Courses

Spring 2024

Wednesday

3 pm - 5 pm

CompLit 97: Tutorial – Sophomore Year

Annette Lienau

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.

In Person

Spring 2024

Wednesday

6 pm - 8 pm

CompLit 98B: Tutorial – Junior Year

Sandra Naddaff

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

In Person

Spring 2024

Wednesday

6 pm - 8 pm

CompLit 99B: Tutorial – Senior Year

Sandra Naddaff

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

In Person

Spring 2024

Monday

12:45 pm - 2:45 pm

CompLit 100: Contemporary Southeast Asia through Literature and Film

Annette Lienau

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

In Person

Spring 2024

Tuesday

10am - 12pm

CompLit 133: Global Shakespeare

Marc Shell

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.

In Person

Spring 2024

Friday

9:45 am - 11:45 am

CompLit 106/YIDDISH 115: The Yiddish Short Story: Folk Tales, Monologues, and Post-Apocalyptic Parables

Saul Zaritt

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 Person

Spring 2024

Thursday

9:45 am - 11:45 am

CompLit 145: Prize-Winning Translations, 2010-2020

Luke Leafgren

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

In Person

Spring 2024

Monday

3 pm - 5 pm

CompLit 156: Songmaking and the Idea of Lyric

Gregory Nagy

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

In Person

Spring 2024

Tuesday, Thursday

1:30 pm - 2:45 pm

CompLit 166/YIDDISH 166: Jews, Humor, and the Politics of Laughter

Saul Zaritt

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

In Person

Spring 2024

Monday

3 pm - 5 pm

CompLit 200/ROM-STD 200: Computing Fantasy: Imagination, Invention, Radical Pedagogy (Munari / Rodari / Calvino)

Jeffrey Schnapp

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

In Person

Spring 2024

Wednesday

1 pm - 3 pm

CompLit 244: On Imagination: From Plato to postmodernism

Panagiotis Roilos

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.

In Person

Spring 2024

Tuesday

12:45 pm - 2:45 pm

CompLit 264: Thinking and Writing Transculturally

Karen Thornber

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.

In Person

Spring 2024

Thursday

12:45 pm - 2:45 pm

CompLit 274: Politics of Aesthetics: New Materialisms and Environmental Humanities

Verena Conley

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.

In Person

Spring 2024

Thursday

3 pm - 5 pm

CompLit 280X: Data and Transmedia Storytelling

Junting Huang

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

In Person

Spring 2024

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Tuesday

6pm - 8pm

CompLit 343 AB, BB, CB: Professing Literature 1, 2, 3

Verena Conley

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.

In Person

Spring 2024

Monday

3 pm - 5:45 pm

Crosslisted: CHNSLIT 245R: Topics in Sinophone Studies – Modern Chinese Fiction on the Periphery

David Wang

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.

In Person

Spring 2024

Wednesday

3 pm - 5:45 pm

Crosslisted: ENGLISH 90LT: Theory Matters: Problems in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory

Homi Bhabha

Why study literary theory? Is theory a conceptual framework or a tool-kit? Is theory a companion to literary study or is it crucial for literary interpretation? These are some of the questions I propose to address in this seminar which will address  literary and cultural problems that have been shaped by theoretical concerns and concepts. This course will not adopt a historical approach nor will it be a survey of “schools” of literary theory. The syllabus will focus on topics such as Power, Race, Identity, Sexuality, Environmentalism, Postcolonialism, Inequality, Poverty etc. etc.  and trace theoretical contributions that have been formative in shaping the diverse discourses around these issues. . Aesthetic, political and ethical approaches will be knotted together in our conversations. The seminar will be concerned with the relation between cultural form and cultural value. Literary texts will be used in conjunction with theoretical works.

