World Literatures

CLS 233 Gender and Sexuality in Greco-Roman Culture (4 Credits)

The construction of gender, sexuality, and erotic experience is one of the major sites of difference between Greco-Roman culture and our own. What constituted a proper man and a proper woman in these ancient societies? Which sexual practices and objects of desire were socially sanctioned and which considered deviant? What ancient modes of thinking about these issues have persisted into the modern world? Attention to the status of women; the role of social class; the ways in which genre and convention shaped representation; the relationship between representation and reality. {H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

CLS 260/ WLT 260 Colloquium: Transformations of a Text: Shape-Shifting and the Role of Translation (4 Credits)

Offered as CLS 260 and WLT 260. Whose work are you reading when you encounter a text in translation? How is the author’s voice modulated through the translator’s? What constitutes a "faithful" or a "good" translation? How do the translator’s language and culture, the expectations of the target audience, and the marketplace determine what gets translated and how? We consider different translations of the same text, including rogue translations, adaptations and translations into other forms (opera, musicals, film). Students produce their own translations or adaptations. WLT 150 recommended. Enrollment limited to 20.

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

EAL 232/ WLT 232 Modern Chinese Literature (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 232 and EAL 232. Can literature inspire personal and social transformation? How have modern Chinese writers pursued freedom, fulfillment, memory and social justice? From short stories and novels to drama and film, we explore class, gender and the cultures of China, Taiwan, Tibet and the Chinese diaspora. Readings are in English translation and no background in China or Chinese is required. Open to students at all levels. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

EAL 239/ WLT 239 Intimacy in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Fiction (4 Credits)

Offered as EAL 239 and WLT 239. How do stories about love, romance and desire (including extramarital affairs, serial relationships and love between women) challenge our assumptions about identity? How do pursuits, successes and failures of intimacy lead to personal and social change? An exploration of major themes through close readings of contemporary fiction by women from China, Taiwan and Chinese diasporas. Readings are in English translation and no background in China or Chinese is required. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 171/ WLT 272 Composing a Self: Chinese and English Voices (4 Credits)

Offered as ENG 171 and WLT 272. Is the self a story? How do we translate ourselves into multiple personas in different locations and contexts? How do we speak to others with diverse beliefs or ourselves at new times? To learn, students read and compose short texts in Chinese, translate them into English, and consider the art and politics of translation. Working in public-facing genres (memoir, narrative nonfiction, journalism, short stories, social media and multimedia projects), students develop their creative writing in both Chinese and English, as well as understandings of Chinese cultures and of literary and cultural translation. Discussion in Chinese and English. Chinese fluency required. One WI course highly recommended. Enrollment limited to 16. {F}{L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ENG 202/ WLT 202 Western Classics in Translation I: Homer to Dante (4 Credits)

Offered as ENG 202 and WLT 202. Considers works of literature, mostly from the ancient world, that have had a significant influence over time. May include: epics by Homer and Virgil; tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Plato’s Symposium; Dante’s Divine Comedy." Enrollment limited to 20. WI {L}

Fall

ENG 203/ WLT 203 Western Classics in Translation II: Renaissance to Modern (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 203 and ENG 203. Considers works of literature from different linguistic and cultural traditions that have had a significant influence over time. May include Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy, Ibsen and others. Enrollment limited to 20. WI {L}

Spring

ENG 207/ HSC 207 The Technology of Reading and Writing (4 Credits)

Offered as ENG 207 and HSC 207. An introductory exploration of the physical forms that knowledge and communication have taken in the West, from ancient oral cultures to modern print-literate culture. The main interest is in discovering how what is said and thought in a culture reflects its available kinds of literacy and media of communication. Discussions to include poetry and memory in oral cultures; the invention of writing; the invention of prose; literature and science in a script culture; the coming of printing; changing concepts of publication, authorship and originality; movements toward standardization in language; and the fundamentally transformative effects of electronic communication. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ENG 225 Hybrid Genres: Experiments in Literary Form (4 Credits)

