of his career. The first section will explore how psychoanalysis grew out Freud’s study of hysteria and work with hypnosis and how he finally arrived at the topographical model with The Interpretation of Dreams. The second section will examine the upheavals of the second period, especially those having to do with the introduction of narcissism, and how they created the paradigm crisis that led to the next stage. With the third section, we will not only examine the introduction of the structural model and the death instinct, but also how these revisions made his late cultural writings possible. The approach of the course will be historical in two senses. First, we will always emphasize the continuously evolving nature of Freud’s thinking and how each idea must be placed in its proper historical concept. Second, special attention will be paid to the historical and cultural context within which Freud’s work was developing and how it affecting his thinking. [Link to registrar listing]
CLRS G6110 Discourse of Self in Russia/West. 3 pts.
R. Stanton. W 4:10p – 6:00p, location to be announced.
The evolution of self-narrative in Russian literature, including both fiction and non-fiction, in comparison with canonical Western texts. Emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical tensions inherent in the project of self-narration, the ways in which major Russian and Western authors addressed these problems, and parallels between personal and national self-definition.
[Link to registrar listing]
CLSP G6107 Medieval Iberian Saints. 3 pts.
P. Grieve. T 12:10p – 2:00p, 505 Casa Hispánica.
Prerequisites: Reading knowledge of Spanish. This course studies the literary, historical, religious and social conditions that produced Latin and Spanish broadly defined hagiographical narratives of the Iberian peninsula from the fifth century to the fifteenth, and considers the relationship between the production of hagiography and the development of popular and learned prose fiction in the medieval and early modern periods. We have learned over the past twenty years or so that hagiographic narratives provide windows into medieval beliefs and daily lives, and they have been particularly fruitful areas of study for our understanding of women and gender. In several cases, we will look at Greek, Latin, and French antecedents to the Spanish texts. Topics will include: Christian martyrs in al-Andalus, and Muslim converts to Christianity; relics and the trafficking of relics, authenticated and fake, and the special role of relics to nation-building; early Christian women's travel narratives and how male confessors framed the women's stories; martyrdom, miracles, pious lives; differences between male and female saints and their stories, monasticism, asceticism, and the function of time/space/ and place in hagiography; the relationship of Marian worship to courtly literature, and of both to the stories of converted prostitutes and secular misogynistic literature of the Middle Ages; historical documentation of peasants' visions of saints and the Virgin Mary in thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century Castile. Reading knowledge of Spanish required, but the other texts are available in the original language and in English translation.
[Link to registrar listing]
Back to Top
