Finnegans Wake is a work that no one should read alone.

The seminar centers on a reading of James Joyce’s unique, brilliant, and purportedly unreadable novel as an opportunity to engage in comparative literary approaches. Close textual analysis and wild forays into the work’s inexhaustible allusiveness, its etymological digressiveness, its intertextual density, and its sheer delight in musical prose are coupled with a consideration of Joyce’s achievement in relation to European Modernism and twentieth-century disenchantment.

Each session is devoted to reading episodes from the novel collectively. References and allusions are discussed, together with historical and cultural contexts and the ramifications of wordplay, puns, and other verbal devices. There is no expectation of mastering the text. Rather, in confronting this audaciously experimental work, the seminar encourages reading as an open, dynamic and interactive experience.

There are no short essay assignments and no midterm or final exams. Instead, each week, participants submit a one-page explication, reflection, or gloss on a selected sentence from the novel. The format of this assignment will be outlined in the introductory meeting. Grades are determined on the overall quality of these weekly responses, as well as the level of engagement during our weekly sessions.

What role does literary translation play in world-making? What is (un-)translatability? How does the reader determine the “fidelity” of a translation by mediating between author and translator? How might we use the paradigm of self-translation to unravel hierarchies in Translation Studies? In what sense is the source text already a translation? This course uses cases of literary translation and transmediation into and out of modern China, Taiwan, and Latin America to explore the history, theory, and aesthetics of global literary translation and intertextual adaptation. Adopting a transcultural perspective, we will identify key aesthetic and conceptual issues in the field of Translation Studies and explore their implications for politics, canon formation and linguistic evolution. Readings will include selections from Jorge Luis Borges, Susan Bassnett, Itamar Even-Zohar, Andre Lefevere, Suzanne Jill Levine, Efrain Kristal, Emily Apter, Eugene Nida, Gregory Rabassa, Susan Bernofsky, and Yan Fu. We will bridge theory and practice through role-plays, self-translations, podcasts, prize committee deliberations, and a Translate-a-Thon. This course will culminate in a roundtable conference in which students present and workshop their own (collaborative) translations and multimedia adaptations. Source texts of all languages and media are welcomed, though all translations and adaptations will be into English.
Prerequisite: Students must be conversant in at least one non-English language (both written and oral forms).

At certain times, it seems that things simply cannot continue as they have gone before. What then?

This course looks at some collective breaking points—moments when scholarly, artistic, and activist practices come together to respond to urgent sociopolitical crises. The concept of breaking points, on the one hand, refers to the collective experience of a pressing need for change. On the other hand, it speaks to formal experimentation––to practices that break genre conventions or theoretical frameworks. When the conventional forms of thought don’t serve us, how do we build new ones?

Throughout the course, we look at different breaking points, and at the forms of thought that arise from them. For instance, we trace the emergence of happenings and performance art, analyzing how they’re rooted in anti-war activism, and we discuss how Indigenous cultural practices create ways to analyze and stand up to colonialism and imperialism.

As a final project, the students will present a creative scholarly work, in which they experiment with formal boundaries, combining different genres or media.

How does modern Sinophone sci-fi reveal the “dark side” of China’s rise to power? How does Sinophone speculative fiction and its transmediated afterlives chart a reparative vision in the face of ongoing ecological and political crises? How do memories of past traumas intersect with future catastrophes in short stories and novels by Sinophone creators? How does speculative fiction produced by women and nonbinary creators forge an alternative path for human-AI collaboration? How do queer, transgressive, and non-human desires coalesce into a flora-fauna-AI symbiosis? How does contemporary Sinophone sci-fi advance inclusive futures for queer, crip, rural, neurodiverse, non-Han, and otherwise disenfranchised individuals in the face of ongoing exploitation? How do translators of Chinese-sci-fi employ a reparative praxis to transmediate trauma for global audiences?

In this course, we encounter an array of sci-fi and speculative fiction authored by Ken Liu, Cixin Liu, Han Song, Regina Kanyu Wang, Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Gu Shi, Wang Nuonuo, and Chu Xidao, alongside selections by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Italo Calvino, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov (reading selections subject to change). We will also examine multimedia adaptations of contemporary Chinese sci-fi, examining the work’s evolution from page to screen to stage. All readings will be available in English and films will be available either dubbed or with English subtitles. By engaging with material through a variety of written, oral, and multimedia responses, you will co-create reparative futures alongside these speculative creators.

