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.

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; the rhetoric of ineffability; 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.

This course will introduce students to writing by major pioneers of twentieth century Arabic literature and to cultural histories of the Middle East through the reading of literary texts. Readings drawn from a diversity of national contexts will include historical novels, short stories, experimental prose narratives, and selections from among the most influential poets of the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of Ottoman and Western European imperial domination within West Asia and North Africa, students in this class will explore how the development of modern Arabic literature has been variously understood by writers and critics: as a response to classical literary influences, as a force for political change, as a form of decolonial engagement, and as a source of cultural and linguistic cohesion after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire in the early twentieth century. Although readings will be consulted and discussed in English translation, Arabic or bilingual versions will be made available to those interested, and an attention to the politics of language will be considered through secondary readings on the controversial difference between regional dialects and transregional standards of literary Arabic.

The first Asia-Africa conference of newly independent states (held in Indonesia in 1955) was hailed by contemporary observers as an event as significant as the European renaissance in global importance. It inspired a sequence of political and cultural initiatives in pursuit of new forms of cultural exchange unmediated by former colonial centers. This course explores the historic tensions of this transition towards a post-colonial global order across two continents. The course raises the following questions: how did anti-colonial African and Asian authors and political figures consider the fields of culture and literature as an extension of their political engagements? How were literature and culture viewed as advancing forms of revolutionary change, or addressing entrenched social grievances? How did writers reconcile the ambiguities of national independence with the risks of neo-colonial or ethno-nationalist exploitations?  The course will introduce you to a diversity of authors to explore these questions, engaging with counter-imperial and revolutionary writing from African and Caribbean contexts, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Between 1923 and 1970, Jorge Luis Borges wrote some of the most original poems, short stories, essays and film scripts in Latin America and anywhere in the world, and he redefined the meaning and scope of literature. In this course, we will examine the signifying power of Borges’ short stories, essays and poems, and we will consider his work as a literary machine whose output radically transforms aesthetic formations and imaginaries beyond Argentina and Latin America. Rather than thinking about what his literature means, we will concentrate on what it produces as a fictional-poetic machine: cities and worlds, love and treason, popular and high culture, politics and death, institutions of knowledge and traditions, and new ways of reading and thinking about aesthetic and social relations (this year, the course will be taught in Spanish).

The seminar provides an opportunity to read through, absorb, and reflect upon Marcel Proust’s monumental novel, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913–1927), considered alongside key essays by French, German, and English literary critics and theorists. Major themes include but are not limited to: involuntary memory; topologies of time; love, sexuality, jealousy, and manipulation; aesthetics of music, literature, and the visual arts; nature and the mind; individuality and social hierarchies.

This course examines a diverse range of creative and critical discourses on migration, diaspora, and trauma: African; East, South, and Southeast Asian (Chinese, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese); as well as Latin American and Caribbean. We focus on connections among diasporas, displacement, migration, and trauma, and on the relationships of these phenomena and constructions and understandings of artistic and cultural identities, ethnicity/race, gender/sexuality, inequality, disease/mental illness/mental health/disability, religion, postcolonialism, transculturation (including translation), multilingualism, globalization and global history, world literature, global literatures, and related fields.

This course has several interrelated but distinct missions. First, we read selected major works from the history of attempts to theorize translation. Second, we read an array of contemporary examples of research on translation. Third, students have an option of drafting a research article or undertaking a major translation project. Graduate students from any discipline are welcome! Interested undergraduates need to have taken other prior coursework on translation, and should receive instructor approval to enroll. This seminar is the capstone requirement for the Graduate Secondary Field in Comparative Literature.

An introduction to the discipline of comparative literature, looking at major issues in the history and current practice of the discipline as practiced in the USA, with special emphasis on seeing how comparatists enter into ongoing debates concerning theory and method. Several of our faculty will join us for the discussion of their work. Additional readings will include selections from Herder, de Staël, Adorno, Auerbach, de Man, Glissant, Said, Spivak, Apter, Venuti, and Heise.

A survey course on major works in German literature, philosophy, and critique from the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth century. Close reading of representative texts opens onto broader ramifications in cultural and intellectual history with further consideration of societal and political tensions.

