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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.

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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.

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In this course we will examine how media and communication technologies both drive and depict the complex set of processes known as globalization. We will explore case studies from sixteenth century maps to twenty-first century supply chains, as well as Huallywood, Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood films. In the process, we will grapple with major questions and tensions that have defined the modern era. Why have human societies become more closely connected over the past few centuries than at any prior time in human history? How has this interdependence changed the ways that we understand ourselves and one another? What new visions and freedoms has it created? Why has it made us more unequal than ever before?

By the end of the semester, students will have gained skills necessary for analyzing media that are produced and consumed across national and linguistic borders. You will have earned familiarity with a number of key analytical and historical categories that will prepare you for advanced coursework in the humanities and social sciences. And you will have applied and developed course concepts and skills through both creative and critical projects.

Above all, you will have learned new ways of thinking. Today, when the words on this page can reach you after traveling, as data packets, through undersea cables or outer space satellites, all media are global. At the same time, increasingly ubiquitous networked computation has turned almost everything on earth into a medium of data. Throughout this course, we will seek to unsettle what we think we know about who, and where, we are–gaining insights into how our lives connect to others, past and present, near and far.

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This course explores the complex relationship between media, technology, and social change. We will examine how activists from a range of places and historical periods have used new media and technologies to build movements challenging existing laws, norms, institutions, and arrangements. At the same time, we will consider the role that new media and technologies themselves play in changing society, by reshaping how people learn, communicate, work, play, find love, make war, and so on.

Throughout, we will consider recurring themes, tensions and trade-offs that media activists encounter. While it is commonplace to associate media activism with “progress,” we will dwell on its ambivalence and ambiguities. By experimenting with multiple methods of analyzing and making activist media, students will develop their own theories of change. By the end of the semester, you will have gained an overview of the histories of contemporary media technologies and institutions and mastered core concepts and methods in the study of media, technology, and culture.

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How do queer and crip accounts of love and desire redefine “modernity” in Greater China and Latin America? How do the Sinophone and Hispanophone worlds encounter each in translation and transmediation? What is the relationship between love and passion, infatuation and desire? How are conceptions of love culturally contingent? How do cultural, economic, social and political factors shape expressions and narratives of love and desire in Sinophone and Hispanophone contexts? How do myth, illusion, and projection influence our romantic philosophies? In what ways do non-normative, non-ableist, queer and crip accounts of gender, sexuality, and desire redefine “modernity”?

In this course, we examine modern and contemporary Sinophone and Hispanophone “love stories” and their transmediated afterlives (films, plays, operas, digital archives, and so forth), with an emphasis on romantic encounters in queer literature, magical realism, dystopian, and sci-fi/speculative fiction. We cover a range of works by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Sandra Cisneros, Julio Cortázar, Rosario Ferré, Isabel Allende, Kenneth Pai, Eileen Chang, Liu Cixin, and Wang Xiaobo, paired with transmedial adaptations by Zhang Yuan, Wong Kar-wai, Jonathan Basile, Manuel Antín, Jason Brauer, and Fernando Frías. Course evaluation will be based on discussions, oral presentations, thesis-based papers, and creative assignments.

A course on Yiddish popular culture. Knowledge of Yiddish required.

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The poetics (or songmaking) of Sappho will be studied from a wide variety of perspectives, suited to the interests of the students enrolled. 

Note: For those taking the course as COMPLIT 235, there are no particular language requirements. The emphasis for students, in this case, is to engage creatively with Sappho’s songmaking in a variety of English translations, or to compare with other poetry or songs (composed in whatever language). Students are free to bring into the educational experience a pursuit of their personal interests. For graduate students taking the course as CLASPHIL 235, research will involve reading the original texts in Greek, and comparing texts of other classical Greek and Latin poets like Euripides and Catullus.

How do we read and write from linguistic crossroads? What would a multilingual critical theory look like? What geographies do we build from the vantage point of multilingualism? In this course we read multilingual literary works and put them in conversation with texts pertaining to different branches of critical theory.