This literature course explores texts that experiment with the boundaries of genre and form, or with combining different genres, from documentary poetics to the essay film to the graphic novel memoir. Upsetting the conventional distinctions between word and image, fact and fiction, and poetry and history, these hybrid texts ask us to rethink how form and genre work, and what students might learn from their undoing. Students will respond to the readings with their own hybrid essays. Readings will include texts by Alison Bechdel, William Blake, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jamaica Kincaid, Maggie Nelson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Claudia Rankine. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ENG 230/ JUD 230 American Jewish Literature (4 Credits)

Offered as JUD 230 and ENG 230. Explores the significant contributions and challenges of Jewish writers and critics to American literature, broadly defined. Topics include the American dream and its discontents; immigrant fiction; literary multilingualism; ethnic satire and humor; crises of the left involving 60s radicalism and Black-Jewish relations; after-effects of the Holocaust. Must Jewish writing remain on the margins, too ethnic for the mainstream yet insufficient for contemporary gatekeepers of diversity? No prerequisites. {H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 237 Colloquium: Environmental Poetry and Ecological Thought (4 Credits)

This course considers how literature represents environmental change and crisis, and shapes our understanding of the natural world. How can poetry provide new ways for thinking through extinction, conservation, and environmental justice? We explore these issues by reading a selection of environmental poetry in conversation with key texts from the environmental humanities. Central to the discussions: the sublime and the aesthetics of landscape and wilderness; garbage and the poetics of waste; the ethics of representing animal and plant life; the relation between landscape, labor, and power; and how eco-poetry intervenes in debates about climate change. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 241 The Empire Writes Back: Postcolonial Literature (4 Credits)

Introduction to Anglophone fiction, poetry, drama and memoir from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia in the aftermath of the British empire. Concerns include the cultural and political work of literature in response to histories of colonial and racial dominance; writers' ambivalence towards English linguistic, literary and cultural legacies; ways literature can (re)construct national identities and histories and address dominant notions of race, class, gender and sexuality; women writers' distinctiveness and modes of contesting patriarchal and colonial ideologies; and global diasporas, migration, globalization and U.S. imperialism. Readings include Achebe, Adichie, Aidoo, Dangarembga, Walcott, Cliff, Rushdie, Ghosh, Lahiri, Hamid and others. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 271/ GER 271 Imagining Evil (4 Credits)

Offered as GER 271 and ENG 271. This course explores how artists and thinkers over the centuries have grappled with the presence of evil--how to account for its perpetual recurrence, its ominous power, its mysterious allure. Standing at the junction of literature, philosophy, and religion, the notion of evil reveals much about the development of the autonomous individual, the intersection of morality, freedom and identity, and the confrontation of literary and historical evil. Readings include literary works from Milton, Goethe, Blake, Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Tolkien, Le Guin; theoretical texts from Augustine, Luther, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt. Conducted in English. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 274 The Pleasures of Not Thinking: Romanticism and the Irrational (4 Credits)

Romantic writers were obsessed with uncertainty, ignorance and the irrational, unthinking mind. Concerned with the unusual ideas that surface when one is sleeping or spaced out, absorbed or intoxicated, Romanticism embraced reason’s alternatives: forgetting, fragmentation, stupidity and spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion. From Wordsworth’s suggestion that children are wiser than adults, to Keats’s claim that great writers are capable of remaining uncertain without reaching for fact or reason, Romantic poets and novelists suggested that one has something to learn from not thinking. Students read texts by Austen, Blake, Burke, Coleridge, Cowper, De Quincey, Freud, Kant, Keats, Locke and Rousseau. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 280/ WLT 280 Historical Memory and the Global Novel (4 Credits)

Offered as ENG 280 and WLT 280. This course explores the relationship between history and memory in a series of post-WW2 “global” novels, texts that somehow straddle or transcend national traditions and marketplaces. This course interrogates how art might ethically engage with—or seek refuge from—historical “events” such as colonial and post-colonial violence, total/nuclear war, authoritarian military coups, global terrorism, trans-Atlantic slavery and the Holocaust. Major course themes include the relationship between the personal and the historical, the national and the global, the generational transfer of trauma, feelings of guilt and complicity, and the idea of historical memory itself. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