This course is reserved to Comp Lit Concentrators or Secondary Field Students.

If you’re taking this course, it means Comparative Literature is your concentration or your secondary field. Welcome to the discipline! But what does it mean to be a comparatist? This spring, we will wander together through the different paths Comparative Literature offers.

This is a course on history and methods. We will trace how the understanding of what it means to compare has changed through time and space. We will examine the sociopolitical roots of the discipline and think together with the intellectuals who shaped its different stages. To tell the stories of the discipline is, of course, also to inquire into its methods. We will experiment with different analytical modes, and see how they allow us to interact with literary texts. And we will explore theoretical and critical possibilities of both grounding and expanding our readings.

Examines how the 1001 Nights, popularly known in the West as the Arabian Nights, is transformed and adapted for different media and genres. Focuses on a variety of films, (e.g., The Thief of Baghdad, Chu Chin Chow, Aladdin), illustrations/images (e.g., Doré, Chagall, Matisse), musical and balletic renditions (e.g., Rimsky-Korsakov, Fokine), translations (e.g., Galland, Lane, Burton, Haddawy), and re-tellings of stories (e.g., Poe, Barth, Mahfouz, Sebbar, Zimmerman). Also considers the role of the 1001 Nights in contemporary popular culture.

This course reviews the influential major films of Stanley Kubrick—Paths of Glory (1957), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), among other earlier films and his unfinished project A.I. Artificial Intelligence (dir. Spielberg 2001). The films will be considered in their historical, cultural, and film studies contexts. Topics include Cold War politics, literary adaptation, the depiction of violence on screen, and the relationship between popular culture and scholarship. We will pay special attention to Kubrick’s interest in war, science fiction, and technology, including artificial intelligence.

35mm screenings of the films will be held at the Harvard Film Archive as part of this course.

No prerequisites.

Course 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 Video

What makes Jewish American literature Jewish?  What makes it American?  This course will address these questions about ethnic literature through fiction, poetry, drama, and other writings by Jews in America, from their arrival in 1654 to the present.  We will discuss how Jewish identity and ethnicity shape literature.  We will consider how form and language develop as Jewish writers “immigrate” from Yiddish, Hebrew, and other languages to American English.  Using the collection, Jewish American Literature:  A Norton Anthology, we will read a variety of authors, including Isaac Mayer Wise, Emma Lazarus, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Celia Dropkin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Allegra Goodman.  Students who take this course will explore the ways that Jewish culture intertwines with American culture in literature.

This bi-weekly writing workshop is designed as a space to practice writing and presenting in different academic genres: such as journal articles, job market materials, conference presentations, or job talks. We will have each participant submit one chosen piece each semester, and discuss two pieces at each session; written texts will be circulated beforehand, and talks can be presented during the session. Everyone will offer feedback for each other’s work, which we will discuss during our meetings. While the workshop will primarily allow the participants to practice these professional genres, it can also serve as a motivation to stay on track with one’s own writing goals, and a way to get experience with giving feedback to others’ work.

The premise of this course, “Modernist Jewish Poetry,” is to present Jewish modernism as an international phenomenon of the early 20^th century.  The course will attempt to define “Jewish modernism” through the prism of poetry, which inevitably, given the historical events in Europe and America during this time, grapples with aesthetic, religious, and national ideologies and methods.  The syllabus will focus mainly on poetry written in Yiddish and English, and will also include French, German, Hebrew, and Russian verse.  All poetry, critical, and theoretical materials will be taught in English translation, although I request that students who know the languages will work on the original texts and will bring to the table a comparative perspective.  Because we will be discussing translated poems, a secondary focus of the course will, in fact, be on literary translation’s process and products.

Eileen Chang (1920-1995), dubbed “the Greta Garbo of modern Chinese letters” and “the pioneer of desolation”, is known for her acerbic psychological forays into her characters’ inner turmoil during times of war and upheaval. This course pairs Chang with the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), known for her strikingly modernist short stories and poems delving into her characters’ inner psychology. Though the two never met in person, Chang had likely encountered Mansfield’s works through a translation rendered by Xu Zhimo (1897-1931). Both authors describe natural images with poetic lyricism, internalize conflict, employ symbolic motifs to externalize emotion, and use writing to dispel personal and national trauma. In this course, we will pair excerpts from Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) with Eileen Chang’s Love in A Fallen City (1943/2007) and Lust, Caution (1979). All readings and discussions will be conducted in English.