In Person

Spring 2024

Thursday

3 pm - 5:45 pm

Crosslisted: ENGLISH 290MH: Migration and the Humanities

Homi Bhabha

By focusing on literary narratives, cultural representations, and critical theories, this course explores ways in which issues related to migration create rich and complex interdisciplinary conversations. How do humanistic disciplines address these issues—human rights, cultural translation, global justice, security, citizenship, social discrimination, biopolitics—and what contributions do they make to the “home” disciplines of migration studies such as law, political science, and sociology? How do migration narratives compel us to revise our concepts of culture, polity, neighborliness, and community? We will explore diverse aspects of migration from existential, ethical, and philosophical perspectives while engaging with specific regional and political histories.

In Person

Spring 2024

Wednesday

6 pm - 8:45 pm

Crosslisted: JEWISHST 204: Messianism in Early Judaism and Christianity

Annette Reed, David Stern

Messianism is one of the most fraught topics in the history of ancient Judaism and Christianity.  This seminar will trace the development of the many different ideas of the messiah—his (unhappily, gender never seems to have figured) character, his fate, his role in history—from the the Hebrew Bible into Jewish and Christian traditions up until the rise of Islam.   We will also pay attention to parallel developments within the Hellenistic and Roman imperial cultures.   Topics to be studied include the semi-divinity of the messiah, the idea of the suffering or dying messiah, and the relationship between messianism and apocalyptic eschatology.  Readings will include primary sources as well as the relevant secondary literature.   All primary source readings will be provided in English translation.  Depending on the make-up of the class, the instructors will make special provisions (like an extra class hour) for those students interested and able to read the primary sources in their original languages (Greek and Hebrew). Students will be expected to make regular presentations in class.

In Person

Spring 2024

Friday

3 pm - 5 pm

Crosslisted: SPANISH 194: The Borges Machine

Mariano Siskind

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.

In Person

Spring 2024

Tuesday

12 pm - 2:45 pm

Crosslisted: WOMGEN 1016: Women’s Voices in Asian and Asian American Literature

Jung Choi

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, Li Qingzhao, Ono no Komachi, Lady Hyegyŏng, Qui Jin, Higuchi Ichiyo, Kim Wŏn-ju, Gong Jiyoung, Yoshimoto Banana, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tamiko Beyer, 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.

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Wednesday

6pm - 8pm

CompLit 98A: Junior Tutorial Workshop

Thomas Wisniewski

A year-long series of workshops on researching in foreign languages, proposal writing, translation, close reading, the junior essay, and the senior thesis proposal. This junior tutorial is required of all concentrators.

 

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Wednesday

6pm - 8pm

CompLit 99A: Senior Tutorial Workshop

Thomas Wisniewski

A year-long series of workshops on researching, proposal writing, the senior thesis, and the oral exam. This senior tutorial is required of all concentrators.

In Person

Fall 2023

Ask Instructor

Wednesday

12:30pm - 2:30pm

CompLit 102Y: Literary Biography & Documentary Film

Thomas Wisniewski

What is the relation between literary biography and documentary film? What might the life of a writer tell us about the work? To explore these questions, we will study a range of writers in tandem with documentaries made about their lives. With an emphasis on travel, exile, expatriatism, multilingualism, modernism, and Paris as a literary nexus, we will read work by a selection of twentieth-century authors including James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Isak Dinesen, Ernest Hemingway, Beryl Markham, and Julia Child. Frequently we will pair the viewing of a documentary film with selections from the sources on which it is based. As we challenge the intentional fallacy, we will analyze the cinematic technique with which the film is made and the literary evidence from which it draws. Selections of fictional and nonfictional texts featured in the documentaries will frame our seminar discussions. A centerpiece of the course will be the work of Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen, a Dane who wrote primarily in English, whose memoirs will be read alongside her short fiction and compared to the feature films and documentaries made about her life and her writing. To that end, the seminar will offer students the opportunity to collaborate on and contribute original research to a new documentary film about Blixen’s 1959 transatlantic tour, including her legendary trip to New York and Boston.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Friday

