Since at least the nineteenth century, computation and capitalism have co-evolved with each other. In many respects, computers have served the interests of capital, by creating new modes of accumulation and means of automating, managing, and outsourcing labor, as well as new tools for researching, advertising to, and transacting with customers. However, computers have also been described as fundamentally changing or even overcoming capitalism–both for better and for worse. Theorists have credited computers with eliminating work or turning it into play and transforming market exchanges into gift exchanges. Contemporary platforms and artificial intelligence inspire dreams of “fully automated luxury communism” and fears that law and contracts are being replaced by code and neo-colonial or neo-feudal forms of coercion.

In this seminar, we will engage with an outpouring of recent scholarship that attempts to describe and theorize digital capitalism and culture, pairing recent texts with excerpts from canonical works that their authors cite and build upon. In the process, students will gain exposure to key concepts, debates, and methods in the emerging field(s) of critical data studies, new media studies, and platform studies. We will also reflect upon the nature and purpose of theorizing. A series of assignments and workshops over the course of the semester will guide students through the process of identifying a promising research topic, reviewing scholarly literature, articulating an original research question, and writing a review essay or research paper.

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.