This course explores the rich and evolving landscape of African literature and film from the mid-20th century to today. We will trace how stories have been told across time—from oral traditions to novels, from feminist cinema to speculative fiction and digital media. Along the way, we will ask key questions: What is Africa? How do we write about Africa? How do we read and see Africa?

We begin with foundational writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mariama Bâ, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who helped define African literature in response to colonialism and its aftermath. We then move to a new generation of writers emerging around the early 2000s, including Binyavanga Wainaina and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who build on – and sometimes break from – these earlier legacies.

We also engage with writers who are also filmmakers, such as Ousmane Sembène, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Manthia Diawara, whose visual storytelling expands how African narratives are shared across borders. Throughout, we consider how language, identity, representation, and power shape African creative expression.

The course draws connections between traditional storytelling and contemporary popular culture – from epic oral tales to Nollywood’s improvisational filmmaking and Netflix’s adaptations of African folktales. These examples help us trace a continuum rather than a divide, linking oral heritage to digital innovation.

No prior knowledge is expected. The course welcomes all students with curiosity, openness, and a willingness to engage critically with African texts and films. Together, we will read, watch, listen, and ask, while engaging deeply with African stories across forms, media, and time.

This seminar is attuned to the times we live in while addressing universal concerns of human life and historical experience. The relationship between “peace” and “protest” is essential to the dynamic of democracy. Peace is a necessary political condition for ensuring progress in a fair and just society; it is a shield against the violence and wastage of war. Democratic ideals and institutions are perennially at risk of corruption and decline, at which point “keeping the peace” gives rise to authoritarian policies and policing that threaten fundamental freedoms, rights, and liberties. In such critical conditions, “protest” is an instrument of collective dissent enacted by the “people” (variously defined) to restore their rights and freedoms. The movement-politics initiated by minority groups around the world against systematic disadvantage and discrimination have been pushed to protest when other channels of democratic dialogue have failed. Just as peace “at all costs” often leads to the death of democracy, protest “at all costs” might vitiate the political “goods” and virtues that it seeks to establish. How do we walk the political tightrope between “peace and protest”? How do we establish moral frameworks of negotiation rather than negation? This seminar will approach these questions through the humanistic disciplines of literature, philosophy, art and politics. Literary fictions and protest speeches will be as important to our class conversations as political theory and social media. We will emphasize the intersections between disciplines, and loosen the boundaries between bodies of knowledge, to reveal humanistic spaces of dialogue and action from which we might reach a better understanding of the complex, often contradictory, relationships between peace and protest.

Against the dual background of ancient and medieval commentaries on the one hand, and modern psychoanalytic and ethnographic studies on the other, diverse literary texts will be explored. The major focus will be on Greek literature from antiquity to the present, but examples from other European literatures will also be considered (including film). Major topics: typology of dreams; dreams as narratives; dreaming and writing; religious dimensions. Theoretical readings to include: Aristotle, Aelius Aristides, Artemidorus, Synesius of Cyrene; Freud, Jung, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard.

This course introduces students to the writings of both canonical and lesser-known Asian and Asian American women writers. The course especially examines the works by Chinese/ Chinese American, Japanese/ Japanese American, Korean/ Korean American women writers. Moving from the pre-modern to contemporary era, the course will explore a range of women’s voices and experiences as reflected through poetry, fiction, diaries, and epistles. Authors will include Murasaki Shikibu, Ban Zhao, Ono no Komachi, Lady Hyegyŏng, Qui Jin, Higuchi Ichiyo, Kim Wŏn-ju, Han Kang, Yoshimoto Banana, Maxine Hong Kingston, Julie Otsuka, and Min Jin Lee. Topics will include family, marriage, loyalty, motherhood, women’s rights, sexual violence, same- sex desire, censorship, and gender and race politics.