Examines trends, issues and debates in the comparative study of mystical literature. Close readings of primary works by Jewish, Christian and Muslim authors from the Middle Ages through the 16th century. Topics include poetry and mysticism; allegory, symbolism and Scripture; body and gender; apophasis vs cataphasis; exemplarity and autobiographism; language and experience. Also examines creative engagement of pre-modern mystical literature in selected works by modern authors and literary theorists.

Why is it that Jews and discussions of Jewishness appear with such frequency and with such prominence in American culture of the twentieth and the twenty-first century? One can often hear the claim that Hollywood is “owned by Jews.” Many call attention to the number of Jews involved in comics and graphic novels. The State of Israel, and its definition of Judaism, has become an important touchstone in American politics, while antisemitic dog whistles have become commonplace in contemporary political discourse. Contemporary left-wing activists often refer to the legacies—contested or otherwise—of Jewish American labor politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. What can we make of these intersecting and surprising references to Jews/Judaism/Jewishness in the current American moment? This seminar discusses the ways that images of the Jew—philosemitic, antisemitic, and everything in between—recur in the American mainstream. Through analysis of film, television, music, comics, and other mass media, we will track the multiple and contradictory portrayals of Jewishness in the popular American imagination.

This course on the major fiction of Vladimir Nabokov begins with his major Russian novels in English translation, including The Defense, Laughter in the Dark (Camera Obscura), Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, and concludes with classic English works, Speak, Memory, Lolita, and Pnin. Topics in the course include emigration and cross-cultural translation, literary modernism, metafiction, nostalgia and stories of childhood, as well as the literary representations of tyranny, violence, and abuse. We will pay additional attention to Nabokov’s interest in film and film aesthetics, and we will consider four screen versions of his novels (Luzhin’s Defense, Laughter in the Dark, Despair, and Lolita).

The first Asia-Africa conference of newly independent states (held in Indonesia, in 1955) was once hailed by contemporary observers as an event as significant as the European renaissance in global importance.
It inspired a sequence of initiatives in pursuit of new forms of cultural exchange and political brokering unmediated by former colonial centers.  This course explores how this historic transition towards a decolonized future was anticipated, envisioned, and critiqued in literary form.  Moving through a range of texts and historical documents that mark this transition, the course invites you to engage with the comparative legacies of African and Asian independence movements and solidarity initiatives as they rose to international circuits of recognition, with implications for enduring cultural debates across the Global South.
Readings for the course will include Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain, an iconic account of the first Asian-African conference of independent states, on the cultural commonalities and uneven temporalities of African-Asian independence movements; theoretical texts on the cultural ambiguities of anti-colonial nationalisms (such as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks); and literary texts that include revolutionary and counter-imperial poetry and prose works. Course assignments will include three analytical papers. (All required texts will be available in English.)

“We are still mythical” as Kae Tempest intones in Brand New Ancients (2013, p.1). This course will analyze creative rewritings of ancient Greek literature in contemporary Anglophone fiction, spanning the novel, lyric poetry, and drama. We will also read Han Kang’s Greek Lessons (in Deborah Smith’s and Emily Yaewon’s translation, 2023) as an innovative counterexample of how to write with and back to ancient Greek literature in contemporary fiction. Broadly, we will consider why and how contemporary authors turn to ancient Greek literature and myth to give form and fresh meaning to contemporary experience, ranging from autofiction to crises of culture, politics, and society. The authors studied in this course come from several different countries and write from diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, and LGBTQ backgrounds. In addition to analyzing the dynamics of rewriting works received as classics of world literature, we will also study what happens to the alterity of antiquity in the process of adaptation and rewriting. Above all, this course is an opportunity to analyze and discuss some stunning contemporary Anglophone fiction. We will study works by Anne Carson, Natalie Diaz, Michael Hughes, Daisy Johnson, Tayari Jones, Han Kang, David Malouf, Alice Oswald, Kamila Shamsie, Kae Tempest, and Ocean Vuong.