9:45am - 11:45am

CompLit 107/YIDDISH 107: The Politics of Yiddish

Saul Zaritt

A bastardized German, a jargon, a woman’s vernacular, an old world language, a dying and ghostly tongue, a Hasidic language, a queer language, a radical language—these are just a few of the ways that Yiddish has been labeled over its one-thousand-year history. This course will trace the shifting politics attached to Yiddish from its early modern beginnings as a language of translation between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures to its postwar vacillation between a language of mourning and nostalgia, Jewish American humor, Hasidic isolation, and contemporary Jewish radicalism. Through poetry, fiction, essays, and film, we will discuss what it might mean to discover “the secret” language of the Jews” at the origins of Jewish socialism and at the foundations of diaspora nationalism. All texts will be read in translation.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Monday

3pm - 5pm

CompLit 110X: What is a Novel?

David Damrosch

The novel has been described as the quintessential literary form of modernity, but do we know what a novel actually is? And is it even an exclusively modern form? This course will look at a range of pathbreaking works that have bent the norms of prose fiction, opening up new ways of understanding the world, from antiquity to the present. Readings will include The Golden Ass, The Tale of Genji,Tristram Shandy, and a range of modern novelists, including Woolf, Duras, Perec, Calvino, and Pamuk, together with major formulations by Lukács, Bakhtin, and novelists themselves.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Wednesday

3pm - 5pm

CompLit 119X/REL119/NEC 107: History of the Book: Using Harvard’s Treasures to Study the Material Text

David Stern

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.”

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Thursday

3pm - 5:45pm

CompLit 131: The Arab American Experience in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture

Sandra Naddaff

This course will explore that experience as expressed in various cultural forms–fiction, film, comedy acts, graphic novels, memoirs, art installations, and new media. We will pay particular attention to contemporary works and authors (e.g., Kahf, Nye, Alameddine, Hammad, Abu Jaber), although we will also consider the work of early 20th-century Arab-American writers (Gibran, Rihani, Rizk). Topics include mapping the exilic experience, translation and bilingualism, cultural translation, and the semiotics of food.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Tuesday, Thursday

1:30pm - 2:15pm

CompLit 140X: Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature: Political Transformation and Social Change across a Decolonizing Twentieth Century

Annette Lienau

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.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Friday

12:45pm - 2:45pm

CompLit 172: Comparative Literatures of the Indian Ocean

Annette Lienau

The maritime counterpart to ancient trade routes that brought silk and cannon-fire to Europe, the Indian Ocean was a space re-imagined through successive tides of trade, conquest, and exploration, historically mediating between the diverse cultures of several continents. This course introduces students to the literatures of this cosmopolitan space and to its historic lines of influence and exchange, through a comparative reading of literary texts drawn from its perimeter and from travel accounts both fictional and historical/semi-biographical. Readings will include Indic, Arabic, and Persian classics, Sufi poetry from across Asia and Africa, travel narratives in Portuguese and English, and twentieth century writing on the region’s imperial afterlives. Class sessions will be complemented by visits to relevant library and museum collections throughout the semester. (Readings will be made available in English.)

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Monday

12:45 pm - 2:45 pm

CompLit 188/ROM-STD 188: Futurisms (A comparative history)

Jeffrey Schnapp

From its foundation in Feb. 1909 through WWII, futurism developed into the first truly international cultural-political avant-garde.  Its aim was a revolutionary transformation of all spheres of life and its influence extended to the whole of Europe, Asia, and the Americas.  Combating the tradi­tionalism and pro­vin­cialism of turn-of-the-century European culture, the move­ment sought to found a cosmopolitan (but often nationalist) countercul­ture based on the exaltation of youth, speed, violent revolt, innovation, and expe­ri­menta­tion. Hence the move­ment’s name: the label “Future-ism” denoting at once adoration of the new and struggle against the prevalence of “past-ism” or passatismo/passéisme (the idolatry of the past). In its first decade of ex­is­tence Futurism became the first full-fledged cultural/political avant-garde of our cen­tury, ga­ther­ing together pain­ters, musi­cians, archi­tects, political revo­lu­tion­aries, and poets from seve­ral European nations. A key progenitor of later move­ments such as Dada­, Vorticism, Sur­real­ism, and Fluxus, Fu­tur­ism had a powerful forma­tive influence not only on the cul­tural atmo­s­phere of Italy during the Fascist era (1922-1945), but also on 20th century cul­ture as a whole. Its contemporary legacies are many and extend from popular culture to the experimental art of our time.

