Self-Translation as Method investigates the process, aesthetics, and politics of literary self-translation and transmediation worldwide. Self-translation refers to the process through which authors translate their own writing into another language; such a translation may be undertaken at the same time as the original is composed or long after it is completed, but it always represents a self-reflexive relationship between the author and their own work. Because the self-translator has access to the original’s authorial intentions, they are empowered to take creative liberties that a conventional translator might shy away from. Through these creative liberties, self-translators enrich the cultural capital of both their native and adopted language and culture. Self-translation, in this way, often involves writing oneself into world literature, creating cosmopolitan palimpsests that reveal, in their dialogue with diverse cultural traditions, the nonlinear forms of modernity. In this course, we will delve into case studies of self-translation from East Asia, East Africa, Latin America, North America, and Italy. We will also investigate the implications of self-transmediation, which occurs when an author adapts their own work into another medium, transporting that work from the page to the stage to the screen, for instance. For the final assignment, students will produce their own work of self-translation or transmediation.

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.

In recent years, it has become commonplace to hear that new technologies are threatening humanity–that “we” must struggle to “stay human” in the face of novel threats ranging from autonomous weapons to addictive social media apps and gene editing to generative AI. At the same time, the “AI boom” has raised profound questions about creativity as an essentially human trait and inspired widespread concern about AI impacts on human and nonhuman environments–or all creation.

Observers often describe the moral and existential challenges that such innovations present as new and unprecedented. But, in fact the concern is at least several centuries old.

Drawing on canonical works of literature, philosophy, and cinema, this course will offer an introduction to the long history of thinking about, and working with, new technologies in the arts and humanities. In addition to close reading and analysis, students will engage in a series of “critical making” projects using historical artifacts housed in Harvard’s collections and brand-new generative AI tools developed specifically for us. The final assignment will be a short paper that reflects on one of these creative endeavors and connects it to course themes.

You have been reading books since first grade if not earlier, but how much do you actually know about the physical object you’ve been reading—the book, the material artifact?  Drawing on a great deal of recent scholarship and the incredible treasures in Houghton Library’s Special Collections, this course will study the history of the book in Western culture from its earliest stages in cuneiform tablets through ancient scrolls, hand-written medieval manuscripts of all types, early and late printed books down through children’s books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and 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 each will be asked to intensively examine books in Houghton’s reading room and then report on them in the weekly seminar.  Books studied in class will include papyrus fragments of Homer and the Old and New Testaments; 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 Houghton’s collection and write a biographical study of its “life.”

All readings for the course are on the Modules section of the Canvas site, which is organized by the weekly sessions.  Each module includes an Assignment sheet with the specific readings and books to be studied for the session.

For a full description of each session of the course, see the Course Plan posted under the first module. No previous background in book history is required for this course.

Note: Because of space requirements in Houghton, the class has to be capped at twelve students.  The course is primarily intended for undergraduates but depending on enrollment, graduate students may be admitted if there is room; if they are interested, they should contact the instructor.   All students wishing to take the course should write a short (one paragraph) statement explaining their interest in the history of the book and the course and send it to the instructor BEFORE  NOON (WEDNESDAY) AUGUST 24 at  dstern@fas.harvard.edu

This course looks at contemporary Indigenous Latin America through literature. It focuses primarily on texts written by Indigenous authors in different genres and languages; and it includes some texts depicting Indigenous peoples from other vantage points, whether it’s in attempts to build solidarity or to revisit historical accounts of national formation––we will ask to what effect. We will analyze the texts’ genre structures and aesthetic devices, as well as situate them in a broader set of literary conversations and traditions. Throughout the course, we will discuss the political stakes of the literary texts we read. We will see the works operate in many ways: for instance, they may build power and resistance, bear witness to the brutalization of Indigenous peoples, or uphold narratives of Indigenous erasure. Land is constantly present in the texts as a position of enunciation, a site of struggle, and a topic of reflection. And so, we will ask: what does it mean to write on stolen land?

It has been argued that the poetic “I” in premodern literatures is not a vehicle for self-representation, but an archetype of the human. The course will examine this thesis against the rise of autobiographical writing in medieval and early modern Europe. Readings include spiritual autobiographies (Augustine, Kempe, Teresa of Ávila), letter collections (Abelard and Heloise), Arabic and Hebrew maqama literature, Provençal troubadour lyric, Hispano-Jewish poetry (Samuel ha-Nagid, Judah Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol), prison poetry (Jacopone da Todi, al-Mutamid of Seville, François Villon), pilgrimage narratives, travel literature, Petrach, Dante (Vita nuova and selections of the Commedia), Ibn Ḥazm of Córdoba, Latin American chronicles, and the picaresque novel (Lazarillo de Tormes). Theoretical perspectives by Spitzer, Lejeune, Zumthor, and DeCerteau.

Course note: This course counts for the Romance Studies track in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.