Multilingual writing cuts through linguistic borders and forces us to mistrust the idea of language as a stable and complete system. It invites us to question monolingualism as a basis for different categorizations––for the delimitation of literary fields, as well as personal and collective identities. Multilingualism sheds light on different possible combinations of roots and allegiances, historically conditioned and linked to the current sociopolitical contexts. In other words, in this course we study multilingualism as a dynamic and polyphonic form through which literature creatively conjugates different experiences of ethnicity, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the course, our theoretical readings help us conceptualize the transformations that multilingual texts puts in motion in our understanding of self and community.

The cultural interactions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Iberian peninsula shaped the literary history of Arabic, Hebrew and the Ibero-Romance vernaculars in the Middle Ages through the early modern period.
Our seminar examines major themes in, and recent scholarly debates on, the historical and comparative study of these literary archives.

The seminar explores the impact of classical literature and culture on the formation of modern critical theory. Topics include: construction of power; trafficability of art; ritual theory; sexuality; gender studies; irony; orality and literacy.

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.

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.

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.

This course focuses on professional development and preparation for academic careers in literature and related fields as well as positions outside academe. Part two 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.

This course aims to investigate modern Chinese literary thought by examining a range of writings, debates, and provocations from the 1910s to the 1960s. The course will guide students to read criticism by figures such as Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Wang Guowei; it also calls attention to writings that are less associated with literary criticism, such as those by Zhang Taiyan, Chen Yinke, and Li Zehou. Above all, The course seeks to examine the linkages between these critical discourses with both premodern Chinese literary thought and Western intellectual traditions.

This course is an exploration of the classical rhetorical tradition and the various ways in which it has been adapted in modern American rhetoric up to the present. We will analyze rhetorical theory and practice in ancient Greece and Rome, using classical rhetoric as a lens through which to explore the craft of speech in American history, and vice versa. You will emerge from this course being able to tell aposiopesis from praeteritio, but rather than dry lectures on the history of rhetoric, the approach in lectures and section discussions will be comparative through and through, staging curious conversations between ancient and modern as we examine the paths of words through history. We will consider what makes individual speeches noteworthy in their local, historical contexts, as well as within a wider rhetorical tradition, and we will analyze the role of ideologies of gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion in the construction of the rhetorical subject. In addition, the classical rhetorical tradition of Greece and Rome will also be compared and contrasted with parallel traditions of classical rhetoric in other cultures. Due attention will be paid to methodological problems in the history of rhetoric, such as sources for speeches, the reconstruction of the context for speeches, and situation criticism. Towards the end of the course we will look at theorizations of digital rhetoric and how AI perturbs the idea of the idea of the rhetorical subject. However, the focus throughout will be the study of rhetoric as the still not outmoded technology of speaking, and the course will offer opportunities to hone your rhetorical technique as well as to become an even more sensitive listener to and critic of the rhetoric of others.

Authors and orators to be studied include: Gorgias, Socrates, Pericles, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Demetrius, Quintilian, Theon, Lucian, Plutarch, Longinus, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Tecumseh, Caleb Bingham, Simón Bolivár, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Ida. B. Wells, Sitting Bull, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, John Chilembwe, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Robert F. Kennedy, Sukarno, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison, Wendy Brown, and Barack Obama. Lectures will provide a thorough overview of topics and debates in rhetorical theory.

This course introduces students to some of the most important Latin American literary works produced during the twentieth century. We will explore the ways in which these novels, short-stories, essays and poems interrogate the historical traumas, political contexts and aesthetic potential of the region between 1920s and 1980s. We will shed light on their place in the historical and cultural formation of the literary canon, as well as on the concept of ‘classic’. The goal of this seminar is two-fold. On the one hand, it introduces students to the Latin American literary and critical tradition through some of the best and most interesting literary and critical works (each novel or grouping of short stories and poems are paired with an important critical essay that situates them historically and aesthetically). On the other, it provides them with the fundamental skills of literary analysis (close reading, conceptual and historical framing, continuities and discontinuities with the aesthetic tradition), and that is why I have selected a relatively small number of readings, in order to have time to work through them, discuss them and have some flexibility to extend the classes we dedicate to a given author when our discussions merit it.

