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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.

Course Video

The novel has been described as the quintessential literary form of modernity, but do we know what a novel actually is? And is it just a modern form? In this seminar we will look at a range of pathbreaking works that have bent the norms of prose fiction and have opened up new ways of understanding the world, from antiquity to the present. Readings will include selections from The Odyssey, The Tale of Genji, and Don Quixote, together with a range of modern novels, informed by several important statements on the novel, especially by the writers themselves.

In this seminar, students will explore tactile reading and writing systems with a focus on Braille, the tactile reading and writing system used by the blind. Students will learn the Braille code while exploring topics like its history, its many applications, the unique perspective it brings to analyzing texts, how reading Braille changes the brain, its use in education, the way it represents visual concepts like music and math in tactile forms, and its use across cultures. As a final project, students will choose a work to transcribe into Braille (this could be anything from a social media post to a poem to chemistry equations/diagrams). Then, in a final essay, students will analyze the transcription choices made and explain the importance of making this media accessible (not only through text, but also through location, presentation, and so on).

This course offers an introduction to contemporary Arabic literature focusing on developments after the seismic period of regional transition within North Africa and the Middle East known as the “Arab spring” (2011). Course readings will include critical essays and literary texts that reflect the forms of cultural reckoning that anticipated and followed the popular uprisings of the period, drawing principally from literary figures across Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia. Themes explored through the course include questions of political change and anti-authoritarian writing; literary innovations across new media landscapes and censorship regimes; revisionist historical fiction in the wake of major political transitions; and intergenerational influences on rising authors. Texts will be taught in English translation and films screened with English subtitles.

Since antiquity, literary works have been drawn to music and the human voice: fascinated by their captivating force, seduced by their alluring charms, envious of their capacity to express the singularity of life and lived experience. Literature has also pointed to the fragile evanescence of music and the voice as a way to assert its own enduring power. How has writing attempted to appropriate musical and vocal effects across different epochs and different cultures? What can these varied attempts tell us about human experience and our ways of representing it? How do tone, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, and breath contribute to literary enterprises? The course invites a comparative examination of selected works of European literature that deal with music and phenomena of the voice.

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Genres, forms, and themes of oral traditions in poetry and prose. Theories of performance and composition. Comparative metrical and formulaic analysis. Students are free to select non-Greek traditions as their focus of research, such as medieval French lays, Indic fables, Gregorian Chant, early Italian opera, Apache female initiation songs, Latin prosimetrum narratives, etc.

No previous knowledge of any language other than English is required. Only Classics Department graduate students who take the course for credit will work on original Greek texts. This course is cross-listed in Classics and can be taken for concentration credit in either Classics or Comparative Literature.