This seminar will examine the movement’s various manifestations in Italy, France, England, Russia, Spain, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. In addition to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a wide range of writers and visual artists will be considered, including A. G. Bragaglia, Apollinaire, Mayakovsky, Malevich, Lissitzky, and Léger. Topics will include: machines and culture; the theater of surprise and futurist performance art; Futurism’s ties to anarchism, bolshevism, and fascism; words-in-freedom poetics; experiments with typography, photography, radio, and film; futurism’s interest in transforming the character of books; futurism’s impact on exhibition design; and futurism’s legacies in postwar culture.

 

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Barker 211

Thursday

12:45pm - 2:45pm

CompLit 213Y: Beyond Subtitles: Cinema, Media, and Translation

Junting Huang

“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” said Bong Joon Ho during his acceptance speech for Parasite’s historical Golden Globe wins. Are we finally ready to embrace subtitles? Are those one-inch-tall subtitles still a cultural barrier? Are they literary artifacts of translation? Despite their widespread use, subtitles are less often studied as a critical site for translation. Using subtitles as a point of departure, this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the intricacies of translation in cinema and other media cultures. It situates translation at the intersection of media and literary theories. In this course, we explore how the media form of subtitles can enable philosophical reflection on issues such as nationalism, nativism, foreignness, aphasia, postcoloniality, labor, and technology. The course will draw on theoretical texts from a diverse range of thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, Frederic Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, John Mowitt, Rey Chow, Naoki Sakai, and Sergei Eisenstein, among others.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

New room: Barker 024

Wednesday

12:45pm - 2:45pm

CompLit 278: Hyperreality

Panagiotis Roilos

The crisis of representation in postmodernity—closely connected with social and existential alienation and technological development—often manifests itself in terms of “hyperreality,” where any distinction between “the real” and “the simulacrum” is blurred. The boundaries between “reality” and “non-reality” and relevant concepts (e.g. originality, authenticity, mimesis, simulacrum) have been explored and challenged from different but comparable perspectives in philosophy, art, and literature since classical antiquity. This seminar will investigate discourses on, or inspired by “hyperreality” and its epistemological, ontological, and political implications, from antiquity to postmodernity. Authors and thinkers to be discussed include Plato, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Umberto Eco, Fredric Jameson, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Grosz, Niklas Bostrom, Lucian, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Christine Broke-Rose, Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Thursday

9:45am - 11:45am

CompLit 299AR: Comparative Literature in Theory and Practice

David Damrosch

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. Notes: Required of first-year graduate students in Comparative Literature; open to all graduate students interested in the study of literature in transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Dana-Palmer Seminar Room

Thursday

6pm - 8pm

CompLit 343AA, BA, CA: Professing Literature 1, 2, 3

Luis Girón-Negrón

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.

4 Credits

In Person

Fall 2023

Ask Instructor

Tuesday

6 - 8pm

Translation Studies 260: Literary Translation Advanced Workshop

Thomas Wisniewski

Students’ work-in-progress on a semester-long translation project will be presented, discussed, and critiqued each week with the aim of publication. Readings on strategies, theories, and methodologies will complement participants’ work in the seminar’s shared enterprise of exploring the pleasures and risks of translating literature. Working as scholars and practitioners, we will challenge the division between theory and practice in the field of translation studies today. Guest translator-scholars will visit the seminar. Requirements: all source languages are welcome; translations into English. Enrollment limited to twelve (graduate students and advanced undergraduates); course application due by August 22.

 

4 Credits

In Person