Narrative Negotiations: How do Readers and Writers Decide on What are the Most Important Voices and Values Represented in a Narrative?

Narrative Negotiations explores narrative “voice” in a wide range of literary and cultural texts. Narrative voice is a lively dialogue between the author and the reader as they engage in the experience of determining the value and veracity of the narrative: whose story is it anyway? The writer creates the imaginative universe of character, plot, emotions and ideas—she seems to be holding all the cards; but it is the reader who rolls the dice as she draws on her human experience and moral values to question the principles and priorities of the storyteller. The game of narrative becomes deadly serious when storytelling confronts issues of colonialism, slavery, racial profiling and gender discrimination. Is the right to narrative restricted to those who have suffered the injustices of exclusion? What is my responsibility as a storyteller—or a reader—if I am a witness to violence, or an advocate against injustice, but my life-story is one of privilege, protection and security? What is the role of the politics of identity or cultural appropriation in determining whose story is it anyway? Throughout the seminar students will be encouraged to draw on their own histories, memories and literary experiences as the enter into the world of the prescribed readings. For the final assessment I hope students will choose critical and creative ways of telling their own stories, or the stories of others who have captured their imaginations. Seminar participants will be required to come to each class with two questions that pose issues or problems based on the texts that are important for them, and may prove to be significant for their colleagues. I will invite members of the group to pose their questions and start a discussion.

First-Year Seminars are available only to first-year students. You may apply to both Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 First-Year Seminars via the FYS lottery between July 15 and August 19, 2024 at 11 a.m.

You may apply to as many seminars each term as you would like, but we recommend you apply to at least six in fall and three in spring.

As part of your application, you must provide a brief statement on why you are interested in each seminar. You will be notified of lottery results for both fall and spring seminars at 5 pm on Weds, August 21. If you are unsuccessful in the lottery, you may still join any seminar with open seats. A list of open seminars and instructions on next steps will be available on the First-Year Seminar Program website August 22.

The term “security” has enjoyed a complex and ambivalent career. Broadly defined as a “removal of care,” security leaves its subjects either carefree or careless. Pursuing an itinerary from the Stoics to psychoanalysis, from international relations to feminist theory, the course draws out the ethical implications of the persistent concern to be free of concern. Does “security” make us vigilant or negligent, confident or complacent? Does it promote more fear than it assuages? Is a security purchased with freedom or human rights morally viable? Such questions broach a more informed, nuanced, and critical engagement concerning our civic, professional and personal lives.

What is the nature of the object that has been the focus of your education since you began to read–and at the core of Western culture since its inception– and why is it important to understand and appreciate its presence before your eyes even if it’s all but transparent?

You have spent much of your life since kindergarten (and perhaps earlier) reading books; and you will spend much of your time at Harvard continuing to read them. But do you even know what a “book” is? Is it merely a conveyor, a platform, for presenting a text? Can a book have a use other than being read? Does the nature of the material artifact inscribed with words shape or influence the way you understand their meaning? Do people read a scroll differently than they do a book with pages? Or a digital text on a screen? Why does the physical book persist in the digital age? To answer these questions, we will study the many different material forms in which texts in Western culture have been inscribed—from tablets to e-books—and the technologies that have enabled their creation. We will also explore every possible aspect of the object we know as a “book,” from the title page to the index, and from the layout of a page to the use of illustrations and decorations—and what each of these features of the book can tell us about its historical role, how readers have used the book, and what it has meant to them. Books we will look at will range from the Bible to Vesalius, from Homer to Harold and His Purple Crayon. Sections will visit the Weissman Preservation Center, Houghton Library, Fine Arts Special Collections, and the Harvard Art Museum, and all students will be required to study a manuscript close-up and participate in a printing workshop. The book as a material object is the focus of the course. The capstone project will be the creation of a (short) book by each student and an accompanying paper explaining its place in the history of the book in the West.