This seminar is intended to introduce students to the history of the book in the West as a physical artifact– and to the growing scholarly field around the history of the book– through hands-on study of books from Harvard’s incredibly rich Special Collections Libraries. Professor Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania, emeritus) will co-teach the seminar with Professor Stern as a regular weekly visiting participant. The course will study the material text from its earliest stages in cuneiform tablets through ancient scrolls, hand-written medieval manuscripts of many types, early and late printed books down through children’s books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and conclude with modernist artists’ books of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including recent ones utilizing digital technology. The heart of the course will be weekly assignments in which students in groups of three will intensively examine books in Houghton Library’s Reading Room and then report on them in the weekly seminar through PowerPoint presentations. Books studied in class will include papyrus fragments of Homer and the Bible, Hebrew scrolls; early Qur’an leafs; Greek and Latin codices; Books of Hours and many other illuminated and decorated medieval manuscripts; the Gutenberg Bible; Copernicus, Galileo’s and Vesalius’ scientific works; censored books; the First Folio edition of Shakespeare; Alice in Wonderland; and Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés. For the final paper, each student will choose a book from one of Harvard’s Special Collections and write a biographical study of its “life.”

This seminar will discuss the possibility of “Jew theory” as a method for theorizing modernity. The course begins with an examination of how the figure of the Jew, as symbol and stereotype, enters the work of important thinkers of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century—from Marx to Slezkine, from Rosenzweig and Benjamin to Arendt and Derrida. We then shift to the history of Jewish studies in the academy and how many of these same figurations recur in the construction of this field/discipline/association. We will also explore the potential of new modes of “Jewish cultural studies” emerging over the last decades.

This course explores the interaction between ritual modes of signification, (written as well as traditional oral) literature, and performance. The seminar proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the topic on the basis of anthropological research and literary and cultural theory. Specific literary examples are discussed in transhistorical and comparative contexts, ranging from ancient Greek tragedy to avant-garde literature.

This course focuses on professional development and preparation for academic careers in literature and related fields as well as positions outside academe. Part one of a two-part series. Students must complete both terms of this course (parts A and B) within the same academic year in order to receive credit. Notes: It is open to all Harvard graduate students and is required of first-year Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.

Translation Studies — or Translationswissenschaft, traductologie, przekładoznawstwo, перекладознавство, переводоведение, çeviribilim, 翻訳研究 etc. – is a worldwide discipline. How was the discipline shaped? And what does it actually study? Is it mainly focused on texts or on people (translators, editors publishers)? This seminar will address these questions through the history of the discipline and its leading theoretical paradigms. Each week we will read and discuss texts on ideas about translation over time and explore how they relate to the actual practice of translation.

Various readings will be from Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 4th edition; others will be supplied in PDF.

To explore key literary, cultural and critical theories, we pose questions through readings of classic and contemporary theorists, from Aristotle to Kant, Schiller, Arendt, Barthes, Foucault, Glissant, Ortiz, Kittler, and Butler, among others. Their approaches include aesthetics, (post)structuralism, (post)colonialism, media theory, gender theory, ecocriticism. Each seminar addresses a core reading and a cluster of variations. Weekly writing assignments will formulate a question that addresses the core texts to prepare for in-class discussions and interpretive activities.

How did ancient Greek heroes, both male and female, learn about life by facing what all of us have to face, our human condition?

How to face death? Concentrating on this central human question, we will explore some of the greatest works of ancient Greek literature in English translation. For the Greeks, a special way to address the problem of death was to think long and hard about what they called heroes in their myths. Our purpose in this course is to extend that kind of thinking to the present. Assignments invite you to engage in personal reflections on the meaning of life and death in the light of what we read in Greek literature about the ordeals of becoming a hero.

How have Arab writers and artists from the past century to the present narrated a variety of displacements – among them migration, diaspora, exile, imprisonment, banishment, and resettlement? How do such narratives address philosophical questions as well as contemporary challenges facing individuals and collectivities? In what ways have scholars and thinkers reckoned with displacements and literary narratives that stage them? The focus of the seminar is on the poetics of these narratives, with reference to how authors’ own experiences of displacement may structure their writing. We will investigate how these narratives may interrupt hegemonic discourses, claim multiple sites of belonging and depict hybrid subjects.

All readings are available in translation; those with sufficient competence in Arabic or other languages are highly encouraged to read the original texts and work comparatively between them and translations.

This seminar will introduce students to the art of literary translation through a wide variety of approaches. Over the course of the semester, we
will read various tracts, articles, and books on the theory and craft of translation from a wide range of Euro-American and South Asian stances and viewpoints. We will analyze editions of various classics from India that have been translated into English repeatedly, paying particular
attention to the political nature of the act and art of translation in its colonial and post-colonial contexts. This seminar will also have a practical component, and one session each week will allow students to present translations-in-progress to their peers for comment and critique.