FYS 107 Women of the Odyssey (4 Credits)

Homer’s Odyssey presents a gallery of memorable women: Penelope above all, but also Nausicaa, Calypso and Circe. Helen plays a cameo role, while Clytemnestra is regularly invoked as a negative example. Together these women define a spectrum of female roles and possibilities: the faithful wife, the bride-to-be, the temptress, the adulteress, the murderer. The course begins with a careful reading of the Odyssey, then studies the afterlife of its female characters in the Western literary tradition. Readings are drawn from authors both ancient (Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid) and modern (H.D., Robert Graves, Louise Glück, Margaret Drabble). This course counts toward the classics, classical studies and study of women and gender majors. Enrollment limited to 16 first-years. WI

Fall, Spring, Variable

FYS 165 Childhood in African Literature (4 Credits)

A study of childhood as an experience in the present and as a transition into adulthood, and of the ways in which it is intimately tied to social, political and cultural histories, and to questions of self and national identity. How does the violence of colonialism and decolonization reframe our understanding of childhood innocence? How do African childhood narratives represent such crises as cultural alienation, loss of language, exile and memory? How do competing national and cultural ideologies shape narratives of childhood? Texts include Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Weep Not Child and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child. Enrollment limited to 16 first-years. WI {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

FYS 167 Viking Diaspora (4 Credits)

The Norse colonies of Iceland and Greenland and the attempted settlement of Vinland in North America were the first European societies of the New World, revealing patterns of cultural conflict and adaptation that anticipated British colonization of the mid-Atlantic seaboard seven centuries later. This course compares the strengths and weaknesses of the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, founded in 930, with the 1787 Constitution of the United States, both political systems facing serious crises within two generations. Sources for these experimental communities are the oral memories of founding families preserved in the later Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders) of the 13th century. This course counts toward the world literatures, English and medieval studies majors. Enrollment limited to 16 first-years. WI

Fall, Spring, Variable

GER 231wc Topics in German Cinema-Weimar Cinema (4 Credits)

During the brief period between the fall of the Kaiser and the rise of the Nazis, Germany was a hotbed of artistic and intellectual innovation, giving rise to an internationally celebrated film industry.  With an eye to industrial, political, and cultural forces, this course explores the aesthetic experience of modernity and modernization through formal, narrative, and stylistic analyses of feature films from the "Golden Age" of German cinema. Films by Wiene, Lange, Murnau, Pabst, Ruttmann, Sternberg, Sagan and Riefenstahl. Conducted in English. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

GER 269tr Colloquium: Topics in Transnational German Studies-Transatlantic Romantic (4 Credits)

This course explores cultural exchange between German and the US in the nineteenth century. The class reads Margaret Fuller on Bettina von Arnim, explores the under-examined influence of Emerson on Nietzsche, follows in the footsteps of Thoreau and Goethe. Discussions are driven by student readings and research projects. As the class follows the Romantics’ explorations of nature, the environment, identity, death, gender and the unconscious, students delve into what it means to be human in the modern age and discover why the Romantic moment is still their own. In English, with readings in German available for students of German. Enrollment limited to 18. (E) {H}{L}

Spring, Annually

JUD 260 Colloquium: Yiddish Literature and Culture (4 Credits)

Why did Yiddish, the everyday language of Jews in east Europe and beyond, so often find itself at the bloody crossroads of art and politics? From dybbuks and shlemiels to radicals and revolutionaries, the course explores Yiddish stories, drama, and film as sites for social activism, ethnic and gender performance, and artistic experimentation in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Americas. How did post-Holocaust engagements with Yiddish memorialize a lost civilization and forge an imagined homeland defined by language and culture rather than borders? All texts in translation. No prerequisites. Enrollment limited to 18. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

JUD 263 Colloquium: The Jewish Graphic Novel (4 Credits)