After taking this course, you will never look at a book in the same way.

Explores the reception of Greek culture in Nazi Germany and the cultural, historical, and political implications of the occupation of Greece by the Nazis. Emphasis will be also placed on holocaust memoirs by Greek Jews.

All readings will be available in English. Students who can engage in coursework in Greek can petition to receive foreign language course credit.

Finnegans Wake is a work that no one should read alone.

The seminar centers on a reading of James Joyce’s unique, brilliant, and purportedly unreadable novel as an opportunity to engage in comparative literary approaches. Close textual analysis and wild forays into the work’s inexhaustible allusiveness, its etymological digressiveness, its intertextual density, and its sheer delight in musical prose are coupled with a consideration of Joyce’s achievement in relation to European Modernism and twentieth-century disenchantment.

Each session is devoted to reading episodes from the novel collectively. References and allusions are discussed, together with historical and cultural contexts and the ramifications of wordplay, puns, and other verbal devices. There is no expectation of mastering the text. Rather, in confronting this audaciously experimental work, the seminar encourages reading as an open, dynamic and interactive experience.

There are no short essay assignments and no midterm or final exams. Instead, each week, participants submit a one-page explication, reflection, or gloss on a selected sentence from the novel. The format of this assignment will be outlined in the introductory meeting. Grades are determined on the overall quality of these weekly responses, as well as the level of engagement during our weekly sessions.

What role does literary translation play in world-making? What is (un-)translatability? How does the reader determine the “fidelity” of a translation by mediating between author and translator? How might we use the paradigm of self-translation to unravel hierarchies in Translation Studies? In what sense is the source text already a translation? This course uses cases of literary translation and transmediation into and out of modern China, Taiwan, and Latin America to explore the history, theory, and aesthetics of global literary translation and intertextual adaptation. Adopting a transcultural perspective, we will identify key aesthetic and conceptual issues in the field of Translation Studies and explore their implications for politics, canon formation and linguistic evolution. Readings will include selections from Jorge Luis Borges, Susan Bassnett, Itamar Even-Zohar, Andre Lefevere, Suzanne Jill Levine, Efrain Kristal, Emily Apter, Eugene Nida, Gregory Rabassa, Susan Bernofsky, and Yan Fu. We will bridge theory and practice through role-plays, self-translations, podcasts, prize committee deliberations, and a Translate-a-Thon. This course will culminate in a roundtable conference in which students present and workshop their own (collaborative) translations and multimedia adaptations. Source texts of all languages and media are welcomed, though all translations and adaptations will be into English.
Prerequisite: Students must be conversant in at least one non-English language (both written and oral forms).

At certain times, it seems that things simply cannot continue as they have gone before. What then?

This course looks at some collective breaking points—moments when scholarly, artistic, and activist practices come together to respond to urgent sociopolitical crises. The concept of breaking points, on the one hand, refers to the collective experience of a pressing need for change. On the other hand, it speaks to formal experimentation––to practices that break genre conventions or theoretical frameworks. When the conventional forms of thought don’t serve us, how do we build new ones?

Throughout the course, we look at different breaking points, and at the forms of thought that arise from them. For instance, we trace the emergence of happenings and performance art, analyzing how they’re rooted in anti-war activism, and we discuss how Indigenous cultural practices create ways to analyze and stand up to colonialism and imperialism.

As a final project, the students will present a creative scholarly work, in which they experiment with formal boundaries, combining different genres or media.

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.

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; 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.