As a literary event, as a narrative artifact bent on capturing the totality of the real, the novel has been at war with its form, its social function, and its reading publics, at least since it emerged as a global, privileged narrative genre. These historical conditions were always particularly intense in the peripheries of the world. In Latin America, the novel was born as a battlefield where writers disputed the meaning of what it meant to be modern (what kind of novels do we need to write to inscribe ourselves in the transnational literary world of modernity where novels rule?). For them, the novel as a cultural monument revered globally was a thing of the past; they felt the need to reinvent it in order to account for their own time and marginal geopolitical situation. This course will interrogate how Argentine writers addressed these cultural dilemmas since the 1920s and, in the process, produced some of the region’s most remarkable experimental novels, non-novels, and anti-novels, as well as insightful reflections on the cultural potential and blindspots of literature as a social institution. We will read texts by Macedonio Fernández, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Manuel Puig, Alejandra Pizarnik, Juan José Saer, Sylvia Molloy, Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Tamara Kamenszain, Sergio Chejfec and Selva Almada.

How to make a sound demonstration in the field of literary analysis? What are the building blocks for a cogent approach to comparative studies? We’ll pay attention to various scales of textual commentary, from the microscopic lens of close reading to the medium scope of thematic reading, with an eye to macroscopic trends in literary history and critical theory. We’ll befriend texts ranging from various genres and explore different media (poetry; fiction; drama; film), relating form to content, historical context to contemporary significance, and join the dots connecting notions of authorship to reception theory.

Notes: This course is reserved to Comp Lit Concentrators and Comp Lit Secondary Field undergraduate students.

A continuation of Literature 98a, focusing on the student’s special field of study. Open to concentrators only.  This is a junior tutorial.

A continuation of Literature 99a, including preparation for the oral examinations. Open to concentrators only.

This course will explore contemporary literature and cinema across Southeast Asia, focusing on regional developments after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 through the present. Themes discussed include literature’s relationship to economic turmoil and political change; questions of class and social mobility; anti-authoritarian writing and issues of censorship; literature, youth culture, and new media landscapes; and literary explorations of gender and sexuality. Readings will include a selection of critical essays to foreground these central themes of the course, along with poetry, short fiction, and films from: Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. Readings will be taught in English translation and films will be screened with English subtitles.

Presentation video

This course examines literary, theatrical, and cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Students learn how artists, including Shakespeare, have used creative production of the past to understand and address concrete issues and problems of the present, including political scandal and persecution, imperial domination, and racial and ethnic biases and oppression. We also explore the continued vitality worldwide of theater and the arts, as well as their constant transformations throughout time and space.

Who are the storytellers of Yiddish literature? Where did their stories come from? Why did the short story become the central genre of modern Jewish literary culture? This course explores the genealogy of the Yiddish short story from the hasidic folk tale to the modernist sketch, from the monologues of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer to the haunting narratives of David Bergelson and Der Nister. Stretching from the nineteenth century to the present, we follow the short story in its comparative contexts from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, Palestine/Israel, and the US.

In this course, students will read English translations of novels that have won major prizes. In addition to exploring themes of contemporary literature from around the world, special attention will be paid to the role of translation in shaping the work and its reception, and to the question of what makes for a prize-winning translation. Each week students will read a prize-winning translation alongside reports from the prize committee, reviews of the translation, and what the translators say about their work.

Assignments:

Write a 2000-word analysis of the translation decisions in a novel translation, with reference to the source text and to the translator’s stated goals, if available.

Write a 1000-word book review of a translated novel, including a discussion of the translation.

Imagine that you are one the committee for one of the prize-winning novels we have read. Write a 2000-word argument for one of the short-listed titles to be chosen in its place.

This course satisfies the Arts & Humanities distribution requirement, counts towards the Secondary in Translation Studies, and may be taken pass/fail upon application. Reading knowledge of one language in addition to English is required.

Course presentation video

A re-examination of “Lyric” as occasion as well as genre. Central questions to be explored will include: how do the “lyrics” of composed song come alive in performance? For example, how do the two librettists of Puccini’s opera La Bohème contribute to the making of a masterpiece in song? Shared readings include The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins. Students are free to select as their focus of research any particular “lyric” traditions, composed in whatever language. No previous knowledge of literary theory is presumed.