Traces the history of major antecedents to the graphic novel and related works, including illustrated books, journalistic cartoons, and comics and sequential art. Topics include Jewish secularism; Yiddish theatre and literature; comic strips; comic books; editorial and magazine cartoons; book, magazine, and other forms of illustration; and a range of Jewish graphic novels, primarily from the United States, Canada, and Israel, with some consideration of creators and publications from Europe and the Middle East. {A}{L}

Spring

JUD 362yl Seminar: Topics in Jewish Studies-Yiddishland (4 Credits)

Explores the relationship between East European Jewish history and post-Holocaust and post-Communist memory through the prism of Yiddishland, the dream of a transnational homeland defined by language and culture rather than borders. The seminar includes a course field trip to Poland over March break. Enrollment limited to 15. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required. {H}{L}

Spring, Variable

POR 233 Borderlands of Portuguese: Multilingualism, Language Policy and Identity (4 Credits)

This course considers the shifting borders of Portuguese as a local, national and global language. The course explores language diversity within and across Lusophone countries and communities, noting differences in pronunciation and vocabulary and ways in which some varieties are esteemed and others stigmatized. Th course examines how different institutions have promoted and shaped Portuguese within and beyond officially Portuguese-speaking nations, and addresses multilingualism and ways in which Portuguese interacts with English, Spanish, Cape Verdean Creole and Indigenous languages in Brazil and Africa. Throughout, students consider views of writers and musicians as they reflect upon the language of their creative expression and what it means to be Lusophone in the world today. Course taught in Portuguese. Prerequisite: POR 125 or POR 200, or equivalent. {F}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

POR 381di Seminar: Topics in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies- Decolonial Imaginaries and Aesthetics (4 Credits)

In this seminar we will explore some of the entangled and contested colonial and postcolonial histories of diverse Portuguese-language communities, through the work of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. We will discuss colonialism and its legacies, migratory and diasporic flows, contemporary contours of a Portuguese-language transnationalism, and decolonization as a concept encompassing a range of social activism and as expressed or envisioned in different forms of cultural production. Course conducted in Portuguese. Prerequisite: 200-level course in Brazilian or comparative Lusophone culture and society taught in Portuguese. Enrollment limited to 14. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required. {A}{F}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

RES 126 Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Madmen, Conmen and Government Clerks (4 Credits)

Populated with many unique and eccentric characters--from revolutionary socialists to runaway human noses--nineteenth-century Russian literature displays a startling experimentation and innovation that advanced Russia to the vanguard of Western literature. Encompassing poetry, fiction and journalism, this survey explores how authors such as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov positioned literature at the center of public discourse, as a venue for addressing important philosophical, political, religious and social issues, including gender and class relations; personal and national identity; and the role of the writer in public life. Conducted in English. No previous knowledge of Russian is required. {L}

Fall, Spring, Annually

RES 127 Manuscripts Don't Burn: Literature and Dissent Under Stalin (4 Credits)

Explores how Russian literary culture responded to the tumult and upheaval of the twentieth century, an epoch encompassing the Bolshevik Revolution, two World Wars, the ascent of Stalin, and the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as unprecedented aesthetic innovations. While spanning key artistic movements of the period (including the avant-garde and other modernist tendencies, Socialist Realism, conceptualism, and postmodernism), the survey focuses on Stalinism and its aftermath, considering how Soviet writers developed strategies of dissent and protest in literature. Conducted in English, no previous knowledge of Russian required.