Why is it that Jews and discussions of Jewishness appear with such frequency and with such prominence in American culture of the twentieth and the twenty-first century? One can often hear the claim that Hollywood is “owned by Jews.” Many call attention to the number of Jews involved in comics and graphic novels. The State of Israel, and its definition of Judaism, has become an important touchstone in American politics, while antisemitic dog whistles have become commonplace in contemporary political discourse. Contemporary left-wing activists often refer to the legacies—contested or otherwise—of Jewish American labor politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. What can we make of these intersecting and surprising references to Jews/Judaism/Jewishness in the current American moment? This seminar discusses the ways that images of the Jew—philosemitic, antisemitic, and everything in between—recur in the American mainstream. Through analysis of film, television, music, comics, and other mass media, we will track the multiple and contradictory portrayals of Jewishness in the popular American imagination.

This course on the major fiction of Vladimir Nabokov begins with his major Russian novels in English translation, including The Defense, Laughter in the Dark (Camera Obscura), Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, and concludes with classic English works, Speak, Memory, Lolita, and Pnin. Topics in the course include emigration and cross-cultural translation, literary modernism, metafiction, nostalgia and stories of childhood, as well as the literary representations of tyranny, violence, and abuse. We will pay additional attention to Nabokov’s interest in film and film aesthetics, and we will consider four screen versions of his novels (Luzhin’s Defense, Laughter in the Dark, Despair, and Lolita).

The first Asia-Africa conference of newly independent states (held in Indonesia, in 1955) was once hailed by contemporary observers as an event as significant as the European renaissance in global importance.
It inspired a sequence of initiatives in pursuit of new forms of cultural exchange and political brokering unmediated by former colonial centers.  This course explores how this historic transition towards a decolonized future was anticipated, envisioned, and critiqued in literary form.  Moving through a range of texts and historical documents that mark this transition, the course invites you to engage with the comparative legacies of African and Asian independence movements and solidarity initiatives as they rose to international circuits of recognition, with implications for enduring cultural debates across the Global South.
Readings for the course will include Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain, an iconic account of the first Asian-African conference of independent states, on the cultural commonalities and uneven temporalities of African-Asian independence movements; theoretical texts on the cultural ambiguities of anti-colonial nationalisms (such as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks); and literary texts that include revolutionary and counter-imperial poetry and prose works. Course assignments will include three analytical papers. (All required texts will be available in English.)

“We are still mythical” as Kae Tempest intones in Brand New Ancients (2013, p.1). This course will analyze creative rewritings of ancient Greek literature in contemporary Anglophone fiction, spanning the novel, lyric poetry, and drama. We will also read Han Kang’s Greek Lessons (in Deborah Smith’s and Emily Yaewon’s translation, 2023) as an innovative counterexample of how to write with and back to ancient Greek literature in contemporary fiction. Broadly, we will consider why and how contemporary authors turn to ancient Greek literature and myth to give form and fresh meaning to contemporary experience, ranging from autofiction to crises of culture, politics, and society. The authors studied in this course come from several different countries and write from diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, and LGBTQ backgrounds. In addition to analyzing the dynamics of rewriting works received as classics of world literature, we will also study what happens to the alterity of antiquity in the process of adaptation and rewriting. Above all, this course is an opportunity to analyze and discuss some stunning contemporary Anglophone fiction. We will study works by Anne Carson, Natalie Diaz, Michael Hughes, Daisy Johnson, Tayari Jones, Han Kang, David Malouf, Alice Oswald, Kamila Shamsie, Kae Tempest, and Ocean Vuong.

This seminar is intended to introduce students to the history of the book in the West as a physical artifact– and to the growing scholarly field around the history of the book– through hands-on study of books from Harvard’s incredibly rich Special Collections Libraries. Professor Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania, emeritus) will co-teach the seminar with Professor Stern as a regular weekly visiting participant. The course will study the material text from its earliest stages in cuneiform tablets through ancient scrolls, hand-written medieval manuscripts of many types, early and late printed books down through children’s books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and conclude with 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 will intensively examine books in Houghton Library’s Reading Room and then report on them in the weekly seminar through PowerPoint presentations. Books studied in class will include papyrus fragments of Homer and the Bible, 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 one of Harvard’s Special Collections and write a biographical study of its “life.”

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.