Course presentation video

Things I have learned from students who have taken my seminars in Comparative Literature, By Professor Greg Nagy

Alongside recognized rituals of praising God through liturgy, a common practice among medieval Jews, Muslims, and Christians was the offering of praise to men of power.  These praises (known as panegyrics), which survive in epistolary correspondences, literary compilations, and records of public ceremonies, reveal a great deal about how members of these religious communities imagined human virtue, group cohesion, leadership, political legitimacy, and interreligious relations. Often dismissed as mere sycophancy, the production of these praises was meaningful both for power-holders and power-subjects. As is the case with visual portraits, they tell us at least as much about the societies that produced them as the individuals they portray.

By mistake some thieves found their way into Hershele’s house late at night while he was sleeping. They searched and searched but found nothing. Meanwhile, Hershele heard their rummaging and slowly crept up behind one of the thieves. He grabbed him by the arm and the thief, naturally, tried to run away. Hershele held him close, whispering, “Be still. Maybe together we’ll actually find something.” Beginning with jokes like this one, this course will examine the question of Jewish humor, exploring the concept of therapeutic joking, the politics of self-deprecation, and strategies of masking social critique behind a well-timed joke. Rather than reach some essential definition, we will instead investigate literature, stand-up comedy, film, and television of the twentieth and twenty-first century in order to 1) think together about the theory, mechanics, and techniques of comedy and humor and 2) ask how and when a text or performance gets labeled Jewish, by whom and for what purposes. Texts, films, and performers include: Freud, Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, the Marx Brothers, Belle Barth, Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Broad City, and Rachel Bloom.

Course presentation video

Built around three seminal 20th century figures–the artist-designer Bruno Munari, the writer-educator Gianni Rodari, the novelist Italo Calvino–the course aims to explore structural, combinatory, and generative thinking about storytelling. It combines the study of literary theory and history, literary works such as folktales and children’s stories, and computer-assisted creation employing both textual and visual generative AI tools. By the end of the semester, the class will result in the creation of a well crafted, curated, and edited volume of AI folktales.

Course presentation video

This seminar explores the development of the concept of imagination in diverse premodern and modern philosophical/theoretical and literary contexts. Emphasis will be placed on Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonic philosophers, medieval Christian readers of antiquity, Kant, Fichte, the Romantics, Lacan, Iser, Todorov, and Castoriadis. This seminar will also develop an interdisciplinary approach to the topic by drawing on cognitive sciences and cognitive anthropology.

This course explores approaches to literature and transculturation in the context of new understandings of human and textual border creation and crossings. Topics include the ethics of dividing cultural products along ethnic, linguistic, and national lines on the one hand and classifying phenomena as global on the other, and the possibilities and ramifications of cross-cultural study. We also examine the relationship between creative production/literary scholarship and ethnic studies, empire and (post)colonialism, identity, travel/migration/exile/diaspora, labor, war, trauma, multilingualism, translingualism, literary reconfiguration (adaptation, intertextuality), and world literature. Course readings are drawn from Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Examines and compares the relation between politics and aesthetics from the point of view of new materialisms and environmental humanities in major critical works by Deleuze, Guattari,  Latour, Stengers, Manning, Massumi, Bennett, Hansen, Parikka, Haraway, Barad, Tsing and others. Focuses on texts of the last two decades that link a politics of aesthetics to a reassessment of the relation between subject and object, event, immanence, matter, affect, sensation and the construction of world(s), fictional and filmic works. Critical texts will be paired with fiction and film.

Over the past decade, data science has influenced the humanistic disciplines in a variety of ways.
Historians use network analysis to discover previously unknown historical connections, literary scholars utilize sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and text mining to identify genres and other stylistic patterns, and media studies scholars use web scraping to develop digital archives.
While data science has proven its analytical prowess, its potential for storytelling is often overlooked in many data-driven projects. This course aims to examine the philosophical foundation of data-driven storytelling and explore how data is incorporated into contemporary transmedia storytelling. The course will also explore how data can provide not only an analytical but also an experimental mode of scholarship. Topics covered may include data visualization, database aesthetics, game studies, and pattern recognition/discrimination, among others.

Course presentation video

This course focuses on professional development and preparation for academic careers in literature and related fields as well as positions outside academe. Part one of a two-part series. Students must complete both terms of this course (parts A and B) within the same academic year in order to receive credit. Notes: It is open to all Harvard graduate students and is required of first-year Ph.D. students in Comparative Literature.

Survey of modern Chinese fiction and narratology from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese Diaspora: polemics of the canon, dialogues between national and regional imaginaries, and literary cultures in the Sinophone world.