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

RES 264/ WLT 264 Dostoevsky (4 Credits)

Offered as RES 264 and WLT 264. Focuses on close reading of the major novels, short fiction, and journalism of Dostoevsky, one of the greatest writers in modern literature. Combining penetrating psychological insight with the excitement of crime fiction, Dostoevsky’s works explore profound political, philosophical, and religious issues, in a Russia populated by students and civil servants, saints and revolutionaries, writers and madmen. In our close reading of his fiction and nonfiction, we’ll trace the development of Dostoevsky’s style and ideas, considering how these texts engage with issues specific to nineteenth-century Russia, as well as the broader traditions of European literature and intellectual history. In translation. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

RES 273/ WLT 273 Cosmic Cold War: Russian and Western Science Fiction in Political Context (4 Credits)

Offered as RES 273 and WLT 273. How did the "final frontier" of space become a "front" in the Cold War? As the US and USSR competed in the Space Race, science fiction reflected political discourses in literature, film, visual art and popular culture. This course explores Russian and Western science fiction in the contexts of twentieth-century geopolitics and artistic modernism (and postmodernism), examining works by Bogdanov, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Butler, Haraway, Pelevin and others. The survey considers science fiction’s utopian content and political function, as well as critical and dystopian modes of the genre. No prerequisites or knowledge of Russian required; first-year students are welcome to enroll. Enrollment limited to 40. {A}{H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

RES 275 Avant-Garde as Lifestyle: Cinema and Socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (4 Credits)

Explores the avant-garde film traditions of Eastern and Central Europe, including works from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The course focuses on how avant-garde filmmakers engaged with the socialist project in the USSR and Eastern Bloc, and its call for new forms, sites and life practices. The course investigates how avant-garde cinema represents everyday life amidst the public and private spaces of socialism. In approaching the relationship between cinema and space, students consider examples of architecture (Constructivist, Functionalist, Brutalist), as well as theoretical writings by and about the avant-garde. Conducted in English, no prerequisites. {A}{H}{S}

Fall, Spring, Variable

SPN 178/ WLT 178 Naughty Fictional Translators (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 178 and SPN 178. This course focuses on fictional portraits of iconoclastic translators and/or interpreters. The first two months are devoted to a (relatively) "slow reading" of Don Quijote as a pioneer text in terms of attributing a central role to a fictional translator. The third month is devoted to international films and short stories--largely, but not exclusively, from the Spanish-speaking world, which has experienced a remarkable upsurge of "transfictions" (i.e., fictions about translators) since the ‘90s. Taught in English. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

SPN 260dl Topics in Latin American Cultural History-Decolonizing Latin American Literature (4 Credits)

This course offers critical perspectives on colonialism, literatures of conquest and narratives of cultural resistance in the Americas and the Caribbean. Decolonial theories of violence, writing and representation in the colonial context inform the study of literary and cultural production of this period. Readings explore several themes including indigenous knowledge, land and the natural world; orality, literacy and visual cultures; race, rebellion and liberation; slavery, piracy and power; and the coloniality of gender.  Prerequisite:  SPN 220 or equivalent.  Enrollment limited to 19. {F}{H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

SPN 372sb Seminar:Topics in Latin American and Iberian Studies-Blackness in Spain (4 Credits)

We investigate the lives of Spaniards of African origin or individuals who lived in Spain such as: painter Juan de Pareja (Velazquez’s slave) in the 17th century, whose unique portrait by Velazquez hangs at the New York Metropolitan Museum; volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, for example poet Langston Hughes, and nurse Salaria Kea; migrant workers; Smith alumna Lori L. Tharp, author of a travel memoir of her Junior Year Abroad, Kinky Gazpacho (2008), which she describes as a “racial coming of age.” The ultimate goal is to gain understanding of racial relations in Spain and to explore the geology of Western racism. Enrollment limited to 14. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required. {A}{F}

Fall, Spring, Variable

TSX 330/ WLT 330 Capstone Seminar in Translation Studies (4 Credits)

Offered as WLT 330 and TSX 330. The capstone seminar brings together a cohort of concentrators to discuss a final translation project that each student undertakes with the guidance of their adviser in the concentration and to situate the project within the framework of larger questions that the work of translation elicits. The readings focus on renowned practitioners’ reflections on the challenges, beauties and discoveries of translating. Students compare how translations transform the original novel and question the concept of original text as it interacts with the culture and the language into which it is translated. Open to students in the Concentration in Translation Studies and World Literatures. Prerequisite: WLT 150. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors and seniors only. Instructor permission required. {L}

Spring